If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
The computer/OS/interface/webpage annoyances thread
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Also IJBM: download speed visors that, when something happens to the network connection, remain stuck on whatever was the last reading and don't tell you anything about it or tell you 0 kB/s or whatever the smoothed value is. On an unstable connection they'll remain on something close to a constant max speed and it's hard to get a measure that's not uselessly optimistic.
* does not distinguish between join alerts and chat messages for the purpose of indicating that a channel has new activity. Strangely, there's a sound difference, so it's good if you're listening to your computer...but there's no visual difference; it's still a dot next to the server icon.
* does not have a way to temporarily monitor an otherwise-muted channel/server activity. In other words, it's not possible to idle-hangout on a channel/server, maintaining one's presence without giving it constant focus. Another way of putting it is, it's not possible to set a server such that it's muted when you're not on Discord (so you ignore messages then) but unmuted it when you are on Discord (since you're around to chat).
1.
On an IRC channel, I get one type of visual notification if it's just people joining/parting. I get a different type of visual notification when someone actually chats (which can make bot lines kinda annoying lol). I get yet a different type of visual notification (plus taskbar flashing) when someone says my name.
On Discord, I get the same visual notification whether it's people joining/parting or when someone actually chats. I get a different visual notification when someone says my name, so at least that part's done right.
But then there's no way to separate taskbar flashing between these two types of notifications. Either I get taskbar flashing for every single thing that happens in every nonmuted channel on every nonmuted server...or I get no taskbar flashing at all.
Taskbar flashing is supposed to be reserve for when stuff REALLY NEEDS MY ATTENTION.
2.
When I'm on IRC, I often join channels to idle in them so that people know I'm around even if I'm not talking, so they can notify me (by saying my name) if they want. I also get to see what the current conversation is about.
Discord, on the other hand, prioritizes the channel history.
* First, it notifies you that there are new lines of chat said since you last looked at the channel...which is something I know, but not something I care about because I wasn't around then and the vast majority of the conversation does not revolve around me.
* Second, it shows channel history first whenever you switch to that channel; you have to scroll down to the bottom or skip to present, in order to dismiss it.
Discord basically thus presumes that I want to stay connected all the time, and catch up with everything I missed. Except I don't. I just want to be connected during those times I have Discord open, and disconnect otherwise.
Essentially, Discord is basically treating activity everywhere, in all servers, to be equal, when it's not equally important.
For example, consider these three servers:
Alux: my own personal server. I'm the admin, and there's a small group of friends here. I want to know whenever there's activity, since it probably relates to me and/or what I'm doing with my friends.
Baño: a server associated with a site that I am significantly involved in. However, the site's activity is much bigger than just what I do. There's a lot of conversation, but only sometimes or in some specific topics does it pertain to me.
Canal: a server associated with a site that I only use lightly. I'd hang out in the chat only when I'm bored.
On Alux: I want to be notified of joins, chats, and mentions, whether or not I'm on.
On Baño: I don't care about joins. I want to be notified of chats only when I'm on. I want to be notified of mentions whether or not I'm on, because they may be important to what I'm using the site for.
On Canal: I don't care about joins. I want to be notified of chats only when I'm on. I want to be notified of mentions only when I'm on.
I could just leave Canal, and rejoin anytime I actually want to chat there. I am currently wondering whether I should do this for actual servers that this situation applies to.
However...
The only perk Discord offers for server Baño is that it lets me keep track of site news. But, if there's an associated site, generally the news is already posted there, making the notifications on Discord redundant.
Discord is strictly worse for server Canal.
TL;DR Discord is bad for low-commitment chatting
Alux: nothing is muted.
Baño: relevant channels (usually stuff like announcements or general chat) are not muted. irrelevant channels (e.g. botspam channels) are muted. is the entire server muted? good question. this seems to keep changing depending on how the server is used and how much i want to keep up with the conversation. so basically i keep muting/unmuting stuff.
Canal: server muted, irrelevant channels also muted. in some cases, all channels are muted lol. which leads to the question of "why join in the first place?" and the answer to that is "well i wanted to chat this other time, and i may want to chat later".
Discord notification sounds go like this:
*sound*
"Okay which channel in which of these servers just generated this noise?"
Note that this is after I muted a majority of the servers I'm on. Before that, it was more like this:
*sound*
"Okay which channel in--"
*sound*
"Okay which cha--"
*sound*
"Okay which channel in which of th--"
*sound*
"Okay which channel in whic--"
*sound*
*sound"
"Okay which channels in which of the--"
*sound*
"Okay which ch--"
*sound*
"AAAAAAAAGH"
Note that you can't tell servers to give visual but not sound notifications.
Then, when editing that next question, Google Forms changes the question type because it tries to guess what kind of response you want.
It is remarkably bad at guessing this. I have been writing some trivia questions and with nearly the exact same format Google almost always changes my answer type from long answer to multiple choice or short answer.
Is there a way to turn feature off? There is currently no way to turn this feature off.
Some things in life are acutely obnoxious. These include forced artificial
intelligencestupidity.It's always great when something that should really not require a terrifying step like that always does.
