Over the last few years, Iāve had some USB memory sticks go bad. There was one particular typeāa cheap one from the Warehouseāthat failed once on Windows 10. The error was āThe last USB device you connected to this computer malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it.ā The problem was that any other USB stick of the same brand would return the same error, even non-faulty ones, from then on.
I took them back to the Warehouse and while one of them actually was kaput, the others I alleged were faulty werenāt. The trouble was that there was no way to make Windows 10 forget the error.
I did the usual ways you find on the internet: going to the device manager, removing the device drivers, scanning for hardware changes, etc., to no avail. Once guilty, forever guilty. There was no turning back.
Tonight, I encountered the same error when plugging in my phone. However, the last time I had plugged it in, there were no errors, so something already was amiss. When probing more, the error was āWindows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)ā, and again, every bit of advice online was useless.
These included: restarting your PC; uninstalling the affected device driver; installing generic Android drivers (none were available at Meizu directly); checking all cables; using different USB ports. Two hours later, which included contemplating getting a Bluetooth dongle for my PC, I came across a solution that should have been obvious much earlier: reboot the phone.
Thatās all it took.
Iām putting this here since no one else seems to have suggested this, of all the pages I read over the last few hours. Itās obvious now with hindsight, but not when youāre following well meaning advice online and trying to do it all procedurally. I knew instinctively I didnāt have to uninstall everything that was USB-related, and Iām glad I never made it that complicated for myself. Hopefully this blog post will save others two hoursā trial and error.
I see Googleās going to stop supporting Huawei as a developer. How is this a bad thing?
First, Huawei can still get the public parts of Android, since theyāre open-source. Secondly, if they donāt get updates ahead of time, so what? When have western software companies rolled out bug-free updates? Based on my own experience, Chinese cellphone developers make stuff that just works, and Iām inclined to trust them more these days.
Thirdly, no one needs all that Google crap anyway: I always said that if it disappeared overnight, weād all find replacements within a week. Now Huawei has toāin fact, it already has them.
Anyone who owns a Chinese phone made for the Chinese market already knows that they have their own app stores. Why do you actually need YouTube through an app when you can browse to the website? Maybe Huawei will do a tiny YouTube app that only surfs to their site for those keen on getting into the Google snooping network. Is a Gmail app really a must if you can set up your phone really easily as an email client to pull from Gmail? As to maps, Iāve been using Here Maps since Iāve had my Meizu M2 Note in 2016, and while it isnāt perfect, itās more than adequate. Recently I found they had maps of the Chatham Islands when the carsā sat-nav didnāt.
All Huawei really needs to do is roll out its own app store to its western phones with decent enough translations, and make sure itās updated with the APKs.
I have a better Meizu weather app on my phone than anything Iāve ever found on Google, and Iām sure Huawei has its version. I owned a Huawei phone many years ago, although it was from my telco and I never had it rooted. It came with a suite of battery-draining Google junk, including services that you could switch off only to have them restart; but when I was able to get a Google-free phone, Iāve never looked back. When that phone was replaced, I made sure the next one was Google-free as well.
Whatās going to happen is that Google and the US will lose out as Huawei might find itself zooming ahead with a superior app store, and its own developments may outpace the Americansā.
Corporate America may be patting itself on the back, and their president may think he was doing their bidding, but I think theyāll find themselves weakened.
Since (mostly) leaving Facebook, and cutting down on Twitter, Iāve come to realize the extent of how outdated traditional computing definitions have become. To help those who need to get up to speed, Iāve compiled a few technobabble words and translated them into normal English.
app: in many cases, an extremely limited web browser for your cellphone that only works with one site, as opposed to a proper web browser that works with many sites.
bots: fake, computer-driven profiles masquerading as real humans on, predominantly, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
clean install: something entirely unnecessary, but suggested by tech support people who want to cover up buggy operating systems (q.v. Windows 10).
cloud: hackable online repository of naughty photos of celebrities.
comments’ section: when you see this while surfing, it’s a reminder to leave the web page you are on and make up your own mind.
Facebook: a website where bots live, where post-sharing is intentionally broken to ensure you need to pay for attention. Once paid, your posts are shared with bots, so even fewer humans actually see them.
