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

I guess a bank’s competitor could do the same to identify holes where there are no branches and then set up their own branches in those locations, but… there are other ways to figure out where bank branches are

do new banks still open in the US? in UK high street/'main street' banks are closing, which is probably its own backwards step

hammersmith has had a new Metro bank open within the last few years, but hammersmith is not short of banks (tsb, lloyds, nat west, nationwide, halifax, barclays, santander, hsbc and now a metro, maybe more)

that said, the nearest 3 hsbcs to me have all closed (although given i had 4 within 20 minutes walk it was a bit ridiculous)

do new banks still open in the US? in UK high street/'main street' banks are closing, which is probably its own backwards step

― salsa shark, Friday, April 22, 2022 12:56 AM (one week ago)

they definitely open when there is a new real estate development where there'd be a perceived need for a bank branch.

Corner spot that hosted, in succession, two branches of different banks has now given up and become a Pret.

IP telephony

fuck's sake, talking to a support number it's like communicating with a walkie talkie buried in a pile of socks

It's not technology exactly but I do not like that on pedestrian crossings in the UK you can no longer see whether the green man is lit by looking straight ahead across the road, which allowed you to keep an eye on the traffic, but instead have to look to the side, attempting to peer around people standing next to you, and that while you're crossing you then can't see it at all.

What the fuck?

that sounds maddening!

i'm here to double down on my earlier gripes about the new digital-interface machines for viewing microfilm. the last of the old machines at the city archives has seemingly given up the ghost, so now i am stuck with this much slower, more finicky and just kind of continuously friction-creating gadget. rrrrr.

It's not technology exactly but I do not like that on pedestrian crossings in the UK you can no longer see whether the green man is lit by looking straight ahead across the road, which allowed you to keep an eye on the traffic, but instead have to look to the side, attempting to peer around people standing next to you, and that while you're crossing you then can't see it at all.

What the fuck?

Absolutely fucking hate this – I thought it was just a Brighton thing and my attempts to explain my frustration to family met with shrugs. Half the time there's a different pedestrian crossing light in view across the road and more than once I've started to act on it. It's dangerous!

The idea behind them is that you meant to be looking at incoming traffic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffin_crossing

"If a pedestrian presses the button but then walks off, the PKD will cancel the request making the lights more efficient. "

or if they are stood too close to the pole ime. i have probably complained about this upthread.

Hey Chewshabadoo, careful; this is personal for me

u mad?

Puffins are notoriously irritable.

were you on that one Puff Daddy album

Haha, I’ve picked the wrong person to cross, obviously.

I’ve had an iPhone without a home button since 2020, and remain unconvinced that it’s an improvement.

I've had one since 2019. Same.

is the home action customizable? I like the Samsung "one hand operation" thing.. set Home to a diagonal swipe down from the right side.

yeah tho.

The idea behind them is that you meant to be looking at incoming traffic.

I guess. I'm not sure I get the logic - you don't need to be looking that way until you decide to cross, unless you're looking for a gap in the traffic in which case you don't need to see the signal.

But I find also that people won't just look right but will turn and look left, i.e. right at me if i'm to their left. My difficulty with this might very well be related to autism, it's hard to explain but I only have so much capacity to try and sort out and filter stimuli and I really don't need people staring towards my face or moving around in front of where I'm looking when already dealing with traffic movement in peripheral vision and the noise of the street. It's fucking hard work.

Reading about the rationale has definitely helped me feel more comfortable with them but I still find it a very awkward thing if there are lots of people waiting to cross, and potentially in your line of vision. Yes, you can stare in their direction and assume they'll move when the light changes but that feels like an odd thing to do. And you can't just rely on peripheral vision of them moving, because some people jaywalk and you might not want to follow their lead.

on ours there's a second button and indicator on the other pole, meaning you'd be looking in the wrong diection if you stared at that.

but at least they've made it straight across now with an island in the middle - previously the two halves were offset by 20 metres or so which meant waiting twice

speaking of iPhones -- am I just "slow" or is there actually no straightforward way to connect the iPhone to a computer and open it like a hard drive where you can see the folder / file structure so that, ... oh, just hypothetically, this may or may not be something I struggled with for an embarrassing number of months, very embarrassing because some of my job entails going to buildings and taking pictures of things with my phone ... you can actually see where a mysterious and unaccounted for 1 (one) Gb of photo storage is actually stored?

Also, the fact that a "real" solution to the phantom storage problem was: change the date on your phone to a year or years earlier and then the phantom photos might appear as recent photos ...

You can’t connect and see everything as on an external drive, but you can with photos

uh, I had 1.4 Gb of photos, according to the iPhone, but when I opened the Photos folders (all of them), even the "recently deleted" folder ... there was maybe 400 Mb ... updating the iOS solved the problem, but I feel like the problem started with a previous iOS update where the Photos folder structure changed from "101" "102" etc. to having folders auto-created by month.

