Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Internet

  • Facebook Ads

    I hide ads all the time as an attempt to improve my experience. (I also have gone through the Ad Preferences page to ensure I get what I want.) When I hide them, Facebook Ads offers a link titled “Why don’t you want to see this?” with various options clearly missing an obvious one. They…

  • Amazon Cloud Player Confusion

    When I hit the play/pause button the keyboard, a completely different song starts playing while the one I wanted to stop pauses. I kept hitting the button and listening to them alternate back and forth. Very odd behavior until I figured it out. Apparently both my normal MP3 player software and Amazon Cloud Player (ACP)…

  • WP to G+

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    WordPress Jetpack finally enabled publishing to Google+. So, I guess my blog posts will finally head there. UPDATE: Google permissions are hard. The first test post showed it was “Shared privately” which by looking closer appeared only to myself. My default permissions for approved applications is “Only Me.” I had to go into Settings > Manage…

  • Stop Processing More Rules

    By default Outlook adds “stop processing more rules” to message filters. Eventually I run into the error: The rule has a condition the server cannot process. The action ‘stop processing more rules’ will prevent all remaining server rules from being carried out. Are you sure this is what you want to do? Well… That is…

  • Google Hangouts

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    Anyone else finding Google Hangouts to be unstable and frustrating? Google decided my version refused to let me use it unless I upgraded, but the upgrade it offered was not new enough. So infinite loop. I switched to my phone.  A friend could speak to me (hot mic), but she could not hear me (cold speakers). In…

  • WP Annoyance: False Plugin Compatibility

    Before upgrading from WordPress 3.6.1 to 3.7, the Updates page said two plugins also in need of updates were both 100% compatible with 3.6.1 and unknown with 3.7. A conservative administrator might wait for WordPress to list 100% compatibility with 3.7 before upgrading to it. I upgraded anyway because really I use both fairly minimally. After…

  • Almost Foiled by Facebook

    A coworker asked me how long a certain song was playing in the lobby. I responded that I posted about it on Facebook and can find out from that. Only I could not find it. I went to my page and hit End until I was too far back in time. Then I used the…

  • Face Recognition Obfuscation

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    Parents of young children posts lots and lots of photos on Facebook. Tags in the photos of their children are of either or both parents. Children under thirteen are not allowed on the site. Babies lack the motor control to operate a camera or computer. So expecting children to have their own identities on Facebook…

  • Trust in Info-Infrastructure

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    James Fallows has an interesting piece in the Atlantic called Why NSA Surveillance Will Be More Damaging Than You Think discussing trust in the US for the info-infrastructure of the Internet is part of why we have Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. As that trust gets eroded by the behavior of the US government, users may…