Journals

NO. FUCK YOU.

The creativity of the human mind is amazing. This... is how not to use it. I used to think this type of stories were only internet fiction. Not anymore.

A few months ago I had to form a work group with a few classmates. In these cases, if you intend to work with digital files, one would think it would make sense to use a service like Dropbox, Drive or other comparable product. This way, everyone could have immediate access to the latest versions of all the files. Right?

No. This girl REALLY didn't like Dropbox or Drive. What kind of mess is that? The best way to maintain a tidy, up-to-date collection of files, of course, is Facebook. Because, amongst a thousand other reasons she gave me, you can tag people. How silly I am, of course, because how could I expect people in a group of 5 to know that they're supposed to be doing something! Besides, what if you're at someone else's computer? In the end, I couldn't convince her to adopt my whimsical processes and she went as far as decided to go do look more like creating an email account, and creating a Facebook account with that so that I could abandon my backwards ways and accept the goodness of Facebook. And tag people.

So far, I though this was a pretty incredible abuse of technology for file management. But as hard as I thought it was, last night someone managed to top that.

How do you send a file to a large number of people? If you have their email address, you could send it to them as an attachment. Or maybe if it is too large, upload it somewhere and email them a link to that. Or you could do what last night's lecturer did to send the students the slideshow of the day:

• Create an email account
• Email the file to that account
• Give the students the password to that account so that they could log in to it and download the attachment

At the end I couldn't hold myself and went up to her and asked why not just sending it to the students directly, they already have everyone's email anyway. The answer? "Because maybe not everyone wants it". The look of confusion on my face must have been quite notorious, because an assistant (that looked under 30) insisted with the same answer. At this point people was giving me that look of "how do you not understand how this BRILLIANT idea works" so I ended up thanking them and leaving. I can't fight that.

It clearly wasn't the case of the lecturer being old and not understanding technology, because there seemed to be CONSENSUS that it was a brilliant idea.

I am unable to comprehend what kind of thought process can lead to an idea like this. My brain is full of fuck.

I use XT9. It may or may not be the best option out there, but it works for me. I like it because words require less key presses than the length of the word being entered, and also because since there are less keys (or touch-screen equivalent) they are bigger than on a Qwerty keypad, giving me more area per key and making it less likely to press the wrong key.

Now, I'm not an expert in phone software, but if I had to do an XT9 parser, these are the rules I come up with without much thought:

• Look for words matching the current input;
• Of the above, prefer complete words that match the length of the current input;
• Of the above, or if there are no direct length matches, pick the most used;
• Give the other words in a list sorted by frequency of use.

• If you don't want to keep track of the user's frequency of words, there are statistics on word usage for pretty much any language to help with that.

It's not particularly hard, right? I haven't put a lot of thought into it and I'm pretty sure the above rules would do a pretty decent job. The Samsung phone I had generally got it right. But the current Android keyboard and any alternate keyboards I try prefer to do it this way:

• Look for words matching the current input
• Ignore one-letter words (trying to write "I" results in "g" unless I tap the letter I from the list)
• Of the word matches found, disregard frequency of use and instead:
• - Pick any words with special characters (such as áäéëíïóöúüñ)
• - If none have special characters, prefer the longest word available even if there are other words matching the length of the input
• - Pick the least likely word possible. The statistics will help achieve this.
• If a valid word is entered and it isn't one of the above, autocorrect-substitute it with one of the above.
• Finally, provide a list of alternative words following the above rules. If you run out of screen space, leave out the common words. You'll auto-correct them out anyway.
• For inputs over a certain length, don't bother matching or suggesting, just spew out the gibberish the user obviously wanted to type.

Which do you prefer?

this++
Because I'm lazy.

I noticed I had a bunch of Steam trading cards, which by themselves are completely useless. Some time ago I put a few on the market and made a whopping $0.22, so I thought, why not selling ALL of them? Maybe it'll add up enough to get me a new game. After all they're completely useless otherwise.Wait, what? Maybe do it from the market page.Fuck you too, Steam.

I have a handful of throwaway email accounts on my web host. As such, some passwords are pretty half-assed and they may even be things like AAA123456. Today I got an alert from the support team at my web host:

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Our servers have detected the passwords of several of your email accounts are insecure. Because they include the u sername (sic) or domain in them. [Note: not the case]
Please change your passwords from your control panel and re-enable the accounts. Follow these steps to build a strong and secure password:
(typical secure password advice removed)

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My reply:

How do can you even tell that? Do you happen to be storing passwords in plain text instead of running them through a one-way algorithm as would be appropriate for a hosting industry of your caliber?

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I can't wait to see what they reply, but it looks like I'll be changing providers soon...

===== UPDATE 1 =====

Dear User:
The server detects it automatically and modifies them, at no point we can see them because they are encrypted.

