Time Unknown (Entries tagged as annoyance)

Warning for Liferea users upgrading to Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10)

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:27:00 +0200

Ungrading to Ubuntu Intrepid or rather to a newer Liferea than 8.04 has will wipe out your news bin contents, permanently putting all those interesting blog posts you have been gathering out of your reach. You can either not do it at all, or prepare yourself to declaring a news bin bankruptcy. If you are at all like me, this will feel like having to run the marathon naked... bad, difficult and like something is missing, but take my word on it, those news bins will be pretty full in a very short time again.

If you have backups, move only the .db file from backups to your updated .liferea_1.4 directory and your news bins should be restored to their former glory. Enjoy! (and thanks for #liferea people on this)

Thunderstorm

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:09:37 +0200

Out of the Demeter scents I've tried so far, Thunderstorm is most suitable for daily wear by me... alas, Richard hates it just like he hates most fragrances. Ironically it's also the first Demeter fragrance that he dislikes.

Thunderstorm smells a bit like a summer thunderstorm, though with different vegetation than what we have here in Finland. Still it reminds me of a childhood summer in Kuivaniemi, lots of thunderstorms then.

The siren song of closed formats

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:19:13 +0200

LifeBalance seems like a really great Palm GTD application. Really yummy and pretty much perfect for my needs. It even has the nice nested places that I have been wanting to see in a Getting Things Done app. However, LifeBalance is proprietary software and does not seem to allow exporting of any kind, at all. That means, once you are in, you are really in, probably fenced in and stuck. Damn you pretty LifeBalance.

Facebook catch22

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 12:18:39 +0200

Facebook does not allow fake users except as test users.
Test users, being fake, are not allowed to be friends with real users.
Only real users can create new apps.
Real users can add their friends as other developers of the app.
There is a Developer Mode, that limits adding the app only to the developers of the app.

All these things make sense, but alas, it means you cannot test a Facebook app with a test user without publishing the app to everyone and some poor real person will have to publish the unfinished piece of crap and seem like an incompetent fool doing it.

Why does Facebook have test users when they are so useless?

Picasa EULA

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:33:11 +0300

When Chrome came out, there was a huge outcry about the EULA. Now Picasa 3 has pretty much the same evilness in the EULA, but no outcry is happening. Bizarre. One would have expected people to care more about their own photos.

Audible billing me despite my cancellation

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:11:08 +0200

Today there was an unpleasant surprise from the audiobook seller Audible in my inbox. They wanted to bill me for membership renewal despite the fact I had cancelled it online according to their instructions last year. I went to cancel it again, but the cancellation link was not there. Their support section said that if I have already cancelled, the link will no longer be there and in that case I should call them to some exotic foreign number during exotic foreign hours to sort it out.

Damn, that could easily cost more than the yearly membership! I emailed them instead through their customer service loops. Wish me luck.

I'm so disappointed in Audible turning evil this way. I liked them still before, despite the fact I could no longer listen to their products (no support for Linux or for my digital audioplayer).

Confessions of a gamer

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:08:15 +0200

Every time I get a new computer, I wish I did not like computer games so much. If I did not play PC games, I could skip having Microsoft Windows on the computer.

I don't like Microsoft Windows, but I do like the games and this puts me in an annoying Catch-22 situation. Outside gaming I'm an enthusiastic Linux person. I wish someone solved my troubles by making adventure games for Linux.

Nice vs. Woman friendly

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 12:54:49 +0200

TedPage blog writes about Being woman friendly. He wonders whether any woman could avoid being offended by the discussion he gave as an example. I could. But I would label the people on the channel assholes. Thus I think 'Anti-Asshole' is much better term that 'Woman friendly'. After all, how would you like the following example discussion:

i-am-a-person: I'm trying to get the newest version to compile, but I'm having some problems
dev1: It's not meant for dimwit n00bs like you
dev2: Just RTFM, loser.
* i-am-a-person leaves room

Overall, I don't think most women have special needs in terms of being ok with a project. The only thing expected is common courticy. What happened to just being, you know, nice? By working on politeness and respect in general, we won't have to add separate 'Gay friendly', 'Black friendly', 'Dyslexic friendly' in the long run.

Stuck with my Treo650

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:14:29 +0200

I'm itching to move to 3G phones and to start using my Internet Tablet N800 with one of those. However I feel stuck with Palm Treo 750 because the Palm apps I use (DateBk, Todo, Progect, MegaClock and SplashMoney) are just too good and there is not really anything to replace then on 3G phones or IT OS2008. Garnet VM does not seem like the solution as it is a bit slow and lacking alarmwise. I certainly do not want have one more device I want to carry with me. Stuck.

Evince for OS2008, please

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:40:02 +0200

I flashed my Nokia N800 to OS2008 couple of days ago. OS2008 seems very nice and even has a better PDF reader than the built in PDF reader in OS2007. However, it's still nowhere as good as Evince: it takes ages to load the next page and offers many ways to accidentally switch a page early. And if you end up switching a page early, it also takes ages to load the previous page. This makes reading a very choppy experience, instead of the nice smoothness Evince offered.

Unfortunately I cannot install Evince for OS2008. There simply is no Evince for OS2008 yet. I hope there will be soon. Or at least a nice howto for a person looking into porting OS2007 stuff to run on OS2008.

Missing hibernation on gutsy

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:13:13 +0200

Ever since upgrading to gutsy I have had an unhappily hibernation free existence with my HP NC8230. I've tried a thing or five, but not being a heavyduty hardware geek, I'm pretty stumped. If you are the first person to come up with the fix for that, a fix that actually works, I'll give you 20 euros. Feel free to combine this with any other bounties out there.

n+w is not nw

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 15:28:47 +0200

When troubleshooting dhcp on a remote network with dhclient, do remember that while -n is usually used with -w, those two together is not -nw, which is something else altogether and can mess up the ip settings of the remote system you are testing on.

Hopefully this reminder saves someone from pointless suffering.

Telling chatterbots from chamberpots

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:09:23 +0200

A potential chatterbot asked me today what's the difference between a chatterbot and a chamberpot. Before that very interesting conversation I had already realized that while it is not difficult to tell a chatterbot from a sane and sensible human, telling a chatterbot from a concentrationless human with schizophrenic or paranoid tendencies is quite difficult. Most of them chatterbots seem like slightly insane annoying people. If the number of the deranged annoying people goes up, Turing tests become much easier for bots to pass.

Dates and themes

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 14:32:11 +0200

I noticed today that the permalinked entries do not show the date of writing. That's just naughty. I'm trying to decide whether to fix it for this theme or whether to change themes completely. What do you think?

Edit:
Thanks to the kind people of s9y.org, I got it fixed now. Seems I was fooled by the indentation used.

Spit and piss

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:22:38 +0200

Walking to a bus stop in Helsinki center today I noticed just how many spit blots there were on the sidewalk. A truly appalling amount of bodily fluids. I notice that there was no place where I could really put my bag if I needed to, the spit was literally everywhere. Gah. It was not this way when I was a kid. Is it my generation that is doing this and peeing the the corners like dogs on weekends?