Iâve discovered that the newer the Instagram, the buggier it is. Weâve already seen that it canât cope with video if you use Android 7 (a great way to reduce video bandwidth), and, earlier this year, filters do not work.
I downgraded to version 59 till, last week, Instagram began deleting direct messages as its way to force me to upgrade. Neither versions 119 or 120 are stable, and are about as reliable as one of Boris Johnsonâs marriages, although they have fixed the filter problem.
Neither version has an alignment grid to aid you to adjust an image so itâs square, even though Instagramâs own documentation says it remains present. Presently, only Tyler Henry and other psychics can see the grid:
I imagine this is Googleâs way of saving on bandwidth and it is utterly successful for them as nothing is ever transmitted.
The ZIPping process took probably 15â20 minutes a go.
A comparable service like Wetransfer or Smash just, well, transfers, in less than the time Google Drive takes to archive a bunch of files.
I also notice that Google Drive frequently only sends me a single image when the sender intends to send a whole bunch. Thereâs no age discrimination here: both an older friend and colleague and a young interviewee both had this happen in October when trying to send to me. It is, I suspect, all to do with an interface that hasnât been tested, or is buggy.
Basically: Google Drive does not work for either the sender or the recipient.
This morning a friend and colleague tried to send me more files using this godawful service, and this time, Google Drive at least gave me a sign-on prompt. Even though I was already signed on. Not that that does anything: you never, ever log in. However, for once, the files he tried to send me actually did come down in the background.
I should note that for these Google Drive exercises, I use a fresh browser (Opera) with no plug-ins or blocked cookies: this is the browser I use where I allow tracking and all the invasiveness Google likes to do to people. Now that it has begun grabbing Americansâ medical records in 21 states without patient consent in something called ‘Project Nightingale’ (thank you, Murdoch Press, for consistently having the guts to report on Google), weâre in a new era of intrusiveness. (Iâm waiting for the time when most Americans wonât care that Google, a monopoly, has their medical records, after the initial outcry. No one seems to care about the surveillance US Big Tech does on us, which puts the KGB and Stasi to shame.)
Looking at Googleâs own help forums, it doesnât matter what browser you use: even Chrome doesnât work with Drive downloads in some cases.
The lesson is: stop using Google Drive for file transfers, as Smash does a better job.
Or, better yet, stop using Google. Get a Google-free phone, maybe even one from Huawei.
Meanwhile, I see WordPress’s Jetpack plug-in did this to my blog today without any intervention from me. I imagine it did an automatic update, which it was not set to do.
Thereâs untested software all over the place, ignoring your settings because it thinks it knows better. News flash, folks, your programs donât know better.
A great way for one tech company to get rid of criticisms of another tech company for a few hours, I guess, harming its ranking in the process. Google itself has done it before.
Farewell, Jetpack. Other than the stats and the phone-friendly skin, I never needed you. I’m sure there are alternatives that don’t wipe out my entire blog.
I really should not have wasted my time with Google, as My Business (see yesterday’s post) reminded me just why I donât use the siteâitâs not only the privacy issues, but the fact that things donât work as advertised, which has always been the case with Google.
Youâve already seen that itâs impossible for me to add my businessâs address to Google My Business. Thatâs not a huge surprise, since the last time I had Google Earth, they didnât even know that the White House was at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DCâand that was version 5 of their software. If these folks donât even know where their own president is, I canât expect them to deal with Tawa.
However, we do have an address in Manhattan, so I attempted to add that. After all, it seemed I was verified, or at least close to being verified, so why not get around the existing entryâs non-verification (as it goes through the process of sending a postcard, and, frankly, no one at the office can be botheredâthey feel about Google much the same way as I).
There was no difference: Google still wanted to send a postcard, so I thought I should delete the entry.
Well, you canât. There isnât anything in the documentation that says itâs this hard. Following their own instructions, I delete the location, and nothing happens.
Seems simple enough: Google says I should select ‘Remove location’.
Google wants me to confirm. I click ‘Remove’.
Like a lot of US Big Tech, they make it appear that they’re busy doing something âŠ
⊠when in fact, nothing is being done.
Maybe I should go in and edit it, as perhaps Google canât deal with three businesses called Lucire.
Good luck with that. I click on the entry and just get taken to a page where I am asked to select an account. I only have one, so I click on it three times, and I get taken back to the My Business home page with the four locations on it.
Clicking on the last entry goes to this page. Click my email address three times, and you’ll go back to the start.
And ad infinitum. You can attempt to do this as many times as you like, but it is impossible to delete a location, contrary to what Google claims, it is impossible to edit some locations, contrary to what Google claims.
