technology

Why Nuclear Power Is Evil

Proponents of nuclear power like to claim that their pet energy source is so clean. I’m mystified by this argument, not mystified as a rhetorical device, but mystified in actual, I’m utterly confused, literal sense. Clean? What do you mean, clean? Have you actually thought this through? There’s no human endeavour less deserving of the […]

Read More

TomTom Sees Me, And Raises

The whole sordid story: Goodbye, TomTom, and Good Riddance | TomTom Sees Me, And Raises This may actually become a customer service blog post series to rival the epic scope of my classic UPC iParcel tale. (To fully appreciate this current post, read the previous one about TomTom first.) As a follow-up to the tragedy […]

Read More
TomTom map, zoomed out to Moon level

Goodbye, TomTom, and Good Riddance

The whole sordid story: Goodbye, TomTom, and Good Riddance | TomTom Sees Me, And Raises This may actually become a customer service blog post series to rival the epic scope of my classic UPC iParcel tale. (To fully appreciate this current post, read the previous one about TomTom first.) After twenty-two years of continuous, loyal, […]

Read More

Lightailing Review (**): Beautiful, But Disappointing

UPDATE: Lightailing has updated their product page to include both a clickable link to the product reviews, and my own review. This prompted me to update this post to include only my product review. Suppliers should <em>never</em> lie. Ever. And fake or suppressed reviews? Those are lies. I’m basically a kid with extra decades on the […]

Read More

How Shazam Worked Before Shazam

Last week, while waiting for my train, I heard a song that I just had to identify. I held up my phone, tapped Shazam, and in seconds, I knew it was Music Box Dancer by Frank Mills. In an seemingly unrelated thread of my life, I decided that I wanted to learn to play the little […]

Read More

Back To The Fifties With Apple Family Sharing

Who would have thought that Apple, of all companies, wants to keep their customers firmly rooted in the fifties? Yes, you can buy early rock’n’roll music in iTunes, but those are not the fifties I mean. Rather, I’m referring to the fifties of traditional family roles: a breadwinner and a homemaker, preferably with daddy as […]

Read More

The Excel Features We’ve Waited 25 Years For

Two new Microsoft Excel features have a good chance of becoming the most celebrated innovations in Excel history. No, not the 3D models that Office now includes. Nor any new calculation functions, charting features, or modelling extravaganzas.As a matter of fact, nothing at all about the content of Excel workbooks. I’m merely talking GUI and usability. […]

Read More

Reset Buttons Are Evil

Dear web designers, Can you please STOP ADDING RESET BUTTONS to your forms? There hasn’t been a single user in the entire history of the interwebs who filled out a web form, and then went, “O wait, all of that isn’t right, I’ve entered the wrong information! What to do, what to do, but pull […]

Read More

Dropbox And Boxifier: What A Team!

Full disclosure: I’m off Dropbox, and as a sad result, also off Boxifier. They still make a great tag team; that part of the below blog post stands. But recently, Dropbox announced that they would increase my annual fee by 20% for doubling my storage to 2TB (while I used only about 10% of the […]

Read More

Fixing WiFi Internet Speed Issues

This is far from comprehensive, but probably useful for others than myself. This post details the troubleshooting steps I went through after my internet speed dropped dramatically at home, from a normal 50-100 Mbps or more to 3 or (much) less, with intermittent dropouts, much fluctuation, and the accompanying slow or absent loading of web […]

Read More