Saying Goodbye to Keurig

They are also available for download on the site I get my movies from: Internet Archive

And make it pretty rather than fast rather than good.

...or another favorite is "have you tried cycling the power?"sad.

Apps and their cryptic UIs are nothing short of insanity. My phone came bundled with apps whose function is not indicated. All you see is a say-nothing name and a meaningless icon. No way in hell would I run one just out of curiosity! Even the standard apps that should come with every phone are ill-defined and too often turn out to be third-party apps that turn into nag-ware ("free" programs that then bug you to death with requests that you pay for a full version).I had bought an iPod (2nd or later generation) and liked it, making it the only Apple product I have ever liked ... with the exception of my iPod Nano which I liked even more. The track wheel control was one of the best parts. I even felt very disappointed when my new cable TV remote didn't have one (it was great for quickly positioning to any point in the content). When it was replaced by the useless iTouch (which had to control wheel), I just kept my Nano (which I used all the time at work -- very handy being able to control it by touch, a sentiment shared by a co-worker who would listen to his while riding his motorcycle where you don't dare take your eyes off the road -- but which I haven't used since retiring four years ago).My utter disgust with user interfaces stem from trying to figure out how to do something on my Nano. I used its video camera function, but I wanted to delete a couple of the videos. No menu option for that and all the "documentation" that Apple had provided did nothing more than show you how to plug it in and turn it on. I ended up having to use Google to find a third-party user's guide which gave instructions for doing everything on a Nano.When I complained about that on-line, somebody had the gall to say that there was no need for a user's guide because the main purpose of these devices is the experience of exploring and discovering how to do things. And that I was making a big mistake by depriving myself of the joys of that experience. F**k that s**t!But that's the attitude: it's all just a game! Don't expect to be able to do anything useful in anything approaching a expeditious and productive manner.In a similar incident, the dance teacher I assisted kept her music on an iTouch, but then somebody stole it so she resorted to playing the music on her iPhone. We're both in the same generation, so her adult daughter had to set up the music app for her. But then she would either accidentally touch the wrong secret invisible control or the phone just simply decided to do something random and then it was a struggle to try to return it to normal. To assist, I turned to Google to locate yet another third-party user's guide for the iPhone and then print out pertinent pages with instructions.It makes me really appreciate the truth and great wisdom Steve "The Woz" Wozniak offerred:

quote:

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Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

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Which is sadly impossible to do when the battery is encased in the device and there is no reset button.Well, on my phone there is a power-volume sequence to force it to reset, but every single time I do it the phone does a complete factory reset, erasing and resetting everything. OK, eventually contacts and calendar data returns, but all the really useless apps that I had deleted or shoved into a memory hole return and I have to download anew all the useful ones I had downloaded. Plus I have to set everything up again, including all the system settings. That all gets extremely tiring very quickly.So when the phone crashes and reboots, then it comes back up. But when it freezes again right in the middle of a reboot, then it's stuck. Since I cannot power cycle it by removing and replacing the battery, all I can do is leave it alone until the battery runs down completely. Takes all day, but it's much better than to have to recover from yet another factory reset.Why did Microsoft leave the smartphone market. My Windows phone was the best one I ever had.

I still have my Microsoft phone. It won't connect to anything anymore but then neither will my Motorola StarTac.

I still keep my Windows phone handy for its apps (it's literally within arm's reach right now). The only problem with it, besides finding replacement batteries, is that when the product was discontinued all the services dropped support for it (eg, no Lyft app for it).

Essentially, the Keurig system is a home espresso unit taking pre-measured coffee grounds of various flavors. Why not just get a home espresso unit? A home unit can even take more grounds if you want stronger.MooseEdited by Minnemooseus, : Managed to spell "espresso" as "expresson" in subtitle.

We have one. It'd be a bit less convenient because it makes small cups, and it has no water reservoir.--Percy

"It's not a bug, it's a feature."

