Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

i'm trying to use alexa as a bluetooth speaker with a mac situated 5 feet away and it's pants

The best bluetooth speaker I own is still a jawbone jambox! And it’s probably using older Bluetooth and a crappier audio encoding than newer options

I know this isn't what this thread is about, but I just upgraded wordpress, which I'm supposed to do to implement all manner of good things to help me work with 'blocks', but know my editor doesn't work in visual mode at all, so now I write in Pages and copy paste into wordpress, which means it all gets in as one block anyway. So yay.

yeah the new wordpress editor is horrible even if you can use it. there is a plugin to use the old one.

Whatsapp voice messages. Jesus. Worse than voicemail.

There is a new app that lets you forward them to a transcription service. Which will be some poor underpaid person on the other side of the world listening to the nonsense instead of me, I guess.

Vending machines, when they were coin only, were always a finicky thing. Sometimes they demanded exact change, sometimes they wouldn't take your dollar. So yeah, the new machines that take cards are better.

Buuuut, if you made a cash purchase, you get your change and move on. The machines that take cards make it so that you can charge multiple snacks to the card in one transaction. So the machine asks you to make another transaction or hit a button to confirm no more transactions.

In order to do so, the button is often unresponsive the first few times you press it, so you have to wait to get the Total Vended confirmation to know your transaction is complete.

If you don't, the person after you can charge more snacks to your card (up to whatever was pre-approved). Yesterday I used the machine after someone who didn't hit the button and his transaction was still live, so I could have gotten snacks on his card if I were the dishonest type.

Minor thing but somewhat a backward step

at two libraries recently i have had to view microfilm on a new gizmo that's plugged into a computer. in fairness, this offers tons of useful features, like scanning documents directly to pdf rather than paying for shitty printouts, and being able to zoom and rotate at the touch of a button (rather than futzing with age-worn, mechanically janky interchangeable lenses). you can also reverse black vs white at the touch of a button which is amazing. however, the overall experience is profoundly worse and less usable than the rock-solid analog variants i've used on and off for decades, where once you load the film on, you're in control - one control wheel, jog it lightly to advance a bit, jog it hard to send the film flying a few hundred frames. now you have four buttons and/or their onscreen counterparts (forward, back, and "fast" versions of each - but the latter only work if you pull the glass plate and film forward, out from under the lens! so the trial and error of finding frame 2,354 is now much more painful). and the image on the screen is of course not an analog projection of light through a lens and a couple of mirrors, but a digital recreation which is inherently laggy, so when you make movements, there's this smeary blur and stop-start thing happening.... aggghh!!

the lag and smear is, i'm sure, partly because the computers these things are plugged into are low-budget filler PCs purchased ten years ago and just can't keep up with the software. but the control scheme is inherently worse and meanwhile the library has been talked into buying a fancy new gadget that's worse at the meat-and-potatoes functions.

horrible

I need to bitch about treadmills with giant smart screens that are connected to the internet again. Drops of sweat inevitably hit “buttons” on the screen that affect the stats i see. Thankfully the speed and incline knobs are still manual.

Those ‘mirror’ ‘smart’ digital exercise stations look like a total nightmare.

It seems like exercise bikes and rowing machines haven’t been as ruined by the internet, yet.

uh, peloton?

at two libraries recently i have had to view microfilm on a new gizmo that's plugged into a computer.

I have to explain to people how to use these days every day btw.

lord, i'm sorry.

mention of treadmills reminds me how my efforts to get a real cheap basic pair of earbuds for the gym went awry, when the ones i bought turned out to have some little track forward/advance button somewhere along the cord, which would get jogged by the swinging motion of said cord when i was moving on the elliptical machines. this would trigger the movie i was watching on my tablet to pause and/or start over.

Kindle - footnote links

the fucking ability to mail everyone in your organisation by pressing the wrong fucking button once

No viral epidemic has ever spread with such speed and intensity as the email which has been mistakenly sent to 500 people and subsequently 'reply all'-ed by 200 of those people.

that's how radioshack went bankrupt iirc

I am beyond thankful that there are more steps involved at my place.

The last time someone did that, the server almost went down due to 3,000 replies of "take me off this thread" and people replying all to tell everybody to stop replying all.

