Archives for December 2004

JVC KD-X320BT I bought Something - from a SHOP

I bought something new, and from a shop. You should be shocked, since I prefer secondhand off the net.

I went into Repco* and bought the cheapest stereo in the place. I am genuinely impressed. Its cheaper than the list price of my old stereo, is packed with features supports so many new digital things I had to Google what a Pandora was. In addition to wma, mp3, Bluetooth USB etc, it supports flac, yes flac and various streaming apps about which I couldn't give a stuff.

The Radio is far better than the old one - all for 100bucks from a shop. What's the catch? Well there isn't one - unless of course you still own some outdated laser readable 80's beer coasters. No CD player. The shop assistant, and were talking Repco here so not an old fella, looked at me quizzically and said "you do know it has no CD player" I said I knew, and that it had been a number of years since I'd owned any CDs. This brings me to why it was the cheapest in the shop. I suspect the world is not ready for the Winamp generation. Or at least not in their cars. Cassettes survived in cars long after they'ed gone from all other walks of life. Radio too is a medium that suits the car. Now either shake proof cd drives are expensive, which is possible given they are fiddly and mechanical, or these have not sold well. I suspect a lot of the latter, the guy on the desk who emphasized the lack of cd sounded to me like they're had a few returns. Anyway, the JVC KD-X320BT is a bloody good car stereo.

I've been running "Chinese double din" touch screen stereos in the work ute, bloody awful things, a big touch screen is not a substitute for good interface design. As well as being, buggy, slow, and badly built.the Bluetooth, when it worked, made me inaudible. This applies to the 4 of these I've seen - only 2 are still "working". The romantically named KD-X320BT, doesn't have a 7 inch touch screen, the mic for the Bluetooth is external. Now the first time I drove with it, no I didn't read the manual, Matt called me and I was able to work out how to answer we could hear each other. It actually managed to voice identify 'MATT' and would have dialed - if my contact list hadn't been so much of a train wreck.Yes it has short wave. I'm yet to try this but SW? In this day and age, I must try and get the world service. Pressing the source button toggles the screen and only after a second does it switch, so you press 3 times it goes from FM to Bluetooth with out stopping at static or silence on AM and USB on the way through. Neat. In all I think I prefer good physical buttons to crap touch screen.

The un pause button was a bit hard to find, but other than that I'm really happy with it.

And since there is now a box under the single din stereo, plan is to gut this QI wireless charger and put it under this slot, wire it to battery #2 always on so I can throw my phone in and it will charge. Bet even your new Bentley don't do that.

* for Pommies that's like a more professional version of Halfords.

KD-X320BT

I bought something new, and from a shop. You should be shocked, since I prefer secondhand off the net. I went into Repco* and bought the cheapest stereo in the place. I am genuinely impressed. Its cheaper than the list price of my old stereo, is packed with features supports so many new digital things I had to Google what a Pandora was. In addition to wma, mp3, Bluetooth USB etc, it supports flac, yes flac and various streaming apps about which I couldn't give a stuff. The Radio is far better than the old one - all for 100bucks from a shop. What's the catch? Well there isn't one - unless of course you still own someout of date laser readable 80's beer coasters. No CD player. The shop assistant, and were talking Repco here so not an old fella, looked at me quizzically and said "you do know it has no CD player" I said I knew, and that it had been a number of years since I'd owned any CDs. This brings me to why it was the cheapest in the shop. I suspect the world is not ready for the Winamp generation. Or at least not in there cars. Cassetes survived in cars long after they'ed gone from all other walks of life. Radio too is a medium that suits the car. Now either shake proof cd drives are expensive, which is possible given they are fiddly and mechanical, or these have not sold well. I suspect a lot of the latter, the guy on the desk who emphasised the lack of cd sounded to me like they're had a few returns. Anyway, the JVC KD-X320BT is a bloody good car stereo. I've been running "Chinese double din" touch screen stereos in the work ute, bloody awfull things, a big touch screen is not a substitute for good interface design. As well as being, buggy, slow, and badly built.the Bluetooth, when it worked, made me inaudible. This applies to the 4 of these I've seen - only 2 are still "working". The romantically named KD-X320BT, doesn't have a 7inch touch screen, the mic for the Bluetooth is external. Now the first time I drove with it, no manual, Matt called me and I was able to work out how to answer we could hear each other. SW. Yes it has short wave. I'm yet to try this but SW? In this day and age, I must try and get the world service. Pressing the source button toggles the screen and only after a second does it switch, so you press 3 times it goes from FM to Bluetooth with out stopping at static or silence on AM and USB on the way through. Neat. * for Pommies that's like a more professional version of Halfords.

Ode to Flash (NSFW)

Flash is dead, this is a good thing its a bloated, dangerous piece of junk used to make everyone internet advertising, video and gaming experience as unpleasant as possible.

Oh god, flash games, Some people wrote some of the most successful but bloody awful computer games on it. I've had limited experience of them but that's cos I know flash, they'll be bloody awful. All in all I am glad, flash is dead. It only runs after a right click in my browser. I don't right click on it very often.

