Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

^

things I was shockingly old when I learned

another great "extract images" trick is an application called The Unarchiver on macOS - if you drop a PDF on it, it makes a folder with all the bitmap images pulled out in their native resolution

damn matt

tools of the trade, I teach using figures from articles etc so I picked up a lot over the years!

Speaking of Q products. Quantel Paintbox, still ain't seen anything on modern computers that comes close to the simplistic and smooth performance that machine brought to digital painting. Fed up of drowning in a sea of icons on paint software these days.

Oh that’s old. My first post college job was at a service bureau that had quantel paintbox and flame suites. That was a different era for sure. A leather couch so the client can watch the work on a big screen. We also had Iris inkjet proofers. Silicon graphics RIPs, scitex prepress systems etc.

The whole notion of OPI seems so quaint. “Those 6mb TIFFs were just too large for any mortal Mac so we had to use JPEG stand-ins and swap them out at the RIP”

Oh yeah. Xinet. It was funny going through those transitions. At some point I started a job where we’d release files with all low res in place and send a dvd of the hires to the vendor and they’d do the swapping. I was the genius who was like you know we have the means to place hires ourselves and release press ready files, which is good because we have more control, assuming the production artists know what they are doing. Suddenly I was like ok we need to buy new computers for everybody because these aren’t cutting it.

I remember when Mac RIP software became available, we had a Power Computing Mac clone with about 90MB of RAM driving the image setter. It was working so hard it could only manage to spit out a line of text every few minutes. Often it took us 15-20 minutes to realise if it had crashed.

and those hilarious Syquest cartridges, I think some were as small as 44MB.

Yeah syquest was 44 and then 88 and later they had one that was like 135 but by then zip had taken over, which was 100 mg. That company also had jazz drives which were 1 gig and fragile as fuck. I was preflight at that service bureau so we had all of those and less popular things like magneto optical drives.

People would send in a syquest disk with a directory pointing to the file they needed printed and be like “be careful that disk is all of my work”.

My last job before my current one I was still burning dvds to release files but by the time k started my current gig 7 years ago that was history. All releases are just via Dropbox or we transfer.

Today, I made some Xmas purchases from my home computer in the morning, then I went to the farmers market. A few hours later, I went to Trader Joe's, where with a cart full of $100+ dollars worth of stuff, my card was declined. I was deeply embarrassed, but also angry, because I knew there was quite a bit of money in the account. So I paid with credit rather than debit, then logged into my banking app.

They put a hold on my account because they deemed my spending pattern of the day "suspicious."

I know the bank's reasoning behind this sort of thing, but what if I hadn't had a credit card with me? Red-facedly log into my banking app to tell my bank that none of my purchases were suspicious? Fucking ridiculous!

there is a big online yarn retailer i have ordered things from and now whenever someone asks a question about something i have purchased, i get an email asking if i can help the person. beats having to pay a customer service worker i guess.

also harbl can you take care of this gentleman's refund, he has misplaced his receipt

I used to find those helpful on Amazon (which has user answered questions) but the people don't always answer them correctly and vouch for something that's a piece of shit

the subject is "Can you help a fellow shopper?" not to mention the information requested in this one is on the product page so they could have a bot easily answer this.

right, like who's to say i'm competent to answer it or ethical enough to not just say there's 10,000 yards of yarn per ball thank you for shopping with us?

Red-facedly log into my banking app to tell my bank that none of my purchases were suspicious? Fucking ridiculous!

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Saturday, December 4, 2021 10:33 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol, i'm very familiar with this experience. like, "as your bank, we know you have been poor your whole life, so we have a really hard time believing you would spend $400 in one day."

Trying to buy a bunch of individual things on bandcamp tends to result in my card getting blocked

Trying to buy a bunch of individual things on bandcamp tends to result in my card getting blocked

This happens to me every Bandcamp Friday. I've even explained it to Citibank, but nope...

hah, same here, and also Citibank

Yes, it happened to me multiple times, and discussing with my bank was no help. It works better to route the payments through PayPal, but that is also a slower process. I kind of blame bandcamp for not having a cleaner payment system, but I assume they have their reasons.

idk works for me

the one thing that bandcamp does that probably seems odd from the processor side is making each label transaction unique even if you have a bunch of stuff in your cart. makes sense, because each could have different locations, shipping terms, etc. but if you check out with a bunch at once, you end up with a series of transactions hitting your card within seconds

may just depend on what your bank will/will not flag as suspicious activity. I assume doing it this way saves bandcamp some amount of transaction fees that would be incurred when dividing up payments on the backend.

It works better to route the payments through PayPal, but that is also a slower process

PayPal also charges a fee for international transactions across currencies. I forget what the percentage is now, but my credit card is fee-free for currency conversion.

Yeah, Bandcamp don't like you using Paypal. Or they don't like me doing it, anyway. There's always a little message telling me that if I checked out directly I could do it all in one go or something like that. I just ignore it.
I had my bank block an online purchase while I was in the middle of confirming it on the bank's own app, which was infuriating.

Yeah, Santander pulls this shit with me too. It's like your bank is an overbearing parent, "are you SURE you want to buy this"...

Ooh, here's one --- the volume adjustment on my phone is a really steppy, jump-from-5-to-6 affair. Often the actual ideal Goldilocks porridge bowl volume is smack between two volume levels. they're effectively volume menu options. you'd do better with a good old fashioned dial, i say!!!! but maybe other more cutting-edge phones than mine are way past this problem.

