Technology

I tried Edge again for part of a whole day

I’ve noticed a few glitches in Firefox lately, namely it sometimes doesn’t load my pinned tab on start-up (Gmail) or my default site (this very blog). It also seems less snappy than before. It’s possible these problems are related to extensions. For example, I use FVD Speed Dial to replace the new tab page with a pile o’ thumbnails for websites I frequent. I find this works way better for me than bookmarks because I can use two distinct visual cues to quickly choose the site I want: location of the thumbnail (they don’t shift around) and the actual look of the thumbnail (usually a miniature representation of the site). But I have so many of these that Firefox actually takes what feels like a long time to load up.

So last week I decided to again try Microsoft’s Chromium-based version of Edge. It now has Collections, which are basically parts of or entire sites that you can name and group together. I thought this might make a handy substitute for the speed dials and it actually is pretty nice.

But then, while doing work (actual paid work, as I’m still working from home) I noticed in Footprints (the system we use for managing incidents) it would not link knowledge base articles to tickets, requiring me to either not link (bad) or manually generate the link and paste it in (tedious). I just gave up and stopped using Edge.

There might be a fix for this issue and I can work around it, but I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m getting tired of fixing things that don’t work for reasons unknown, and workarounds aren’t that great, either. I want things to actually function properly, without a song and dance. I don’t expect perfection, but I do expect all the basics to behave as you’d expect.

So Edge has been kicked to the curb again. It’s too bad, in a way, because it is pretty snappy, and has some unique features (like the aforementioned collections). On the other hand, though Microsoft claims to care about my privacy, they are a giant corporation and while not as loose with ethics as Google (who basically inverted their famous “Don’t be evil” motto), I’m not sure I entirely trust them, either, as ads are definitely a part of their business in a way they aren’t for Mozilla (or Apple, but Safari sucks and it’s not on PC, anyway).

I’ll probably try Edge again at some point, though. The collections idea intrigues me. And the snappiness was nice.

Side note: For some reason have highlighted products in bold, in a wacky throwback to John C. Dvorak’s old columns in PC Magazine.

EDIT: I did try Edge again, just now (the morning after) and in a CBC News story there were big gaps in a story that I assumed were ads being blocked, but no, it was Twitter embeds. I verified that Twitter is the one tracker on the site blocked by default (by Edge), so I set it to allow tracking. It still won’t show tweets. On the one hand, it’s Twitter, so what am I really losing? On the other, if I want to see tweets, it should just work if I say, “Thou shalt allow tweets.” Even the usual routine of clearing cache and cookies, disabling ad blockers, restarting thew browser etc. has no effect. Edge, you stink!

EDIT, The Sequel: I switched over to the Mac mini to do some things and on a lark decided to try Edge because I am a glutton for punishment. Two things:

  • Twitter embeds are working on the CBC News site. Weird, but good.
  • Collections, which are supposed to sync across different systems, do not appear to be syncing, so boo. It may just be syncing slowly, though (hopefully not syncing into the depths to never be seen again).
  • Bonus third thing: I keep trying to spend more time on the Mac, because it’s where my main writing app is, and keep failing because I can never get mice working the way I want. This tasks me as Kirk tasked Khan. I’m hoping I get a better ending (than Khan).

EDIT, The Sequel to the Sequel: Tried a bunch of typical troubleshooting steps to get Collections to appear/sync on the Mac but no go. Alas. It is hard to turn off the li’l troubleshooter in me, but I will try for now.

While I was on the Mac I also tried the Logitech MX 720 mouse again, both on Bluetooth and with the receiver, after doing a firmware update. And it’s still kind of juddery and glitchy instead of smooth, noticeably worse than the Microsoft Sculpt mouse on Bluetooth, so this does appear to be a Logitech thing. Too bad the Sculpt mouse is so basic. Also I feel a bit dirty using a mouse with a dedicated Windows key on a Mac.

I’ll try yet again next week (update: on PC, that is).

The mysterious workout

I got a notification on my watch and like any well-trained modern technology user, I checked it out, to find this:

Nice indeed! There are a few issues with this, though:

  • I do not own an elliptical
  • I was sitting in my chair at the computer doing pretty much the opposite of burning calories. How many calories are consumed by using your eyes to read text off a screen? I’m assuming not many.

