The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[cc_in_oh]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

Apparently when I bought a Fire HD10 last year, it somehow became my default download device (replacing Kindle cloud reader). So now the HD10 has the hundreds of free books I've acquired since then. Not only do I have to delete them one by one, but after each delete I have to wait until the book list refreshes with one more title before I can get the menu to delete the next one. Surely there must be a better way?

So it's 2 months since this post, and I just noticed that my default device once again somehow got switched from cloud reader to the Fire HD10. Is there something my wife could be doing accidentally on the HD10? I thought it could only be changed in MYCD, but she never logs into that.

[BetterRed]

Logged into my bank's Internet Banking site, glanced at the account balances, they looked okay, copied credit card balance to clipboard and went into Funds Transfer - I was there to pay my credit card debt.

Did what I do every month, pay off Credit Card from Cheque Account, but I didn't end up at the "Done, where to next guv?" page. Instead I ended up at the Transaction List page... and my balances hadn't changed, credit card should have been zero but it was still $49.50.

Tried a couple of times over next couple days, same result. I hate having to call banks and such with their press 2, press # nineteen thousand times. Have you tried our Internet Banking. Are you sure you want to speak to an account rep. Did you know we have phone banking too.

Listened to their crappy music, yelled obscenities at their promos telling me what a wonderful outfit they are. They're not, they're the NAB, they just got a shellacking from a Royal Commission for charging people for stuff they didn't want or didn't need, and charging people for things the bank could never deliver - because those particular things never existed.

Eventually a pleasant enough lady took my call, we walked through the transaction - at the end of which I heard a long sigh - "What browser are you using?', "Firefox 69," says I. Another sigh "Can you try doing it in Internet Explorer?", "No," says I, "I uninstalled IE ages ago - I have Chrome, Edge, and Falkon"

Upshot was we finished the call with the understanding that if I couldn't do it in another browser I'd call back. Fired up Edge, did what was needed to logon to NAB, the Funds Transfer worked fine.

I thought we'd gotten well beyond banks and government agencies etc being stuck in the 1990's.

BR

[binaryhermit]

Over the weekend, I had massive issues getting Debian installed on my new laptop. It seems GRUB is massively messed up on (at least some) Apollo Lake devices and you need to use a different bootloader like rEFInd. Only took me like 9 hours to figure that out.

[Darqref]

My TV broke a couple of months ago, probably a power surge. Bought a new one to replace it.

I currently do not have cable, I use a Roku occasionally, but most frequently an antenna on the roof. I get lots of local channels, many with several digital sub channels - As in, channel 7.1 is a CBS affiliate, 7.2 is usually something like Justice Network, 7.3 is currently LAFF, etc.

Last week, some of the channels stopped having a signal. Not all of them, and not all from a particular direction. One that is still working has always had a weaker signal, so if something was interfering with the antenna, I would have thought that channel would be faulty. For the faulty channels, the tv is displaying a screensaver, with the text that no signal is being received.

On the other hand, all those channels are still listed in the on-air guide. The TV displays the name of the show that *should* be on, but then reverts to the "no signal" screen saver.

I don't really even know if it's truly a tv hardware problem, or something in the signal.

[cromag]

I use an antenna as well, in my attic. Have you tried re-scanning? Some stations are changing their frequencies.

https://www.fcc.gov/TVrescan

[Freehunter]

The FCC has been reallocating frequencies for other uses and so has been compressing those available for television. Not sure how long this will continue. About a month ago, half the stations in northeast Ohio and a couple bordering states changed the digital frequency they broadcast on. It was a pain because my old TV only does full rescan not just update, some marginal strength signals are skipped. So had to do manual add trying "all" channel to find new locations. Did find some new frequencies in station's listing in Wikipedia.

[Darqref]

Weirdness. So a re-scan of all the channels worked. I didn't really think it would, because only about a quarter of the stations I normally receive had changed. Logic would have guessed more would have needed to change.

It may say something about my awareness, but I haven't found any mention of this happening in any local media. Now Mom can watch Jeopardy again.

