I sorta knew that existed, but never messed with it until just now. Thanks to you, now I have.
The Google website’s find my device function can trigger my phone to ring, even if set to silent. So from any other device or computer, whether mine or somebody else’s I can beg, borrow, or steal, if I can log in to Google’s website I can locate my phone. Tres cool. Thank you.
I don’t see what benefit some other 3rd party tracker app would have unless it’s really about you keeping tabs on his phone, and thereby usually him.
We find it useful at times to be able to see each other’s locations. That way, if one’s running late getting home, the other can see if there was a detour along the way. Also useful for finding each other if we get separated in a large store/shopping center/touristy area.
That interrupt storm taking up as much as 10% of the CPU I was getting on the computer … it wasn’t the keyboard. I don’t know what the hell it was. It went away after reboot, but came back the next day even with a different keyboard.
I read that in some cases “wake-from-sleep” can cause these problems, and I routinely let my computer sleep all the time – typically I don’t reboot for months.
Very strangely, it went away after I ran a virus scan, which I aborted after it scanned “critical areas” and started the long scan. It never reported finding anything, but the problem was mysteriously gone. I also changed a couple of registry entries related to power management just in case. The problem has not returned.
So I think I will take the fancy illuminated keyboard back out of my closet where keyboards are sprouting like weeds, apologize to it for falsely blaming it, ask it to forgive me, and at least temporarily reinstate it as my active keyboard. It’s definitely much, much more comfortable and accurate to type on. But sometime later. Right now a Caesar or maybe a martini and some porch-sitting would be more rewarding than fighting with technology and haunted computers.
I do not like sleep mode. Many things, in my case especially networking, get weird after a few sleep/wake cycles. A full reboot always comprehensively solves the gremlins.
Win10 or 11 is not nearly as troublesome that way vs. much earlier Windows. But it, and the craptacular drivers for all your hardware, are still not perfect. Especially not the drivers. Rebooting is far easier than troubleshooting and is much less likely to result in you making random unneeded, and ultimately unhelpful, config changes.
Sadly, I lack Caesar ingredients. Martini in your honor it shall be. Cheers!
I disable sleep mode. I’ll let it turn off the screen after a period of inactivity, but no sleep and definitely no hibernation.
Then again, my home PC is a desktop (one I built and I’ve been constantly upgrading for decades). Sleep has zero benefit. It’s not like I am worried about battery life.
I was about to go outside to get fresh air last night when I saw 4 police cars show up, lights flashing.
They were in for 2 hours…today I found out there were shots fired, the guy got away, gun was found in upper floor laundry room.
Still locked out of remote desktop. I sent an email to our tech company and asked them to please make it a priority. Tried to do some work without remote access… it’s not happening, I need too many documents that I don’t have. I hate this feeling, that I’m behind and need to do work, and can’t.
But let’s get to the truly important rant. Paramount Plus is the worst, and I mean the single worst streaming app that has ever existed. It is a fucking joke of an app. Peruse reddit and you will find scores of complaints, including one who had to manually switch every episode from German to English for no apparent reason. It’s like the fucking app is haunted. The last time I used it, it would freeze up at the end of every episode and then lose my place.
Why am I using such a garbage app? Because Paramount Plus has Star Trek, and there are some damned good Star Trek shows out right now. We finally fired up the old app last night to watch us some Strange New Worlds.
Surprise! Ads. Ads ads. Constant ads, that my eyeballs had to sit and watch for the first time in twenty years. And holy fuck, ads have not changed at all in that time. I felt like I’d been transported back to the 90s.
So I look at my subscription options and see I’m in the lowest “limited ads” tier. There is an option to upgrade to include Showtime. Does that get rid of the ads? No, it does not. At best, it reduces them. “Ads in live TV broadcasts and a few shows.”
“A few shows” What in holy fuck that does that mean? Poking around the internet it seems there is no way to escape the ads on Paramount Plus. Just to have slightly fewer of them.
Fuck this stupid fucking worthless piece of shit app for making me watch fucking ads and bleeding me dry for a fucking garbage streaming service I don’t even want except for Star Trek.
It’s pretty shitty and I considered posting a rant about it too.
Here is what drives me crazy. I’ve been watching Strange New Worlds (which is my favorite Trek show now, sorry all of you who love the classics). Really enjoying the new season. But not the app itself.
To start with, I have to manually fast-forward past the extended opening credit sequence. It’s not bad, but it’s long, and if you’ve seen it once you don’t need to see it again. And it’s a bit janky to keep hopping 30 seconds at a time. There is no “skip” option as just about every other app has.
Then I watch some stuff, watch some commercials, watch more stuff, watch more commercials, etc. It’s actually not that bad, in the sense that it’s generally a minute and a half of commercials and I have to do it only a few times per episode, and each episode is about an hour long. But here is what really pisses me off. At the very end of each episode, right before the end credits, with only one minute left in the entire thing, it cuts to one last set of commercials. Of course, at this point I stop watching because why would I watch another set of commercials just to watch a bunch of names scroll by? The commercials take longer than the credit sequence.
So now the next episode comes out, and I want to watch it. But I can’t “continue”, as every other streaming app does. Because if I try, guess what happens? It takes me to where I stopped watching the previous episode. If I finished Episode 3, and Episode 4 is now out, and I want to watch Episode 4, if I go to Strange New Worlds and click “continue watching”, as you would any other app, it puts me back in Episode 3 to watch a bunch of commercials before watching the end credits of the episode I already saw. Fucking idiotic.
