The Jaded Tech

Oh you know when you have a friend who jut recently joined a MLM when you see those 6 words at the beginning of an email.  It’s like they know you are going to complain so they put up some sort of fake apology in advance so that you have no basis for the complaint because they already apologized.  Wow, talk about your control freak eh?

So it has been awhile since my last post.  Let’s get you up to speed on tech things, which have really been keeping me from this blog.

1/ My Android-powered HTC Dream.  The battery is these devices has a known history of being insufficient.  Not only does the operational time suck, it seems that the overcharge protection is even worse which compounds the problem.  In the last month I have reinstalled my OS no less than 20 times.  each time hoping that it’ll cure the 5min non-standby use I get out of it.  Or at least l me still have a functioning phone should I ever need to look something up quickly.  So, after two weeks of this, I finally broke down to see what a replacement battery will cost on eBay.  I was expecting something along the lines of $40 to $50.  Nope, about $5 shipped to my door from Hong Kong.  Yes, we’ve all heard stories and stuff from over seas and how some people perpetuate the idea that I lost my money.  Well, that bubble was nice and busted as I got the battery and the phone works great now!  If only I can figure out how to upgrade from CM 5.0.7 to CM 5.0.8….did it once, doesn’t want to do it again….ugh.

2/ Ubuntu.  While my machine has been mostly quite reliable (way more than any windows machines I’ve used), it is not without it’s forced learning curves for what I try to do.  For some reason, this particular machine and video and Linux have issues.  I have never been a big fan of ‘on-board video’.  Too many compromises and too much of a performance hit.  This gets exaggerated in Linux.  Even worse, there is only PCI slots available.  Do you know how hard it is to find a PCI Video card nowadays?  Luckily a friend of mind had one and gave it to me.  That kinda worked but then Ubuntu kacked on me and so I went back to the onboard.  At least it’s been stable for quite some time now.

3/ Flash on Ubuntu.  This would be another annoying point.  Not so much Ubuntu but Ubuntu and MY SYSTEM.  Again things were running really crappy…they worked at one point but then stopped.  Did some research and found one little line, added it in and bam, things are working fine again.  Still get some flash issues every now and then but other wise it’s good enough for now.

That’s pretty much the bulk of my battles over the last month or so.  Gotta love tech eh?

Given all the recent kerfuffle over Flash on Apple products (with wonderfully scathing headlines like “The Battle of Apple and Adobe‎” and “Adobe And Apple Continue To Fued Over Flash‎”) you’d think it’s a laymans techie internet WWIII going on.

Then I get this in my email today.

Is anyone else confused?  Geeze, you think these two companies are just a married old couple from a cheesy 60’s sitcom.