Category Archives: Apple

Apple and scrollbars

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The new Lion OS. In Snow Leopard the scrollbars were visible and substantial. They were irritatingly a couple of pixels narrower than a Windows scrollbar but they were good enough. But in Lion Apple haven’t asked someone with limited fine motor control to check how the scrollbars behave for them. Apart from having to make them visible in the first place that are really narrow now and there is no indicator that shows they have been grabbed by the mouse. This makes clicking on them much harder and that means more frustration. Apple didn’t even see fit to address that in the Accessibility prefs. Looks like Apple employ only the beautiful people with perfect control.

Another reason to hate iTunes

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Like I needed more… It’s 3am and pretty quiet. I realise that the external HD is noisy. Check that Spotlight hasn’t decided to index it (not allowed to) and realise it’s that damn iTunes again. Pause playing the music, drive stops. Repeat to be sure. Go do some searching and fine instances of this very complaint going back to 2004. SIX YEARS. That far back people were complaining and yes there are noisy drives but if I am playing one track why can’t iTunes work out that lifting that track in one go into RAM to play would make total sense instead of dragging it off 100kb at a time? It’s not rocket science is it for a computer to cache some data? And it’s not even that much. But then iTunes is no ordinary shop is it?

If you ever wrote any code that is in iTunes you should be skinned, rolled in salt and have the crystals washed off with hot water. Daily.

Creepy Apple

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The Magic Trackpad I bought does not work despite my trying everything I could find. I even took the MBP into the garden where any interference would be less but it still refuses to work. Posted to the Apple forums but the problem does not seem to exist except for  few so I got the junky one. The emailed receipt – or as they put it ‘Billing Document” – arrived so after one last check of their forums I rang their number to arrange the return.

Usual robotic voice answers and I was expecting the “Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for …”. Instead I get this female voice saying that she can understand full sentences so to just ask what I want. I’m sure some people will go to Google and type “How can I take my horse to water and make him drink?”. Too long. “Horse water drink” or even just “horse water” is what I type so in this case I said “Refund”. And I hear what I think is typing. This robotic voice has said she can understand full sentences and now she’s typing? A couple of questions later and I’ll swear that the sound was of someone typing. If you can understand my voice like that you don’t need to type. I can see that if I were stood at a desk and a robot were dealing with my request that the sights and sounds of a what was a human activity would be in some way reassuring but this is a phone line. I don’t need that. It is creepy. Someone somewhere in an Apple meeting debuted their new answering / understanding bot and someone else said “Hey, sound effects!”. Why?

Clueless Apple Support

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I bought Doodlejump for the idevice many months ago. It showed up – as you would expect – on the email receipt Apple sent at some random later date. Now… I had paid money for Doodlejump. I called that ‘a purchase’ and so did Apple.
3 days ago I opened iTunes and it said 45 apps needed updating. It did so and now in iTunes it says I had 45 purchases on that day – but I bought nothing. The ‘receipt’ shows 45 purchases at the price of Free. But some of those apps were originally free, some cost me but none were purchases that day. So why does Apple use what must be some sort of scam in stating everything is a purchase?

Fact is that Apple don’t want us to know how much we spend there. It would scare them to let us find out and that is why there is no way at all to establish just how much you have spent and in the case of the app store what you have bought.
It matters because you don’t know if you have bought something until you either click through all your Purchase History in iTunes (no search function there) or you click and find you have been billed. Could they make it easy? Of course they could – but that’s not profitable is it?

So I emailed Apple Support. I pointed out what I knew I could do and what I wanted – a list of all purchased apps where a name would appear just once, no updates, just a list of each app. Eric emailed me back having pasted an answer, having not read what I had written and told me what I knew and he could have seen I knew. He said that he hoped he had helped. I replied that his response to me was “Useless”. He trotted out “While I understand that your purchase history displays your updates, it also displays a complete list of all of your actual purchases as well. Also note that all of your emailed invoices also contains a list of your purchases.” I don’t want to see updates – but the money/music machine that is Apple won’t let you.

What Apple are doing is a con and probably a scam in some way.

(And I have never and will never buy any music from them. Thankfully they are not the only game in town there, not by a very long way and never will be).

iTunes. Buggy, useless and crap.

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Copy one track from one album into one folder and have the computer see just that one track. It’s not much to ask and if that happens I am happy. What makes me unhappy is when iTunes is playing and I find a track playing twice even though I only own it once.

I deleted all the AC/DC tracks and re-ripped the cd’s. Some tracks showed up 3 times inside iTunes.

I remove all iTunes folder, prefs, and other files (yes, apple programmes stick crap everywhere too) I copy the entire Music directory to another HD. I remove all old apps, I go through all the albums and remove the junk left from the wife’s music. I use artwork view and do the same. I check for duplicates and it gives me hundreds. I don’t mean the same track on different albums, I mean the exact same track on the exact same album is showing up several times. I reveal in Finder and find the one track only. I buy Dupin from Doug’s Scripts and run that. After doing so I check iTunes and it says no dupes. I then use Pollux to find artwork for the missing albums. It does what it can – which was very good indeed – but another of Doug’s Scripts to embed artwork does not work for some reason. Now, this one small paragraph has been a huge amount of work. I think I started with 60-80gb of music apparently. So, it’s looking just about okay and I need to just check again the missing artwork and use Amazon to find the right images. I had quit iTunes, so I fire it up again and just check for dupes. It finds hundreds again but a different number. So everything I have done I need to do again with no guarantee that it will work. What.is.the.fucking.point?
I check more. The /Music folder is 81gb. I check iTunes. It says I have over 30gb of music. Using Daisydisk I find what is taking up that 81gb. My compilations take up 5.7gb (they don’t), iTunes Media takes 45gb (what?) and then I have some music. The media has 12gb of ipod touch apps. I know that but that leave 33gb of something when the music (in another folder) I have is 30gb (and no, it was not organising and no, it was not copying music). So what is that 33gb because it isn’t music. I have no idea and by now I really don’t care.
I would cheerfully see the iTunes programmers hang. Really. They deserve all the punishment possible and then some. But then it isn’t a music player anyway is it?