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Yeah totally encrypted. With ROT13. TWICE!

Time flies. It slips away like sand between your fingers every second you're not looking. One day you realise all that time has gone, we're not here long enough. Don't let it run past with impunity. Have fun, love others. Trap that time in your heart and make it last forever.

Now go out there and have a great 2016!

If anyone even cares and had been following, I now have one of these.

Comes with Android 4.4.2, it updated to 4.4.4 but hasn't offered me 5.x yet. After fiddling with it for a few hours now, I can say the following:

• My older phone has a 140dpi screen. After two years of use everything was good. The new one has a 330dpi screen. After two hours of use, there was no turning back. Everything looks so bloody fuzzy on the old one.

• I actually liked the 3x4 keyboard on the old one. The new one only has a QWERTY keyboard which I find much slower and error-prone. I'll look into installing a custom keyboard or something.

• It's pretty snazzy but I have one gripe: On the contacts list, the old one has an option labelled "Only show contacts with phone numbers". Which is pretty nice. The Moto G has no such option and it displays every Google contact ever. I do not like that. The list gets a bit long.

• It's pretty nice to have more than one app installed at a time.

• I probably don't need to worry about it freezing or hanging for several minutes every time I try to do anything, including nothing.

Conclusion: I like it. It's affordable and good. I'm happy with it.

//UPDATE1: Since I unexpectedly I can afford a tiny bit more if necessary, I've been looking a bit more. I've come across two models that are essentially the same, the only differences being a marginally bigger screen, more camera resolution (can't say I care about either) and a bigger battery (I do care about that though).

Does a 2600mAh battery vs. a 2000mAh battery seem worth a $75 difference? Because I'm thinking probably not and I'd rather find out if the bigger battery fits the smaller phone

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I managed to scrounge up a few bucks from places I didn't know existed so I could get a long-needed phone upgrade* and now I must choose what to spend them on. From what I can afford, I'm between two models with very minor differences**.

Do I need to worry about 4G vs. dual-band wi-fi, or should I go for 4G without a second thought?

I don't care about the other differences, but I won't refuse an explanation if anyone feels I should know something I'm ignoring. Such as what's listed under Bluetooth or NFC***, which are things I'm intrigued about but I'll probably never need. I just want to future-proof it as much as I can so I can hold on to it long after most people change it. Because I'm poor and also because I'm lazy and I don't want to do this research too often.

*Current phone not only hangs, freezes and restarts, now it started to reject texts blaming lack of memory. Deleting all the old ones did nothing, so I can pretty much only receive calls.

**I know those sites might give incomplete or inaccurate information, but that seemed the most complete. I tried to double-check with the manuals, but they don't say anything at all about the specs. How silly is that?

***NFC intrigues me the most because the manuals don't even mention it. If I don't even know how to use it, how am I going to know if it's useful?

I truly hope it's considering it failed because I didn't agree to it, and not that it's constantly trying without my permission and failing for other reasons.This appears to be happening since the day of the release. I like W7 and have no intentions of upgrading for now. STOP TRYING TO SHOVE IT DOWN MY THROAT.

The day W7 becomes W10 without asking me first, will be the day I turn to Debian and never look back.

What do you mean "confirmed" and "complete"?? I NEVER SIGNED UP FOR ANYTHING!

I guess that explains why my internet was extremely slow for the last 48 hours.

So who else got this today?I'm going to wait until it's well studied to decide if it's worth my while.

I seem to be missing ~100GB off my hard drive. I don't know where they went.

Last time I checked, I had ~150GB free. Last night I happened to notice the red bar, looks like now I have 42GB free. The only thing that happened since then is Windows updates and installing a gift game I got on Steam that took up less than 1GB.

Disk cleanup said it could clear some 500MB. Not quite enough. Getting it to count Windows update files, it said 6GB. That's better, BUT THERE'S STILL 94GB UNACCOUNTED FOR.

Has anyone ever experienced this?

In need of some hardware expertise here. I have my old computer, which is where all my old files live. I had been using it as a file dump/backup right up until it ran out of hard disk space.

Since I got this fancy new network-enabled drive (it's little more than a compact file server really, it's literally a Linux system with a file share and a web server for setting it up) I've been throwing everything there instead. So the time came to take all the old work files and send them there too.

Because I used this computer less and less often, at some point it decided to no longer start up immediately. As of today, the last time I turned it on was on friday. And before that, sometime in January. When I turn it on, nothing happens. Lights and fans go on, but nothing happens. No post, no output at all from the video card. The monitor sits there blinking its LED waiting for a video signal.

Normally, after turning it off and back on a few times, it finally starts up. On friday, I had left it on this idle state for several hours wondering if it needed to charge the battery to be able to start up, and it did work. However I tried the same yesterday without success. Leaving it on all day didn't make a difference.

Has anybody here had this experience before?