Facebook friend: (a) a friend; (b) a total stranger; (c) a bot.
Google: (a) a virtual hole into which you dump all your private information, to be sold on to corporations, but feel good doing it because you gave it up to a private company to use against you rather than have the state take it to use against you; (b) a cult that supports (a), whose members will think you have a degenerative brain disease if you dare question the perfection of their god.
malware scanner: malware (especially when offered by Facebook, q.v.).
messenger app: an inefficient messaging program where typing takes 10 times as long as on a desktop or laptop computer. Designed to dissuade you from actually calling the person.
phone: portable computing device, not used to make calls.
remote desktop: when your operating system fails, and the odds of you seeing your familiar screen are remote.
social media: media where people are antisocial.
Twitter: (a) social media with no discernible rules on who gets kicked off and why; (b) where the US president gets angry.
white balance: when racists attack people of colour but pretend they are noble and against racism.
Weibo: a website monitored by the Chinese Communist Party, where users have more freedom than on Facebook and Twitter.
Windows 10: a buggy operating system that requires 10 goes at any updates or patches, hence the name.
The Associated Press had an exclusive this week: Google does not obey your opt-out preferences.
I could have told you that in 2011. Oh wait, I did. And I pointed out other instances where Google ignored your request to pause your history, continuing to track you either through its main site or its properties such as YouTube.
This latest story related to Google tracking peopleās movements on their Android phones.
The AP found that Google lies: what it claims Location History does on its website is not what it actually does.
In 2011, I proved that Google lied about its Ads Preferences Manager (no, it doesn’t use apostrophes): it said one thing on its website and did another. In 2014 and 2015 I showed Google lied about what it would do with your search histories. Instagram does that these days with its advertising preferences, saying you can control them via Facebook when, in fact, it stores another set altogether which you have no control over. If I get time I’ll post my proof. It makes you wonder if the same dishonest programmers are running things, or whether itās part of Big Techās culture to lie.
This is nothing new: they all lie, especially about unwanted surveillance, and have been doing so for a long time. Itās just that mainstream media are finally waking up to it.
The EU gets it when it comes to fines. Rather than the paltry US$17 million certain US statesā attorneys-general stung Google with some years ago for hacking Iphones, theyāve now fined the search engine giant ā¬4,340 million, on top of its earlier fine of ā¬2,420 million over anticompetitive behaviour.
That US$17 million, I mentioned at the time, amounted to a few hoursā income at Google.
As the EUās competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager noted on Twitter, āFine of ā¬4,34 bn to @Google for 3 types of illegal restrictions on the use of Android. In this way it has cemented the dominance of its search engine. Denying rivals a chance to innovate and compete on the merits. Itās illegal under EU antitrust rules. @Google now has to stop itā.
Google forces manufacturers to preinstall Chrome if they want to install Google Play. The EU also notes that virtually all Android devices have Google Search preinstalled, and most users never download competing apps, furthering Googleās dominance of search. Google pays manufacturers and cellphone networks to preinstall the Google search app on their phones, and prevented manufacturers from installing Google apps if their versions of Android were not approved by Google. DuckDuckGo, my search engine of choice, welcomed the decision. It noted:
Up until just last year, it was impossible to add DuckDuckGo to Chrome on Android, and it is still impossible on Chrome on iOS. We are also not included in the default list of search options like we are in Safari, even though we are among the top search engines in many countries.
Their anti-competitive search behavior isn't limited to Android. Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they'd like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension.
Thatās consumer confusion on top of restrictive contracts that promote market dominance and anti-competitive behaviour.
This is a very petty company, one that shut down Vivaldiās Adwords accountafter its CEO gave some interviews about privacy.
Of course Iām biased, and I make no apology for itāand anyone who has followed my journey on this blog from being a Google fan to a Google-sceptic over the last decade and a half will know just how Googleās own misleading and deceptive conduct helped changed my mind.
Googleās argument, that many Android manufacturers installed rival apps, clearly fell on deaf ears, and understandably so. While Iām sure Android experts can think up examples, as a regular person who occasionally looks at phones, even those ones with rival apps still ship with the Google ones. In other words, thereās simply more bloat. Iāve yet to see one in this country ship without a Chrome default and Google Play installed, often in such a way that you canāt delete it, and Google Services, without getting your phone rooted.
