Happy new year everyone!
Hope the year turns out great for everyone. Personally I’m hoping for more time to update this site than I had last year (between working and writing my thesis). Let’s see how it turns out.
Category: General
An Evening With Comment Spam
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the imagination of Internet comment-spam. All of this stuff is genuine (unfortunately), taken from WordPress comments here.
Most netbooks taste perfectly normal
From: Susan Christian
Submitted: 2010/05/07 at 7:12 pm
Regarding: iPod Touch Software 2.0
I want to buy a netbook with a touch screen. It should be a little bit bigger as the iPad and must have a normal tastatur. Can you help me?
I wonder what the ‘tastatur’ even means. Checking from the dictionary, the closest proper word seems to be ‘testator‘, which apparently means “One who has made a legally valid will before death.”. Let’s just assume that the spam-poster misspelled “taste”, because it’s a bit funnier. Still, I don’t believe I can be much of an service here.
The council of networking colleagues
From: Travel Deals to Paris
Submitted: 2010/05/11 at 8:14 am
Regarding: Asus WL-500W Wireless Router
I recently had a new computer with windows 7 that came with a free trial of Microsoft Office. The trial has a few weeks left before I have to purchase the full lisence. Someone has told me about a free download alternative called Open Office and I wondered if anyone of my 4 networking colleagues had any experience of it?
A question best left to your “four networking colleagues”, which actually sounds like a great company name.
PS3 doing not so well on the game-front
From: Eldon Sether
Submitted: 2010/05/13 at 8:39 pm
Regarding: X-Arcade
I downloaded Gears of War a couple of weeks ago and, even though its a”dusty” game, its the best PS3 game in my opinion
Gears of War is the best game on PS3 despite the fact that you can’t play it since it’s an Xbox-only game? Not sure if this means that GoW is utterly awesome or that Sony needs to crank up PS3 game production asap. Foolishness or clever critique? Can’t decide, spam-man.
I am not worthy
From: Jason Ecton
Submitted: 2010/05/27 at 8:10 pm
Regarding: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Considerably, the post is in reality the sweetest on this deserving topic. I agree with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your next updates. Just saying thanks will not just be adequate, for the extraordinary lucidity in your writing. I will at once grab your rss feed to stay abreast of any updates. Fabulous work and much success in your business dealings!
I am humbled by your ass-kissing abilities, spammer. I was actually a bit tempted to approve this comment.
From the land of unnecessary details
From: Jaimee Klice
Submitted: 2010/06/10 at 10:49 pm
Regarding: Asus WL-500W Wireless Router
I found your site on yahoo and thought I would drop by and say hey. I like the way your blog is set up. I¡¯ll come back later. I have to go walk my dog right now and take them to potty.
Intriguing. Can’t wait to hear what happens next. Perhaps the spammer goes to check his/her mail? Damn the suspense.
Thanks, tenant
From: Earnest Finch
Submitted: 2010/06/23 at 11:56 am
Regarding: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Landlord’s post is written wonderful. Writes fluent, rhetorical appropriateness
Finally the nickname “Landlord” is gaining some momentum.
They stopped making games after 2008
From: Micah Miles
Submitted: 2010/07/02 at 8:43 am
Regarding: Thoughts on Wii
According to me the best game is FIFA 08 ,anyone have a suggestion of a similar game?. I have a XBOX 360
FIFA 08 is so unlike any other games, so this is a difficult one. I would recommend FIFA’s 09 – > infinity, but I’m really grasping at straws here. This would have to be “according to me” also.
So deep
From: GSX-R750 guy
Submitted: 2010/07/15 at 1:13 am
Regarding: Technological breakdown
A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.
Sent from my iPhone 4G
I just love haiku-like spam. Also, can’t get over the fact that this bastard has iPhone 4G. Apple employees have been on a drinking binge again and losing their prototypes.
Hey, that’s nice!
From: Beau Thacker
Submitted: 2010/09/25 at 7:36 am
Regarding: Xbox 360
Congratulations from one genius to one other.
Ditto.
You got me there
From: Mrs. Anti-Virus
Submitted: 2010/08/15 at 10:20 am
Regarding: Syksymmällä
I bet you wish george bush was still president now
This is so random that I have to give high marks for originality. Like the nickname as well.
