Blackmoor Vituperative

I received a Harmony Ultimate from Logitech because I own several Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote remotes and have recommended them highly. I was looking forward to the Harmony Ultimate, since I had given an unfavorable review to the Harmony Touch, and I was hoping that the Harmony Ultimate would correct the design deficiencies of the Harmony Touch. It does correct some problems, but it also introduces new ones. Here are some good things and bad things:

Good things:

1. The removal of the number buttons to make the Harmony Ultimate a more convenient size was a good move. The on-screen numbers are easy to find, when they are needed.
2. Overall, the size of the Harmony Ultimate is convenient and comfortable.
3. Most of my settings were successfully imported from one of my Harmony One settings, so that saved me some time during set-up.
4. Having a dedicated button for the DVR and for the four colored buttons is a great addition.
5. The remote comes with a “hub” and a pair of “IR blasters”, which one could place in a cabinet to control concealed electronics. That’s nice, I suppose.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few things that make the Harmony Ultimate a bad fit for my living room experience.

1. The location of the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons to above the screen makes using the Harmony Ultimate more awkward than using the Harmony One, even though the Harmony One is significantly larger. Using the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons on the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote can be done one-handed. On the Harmony Ultimate it requires awkwardly shifting the position of the hand, or using two hands. This is a significant step backward in usability. However, what’s worse is….
2. Putting the touch-sensitive screen between the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons and the up-down-left-right buttons is a terrible design. I was constantly hitting the screen when trying to use the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons, causing all sorts of mayhem. This rendered the remote useless.
3. The addition of “favorite channels” is a needless complication. Every DVR has favorite channel lists built in.
4. The Harmony Ultimate itself does not control a Roku box. The remote *only* sends commands to the Roku box through the “IR blaster” widgets. For me, this would require putting the Harmony Ultimate “hub” in my already crowded entertainment cabinet and re-arranging it so that the Roku box can face one of the “IR blasters”. Why not just have the remote itself send the commands? That’s what the Harmony One does,and it works perfectly. Even the Harmony Touch was able to get this right. This is a bad design.
5. The Harmony Ultimate does not have physical buttons for “skip forward” and “skip backward”. To activate those frequently-used commands, you have to hold down the “fast forward” and “rewind” buttons. This is a bad design.
6. There is no obvious way to access the commands for Devices, in order to send a command directly to one of your components. On the Harmony One, the “Devices” button is always easily accessible at the bottom of the screen. On the Harmony Ultimate, the Devices button is hidden in an on-screen sub-menu.
7. After the activities are set up, they are listed on the screen, much like they are on the Harmony One (a great improvement over the Harmony Touch). However, the on-screen button for the bottom-most activity is located *behind* the on-screen “Menu” button for the remote itself (this menu is where the “Devices” menu is hidden). This makes accessing that fourth activity … difficult.

Conclusion: in a world where the Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote had never been invented, the Harmony Ultimate would be a nice addition to any living room. However, the Harmony One does exist, and has existed for years. That being the case, there is really no excuse for the flaws in the design of the Harmony Touch.

Suggestions for the Harmony Two, or the Harmony Ultimate Plus, or whatever the next version will be called:

1. Put all of the physical buttons, including the play-stop-forward-reverse buttons, below the screen, where the user can reach them with one hand.
2. Have physical buttons for “skip forward” and “skip backward”, located beneath the “fast forward” and “rewind” buttons, as the Harmony One currently does.
3. Do not put any physical buttons above the touch-sensitive screen.
4. Eliminate the “Favorites” screen and replace it with a list of the user’s “Devices”.

I received my lovely (and exorbitantly expensive) HTC One today. It’s a well made phone, attractive and solidly built. I was very pleased with it until I discovered it has no SD Card slot and, more importantly, no way to replace the battery!

Like most people, I assume, I am paying for this phone over the course of two years. As we all know, the Li-ion battery in a cell phone typically lasts a year or so. To put this into perspective, I have worn out and replaced three batteries in my previous phone before the phone itself died and needed replacing. (That’s why I bought the HTC One.)

So now I have a phone that will literally not last as long as the payments on it. I can’t express how disappointed I am. How on Earth could anyone think that making a disposable $580 phone was a good idea??

I’m sending this back tomorrow. I don’t know what I’ll do for a phone. Maybe a Galaxy S4.

P.S. I bought a Samsung Galaxy S4, which arrived yesterday. I am well pleased, and would recommend the Samsung Galaxy S4 to anyone considering the HTC One.

