'Twere the Rants Before Christmas (December Mini-Rants)

The BBQ Pit
61

Depending on the make of your machine, that ‘water’ might be for the humidification chamber. Humidifying the air makes it much more comfortable in the long run. The tutorial will no doubt explain it. If not, shoot me a PM and will walk you through it.

A night or two without humidification won’t hurt any thing. You do want to figure it out or otherwise your lungs will have to do the humidifying and that makes a lot more work for them (again, in the long run).

Buy a couple of jugs of distilled water, that’s what you want to use in the CPAP. Some stores hide it in the pharmacy or over with the baby formula.

May the force be with you!

62

It’s amazing just how much of a clusterfuck Google services are.

Inna and I have an accounting business which is nearing on 50 clients. Tax season is just around the corner and we want to get ahead on who to send P&L’s and Balance Sheets to for tax prep reasons. I decided that, you know, this would be a good thing for Google Forms, since I’ve been asked to fill out a GForms by many an organization before, with my idea being of sending our clients an email asking them to verify their tax-prep person by clicking on this simple, 5-question, Google Forms link and filling out the form.

Well.

I create the form. No problem. It creates a Google Sheets (aka Google Shitz). Again, no problem. I then schedule an email to go out December 2nd with the respondent’s link to the form to all of our clients.

Now, you would think that having a link called “Respondents link” would be all that our clients need to fill out this simple 5-question form, right?

No.

Apparently, even though GForms created this special link for me to send to all respondents, that apparently does not give the respondents the right permissions to fill out the form! So what happened, instead of filling out five answers, is our clients were asked to send us an email giving them permission to fill out the form.

But wait, there’s more!

So they did so. But the emails asking for permissions didn’t go to our Workspace inbox, no, that would be too fucking simple.

Instead, they were all shunted to something call the “Updates” tab, where they have been collecting ever since 9:01am, Tuesday, December 2nd.

I didn’t realize this until last night, whereupon I had to “respond” to 26 email requests, giving our clients permission to fill out the form using the link that GForms told me was the “respondents link”.

I have zero idea how this is a trillion-dollar company. Google is such a fucking joke, we’re seriously contemplating just migrating all our services to Microsoft. They might be evil too, but at least they’re competently evil.

63

Thank you! I’ve been using filtered water until I can get to the grocery store.

My first night with it was okay-ish. I had it on the wrong mask setting which probably didn’t help, and I woke up a lot so I don’t think I had the best fit. But according to the app I had 75% fewer breathing incidents per hour than during my lab study, so that’s something.

A-Z list just finished the Zs as in ZOMG I’m so glad that’s over. I still have to fuck around with the formatting and everything but the worst is done. Most of the stuff I entered in was 15-20 years old. I’ll be surprised if any of those foundations still exist.

64

I think the answer is that they were once very competent, then they became very large and very rich (something like $3.83 trilllion is the current market cap for Alphabet Class C) and the rest is history.

I don’t use Google in any sophisticated way at all. For my purposes I find Gmail very reliable. Mainly what bugs me about Google is their incredible obsession with what they think is “security”. My Google Account may soon be terminated because of the hassle of logging into it so I haven’t done so in nearly two years. They send a password change confirmation to my known registered email account. That’s not good enough – they want to re-verify via 2FA. Done, but wait – that’s not good enough either! They want to do a second 2FA via my cell phone, without explaining why the fuck they need to do this. At that point I was too frustrated to continue.

65

To be fair, that is a fad that a lot of software companies (particularly email clients) are doing; trying to organize things for you without letting you know about it. I run into that with newer versions of Outlook, for example, and a number of my web mail clients do that too.

It’s as if a burglar broke into your home while you were away to rearrange things in a manner they thought made sense, and you only realize it when you’re trying to find stuff which seems to be missing. It’s not “missing”, it’s just tucked away in a place someone else thought made sense, and you get to play scavenger hunt to find it. Or worse, you don’t see the notification of something that arrived because it arrived on your back porch (so to speak).

I hate that trend. I love having tools to organize things, I hate when some automated process decides to do it for me and I have to go figure out where things went. That is the opposite of helpful. Anytime I notice that behavior, I try to see if there is a way to disable it. Let me organize it myself if I feel I need to, thank you very much you AI-wannabe piece of shit.

66

This is true. To elaborate, I’m reading Corey Doctorow’s book Enshittification, which discusses the process by which useful platforms become absolute shit. This is actually part of their business model. In the beginning they provide a great service so that, with the help of regulatory capture and aggressively anti-competitive business practices, they can eliminate the competition and lock in their users to their services. Once all the competition has been taken out and their users locked in, they can exploit the shit out of us.

To use Google search for example, it once was a great product that they enshittified in all sorts of creative ways. They now give intentionally bad results so that users have to click through more ads. Another thing they’ve been doing for a while is silently appending sponsored companies to generic searches. So if you search for “snow pants,” Google invisibly adds to the search query so the results you’re actually getting are as if you had searched, for example, “Land’s End snowpants.”

I’ve actually switched to a paid search engine mentioned in this book, Kagi. It’s a thousand times better than Google search and the kicker is they are running it entirely off Google’s data, and paying for the privilege. It’s the ultimate proof of how much better Google would be if it actually gave a shit about user experience.