Old computer:
* slow. well, it was bought back around 2004, and nothing's been replaced in it except I think some RAM and the hard drive. Anyhow, this computer is not really fit for running any modern browser.
* screen lid is missing a peg mechanism that detects whether the lid is open. As a result, the screen doesn't turn off on lid closing.
* screen frame is slightly cracked.
* screen frame heats up a lot more than a normal screen does.
* battery no longer holds charge.
* optical drive occasionally pops open for no apparent reason.
* probably has a good amount of dust.
Overall though if I'm running appropriate programs on it it's not *too* bad.
Main computer:
* left arrow key is loose. Every so often I have to guide it back in.
* screen frame is being pried apart by the hinges. Therefore, I have to be very careful about closing/opening the lid. I found out about this problem half a year after buying it. I looked online and found that other people had the same problem. The company refused to fix it under warranty. Note to everyone: do NOT buy Toshiba laptops.
* screen has accumulated some dust inside that I can't wipe away, because it's getting pried open.
* screen has some dead pixels. I tried ignoring it. That created more dead pixels. I tried fixing them by smashing it together. That created more dead pixels.
* screen always has had an odd dimple that is less bright than the rest of the screen. It's barely noticeable in most circumstances though.
* speakers are not the best. but they're laptop speakers, so what would you expect. but they're Skullcandy branded, so I expected more out of them.
* a design problem: the battery can't be taken out.
* probably has a good amount of dust.
* some keyboard letters are missing their labels. My friends consider this to be a problem. I don't since I've long since learned to type by muscle memory.
* design problem: touchpad integrates buttons into part of the pad. This is a very bad design.
* Touchpad is also off-center on the left so that I keep hitting the right mouse button when I mean to hit the left mouse button. There is NO tactile feature to indicate the separation of the buttons.
The computing hardware of this was worth the $750 paid for it in 2014; the structural hardware has been shit. (The fact that it's a touchscreen is pretty much entirely useless.)
USB keyboard:
* one spacebar hinge is busted, so now I have to hit the spacebar on its left side for it to work.
But for $5 this keyboard is friggin excellent. I've had zero other issues with this keyboard. It can even be rinsed with water, since it has holes to drain liquid.
Regardless, I had surprisingly good results fixing my old laptop's cable issues using tinfoil... though of course, twisting and turning the cable is easier.
If you can get yourself an installer (not just a downloader but an actual installer), now would be a time to get them, so that you can continue to use Flash applications/pages (e.g. games) beyond that date.
Edit: so apparently discord portable was open in the background this entire time, possibly after I Alt+F4'd the updater process.
Edit: Now, it's just failing to update. So it's actually broken again.
I guess I'll have to start looking for a new one...
The heat pipe and the fan are attached to each other. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Toshiba+Satellite+L55t-B5271+Cooling+Fan+Replacement+with+Heat+Sink/107113
Note that this is the same computer whose screen is already basically busted because the hinge is poorly designed and has been prying the screen apart (since late 2014/early 2015!), and because there are various amounts of dead pixels on the display (since late 2019/early 2020).
Also, don't use Google apps on your Android devices. (1) They are storage-hoggy, and (2) they talk to each other, causing them to balloon in their storage space usage. And that's on top of (3) them being designed to make you continue using/engaging with the app, so you get default crap like recommended YouTube videos clogging up your notifications, and (4) the various privacy issues of having a big company know basically all your stuff.
I highly recommend ignoring the Google Play Store and instead opting to get apps from someplace like F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/
It's like Play Store, except all apps are free and open-source software (abbreviated FOSS). And they're self-contained.
If you need to download stuff from the Google Play Store, there may be ways to get around it, though I don't know of any specific surefire way that works all the time yet.
I remember having some trouble with F-Droid, it took me a while to figure out what I needed (forgot what it was) and then it was pestering me over whatever so I sent it to software Hades.
But the F-Droid site itself lets you download APKs for specific applications too, which is useful.
I'd say the same for PC Chrome, but then Firefox started using the same weird build mechanism where it runs as multiple processes whenever it's open.
That's true, but I'd put this below my privacy concerns. I know like, at it's base, most apps want to connect to something that collects all your data, but I'd rather not make it easy like environments like Google and Facebook and whoelse ever do.
The weird thing is that I think designers were very open about this a few years ago and I saw articles about it in the BBC, but nowadays it seems frowned upon to mention it. There was a name for concepts like Infinite Scroll and such, but I've forgotten it now.
I genuinely didn't even know that was a thing.
Though I mostly use twitter to lurk, I do install/uninstall the app on my phone from time to time. I've noticed that if you turn off general notifications, the app will still have the notifications badge on it.
If you turn off the badge whilst you still have notifications in the app, they just never disappear from the last time you saw them. Therefore, you have to turn on Twitter's notifications from app permissions, turn on the badge, and then wait for all your current notifications to come in.
Then you clear the notifications, immediately turn off the badge, then turn off Twitter notifications.
