TechBlorg

Dual-Monitor-Compatible ATI Video Cards | Tech Tips – Salon.com

sollipsist — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:39:42 +0000

Where were you when you heard that ATI died? I remember it like it was yesterday… anyway, another of the little articles that I’ve been doing lately for Salon.com:

Dual-Monitor-Compatible ATI Video Cards | Tech Tips – Salon.com.

EDIT: apparently the Salon.com articles are now appearing on “OpposingViews.com” which is a better name but with less cachet. C’est la vie.

People Dont Use TV Apps, and Mobile Gaming Is Set to Implode | Adweek

sollipsist — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 16:47:00 +0000

“The term casual gamer is a misnomer. They are not gamers.” — Machinima COO Nanea Reeves via People Dont Use TV Apps, and Mobile Gaming Is Set to Implode | Adweek.

Well said. TV apps, mobile gaming, and even console gaming all suck balls, according to a bunch of gaming and TV execs at CES. Maybe they’re a little biased? Whatever the case, I kinda agree… but for the time being, investors still love to pour money into bottomless trendy holes and call it The Future.

“The telephone network is obsolete”: Get ready for the all-IP telco | Ars Technica

sollipsist — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:46:13 +0000

“The telephone network is obsolete”: Get ready for the all-IP telco | Ars Technica.

As usual, the real story is in the comments. What happens when the power goes out? What happens to customers when AT&T doesn’t have to worry about regulation anymore?

Blackberry 10: The year we make contact

sollipsist — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:19:04 +0000

I’m typing this on my phone’s virtual keyboard for three reasons:

A) Because everyone laughs at me and tells me I’m behind the times for preferring the slider keyboard on my Droid

B) Constant contact with Internet writing has shown me that I need to confront my paralyzing fear of misspelled words, and

C) Because Blackberry 10 is coming soon.

As far as A) is concerned, the virtual keyboard — while better than i sometimes give it credit for — lacks some features for writers. For one thong, cut and paste is so unwieldy as to make me nostalgic for the days of electric typewriters.

I’m not fond of switching to a different keyboard set every time i need exotic characters like quotes, question marks, commas, apostrophes and dashes. It’s bad enough that i have to hit the ALT key on my slider.

And don’t take this opportunity to evangelize about innovative new predictive virtual keyboard apps. Maybe taking the time to learn them would result in a better workflow… but you know what would be even better for my workflow? A physical keyboard, and a mouse. If Swype can beat that, then we’ll talk.

Simply re-positioning your cursor via touch is way too hit-or-miss compared to mouse control, or even compared to a simple set of arrow keys (which slider keyboards all have, and which Blackberry improved upon in many respects with its little trackball).

I’ve never actually owned a Blackberry, but my old hands have been on a lot of them, and my writing had followed RIM’s decline closely.

Nobody really believes that the next generation of RIM’s devices will reverse or even halt Blackberry’s dwindling market share and relevance. But we’re still curious… call it a car-crash mentality, or simply a fascination with the things that RIM is trying. Some of these thongs are the RIGHT things.

QNX, for example, is an impressive OS, and Blackberry 10 makes good use of it. I’d love my phone to multitask, because I’m constantly researching (and cutting and pasting) while I’m writing. I’d love ny phone to be able to “peek” at apps and notifications without having to unlock it every time.

I’m not as swayed by the ability to switch back and forth from an unrestricted “personal” to an encrypted and BYOD-friendly “work” mode. i do recognize that it’s a major plus for the enterprise user base… you know, the oner that kept Blackberry alive when the trendies departed en masse for the big Apple.

And i definitely see that RiM recognizes that they meed to ditch (or at least de-emphasize) the iconic little keyboard in favor of a virtual one. But as i’m saying and proving, it’s a feature that i need… although, to be honest, it’s precisely the feature that kept me from getting a Blackberry in the first place.

Why? Because of screen space. Blackberrys sacrificed over half of their form factor with that iconic keyboard, making it undesirable to me. I need to see more of my work than simply the last dozen lines, especially when the actual composition space is increasingly encroached upon by notifications, banners, menu items, et ceteta.

(At this point in the editing process, my phone’s spellcheck decided to stop giving me predictive replacement options, and editing the rest of the text became frustratibgly laboripus)

To be totally honest, i need a multitaskibg split screen so that i can refer and research properly. I’d be so much happier if my phone had sometjibg like Google’s Docs with the embedded Reasearch function (obly available on the desktop version, alas).