Itâs no wonder the Dashboard was so full of discrepancies because, like Facebook, like Twitter, like Amazon, their databases are probably shot to hell, and nothing works as they say they do. I may be a layman on such subjects but it appears the more they add, the more the house of cards collapses.
I suspect some of these errors are intentionalâwe know Google intentionally programs in more pages so they can claim increased page-views to their site (e.g. if you click on an image in the Google image search, they take you to an intermediate page firstâ10 years ago, they took you straight to the page)âso by offering a website that is SNAFU, youâre forced to increase the page-view count. (Of course, if we do holding pages and forwarding pages to our sites, Google penalizes us.) When such obvious inefficiencies are introduced, you know that the reasons arenât all kosher.
So there you are: even if you wanted to delete an entry (and I was sorely tempted to yesterday), Google won’t let you.
Google: deceitful and useless. And a total waste of time. I’m so glad I don’t use this site in any real wayâapart from the time it sucked over the last 24 hours.
Iâve found some forum entries about this, but they date back to the beginning of the decade. I alerted Jetstar to this in March, and the problem has worsened since then.
Basically, I canât book online, and I donât know why. Consequently, I booked one flight with Air New Zealand and only managed, after huge effort, to get the other (for a colleague) with Jetstar.
Back in March, I couldnât book with Vivaldi, but I was able to switch to Firefox. I let Jetstar know.
Now, this strategy does not work.
Before you suggest it, cookies and caches have been cleared.
Hereâs what happens after Iâve selected the cities and the dates, and I go to select times. Letâs begin with Vivaldi on Windows, which is based on Chromium (which, as we know, is what Chrome, the browser Jetstar suggests you use, is based on):
Switching to Firefox now results in this:
Switching to Edge on the same PC gives this:
Fortunately, I also own Macs, so hereâs what Firefox for Mac returns:
The only browser that works with the Jetstar website: Safari on Mac. As I’ve sold my Ubuntu laptop, I was unable to test using that OS.
Not many people would go to that effort, and while Jetstarâs Twitter staff (after some pushing from me in DMs) said they would refer it on, I donât expect anything to happen. Maybe Chrome would work, but Iâm not ever going to download it to find out. Why invite Google on to your computer? But if that is the case, it seems foolish to limit yourself to such an invasive browser. My experience is that whatever is blocking me from booking with Jetstar (some may argue that this is a good thing), it is expanding across browsers.
The descent of software seems to be a common theme among some companies. You get good ones, like Adobe and Fontlab, where (generally) successive versions tend to improve on those gone before. Then you get bad ones, like Facebook, which make things worse with each iteration. Facebook Timeline launched to much fanfare at the beginning of the decade, and I admit that it was a fantastic design, despite some annoying bugs (e.g. one that revealed that Facebook staff had no idea there were time zones outside US Pacific time). It was launched at the right time: a real innovation that helped boost my waning interest in the platform. But then they started fiddling with it. I equated it to what General Motors did with the Oldsmobile Toronado: a really pure design upon launch for 1966, with that purity getting spoiled with each model year, till the 1970 one lost a lot of what made it great to begin with. Donât get me started on the 1971s.
Facebook had, for instance, two friendsâ boxes when they began fiddling. The clever two-column layout eventually disappeared so what we were left with was a wide wall, a retrograde step.
Theyâve spent the rest of the decade not innovating, but by seemingly ensuring that every press announcement they make is a complete lie, or at least something not followed up by concrete action.
When they bought Instagram, they began ruining it as well. First to go in 2016 were the maps, which I thought were one of the platformâs best features. Instagram claimed few used them, but given that by this point Facebook owned them, any âclaimâ must be taken with a grain of salt. Perhaps their databases could not handle it. Back in the days of Getsatisfaction reports, there were more than enough examples of Facebook’s technical shortcomings. In December I had to replace my phone after the old one was dropped, but now Iâm wondering whether I should have spent the money getting it fixed. Because the new phone is running on a skin over Android 7, and it looks like Instagram doesnât support this version, as far as videos are concerned. So you could say that videos are no longer supported. Since December Iâve had to Bluetooth all my videos to my old phone, peer through what I could make of the details on a dodgy screen, and upload that way, if I wanted a proper frame rate. User feedback on Reddit and elsewhere suggests the cure is to upgrade to Android 8, not something I know how to do.
