When I was 13, my father became self-employed after being made redundant at his work. By choice, my mother did the same when I was in my early 20s. They both loved the lifestyle and I imagine it was inevitable I would do the same in my career, beginning at a time when I was still studying.
As some who self-isolate because of the coronavirus pandemic say that their mental health is affected, I thought Iâd share how Iâve been based at home for over three decades.
1. For those working, make sure itâs not just one project. Thereâs nothing more wearing that having just one thing to work on the entire day. I always have a few projects on the go, and make sure I switch between them. The second project should be a lighter one or be of less importance. Even if itâs not work, make sure itâs something that gives you a bit of variety.
2. Make sure you have a decent work set-up. I find it important to have a monitor where I can read things clearly. Also I set mine on a mode that restricts blue light. If youâre working at home, itâs not a bad idea to have comfortable settings on a screen. If your monitor doesnât have a native mode to restrict blue light, thereâs always F.lux, which is an excellent tool to make screens more comfortable.
If you’re used to standard keyboards and mice, that’s great, but for me, I have to ensure my keyboard is either at around 400 mm in width or less, and my mouse has to be larger than the standard size since I have big hands. Ergonomics are important.
3. Find that spot. Find a comfortable space to base yourself with plenty of natural light and ventilation. At-home pet cats and dogs do it, take their lead.
4. Stretch. Again, the cats and dogs do it. Get out of that chair every now and then and make sure you don’t get too stiff working from your desk. Exercise if you wish to.
5. If you relax to white noise or find it comforting, there are places that can help. One friend of mine loves his podcasts, and others might like music, but I enjoy having the sound of web video. And if itâs interesting, you can always stop to watch it. One site I recently recommended is Thought Maybe, which has plenty of useful documentaries, including Adam Curtisâs ones. These give an insight into how parts of the world work, and you might even get some theories on just what landed us in this situation in 2020.
When Aotearoa had two network TV channels, I dreamed of a time when I could have overseas stations accessible at my fingertips. That reality is now here with plenty of news channels online. If thatâs too much doom and gloom, Iâm sure there are others that you can tune into to have running in the background. Radio.net has a lot of genres of music.
6. Find that hobby. No point waiting till you retire. Was there something you always wanted to learn about but thought youâd never have time? I recommend Skillshare, which has lots of online courses on different subjects. You learn at your pace so you can delve into the course whenever you want, say once a day as a treat.
7. I do some social media but generally I limit myself. Because social media are antisocial, and theyâre designed to suck up your time to make their owners rich (they look at how much attention they capture and sell that to advertisers), thereâs no point doing something draining if youâve got some good stuff to do in (1). However, they might be cathartic if you want to have some human contact or express your feelings. Personally, I prefer to blog, which was my catharsis in the mid-2000s, and which I find just as good today. It’s a pity the old Vox isn’t around these days as there’s much to be said for a long-form blogging network.
Sarb Johal started the #StayatHomeEnts hashtag on Twitter where Tweeters have been putting up some advice on what we each do to keep entertained. I just had a scroll down and they’re really good!
8. Many of us have this technology to chat to others, letâs use it. Weâre luckier in 2020 that thereâs Facetime, Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. I had thought that if we didnât have social media, weâd be finding this an ideal opportunity to connect with others around the planet and learning about other cultures. I remember in the early days of the web how fascinating it was to chat to people in chatrooms from places I had never visited. I realize these days there are some weirdos out there, who have spoiled the experience for the great majority. But Iâm sure there are some safe places, and if theyâre not around, see what friends are in the same boat and form your own virtual networks. Importantly, donât restrict yourselves to your own country.
9. Donât veg: do something creative. For those of us with a creative bent, draw, write, photograph, play a musical instrumentâsomething to de-stress. I canât get through a day without doing one creative thing.
10. Anything in the house that you said youâd always do? Nowâs your chance to do it, and hopefully youâve got your tools and equipment at home already.
