hackbash

Uninstall.

Tags: Chrome, Google, patronising

Great though the idea of legal music streaming is, the implementation still leaves a bit to be desired. After six or seven years as a Napster customer I ended up leaving the (increasingly unloved and dated) service when they messed up my monthly payments for the second time.

Onto Spotify, about which a few things bug me. The first is that I’m not sure why, with the bandwidth and storage available in 2012, we still can’t have lossless streaming based on a codec like FLAC. I’m guessing this one’s down to the rights-owners.

The most recent update appears to have fixed another gripe; that tracks were automatically cross-faded and that this couldn’t be switched off, meaning that tracks without a lead-in pause could be heard to fade in. Two new options let you toggle gapless playback, and disable or tweak the crossfade. Good.

Unfortunately, the most recent update has also taken the single worst feature of the software and somehow made it worse. For reasons that are hard to explain, playing a track in Spotify typically queues all the other tracks in the view you had at the time. For example, if you play a track after searching for an artist, the artist’s entire Spotify catalogue is added to the play queue.

This usually does make sense if you’re viewing an album page, but the real problem is that the additional tracks aren’t explicitly queued: if you explicitly right-click other tracks and select ‘Queue’, they’re given a higher priority and inserted (in yellow) after the track that’s currently playing, but before the remaining tracks implicitly added to the original play queue (in white).

It’s incredibly unintuitive: play an album, find another you want to hear next, queue it and you’ll find it plays in the middle of the first album you selected. Worse, you can’t delete implicitly queued tracks or move them around in the play order. The easiest way to deal with them used to be by quitting and restarting Spotify.

With the latest update, even that doesn’t remove them. Now the only way I’ve found to clear the unwanted items is to double-click to play the last track in the list, which should make those before it disappear, then seek to the end of the track and when playback finishes that track will also disappear. Now that’s good UX.

In case you hadn’t worked it out, you can avoid the problem in the first place by always right-clicking tracks/albums and queueing them, then starting playback by viewing the Play Queue and double-clicking on the first track in the list.

Tags: crossfade, FLAC, gapless, Napster, payment, queue, rant, Spotify, streaming

Fewer grammar.

Tags: grammar, napkin, Starbucks

Twitter spam seems to be on the rise, anecdotally at least. In my experience the network’s spam falls into one of two camps. Spam followers are invariably female, have an unlikely sounding name and an attractive/revealing/slutty profile pic. Spam replies typically come from a similar profile.

It’s tricky to deal with the former. Any new user is likely to follow several other accounts and send a few messages before anyone follows them back, so it’s hard to say with any certainty whether a brand-new account is a spammer.

The latter is easy: if I’m not following someone, we’ve never messaged each other before and they send me an @ message containing only a shortened link; it’s spam.

It’s a simple and unfailing rule, which is why Twitter should impliment it, rather than relying on me reporting offenders.

Muscle memory can be a bugger for touch-typists, particularly those of us taught by a combination of Mavis Beacon and the Typing of the Dead.

My own personal keyboard twitch appears to be transposing the ‘o’ and ‘n’ in words ending ‘ion’. I have to watch for it when proofing myself, but it’s a typo that keeps on giving; always calling to mind a smaller, more Italian form of whatever I’m writing about: train statino, BIOS configuratino, administratino passwords.

A less frequent transpositino comes with words ending ‘ine’; most frequently when I substitute ‘machien’ for ‘machine’. On some days, using some computers, it’s more apt.

Tags: touch-typing, typing, typo

Everyone I’ve spoken to hates Facebook’s ‘frictionless sharing’ thing. You know, the thing that shows you every single article your friends are reading on supported sites.

On the occasions when the story sounds interesting, you click the link and get asked to install a social reader, rather than just taken to the story. Install the reader and you become one of the people pumping out endless ‘X read Y’ updates to their friends’ timeline.

The problem is that you can’t turn it off, so imagine my joy this morning when I encountered this:

Yes please!

Imagine the crushing disappointment when I discover that, like marking the fucking things as spam, it doesn’t work.

Tags: Facebook, frictionless, spam

Let’s face it, things have been a bit quiet on the blog. As such I’ve decided to start using it a bit more as a personal brain dump, probably – we’ll see if anyone objects.

That means it’s going to start wondering off-topic a bit. Hope that’s alright.

Tags: freeze, Hove, photo, sea, splash

Doubtless you’re all familiar with the CAPTCHA – those weird boxes with obscured words you have to type in when somebody in the building’s done something naughty to Google.

It actually stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, and while they’re a pain in the arse they do serve a purpose – helping sites work out whether you’re a human or an unthinking robot. If you’re filling out a reCAPTCHA, in particular, console yourself that you’re also helping recognise words that have defeated the computers processing real book scans.

Wasted attention

However you feel about CAPTCHAs, I guarantee that you have never, ever, seen them as a wasted opportunity to be advertised at. Have you?

Well, all hail Solve Media’s TYPE-IN™, a proprietary branded CAPTCHA “which places relevant brand messages where users are already engaged”.

I encountered one of these for the first time this morning, and felt that being forced to sit through a short video advertisement before seeing a conventional CAPTCHA was offensive enough to merit swears. Isn’t the whole point of a CAPTCHA to stop automated spammy adverts spoiling a website for humans?

According to Solve Media, the ads offer “Guaranteed engagement for advertisers”, which is true in a sense because one particular format of TYPE-IN asks you to parrot back a “Brand Message” to prove that you’re a human.

That’s right; obediently mumbling back some advertiser’s unique selling proposition goes to show that you’re a human. Rather than, say, some kind of empty, unthinking machine.

Tags: adverts, captcha, evil, reCaptcha, Solve Media, TYPE-IN

Typical. You wait all summer for something worth posting and then your blog gets hacked by 4li from Iran.

It only took an hour or two to get unhacked, but we spent considerably longer puzzling over 4li’s manifesto: “If you hate Islam, We hate anyone who does not hate you!”

4li, we don’t hate anyone, except those two blokes in the BMW 1 series adverts. And hacking isn’t very nice.

Tags: BMW, hacked, hacking

Looks like the Android 2.3 update for the Galaxy S has finally landed, after Samsung announced it on Monday. Here’s how it went for me:

1) Ran Kies (yuk), upgrade found

2) Gave the relevant permissions. No, Samsung, you can’t have my personal information

3) Prompted for backup. This took quite a while on my lowly netbook

4) Downloading the firmware. This was suspiciously quick

5) Epic Failure. After momentarily preparing the firmware update components, Kies reported that it couldn’t obtain permission from the phone administrator. Which will be because it didn’t ask

I tried again (skipping the backup this time) but it failed in the same place and the same way. Will report back after a reboot of phone and PC.

**UPDATE**

OK, so when Kies says ‘phone administrator’ it means ‘computer administrator’. To get past this particular roadblock, close Kies and run it again, but this time right-click it and select ‘Run as Administrator’. The upgrade should then complete successfully: Gingerbread, finally.

Tags: Android, Galaxy S, Gingerbread, Samsung, update, upgrade