I have a Skype Unlimited Country subscription which, here in the UK, cost me £1.95/month. It seemed like a great deal. Just moments ago, I got an email from Skype telling me that my subscription renewal had failed because it had been refused by PayPal. I logged into PayPal and there was no record of the transaction.
That’s when I headed over to the Skype site and noticed that my subscription was about to run out in 2 days because of this renewal “failure.” However, I also noticed that the subscription rate had jumped from £1.95/month to £2.95/month without any indication as to what had changed. The subscription forum makes no mention of it (but there does seem to be a lot of complaining going on over there).
You know, it’s just a little thing, but I would hope that if you’re going to summarily hike the rates, you’d at least (a) tell me, and (b) convince me it’s worth it.
Google Software Update, which vexes system purists everywhere since it’s installed silently when you install certain Google products, is set by default to autonomously execute on a daily basis. In Mac OSX, there’s no control panel or preference pane with which to change this annoying behaviour unlike in Windows.
However, I just found this page tucked away which describes how to set the update frequency for OSX (Windows users look here). You have to get into Terminal and:
$ defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval <frequency>
…where <frequency> is in seconds. Setting it to 0 (zero) disables it completely.
If you want to manually run an update check, you need to look in either
- /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/
- ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/
for a file called ‘CheckForUpdatesNow.command’ and run that. Convenient, huh?
If I get the time, I might hack together a Pref Pane for this.
ClickToFlash is a nice little Flashblock-type plugin for Safari with one big problem. Two, actually.
- you can’t leave feedback for the developer without creating a (free) account on the project website. Dude, I just wanted to tell you about #2…
- the only way I could find to get into the whitelist and preferences for the plugin is via a page with Flash that isn’t already blocked (there’s a little control on the blocker that gets you in). However, if you’ve already whitelisted the page there’s no way to get back in and un-whitelist it without going to another site with Flash. Worse, if you’ve whitelisted it in Fluid (a single-site browser application instance of Safari) there’s no hope at all of making any changes. You are stuck.
You need to get a preference pane in the main application fast.
One thing about ClickToFlash compared to Flashblock: as I’ve cranked about a few months ago, the Flash media player on MySpace doesn’t load properly in Firefox when you tell Flashblock to unblock. However, with ClickToFlash in Safari there’s no such problem. You click, it appears. Flashblock developers say this is a known bug in the Mozilla code which I should point out nobody seems to be working on. The Flashblock bug was logged October 2008, the Mozilla bug March 2009 and the feedback comments run in circles. It’s also suggested that the problem is with the Flash player but ClickToFlash on Safari doesn’t have the same issue.
Score one more for Safari.
Google Calendar has been down for me for the past hour and a half. The most irking thing about it is that I get bounced to this page, which offers no way out or to check back that the Calendar is up yet. Unhelpful -
à la 1994.
I’m not in love with Twitter like some – it’s fine. It’s a thing. But I think I just coined a name for people like Maureen Dowd who rail against Twitter without a clue.