11. If you’re in a relationship, don’t get on top of each otherâhave your own spaces. Having said that, seeing my partner helps as I used to go into town a few times a week for meetings; because I see her each day, that need to meet up with colleagues to get out of your own headspace isn’t as strong.
Normally I would have a small amount of meetings during the week but as I get older, they’re actually fewer in number, so I can cope with not having them.
Do you have any extra tips? Put them in the comments and letâs see if we can build on this together.
Hereâs a cautionary tale found by Lucire travel editor Stanley Moss. His words: âPhotographer Dmitry Kostyukov recently experienced a rich dialogue with an algorithm belonging to a Scandinavian swimwear company. Heâd been auto-mistaken for a Y chromosome, and digitally invited to become a brand ambassador. Dmitry accepted, and received the sample suit of his choice, an influencer name and instructions on how to photograph himself wearing the product. This exposes one facet of what advertising has become, commodified advocacy. Following is the text of his statement about the project, filled with reminders of what today constitutes the new paradigm of product promotion. Caveat emptor.â
In other words, donât leave your marketing in the hands of a program. I havenât followed up with Bright Swimwear, but I hope they’ll run with it, not just to show that they are âprogressiveâ, but to admit that there are limits to how algorithms can handle your brand. (They haven’t yet.)
If the world desires more humanistic branding, and people donât want to feel like just a number, then brands should be more personal. Automation is all right when you need to reach a mass audience with the same message, but cultivating personal relationships with your brand ambassadors would be a must if you desire authenticity. Otherwise, you just donât know the values of those promoting your brand.
Fortunately, I took it in good humour just as Dmitry did and ran the story in Lucire, and you can reach your own conclusions about the wisdom of algorithms in marketing, particularly in brand ambassadorship.
My early 2000s Microsoft Intellimouse 1·1 is still the perfect shape for me. After getting the second-hand one into service last year, I thought that I needed a spare. Iâve several other mice, including no-brand ones, that are a decent size, but I got used to having the forward and back buttons on either side.
Microsoft makes a Classic Intellimouse these days, but itâs based on a later design, and it appears the side buttons are on the left only, which seems to be the convention in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Itâs also had some reviews criticizing the quality, so I knew I couldnât go with the latest.
I headed back to Recycling for Charity, where I sourced this Intellimouse, but judging by the stock, Iâm not alone in my preference. All that were left were smaller mice, making me wish that I bought multiple Intellimouses a few years ago and stocked up. This surely is a massive hint to mainstream mouse makers on a latent, forgotten market.
After sampling some during spare time at Noël Leeming in Porirua, which did fit my hand, I opted to look online. The Noël Leeming ones were mostly Logitech, and my experience is that their mice last about two years. I wanted quality.
After much searching, one mouse that matches the dimensions of the Intellimouse (125 mm Ă 65 mm Ă 40 mm) with one millimetre out on the height is the Asus Republic of Gamers (ROG) Strix Evolve, and our old friends at Just Laptops in Albany had them on special at under NZ$70 plus freight. Thatâs a lot more than the NZ$3 I paid for the used Intellimouse and the NZ$25 I paid for the Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 in 2015, but with Asus claiming that the switches were good for 50 million clicksâprobably 10 times more than regular miceâI decided that three times the price for ten times the longevity (at least in one respect) was acceptable. And it had two switches on each side, which I could program.
It arrived a (working) day later. A lot of the gaming features are lost on me: the option to have lighting effects, choosing your own colour or having it cycle, for instance. I donât necessarily need DPI switching. Itâs simply vital that I have something my right hand is comfortable with.
The mouse comes with a second set of covers, so you can raise it slightly to suit your hand. I tried all permutations: left high, right low, vice versa, both low, both high, before deciding on having both sides in the raised position. The rubber side panels help with grip, and they aid comfort.
