Plaidophile

For a few weeks now, Windows has been unable to remember how to install drivers for basic USB class-compliant devices, such as mice, keyboards, or thumb drives. It would only allow devices to work if they were still plugged into the same port on the same hub where they last worked. Everything else would make it bring up the "found new hardware wizard," and everything in it would insist that there was no driver found, or that the driver I specified "did not match the hardware," or whatever.

But I appear to have found the secret to fixing this: when the "found new hardware wizard" comes up, tell it to search for the driver in c:\windows\inf (which is of course where Windows is supposed to search for it TO BEGIN WITH — oh and note that you can't browse to it, since it's a hidden directory for some reason), and then that seems to get everything back in order.

Of course, none of the billions of forum threads I've seen about this even remotely touch upon this issue. ARGH.

So, photos of the new Kindle have been spreading around for a couple days. I personally think that the new design looks terrible, and in fact it's ridiculous that the only really bad thing about the old design (the horrible attempt-at-paper-white plastic) is the only thing they kept!

Also apparently they've replaced the scroll wheel with a joystick. I can understand them wanting to replace the scroll wheel (since it was a terribly unreliable part) but it sounds like the joystick they've replaced it with is worse.

The only true improvements seem to be build quality, and the fact that now it charges via the miniUSB port instead of through the (also failure-prone) round-style wallwart plug. Well also the new pageturn button placement looks a bit better. But the overall design just looks ridiculous.

So, in iPhone 2.0, if you selected a single episode of a podcast to play, after the episode finished, it would simply stop. In 2.1, however, it seems to treat the podcast episode list as a playlist, and so it keeps on playing other episodes. Very obnoxious, especially since I like using episodes of A Prairie Home Companion and the like (played on my speakerphone) to fall asleep at night. Drifting off at midnight only to be woken up at 3 AM by Garrison Keillor still lilting away kind of defeats the point.

So about a year ago I bought a bunch of different Wacom stylus nibs: some more of the standard acrylic ones, some of the spring-loaded "stroke" ones, and some of the compressed felt ones. By now I've actually used all three kinds regularly, so I'd might as well share some thoughts.

So, I'm selling my MacBook (in anticipation of the new ones coming out in a month or so, since my current one just has the GMA950 which makes it useless for gaming) and so in the meanwhile I'm using the OLPC as my couch computer. In particular, I'm taking advantage of the fact it comes with a VNC client, so it's basically a dumb terminal attached to my G5. Surprisingly, the screen seems much more vibrant when it's channeling a Mac rather than using the rather dreary-looking built-in apps — I always had the impression that the funky low-power diagonal-bias transflective screen led to a crappy color gamut, but instead it's just because freetards have no design sense. (or more charitably they probably don't want to run afoul of cultural color biases or whatever)

This keyboard is still terrible for adult-size hands. I also wish there were a way to scrollwheel from the touch pad like what every modern laptop supports these days. Oh well.

So, my GMail-based setup is certainly nowhere near as good as what I had on DreamHost. I had much better control of my spam filter (bogofilter+spamassassin) on DH, and never, ever got 419 scams in my inbox (unlike on GMail where it seems like several make it through every day), and meanwhile GMail's filter seems to be overprotective on things like topic reply notifications and the like (so I keep having to check my spam box and adding whitelist rules). Plus, bogofilter's yes/no/unsure classifications made checking the spam filter much easier since I never, ever had to check the 'yes' folder (300 messages/day) for false-positives (I just had to guide it on the maybes, with around 10 messages/day).

The more annoying thing by far, however, is the limit to the number of simultaneous IMAP connections. Between my computer at work, two computers at home, and my iPhone (which often decides to connect over EDGE even when I'm in WiFi range — and, amusingly enough, there's a few open access points it seems to connect through while I'm riding my bike to work, according to GMail's access log) I hit the limit pretty quickly, and unfortunately, GMail handles the limit by killing the most recent ones — meaning the one I'm actually using is the one that's most likely to start messing up. (It doesn't help that when I'm at work I'm using Thunderbird which seems to be much more aggressive about its reconnect attempts than Mail.app, which only makes things mess up even faster. I've also run into trouble with Thunderbird locking me out of my corporate email due to repeated login failures, which is one of the reasons I'm back to using Outlook.)

Basically, email sucks.

I've tried Opera several times in the past but I never really liked various things about it, such as weird UI issues (its bizarre insistence on MDI for so many years, for example). But Firefox 3 has been a bit annoyingly slow, and Chrome is a nice idea marred by a hell of a lot of Big Ideas getting in the way of getting the basics right, but various comments I've seen from people sick of hearing about both of those browsers reminded me of Opera (both on poe-news and on The Register). So, I'm trying Opera 9.5 out.

At least on Windows, it's pretty nice. It feels a little faster than FF3 (although TEXTAREA is a bit laggy), and its default key bindings are irritating but it was easy enough to fix those and make it behave exactly like Firefox. I really like how UI-wise it actually works with the native GUI instead of tring to do its own thing (unlike, say, Firefox or Chrome), and it's also the only browser I've ever seen which does a good job of doing smooth scrolling which still feels responsive.

So far the only bug I've run into is that the background on my 404 error animation doesn't move, which tells me there's something weird with how it deals with CSS background-position in DHTML or something. Also, there doesn't seem to be any way of adding a resize widget to the lower-right corner of the window (the default skin had one but this other skin doesn't). I'm sure there'll be other problems as well, but I think I'll give this a try for the next few days and see how it works out for me.

Oh yeah, today for the first time ever while waiting for The Church of Beethoven's weekly show to start, I finally saw something in the wild:

Okay, so Dreamhost has been making various changes to their email setup which is making the whole spam situation a losing battle, so for now I'm trying out gmail for domains. The nice thing about this is I can finally use my beesbuzz.biz address to log in to Google things (reader, posting comments on Blogger, etc.). If it works out for beesbuzz.biz I'll probably switch my other domains over as well.