[4691mls]

In my area the stations that were changing frequencies broadcast frequent announcements as well as message crawls across the screen in the weeks ahead of the change warning viewers to "rescan on September 5" (or whatever the date was). If they didn't do that in your area then you probably weren't the only one caught by surprise!

[BetterRed]

I was going to post this here ===>>> https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...=326848&page=3, but decided here would be a better place

I've had one malware infestation since I first installed a beta copy of Windows 2.0 from a couple of boxes of diskettes 30+ years ago on a corporate PC.

It arrived in the early '90s when a PC support techie installed a 3270 terminal emulation package on my corporate PC. It was detected by me when 'stuff' started to go awry, but not by the PC Support recommended AV. The source of the malware was the PC Support server. Not only did they screw up my almost new PC, they also screwed the bank's COO and his PA's new laptops. Heads rolled, out the door, toot sweet - next day.

A few years ago I was installing a new version of CCleaner when Defender popped up to announce - "Oi, that proggie your trying to install is crap - it's infested with Trojan ????." So I ran the install.exe through VT, only one scanner reported anything, but it wasn't Trojan ????, Defender wasn't in the VT scanner list. So, mused I: It must be a false positive. But before telling Defender to ignore it, I did some searches and discovered that CCleaner was known to have been infested with Trojan ???? at source. I also found apologia from the company that had just bought CCleaner's parent company - AVG or Avast, I forget which.

FWIW Microsoft has 99 pages of open source projects at GitHub (which it owns), Apple has 9.

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I was going to post this here ===>>> https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...=326848&page=3, but decided here would be a better place

I've had one malware infestation since I first installed a beta copy of Windows 2.0 from a couple of boxes of diskettes 30+ years ago on a corporate PC.

I've had zero malware infestations at home. I did have one at the office, decades back. It came with a copy of the WRQ Reflections package I was installing from a WRQ CD to implement communications with a server. There were other ways to do the same thing, so I uninstalled Reflections and deloused the PC. (And, IIRC, I sent WRQ a nastygram about the quality control on their installation CDs.)

It arrived in the early '90s when a PC support techie installed a 3270 terminal emulation package on my corporate PS2 model 90. It was detected by me when 'stuff' started to go awry, but not by the PC Support recommended AV. The source of the malware was the PC Support server. Not only did they screw up my almost new PS/2 80, they also screwed the bank's COO and his PA's new laptops. Heads rolled, out the door, toot sweet - next day.

I've used 3270 compatible terminals to access a mainframe at a bank. One had me mumbling to myself. It failed. The support tech replaced everything that could be replaced - internal circuit boards, CRT, keyboard - the only remaining original part was the metal housing. It still failed. He gave me a new one and took away the old one. I said "What are you going to do with the old one?" He said "I'm going to stick it in the parts closet in the basement, and whenever I have to come back for a service call I'm going to pull it out and beat it with a stick!" I didn't blame him a bit.

The last time I dealt with a 3270 emulation package, it was for a Unix machine. The Unix systems house I worked for sold a Unix workstation to a shop that made jewelry, and needed to communicate with an IBM mainframe on the site of the vendor who was their principal customer.

Unfortunately, the owner of the systems house who sold them the system didn't find out enough about their needs. What they actually needed was 5741 RJE emulation to talk to the customer's MRP system. That did exist for Unix, but would cost more than the system we sold them and everything in it. I prompted one of several conversations with the owner about "Run the contract by me before you get the customer to sign it, so I can tell you whether we can do it and whether we can actually make money on what you want to charge?"

The systems house went belly up, and stuff like that was a reason why. (I bailed before they technically folded.)

A few years ago I was installing a new version of CCleaner when Defender popped up to announce - "Oi, that proggie your trying to install is crap - it's infested with Trojan ????." So I ran the install.exe through VT, only one scanner reported anything, but it wasn't Trojan ????, Defender wasn't in the VT scanner list. So, mused I: It must be a false positive. But before telling Defender to ignore it, I did some searches and discovered that CCleaner was known to have been infested with Trojan ???? at source. I also found apologia from the company that had just bought CCleaner's parent company - AVG or Avast, I forget which.

I still have a previous version of CCleaner installed from before the infestation, but it's likely to go away. I haven't used it in some time. It was a convenient way to remove all junk in one operation, but not all that needed.

