This “article” on the BBC Magazine site wrings its hands and cries:
Sat-nav clearly suits an era which has given up on understanding the roads as a coherent, logical system – an era in which map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.
I honestly wish I knew more about how the editorial process in the mainstream media works. I can’t fathom the genesis of this story and I can’t understand the fear-mongering behind it or why its acceptable to crank out a fluff-piece that does nothing but weep about the loss of our humanity (which isn’t happening, in case you were wondering). And yes, I am aware that this is quite a common pattern, particularly on slow news days.
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Password masking is the HTML thingy that replaces your password characters with bullet-points as you type. It may not be the perfect or most effective way to stop snoopers, but it’s not meant to be. It’s only meant to be good enough to stop most snoopers – at the very least make it somewhat inconvenient. And it covers casual as well as determined distance creepers with binoculars. He says:
More importantly, there’s usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website. It’s just you, sitting all alone in your office, suffering reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.
While I agree with Jakob’s general observations about usability and the apparent cost of failed password attempts, I think the alternative isn’t quite acceptable. Because frankly, we’re not all sitting alone in our office. Many of us, are in fact, in the real world…like airports and coffee shops.
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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.
