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Y is the new X

Prius’ are the new Saturn.

Tesla is the new BMW.

Except that BMW is still BWM, and Saturns are getting hard to find, but when you do, no less Saturn-y.

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2019 01 18 Brent Rant Comments Off on Y is the new X Permalink

PotD 20190109

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2019 01 09 Brent Picture of the day Comments Off on PotD 20190109 Permalink

PotD 20190108

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2019 01 08 Brent Picture of the day Comments Off on PotD 20190108 Permalink

PotD 20190107

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2019 01 07 Brent Picture of the day Comments Off on PotD 20190107 Permalink

PotD 20190106

2019 01 06 Brent Picture of the day Comments Off on PotD 20190106 Permalink

PotD 20190105

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2019 01 05 Brent Dogs
Picture of the day Comments Off on PotD 20190105 Permalink

PotD 20190104

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2019 01 04 Brent Picture of the day Comments Off on PotD 20190104 Permalink

Point taken

Smokers are assholes.

Smokers are assholes

Smokers are assholes

2018 12 07 Brent Rant Comments Off on Point taken Permalink

Fanboi

Lest you think I am a total fanboi, here’s some things that bug the shit outta me:

  • When I eject a disk, MacOS closes the finder window. Why!?! I was using that.
  • When I get into the car, Podcasts/Music starts the last one I was listening too even if I had stopped it by hand. I stopped it because I wanted quiet or was bored with it. Respect my wishes. If it’s stopped, leave it stopped.
  • This also leads to: respect my silence. I stopped the podcast or music and put the phone on mute. Then I listened to a voicemail on Airpods. When I put the Airpods away, the damn podcast or music started automatically through the speakers even though I had been listening on Airpods before. Not cool to start playing music out loud in the middle of a meeting or conference. Very not cool.
  • WiFi Assist just doesn’t work. Why are you trying to hang onto the WiFi as I drive away from my house? You know I just got in the car because you told me that it’ll take me 15 minutes to get to work. So fucking let go of the WiFi and go to LTE.
  • And fix the LTE. I’m no big Qualcomm fan, but the Intel modems seriously suck.
  • And fix the “A Song” bug. Why why why would you start the music in my car with the first song alphabetically. I’ve deleted whatever the first song is twenty times now because I got tired of hearing it.
  • Fix iTunes. I can’t even fill up the 512 GB iPhone because iTunes sucks. I’ve got the music. iTunes seems to be incapable of filling it.
  • Stop the app shuffle. When I try to drag an app on iOS to a folder, the folder jumps away. You got to get the timing just right. I can drop a hook shot from 20 feet, but I can’t drag an app to a folder.
  • Make the trackpad smaller again. The last gen MBP trackpad was so much better than the 2016+ it’s not funny. Palm rejection works like Windows now. Badly.
  • Does no one at Apple use their laptop to take notes in meetings? If they did, they’d get rid of this loud-ass keyboard.
  • USB-C good. MagSafe better. USB-C MagSafe would be best.
  • Why can’t iOS Safari play GIFs inline?
  • Whatever happened to WiFi MAC address spoofing to keep from being monitored at malls, airports, etc? Apple made a big deal of it, it never really worked, then it went away.
  • Why, oh why, in the middle of the night, does my work laptop insist on taking over the connection to my home Bluetooth mouse? It’s got its own sitting right there. My home machine is connected to the home mouse? Yet I wake up and can’t use the damn mouse because work laptop has dropped its connection to Work Mouse and taken over Home Mouse. About once a week. The only way to fix it is to go over and turn off BT on Work MBP. Which I will forget I’ve done when I get back to work. Deleting Home Mouse yet again from Work MBP connections doesn’t work, it doesn’t really delete it.
  • Stop stealing focus. I’m typing. Just because something else pops up doesn’t mean you should switch over to the window and put input there. I might not even notice that focus has been stolen until I’ve hit enter, thinking I was hitting return in whatever text I was typing. This is how fucking LinkedIn stole all my contact info and now every bad OKC date is connected to everyone I ever worked with (and fuck you LinkedIn for this kind of shitty behavior).
  • Similarly, stop populating the search results in IOS dynamically. You’ve trained me to have the reflexes of an MMA fighter; invariably I see a result and click on it only to have IOS dynamically reconfigure the results as my thumb is descending on the desired result so that I get YouTube instead of Yelp.

 

Seriously, it’s like no one at Apple actually uses their damn devices or they’d fix this shit.

