technology musings

Choosing your evil

I’m typing this in Firefox running on Linux Mint. I am also thoughtfully stroking my neckbeard as I gather my thoughts. Well, not really, but I do need to shave.

I occasionally think and write about making choices on who I do business and interact with, especially on the internet where the products are more intangible–software and services, not physical locations and goods. Avoiding a bad restaurant saves me gas (in multiple ways), avoiding a bad service or software is more about staking out a moral or ethical position, usually accompanied by me noting the fact somewhere online (this blog, social media, etc.) with the intent to broadcast my position to let others know where I stand, and to influence them to join me (JOIN ME), because if I think a company is evil, you should, too!

(I realize it is more nuanced than that, but go with it for now.)

The thing today, though, in 2023 and soon to be 2024, software and services have increasingly been consolidated into an ever-smaller number of mega-corporations, all of which, to varying degrees, engage in platform decay or, as Cory Doctorow more colourfully calls it, enshittification. Basically, this means most of your choices are bad, the degree just varies.

Possible solutions:

  1. Try even harder to go full FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), completely avoiding the offerings of the big companies (this can also apply to services or platforms, though it may be trickier)
  2. Avoid the internet
  3. Some combination of the first two

I’m opting for #3.

I’m writing about this now because I have come to another one of those points where I have to decide if I want to make a stand against a particular service/platform/piece of software, and it’s made me think about the whole thing and how so much of what we do online is wrapped up in one of the big tech companies. For me, this includes:

  • Microsoft:
    • Primary operating system (Windows 11)
    • Primary email (Outlook)
    • Cloud storage (OneDrive)
    • Occasional apps (Excel, Word mostly)
  • Apple:
    • iPhone
    • iPad Pro
    • Secondary computer (Mac Studio)
    • AirPods (for all of the above)
    • iCloud (mostly for photos)
    • Apple Music
    • Apple Watch Traded this for a Garmin Forerunner 255 a year ago
  • Google:
    • Google Maps (occasionally)
    • Gmail (only checking it to keep it active)
    • YouTube

There’s more, but you get the idea. In terms of hardware, I’m deep in the Apple ecosystem and software and services-wise, I am beholden largely to Microsoft. On the plus side, as giant evil tech companies go, I would rank both as less terrible than others, like Google and Meta. Microsoft, who for a time, had almost rehabilitated their reputation by embracing open source, Linux and giving out Windows 10 for free, has fallen in the last few years by going hard into ads, trying to monetize everything (the weather app in Windows 11 now has ads) and junking up their otherwise good Edge browser with shopping and other clutter/services. They have also junked up Windows 11, too (though have also continued to make improvements). Apple touts privacy and security, but it’s really about lock-in and making sure you never step outside their walled gardens, where they control everything. Some people see this as a positive!

I have made efforts to move away from the big tech companies–as mentioned, I’m making this post in Linux Mint–but my efforts are a bit scattershot, a bit piecemeal. I am always looking to improve.

And now I’ve reached a point where I’m making another small step to move away from a service that has adopted policies and positions I fundamentally disagree with. It’s not even the first time this particular company has garnered press over their stance.

I’m speaking of Substack. I wrote about the company previously. That was almost two years ago, and in the time since the platform has become even more popular with right-wing extremists, including literal Nazis. The founders of Substack recently confirmed that they are OK with Nazis being on their platform because censorship is bad, and they are also good with collecting Nazi money from those that charge for subs. Popehat, aka Ken White, neatly deconstructs Substack’s position here.

I am OK with Substack cozying up to Nazis and taking their money–it’s their choice to do so. Likewise, it is my choice to not be associated with a company or service that cozies up to Nazis and takes their money. I’ve decided to move my piddly newsletter, which I recently chose to revive, off of Substack, probably to another service called Buttondown, though that’s not 100% confirmed yet.

I’ll update on how this goes, as well as further updating about how others are responding to Substack’s now official position of “Nazis are OK!” I subscribe to several Substacks myself, and am very curious to see how the authors of these will react.