FWIW Microsoft has 99 pages of open source projects at GitHub (which it owns), Apple has 9.

Microsoft has become increasingly open source friendly in recent years. Most recently, they decided to open source the .NET framework, and MS engineers are major contributors to the Linux Mono project which was founded to provide an compatible open source alternative to .NET.

Another effort of MS is the open source Visual Studio Code editor. It's based on the Electron framework also use by the Atom Editor, but MS's involvement means their fork gets more attention. Cross platform and behaves identically on Windows and Linux. What's not to like?

Microsoft has figured out that it's a wide world with lots of people using lots of different kit, and it has to play well with others. I can't just stuff things tdown people's throats because it's Microsoft.

Buying Github was part of that strategy. So was acquiring LinkedIn. they need to cater to developers writing code for all sorts of platforms, and know it.

I do still know folks who are afraid of getting cooties from anything MS has a hand in who are looking at alternatives like GitLab, so Microsoft still has fence mending to do.
______
Dennis

[PeterT]

3 weeks back my PC started to act up; shutting down randomly, not powering up, all that type of thing. In the brief times it would stay up no messages in the event viewer to help me.

I decided it had to be the power supply, bought a new one and had yet to install it.

Today decided that this would be a good time to get the job done.

As I started to unplug the cables (fully modular supply) I noticed one cable seemed loose. Reseated it and tried the PC.... Woot it worked.

So I started on all the updates I'd missed. Finally went to run a backup and saw an error message that the XML definition file was invalid... discovered my D drive missing.

Shut down, opened case again and saw I'd not connected one power cable.

Fixed that and now back in business.

Ran my monthly full backup, caught up on some tv series I'd missed and all is good.

Now I have an extra power supply waiting for the next build.

[Richwood]

Watch out for rechargeable USB lithium battery packs being offered on ebay. Some of the claims for capacity are getting ridiculous, like 2 million mAh!!! The same for at least one such pack listed on Amazon which claims 50,000 mAh and an outrageous price. Remember that anything over about 26000 mAh in one lithium ion or lithium polymer battery pack or battery powered device cannot be carried on a plane in the USA or on most foreign air carriers.

[4691mls]

I wish phone GPS were more accurate. I have a Google Keep reminder set to go off when I get to work to remind me to put my parking tag in the window because I don't always remember it on my own. I also sometimes set reminders for things I need to do when I get home.

Usually the reminders go off about a tenth of a mile before I get to work/home but occasionally I will get to work, get all the way inside to my desk and start to work, then the reminder goes off and then I have to go back outside and put the parking tag up.
This happened with both my old Moto phone and my current Google phone.

[badgoodDeb]

That sounds like it checks the location on some schedule, maybe every N minutes. If the timing is just so, then the reminder won't happen till you are inside the house. There might not be any fix available. (Note, I've never used those features.)

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

I wish phone GPS were more accurate. I have a Google Keep reminder set to go off when I get to work to remind me to put my parking tag in the window because I don't always remember it on my own. I also sometimes set reminders for things I need to do when I get home.

Usually the reminders go off about a tenth of a mile before I get to work/home but occasionally I will get to work, get all the way inside to my desk and start to work, then the reminder goes off and then I have to go back outside and put the parking tag up.
This happened with both my old Moto phone and my current Google phone.

You can be sure that the GPS receiver in your phone is accurate to within a few meters. However, Google Location Services may be less accurate if your phone's GPS cannot resolve a fix through not seeing any or enough satellites (e.g. you are parked in a basement carpark, inside a building, etc.) when, if you have enabled the contrarily named "Improve Location Accuracy" in Location options, Google Location Services will estimate a fix using cell tower positions, etc.

Like badgoodDeb I suspect that your problem is the frequency that Google Keep polls Google Location Services for a position. One can see a similar thing in Google Maps if one shares a position, the position is seen only at a slow update frequency by those the position is shared with, whereas the user whose position is shared sees their position on the map update seemingly in real time.

I am pretty sure there is no way for users to change the update frequency for Google Keep in stock Android. That does not mean to say that there is not a manufacturer's version of Android or an App out there somewhere that allows modification.