67

That’s great!!!

68

Google’s priority is their paying (advertising) customers, not you the end user. They do give a shit about their primary audience, unfortunately, that’s not the end user.

69

Doctorow could give you a long treatise about advertisers as well. They also make their advertisers dependent on them for revenue and screw them over. Apparently ad fraud is a massive problem. They’re gaming the system to rip off anyone who touches it.

70

My Samsung Note 22 phone - which has served me well for 3.5 years - quit connecting to the network reliably back in August. Rebooting didn’t help. At first it was when we were driving through a rural area - no surprises there. Then we were driving around Toronto - where one would expect decent coverage. No luck.

This has persisted - despite numerous reboots, tweaking the SIM, doing an e-SIM…. so I knew I had to replace it. Dammit - aside from THAT, it worked great.

Got the new one the other day - Samsung S25 Ultra (I like the stylus).

I tried figuring out how to configure the S-pen to remotely activate the camera - a feature I’ve found quite useful on the older one.

And they’ve DISCONTINUED that functionality.

The enshitification continues.

At least the phone appears to work….

71

The same thing has happened to my wife’s S22. Asurion sent her a refurbished one, and that one is getting iffy.

But you can tell the phone “shoot” in a loud voice, and it will take a picture.

72

I’m ready to find a new primary care doctor.

They prescribed a statin after reviewing my blood labs. It was in my chart notes, doc writes your nonhdl cholesterol is high sonim prescribing a statin. My results have been trending lower so I’m confused. I schedule a video visit because I want to know why. And I have questions about it all. I’m not currently on any meds.

I don’t get to ask those questions because she said she reviewed my results and previously thought my ASCVD value (8.4) indicated a need for a statin. However she recalculated it just before the video visit and realized she fucked up her calculation and I’m actually not in need of a statin my value was like a 4.

Barely apologizes. Um just ducky. you almost had me take a statin for no good reason.
WTF.

73

Holy bananas… the side effects of the second dose of the shingles vax are awful! I went from shivering violently to soaked in sweat and back again multiple times during the night last night. But I’d rather feel crappy for a day than get shingles. I know two people who had it bad and I don’t want to deal with that.

74

I wonder if we need a dedicated thread for this. Our Sony Bravia TV from like 7 years ago needs to be replaced. The Sony looks beautiful but I’ve always hated the interface. The way they shove recommendations at you and all the visual clutter is so obnoxious. I looked around to see if I could avoid this with a different brand, and apparently they all suck. My buddy recommended we get an Apple TV 4K for a great interface, so I guess we’re getting that on top of a new TV.

I’m on the fence about getting a new model Sony Bravia 5 or something else. Or something fancier. It’s not like we ever play video games anymore. We mostly just use it for TV and movies. I hate paying so much for something I’m just gonna have to replace in 5-7 years.

75

Our Samsung TV no longer supports BritBox or Crave. You can only access these services via Amazon… which means if you have an account with BritBox, it won’t work, you must cancel and purchase that subcription through Amazon. Just evil, and certainly enshittification.

76

Are you sure they didn’t mix up the shingles vaccine with the vaccine against vampirism or the werewolf bite?

77

I deal with both of those kinds of TV problems by opting for TVs with minimal fancy features but good picture quality. My Sony Bravia is maybe 12 to 14 years old, and it’s still just fine, though admittedly I don’t use it very much. But more to the point, it has zero “smart” features, just a nice 1080p picture, 3 or 4 HDMI inputs, and the ability to output audio over optical cable to my home theater audio system. That’s all I need. I use its remote features for awesome functions like turning it on or off, and selecting an HDMI input. And on the very rare occasion when I watch broadcast TV, for the awesome function of changing channels! :grin:

I’ve been called a Luddite with reference to my attitude to most modern tech. I take it as a badge of honour. I suspect I would be very unhappy if I had to get a new TV with a ton of newfangled features that I didn’t need or want but had to pay for. This is the spirit with which I despise cell phones, and have despised them ever since they ceased being useful mobile telephones and became addictive gadgets marketed to teens. Wait, school is out and I see one on my lawn now – have to run!

78

You should! I recently read that Luddites were not in fact irrational haters of progress, but people who vocally opposed the corporate exploitation of men, women and children in factories.

I take it you don’t use streaming services? That’s all we’ve ever used. We don’t even have cable. Although if that merger between Netflix and Warner Bros goes through we’ll need fewer streaming apps than we do now.

79

I don’t have cable TV, either. The commercialism of broadcast TV drives me nuts. What I have instead is broadband internet that provides most of my content, and also an OTA antenna which picks up over half a dozen digital HD stations on the rare occasions when there’s something I want to see, which is usually CBC News or CBC playoff hockey. The cost of cable TV would be totally wasted. In the ~17 years I’ve lived here there’s been literally nothing I ever missed due to not having cable TV (well, except maybe when the Jays were in the World Series this year!).

80

Broadband internet providing content is what people mean by “streaming”.

Now, whether or not you subscribe to paid streaming services is another thing, but you can certainly watch free streaming services through the internet.

And I was in the same boat as you before I got married. I saw cable as a waste of money, and just watched everything through the internet, until my wife insisted on cable TV, so we have cable TV.