So I have an indeterminate amount of music which may or may not have artwork and a programme I have every intention of uninstalling. I don’t care if I won’t use it, I do not want it there.

I have Windows 7 installed, I have a Creative Zen Vision M and I will use those to rip and move the music to the Zen. If there is not enough space for what I really want to move I’ll buy another player – anythingbutipod should have the collective wisdom. And that will have the sound system plugged into it. This will actually give better sound, less tinny.

I have previously tried dragging and dropping album by album and now even though I have only added I find it dupes old tracks for no good reason. The same track across different albums is fine but what it is doing is not. I’ve gone beyond even thinking about other solutions. You know if you go to the apple forums people mention this constantly but the posters there must think it an acceptable price for being “cool”. It’s a bug. Treat it as such, put the tools in the programme to properly fix dupes and better still make it so it cannot happen.

iTunes. The biggest pile of steaming skank on any computer currently.

mods

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Ipod touch now jailbroken. Each time I do this I wonder why then reverse it then see something cool I could use/try. So this time I’ll stick with it. Takes longer to restore it anyway. PSP also modded to the latest custom firmware so time to get a couple of large mem sticks and get some game backups going. Not that I have the time to play much.

11qs

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Q: How can I make Firefox start faster and run quicker?
A: Uninstall NoScript.
It updates, Firefox slows. And slows. I like fast.

Q: How can joining a game of Battlefield 1943 be improved?
A: EA buying some servers because the one they obviously have is crap.

Q: Is the build quality of official Sony PS3 Sixaxis controllers getting worse?
A: Yes.

Q: Are most lawyers complete twats?
A: Indeed they are.
Q2: But this is confined to the UK?
A: No, it’s a worldwide truth.

Q: Are MP’s lying cheating scammers out only to feather their own nests?
A: Unless you are called Dennis Skinner, yes.
Q2: If they are Conservative MP’s can we add philandering, embezzling and criminal to those “qualities”?
A: Certainly, and more besides.

Q: Do I believe David Cameron?
A: If the pope believes in contraception.

Q: Do I miss Twitter?
A: No, why would I?

Q: Facebook?
A: Freaky place. It’s ugly, takes money off you, strips your privacy and offers you nothing back. Very uneven relationship. Nasty even.

Q: Why does Google exist?
A: To let people find out how to do the simple things that Apple says you shouldn’t be doing. Like deleting your own backups…

Time Machine – useless

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Which fuckwit at Apple decided that everyone MUST backup every 60 minutes with Time Machine? Which other fuckwit decided that users are stupid and that giving them a choice is bad? So this pair of complete fuckwits should be shot. Imbeciles of the highest damn order. Yes I know there is software out there that will change this but default behaviours can be utterly crap at times and like just about everything from Apple this too is crap. Fucking useless.

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Edit: Ages ago i bought ChronoSync. It has a stack of options, lets me do lots of things and overall I will use a very small set of it’s choices. But what it does really well is step me through, let me check what will happen, reports any errors in a form I can read and understand. It’s a one-time learning curve and with their Support behind it. I used it before and I’m now setting it up. Lots of choices – unlike that crap Time Machine – means I get precisely what I want – unlike that crap Time Machine. This technology should enable me, not cripple me. Chronosync lets me think about what I want. Apple tells me what I want. Chronosync wins. Excellent program.

Volumes do not exist

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cd Volumes

ls

Carrie Ext-1 Mac2 Play

Play is the actual HD .
Carrie is an external HD but it is not attached. It is unplugged, not there, off.
Ext-1 is an external HD but it is not attached. It is unplugged, not there, off. It is actually called something else.
Mac2 is an external HD but it is not attached. It is unplugged, not there, off. I think this is what Carrie now is.

When I run Grand Perspective to see what space is occupied and by what it tells me that many gb of data is in /Volumes/Ext-1/ but it does not report both the drives, just that one and the name is still wrong. I can rollover the graphics in Grand Perspective (GP) and it will tell me the images and file names. So it’s not just saying “10gb” it lists every single image.

I can cd to Mac2 and it tells me the directory ‘d2′ is there. cd ext-1 and it says ‘Pictures’ is there. How? They don’t exist. Nothing is mapped, shared, connected. I cann0t cd Carrie because it is not attached. But I can to 2 that do not exist? Weird.

Now, were this Leopard I could in some odd way begin to think it could be remembering old data. But this is Snow Leopard, clean install. No archiving. So it is obviously not a clean install because SL has knowledge of something it could not remember? Or it stores and then uses information on external HD – why load old names?

Reboot.

It does exactly the same thing.

From GP, open an image file. It does – a long list of them in Finder. Get Info /Volumes/Ext-1/Pictures/2006/10-10-2006 (it’s a pigeon). But how?

Here’s the problem – if I set up Time Machine it’s going to copy that which does not exist. And even if it does not, why is Mac OS 10.6.1 not getting a clue and removing that which does not exist? Time to go look (again) in the Apple forums for the solution to (yet another) problem caused by Apple’s very own operating system.

The next day … the answer … http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=92023

Firefox cpu

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1. Open Firefox
2. Open Activity Monitor
3. Go to http://wordpress.com, let it fully load.
4. Watch Firefox CPU. If you do nothing the usage is around 1-3%
5. Go to http://google.com. I see 1-3% usage.
6. Go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/ I see usage of 1-35%

Safari is 5-40%. I assume it’s that single line of latest news.