Instead, what I have to do every time, is go to the show entry, open details, scroll around the non-intuitive interface that has the cursor bounce around to weird places until I get to “episodes”, find Season 2, expand it, then make my way through each episode in the list until I get to the last one, then click to play it. As opposed to just going to “continue watching” in my list of “recently watched” and pressing to continue. It’s like their app was designed by some robot that doesn’t understand how humans watch entertainment.
Also, I have this on my Kindle Fire in my home office (not the only place I watch it, but one place I watch it). When I watch shows or movies on Paramount Plus, they often struggle to buffer, and will freeze or get pixelated. On a good day, it will do that for a few minutes before smoothing out. On a bad day I will struggle with it until I give up and decide to watch it later or on another device. The stuttering gets so bad at times that I have to rewind because I can’t understand what’s happening. The thing is, none of the other apps do this on that device. It’s just Paramount Plus, like they don’t know how to optimize it properly.
The app is a piece of shit and I wouldn’t waste money on it except that it’s the only place to watch some extremely good content. It’s good enough to put up with how awful it is. But that doesn’t make it any less awful.
A church friend was going to a store where things are free, she was going to take me;I got back to her but she had already left. I don’t ever get to go out with people, they’re too busy. Whats it like having a life?
So when we lost our development director, for some reason they brought in our contracted PR consultant as interim. I guess we were desperate and needed help with gala.
Anyway, I hate her. It’s rare for me to hate a coworker, but I honestly just wish I could yeet her into the sun. She is the most obnoxious condescending person to me. I’ve been doing this job managing grants for eight fucking years and suddenly she’s on our fucking Grants Committee email list offering her “feedback” on every damned thing and this gets me so worked up. She has to dominate and insert herself into everything. She recently did a presentation about social media to all staff and she was so fake. She’d say one thing, and a staff member would counter with, “What about this?” And she’d be all, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
I can’t stand micromanaging condescending bullshit. Well our new developmental director quit so guess who’s my interim boss?
I truly don’t know why I hate this person as much as I do but if this becomes a permanent thing, I might fucking quit.
I was thinking about gettIng the Paramount app because they have a few things I want to watch, but maybe it’s not worth it. I hate that there are so many good shows and movies that are only available in one place. We can’t even have DVDs anymore. This is not progress.
Another thing I realized about the app… When you pause, the screen goes grey then gets covered up with an ad for the platform. See something interesting and want to pause to check it out? Looking for easter eggs? Want to see what’s written on that note flashed on the screen for a half second? Well, fuck you, you don’t get to!
Tehcnically, I’m supposed to get off work at 5. Often, a call runs late. IIRC The latest I’ve gotten off work is 6:45. Today, I was on a call til about 5:35. That isn’t my rant. During certain periods of each call, I have free time to surf the Dope or read the group chat I share with my fellow CSR’s. For reasons I genuinely do not understand, the two managers in charge of telling us we can log off for the day kept posting we needed to stay logged in. They didn’t tell us we could go until 5:21. Like I said, I cannot figure out why.
Mom has been having to watch her story on Paramount+ due to some bullshit between our provider and Nexstar (sp?). She’s so mad about the current plot that she hasn’t had much to say about the commercials…I think she typically watches it live though.
\(^o^)/ My work keyboard is also illuminated, but I don’t use that function unless they’re doing maintenance work and the overhead lights are out (happens more often than you would think). It’s a rather old Logitech I had at home when I had a Windows desktop as my primary computer; it’s meant to be rechargable, but also accepts alkaline AAs, so yay. As a bonus, I managed to convince IT to install Logitech’s software on my computer, so I’ve been able to map most of the custom function buttons.
Also, I’ve never been able to get my Windows 10-based work computer to sleep properly. It takes so long to boot that I pretty much leave it on all the time; this is actually sort of encouraged in my department, because it allows for easy remote login.
And I’ve narrowed my monitor selections down to two options, both Dell UltraSharps. Progress! One is a 27", the other 32".
I find it very convenient to just leave the computer when I have other things to do or want to have a lie-down that may or may not turn into going to bed for the night, and the computer takes care of itself by powering down but leaving all of my applications up and intact. And I like looking at “up time” in task manager and seeing it extend to double-digit or even triple-digit days. That says a lot about hardware and software reliability. Windows 95 could typically barely survive half a day without crashing, and less if gaming.
But you’re absolutely spot on about sleep mode, especially in earlier versions of Windows, as you say. My previous computer, running Windows XP, developed a problem after several years where it would crash for no particular reason. After a bunch of analysis that I don’t recall the details of, I concluded that the problem only happened when it woke from sleep. I subsequently disabled sleep mode and left the computer on all the time, and it ran just fine.
Your comment about networking adapters in this regard is especially astute. The two properties I turned off that I mentioned before that are associated with sleep problems in Windows 7 were in fact network adapter properties (Wake on Magic Packet and Wake on pattern match, if anyone is curious).
Judging only from my sample of one, Dell Ultrasharps are excellent monitors. I’m surprised you need one that big, though, but your use case is not the same as mine. Mine is 24" and, sitting close to it as I do, I find I have to move my head from side to side to see the vast expanse of it. 32" is absolutely huge for a monitor – that was the size of my first HD television!
This is not progress.