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he’d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.

[...]

Vicinanza made the unusual choice to fight back against Hill and “Project Paperless”—and actually ended up with a pretty resounding victory. But the Project Paperless patents haven’t gone away. Instead, they’ve been passed on to a network of at least eight different shell companies with six-letter names like AdzPro, GosNel, and FasLan. Those entities are now sending out hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of the same demand letter to small businesses from New Hampshire to Minnesota. (For simplicity, I’ll just refer to one of those entities, AdzPro.)

Ars has acquired several copies of the AdzPro demand letter; the only variations are the six-letter name of the shell company and the royalty demands, which range from $900 to $1,200 per employee.

(from Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners, Ars Technica)

I just had a panic moment when I thought that a Google document I’d spent the better part of a week writing had vanished. This is what I plan to do from now on, once a week, until I forget about it and stop doing it.

1. In Google Docs, go down to the far left bottom menu item, and select “More V” and then “All Items”.
2. Click the select box at the top of the screen next to “TITLE” to select all items.
3. Click the “More V” button at the top middle of the screen, next to the eyeball (“Preview”) icon, and select “Download”.
4. Select “Change all formats to… OpenOffice”, and click the “Download” button.
5. Wait a couple of minutes and then download the file somewhere.

I just spent too much time pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to get Google Docs to paste spaces and keep them spaces, rather than turning the spaces into tabs. I couldn’t find a way to prevent it, so here is what I did.

1. Paste my text into a text editor, such as Notepad++.
2. In the text editor, find & replace every instance of a space ” ” with a character that does not already exist in the text, nor in the document you intend to paste that text into. In my case, I used a tilde “~”.
3. Copy this modified text, and paste it into Google Docs.
4. In Google Docs, find & replace every instance of the placeholder character with a space ” “.

Is it ridiculous that you need to do this to keep Google Docs from corrupting what you are pasting? Yes. Yes, it is.

I have a number of web sites I administer. Most of these are hosted on Dreamhost, and most of them run MediaWiki.

Recently, I have noticed an error whenever I upload an image to the wikis. What is supposed to happen is that ImageMagick resizes the image to make a set of thumbnails. What has been happening is that ImageMagick displays an error:

Error creating thumnail:

Exactly like that, with nothing after the colon. After many hours of research (and great help from the Dreamhost tech support team), I finally found the solution. Add this line to the LocalSettings.php file:

$wgMaxShellMemory = 524288

The cost to stream videos is ridiculous. DirecTV wants $6 and Amazon wants $4 for the same movie I can drive around the block and rent from a box for $2. And why is it that neither version of The Thing (1982, 2011) is available on Netflix streaming? I know Netflix would have them if it could, so it’s the dumbass studio that doesn’t want me to stream them from Netflix. It’s like the studio execs want people to download the movies from the internet without paying for them. Movie studios should be down on their knees kissing Netflix’s red leather loafers. It makes me wonder just how short-sighted someone has to be to get a job at a movie studio. I expect a typical movie studio meeting room is full of people who think vaccines, homeowner’s insurance, and dental floss are a waste of money.

Oh, speaking of The Thing (2011), we watched that last night. Not as bad as I’d heard, but clearly not the masterpiece that the 1982 John carpenter movie is.

What do you call a project management tool that doesn’t have any way to set task status, doesn’t have any way to set task prerequisites or dependencies, doesn’t have any form of time tracking, doesn’t have a way to set task priority, doesn’t have a way to move a task from one category to another, doesn’t have Gantt charts, and quite simply doesn’t have any of the fundamentally essential features of a project management system?

It’s called Basecamp. And they charge money for this garbage, believe it or not. Even more astonishing, people actually pay for it.

There was a reason for the rise of the great publishing houses of yesteryear — not everyone could afford a printing press. That gave power to those who could afford them: the power to control what books were printed, and what books were not. The criteria publishers have used to make that decision have varied, according to the fashion and politics of the time, but the quality of the book itself has rarely, if ever, been the primary consideration.

There has been no need or reason for publishers to be wardens of our culture for at least a decade. Today, anyone can be a publisher. Where a few Goliaths once stood, now there are a thousand Davids. People who pine for “gatekeepers” and who sneer at ebooks simply because of how the book was distributed… it’s just sad. It’s like an ex-convict who can’t handle the outside world and wants to return to prison.

A good book is a good book, and a bad book is a bad book, and how the book reached the reader has no bearing on that whatsoever. I feel a great swell of pity for the poor soul who wants other people to control which books he may read and which he may not.