Actually, I’m getting high amounts of useless traffic
From: Porsche Tricarico
Submitted: 2010/09/07 at 7:06 pm
Regarding: X-Arcade
Fed up with getting low amounts of useless traffic for your site? Well i want to inform you of a brand new underground tactic that produces me personally $900 every day on 100% AUTOPILOT. I possibly could be here all day and going into detail but why dont you just check their website out? There is really a great video that explains everything. So if your serious about making hassle-free hard cash this is the site for you. Auto Traffic Avalanche
I bet it produces you $900 for every poor fool you manage to sign up. Change the name, though. Auto Traffic Avalance sounds like a fancy name for commuter traffic.
As did I…
From: Andrew A. Sailer
Submitted: 2011/04/11 at 6:40 am
Regarding: NHL 2003
Oh! Darn it! I almost forgot about the Easter Sunday Dance Presentation
Holy crap, thanks for the reminder!
All right, all this spam is making me sleepy and it’s time to call it a day. Fear not: there’s plenty more from where that came from.
Makeover
Decided to cut some corners regarding the new layout: I stumbled upon theme Ghostwriter, liked what I saw and decided to use it as a base. I’ll probably customize the visuals a bit, but it’s a rather nice base theme as it is.
Back to basics
After an extremely busy second half of year 2010, it’s time to do some cleaning to get this site in shape for year 2011. Guess I’ll start by implementing the new layout that’s been waiting and gathering dust. We’ll see how that goes.
Afterwards it’s time to cook up some new stuff, like ranting about auto-correct -features in certain mobile devices that keep on botching my text as I write. Yes, iOS, looking at you. I love the backwards logic of applying the corrections automatically instead of asking me whether I want a word replaced or not. Although by auto-correcting the title of this post into “Backwards to Basics” it might be into something
Dead by dawn
It looks like there’s seriously something really funky going on with the battery consumption of iPhone OS 4 (iOS 4) on older-generation iPhones. Ever since upgrading to iOS 4, the battery on my 3GS barely lasts a day even on light use. Last night I had around 50% left of the capacity when going to sleep. In the morning I found out the battery had drained overnight. Fortunately I had no work that day, I’d been rather late since the alarm clock (naturally) wasn’t working.
It’s not the first time either (or second, or third…), and we have to keep in mind none of this happened on previous versions of iPhone OS. It’s not just me and my phone either, others have this issue too (not just one crackpot with a dying battery). Here we seem to have a case of a cell phone battery draining 50% in 8 hours while on standby. Far from normal.
In addition to overnight drain I can see battery level on iOS 4 dropping around 1% a minute when actually using the phone. If the battery’s 100% in the morning, it’ll be around 60% on evening (or less, depending on usage), even when in standby-mode.
Solutions to the problem according to messages on Apple’s support forums:
1. Erasing the phone
2. Restoring the phone from a backup
3. Turning off location services
4. Turning off push email
5. Turning off Spotlight indexing
6. Draining the battery and then recharging
7. Waiting for a while, it gets better soon
8. Installing the updated Exchange profile
9. Turning off running background applications
10. Praying to Ni-Cad, ancient Chinese god of battery and dancing in the rain while holding the phone
Ok, so the last one is mine, I wanted to have a nice, round number like 10. Nevertheless the rest are proven solutions that are guaranteed to work except when they don’t. Please note that none of these solutions are suggested by Apple to fix the issue. As far as I know, Apple hasn’t even acknowledged that there’s an issue.
Let’s take a closer look:
1. Erasing the phone
2. Restoring the phone from a backup
Haven’t tried these yet. To me they seem like a last resort and a major pain, especially #1. Although, if all else fails they’re worth a try and I’m fast running out of solutions.
3. Turning off location services
4. Turning off push email
Now these are just silly. Of course they improve battery life. So does disabling 3G. And Wi-Fi. The actual problem still remains and turning off features to fix it is useless. You could have all of these enabled on OS versions prior to iOS 4 with no issues. Hey, let’s turn off the phone, that’ll save battery and certainly stops the drain.
5. Turning off Spotlight indexing
Kind of like the previous two suggestions, the difference being that Spotlight doesn’t use data connection. No major difference. Probably works better on 3G models than 3GS. Still, earlier OS version was able to run Spotlight without problems.
6. Draining the battery and then recharging
Now this I’ve tried. Multiple times. Not by choice though, kind of comes automatically when your battery drains overnight. Results were disappointing.