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2018 11 29 Brent Comment
Rant Comments Off on Fanboi Permalink

Loud

Loud pipes make your neighbors think you are an asshole and hope that that stupid half-helmet doesn’t save you when the inevitable happens.

2018 11 28 Brent Rant Comments Off on Loud Permalink

Fanboy

When I read the comments on /. or Verge or Giz or some other site [1], there’s always someone piping up about how real techies use Android or Linux and only fanboys, poseurs, and weak-minded sheeple confused by marketing would buy an Apple. Only marketing sells Apple, not technical proficiency or good value [2]. SJ wasn’t a techie, he was a marketing genius, and TC’s skills lie not in making technically superior devices, but in making them fashion accessories.

Then I look around the room at the place where I work, which seems to have the best record in this solar system for sending things to other planets and making them work. Pretty much everyone has an Apple marketing device, I mean iPhone, and as of a few years ago, 50% MBPs. Higher now. Lots of the hardcore Linus fanbois have switched over [3].

No one would accuse anyone here of being a fashion victim [4].

 

[1] Never read the comments.

[2] Never mind that one of our missions still keeps some Mac IIci’s around to compile the hand-written compiler, or that my neighbor still runs stacks of Titanium PBG4s, or that I have an iPhone 6 (2014 – still gets updates), the original Retina iPad (2012 – stuck on iOS 9 I think), Mini (2008 – 10.6), Ti G4 (2002 – 10.4?), all of which still work, though the last needs a new battery and backlight.

[3] Lots of SEs still go Win because lots of the SE tools are Win only, and it’s a PITA on a Mac. I got around this by going headless into one of my RDC windows test machines with the sadly demised iTap Mobile, but it’s still a PITA esp. if you are VPNing from offshore. Almost enough to make you carry an Air around with your Lenovo.

[4] I mean, we are in LA, so we’re not talking skinny black ties and short-sleeved white button-downs. More flip-flops and Prana.

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2018 11 27 Brent Rant
Science Comments Off on Fanboy Permalink

Rob me

I travel frequently. I go to some effort to make it look like someone is home – not that I have anything worth stealing unless you like expensive photography books. My TV is still 1080p fer chrissakes. My stereo is from 1982, and it’s not one of the vintage ones that’s worth a lot of money on eBay (MacIntosh was expensive even back then). Still, it’d make my life difficult to replace them and they work well enough. A PITA.

So I have the lights and sprinklers on timers. I stop the mail. I hold the packages.

Nonetheless, I’m gone for a week and I come home to this:

plus a bunch of those goddamn unstoppable LA Times Spanish language HOY! fliers. That’s seven (7) that you can see there, and a bunch more behind the gate and in the mailbox.

Thanks, assholes, for unstoppably advertising that there’s no one home. I can guarandamtee you that 2 Guys From Italy are never getting any orders from me, nor are the house-cleaning services and the tree-trimmers.

2018 09 29 Brent Comment Comments Off on Rob me Permalink

USENET dead, film at 11

It’s for reals this time:

Since about half of the RSS feeds I used to look at are also dead, this is pretty much it for the old non-commercial internet.

2018 09 29 Brent Comment
Rant Comments Off on USENET dead, film at 11 Permalink

DRL

When they first came out, I thought daytime running lights were stupid. Either turn them on or turn them off. People should be capable of judgement.

But they aren’t. Americans anyways [1]. Dawn, cloudy, marine layer, drizzle, and every damn car on the road these days is gray, white, or black [2], and they all either 1) don’t turn their lights on so their gray car is invisible in the pre-dawn gray light, or 2) have their brights on and try to blind you so you can’t see the gray car with their lights off right behind them.

 
 

[1] Don’t get me started on how Americans just can’t park, even with every new car coming with sensors and cameras. It ought to be easy to park so as to not take up two spaces, but Americans are fundamentally just assholes (see “rolling coal“). “Eh, I’ll just park 9 feet back from the end of the curb, and 8 feet in front of the car behind me. Who cares that that’s an extra spot that no one else can use.” Fuck them. But that’s just an inconvenience – driving invisible is fucking dangerous.

[2] And why can’t I get a damn red car or truck anymore? I can’t even get green. Every time I configure the car I want, it’s gray. Or orange. And I’m not a douche-bro, so orange is right out.

2018 09 08 Brent Rant
Travel Comments Off on DRL Permalink

Dogs have learnt to take selfies

Now he’s snapchatting all his dog buddies. Not sure if my mobile bill will survive.

2018 09 05 Brent Dogs Comments Off on Dogs have learnt to take selfies Permalink