A relative of mine has a recent HP Pavillion laptop. (I suggested that she get a Mac, but she was concerned about MS Office compatibility).
I was doing some telephone support trying to reattach it to her wireless network tonight. I was ultimately unsuccessful, but I did learn two reasons why HP laptops suck.
- HP has their own ‘wireless assistant’ wizard, with a plethora of confusing options, so even my limited knowledge of Windows network configuration was useless.
- The laptop has a wireless on/off switch on its front. This switch was in the off position, but the software couldn’t tell that. All it could say was ‘please check the network switch’ — and it didn’t show a picture giving the switch’s location. I had to Google and then describe the location over the phone. It’s a hardware switch when it should be a software switch, and to add insult to injury, its state isn’t even visible to the software!
This site has potential to be quite interesting, depending on the quality of the instructions.
It may also self select an interesting group of people — I wonder what a version of Slashdot which only those people knew about would be like?
Fuel additives seem to be the most popular science-based scam outside of alternative medicine.
I’m not sure whether the promoters primarily make their money from investors or customers, but it seems that there’s enough money in it to keep a steady stream of ‘inventions’ coming.
The press (or ‘mainstream media’ as us bloggers call it) loves the ‘Aussie innovation’ angle, so I’m pleased that the Sydney Morning Herald has got a grip and has published a series of many critical articles.
Firepower have now threatened to sue blogger Daniel Rutter, a step which I think they will find counterproductive in the age of Google.
The Herald has treated another magic fuel additive completely differently — again, see Dan for the details. An initial uncritical puff-piece, followed by a mysterious two-stage withdrawal of the article, with no real description of the reasons for doing so.
Apple ships good developer documentation with OS X, and Xcode provides a good UI for searching it, but as I’m a beginner I like to read the conceptual documentation all the way through.
I don’t like reading long documents on a screen, so I print out the documents I want to read 2-up on single sided A4.
This means that I end up with an unordered pile of dog-eared pages.
I have always been interested in the publish on demand idea, so I decided to get hard copies of some of the Apple documentation from http://www.lulu.com — this is permitted by Apple’s terms and conditions, as I read them.
So I concatenated a few documents, converted to Postscript and back to PDF to embed the fonts, and uploaded the result to Lulu. I photoshopped a cover with a Leopard desktop wallpaper image, and it was all ready to go. I had a 712 page book with a spiffy looking colour cover!
The best part was that the indicated cost was $18.77.
Of course once I got to the checkout I was unpleasantly unsurprised to see that shipping was more than double the cost of the book itself.
I don’t want to spend that much money, so I put this experiment on hold for now.
There’s certainly a cost to not living in the US. Perhaps I’ll just wait for the AUD to appreciate a little more against the USD…
While the new iPods look fine, I was surprised to see the mess that was Apple’s Australian web site at 7:25 AM this morning.
Broken images everywhere and copy which refers to the old iPod nano. Surely the updates should have been ready for weeks, and deploying them should be a press of a button!
Do you suffer from Hindsight bias?
This is not one of those irritating quizzes which leave you thinking “But they didn’t ask the right questions!”, just a simple demonstration of hindsight bias.