I did read this in the Murdoch Press and thought it was a bit of a laugh, but then maybe my own experience isnāt typical:
The impact of any changes mandated by the EU decision on Googleās ability to target ads to usersāand to its profitabilityāis an open question. The two apps targeted in the EU decision, Googleās search and its Chrome browser, are extremely popular in their own right. Consumers are likely to seek them out from an app store even if they werenāt preinstalled on the phone, said Tarun Pathak, an analyst at research firm Counterpoint.
I just donāt believe they would, and I made it a point to get a phone that would, happily, have neither. By buying a Chinese Android phone, I escape Googleās tracking; by seeking out the Firefox browser, I get to surf the way I want. That choice is going to create competition, something that Google is worried about. The Wall Street Journal also states that despite the earlier fine, Googleās shopping rivals said little or nothing has actually happened.
With all of Googleās misdeeds uncovered on this blog over the years, Iām really not surprised.
The EU is, at the very least, forcing some to examine just how intrusive Google is. It might soon discover how uncooperative Google can be.
I see the media (led by the Murdoch Press) have been reporting that Instagram plans to let people upload videos of an hour long. Itās a ārumourā at the moment, apparently.
As those of you who follow this blog know, Iāve been able to upload videos exceeding one minute since April, and one theory that Justin Bgoni, whoās the bursar at my Alma Mater, St Markās Church School, advanced when I mentioned it to him was that I must be part of a trial.
That makes perfect sense and it shouldnāt be a surprise that someone with a great financial mind like Justinās would conclude this. He says: weāre in New Zealand, itās a small country, and there are probably 10,000 people who have been given the capability in advance. Soon, he theorized weeks ago, Instagram will roll it out to the general public. I think heās right.
Iāve so far fielded two questions from strangers on how I do this, and I tell them the truth: Iāve just been able to, and I was as surprised as anyone else.
I donāt claim to have āspecial super powerā like this user doesāand when I visited his Instagram, he doesnāt have a single video over a minute, so goodness knows what heās talking about. (Having said that, I do like a lot of his uploads.) If youāre uploading 10 one-minute videos into a single post, that doesnāt count: almost anyone can do that, and it doesnāt take special powers, just patience.
There is a limit for me, however. Iāve attempted four times to upload a 9ā²3ā³ video to Instagram, and have failed each time, so we can conclude that thatās too long. However, I have managed 8ā²37ā³ as of today, so the present maximum length on Instagram must be between the two times.
I havenāt discovered too much more since I last posted on this topic, other than enjoying the freedom of having the greater length. (Instagramās probably noted that, which is why the rumours have begun surfacing.) Engagement is still rather low on the long videos, for starters. Instagram only (rightly) counts full views, so there are videos with likes but 0 views recorded.
Itās nice, once again, to be ahead of the ball when it comes to these technologies, just as I have been with Google and Facebook. The exception here is that itās been a positive feature rather than the usual negative ones, though I realize that since itās Instagram, it comes with a load of Facebook-linked privacy issues. Just today it fired through another alcohol ad despite my having turned them off in my settings, again underlining Facebookās blatant dishonesty.
Yet here I am, still using one of their services despite having mostly de-Facebooked (and de-Googled years before that). Like millions of others, Iām still a sucker because I continue to use a service they own.
Speaking of the Murdoch Press and Google, we (at work) actually deal with the former when it comes to advertising. Let that sink in for a moment: I trust Murdochs more than I trust Google when it comes to our usersā privacy. Thatās saying something.
So I signed up for 2 factor auth on Facebook and they used it as an opportunity to spam me notifications. Then they posted my replies on my wall. 🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/Fy44b07wNg
I see Google has messaged me in Webmaster Tools about some sites of ours that arenāt mobile-friendly.
No surprises there, since some of our sites were hard-coded in HTML a long time ago, before people thought about using cellphones for internet access.
The theory is that those that donāt comply will be downgraded in their search results. After my battle with them over malware in 2013, I know Googleās bot can fetch stale data, so for these guys to make a judgement about what is mobile-optimized and what is not is quite comical. Actually, I take any claim from Google these days with a grain of salt, since I have done since 2009 when I spent half a year fighting them to get a mateās blog back. (The official line is that it takes two days. That blog would never have come back if a Google product manager did not personally intervene.)