The first negative is that the forward end isnât as wide as I was used to. The Microsoft mice are a reasonable width all the way down, and the Evolve is slightly narrower. That means my ring finger touches the mouse pad more on the side, as it did with an earlier Lenovo (plenty of those at Recycling for Charity, incidentally). I thought I wouldnât be able to get used to it, as I didnât with the Lenovo, and it does continue to be a slight problem. In other words, I havenât quite got the perfect mouse and itâs a lesson about buying online when your requirements are this strict (though again I wouldnât have considered this a major problem if manufacturers werenât skimping on materials and giving people repetitive strain injuries).
Asus hasnât deceived about the measurements: it is 125 mm wide at its greatest width, just as Microsoft has it on theirs.
I may put up with letting my ring finger drop and go along the mouse pad for the time being just for comfortâs sake and see if Iâm OK with washing the pad more regularly. Or adjust my hand positioning slightly. But I know I cannot use the modern mice.
One Tweeter noted that maybe the mouse manufacturers are finally appealing to women, and I had to agree it was nice for us men to experience just once what itâs like for them in a usually male-designed tech world.
The other features are excellent: the ability to program the switches, which I did very early; and I can turn the lighting off as I see no point to it if my hand is on the mouse obscuring most of it. Then again, Iâm not a gamer.
The mouse wheel and switches are far more solid than anything Iâve encountered, making the 50 million-click claim believable. I do occasionally hit the right button inadvertently, probably out of unfamiliarity, and I must hit the DPI switch from time to time, again accidentally.
Nevertheless, Iâm going to keep my eye out for second-hand Intellimouses. Mine has become the back-up again, and really I didnât think I was asking for much. Microsoft had a perfect design for which the tooling must be long amortized, so it makes you wonder why they donât just trot it out again and make a bundle more off us.
I wonder if itâs time to return to Firefox after an absence of two years and five months. After getting the new monitor, the higher res makes Firefoxâs and Opera GXâs text rendering fairly similar (though Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge remain oddly poor, and Vivaldiâs tech people havenât been able to replicate my bug). Thereâs a part of me that gravitates toward Firefox more than anything with a Google connection, and I imagine many Kiwis like backing underdogs.
Here are some examples, bearing in mind Windows scales up to 125 per cent on QHD.
Vivaldi (Chrome renders like this, too)
Opera GX (and how Vivaldi used to render)
Firefox
Opera renders text slightly more widely than Firefox, but the subpixel rendering of both browsers is similar, though not identical. Type in Firefox arguably comes across with slightly less contrast than it should (especially for traditionally paper-based type, where I have a good idea of how itâs âsupposedâ to look) but Iâm willing to experiment to see if I enjoy the switch back.
In those 29 months, a lot has happened, with Navigational Sounds having vanished as an extension, and I had to get a new Speed Dial (FVD Speed Dial) to put on my favourite sites. FVD uninstalled itself earlier today without any intervention from me, so if that recurs, Iâll be switching to something else. I donât like computer programs having a will of their own.
A lot of my saved passwords no longer work, since I change them from time to time, and it was interesting to see what Firefox remembered from my last period of regular use. Iâll have to import some bookmarks, tooâthat file has been going between computers since Netscape.
The big problem of 2017âFirefox eating through memory like crazy (6 Gbyte in a short time)âcould be fixed now in 2020 by turning off hardware acceleration. Itâs actually using less right now than Opera GX, and thatâs another point in its favour.
I also like the Facebook Container that keeps any trackers from Zuck and co. away.
I did, however, have to get new extensions after having resided in the Vivaldi and Opera space for all that time, such as Privacy Badger.
If I make Firefox the default I know Iâll have truly switched back. But that Opera GX sure is a good looking browser. I might have to look for some skins to make common-garden Firefox look smarter.
Growing up in a relatively wealthy country in the 1980s, after getting through most of the 1970s, youâd be forgiven for thinking that the world would just keep getting better and things would make more sense as humans evolved.