This raises the question of how the Fitbit Inspire HR, which was in my pocket at the time, somehow decided I not only did an impossible workout, but did it for 19 minutes. Normally there would be some semi-plausible explanation, like I was moving back and forth from one room to another, and it was misinterpreting that as exercise, but no, I was sitting still in a chair.

Now, I have tricked my Apple watch into thinking I did a few minutes of exercise by vigorously singing along to music with the headphones on, but that’s one of those semi-plausible things. With the Fitbit the only way I could have been less active is if I was sleeping.

It is a mystery, then, and a reminder that while technology can be great, it can also fall flat on its shiny metal face.

Laptop Quest 2020: Maybe a better keyboard

I have two laptops currently:

  • A sixth generation (2018) ThinkPad Carbon X1
  • A 2016 MacBook Pro without touch bar

I got the ThinkPad because I a) hated the MacBook Pro’s butterfly keyboard and b) worried that it would fail out of warranty, leading to a $600-700 repair bill, given Apple’s insane (or insanely clever?) design that necessitates not just replacing the faulty keyboard, but basically half of the entire laptop.

Apple then started its keyboard repair program, which covers every model with a butterfly keyboard (this is every MacBook released since 2015, not counting the MacBook Air prior to its 2018 redesign). For four years after purchase, Apple will repair or replace a defective keyboard for no charge.

I bought the MacBook Pro in December 2016, so I am good for 10 more months, after which the cost of repair will again rise to about $700. Or maybe even more, because Apple has never been shy about raising prices.

This whole thing is further complicated by a couple of things related to my writing:

  • I went back to Ulysses, which is Mac-only
  • I still really hate the butterfly keyboard. I find it uncomfortable on my finger tips, and that’s even when I’m not applying my usual “fists of gorilla” approach to typing

I’m wed to macOS, but have begun looking for other writing app alternatives again, because the tool is really secondary to the writing itself.

But wait! In October 2019 Apple updated the 15 inch MacBook Pro to a 16 inch model and brought back the more traditional scissor switch keyboard. Instead of having half a millimeter of travel, it now has one entire millimeter of travel! I tried it out in an Apple store and it’s better, but it’s still not great.

The ThinkPad keyboard feels luxuriously deep and satisfying in comparison (my partner is using the ThinkPad now, as his $200 HP laptop is not running anymore so much as hobbling along intermittently).

So my current options are:

  • Hope that Apple comes out with an equivalent to my current MacBook Pro this year with a “good” keyboard and a price that is not any more outrageous that what it is currently. Rumors suggest the possibility of this is pretty good, but Apple is notoriously unreliable for updates on anything other than the iPhone and Apple Watch. And they have treated the Mac line pretty shoddily post-Jobs.
  • Get a Windows laptop and find other software to use. I’ve been trying out a bunch of new writing apps, as well as noodling around in some old standbys, like the perpetually-in-beta version 3 of Scrivener for PC. For the actual device, the Dell XPS 13 and ThinkPad (7th gen) both seem like strong candidates. The Surface Laptop 3 can be had for a decent price, too, and I’m not concerned about its relative lack of IO.

It’s early, so I’m not really leaning in one direction or the other yet. On the one hand, Ulysses is a really nice app. On the other, I resent having to pay a subscription for it (the updates have clearly not been enough to warrant the cost, which I’ll go into in a separate post). I’m also not a huge fan of macOS. It’s fine and for writing it does everything I need, but I am both extremely comfortable with Windows 10 and really like some of the native features of Windows (it may come as no surprise that windows management is really good, where in macOS it is just short of a disaster).

Anyway, I’m typing this on the MacBook Pro now and my finger tips are starting to hurt, so unless I switch to voice dictation, I am going to end this post here. More to come!

On the Edge

Today Microsoft released the new, Chromium-based version of its Edge browser. Chromium is the open standard that Google uses as the basis for Chrome, so while some think that Microsoft has essentially caved in and started using a reskinned version of Chrome, that’s not true. In fact, Microsoft will now have direct influence over the future of Chromium, helping to reduce Google’s oversized leverage.

Chromium Edge also doesn’t include all of Google’s data-collecting services, too–an important distinction.

While I have used Firefox for a hundred years and will use it for a hundred more, long after I’ve become a floating head in a jar, I am interested in seeing what an actual competitive Microsoft browser looks like. I’ve installed it on my PC and will also install it on my MacBook Pro and mini. I’m going to try sticking with it for a solid week to see how it feels vs. what I’m used to in Firefox.