It's like an easy thing that would be a design flaw if it wasn't entirely on purpose.
Also; >having notifications on
Oh, fun thing! At some point, Android as a whole moved the "SMS " tone from the "Phone" volume control to the "Notifications" volume control. As such, I haven't heard my own message tone in at least a year now.
Oh yeah, GMH got a new phone.
There are like, no good ways to get updates otherwise. Updates happen like every 3 seconds, and YouTube/Twitter/Google Hangouts regularly break if you don't update them like, every two weeks at the longest.
I actually was going to say "I don't pay much attention to Android and just use it as is" but it turns out I mod it immediately out of the box. Like, I genuinely forget that phones come pre-installed with Facebook (and you can only "disable" it anyways).
I think this had to do with me always considering my phone important during the flip-phone days (I miss you red chromey) so when all these new features showed up I was like "Who even needs these things?"
The storage usage was a thing because my dad asked me to help clean up his phone and we uninstalled one Google suite app and then watched it as it reinstalled itself in seconds.
Something involving the term "engagaement" presumably. I think I remember some such term.
That is weird.
Nah.
I dunno about Twitter, but I only use its website when I do touch it. Unfortunately, browser access is slow compared to dedicated apps, but whatever. Mastodon better anyway, aside from everyone and their mom being on Twitter unfortunately.
As for app updates, F-Droid can deliver them, though it doesn't work right on my phone so I don't use it there.
Yeah basically I know by now that I have a period of time shortly after I get any new electronic device where I spend time customizing it to my liking and breaking/changing a bunch of defaults that I don't like.
Also, preinstalled apps that can't actually be deleted are obnoxious.
(If you're wondering, the other answer was people working in military-related things.)
I feel like I've seen this happen before, but that might have been a Windows thing.
I do remember that six months or so ago, all the games from the Google Play Store were suddenly disabled until you installed a new variation of the Google Play Games app that required new privacy invasions they couldn't just sneak in through an update and so you had to agree to.
It was a term for driving engagement. Like attention mining, except not either of those two words.
Another thing that's clearly on purpose. Like, the clickable spaces on the app are like 300% more precise than mobile browsers.
This also reminds me of whenever you go on reddit or whatever and it asks if you want to continue through your browser or download the app.
It's always confusing because the "browser" icon is almost always Chrome and I use Firefox everywhere.
Relatedly, I need to stop using twitter aside from anime news. It wreaks havoc on my attention span in the short-term and I don't want it to become permanent.
Yeah this faced the same problem as Parler, bitchute, and whatever else is out there.
Though to be fair I only ever heard anime nerds talk about Mastodon, so it might be even worse for that site.
I assumed since I remembered you saying something about your old phone going wonky.
Putting the covers together means that thing has to slot into both covers, the back button isn't out of position (they are by default) and the button's base allows you to fit the back cover, which is especially troublesome because it doesn't fit anywhere, a bit of it slots into the front board but that's it, lightly pressing the back button is enough to move it to a bad position/orientation and it also needs to be forced into the back. And of course it has to be just right for both sides at the same time.
There are probably manufacturing reasons for that but I wish they were only one piece.
May as well keep using this thread as repair log:
Supposedly it's possible to add the little plastic pieces without disassemblying too much but I tried and accidentally undid a lot of work.
It may be convenient to glue the piece onto the back cover but I tried and getting the pieces to fit is still tricky with that thing there, if I try again it should be with the front cover.
To make this work: connect to USB (all lights will flicker) then open ScpServer (it'll set to one player at this point) then test by opening whatever.
That was frustrating. Such are the hurdles of the most oppressed minority.
flawlesslysince then, apparently when I uninstalled drivers for the second one I set the way for the first one to sort things out.No, actually the adapter (or its drivers I dunno) fails very often and becomes unable to connect to anything until I remove and reinsert it, but still, I can now do a lot with this, for instance I can now feed the bane of networks known as Windows Updates, it's been hungering for nearly a year.
I also tried turning this extra router (which uses the DD-WRT custom firmware) into a client but eventually had to reset it to make it usable again (couldn't access it anymore), however I'll have to keep trying if I can't make this adapter behave.
Whoah I'm posting on IJBM using a keyboard.
I guess this isn't applicable, but I've always found networking to be difficult to get into. In principle it's just two or more computers sending and receiving signals through interfaces in a way that they can agree on what they mean, but all but the most high-level stuff is hidden behind a black box and to get through it you have to get acquaitanced with lots of implementation details (protocols, standards, whatever, all with long acronyms and numbers for names), in fact other than the parts that have more to do with information theory, from the stuff I'm familiar with it's the one that blends theory and practice the most, you aren't likely to come up with a resource to learn how two computers can send bits to each other without also learning what numbers router manufacturers agreed on 3, 5, 10 and 20 years ago. Also it's annoying that if you're experimenting with this stuff you gotta restart the computer if you're to make sure if some change you made didn't have an obvious effect.
I 'unno, maybe I'm just bitter that network troubleshooting is always frustrating.
* an ethernet jack
* an optical drive
* a VGA port
* an audio jack