From a teenagerâs perspective: home computers, with a modulatorâdemodulator (modem), could bring you information instantaneously and from around the world. As an immigrant kid, that excited me: contact with people âback homeâ and from other places, making communication quicker. You could hear from others, and you could help others who needed you. And if you didnât have a computer that could connect to a bulletin board, there was Teletext, which gave you regularly updated information through your TV set.
Cars were getting more aerodynamic, which meant they would use less fuel, and that was understood universally to be a good thing. MPVs were very practical vehicles that had small footprints yet fitted a lot of people, or stuff, inside. Here in New Zealand, natural gas-powered dual-fuel cars were mainstream, and that meant we werenât reliant on overseas oil. They also didnât pollute anywhere near what petrol didâthey burned cleanly.
And since saving energy was understood to be a good thing, who knew? Before long solar power would be the norm for new homes and weâd be putting electricity back into the grid.
I also heard about recycling for the first time as a teen, and that seemed like a good thingâall that old paper and plastic could have a second life.
People were interested in being more efficient because no one wanted a repeat of the oil shocks of the 1970s. Nor did we want the government imposing carless days on us again.
That same teenager would have thought that by the dawn of the 21st centuryâif the US and Soviet Union behavedâweâd have evolved to have recognized that we had the tools to make things better.
When the internet came to our house in the 1990s, I saw it as a direct evolution of the 1980sâ optimism. It made sense.
So through that lens, a lot of what the world looks like today doesnât make sense.
We have connected computers, milliards which are handheld, yet some of us are addicted to them and others use them to express outrage, rather than delight in having any contact at all with people thousands of miles away.
SUVs outsell regular cars in some size segments. They are less aerodynamic, use more fuel, and are less efficient. We have American companiesâFord in the US and Holden hereâsaying that theyâll stop selling cars in most segments in favour of utility trucks, crossovers and SUVs. Petrol is expensive, and I complain about it, but I guess no one else thinks itâs expensive. Dual-fuel cars are a thing of the past here, for the most part, yet lots of people marvel at hybrids, conveniently forgetting we were decades ahead in the 1980s.
And solar power isnât the norm.
We still, happily, recycleâbut not everything we collect winds up being recycled. We have an awareness, but if we kept on progressing as I expected us to when I was Greta Thunbergâs age, then we wouldnât have Greta Thunberg reminding us that we havenât.
I wonder if others in middle age realize that humans have the potential to go forward, and in many respects we doâbut collectively there are enough of us who go backward and prevent any real advance in society.
I like to have the same optimism as teenage me about the future. In terms of myself, many things bring me happiness, particularly in my personal and work lives. Yet in terms of society, I wonder if I can be as optimistic. I know deep down that we are interested in efficiency and treating our planet better (or we say we are), so then who are the ones holding us back, and what are we doing that stops us moving forward? Is it personal greed, hoping others will pick up the slack? Many of us choose products and services from companies that align with our views about what we wantâyet are we doing the same when it comes to politicians?
I had to put in a good word for Dell’s P2418D monitor (earlier post here) after the multiple negative reviews left by one person.
If I had to write something negative, it would be about their website blocking me from submitting my positive review by claiming I was using an ad blocker. I wasn’t. But I do have ‘Do not track’ turned on and I wonder if that is doing it.
Eventually I got the review through on my eighth attempt by using a vulnerable browser: one with no privacy plug-ins, allowing all cookies, with all the default tracking that Big Tech likes.
After reading another reviewerâs multiple entries, I had a few doubts about this monitor, but Iâm glad I bit the bullet anyway. I bought mine in 2020, so they may have ironed out the bugs.
First up, the QHD resolution is a great thing to have. Windows 10 automatically scaled everything 125 per cent for me, and the programs that were a bit fuzzy were easily sortedâyou just go into the properties and make sure that they use their own magnification and not the OSâs. Iâm actually more productive as a result of being able to see the finer detail. I work in publishing and itâs great to be able read the smaller copy on a spread. Before I would have to zoom in and out to do a lot of my work.
