Before this gets recycled, I thought Iâd scan it as a memento: a 1986 printout off our Riteman dot matrix printer (which I still have, with spare cartridges), hooked up to a Commodore 64. I forget the printer interface. The image isnât mine: I only imagine that 14-year-old me was claiming copyright over the layout and text. To me this was all amazing. Dad bought a box of the line-flow paper from the computer store, I believe, a place called Einstein, run by a really nice guy called Raju Badiani (who also sold the computer system). Anything seemed possible, and by the summer of 1986â7 I was hacking the bits and bytes and creating my own bitmap fonts on the 64, trying to make it all look like Eurostile. Nothing as sophisticated as Emigre. The 5ÂŒ-inch floppies are still around somewhere!
Posts tagged ‘computing’
From my desk, 1986
24.01.2021Tags: 1980s, 1986, Aotearoa, Commodore, computing, New Zealand, retro, Riteman, technology, typography, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in New Zealand, technology, Wellington | No Comments »
Payoneer frustrates and sends you round in circles
08.10.2020I can safely say that I wouldn’t choose Payoneer as a payment service. As I told in their forums today as a last resort, after already spending hours (in the plural!) on this.
This has been deeply frustrating and here I am telling the story for the fifth time, since Payoneer stores none of my requests in the support centre.
Today I received an email saying a payment was coming from a company that I work with. The problem: the bank account on file is out of date.
There is no way I can make any changes.
You may think that I can go to the settings on my account and do the edits there, but this particular account is not recorded there. So how can I remove or correct an account that is not even shown on the Payoneer website?
No matter which option you select from payoneer.custhelp.com, youâll get an automated response that is completely useless and irrelevant.
The emails read, âIf this response does not resolve your issue, visiting our Support Center is the fastest way to find a resolution,â which is a complete and utter lie, since you cannot file a single support request. After youâve typed out your story for the umpteenth time, support never receives a thing. You just get another automated email with useless information. When you look under âMy requestsâ, you find that Payoneer never recorded what you wrote. This must be the quietest support centre in the world.
When clicking on the link when the websiteâs advice is useless, you get a 404 that reads, âThis site has been disabled for the time being.â
They keep sending me to pages that I have already seen and can do nothing with. This has been the worst payment website I have ever had to deal with, as they keep sending you round in circles and nothing ever gets resolved. Itâs out of sheer desperation Iâm on a public forum in the hope someone knows how to do this.
I’m not kidding about their website. Here are some fun pages it’s led me to in order to resolve my query.
I’d like our money, please.
Tags: 2020, computing, customer service, Payoneer, technology, user interface
Posted in internet, technology | No Comments »
Reaching the end of Facebook
05.08.2020With the new season of Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei nearly upon us, I decided Iâd pop into my Facebook group (Iâm still an admin) to see what had been happening. Iâve been there a few times this week and I have discovered some of the siteâs latest features.
Groups: these now have three posts. Thatâs it. Three. It doesnât matter how long they have been running, Facebook doesnât want you to be bothered by history or anything so stupid. Therefore, after the third post (fourth if youâve just posted something), youâve reached the end. Saves heaps on the server bills, since I guess theyâre not as rich as they would have us believe.
(This bug has been around for years but now itâs the norm, so maybe they eventually figured out it was a cost-saving feature.)
On groups: welcome to the end of Facebook. This is the last post.
Comments: donât be silly, you shouldnât be able to comment. This is a great way for Facebook to cut down on dialogue, because they can then just propagate nonsense before an election. We know where Zuckâs biases are, so they want to be a broadcaster and publisher. You can select the word âReplyâ in the reply box, you just canât type in it. (Again, an old bug, but it looks like itâs a feature. Iâm still able to like things, although on many previous occasions over the last decade or more that feature was blocked to me.)
Commenting: they let me have one reply, but replying to someone who has replied to you? Forget it, it’s impossible.
In the reply box, you can highlight ‘Reply’ but you can’t type in there. That would be too much to ask.
Notifications: these never load, had haven’t done for a long time. Remember the ad preferencesâ page? They donât load, either, so Facebook has now extended the âcircleâ to notifications. If you donât see notifications, you wonât need to continue a threadânot that you could, anyway, since they donât let you comment.
If you knew what your notifications were, you might stay longer and post stuff that makes sense. No, Facebook is for people who want to spread falsehoods among themselves. You have no place here.
Messages: why not roll out the same spinning circle here, too? They should never load, either, because, frankly, email is far more efficient and everyone should just give up on using Facebookâs messaging service.
Time to go back to email: if you were ever silly enough to rely on Facebook for messaging, then you’re out of luck.
I once thought that I encountered bugs on Facebook because I was a heavy user, but as I havenât even touched my wall since 2017, this cannot be the reason. I also used to say their databases were âshot to hellâ, which could be the case. And I still firmly believe I encounter errors because Iâm more observant than most people. Remember, as Zuckâs friend Donald Trump says, if you do more testing, youâll find more cases.
I’ve even found the “end” of Instagram, at the point where nothing will show any more.
The end of Instagram: when you can find the limit to the service.
No one’s posting much these days. In the early 2010s, there’d be no way I’d ever get to see the end of my friends’ updates.
Solution: donât use Facebook. And definitely don’t entrust them with your personal data, including your photosâeven if you trust them, they’ll potentially get lost. From what I can tell, the site’s increasing inability to cope suggests that its own technology might fail them before the US government even gets a chance to regulate! Andâthe above topics asideâit may be time to regulate Facebook and pull in the reins.