10 inventions I would like to see

In no specific order:

  • Personal teleportation
  • Chocolate fudge that is actually good for you
  • Self-cleaning clothes
  • Self-cleaning anything, now that I think about it
  • No more billionaires. Technically not an invention, but it’s my list, so it stays.
  • The holodeck. Yep, the holodeck. Not this “put a stupid-looking piece of gear on your face” VR/AR stuff. I don’t care if Apple calls it “spatial computing”, it still looks dumb and no one wants to wear one of these things on their heads for hours at a time.
  • The Undo Device. Lets you undo any decision you’ve made and all of its consequences. This would, of course, lead to new and more horrible consequences, in true Twilight Zone-style, but I’m willing to risk it.
  • Purple cats
  • Replaceable body parts
  • A microwave oven that works the way we imagine a microwave oven should work

How to recognize when your tech website is being slowly transformed into an SEO-driven clickbait hellscape-to-be

If I do a search for “the best” on engadget.com, I get 10 results in the portion of the site that is revealed without further loading:

  • The best iPad accessories for 2023
  • The best laptops for 2023 (twice)
  • The best early Prime Day deals for 2023
  • The best 2-in-1 laptops for 2023
  • Fisker gives the best look yet at its 600-mile range Ronin EV (twice)
  • The best wireless earbuds for 2023
  • The best projectors you can buy in 2023, plus how to choose one
  • The best budget wireless earbuds for 2023

The story in bold doesn’t really count, as it’s using “best” differently.

These are the exact kinds of articles you find on pages that exist solely to be SEO results in Google web searches. And engadget is now stuffed with them.

What makes this funnier (or sadder) is that engadget has recently started recycling a number of these SEO-friendly articles, constantly bringing them back to the front page, often with few or any updates, seemingly to push this kind of SEO stuff to the top (I can’t say what their actual motives are, of course, this is just my best guess).

For example, their article on running watches, cleverly titled Best GPS running watches for 2023 does recommend the current Apple Watch Series 8 (though keeping in mind it’s nearly a year old and one might argue the Apple Watch Ultra is better for running), but then it recommends the Garmin 745 for triathletes. The problem here is while Garmin does still sell the 745, it’s now an old model that is not getting replaced with a newer one. The Forerunner line has been simplified and the upper end, once held by the 245/745/945 is now represented by the 265/965, with the 265 (and the 255 before it) absorbing features of the 745. Any of the 255/265 or 955/965 are better options for triathletes, in terms of price, functionality and longevity (the 55 and 65 series are mainly differentiated by the display, with the 65s using AMOLED).

The story has a byline of June 9, 2023, yet the first comments date back to March 2022, belying its recycled history. The comments are almost uniformly critical of the choices, too, pointing out issues of comparing old Garmin vs. new Apple. And the article is by the editor-in-chief, so there’s no ambiguity about whether engadget is okay with this sort of thing.

It’s transparent and kind of gross and makes engadget seem less interested in being about quality news and reviews and more about ranking high in Google search for the $$$. Which is a thing, I guess.

Computer ads (and stores) of yore

From the December 1997 issue of The Computer Paper, a free publication that was all over the place in Metro Vancouver way back when:

To me, a rotary phone is ancient tech, but I remember using them. And now we’ll have people who will remember ancient tech as having to buy software to get on the internet.

Actually, I guess that still includes me, because I actually did this myself (I went with iStar).

(BTW, netcom.ca is a broken link now, and www.netcom.ca has an expired certificate that has nothing to do with what the site was back in the days of parachute pants.)

While marvelling over having to install a browser just to get on the internet and then doing so at a maximum speed of 56 Kbps (I only ever have a 33.3 Kbps modem before going to broadband), I am mostly struck by the list of retailers at the bottom of the ad where this software (remember when software came in boxes?) was sold and how most are long-vanished, proof that even tech is not immune to getting steamrolled through evolving times:

  • Future Shop: Bought out by Best Buy, shuttered for good in 2015
  • RadioShack: Effectively killed in 2005 when it became The Source and turned into a kind of Best Buy Mini (it’s now owned by Bell, boo hiss)
  • London Drugs: Still going, but computers were only ever part of their business. Fun Fact: I worked in the computer department of LD from 1999 to 2001. I was there for the launch of Windows Me. We got free copies. I ran it on my home PC for two weeks before going back to Windows 2000.
  • Staples: Still going, will probably scrape by as long as the paperless office remains a fantasy
  • Doppler Computer Superstores: I had to check to see if they actually had more than one store (the one I know was in Vancouver, across from a Wendy’s that’s still there) and I think this was the only one. The building is long gone now, but you can see it in this reddit post. I bought my first two CD-ROM games there: Myst (of course) and a disc of shovelware games. I remember the spinning racks of shovelware. You might find a low budget gem if you looked long enough, but it was mostly junk. Still, CD-ROMs seemed very futuristic in the early 90s.
  • Computer City Canada: There were seven Computer city stores in Canada and more than 60 in the U.S. before the entire chain went kaput in 1998. Fun Fact: I worked at the brand-new Coquitlam store during the launch of Windows 95, which was a very big deal at the time. We had two Compaq PCs set up running Win95, one with 4 MB of ram and the other with 8 MB, to show how much better Windows 95 was with more memory (some things never change).

And while I’m waxing nostalgic, here are some of the other stores I used to haunt regularly when shopping for computers or software that are all gone now, and mostly forgotten:

  • CompuCentre: These were in malls, and they quietly vanished without me even noticing. I’d buy the odd game here.
  • ATIC Computers: Still around, actually! I bought multiple PCs from them in the 90s. They were cheap, which was the main appeal, as I was poor.
  • Wizard Computers: I mainly went here to get software for my Atari ST. I remember buying Dungeon Master at this store, which was on Fraser Street.
  • MicroConcept Systems: Like ATIC, but not as cheap. Ran huge, multipage ads, had a business division, then shuttered.
  • NCIX: Ho ho, the store that spawned Linus Tech Tips and is probably most famous (or infamous) for going bankrupt, then auctioning off a bunch of equipment that still contained user data. Oops. I bought stuff here for years and remember the early days of Linus making videos for them.
  • Egghead Software: I bought OS/2 at the Broadway store. I barely remember running OS/2. I was a Windows guy, ultimately.
  • Software Superstore: True to its name, this massive store in Richmond sold software for every major platform (this was when there were more than two). My biggest single-day haul was picking up both Populous and SimCity for my Amiga 500. At the time, this would have cost $100 and would be apparently about $180 today. Considering some games are now costing $90, it seems both weird that prices have pretty much stayed the same and also that $90 feels like way too much to pay for a single computer game (thank you, Steam sales and indie devs!)

On one hand, I miss picking up software from these stores, because there is something about getting something tangible, something physical, that can’t be replicated with downloads. But there’s no denying the way software works now is way better. Still, it would be fun to zap back in time for a day and be able to check all these places out circa 1992.

The Verge’s unique grading curve for laptops

Review: Dell XPS 15 review: too hot to handle

From the above review:

Also from the above review:

To clarify, this is 8.5/10, not 8.5/100.

I can only guess that if the laptop didn’t run loud, hot (over 100°C at times–which is to say, the temperature at which water boils) and had poor battery life, it may have rated 11/10. But I suppose we’ll never know.

Instagram: Don’t fear the dark (pattern)

In case for a brief moment you thought the people behind Instagram weren’t committed to being awful, check this TechCrunch article on how they have changed the daily time limit option so that the minimum time before you can have the app warn you to take a break is now 30 minutes, instead of 10, and also made the longest option (3 hours) the first one at the top of the list.

I don’t know that the people designing this stuff actually believe they’re fooling anyone, but they are bad and should feel bad. I can’t wait for everything Meta owns to crash and burn.

Instagram quietly limits ‘daily time limit’ option

Important update!

Lying, it’s not important at all.

But I am still using the new Chromium-based Edge, which surprises me. While there are some niggles, there are no showstoppers driving me back to Firefox.

On the other hand, there are a few features of Firefox I miss, but not enough to compel me to go back to it–not yet, anyway.

The funny part is that the only reason I even looked into switching is because Firefox started displaying some squirrely behavior on start-up (it also feels a bit slow to start). Had that never happened, I’d still be using it daily now.

Anyway, a random tech musing. Carry on.

Stay awhile and listen… to how I finally got Diablo 2 working

On my old PC I was able to install and play Diablo 2. The game is 20 years old now and has lots of janky bits to it. The characters walk awfully slowly around the landscapes, and they move like they have to go to the bathroom very badly. You have to hold town portal and identify scrolls in your limited inventory. And so on.