I've thought the same thing about digital radio displays replacing analog dials. I mean, sure, the radio station is broadcasting at 102.5 FM, but maybe it comes in just a little clearer at 102.55.

I got my haircut at a shop a few years ago where an old Magnavox TV set was on, playing "Gunsmoke" from a local station. It was the first time I had watched local TV without cable since they did away with the terrestrial broadcasts and went digital.

Now instead of rabbit ears, the barber had to use a digital tuner. And now, whenever the transmission would lose a little power, you wouldn't see the ghost of Miss Kitty stand behind some static, but instead a big solid blue screen would appear.

That volume thing drives me nuts

on my bedroom TV the ideal volume lies somewhere between 0 and 1 - is either off or too loud. and i think the 'dial' goes up well beyond 20 bars.

(main tv has a 'dial' that goes around more than once, 360 degrees is like 30% of maximum, which kind of breaks the analogy)

the microwave 'I've finished' beep sounds like it's designed to be heard from the other side of a large house, is far too loud for my 1 bed flat. but i can stop it by opening the door early.

I finally bought big, floor Bluetooth speakers cause was sick of all the smaller ones not being loud and/or bassy enough. These are for sure loud but vol level 1 is TOO LOUD. Luckily there's also sliders on the actual speakers so I can turn those down and have the volume be low enough.
If you go in the command hub or whatever the fuck apple calls it on the iPhone, you can slide the volume with your finger but of course it's a digital fake slider so you still get huge quantum jumps between volume settings. Dumb.

My 2017 car is bad with volume since the knob is non-mechanical. If I leave it up too loud, then when I turn the car back on it's several seconds before I can either turn it down or turn it off. I've had a few years to learn this lesson but it still happens occasionally.

Okay, trying to read a simple article on my phone and the text keeps jumping and diving as special ads 'just for me' load into the article.. FFS

the little thing that looks like page in the url bar of android firefox is very useful - gives you a very plain view of webpages (but isn't always available)

I have a microwave that beeps too loud, but if I open it, early it causes a problem with the circuits, which I've learned how to fix but which I feel I should avoid.

Usually if you have some kind of media playing on your iPhone you can adjust the volume in a more fine-grained way with a slider on the lock screen.


Also, why does my ducking phone want to capitalize “Lock Screen” so bad? I half expect it to start inserting little registered trademark symbols every time I write “Apple” or “iPhone” (the auto-caps-ing of that “P” is bad enough)

What's interesting to me about the follow-ups to my post is that Bandcamp never gives me bank issues— I think that this was a "you spent too much money for one day you broke fuck" and/or somehow, when I purchased a few things online, the transaction was processed as happening *in those locations*, since two of them were very small companies that i was ordering specialty goods from. Reasonably, tho, one couldn't order a load of coffee in Oakland, then fly to New Hampshire to purchase a wee print of a railroad trestle, then go to a Farmers Market and later a TJ's in Philly...all within 7 hours. So why flag it at all!

Also now you all know what my father is getting for christmas

coffee?

in terms of fraud and flagging, there seems to be a revival of old fashioned check fraud -- this has happened to me twice in the past few months: once for my personal account (landlord had my rent check in his car, which got broken into), and once for the bank account at my job (totally unrelated to the other issue) -- the fraud crew will obtain checks on real accounts, and then print checks with the account into on it, and then use them to pay for things like groceries, car repairs, whatever the person who used my neighbor's account to buy at walmart. Idk if this is related to the increase in popularity of mobile check depositing or advances in printer technology.

I think the fraud crew will actually print checks that are adjacent in sequence to the stolen one so that flagging is less likely

i can't begin to describe my growing long-term rage with automated phone systems. and, related, how the people you ultimately talk to (after herculean efforts to fight past the machine and reach them) are systematically walled off from any of the information you might actually want, can't transfer you to anyone who does know anything, and are enabled only to do the same exact things you could do by going to their website.

I hear you.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/10/26/1048892388/meet-skimpflation-a-reason-inflation-is-worse-than-the-government-says-it-is

it's astounding the lengths they go to to keep you from talking to someone even when you know that is what you need

our internet company now has a thing where if you tell the robot "service outage," it demands that you walk along with it in the act of unplugging the modem and plugging it back in. which obviously we have already done, but anyway, to make sure you give this enough time, they play an annoying synthetic mouth-noise sound reminiscent of the song "popcorn," punctuated by the robot man coming back in periodically to say "thanks for your patience! your modem is still restarting!" after five minutes of this you can get to the point of demanding to talk to a person, whose first move invariably is to make you unplug the modem and plug it back in. imagine my joy at having to go through this experience three times in the last 24 hours.

xp
lol at your screen name. A+

if you call FedEx their customer service people do not have the phone numbers for the local distribution hubs that actually handle your packages

can't remember if i posted about it, but a few months ago we discovered it was literally impossible to call the various Best Buys in the general region and confirm if sth was really on the shelf or just listed in inventory. all the numbers just send you to a central authority, who have access only to the same inventory info you have looking at the website.

I went through the exact same thing with Ikea and record shelves a couple of years ago. It was exasperating. They were supposed to get the shelving I wanted in on a certain day, but a) I couldn't call them to confirm, and b) they wouldn't call me. They wouldn't even let me pay up front to put a hold on it.

I can vouch for tweeting at or messaging Ikea on Twitter. I'd been calling and emailing contacts listed on the website and getting nowhere, messaged their twitter and got a reply and a solution within an hour.