Before the ad industry used it to rape our pc's, before it got so bloated and malware ridden people used it for fun. Here's a few things that made me laugh over the years, while you all still have flash, cos by next year it will be with Gopher and Netscape, that is consigned to the dustbin of history. And no they're not safe for work. Where possible they're the originals, so don't bother with this on a mobile. Fire up the right click and run plugin cos here we go:

Irritatingly the perpetual looping flash is not available still, the 10 hour yourtube vid should be long enough.

I'm going to stop there, and yes I've left out Badger Badger Badger, Kitten War, Funnel or Tunnel, Communist Christmas, spot the cliffernace, Weeble and Bob and god knows what else. I probably missed a few classics back in the day. Probably not many though, many of these creations are linked in some way to B3ta.com. I doubt we will see content like this again when flash is gone, and the web will be poorer for it.

Oh and if you got pawned using flash, sorry, that happens, blame Adobe.

Quit Whining - Online advertisers bleat and no one cares.

First the Music industry was running a cartel and then got exactly zero sympathy when piracy took off. A few years latter it was the movie industry bleating, DVD's region codes and their policy of suing kids so their parents paid off. The whole world started making charity appeals for the poor movie industry. Wait sorry I've got that wrong. They all went "they're a bunch of rich &%#@$ who ripping us off" and ignored them. Despite huge lobbying the industry got short shrift from most governments.

I've not used uber and rarely taxi's, this is slightly different as there's government regulation/tax involved in this one. But only last week I was cut up by a taxi trying to pull out across 3 lanes to a dedicated right turn lane that was already full. He forced 2 lanes to emergency stop then blocked the third. Nice. I'm not even a customer and I'm pissed off. They wonder why they don't get sympathy? Last time I did need one he was trying to surreptitiously use a gps on his knee. I had to "I know where I'm going keep your eye on the road." The taxi licence didn't exactly look like him, they never do. If there was an app that rated taxi drivers the way uber does most would be rated lower than pond life.

(Image courtesy of the internet)

Now its the turn of the online Advertising industry to start whinging. The online add industry's behavior has been utterly continence free. They love the notoriously security flawed flash platform. The online advertisers accept malware - always have, coupled with their profiling of users, the malware publishers can target vulnerable users/pcs.

The Add industry is responsible for massive slowdowns in the net, you click a link it loads a 3rd party site, then jumps you to the target site. Then loads buggy flash plugins to flash crap at you. What's not to like? I'm on 3g at the moment and its expensive. I don't want to watch auto-run movies of plastic people and their puppies. I used to run ghostery and Add Block Plus. But am currently using an open source one called ublock.

Now here's where it gets complicated. I delete cookies on exit and don't run flash by default - these were all features of old Opera Browser. fortunately back in Vivaldi! The net result is I've had to stop reading the Guardian. I do sympathize with the Guardian the're add funded, but this is what their site looks like: 

Normally I zoom in, and my browser remembers that (remembers locally on this PC not using a cross site tracking cookie) this has the effect of rendering the page un-readable. Even if I paid the guardian money this would not go away. Not much incentive for me to pay. They can remove those banners only by tracking me. Either by login or cookie (which I will delete). Also they'ed probably share my preference to pay with "associates" who'd then find other ways to nag me.

Not much incentive to pay is it? I block your intrusive technologies, you detect the lack of feed back from affiliates you then put up appeals all over the screen asking me to give you my personal details, and bank and money so you can set a system to uniquely identify me so the banners don't appear? Not making me uniquely identifiable was part why I did it in the first place. Its a shame, I'm now reading the independent instead. Someone needs to fund the Guardian, its one of the worlds most important newspapers keeps people honest. However they want to share my visits with some of the worlds most intrusive bastards including google. A company that's pretty much single single-handedly responsible for their financial problems).

My 2 cents worth: A marketing fool and his money are easily parted, its the industries fault for becoming too good at targeting individuals, tracking them and feeding their statistics back to the people who gave them the money. If you see an add they know, if you click it they know (and usually charge per click). The only fix i can see for this it to make the add networks trackers go dark. Using add blockers, and script blockers. Replacing them with click fraud robots. Click fraud is falsely clicking adverts to increase the sites profits (add networks have historically been quite tolerant of this as they get a cut too).

Can someone write me a program/plugin that will work out how much data I've got left and randomly browse deserving sites I choose and click their adds randomly? This would fuck up the add industry by double wammy. Firstly it would fill their trackers with false data. Poison the targeting well, secondly I could make the Guardian get money, but not useless click bait like "5 hamsters who look like Donald Trump" though I think that last one may have been Rob Manuel's Click Bait Robot. A Turing machine for generating click bait, now we need another Turning machine for Click Fraud.

Its your mistake not mine. If you weren't spying on me you wouldn't know I was blocking you, if you didn't know I was blocking you then you and your client could believe I was and every body wins. I don't get my internet experience Guardian gets its money and some marketing fool pays for it. As far as i can tell my click fraud robot is the only way forward.

EDIT: It turns out most of the Advertisers are being fleeced anyway http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/ - fascinating article.