We actually used that once professionally.I was sole programmer for a company that designed and installed computerized greenhouse control systems. The original programming was in 8048 assembly for the sensor and control devices and apparently a BASIC program running on an Apple II that took readings from the sensors and sent control signals to the controllers (eg, open/close vents, turn fans/heaters/lights on/off). By the time I was hired, an actual programmer had written the control program in Turbo Pascal for an IBM XT -- he had wanted to do it in FORTH, but management wouldn't let him.The original programmer was a EE who tried to be far too clever. No UARTs for the RS232, but rather the code emulated one (which meant that all the branches in the code had to have just the right timing; ie, lots of NOP instructions). No symbolic names for anything -- I had to go through the code, decipher what what supposed to be what (he did leave a few handwritten notes on file), and name them with EQU statements (similar to C's #define). BTW, the microprocessor was of the 8048 family, which did all memory access through two address registers that you had to load explicitly, so if you were working with more than two memory addresses you had to keep reloading them. I guess was one reason why there was no C compiler for it (the lowest processor with a C compiler was the 8051). The 8048 was so underpowered that the original IBM PC used it to run the keyboard, scanning the key matrix and sending character codes to the PC. In programming the 8048, I took to writing the comments as lines of Pascal code following which was my hand-compiled assembly code -- it not only streamlined the process, but the comments were far more informative than mere prose would have been.Then later in my time there I was given the task of making a few minor changes to a massive single-box product from their earlier days. A massive 8048 assembly program which ran an enormous loop, setting/resetting/testing flags, no symbolic names, hardly any comments (as I seem to recall 30 years later). In order to understand what it was doing, I had to flowchart it (an arcane art that we abandoned after our first programming class in 1977, because structured programming ... though I still have my templates stuck away somewhere). I forget how many pages that flowchart took. Fortunately, the code was not total spaghetti (like far too many BASIC programs), but rather it divided itself into a series of modules (each of which was very intricate) with one entry point and one exit point.I was finally able to understand enough of it to see what I needed to do so I made the fix. And it worked ... almost. One very minor thing that didn't quite work as they wanted it to. We couldn't figure it out and nothing we tried to fix it worked. But what it did do seemed to be useful anyway, so we decided to call it a "feature." 
A friend in our skeptics brunch meetings had worked his entire career at IBM starting in the 50's, I think. Something he saw happen many times was that they would find a bug in the mainframe software, one that had been there for several years. So they'd fix it. Then many of the programs suddenly stopped working. That generation of programmers was a very inventive lot and as they found those bugs on their own, they wrote their code in order to either work around the bug or else to exploit it to do something useful. I think I see an analogy to evolution's interplay between mutations and natural selection. 
At Ford Aerospace, my first software job (1982), we were using a VAX-11 to design embedded software meant to run on an 8086 processor. So we used a Pascal cross-compiler and cross-assembler. The cross-compiler was a bit buggy -- I will not name it since the company still exists, but we would refer to it as "Bozo Pascal." The only bug I can remember 40 years later is that the BOOLEAN operation in the REPEAT..UNTIL structure was reversed, so that a TRUE evaluation would be interpreted as FALSE and vice versa. Therefore, we had to write our code to get around that bug. Which also meant that if that code were ever ported to a compiler that didn't have that bug, then the program would not work.It also didn't help that the cross-compiler/assembler suite had been written for the PDP-11, so the VAX-11 had to go into emulation mode to run it, which slowed the VAX down to a crawl. Doing a complete build (compile-assemble-link) would literally take a couple hours, during which time there was nothing else for us to do than sit and wait. Our supervisor understood the situation, but he would still look at us with suspicion. "What are you doing?" Looked at the display, "We're still compiling." An hour later, "What are you doing?" "We're linking now."Those were the days!

I was working for Digital when they made the VAX 11/780 announcement in the fall of 1977, in fact worked adjacent to the VAX hardware development team which was completely wrapped up in security. We were barely aware there was a lab on the other side of the wall.We used DecSystem 10/20 for timesharing back then, but by 1980 or so they'd been replaced by VAX 11/780's. In the early VAX's my recollection is that PDP/11 was not an emulation mode - the VAX 11/780 could actually run PDP/11 programs native. That's why "11" was in the name. If you had to run PDP/11 programs in emulation mode you might have been using a more recent model VAX than the 11/780.Debugging programs was a new world when we moved to the VAX's because instead of looking at PDP-11 object code (16 bits) or DecSystem 10/20 object code (36 bits) which I had years of familiarity with we were looking at VAX 11/780 object code (32 bits) which was completely foreign to us. One of the great innovations that happened around then was when compilers began putting file and line information in the objects. I was still figuring out VAX 11/780 object code when debugging programs when suddenly the high-level code feature was released and I never had to look at VAX 11/780 object code again.The debugging program on PDP-11's and DecSystem 10/20's had been around for years and was called ddt (it stood for Dynamic Debugging Tool, but we liked the pun on insecticide), but VAX's debugging tool was called something else, I don't recall the name.AbE: Maybe it was dbx.--PercyEdited by Percy, : AbE