When youāre told one thing and the opposite happens, over and over again, you get a bit wary.
To test my theory, I fed in some of our Wordpress-driven pages, and had varying results, some green-lighted, and some notāeven though they should all be green-lighted. Unless, of course, the makers of Wordpress Mobile Pack and Jetpack arenāt that good.
Caching could affect this outcome, as do the headers sent by each device, but it’s a worry either for Google or for Wordpress that there is an inconsistency.
I admit we can do better on some of our company pages, as well as this very site, and thatās something weāll work on. Itās fair enough, especially if Google has a policy of prioritizing mobile-friendly sites ahead of others. The reality is more people are accessing the ānet on them, so I get that.
But I wonder if, long-term, this is that wise an idea.
Every time weāve done something friendly for smaller devices, either (a) the technology catches up, rendering the adaptation obsolete; or (b) a new technology is developed that can strip unwanted data to make the pages readable on a small device.
Our Newton-optimized news pages in the late 1990s were useless ultimately, and a few years later, I remember a distributor of ours developed a pretty clever technology that could automatically shrink the pages.
I realize responsive design now avoids both scenarios and a clean-sheet design should build in mobile-friendliness quite easily. Google evidently thinks that neither (a) nor (b) will recur, and that this is the way itās going to be. Maybe theyāre right this time (they ignored all the earlier times), and there isnāt any harm in making sure a single design works on different sizes.
I have to admit as much as those old pages of ours look ugly on a modern screen, I prefer to keep them that way as a sort of online archive. The irony is that the way they were designed, they would actually suit a lot of cellphones, because they were designed for a 640-pixel-wide monitor and the columns are suitably narrow and the images well reduced in size. Google, of course, doesnāt see it that way, since the actual design isnāt responsive.
Also, expecting these modern design techniques to be rolled out to older web pages is a tall order for a smaller company. And thatās a bit of a shame.
Itās already hard finding historical data online now. Therefore, historical pages will be ranked more lowly if they are on an old-style web design. Again, if thatās how people are browsing the web, itās fair: most of the time, we arenāt after historical information. We want the new stuff. But for those few times we want the old stuff, this policy decision does seem to say: never mind the quality, itās going to get buried.
I realize Google and its fans will argue that mobile-friendliness is only going to be one factor in their decision on search-engine ranking. That makes sense, too, as Google will be shooting itself in the foot if the quality of the results wasnāt up to snuff. At the end of the day, content should always rule the roost. As much as I use Duck Duck Go, I know more people are still finding us through Google.
What will be fascinating, however, is whether this winds up prioritizing the well resourced, large company ahead of the smaller one. If it does, then those established voices are going to be louder. The rich melting pot that is the internet might start looking a bit dull, a bit more reflective of the same-again names, and a little less novel.
Nevertheless, weāre up for the challenge, and weāll do what we can to get some of our pages ship-shape. I just don’t want to see a repeat of that time we tailored our pages for Newtons and the early PDAs.
When Lilith-Fynn Herrmann, Tania Naidu, Julia Chu, Tanya Sooksombatisatian and I redesigned Lucire in 2012, we went for a very clean look, taking a leaf from Miguel Kirjon’s work at Twinpalms Lucire in Thailand. I’m really proud of the results, and it makes you happy to work on the magazineāand just pick up the finished article and gaze at it.
But the websiteāwhere it all began 15 years agoāwas looking a bit dreary. After getting Autocade to 2,000 models, and updating various listings to reflect the 2013 model year, it was time we turned our attention to Lucire.
Like all of these things, the mood has to hit you right, and we needed a quiet news dayāof which there are plenty at this time of the year. We knew where things were with the web: because of improved screen resolutions, type had to be larger. There may beāand this is something we don’t have any research on yetāpeople who are familiar with on-screen reading that some of the rules about line length might apply less. And some of the successful publications have multiple sharingāin fact, there are so many links to like or Tweet or pin something on each page that you can be left wondering just which one you press.