Realistically, I don’t expect to keep using it, but you never know. I’ve previously used Chrome and yes, Internet Explorer, as my main browsers in the past, so I’m open to change.

Here’s a few things I already like (some of these are common features to most browsers, others are more unique):

  • Pinned tabs
  • Pinned sites on the taskbar. I find this more useful than I thought.
  • Reading mode
  • Being able to use Chrome extensions from the Chrome web store (MS’s store is a bit sparse)
  • The pretty backgrounds you can opt to get on the new tab page
  • The new tab page customization options
  • Nice-looking dark mode
  • Generally speedy, though these are early days. Er, hours.

UPDATE: The new tab page only lets you have a maximum of seven “top sites.” This is fantastically dumb and basically a deal breaker for me. I then spent most of the evening looking at other new tab extensions, but they all had features missing or other issues, such as:

  • Ugly as all get-out
  • Kind of skeevy (usually requiring an account)
  • Locking basic functionality behind a monthly subscription (lol)
  • Lacked customization (icon sizes, etc.)
  • Focusing on widgets and other things over presenting a list of sites

I did a search hoping there might be a way to have more than seven top sites on the official new tab page, but my results yielded nothing. I was using Bing, though.

Tech quote of the day, December 20, 2019

This is from The Verge’s article The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the decade in tech, in reference to the Microsoft Band:

Microsoft’s first attempt at wearable hardware looked more like a prison experiment.

Which is pretty much a perfect summation of how the device looked. Too bad Microsoft never kept developing it, because I think, like the Surface line, they would probably have nailed it after a few iterations and the thing was loaded with sensors. Alas.

The new Mac Pro wheels

The internet is aflutter over the announced price for adding wheels to the new Mac Pro. They cost $400 ($480 Canadian). The jokes, of course, write themselves.

Could these $400 wheels on a $6,000 computer turn out to be a surprisingly reasonable value?

No, of course not. They’re wheels. I’m pretty sure the fourth wheel will start wobbling in a few years just the same as any cart-like wheels would.

The only weird part is these ludicrous transportation units or whatever Jony Ive might call them (if he still worked at Apple) stand out against some actual reasonable things Apple has done recently, like upgrading the 15 inch MacBook Pro to a 16 inch model without raising the price (though it ain’t exactly cheap to start with), and actually dropping the price of this year’s equivalent to the iPhone XR while improving the specs.

The price doesn’t actually bother me as the Mac Pro is very much in the “maybe if I win the lottery” category and it probably still sucks for gaming. But given Apple’s track record with Macs (inconsistent at best, a disaster of neglect and quality control issues at worst), if I were one of those so-called pros who wants a pro-level machine, I’d be casting back to 2013 when Apple released the last Mac Pro.

It didn’t receive any updates in 2014.

Or 2015.

Or 2016.

Or 2017.

Or 2018 or 2019. It was, in fact, never updated. Apple essentially killed it the day it was released, they just never formally announced its death until four years later, then they continued to sell it for two more years before finally re-inventing a basic, modular PC that optionally comes with $400 wheels.

What I’m saying is if you want to get a new Mac Pro, keep in mind that what you unbox may be the exact same thing you might unbox in six years. And it will be the same price, too.

So will the wheels.

Escaping the Googles

Back in its early days Google had a simple motto:

Don’t be evil.

This motto still exists in their official Code of Conduct, right near the end of the very long document:

And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!

Since changing their official motto to Do the right thing, Google has seen itself increasingly mired in controversy, most of it borne from the fact that the company makes its money through selling the data of its users to companies that then use the data to target users with ads, ads which often follow them around the internet. Google is essentially a series of services—most of which are free to the user—designed to harvest data and sell it for ads.

Put more simply, Google is an advertising company. Nearly everything it does is in service to advertising. This is the code of the company and is likely to remain so into the foreseeable future.

Is this bad? Is it evil? On a relative scale, not so much. To paraphrase Stockard Channing, there are worse things it could do. But what it does is enough to have finally given me pause after years of using their free services:

  • The Chrome browser is near Internet Explorer 6.0 levels of dominating the browser market, with sites increasingly being tailored for and only tested with Chrome. This is not good for the web, web standards and basically everything a free, open web stands for.
  • Gmail, Google search and other free services are tracking users across the web, feeding their surfing habits, random clicks and more to companies that use that information to target the users with ads and services. Most of this is done surreptitiously, without the user being aware.
  • Chrome is easing restrictions on some kinds of ad-blocking, for obvious reasons

Basically, I’m not comfortable supporting this model anymore. I think it makes for an unhealthy web. So I’m making changes. Some are days, some are more difficult.