But still, the music is great and there is satisfaction in slaying a multitude of demons and picking new skills to slay a multitude more.

Last April I assembled a new PC. Still running, Windows 10, but now with a newer video card (still Nvidia) and a modern CPU (this time AMD instead of Intel). Among the games I installed was Diablo 2, grabbing the installer from Blizzard’s site, and using my license key from the same place.

When I ran the game I got an unhandled exception error. Visions of the early days of Tribes 2 came vividly back–these are not good visions. I began searching for, then attempting every fix or workaround I could find.

All of them failed. Diablo 2 would not run on my new PC.

Fast-forward to today, a year later. Diablo 2 will still not work. I am sad, but have moved on.

But wait, that’s a lie, because I am actually still quietly obsessed with getting the game to work. Periodically I try something new, or repeat something I’ve tried before, hoping it will magically work this time.

Yesterday I went looking for my original game CDs…and found them. I brought out my portable USB DVD drive, connected it to my PC and tried installing the game the same way I did back in the year 2000. Then it asked for a CD key. No problem, I went to my Blizzard account and…noticed that it has a license key, which is different than the CD key. The CD key is on the front of the CD case, but I found the discs in a binder of game discs.

I searched again…and found my original CD jewel cases! The one for Diablo 2 has a note on the back to assure you that it is “Year 2000 compliant.” Good to know.

The installation of the game and Lord of Destruction expansion is appropriately tedious, requiring me to juggle an Install Disc, a Play Disc, a Cinematics Disc and Expansion Disc.

I previously had installed a Glide (3dfx) wrapper, which was one of the recommendations in getting Diablo 2 to work on modern systems. I completed the installation and the game moved to the video test, which is sort of farther than it had gotten previously. I say sort of because the latest patched version of the game removes the video test entirely.

The test completes and it defaults to 3dfx. I leave this and without doing anything else, I click the Play button.

And it works.

It works with both the base game and expansion. Yes, for now I need to leave the DVD drive connected and have the Expansion Disc in it. Yes, it is only running version 1.07 (the version that the LoD expansion updates it to). But it works and everything is there, in glorious 800×600 resolution!

Behold my druid, DrewEd (no, I will not apologize for the name):

You may have to squint a little.

As for the actual game, after the opening cinematic (which makes no reference to your character at all), you are dumped into the Rogue Encampment where Warwiv vaguely warns of evil spreading across the land and the monastery is closed. Then you’re left to just bumble around and kill things. It’s been 20 years, I don’t remember how the plot actually gets started. Or how much of a plot there even is. All I know is I want my volcano and molten boulders, and they shall be mine.

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.

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.

App of the Day: No app

I can’t remember the last time I got an app for my phone that actually excited me. As phone technology has improved, I’ve found the way I use the phone has, in some ways, regressed.

I’ve commented on this before, but my phone habits have probably shrunken even more since then.

My typical usage now is:

  • text messages, either with my partner using the default Messages app, with friends using Facebook Messenger (ugh) or at work using Slack.
  • taking photos of things, sometimes work-related (these are typically deleted after, as they are only useful in the moment, but mostly just flowers and scenery I find interesting
  • occasionally checking email
  • occasionally checking something in a browser (usually Firefox)
  • occasionally adding something in the Reminders app
  • using the PayRange app to buy something from a vending machine (I do this at work to avoid long lines in the cafeteria when all I want is a beverage).
  • occasionally taking or (even less occasionally) making a phone call

Everything else, like playing games, checking news, other apps, the weather, maps–are all edge cases I only do once in awhile.

AR (Augmented Reality) is something Apple is pushing but it excites me about as much as putting on socks in the morning. VR is even worse, and doesn’t work for me, anyway.

I am more likely to delete an app than install it. In fact, iOS 13 (coming next month) will offer a new feature that will make this easier, by presenting an uninstall option when an app offers an update. This is kind of clever, really. “Hey, here’s an update for an app I installed a year ago and never use. But look, there’s a handy uninstall option right here, too!” This might make some companies like Facebook rethink their strategy of constantly pushing updates to keep the app in the user’s mind.

Anyway, it could be that I’ve just become a boring old sod and the app world is actually exciting and innovative, but when I look at the upcoming iPhone launch, I wonder why on earth I would spend so much money to do so little, especially when the phone I have now seems to be good enough.