Migrating email is a pain in the butt though. (The stupid migration tool only works if you have everything in a single gigantic POP folder. I've kept my stuff in a pretty decent time-based hierarchy and simply copying those hierarchies over leads to other weirdness.)

So, I decided to try out MobileMe to try to keep my calendars and contacts in sync between my three computers (two Mac, one Windows) and my iPhone. So far it's been quite aggravating.

At the core of it, the primary problem is just that the computers all do pull-based sync, and they don't do a very good job of handling contention. The Mac clients just spinlock forever waiting for the others to complete, and the Windows client puts up a very annoying dialog box right in the middle of the screen telling me I "can't sync now" because another computer is trying to sync. This happens about every 15 minutes, and there is no option to suppress it.

Meanwhile, the reason I decided to try this is because I finally got sick of Plaxo's less-than-stellar capabilities (its Outlook sync is merely tolerable, there's no direct iPhone sync, and it doesn't preserve alerts when syncing calendar events so the whole point to syncing my calendars goes out the window anyway).

I suppose I could just switch to syncing all my computers manually for now until Apple gets its collective head out of its butt regarding user experience. Argh.

(Of course if this were a true push solution it wouldn't be a problem — the only contention issue is while a client is pushing an update up to the server, and that's not likely to happen simultaneously. In the rare event that it does, the second one can just wait.)

The accelerometer calibration screen of Labyrinth Lite makes an excellent carpentry level. (iPhone EDGE and iPod Touch only.)

I can understand Comcast filtering incoming ports 25 and 80, but 22? Being able to ssh home from work is exceedingly useful. Oops, never mind, it's something stupid with my 802.11n bridge. Argh. I blame Netgear instead.

This is weird though. I can ssh across the bridge on my local network just fine, but I can't if the connection originates from outside the network. However, I can ssh to a different box which is connected via 802.11n from the head end of the bridge. Gah.

7:50 Okay, got it working, somehow. Weird.

I have to say, Comcast is pretty great at getting things going when they need the going getting.

My cable modem arrived today ($60 from Amazon) and I hooked it up. It was able to train up but couldn't get any routing, so I called Comcast, and the tech (who treated me respectfully and didn't talk down to me etc.) found that when I placed the order, the sales person entered it as a self-install with a leased modem, which is certainly not what I ordered, nor what the sales person had confirmed to me. But he got it straightened out, and after I gave him my MAC address, I was online right away. Awesome.

Also:

• Since Joss Whedon cowrote Toy Story, does that mean the toys are animate because of demonic possession?
• Is thinking about the inefficiency of the "light switch schema" in my condo a sign I am irrevocably geeky?
• Not to mention referring to it as a schema to begin with?
• How much fibrous lignified structural plant tissue could a lowland marmot propel manually if said rodent were physically capable of the act of manually propelling a potentially heavy mass of such plant matter?

Okay, so I'd uninstalled the Plaxo Assistant from all of my computers because it was getting annoyingly unstable lately, and was taking out Mail and Address Book as a result. Because of my new iPhone I decided to give it another shot, though, and I discovered that if you customize the install, you can remove the ultra-annoying Mail and Address Book plugins, which at least mitigates that particular problem.

So, this morning, between signing for the condo and going back to work, I stopped at an AT&T store to pick up a SIM for the iPhone. There was a short line ahead of me. One person in front of me was on the phone, talking in a very dramatic way to a regional manager about some terrible customer experience he suffered at the hands of something or other. I couldn't help but listen in (seeing as how he was loud enough to be heard throughout the whole store) and it was plainly obvious that he was ranting about his experience buying an iPhone 3G on Friday.

What I heard from his story is that he was in line for 4 hours when the Apple store first opened, and was turned away because of the activation issues. The woman in line next to him was "in tears" because of her inability to buy an iPhone (what). He was ranting and raving about how Apple and AT&T need to "get their act together" and how they should have gotten news about the activation failures into "all the papers" ("for the people who don't have Internet") so that people wouldn't have to wait in line for four hours to not be able to buy an iPhone. Furthermore, he refuses to go into an Apple store after his bad experience and was aghast that the AT&T stores were out of phones.

and bought an iPhone.

Specifically I got a used first-generation iPhone 8GB, since I got lucky and found someone selling one on Craigslist for $250, with a preference for in-town and cash, and I was the first person to respond who was in-town and willing to pay with cash. Go figure.

Okay, I finally looked at Android and watched their little demo videos, and now I'm thinking I'll just wait for that. It's not as sexy as iPhone but it seems like it has way more potential. Plus I won't have to obsess over switching to AT&T or whatever.

Turns out it will be an option after all. Phew. No word on the actual service plan cost, though — hopefully it will be significantly cheaper than the contract pricing since there's no way I'm going to pay $75/mo + taxes for a damn cellphone.

(I might just end up getting a normal AT&T PAYG plan with unlimited data and just keep using my current phone with it, too. I mean it's not like I'm suffering with it or whatever. Mostly I was just waiting for my T-Mobile contract to expire, which it will do in a couple weeks, before deciding what to do about finally getting a San Francisco phone number.)

After having used it for about 3 minutes:

• It certainly feels a lot faster and more responsive, especially when loading old table-layout pages like PoE
• Not sure if I like the Awesomebar yet. Maybe it'll grow on me.
• Yay, my error animations run silky-smooth now!
• Boo, the music on them doesn't loop right (maybe it's time to finally turn it into a Flash player instead of a Quicktime embed)
• The new UI is weird but not incomprehensible. Although I miss the 'open' control on the download manager.