Tags: 2010s, 2020, 2020s, bug, bugs, computing, error, errors, Facebook, Instagram, privacy, technology, trust
Posted in internet, politics, technology, USA | No Comments »
After you’ve gone through the brands you’ve heard of âŠ
23.05.2020
The mouse quest continues. After going through all of PBâs listings and coming up shortânothing (at least with listed dimensions) matched or came close to the size and shape of the Microsoft Intellimouse 1.1âI returned to Aliexpress for another look.
This Tecknet mouse might be the right one, but itâs hard to say till I try it out. For around NZ$20 weâll soon know.
Iâve bought mice from Guangdong vendors on Aliexpress before, and even have one I regularly take with me when I travel, but it doesnât have the side buttons, which Iâve become accustomed to. When youâre spoiled, itâs hard to go backâeven though I have three mice here without those extra buttons which might be totally adequate size- and shape-wise. Iâll report back when the new mouse arrives. Here’s hoping this will be large enough for my handsâand if it is, Tecknet could well get a lot of business from many of us in the same boat who don’t wish to subscribe to the current trend of tiny computer mice.
Tags: 2020, Aliexpress, China, computing, Guangdong, mouse, online, retail, Shenzhen, technology, Tecknet
Posted in China, design, technology | No Comments »
Microsoft’s revived Intellimouse isn’t a successor to the old
17.05.2020
How I had such high hopes that the Microsoft Intellimouse Pro Special Edition bought at NoĂ«l Leeming would be a successor to my Intellimouse 1.1. The short version: it isnât.
It might be a successor to the Intellimouse Explorer 3 on which the shape is modelled, but for those of us who prefer symmetrical mice, because the higher right-hand side supports your hand better, it literally was a pain.
There are only some counterfeit ones going for a decent price on Ebay, and I really should have snapped up more of the second-hand ones when I had a chance. The mice now at Recycling for Charity are, like all those reasonably priced ones in shops today, tiny. I imagine mice from the early 2000s aren’t even getting recycled any more, since it’s 2020 and the “old” stuff is from last decadeâafter the manufacturers began to shrink them.
Asus did a good job with its ROG Strix Evolve which I bought three months ago, but I find that the absence of tapering at the front and the overall tightness of the buttons didnât serve me that well.
The Intellimouse 1.1 is back here as my reserve, and the Asus is on the mouse pad. It took all of a few seconds at my desk to know that Microsoftâs revived Intellimouse wasnât rightâand one wonders why they couldnât just keep making something that worked so well for so many of us.
I was lucky to get the similarly shaped Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 five years ago, a dead-stock mouse made in 2005 that had been sitting at Corporate Consumables. In between the properly sized Microsoft miceâthree in total, including my first in 2002âI had all manner of other types but nothing was as comfortable.
When you go to some websites selling mice, they tell you that you can hold their product like a âclawâ, as if that is a positive attribute. Once again we see the need for humans to adapt to technology, rather than the other way round. I can see why one might need to do this given how mice have shrunk. If your handâs like a claw, then you may be the modern equivalent of the Chinese women who had their feet bound in the 20th century. You may feel that is the fashion, but you need not live with it.
I did it. On Saturday night I reset my Meizu M6 Note again, the second time in eight days, taking it back to factory settings. Except this time I didnât load Whatsapp or Signal. Two days later, my phone remains OK.
I suggested to PB that it may have developed a readâwrite fault, as deleting photos from the internal memory takes minutes (if it ever completes), which the warranty should cover. It also would explain why the gallery, camera and the downloadsâ folder wouldnât load properly, since they each tried to access the internal storage. I also had difficulty restoring my SMSs with SMS Backup, with the operation crapping out before completingâthough strangely, today, the SMSs are back without any intervention from me.
But it also wouldnât surprise me one bit if Whatsapp wasnât compatible with Android 7 nowâInstagram never was, not fully. To save a load of time I wonât be putting messaging apps back on there. I lost a second evening to this and Iâm not keen on losing more.
There are two up sides: I donât need to get a new phone, and if I did, I finally found a vendor on Aliexpress whoâll sell a Chinese-spec Meizu. No more of these western editions: they are less reliable, with a less well stocked app store, and you canât update the OS. You have to root them to get rid of the Google spyware. I may stick with Meizu but I really wonât be buying domestically again.
Tags: 2020, Aliexpress, Aotearoa, Asus, cellphone, China, computing, counterfeit, Ebay, Google Android, Meizu, Microsoft, mouse, New Zealand, Noël Leeming, office, PB Technologies, recycling, software, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara, Whatsapp
Posted in business, China, design, New Zealand, technology, Wellington | 2 Comments »
One more COVID-19 post: graphing and animating the data
06.04.2020Russell Brown linked this COVID-19 trend page by Aatish Bhatia on his Twitter recently, and itâs another way to visualize the data. There are two axes: new confirmed cases (over the past week) on the y and total confirmed cases on the x. Itâs very useful to see how countries are performing over time as itâs animated, and to get a handle on what trajectory youâre on.
Iâve plotted us against some Asian countries and territories in the first graph and western countries in the second. South Korea is doing quite well and Taiwan is really bending its curve down. Try it yourself by clicking on either of the screenshot graphs below.
Tags: 2020, Aatish Bhatia, Asia, China, computing, COVID-19, data, design, Europe, health, Korea, occident, pandemic, programming, Republic of China, South Korea, statistics, Taiwan, Twitter, USA, YouTube
Posted in design, globalization, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Sweden, technology, UK, USA | No Comments »
Asus ROG Strix Evolve: a gaming mouse for a non-gamer
18.02.2020My 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.
Tags: 2010s, 2020, Asus, computing, design, Microsoft, recycling, technology
Posted in design, New Zealand, technology | 1 Comment »