The Sad State of Technology

This is a bit of a rant about the declining quality of today’s software and technology in general. One program that I use a lot because I hike and take thousands of pictures, is the image viewer. When I want to take a quick look at an image or flip through a series of images, I expect the viewer to open the photo right away. Unfortunately, the image viewer that comes with Windows 10 as begun to ignore me and display a blank screen when I open my first photo. I have close the program and then double-click on the photo again to get it to open. There is also a noticeable delay when opening the photo. It’s longer than opening a photo in Photoshop. That does not bode well for a program written by Microsoft and bundled with Microsoft Windows 10. The assumption I make is that the photo viewer should be the most compatible since Microsoft has inside knowledge of their own O.S. Ah, but I’m sure that the left-hand doesn’t pay attention to the right-hand. My cynical side says that Microsoft relegates their utilities to interns.

Today, my patience came to an end. I’ve put up with this “bug” for months, assuming that a patch would fix it. I will not waste my time trying to troubleshoot such a problem. It could be any number of problems, including corrupt dll, conflict with another program (good luck figuring out which one), or maybe it has some fancy feature where it’s calling home for statistics and there is a connection delay (that’s only a guess). I know it’s particular to my machine because my wife uses the program and it’s not suffering the same issue on her machine.

My fix is to download ImageGlass and install that program. It was recommended as one of the top 10 viewers for Windows 10 for 2020. It installed quickly, I set it to be the default and it’s fast. Yes! I remember fast. It’s been a while since I used a third-party photo viewer, and I really miss how quick and transparent a better application used to be.

Then there’s Visual Studio… sigh. That has been my favorite software development editor since I started using VS 2005. Over the years it has become more and more annoying. It’s not really VS that is at fault here. I noticed this about a lot of programs. The problem is the hover over instant help windows. They pop up everywhere. Sometimes, there are so many hot-spots in VS that the little windows overlap each other, and many times they just cover up the code I’m trying to type in (as I’m typing it in). Making it a nuisance.

The next issue with VS is all the buttons, dock controls, and other areas that make the edges of the program nothing more than a mine-field of disasters waiting to happen. I normally work with APIs and I typically have two or more instances of VS running (usually four or five). When I want to switch between instances, I have to use the Alt-Tab or the right-click menu item and select which one I want to work with. My alternative is to carefully click on a piece of the window sticking out from behind the active window. Here’s a sample of the top of VS:

There is a tiny clean area that you may click on to select or drag the window around. If you hit anything else, you just select a menu or push a button. This “feature” started when Microsoft went with the thin window edges. Although they kept the little stretch icon in the bottom right, the user can stretch from any corner, but the hot-spot for each corner is very tiny. I have hit the close button trying to stretch the upper corner. My fault, I should no have changed my behavior of stretching only from the lower right, but it’s still annoying. I miss the big grab area on top of the window. It was useful.

Moving on to another program that I use as well as any other IT and developer in the world of computers: Notepad++. Oh yeah. It’s a sweet application. Does everything. The only program that I think is better is Sublime, but that’s technically a paid application (much sweeter though). Back to Notepad++, and anyone who has used it knows exactly what I’m about to complain about. I can’t open that program with it asking me to upgrade it. To top it off, I have to run through the typical Next-Next-Next installer to finish it off, and then it opens my document back up. Why can’t they offer an automatic upgrade-in-the-background feature? You know, just set it to automatically check for updates. It’s one of those features that was invented in the early 2000s. I suspect all of the bug-fixes that they are sending my way only affect features I never use (except one, there was actually one that I remember where I was happy to see the upgrade).

WebEx… Who doesn’t hate that program! There was a recent upgrade for the WebEx that we use at work but didn’t fix all of their audio select issues. There was one issue that they did fix. It involved an issue where the user had to go to the audio select every time they join a meeting and select the preferred microphone device, even if it was already the one that was selected. Otherwise, you can’t talk. It still has an issue where I join a meeting and sometimes I can’t hear anything from the meeting in my headphones. Then I go into the configuration and select the headphones or just select “test” and it starts working (I hear it click in). I usually know if I’m the one with a problem when I can see the square boxes animate that someone is speaking and I can’t hear anything. Yeah, fun times!

The digitized audio on WebEx is a big problem as it is. It has to be some of the lowest quality digitization ever. I know that part of the problem is that the audio is going over an asynchronous communication path. Telephones never suffered from these issues, because the digitization process on telephones is normally transmitted down an asynchronous data path that is dedicated. Guaranteeing that you will not get dropped or delayed data. One issue that I really despise with WebEx is that a drop-out causes the person’s voice to be encoded at a lower bitrate and it comes in extremely loud. I usually jump out of my seat when it pops in like that. Not to mention the pain in my ears as I try to pull my headphones away from my head. Good job WebEx, maybe your techs could work on the signal quality issues. I used to work in the telephone industry, so I know a lot about digitizing analog audio signals, including protocols like AMI, B8ZS, VoIP, etc.