I donât really need 27 inches as I donât want to move my neck to see the different corners of the screen: 24 is plenty for me. I actually have a feeling 27 inches would decrease my productivity, but thatâs just my personal preference.
Iâve noticed no backlight bleed, the edge is fine for me and the desktop appears normally. As to the prompts that appear when the monitor goes into sleep mode (one source of complaint for one reviewer)âfor me it doesnât sleep for ages (it must be my settings) and when it does, Iâm usually out of the room. In three weeks Iâve seen those prompts once.
I had a problem with the driverâWindowsâ security settings prevented me from opening the executableâbut I was able to open it using an elevated command prompt. The controls you need for resolution, brightness, contrast, etc. are in there, too, if you donât wish to fiddle with the buttons on the front of the unit itself.
All the cables are included (USB 3 downstream, Displayport, power), and itâs been great having USB ports on my monitor. Itâs allowed me to tidy up the external HDs a lot (I run three). Going from DVI-D to Displayport has been useful, tooâI know I shouldnât notice 1 ms improvement in speed but I really sense that I do!
The blue-light-blocking comfort mode means I donât get sore eyes if I work late, another bonus.
Iâm glad someone makes QHD at this sizeâin fact, I know Dell does 4K at this size, too. But QHD is fine for meâof the programs not using Windowsâ scaling, I donât want the menus to get too small! A great investment to my everyday computing.
Hope that redresses the balance a bit more for Dell. I get that the other person is annoyed, but stick it all in one review, please!
Iâve had a go at software makers before over giving us solutions that are second-best, because second-best has become the convention. While I can think of an explanation for that, viz. Microsoft packaged Windows computers in the 1990s with Word and Outlook Express, itâs harder to explain why peripherals havenât been human-centred.
I thought about this with my monitor. Itâs “only” 24 inches, despite being QHD. But it works for me, as 27 or more would see me move my neck to view the corners. I was always happy with the 24-inch Imac: I had no desire for it to be larger. If I had 27 inches I might need to sit further back, cancelling out the upsizing. Despite saying this, I can see in some situations where people would be quite happy with 27 (and even larger ones for coders), but it begs the question of why there arenât more 24-inch QHD monitors on the market. My friend Chelfyn Baxter believes it is the optimum size for productivity (granted, he told me this over five years ago, though I still see little to fault him). Are our suppliers driving us to larger sizes, just as car importers are driving us to automatics here? (The latter is not backed up by any research on preferences, to my knowledge.)
The same thing applies to keyboards. To me, the optimum width of a keyboard is around 40 cm. Any wider, youâre reaching for your mouse and causing repetitive strain injuries. Iâve stuck to my 40 cm rule for a long time and havenât had the sort of pain I had in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I had a standard-width keyboard. The mouse is roughly where I expect it to be, and I wouldnât object if it were closer still. Again, it begs the question of why 40 cm isnât a standard if it saves us from pain.
Then thereâs the mouseâI now use a Microsoft Intellimouse 1.1 from the early 2000s after my 2005-made, 2015-new one gave up. I know thereâs a lot of comedy around the US president having small hands, but weâre no longer in the sort of society whose products change to appease a leader. But regular mice are awfully small, a trend that seemed to have begun in the 2010s. I canât hold them and maybe I have large hands, but I canât be alone. In so many places I visit, I see some very uncomfortable hands try to grip a small mouse. I learned that was a bad thing in the days of the round 1999 Apple USB mouse (it wasnât the Imouse), which created a trade in adapters that snapped on around it.
Fortunately, mice manufacturers do offer larger sizes, recognizing that not all of us accept a childâs size as the standard. Here I can understand why mice have downsized: the manufacturers attempting to save a few bob and forcing more of us into it. However, there must be a decent part of the population who think, âIâll be uncomfortable with that. I wonât buy it,â and let the market move accordingly.