The young mind is different. No matter what happens it treats it all as just interesting stuff. The attitude that older people have of "this is something routine I've done a million times, so get in, get out, and move on" hasn't developed yet.Some stuff I got used to as an adult kid I still haven't abandoned. The control and caps-lock keys used to be in opposite positions. I use the control key all the time everywhere, so I swap the control and caps-lock keys back to where they used to be before IBM's 1984 swap somehow took over. One article accurately reports, "Some people still angrily complain about it to this day," if I'm any indication. I'll complain angrily again now. Who in their right mind would position something as obscure as the caps-lock key on prime real estate? It hardly ever gets used. Stick it back in a corner - how about the same corner it occupied nearly forty years ago?I use Emacs where the control key is central, and I map all keys on any machine I use to Emacs keys. Apple has many Emacs keys predefined.The damage wrought to apps on phones and tablets with each release has no remedy that I can see. I had a large backlog of podcasts in iTunes, but podcasts went away in iTunes on Windows, and I don't know where they are now on my Windows machine. But my iPhone has the podcasts in the podcast app - how they got over there I have no idea.Apple's Music app keeps changing, perhaps in a good way, but who can tell because they make it more confusing at the same time.And while some apps change with each release, others remain stubbornly minimally functional for years and years. Why can't Apple's FaceTime a) let you zoom in and out of an individual tile; b) let you independently position each person's tile if you want; c) turn off a person's tile if you don't want to see them; d) display screen shots or images (you *can* share your screen and display them that way); g) show a video. FaceTime will display the shutter button even when no one's tile is selected and no picture can be taken. There's an icon on the little image of myself that I have no idea what it does - touching it does nothing except reverse the shading of the icon. My wife's iPhone doesn't have this icon. Yes, we're running the same iOS version. I've got a 12, she's got a 13.But the specifics aren't important. I only mention these details to show how confusing and inconsistent a simple app like FaceTime is. In different ways, the same is true of many other apps.Software quality was better when most consumers of software were also computer professionals, but now most consumers are unfamiliar with software and either don't really care if only some of the stuff they try works or blame themselves when it doesn't work or both. If they understood that most of the problems they have with their phones, tablets and computers were the result of poor design and poor quality of implementation and inadequate testing they might feel differently.I use IDrive for backups. A while back it would daily display a popup saying, "You have not backed up for 782 consecutive days." I finally called about it and was taken through an arcane sequence of steps. I quizzed the guy about why this would have any effect on the popup, and he was honest. He said there was no reason it should be related, but engineering had told them this made the popup go away. And it did. Maybe the next release will fix it permanently, maybe not. Who knows.Chrome just made a [sarcasm]wonderful[/sarcasm] change some months ago. Used to be when you dragged a link to another Chrome window it would open in that window. Now it opens in a new tab. Don't like the new behavior? Tough, there's no setting to enable the old behavior. It you want to drag a link to a specific tab you have to drag it to that tab at the very top. Dragging to a tiny tab (I often have 30 or 40 tabs open, so the tabs get tiny) instead of an entire window is a real pain and I rarely do it, so I put up with the new behavior, as much of a pain as it is. Sometimes I'll use Safari instead because it still behaves rationally.Software. Pah! I've got to go now, I'm installing more bugs in the board software. --Percy

Percy writes: The first thing i do to any new keyboard is pop off the caps lock key to make it harder to do and to make it feel different.

As I recall this was from the late 70's with the growth of the "home computer" market. I seemed to recall that this happened on the Apple II, so I looked up the keyboard layout and this is what I found.The power key was in the bottom left-hand corner right beneath the left shift key. In addition, the reset key was in the upper right-hand corner right above the return key. Since touchtyping means not having to look at the keyboard, hitting the power or reset button unintentionally was apparently a rather common mistake to make. Kind of like accidentally hitting the Caps Lock key on a Windows keyboard when going for the left shift key.I saw a third-party piece of hardware for the Apple II which I recall hearing was very popular. It was a key guard that you could place over the reset key but that would hinge up out of the way when you actually wanted to hit reset. I assume that there was another one for the power key.It looks like on the Apple IIe they moved the reset key to the right making it separate from the keyboard and removed the power key altogether.Google on apple ii keyboard layout .