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

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.

I do not miss the sound of three or four phones in different rooms suddenly ringing all at once.

We have had a "bundle" deal (phone/cable/internet) for probably 20 years now. Several of our streaming services and various other things are inextricably linked to that account. We're simply too lazy to investigate how to unbundle it without losing something important. (Plus the system is too baroquely interwoven to make this easy. I have no doubt this is on purpose.)

For some reason I unplugged the landline phone like two years ago. Haven't bothered to plug it back in.

That said, I am well aware of the thing where old-school landline phones work even when the electricity is out. So I do keep an extremely old traditional phone that I can plug in in case of nuclear alien zombie militia apocalypse or whatever.

Right now I am telling myself that the reason I keep a traditional landline phone line in place is for emergency preparedness. Yes, in my darker moments I think it's just because I don't want to deal with the logistical excrementstorm of untangling all these various accounts and passwords. But please don't mess with my carefully cultivated system of illusions, thxbye

it’s definitely on purpose. some providers will even give you separate contracts for each of the services which each have slightly different lengths. they’re combined for billing purposes but make it more complicated to switch if you decide you want to.

that said i found it absolutely worthwhile to switch to full fibre to the house and cancel the landline. faster and cheaper. i don’t have cable and don’t want it but i’m sure there are people out there selling fibre/tv packages.

I have an irrational fear of me or other half becoming unconscious (falling down stairs, whatever) when looking after the kids and I want an easy way for them to phone 999 rather than having to have them remember how to do it on a locked smart phone. Familiar as they are with apps, they obviously don't make phone calls themselves.

I do keep an extremely old traditional phone that I can plug in in case of nuclear alien zombie militia apocalypse or whatever.

<3 <3 I have one too ... I don't pay for a landline but I still have the phone in a drawer next to the phone jack ... because I do think about these things

sarahell: Right! They say that no one expects the nuclear alien zombie militia apocalypse. But one could pretty easily write the script of an M. Night Shyamalan-style disaster movie where the power grid is out, the cellular networks have shut down, and all seems lost.

But! There's like six late-middle-aged Luddite dorks who still have conventional phones and they are somehow able to communicate over landlines and defeat the zombie alien shape-shifting ninjas or whatever, through good old-fashioned moxie and unhackable obsolete technology. They use postcards and mimeographs and party lines and maybe somehow involve 8-track tapes.

(Totally writing this screenplay now, but I might go with reptiles instead of zombies. Thoughts?)

I haven't had a landline in 18 years, but when I did I did keep an old basic phone around, one that plugs into a phone jack but doesn't have a separate cord that plugs into your mains electrical outlet. It will work in a blackout, and is also good for diagnostic purposes.

i think for box office draw, you should go with cassettes ... the dorks will make each other mix tapes. Reptiles are good. You might also want to consider fleas or some sort of parasitic wasp that spreads disease to humans from rodents and rodent adjacent animals (rats, mice, raccoons, possums) that are attracted to contemporary abundance. It would make for a good "DO YOU SEE?!" theme that can also incorporate adorable fluffy household pets that may or may not be disease carriers.

man i guess i've missed that whole trend, but yeah, mostly sounds like a backward step to me. the mix tapes sound good though.

probably should star Mark Wahlberg ... and a dog

sarahell: Okay, cassette tapes and parasitic wasps it is. Many thanks, you will get an executive producer credit and four points on the box-office gross. Have your agent call my agent.

Jokes aside, here is a literally 100% true thing that happened, and is actually relevant to the thread.

A few years ago, a friend of mine found some music stuff that had been recorded on a 4-track Tascam cassette Portastudio. He didn't have the equipment to even assess the quality of it to determine whether it was worth digitizing. Fortunately I had a decent Portastudio in the attic, as I never throw anything away. So I casually lent it to my friend, without a second thought.

Then the world subsequently descended into pandemic chaos.

Two days ago I saw him in a bar and he handed me a grocery bag and said, "Merry Christmas." The bag contained... my old 4-track Tascam cassette Portastudio. What I didn't realize was that the tape that I had left in it was the Counting Crows' August and Everything After. Peak cringe.

landline people: have you actually used yours during a power outage? We held onto a landline for a long time because my partner lived in Michigan during the 2003 blackout. She had a landline at her apt but none of her (grad student) friends did, so she had to call all their families to let them know they were okay. After that we were stubborn landline maintainers even though people made fun of us.

Jump to 2012 or so and we're living in Oregon, when a snowstorm knocks down a ton of trees across the city and our power goes out for a couple days. Within minutes of the outage our landline no longer works, not because of the phone but because the landlines were all digital now.

Now living in Quebec: last week a friend was in an area hit by a terrible storm, the power went out, and apparently some of the local radio stations stopped broadcasting, plus lots of gas stations couldn't pump gas, etc.