I wonder how much more comfortable and productive a chunk of the population would be by following a few basic rules: have a monitorâwhatever size suits youâwhere you limit strain on your neck; have a keyboard around 40 cm wide or less; and have a mouse which your hand can rest on (and keyboard wrist rests and mouse wrist rests to suit to make you comfortable). But I know most of us will just go, âThe default is good enough,â and unnecessarily suffer.
Speaking of practical, I hope Mudita gets its designs on the market sooner rather than later. Who needs pizzazz when we all value simplicity? Technology serving humanity: what a novel idea! Here’s how we can help.
The Dell P2418D: just like the one I’m looking at as I type, but there are way more wires coming out of the thing in real life
Other than at the beginning of my personal computing experience (the early 1980s, and thatâs not counting video game consoles), Iâve tended to have a screen thatâs better than average. When 640 Ă 360 was the norm, I had 1,024 Ă 768. My first modern laptop in 2001 (a Dell Inspiron) had 1,600 pixels across, even back then. It was only in recent years that I thought my LG 23-inch LCD, which did full HD, was good enough, and I didnât bother going to the extremes of 4K. However, with Lucire and the night-time hours I often work, and because of a scratch to the LG that a friend accidentally made when we moved, I thought it was time for an upgrade.
Blue light is a problem, and I needed something that would be easier on the eyes. At the same time, an upgrade on res would be nice.
But there was one catch: I wasnât prepared to go to 27 inches. I didnât see the point. I can only focus on so much at any given time, and I didnât want a monitor so large that Iâd have to move my neck heaps to see every corner. On our work Imacs I was pretty happy to work at 24 inches, so I decided Iâd do the same for Windows, going up a single inch from where I was. IPS would be fine. I didnât need a curved screen because my livelihood is in flat media. Finally, I don’t need multiple screens as I don’t need to keep an eye on, say, emails coming in on one screen, or do coding where I need one screen for the code and the other for the preview.
Oddly, there arenât many monitor manufacturers doing QHD at 24 inches. There was a very narrow range I could choose from in New Zealand, with neither BenQ nor Viewsonic doing that size and resolution here. Asus has a beautifully designed unit but I was put off by the backlight bleed stories of four years ago that were put down to poor quality control, and it seemed to be a case of hit and miss; while Dellâs P2418D seemed just right, its negative reviews on Amazon and the Dell website largely penned by one person writing multiple entries. I placed the order late one night, and Ascent dispatched it the following day. If not for the courier missing me by an hour, Iâd be writing this review a day earlier.
I realize weâre only hours in to my ownership so there are no strange pixels or noticeable backlight bleed, and assembly and installation were a breeze, other than Windows 10 blocking the installation of one driver (necessitating the use of an elevated command prompt to open the driver executable).
With my new PC that was made roughly this time last year, I had a Radeon RX580 video card with two Displayport ports, so it was an easy farewell to DVI-D. The new cables came with the monitor. A lot of you will already be used to monitors acting as USB hubs with a downstream cable plugged in, though that is new to me. It does mean, finally, I have a more comfortable location for one of my external HDs, and I may yet relocate the cable to a third external round the back of my PC.
Windows 10 automatically sized everything to 125 per cent magnification, with a few programs needing that to be overridden (right-click on the program icon, then head into âCompatibilityâ, then âChange high DPI settingsâ).
Dellâs Display Manager lets you in to brightness, contrast and other settings without fiddling with the hardware buttons, which is very handy. I did have to dial down the brightness and contrast considerably: Iâm currently at 45 and 64 per cent respectively.
And I know itâs just me and not the devices but everything feels faster. Surely I can’t be noticing the 1 ms difference between Displayport and DVI-D?