Spam Filters… Yeah, I’m bouncing around to all kinds of categories today. I should collate a list and write a book! I’m currently using Bluehost for my hosting company. I’ve been through a couple of hosting companies. GoDaddy was my last hosting company. They let their web server technologies lapse and I finally switched to Bluehost. I have my email addresses set through them and they provide spam filtering. Sometimes. Sometimes I just get a flood of spam to my iPad and other times the spam filter puts them in the spam folder. In addition to that issue is that RoundCube, which is a program I used online for my email client, does not have a button to mark something as spam. On the GoDaddy email client, there was a way to mark something and tell it what to look for when marking it as spam. Then any emails with that signature, like the “from address” would automatically go to the spam box. All I can do with RoundCube is move it to “Junk.” Too bad I don’t have a configuration window where I can make up a few of my own rules…

Google Maps… Oh, this is not a bug. I installed a VPN application on my iPhone to cut down on the number of third-party sites receiving data, especially at night when I’m not using my phone. One “issue” that I discovered was that the navigation feature of Google Maps does not work with VPN turned on. Seems that there is a third-party site that must receive data in order for Google Maps to operate as a navigation tool. It was frustrating to troubleshoot what the problem was. After searching around to figure out why it quit, I suddenly remembered that I was evaluating the VPN program. The second I turned off the VPN program: voila! It worked again. Google Maps should have popped up a warning that the signal was being blocked and prevented the feature from working. However, I’m sure that would have given away the fact that they were secretly tapped into my private data. I’ll live with the invasion of privacy because I have little choice. Garman GPS you say!

We moved to Utah last year and we used to use the Google Maps GPS feature for navigating because the voice is quick. In other words, I can get a description of where to turn before I arrive at the corner in tight urban areas. Utah, however, is a big and poorly cell covered state. I like that “feature” but I also don’t like it. Once you arrive withing twenty miles of Capitol Reef park, there is no cell reception. Navigation requires you to pre-load any maps into Google Maps before venturing into this area. If you decide to change your destination, then Google Maps is lost. We bought a new Garmin GPS (in 2019). The Garmin GPS unit had a huge update, which I’m okay with. I set up the WiFi feature and ran the update and it was good to go. Except, it can’t find Dinasour National Monument. I can read a map and find it quick, but Garmin had no idea. We had to get the GPS coordinates and manually type that into Garmin to get it to work. Not optimal. Oh, and Dinasour National Monument is not a new park. The park was established in 1915 by President Woodrow Wilson. Garmin GPS, we all know did not exist before that. What really got me angry about last year’s trip to Dinasour National Monument was that we were out of cell range when we noticed that the Garmin was not on the right track, making it difficult to navigate. I was beginning to miss my 1990 Rand McNally map book!

Apple Watch… I love my Apple watch. It has some really cool features and I can look at my heart rate and verify that the reason I can’t breathe while scaling that cliff is that my heart is about to explode. There is one thing that drives me crazy. The fitness tracker doesn’t do so well with hiking. It’s okay with tracking the distance that I walk. Although, I am baffled why it is different from my wife’s Apple watch. They both use GPS to track our location, so the distance traveled should be pretty close. Sometimes, they’re different by a mile after we walked about five to six miles. That problem is not what bugs me the most. The problem that annoys me is that the watch itself is annoying. If I’m climbing a 55% steep incline and I stop to catch my breath, the watch vibrates to ask me if I want to stop my “workout” or put it on pause. Of course, I don’t want to do either. I just want the thing to track my path and distance. Also, if I don’t set it to start my hike, within a mile or two, it’ll be clever and tell me that I must be out for a walk and asks me if I want to track my exercise. That’s when I have to keep hitting the button to make the “feature” go away!

TVs… I may have mentioned this on my blog before, but TV’s have improved, and yet they have become more painful to operate. We have a couple of flat-screen TVs. Our main panel is a 60″ TV that is nice and run-of-the-mill. We bought it when the 4K TV’s first came out and cost an arm and a leg. One thing that bugs me about the device that we bought is that it doesn’t have an LED light on the front that tells when the TV is on or off. That would be okay if the TV came on instantly (remember the instant-on TV, yeah, good times). Today’s TV is nothing more than a monitor with a little Linux machine built into it. Now the TV has to boot up and load software, probably from flash memory. There are updates and special features that the average person will never use. It’s the bootup time that I have an issue with. If it wasn’t so slow, there wouldn’t be a problem. Alternatively, if there was a little green LED on the front that indicated that it was on and booting up, then I could see that the remote worked. Sometimes I hit the on/off button on the remote and wait and think: “Must not have turned on.” So I hit the button again and notice that it just went off. This what I call a bad OOBE (Out Of Box Experience).

