Cellphone apps: InShot’s Music Player may finally be the one; Über remains a total waste of time

Forgetful Muzio Player has been replaced by a program (or app) called Music Player, which isn’t the best brand name considering the many other apps out there with the same name. This one’s version 2.5.6.74 and its maker is InShot Inc., so if all goes well, this is the one Meizu users should go for. […]

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Time to abandon Meizu Music: 8.2 is a lemon

That didn’t last long. Within a day, this was what Meizu Music showed:    The songs, all 1,229 of them that I had fed in manually, are still there, and they still play, but the question remains: for how long? If they don’t show in the list—I told you computing devices were forgetful—then how long […]

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Facebook whistleblower gets fired; and a workaround for Meizu Music’s inability to find your SD card

This is a pretty typical story: find fault with Big Tech, try to alert the appropriate people in the firm, get fired.    Julia Carrie Wong’s excellent article for The Guardian shows a data scientist, Sophie Zhang, find blatant attempts by governments to abuse Facebook’s platform, misleading their own people, in multiple countries. Of course […]

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Computing in 2021: Gmail’s advertorial spammers, Facebook bots, and Twitter fatigue

I’m not entirely sure I need to block out the email addresses here since they’re likely to be burner Gmail accounts, but I’ll give these spammers the courtesy they don’t deserve.    As shown below, they’ve been coming for over a year; there’s a chance I may have even received them in 2019.     […]

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After 18 months, some progress on the Meizu M6 Note

That was an interesting day in cellphone land. I collected the Meizu M6 Note from PB last Friday and switched it on for the first time in the small hours of Tuesday.    I originally wasn’t pleased. I had paid NZ$80 for a warranty repair (there is provision under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 in […]

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Cellphone saga update: back to the past

Off to PB. The M6 Note was under warranty after all, so it’s now with PB Technologies’ service department in Wellington, after I explained it could have trouble doing read–write operations and the tech saw the camera and gallery hang (usually they just shut themselves down). I paid over NZ$400 for the phone including GST, […]

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The latest phone factory reset was good for eight days

It looks like this latest phone reset lasted all of eight days, as today, all the bugs returned, all indicating to me that the M6 Note has some sort of read–write error. PB has offered a link to file a report and asked that I drop phone and form in to their Wellington store, but […]

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The end of the cellphone?

Motorola This is a take that will probably never come true, but hear me out: this is the end of the cellphone era.    We’ve had a pandemic where people were forced to be at home. Whilst there, they’ve discovered that they can be productive on their home desktop machines, doing Zoom and Skype meetings, […]

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Microsoft’s revived Intellimouse isn’t a successor to the old

How I had such high hopes that the Microsoft Intellimouse Pro Special Edition bought at Noël Leeming would be a successor to my Intellimouse 1.1. The short version: it isn’t.    It might be a successor to the Intellimouse Explorer 3 on which the shape is modelled, but for those of us who prefer symmetrical […]

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The first world problems of the cellphone (lockdown edition)

This Pukerua Bay Tardis was the last thing I shot before the cellphone’s camera and gallery failed   First world problems: the cellphone. Right now my partner and I have half a phone each, so between us, we have one phone. She can receive calls on hers but no one can hear her answer. Mine […]

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