I can foresee this being far more productive than my old set-up, and Ascentâs price made it particularly tempting. I can already see more of the in- and outbox detail in Eudora. Plantin looks great here in WordPerfect (which I often prep my long-form writing in), and if type looks good, Iâm more inclined to keep working with it. (It never looked quite right at a lower res, though it renders beautifully on my laptop.)
I feel a little more âlate 2010sâ than I did before, with the monitor now up to the tech of the desktop PC. Sure, itâs not as razor-sharp as an Imac with a Retina 4K display, but I was happy enough in work situations with the QHD of a 15-inch Macbook Pro, and having that slightly larger feels right. Besides, a 4K monitor at this sizeâand Dell makes oneâwas outside what I had budgeted, and Iâm not sure if I want to run some of my programsâthe ones that donât use Windowsâ magnificationâon a 4K screen. Some of their menus would become particularly tiny, and that wonât be great for productivity.
Maybe when 4K becomes the norm Iâll reconsider, as the programs will have advanced by then, though at this rate Iâll still be using Eudora 7.1, as I do today.
Go a bit further to this link, and there they are, nearly 500 preferences linked to me, compiled even though I had opted out of personalizationâmaking Twitter just as bad as Facebook.
What do I do? Exactly what I did on Facebook: I deselected each and every single one. Twitter doesnât need this to market to me. Frankly itâs enough that it has my IP address and it can geo-target. It doesnât need any more precision than that. I get to the bottom of the page, having done them all:
And just like Facebook, within hours it has reselected over 400 of them, repopulating preferences and overriding what the user wants.
In fact, some were being reselected within seconds, but I put that down to the fact I was using a cellphone. As of this writing, the second deselections have been done on the desktop.
This is simply not right, but we have been seeing signs in the latter part of the 2010s that Twitter is as bad as Facebook, with its love of bots, bigotry and its mass censorship. Now itâs as devoted to selling its users as the rest of Big Tech. The net result is Iâll begin limiting my time on Twitter because its privacy intrusion has gone too far. It cannot be trusted. It will probably become a work tool as Facebook has, where I do little of my own stuff, and only serve my clients; or I simply have automated content.
I suppose you can always say, âWell, at least itâs not as bad as âŠâ and on that note, I checked in to Facebook to see if I could post a question on why advertising preferences were not editable.
Eventually I found four others had managed, after wading through Facebookâs many layers of pages before getting to one where you could pose a question, to ask the same.
Except none of them are clickable to a question-and-answer page. They all take you to a Facebook Business advertising queriesâ page.
Therefore, I asked the question even though it had already been asked. I doubt Iâll hear back, as I noticed that on the same visit, Facebook had censored two of my earlier responses.
Why? They reveal that Facebookâs platform is buggy, that I was unable to do some things on pages that it claimed I was able to do.
All I can say is that this is petty. Facebook: for the last 15 years your platform has been buggy. Everyone knows this. Covering up a couple of comments made in your own forums, comments that are truthful and actually helpful to others who encounter the same thing, doesnât make your platform any less buggy. But this is the Zuckerberg way: all-too-precious, wimpy against criticism, with a self-belief that not publishing something will make it go away. I mean, itâs worked against equally wimpy governments. It is a page out of the Google playbook, too: its forums are full of cultist believers who ask, âHow dare you question our god?â when you post about bugs. However, it alienates users.
Itâs probably why the old Getsatisfaction Facebook forum was closed down, because it revealed so many bugs about the system.
Iâm hoping the 2020s will see some sort of mass rejection of these Big Tech social-tracking platforms, but I thought that would happen years ago. I was wrong. There are still good people on them but there are also good people on Mastodon and elsewhere.
PS.: Here we are, four hours later, after I unticked all the preferences. At least 300 of them have been reselected by Twitter. So it is like Facebook. Once again, we have to say to a US Big Tech firm: stop lying. Your claims about your settings are bogus.
P.PS.: Day two, still fighting Twitter, which reticked a lot (but not all) of the preferences. Still in the hundreds.
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.