It might have been a bug, or it may have been a case of trialling a feature among a tiny subset of users, but for ten months I could upload videos of over eight minutes. As of February 2019, that feature vanished, and Iâm back to a minute. I notice others now have it as part of IGTV, but I canât see anything that will allow me to do the same, and why would I want vertical videos, anyway? God gave us eyes that are side by side, not one above the other. Frankly, when youâve been spoiled by videos going between eight and nine minutes, one minute is very limiting.
Now I see with the latest versions of Instagram that the filters donât even work. For the last few versions, no preview appears for most of the filters; and now itâs constantly âCanât continue editingâ (v. 90) or âYour photo couldnât be processed correctlyâ (v. 89).
Instagram is a steadily collapsing platform and I shudder to think what itâll be like when they get to the 1971 Oldsmobile Toronado stage. I almost wonder if Facebook is doing the digital equivalent of asset-stripping and taking the good stuff into its own platform, to force us into their even shittier ecosystem. At this rate, others like meâlong-time usersâwill cease to use it and go with the likes of Pixelfed. I stay on there because of certain friends, but, like Facebook, at some stage, they may have to get accustomed to the notion that I am no longer on there for anyone else but a few clients. And they may bugger off, too, sick of every second item being an ad. Weâll have foretold this bent toward anti-quality years before the mainstream media catch on to it, as we have done with Google and Facebook, and all their gaffes.
I’ve had a great week with my new laptop, though it exhibits some of the same traits I’ve frequently seen with Windows 10: settings’ windows vanishing when attempting to load. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, demo PCs I’ve seen at the store have terrible reliability history scores, and mine is no exception. It ranked a 10 when it left Just Laptops in Auckland, but dropped to 1 when I began installing software on it. The lesson here is this: Windows 10 is allergic to software and usage. Never install a thing on it, and never touch it, and it might continue being a 10. It’s that simple.
Of course, there is the issue of updating it, and even a PC on absolutely stock settings has trouble with that âŠ
I think the signs of a departure from Twitter are all there. Certainly on a cellphone there’s little point to it any more. As of last week, this began happening.
If you donât seesee me on Twitter as often, itâs becausebecause itâsitâs no longer compatible withwith the Swype keyboardkeyboard on my phonephone. I canâtcanât be botheredbothered correcting faults createdcrcreated by technologytechnology and not me. Other sites are fine.
That last sentence refers only to the fact that Twitter is the only website on the planet where the keyboard is incompatible. (Thanks to Andrew McPherson for troubleshooting this with me.) Other sites are buggy, too: earlier today I couldn’t delete something from Instagram (being owned by Facebook means all the usual Facebook databasing problems are creeping in), and one video required four upload attempts before it would be visible to others:
I couldn’t reply on the Facebook website to a direct message (clicking in the usual typing field does nothing, and typing does nothing) except in image form, so I sent my friend this:
Earlier this year, many friends began experiencing trouble with their Facebook comments: the cursor would jump back to the beginning of text fields, pushing the first few characters they typed to the end. Others are complaining of bugs more and more oftenâreminds me of where I was four or five years ago. And we all now know about Facebook bots, four years after I warned of an ‘epidemic’.
It’s as I always expected: those of us who use these sites more heavily encounter the bugs sooner. Vox was the same: I left a year before Six Apart closed it down, and the bugs I encountered could never be fixed. I’m actually going through a similar battle with Amazon presently, blog post to come.
Now, since Mastodon and others work perfectly fine, and there’s no end of trouble to Big Tech, it’s inevitable that we jump ship, isn’t it?
Everybody wants PS2. Still from The Professionals episode ‘Servant of Two Masters’.
I read this article in The Guardian, thinking: surely, after Microsoft rolled out some terrible updates, it wouldnât be so stupid as to do one that bricks customersâ computers again? Especially after the bug was reported a month ago.
The April update worked reasonably well, though I lost my wallpaper. But everything else was there, and I was using Vivaldi, which is a Chromium-based browser.
Then I rebooted.
That was it: my computer was bricked. The first boot, a very tiny rotating circle eventually appeared, but I couldnât do anything except move the circle with my mouse. Subsequent reboots just resulted in a black screenâsomething, I must say, I had already encountered with an earlier Windows update that saw my having to take the PC back to the shop.
I rebooted the computer three times to force it into recovery mode, but then there was another problem: neither mouse nor keyboard worked. It was as though USB was dead.
Out of sheer luck I had a PS/2 keyboard that was unused, and after more forced reboots, I was able to use the old keyboard to look at various recovery options. Remember: no input device on USB works, and this was a bug that had surfaced with the last update in February.
Forget system restore: the April update is a fresh OS, so there are no restore points.