Does it say you have 1.4GB of photos on the phone, or 1.4GB total? Could be that you just have the thumbnails for a bunch and they’re in the cloud to be loaded on demand

on the phone ... when I go to "iphone storage" it said 1.4GB ... I un-synced iCloud. I moved photos out of iCloud onto my hard drive and then deleted them in iCloud, then re-synced it with the phone. ... still 1.4 GB.

*a folder on my hard drive that wasn't iCloud Photos (lol)

I don't have a problem with the puffin crossings at all. While you're standing on the pavement waiting for it to change from red to green you don't need to look at the oncoming traffic, you just need to be looking at the red/green man. If you can't see it, move until you can!

Another objection is that you can't see the green man anymore after you've started crossing, so you don't know whether it's changed back to red or not and you need to start hurrying. But this is not an issue. If it's green when you start crossing, you know you're going to have time.

I've just remembered another thing I don't like about them – they don't beep. I assume partially sighted people have some other way of using them.

there's a little cone thing under the button box that rotates when it's green

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-ouch-22706881

omg

my son used to think it was a secret way to get the light to change more quickly but i never knew what it was actually for!

Oh yes, I remember those now. OK, I’m now fully indoctrinated into the way of the puffin.

(Rubs hands togethet)

excellent

am I just "slow" or is there actually no straightforward way to connect the iPhone to a computer and open it like a hard drive where you can see the folder / file structure

Here's one..

A few years ago, Keith Richards did a "Takeover" of BBC Four, over a weekend. There were films, musics, documentaries and various art-movies and more.

Now, back in the day I'd have got a couple of 5 hour VHS tapes, and recorded them and saved them, no problem.

However, now it's all "set your TiVo set" so I duly did, and ended up with a ton of half-rendered segments, which the TiVo managed to mangle into various snippets, some unreadable.

This many years later (and one more up to date Tivo box), I'm looking on t'internet for more details but all I find is the "Keith Richards to take over BBC4" news stories, and nothing about what happened and when.

what were the dates mark?

Sept 2016

We loved @officialKeef's takeover of @BBCFour - this was one of our favourite bits: https://t.co/gthF3iVoai pic.twitter.com/i24J0YqSOF

— BBC Radio 4 (@BBCRadio4) September 26, 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/sep/21/keith-richards-pie-badgers-rocknroll-what-to-expect-from-bbc-all-nighters

Fullish listings here:

Full listings (Fri-Sun) for @BBCFOUR Keith Richards' Lost Weekend starting tonight with @JulienTemple. Superb movies pic.twitter.com/p4sUuZS1SS

— Tony Paley (@tpaleyfilm) September 23, 2016

Yeah, so much that you could :

1) Spend three nights locked in with your favourite bottle and live in your pit watching the lot, or

2) work through a set of VHS tapes going ooh, over the next three months!

So many added in bits that weren't pre-listed, such as Brian Jones' kellogs advert, and some bits from the Pan Pipes as background music, and so on

okay i just looked and you're right it looks amazing. 15 different parts. the first part is 2 hours, the subsequent parts around 20 minutes each. it looks a bit as if he's doing his version of adam curtis, riffing off stuff he's found in the archives, running off down rabbit holes of his memory. how do you annotate that??

here are the other films he picked. one doc about himself and you can see the rest. a pretty great clutch of stuff.

Keith Richards - The Origin Of The Species: Director's Cut (80 mins)
The 39 Steps (1935)
The Girl Can't Help It (1957)
The Sorcerers (1967)
Bicycle Thieves (1948)
I Walked With A Zombie (1943)
The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
Lords Of Little Egypt: Mai Zetterling Among The Gypsies (30 mins) (1961)
Pandaemonium (2000)
Build My Gallows High (1947)

WRT phones discussed above, I continue to feel that the loss of regular landlines is tragic. My office has now gone through three different phone systems, all are glitchy as hell and sound terrible. I haven't even been able to use my office phone for a month because I can't seem to "log in" to it properly and I don't have the patience to deal and just use my cell.

Also, for home use, a landline makes so much more sense in an emergency. Power outage? Can't use the phone. Great.

soft phones suck balls

we keep our landline as a way to have our cake and eat it to with leaving the kids home alone safely but still refusing to buy them cell phones yet (10 and 8 years old). i will admit we adults really never use it but the 10yo has taken to calling her friends on it.

They’re turning off landlines in the UK soon, and the VoIP replacements won’t work in a power cut either. “Use a mobile” say the regulators.

Oh really? I like the idea of having a landline but the fact you have to pay line rental or whatever for it makes it too expensive. But I had hope I would get one one day.

Losing access to emergency numbers during a power outage hasn't even been a concern when we went to mobile only. First thing we do when the lights go out is pull up the utility company's website and report our block, check which lines have gone red. As long as you've got a backup charged, I'd even say that having access to a cell tower is handier.

Kinda like the argument of "Oh I keep a gun in the house because what if someone breaks in," but dialed back a thousand percent.