What’s Wrong with the Personal Computer? Pt. 1
The following article was witten and published by William Szilveszter.
“I think he picked me because of my motivational skills. Everyone always says they have to work a lot harder when I’m around.” —Homer Simpson
The first in a series of critical looks into the modern day personal computer.
Sit, Roll Over, Beg—Good Boy
Since the majority of us have had (at least) a good solid decade of steady computer use under our belts, we’ve learned to act and behave just like the nerdy programmers have trained us to act and behave behind that keyboard and mouse. We’ve learned to be patient when watching that infernal hour glass or spinning beach ball, to wait for the images to painfully load or generate thumbnails, and to quietly suppress our anger, and just mutter and clinch our mice in frustration when things don’t go our way, instead of throwing them at the nearest geek with a pocket protector (which used to be far too often).
Let me take a page from history: The QWERTY keyboard. It was designed back in the late 1800′s for one sole purpose: Slow down the typist. Back in those days, they had bulky typewriters that would jam if two keys were pressed simultaneously. So the brilliant minds at the time laid the keys in a sequence that would prevent jamming. How? By slowing down the typist. Conceived theoretical limits were an abysmal 20-30 words per minute. That’s more than you could do by hand, and it wouldn’t jam your instrument. Win, win in their book. Yet, after a century of use, humans have pushed those theoretical limits to a blistering 150 wpm. (Mrs. Barbara Blackburn of Salem, Oregon can maintain 150 wpm for 50 min (37,500 key strokes) and attains a speed of 170 wpm using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) system. Her top speed was recorded at 212 wpm. Source: Norris McWhirter, ed. (1985), The Guinness Book of World Records, 23rd US Ed., New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.)
Put the Kibosh on (Some) Telemarketers
The following article was witten and published by William Szilveszter.
I used to receive repeated calls from strange 800-numbers. When I picked up, nothing but silence, then a click, followed up the lovely dial tone. I eventually traced the call and discovered they were coming from my local cable company. Once a week they would come, like clockwork. After repeated attempts, I was finally greeted by a salesperson, trying to peddle the usual promotion. I asked her why I had picked up so many times, yet never spoke to someone with a pulse? She informed me that they have an auto-dialer that randomly dials a list of numbers… when one caller picks up, the others are disconnected. First come, first served.
I thought, “Great, it’s not bad enough they are bothering people, but now they are bothering swarms of people at the same time.” Technology sure can be used for great evil it seems. It was a joyous day when I purchased my first cellular phone. No more calls from the local ambulatory burn ward looking for donations. No more calls from marketing agencies and smarmy cable companies. But it seems like the dream has since ended.
Almost overnight, I’ve been plagued with calls from Mexican lottery agencies (I actually won $12 million in a lottery I never entered? Really? I’m more interested in how you got my cell number), my bank (it’s not enough I let you play with my money, making you rich?), my service provider, a slew of marketing agencies, and even my university. And they just don’t give up either. If they don’t talk to a living person, they incessantly call back. I guess if they gave up too quickly, people would be out of a job. I suppose everyone has to pay the mortgage. But enough is enough, seriously.
Prevent Hard Disk Spindown Using PMSET
The following article was witten and published by William Szilveszter.
Using PMSET on Mac OS X, you can prevent your external hardrive from going to sleep (or spinning down). If you rock a notebook, and rely on an external enclosure, you probably know how annoying it is when your drive goes to sleep on you and it takes a good 30 seconds for it to spin back up again. More annoying is when Finder becomes unresponsive until this happens. If your drive is set to spindown every 15 minutes, then this ends up being downright maddening, and seriously cripples your workflow.
Worst yet, most external enclosures are incredibly aggressive when it comes to their power saving features, and sadly, nearly all of them do not provide the option to change the frequency of which the drives power down. It may not be so bad if you could get the drive to spindown when you truly weren’t using it, but enclosures are dumb. They spindown regardless of your intended usage. If the system is not actively using the hardrive, then it goes to sleep. Well, I suppose that’s fine but system’s still consult your drives even if you don’t expressly do so (e.g., entering Front Row will talk to any drive connected to your system, and if a drive went to sleep, become unresponsive upon load until said drive wakes up).
I got real sick of this behaviour and decided to hit up google, hoping to find a workable solution. Sadly, all I found were ancient hacks, obscure cron jobs that wrote to the drive every n minutes, and over-priced programs that meant I had to run an additional process. I had hoped for a better way, and eventually I stumbled on one: PMSET.
Promoting Air, What Do You Mean You Don’t See It?
The following article was witten and published by William Szilveszter.
I’ve dealt with my fair share of “difficult” clients. I’ve also seen a number of my fellow designers post up on their blogs about some of their worst and most frustrating moments. Personally, I’ve tried hard not to let them get to me. I’m not judging, but I never wanted to be at the point were I threw up an angry entry, condemning an ex-client. Sure, I’ve been frustrated. Walked away from Mail.app. Even felt downright despondent, but I’ve always pushed through, ultimately settling on the notion that my clients are paying my bills. Sure some of them have butchered my designs with rather “questionable” recommendations, but it’s their website. I’ve never had anything too extreme (nothing that made me want to take my name off of it) and can usually pick out quite accurately who is going to be hard nosed in our initial meeting. Truth be told, I tend to take contracts from clients who leave the majority of the design in my hands. But I’ve recently come across more and more clients that are really interested in the aggressive promotion of their websites.
SEO (I’m really starting to hate that acronym) now permeates much of the mainstream. I’ve even had clients without any knowledge of web design approach me on the use specific metadata. I tell them, “your site’s got it.” I design all my websites to be search engine optimized. Metadata is just but one facet. Including search engine friendly URLs, titles, tags, and the proper use of headings and content layout is just good design, at least to me. Frankly, I don’t know any serious designer that forgoes these small details. Moreover, I don’t think it’s all that 007. I’m open with my clients and always try to teach the receptive ones about my craft. I figure it’s the equivalent of a mechanic taking the time to explain the inner workings of fuel injection, or what the master cylinder does.
Palm Just a Bunch of Pirates, Arrrrr!
The following article was witten and published by William Szilveszter.
Everyone’s pretty familiar with the Palm Pre and its fabled iTunes support (unless you’ve been on Mars, in a cave, with your eyes shut, and your fingers in your ears). The release of the new Palm Pre saw native iTunes connectivity. Its users rejoiced. Apple (obviously) didn’t like Palm piggybacking off its baby (hey, Apple fanboy or no, they did put a ton of money and man-hours into their flagship program; you know the one that blew open online music sales?), so they released a new version blocking the Pre. Apple 1, Palm 0. A few days later, a new firmware update for the Pre was loosed on the disgruntled phone owners returning iTunes connectivity. Apple 1, Palm 1.
So now we wait. We wait for Apple to inevitably block the Pre with a probably much more advanced method. You see, the Pre used a hack the first time around. Apple blocked it by requiring that all devices present their God-given USB vendor ID. Palm fired back by spoofing the vendor ID to look just like an iPod. Clever? No, not really. And Nilay Patel (of Engadget fame) writes why, in an elegant and truly sound rundown of Palm’s “tactics.” You can hit up his post here.
I was going to write a lengthy discussion about the debacle, but I think Patel has already said it all. Just a fantastic piece of journalism, from a very astute and down to earth reporter. I’m sure Pre owners aren’t going to line up to return their Pres over this situation any time soon, but I hope they remove themselves from the heat of the moment and see just what’s really is going on, and why companies shouldn’t conduct business in this way. That’s a two minute time-out for you Palm. And I want you to write a 500 word essay on why you think this is not how to conduct business.