I had no choice but to roll back to the previous version I had installed.
And here I am, back again, an hour wasted. It would probably be longer if I didnât have an SSD.
Microsoft, get your QC sorted, because this current model youâve employed over the last few years simply does not work. I have spent more hours on these updates than with any OS you have ever rolled out, and that includes XP Service Pack 3 on a comparatively ancient system.
And if you get stuck like I do, and like all those in The Guardianâs article did, I hope you still have a way of plugging in a PS/2 device and have an old-school keyboard lying around.
Since Facebook bought Instagram, itâs been getting buggier, of course.
Iâve complained about Instagram uploading a series of posts in a totally different order to what I had (which, on ANZAC Day, made it difficult for anyone to follow the story I was trying to tell on my account when the order is 2, 1, 5, 4, 3, 6, 7).
Video (2) was an interesting one, because Instagram allowed me to post something that was 2 minutes, 6 seconds long, which it had never done before (or since).
I thought it odd at the time but given that it was twice as long as normal, I didnât complain. It allowed me to show more of the Air Force band performing ‘Au e ihuâ (Soldierâs Hymn).
I did complain about one particular video featuring our national anthem which Instagram would say was loading, then on checking again, it would vanish. I made three attempts over a two-hour period before it âstuckâ (video no. 3 in the sequence above). I had to wonder if Instagram was picking up the music and flagging it as a copyright violation: after all, YouTube flags static as copyright violations (hat tip to Retrorechercher).
Above: Instagram says these two are loading, but the one featuring our national anthem (the top one) kept vanishing. It never made it on to my account without three attempts.
This morning, on checking the stats, I noticed that no one had viewed the longer video, and, after asking some friends on Twitter, learned that Instagram blocked anyone from seeing it. Itâs like shadow-banning on Twitter: you can see your own stuff, but no one else can. Try it for yourselfâhere’s the link Instagram claims it’s at.
Look at the eighth post down. On my account (top), I can see it. When logged in as someone else (above), I can’t. Instagram’s version of shadow-banning?
I can still play it straight from Instagram on the web and on my phone.
You can give the MP4 a shot here (and note the URL, which is an Instagram one, and the duration). The thumbnail is here.
However, I canât embed the video the normal way, and any link that it lets me share results in a 404. It all feels very familiar, because this is the sort of bug that Facebook used to cook up, e.g. on days when you couldnât post, like, comment or share, or tag yourself in a photograph.
I might save the two-minute-long video separately in case thereâs a way you can tell that it was edited inside Instagram.
To sum up: Instagram will not load content in the same order you do (we already know this); it will permit much longer videos that exceed one minute, but if they let it through, no one will ever see it except you. We also know that Facebook will pump through any advertising on to Instagram, even in categories you have expressly asked not to be shown.
There you have it, Instagram in 2018.
PS., April 25, 1.19 a.m. GMT: I’ve just tried a 2 minute 50 second video, and it appears it is visible. For how long, I don’t know. Check it out here, or, if the embed’s visible below, have a look.
P.PS., 1.59 a.m. GMT:Looks like four minutes is fine, too. While the first one is still invisible, it does appear Instagram has lifted the one-minute limit, and that’s not something I can find documented anywhere. Still, I’m grateful, because it makes far more sense to show two- to four-minute vids.
P.P.PS., 8.54 a.m. GMT: Just tried one at seven minutes, and it’s hidden. Seems Instagram is very inconsistent on what it shows and what it doesn’t. Link is here (it won’t work) and the MP4 is here.
As many of you know, between around December 8 and February 2âdates during which I had Microsoft Windows 10âs fall Creators update without the January 31 cumulative patchâmy computer suffered roughly three to six BSODs per day. Going on to Bleeping Computer was helpful, but Microsoftâs wisdom tended to be hackneyed and predictable.
While I was lucky at Microsoft Answers and got a tech who wasnât rehashing remarks from other threads, eventually he gave up and suggested I download the old spring Creators update, if that was the last version that was OK.
I never had the time, and on February 2, I got the cumulative patch and everything has been fine since.
It means, of course, that Microsoft had released a lemon at the end of 2017 and needed a big patch to deal with the problems it had caused. No word to their people on the forum though, who were usually left scratching their heads and concluding that the only option was a clean installation.
I had bet one of the techs, however, that there was nothing wrong with my set-up, and everything to do with the OS. We know Windows is no longer robust because of the QC processes Microsoft uses, with each team checking its own code. Thatâs like proofreading your own work. You donât always spot the errors.