As an aside: I mentioned the instant-on feature above. That was a feature that was added to the old tube-type TVs. Basically, a video tube required time for the heating element to heat up the electron guns. Those are devices that shoot a stream of electrons that fly towards the front of the screen and hit the phosphor and make it glow. A color tube TV had three electron guns, one for green, red, and blue. Anyway, there was a delay where the tube needed to heat up before it would start showing a picture. Someone got the bright idea that they could wire the TV power supply directly to the heater and bypass the on/off button. Even when the TV was shut off, the heater was on. When you turn on your TV, the tube was already heated. It’s been cooking 24/7 since you first plugged the device in! This meant that the TV would come on instantly. It was magical.

Google Maps…. again. When using Google Maps GPS in the car it has this “feature” where the music starts playing. In the truck, I hit the pause button and continue on my way. In the car, since the last update, it just plays the music. You can’t turn off the music without muting the GPS voice. Isn’t that a nice feature? I’m not sure who is at fault for this problem. Is the vehicle, or the iPhone software? As a user, I really don’t care. I just want it to work without requiring me to dig around on the Internet and trying and find a work-around. It’s even more frustrating when there is no workaround. Our car is a VW and the truck is a GMC. Can’t really pin the problem on one automaker. Apple should probably know better than to autoplay the music, or maybe Google needs to do some testing of their iPhone app in various cars. I’m sure they have enough employees who could test the app in different cars.

Printers and printer drivers… This is a perpetual problem that will NEVER be solved. It’s existed since the early 1800s (okay, that might be an exaggeration). How many times have you sent a print job to a shared network printer and suddenly realized that you printed multiple copies (hit the button twice) or you meant to print one page and it’s printing all pages of a 5,000-page manual? It happens. We’re human. Now, what happens when you want to cancel the job and try and save a forest or two? Yeah, you have to cancel the job at your PC because it’s still spooling to the server. Then you have to go to the printer and cancel it there or it will just continue until its buffer is empty. Why can’t Microsoft, or even the international standards community come up with a protocol for printers that allows one to hit the cancel at the printer that sends a signal up to the server and back to the calling job to STOP! As well as that, there should also be the capability to hit the cancel on the computer that would send a signal down to the server and then to the printer to stop and flush the job. Even a stop now and resume would be nice. A feature like that would bring printing into the 21st century. I would bet that if I built a time machine and went forward a few hundred years, that printers will still suffer from the “I can’t stop my print job” problem.

Our Keurig… We have a Keurig to make coffee. I like it better than the old drip machine we used to have. Now, my wife and I can choose which coffee we’re in the mood to drink at any time. This is our second Keurig and we bought the one that has a water tap so we can hook it into the water supply when we move into our new home. The problem with this model, that did not exist with the previous model, is that it is not very smart. It tries to be smart and tell that dumb human what to do next, but it fails miserably. If you put a new k-cup in the top part when it is re-heating the water or you have to refill the water, it asks you to change the k-cup. I usually recognize the “stupid” and just pull the handle up and put it back down. It should know that water has not been run through the k-cup since it has been changed. Another issue with this machine is that you can program the time when it will come on and heat up. That’s nice when you get up in the morning and it’s ready to go. Unfortunately, this model doesn’t have a calendar capability. On Saturdays and Sundays when we sleep in (most of the time) the machine shuts down before we get up. Oh, it still comes on at 6:15 AM, but then it shuts down at about 8:00 AM. Too bad there wasn’t a software upgrade that I could buy for five bucks. Also, did anyone dogfood this product?

I really should just write a book. Put a funny spin on it. Maybe a coffee table book that one could read while sitting in a Doctor’s office. Hmmm…

I could continue for another 50,000 words, but I’m going to stop here. Do you have a favorite technology “issue” that drives you crazy? Share your frustration in the comments. It’s a mad world that we live in where technology is making our lives easier, and more miserable at the same time. I’m a gadget freak, so I have all kinds of toys. Most work pretty well, but many fall short of what they could be. Just a little more polishing would make our technology better. There are too many CEO’s who think that slapping on another feature will improve their sales better than making their device the top-notch high-quality device that stomps their competition. An extra feature on my iPhone will never overcome the problem with music playing when I’m trying to navigate. I’m willing to bet that a fix for that would be cheap and easy. Garmin could have sold an extra GPS for our car, but I’m not happy with that device (and it goes beyond the fact that it can’t find Dinasour National Monument).