So a QNX-based Blackberry 10 would be a win for multitasking, but a big step nack for the writing tasks. And I had already “written off” (pun intended) Blackberrys necause of the screen space issue… a problem that all curprent virtual kaynoards still have.

I’m resisting the urge to edit this on a REAL computer with a REAL keyboard, or even switch to my droid’s slider… because that’s what I do. Professional? Hard to say. Many journalists deliver flawless articles usibg norhing but their virtual keyboards on their phonrs and tableys. Cuttibg-efge? No, i’m behinf the times, baby.

But until I’m forced to make the trends work for me instead of against me, I’ll still be looking for a physical keyboard on my nexy phone… and this time around, for one reason or another, it looks lile i won’t even need to deselect Blackberrys in the search filters.

Google Chrome Black Screen! Aaughh!

sollipsist — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 18:27:51 +0000

Chrome is currently pissing me off.

The problem: web pages load completely black.

History: once upon a time, I had to use Internet Explorer or Netscape. Yep, I’m THAT old. I didn’t really like either one, but people kept telling me Netscape was better, so OK, whatever. But the glorious salvation came in the form of Firefox, and I lived and loved with Mozilla for several years. Then, like many comfortable partners do, Firefox got bloated and sluggish and made my life harder instead of easier. And although it sounds unbelievable, IE actually got good enough to switch back to — but before I could take that ideologically dubious step, Chrome came out and was the answer to my dreams.

So ultimately I got really used to Chrome, and integration with other Google products such as Docs (now Drive), Android, and Gmail made my workflow very streamlined and convenient. But that all ended about a month or so ago…

Details: originally, problem pages started to load OK but then go black when finished loading. Page elements were still present — I could hear audio, and see the cursor change when I hovered over something clickable — so it wasn’t a LOADING problem per se but a RENDERING problem.

The problem affected very few pages — YouTube was an early offender, which suggested that Flash was the problem until I remembered that I’d opted for HTML5 instead a while back. I also thought that my AdBlock was acting up (it does give problems from time to time), so I disabled it. No luck.

I could get a usable page by quickly hitting STOP before the page had a chance to fully load. Irritating, but it didn’t happen more than once or twice a day, and I figured that one of the all-too-frequent Chrome updates would fix things soon enough.

But it kept affecting more and more pages as time went on. And updates not only didn’t help, they seemed to make it worse.

At the time of this writing, Chrome now loads black pages instantly, without even the millisecond of grace that I used to enjoy. Ironically, I can almost count on Google pages loading black (Search, Gmail, Drive, YouTube etc.) even when other sites seem OK.

The problem comes and goes, and I can sometimes enjoy up to a whole hour or two of actually seeing web pages before the blackness creeps in. At its worst, most (if not ALL) pages load black.

A Google Search (when I could get it to show up) proved that I’m definitely NOT the only person who has seen this. But the things that have worked for others simply don’t apply to me. Disabling Flash seemed to work for about half a day. Using “incognito mode” seemed to work at first, but now it’s just as bad. There’s a well-known fix from last year that involves “switchable graphics”, but I work on a desktop, and that’s not an option.

Google Support suggests using the Chrome Canary builds, which is nice for them but kinda silly for a daily user point of view (not to mention would probably ADD more instability than it corrects). So far, Google’s focus has been on fixing hybrid graphics (CPU/GPU) setups and Windows 8 issues… again, nice for the people involved, but not really much help to me, with boring old Win7 and a discrete GPU. You know, like a small minority of people using Chrome… /s

I can eventually get any pages to load by “duplicating” the tab once or twice, or by hitting “back” and then “forward” once or twice. But my experience is that this problem gets WORSE instead of better, so I can totally see getting nothing but black whenever I use Chrome… in other words, probably not for much longer.

Big Charlie Brown-style AAUGH!!!! This makes my workflow extremely frustrating and full of little stops and starts. Writing for the web isn’t brain surgery, but it does require a certain amount of concentration and unbroken rhythm. And my current habits are bound up with several years of Chrome familiarity… sure, I could migrate everything back to Firefox (or IE!!!!) and re-learn my habits in a fairly short period of time, but WHY SHOULD I EVEN BE CONSIDERING THIS?!?!!?

Writing for the Houston Chronicle Online, Small Business Section… yo.

sollipsist — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 15:31:09 +0000

I’m not all about the tech. Sometimes I can be persuaded to talk about legal issues… and by “persuaded” I mean “paid”, and by “legal issues” I mean “law stuff that supports life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Types of Child Labor Laws | Chron.com

Forced Overtime Laws | Chron.com.

And yes, it’s the Chron yo.

Urban Dictionary: chron