Instagram’s slow frame rate is probably down to an incompatibility with Android 7

I thought downgrading to an earlier Instagram would have solved the frame-rate problem, but I was wrong. Here are two videos using the same file. The first was uploaded using my new phone, but running v. 43 from April 2018, given that using the latest Instagram produced very stuttered video. However, it was the same […]

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Why you shouldn’t build projects on Google Cloud (or, why are we still having these conversations?)

This story on Medium, about Google Cloud, is all too familiar to me (hat tip to Donkey). It mirrors my experiences with Google in 2009 and 2013.    A company monitoring solar plants and wind turbines had Google pull their account twice. The Googlebot falsely claimed there was suspicious activity, with Google threatening to delete […]

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Instagram videos of between 2′50″ and 7′03″: it can be done, but some are hidden

As you saw in the previous post’s postscripts, it is possible to upload videos of longer than one minute to Instagram, but Instagram may or may not let the public see them. If you want people to see your videos for sure, then keep them to the standard minute. But if you want to chance […]

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Mozy driver could have been behind 100–200 BSODs since the Windows 10 Creators fall update was installed

A post shared by Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jack.yan) on Jan 14, 2018 at 4:04 p.m. PST Two very helpful people—bwv848 at Bleeping Computer and Sumit Dhiman at Microsoft—have taken me through the steps to figure out what was going on with my Windows 10 desktop computer, on which I’ve had between 100 and 200 BSODs […]

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The perfect storm: there’s a spike in users being told by Facebook they have malware today

Many years ago, I was locked out of Facebook for 69 hours. It was completely a Facebook database problem, but in those days, they just locked you out without any explanation. It happened on a Friday. I believed I would not get back in till Facebook staff got back to work on Monday—and I was […]

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Capricious Cortana

I have never seen a program as inconsistent as Microsoft’s Cortana.    We were always taught that computers were very logical, that they all followed a certain set of code each time.    Not so Cortana, which has had more different behaviours than anything I have ever seen.    When I run into technical issues, […]

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Cyberfox day two, or, the day it, too, stopped displaying text

Rather than repeat the story in new words, here is a draft of the post that was sent to Cyberfox’s support forum. The short story: Cyberfox no longer displays text as of this morning after working well for its first evening yesterday after installation for the first time. Glyphs that are not from a @font-face […]

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Has Facebook admitted its servers ran out of resources?

Those of you who follow this blog know that I believe Facebook’s servers are reaching their limits. In June 2014, when there was a 69-hour outage for me—and at least 30 minutes for most other Facebook users—I noted I was recording a marked increase in Facebook bugs before the crash. And the even longer outage […]

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I might not have Facebook, but I do speak Ebonics

Forty-nine hours and counting, which makes it the beginning of day three without Facebook.    I didn’t really need it yesterday, so there’s something to be said about habits breaking after a couple of days. However, for work, I have needed to go on there: while Sopheak is covering for me as far as Lucire’s […]

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Check your Google Feedburner feeds: are they serving the correct sites?

A month or so ago, our Feedburner stats for Lucire’s RSS feed delivery tanked. I put it down to the usual “Google being useless”, because we would have expected to see the opposite. The take-up of Feedburner feeds has usually slowly grown since we started this one in 2007, without any promotion on our end. […]

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