I said I could walk into any computer store and find that the display models were crashing as well.
Last weekend, I did just that.
Here are the Reliability Monitors of two Dell laptops running factory settings picked at random at JB Hi-fi in Lower Hutt.
Above: The Reliability Monitors of two display Dell laptops at JB Hi-fi in Lower Hutt, picked at random.
Above: My Reliability Monitor doesn’t look too bad by comparisonâand suggests that it’s Microsoft, not my set-up, that was responsible for the multiple BSODs.
The Monitors look rather like my own, not scoring above 2 out of 10.
They are crashing on combase.dll for the most part, whereas mineâs crashing on ntdll.dll. Nevertheless, these are crashes that shouldnât be happening, and a new machine shouldnât have a reliability score that low.
For those of you who suspect you have done nothing wrong, that your computer has always worked till recently, and you practise pretty good computer maintenance, your gutâs probably right. The bugs arenât your fault, but that of slapdash, unchecked programming. I doubt you need full reinstallations. You may, however, have to put up with the bugs till a patch is released. It is the folly of getting an update too earlyâa lesson that was very tough to relearn this summer.
Now that I’ve gone four days without a BSOD, it does appear Microsoft realized it had rolled out another lemon, and, nearly two months later, patched things. Goodness knows how many hours it has cost people worldwideâthe forums have a lot of people reporting BSODs (maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I really don’t remember this many, ever). I posted this in a discussion entitled âWindows 10 is a nightmare!’, and the comments there make for sobering reading. A small number have had to purchase new computers; others report that the OS has made their computers unusable or that countless hours were spent trying to fix things. I can believe it. My addition:
I have to concur with the original poster: Windows 10 has been, hands-down, the most shockingly unreliable OS ever made, by anyone, anywhere.
I have spent more time here for this OS than at any other time with Microsoft productsâand Windows 10 has been terrible from day one.
Most recently, I have had multiple BSODs per day since the fall Creators update was installed, and until Microsoft rolled out a patch at the end of January that finally fixed problems of its own making. If your computer is BSODing multiple times a day, with 800-plus events in the reliability monitor per week, then you can imagine how little work gets done. Things finally calmed down on February 2, when I received the cumulative update. You can see the thread for yourself here: I actually feel sorry for the MS tech who stepped in, because heâs solving problems a crap product with faults not of his own making. They wonât be bugs that are in his handbook. Looking at this part of the forum alone, BSOD comes up a lot in the subject lines, more than I ever remember. So it isnât us, Microsoft, itâs you.
Going right back to day one, I canât believe how many threads Iâm involved in. Windows 10 started up differently each day, as it would forget its own settings each day. Some days Cortana worked, other days it didnât. Sometimes I had the UK keyboard (which I had never once installed), other days the US. In November 2015 I had to post a queryto ask how many hours it would take for a Windows 10 machine to shut down. Thatâs right, hours. At least thatâs better than some of you who commented earlier who canât get yours to start up.
Initially, Cortana required fiddling with each day to get it to work. Notifications once went back in timeâon a Saturday I began getting notifications from the previous Thursday. None from Friday though, they all vanished. Windows began forgetting my default browser and default PDF application, and no, you couldnât fix either from the standard settings. The Anniversary update took 11 attempts to install on this PCâand one of them screwed things up so badly my PC was bricked and wound up at the shop, where I had to spend money to get it fixed urgently. (I joked at the time it was called Windows 10 because you needed more than 10 attempts to do anything.) It never installed on my laptop at all: by the time Creators spring came round, the one update that was compatible with my laptop, it had been through 40 unsuccessful update cycles.
Thereâs still more that I can share, and you can probably find it via my profile. I would add more but on the original reply I actually hit a limit on these boxes. I guess Microsoft has a limit to how much bad news it can take from one user.
Microsoft has actually changed its QC procedures for the worseâthat is a matter of recordâand youâd think after three years of abject failure they would switch back. We see the same hackneyed official responses here day in, day out. They need to spend more time getting things right before they ship their OSs, and spare their community people a lot of wasted hours with solutions that generally do not work. In my latest thread, I fixed itâyes, the tech helped a bit, but ultimately I had to listen to my gut and believe that MS had messed up. I was right, but wow, at a massive cost to my real job with days lost to being Microsoftâs unpaid technician.
It is good, however, to come out the other side (knock on wood)âand despite the countless hours spent, I was once again right, and conventional wisdom was wrong. I’m not sure if that’s something to be that proud of. A healthy mistrust of big firms stands one in good stead nevertheless, and remember, every industry has thick people making stuff.