Let’s start with the easy ones:

  • I haven’t used Chrome as my primary browser for quite awhile, having switched to Firefox long ago. If I need alternative browsers for whatever reason, I can use Edge (!), Vivaldi or Brave.
  • I’ve switched from Google search to DuckDuckGo. Plus DuckDuckGo is way more fun to say. Are the searches less comprehensive? Maybe. I can’t say I’ve never not found what I was looking for yet. In fact, the searches are more accurate because I no longer have Google trying to shape (or contort) the search results to better “fit” what I am allegedly looking for.
  • I no longer use Google Drive for cloud storage (I use OneDrive and iCloud Drive)
  • I have long abandoned Google’s office apps, like Docs and Sheets

And now the harder stuff:

  • Google Maps is still by far the best map site/software, though Google is doing its best to clog it up with services, suggestions and generally getting in the way of what should be simple directions on how to get from A to B. The alternatives are still not quite there. Apple Maps is improved, but it’s limited to Apple platforms (which, honestly, is kind of dumb—Apple should have a browser version, and I don’t mean one that requires Safari). Apple is also way behind on its equivalent to Street View. Then there’s Bing Maps. It’s okay, but it lacks in so many little and some major ways. I will keep using these and hope they improve, but it will be a meaning process. I don’t use maps much, anyway.
  • Gmail. This is the big one. I have had a Gmail account for a long time. I have thousands of messages and many subscriptions and services tied to my gmail address. I can direct new subs to an alternate email address—I have a more “serious” email address at outlook.com, for example, or I can use one from my own domain, @creolened.com, though that looks a little weird, really. This is a long term project, one I’ll probably tackle piecemeal. There is always the fear that whatever other service I switch to could disappear, while Gmail is one of the handful of Google services that seems relatively safe.

All said, I’m making these moves to help simplify my interactions on the web, to get less ads and less shaping, to find what I am looking for, without handing over information that really sin’t anyone else’s business. Excelsior, as they say.

Mac mouse mayhem: More and then no more (for the moment)

I don’t actually have a Magic Mouse 2, I just love pictures of them being charged. Image is courtesy of geek.com.

A small but persistent annoyance in writing on my Mac mini is the way the mouse cursor behaves. Or in this case, misbehaves.

I noticed it when I connected my Logitech Marathon 705 via USB wireless receiver. Mouse movement would seem okay, but on closer inspection there is always some glitches in the form of the cursor jumping ahead or stuttering. I installed the Logitech drivers and found no change.

I then switched to a Logitech M720, which connects via the same receiver. The erratic mouse movement was even worse. I tried using both mice directly on my desktop, no mousepad. No improvement. I tried various things like software updates, restarting in safe mode and so on and again, no change. Jiggly mouse syndrome persisted. I did not want jiggly mice.

Searching for troubleshooting tips largely produced results that were obvious and unhelpful (“check to see if there is gunk in your mouse”) or obscure enough to make me wonder if Macs are just really bad with third party mice.

Since both tested mice are wireless and using the same receiver, I decided to try a different approach. I unplugged the receiver and plugged in my old wired Steelseries Rival 300 mouse. When I used this mouse with Windows, I quite liked it and only replaced it when I went wireless (with the Logitech G700, which I adore, save for somewhat short battery life). After plugging in the Rival 300 I waited a few moments, then moved the mouse. It moved exactly as intended. No jumps, no jiggles, no erratic behavior. It was super slow, as is always the case with the default mouse settings on a Mac (why this is so is a question left for the ages). I bumped up the tracking speed and voila, it is working just fine.

So now I wonder, is it the wireless receiver? Is it a Logitech thing? Would this happen with a Bluetooth mouse? I am okay with using the Rival 300 as a stopgap but given the Mac mini and PC share the same desk, I really prefer wireless for both. I’ll probably try digging out my old Microsoft Bluetooth mouse and see how it fares, as soon as I remember where it is. In the meantime, I accept a tail on a mouse to end the mouse mayhem on my Mac.

Also, to paraphrase Phil Schiller, as others have done a billion times or so already, “It just works, my butt.”