The reason I hate the new espn.com? Auto playing content, I just want to read the latest news.
Posts Tagged ‘tech’
iTunes Issues
We’ve all been there, been stuck with a computer error that seems to be exclusive to our machines. We consult support forums, publications, friends and other computers to no avail and then resort to pulling our hair out and generally being mad that our exspensive computer has flat out died in some small way.
Well for the past week this has been me, and to make it worse it has been an issue with a mac, a system I am not extensively experienced with. For no reason at all iTunes would crash within a minute of opening, and it was the only piece of software experiencing this issue. I consulted another mac in our house, and it had no problems, so finally I resorted to drawing straws.
I tried rebooting with no positive results, looked at re-installing iTunes on top of the existing install and it didn’t change a thing. I even removed iTunes entirely and installed it again without it helping things. That is when I effectively gave up because I was out of ideas.
That is until it ocurred to me to try an old Windows trick, I copied the iTunes library files to the desktop and deleted them and fired up iTunes, and boom it worked. I am not sure why this helped but I don’t care.
So if you have an issue with iTunes don’t fret and as a last resort no matter the OS, kill the library and restart the program, then paste back in the library so you don’t lose your library and hopefully you will be back in action.
mobile me should not be
I love apple, I absolutely adore my macbook and I think OS X is an extremely superior operating system to any version of windows or linux that I have used, however apple is extremely wrong. They continue to be wrong however. When upgrading iTunes they have forced safari onto windows users and while it is a better browser in my opinion it is still wrong, and even when they remedied that, they didn’t because safari was still auto checked in the update. I remembered these instances when I was on my vista machine today and noticed a new icon that I had never seen before.
The icon for mobileme (or is it mobile me?), apples anticipated update to .mac, it sounds like a wonderful service in many ways just definitely not for me so I knew I didn’t download this. So who did? I know I have updated iTunes on the machine recently, and I think Safari may have been updated as well, either way I am certain it was apple who initiated the download and install without asking me at all (or giving me a way to remove it).
So what does it do? For those with mobile me, it’s an entry into the service and for those that NEVER WANTED IT IN THE FIRST PLACE well it’s an ad, so much so that the learn more button simply links you to apple.com/mobileme. It’s a bad move by apple, but hey maybe they will get a few more customers for mobile me, but it won’t be me.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to the products I received from apple today and monitoring the shipping of a new macbook.
I am such a hypocrite….
Time Warner stop sniffing my packets
Anyone who has used firefox has probably noticed that when entering a url without it’s TLD you are redirected to where you want to go. For example if I enter twitter into the address bar and hit enter I get twitter.com not a page of search results or a page not found error.
Firefox achieves this by sending the request to google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button which simply sends you to the number 1 result on your queries search page. For myself this all changed today.
Apparently between the time I left for work and the time I got home Time Warner’s Road Runner internet access instituted a change where upon they do some packet sniffing and instead of allowing my request to go to google they take it their page where they can serve up search results and advertisements. This is an easy feature to turn off (click on why am I here and then on preferences then when you see the question above click disable) but my problem is really what else Time Warner might be doing via this packet sniffing.
Don’t get me wrong I expect some form of internet history to be maintained by my ISP (for a very limited amount of time for various reasons) but to sniff into it without cause or court order is wrong period. Which brings me to my fear that this could be a beginning of Time Warner abandoning the idea of net neutrality.
For those who do not know, net neutrality is the basic ideal that all internet traffic should be treated the same whether I am searching for at&t internet or Direct TV service the speed of my connection should be the same as if I am searching for the same service at Time Warner.
If I call someone on at&t from a Verizon phone there is no discernible difference than if both were lines on the same network, and that is how the internet should be. All traffic should be treated the same without my ISP forcing me to opt out of their stupifying plans.
I have been prepared to switch away from Time Warner to FIOS once it moves into my area, now I might instead move prematurely.
Hands off my Internet Time Warner, please.
For more on neutrality please click here, it’s a very important issue.
In All Fairness … Internet Explorer Still Stinks
This is something many have said for quite a long time, and that I have been saying for just as long. It took me a long time to come around but now that I have my browsing experience has been much improved and the same can be said for anyone I know who uses a different browser, I prefer firefox but opera and others are incredible as well.
With all that said this is the story of how SitePoint tried to give Internet Explorer a fighting chance … and it lost anyway.