I had to create a filter to send the emails to the trash bin for an entire day

oh jesus the first response is from the sec gen

right im off to the fuckin pub fuck this

Just be grateful that you are not the lady in my workplace who somehow managed to copy the entire department on an email about mashing her husband's face into her boobs.

wow bragging

Okay, yes, it was me. Me and my wonderful boobs.

3,000 replies of "take me off this thread" and people replying all to tell everybody to stop replying all.

seen this happen several times too. it's good to know there's ppl dumb as rocks yet still managed to not be fired by my employer. setting that bar wayyyy low.

P sure there are rocks functioning at a level that would outpace some of my esteemed coworkers.

please remove me from this thread thks

mick, it looks like you may have replied all by mistake. In future, please only reply all intentionally, as I have with my response to you. Thx.

I'm not sure this thread was for me

Rhonda???????

STOP CLICKING REPLY ALL

lmao silby

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm

Kindle - footnote links

― Ste, Thursday, 5 December 2019 14:20 bookmarkflaglink

jfc i am ready to do violence after trying to handle that shit. good call.

please, i know people have said this already, but can people plaese stop replying to this thread as its clogging up my inbox thx!

lol

/Kindle - footnote links

― Ste, Thursday, 5 December 2019 14:20 bookmarkflaglink/

jfc i am ready to do violence after trying to handle that shit. good call.

xxxp the email storms where people just joined in on the chaos by sending broccoli and pizza recipes... that's the good stuff

STOP REPLYING ALL GODDAMMIT

no the world needs more horny emails

Rhonda's alive?

didn't we expense flowers to her memorial?

xp Kindle footnotes... are they not in a little popup box when you click the number in the text? Or, worst case, take you to the long note with a back button for where you were? If not, you're probably dealing with a file not properly formatted for your reader. Calibre could probably make it behave. But yeah it's all a lot of messing around ennit

Ingredients

APPLE FILLING

2 lb / 1kg Granny Smith Apples( green apples), weight before peeling1 tbsp white flour1/2 cup / 110g white sugar2 tbsp lemon juice (or water)1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

TOPPING

1 cup / 90g cup rolled oats / oatmeal (quick cooking is ok)1 cup / 150g white flour1 cup / 175 g brown sugar (loosely packed)1/2 tsp baking powder1 tsp cinnamon powder1/2 cup / 125g unsalted butter, meltedPinch of salt

TO SERVE

Vanilla ice cream

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F/180C.

Peel apples, then cut into 1.5cm/ 3/5” cubes.

Place apple in a bowl. Sprinkle with flour, sugar and cinnamon, then pour over lemon juice. Toss, then spread out evenly I'm a 1.5 litre/1.5 quart baking dish. 

Place Topping ingredients in a bowl. Mix until clumps form, like wet sand (see video). Spread over the apples, crumbling with fingers if required to get that crumbly topping.

Bake for 30 to 40 minutes or until golden brown. Remove, cover loosely with foil to keep warm and let stand for 10 minutes before serving (let's the apple filling come together).

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream!

after one of those mass email debacles someone in IT always needs to do fun metrics on the incident.

"emailing you all this survey, pls reply back to me with the reason you hit reply all on the last email storm"

yeah, footnotes on a kindle seem fine? you click and they appear? Seems like an improvement to physical books for me, where it's much easier to lose track of where you were when looking at a footnote. Though now this is making me wonder what reading Infinite Jest on a kindle is like.

xxxp

__born stupid
__became stupid (drugs/alcohol/head injury/lab experiment/etc)
__troll
__all the cool kids were doing it
__unable to control body (ie, you're a "spaz". requires doctor's note)

Xpost Lotsa dimples in the Kindle

To: Grannistopher Percival Danger
CC: company mailing list

Mr Dainger, you were meant to send your reply to just me, but you have instead replied all. Also you did not checkba box.

BUY A KOBO AND STOP EMAILING ME

ALL HANDS MEETING, MANDATORY, 10AM FRIDAY
RE: REPLY ALL EMAIL FW: STOP REPLYING FW: THIS IS CRAZY
MICROSOFT TEAMS INVITE FORTHCOMING

WHAT TIME ZONE?

Atlantic