7. Waiting for a while, it gets better soon
Who knows, maybe this works on some occasions. For me it didn’t. I hope people don’t use this approach when dealing with illnesses or wounds.
8. Installing the updated Exchange profile
Applied this, but unfortunately it didn’t fix the issue for me. Seemed like a valid solution, though. Helps those using Exchange accounts.
9. Turning off running background applications
While this seems to have a certain effect on battery life, it does not fix the issue at least for me. Also, let’s remember that iPhone 3G users are suffering from the same issue and there’s no background multitasking on iPhone 3G.
10. Praying to Ni-Cad, ancient Chinese god of battery and dancing in the rain while holding the phone
This did not work.
The iPhone problem diagnosing and recommended solutions often feel like voodoo, with people advising to do this and that “because it definitely fixes the issue”. This makes it quite hard to find solid facts.
I’ve been searching for a way to fix this ever since iOS 4 was released and I’m not any closer than I was a month ago. Not cool.
Fortunately according to Wall Street Journal, Apple is currently investigating iOS4 issues on older devices – namely on iPhone 3G. Here’s hoping this leads to improvements on 3GS as well and improved battery life.
Picky electricity
Sometimes it’s the little things that get to you most. Like some of the Sony’s design choices on PlayStation 3 that are rather hard to understand. For instance, consider the charging of a controller. They’ve somehow managed to build a device that is charged via USB, but only accepts charge from USB ports of a few selected devices – mainly the PS3 itself.
You can’t use USB chargers that plug into power outlet, the controller won’t charge. Besides PS3 itself, I’ve only managed to charge the controller using a laptop’s USB-port, with the condition that the computer isn’t on standby. Speaking of standby, you can’t charge the controller with PS3 either if it’s not powered on.
Sony keeps sweetening the deal by including an amusingly short USB cord to charge the controller with. If the battery runs out while you’re playing, you’re essentially forced to sit 10 cm away from PS3 (and possibly your TV) while waiting for the controller to charge. Either that, or invest into a longer USB cable that is probably useless for any other purpose besides PS3. Makes me wonder what the grand idea behind this is…
Roundabout MacBook Pro
After finally saving enough cash to replace my foreced-into-retirement-iBook, I invested in a brand new MacBook Pro 13″. Even though MBP’s value for money decreased considerably doe to the recent MacBook-upgrade, I still wanted the aluminum enclosure and the backlit keyboard.
Initial impressions of the laptop were rather positive. I really like the aluminum casing, and especially when compared to my 2005 model iBook, the new MacBook Pro is pretty compact. The CPU is only a bit faster than on my Mac Mini, but overall the laptop still feels much faster. Plenty of thanks to the improved integrated graphics and total memory of 4GB, I would assume.
The glass trackpad feels excellent, even better than on my old iBook. That’s a big deal, since in my opinion many PC laptops are still struggling to get to that level of comfort iBook had to offer (Here’s looking at you Asus and your EEE-series). The trackpad takes some time to get used to though. The gestures and customizations offer many possibilities, but learning a new way of doing things is always a time-consuming process.
Jury is still out on the battery life. Apple claims it’s “up to 10 hours”, but all I’ve gotten yet is around 6-7 hours on light usage such as web browsing. It should be noted that WLAN and bluetooth have been enabled on all cases, so the battery should last a bit longer when you switch them off. It’s still a new battery and it takes a while to see what the actual capacity will be in the long run.
Despite of all the good qualities, it was soon time for the laptop to depart as the biggest drawback ended up overwhelming. Every time audio was turned on, the machine emitted a high pitched whine from below the keyboard area. This was extremely annoying especially in a silent environment. That being said, it was time to send the laptop to be repaired. I suspected that the problem was on the speakers, but they ended up replacing the entire logic board. A little bigger issue than I had originally expected. After a few days in repair, I got the MacBook Pro back and everything is once again smooth and shiny.
With new laptop in hand, my productivity is soaring. Hopefully that translates to me getting the new layout finished soon.
Hey, is that mold I’m seeing here?
Looks like the content is getting a bit stale again. After all, it’s May and the last update was on January.
Fear not. New layout is in works and I have a few posts in the pipeline. To be completely honest, I also have about four old drafts that should probably be finished soon.
So there, not dead yet.