The last big overhaul of the Lucire look online was in 2009, and the updates have been relatively minor since then. But it was looking messy. We had to add icons for new things that were creeping up. One Facebook “like” button wasn’t enough: what about people who wanted to become Facebook fans? Surely we should capture them? Maybe we should put up a Pinterest link? That went up during 2012. We had 160-pixel-wide ads for yearsāso we kept them. The result was tolerable, and it served us reasonably well, but did people still browse Lucire for fun? Or was it just a site where you got the information you needed and left again? Bounce rates suggested the latter.
While some of these things were noted subconsciously, we didn’t have a firm brief initially. We simply decided to do one page with a new look, to see how it would go. We had the print editions in mind. We knew we wanted cleanābut we still had to eat, so advertising still had to take up some of the page. We also knew that the lead image should be 640 pixels wide, and that that would have to be reflected on the news pages.
I’m glad to say we got lucky. The first page doneāa redesign of Sarah MacKenzie’s BMW X1 first drive, which originally went up with the old look on January 1āworked. It had all the features we wanted, even if it meant abandoning some things we had had for a long time, such as the skyscraper ads. The callouts could go. In fact, we could remove the central column altogether. And the ‘Related articles’ could be moved to the bottom, where they used to be. And we stuck up plenty of sharing tools, even if good design says they introduce clutter, so we could capture users at the start and the end of an articleābut we used different templates for each one. All the social networking pages we had could go to the top of the page in a row with ‘Follow us’.
The trick was then to repeat the look on other pages.
The āVolante’ index page is the only one so far to be brought into line with the new template, just to try some different layouts. I don’t think it’s quite there yet, though fashion ed. Sopheak Seng believes it’s clean enough. Practically, it is where it should be, but I want some visual drama in there. We’ll seeāI think Sopheak might be right given the function of the index page, and it is heaps cleaner than how it used to look.
The home page, of course, is the biggie, and I’m very proud to note that there’s been some great DIY there. While the slider and Tweets appear courtesy of programming that its authors have distributed freely, it’s a nice feeling to be able to say that they are on there because of in-house work, using Jquery (which we last used internally at JY&A Consultingās website), and not a convenient WordPress plug-in. Time will tell whether it will prove to be more practical to manage but I think it already is. I’ve summarized in Lucire some of the features, but there were just sensible things like getting rid of the QR code (what’s it doing on the website, anyway?), the Digg link (yes, really), the Nokia Ovi link (not far from now, kids will be asking what Nokia was). We have removed three of the six news headlines and grouped the remaining ones in a more prominent fashionāwhich might mean people will need to scroll down to see them, so I can foresee them being moved up somehow. But, overall, the effect is, as Sopheak notes, so much closer to the print title.
The slider has solved some problems with Google News picking up the wrong headline, too. I realize the big omission is not doing a proper mobile-optimized version but we need to do a bit more learning internally to deliver that properly. The news pages, which are on WordPress, have the default Jetpack skin. We have made some concessions to mobile devices and Sopheak tells me it is more browseable on his Samsung.
And today, the look went on to all the news pages.
I mentioned to him today that it was very 2002ā3. That period, too, saw Lucire get a redesign, standardizing things, making the pages cleaner, and in line with a print style (although at that point, the print edition had not been launchedāthough when it did, we adapted some of the look from the site). That look lasted us into 2006, perhaps longer than it should have been, given that we had some internal issues in that period.
It’s only natural that some clutter will be reintroduced as the years wear onāin Facebook’s case, it only takes a few monthsābut, for now, we’re hoping that bounce rate goes down, that the team, as a whole, feel far prouder of the work that appears online where it’s seen by more people, and that we have future-proofed a little.
So what were the lessons? (a) You need to keep on top of developments, and, even if you’re not the richest company in the world, you need to have someone thinking about how you look to the public. If smaller companies can manage teams more effectively, then they need to ensure there’s strong loyaltyāand that the feedback about things like the website are collated, either online or kept with one team member who champions the change. When a redesign happens, you’ll need to solve a lot of problems in one go. (b) There is no substitute for doingāand even getting it wrong on occasion. What we’ve done is to phase things inājust so we can learn from any bugs. (c) And after the job is done, take some time to enjoy it.
There’s probably no surprise when I say that this site is next. I know, it has links to different blog readers. It looks very mid-2000s. Which is no surprise, considering when it was designed ā¦
