Jolt Country

It's a way to keep the riff raff from depending on the banks to pay their bills for them until they can come up with next week's paycheck

I am using Venmo to pay for daycare. I get charged fees, so I thought I'd move cash into my Venmo account.

You can't do that. This is a banking app that doesn't let you ADD FUCKING FUNDS.

“At this time, only users who have applied for and activated a Venmo Debit Card have the ability to add funds to their Venmo balance manually. That being said, you don’t need to add money to your Venmo balance to pay friends or businesses in the app since you can fund those payments directly with a bank account or card on file. I hope this helps!”

How did everything get so stupid? They should just shut their piece of shit app down if they can't manage this, if this is too big for them.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Tue Aug 15, 2023 8:22 amdaycare

Daycare? When did Jonsey get a kid and never once mention it?

I have no children.

Trying to get organized on my domain names. It's a mess.

caltrops.com is through Register.com.
joltcountry.com, cryptozookeeper.com and cyberganked.com are through the POE Hosting thing.
trottingkrips.com was through SoonerDomains.
I don't know what textadventures.online was through, I will probably let that go. I apparently had a namecheap.com account that was tied to beaver@zombieworld.com. Well, that is gone.

Frustrations so far:
Register.com WOULD NOT LET ME PAY. I tried a credit card and Paypal. Got a 404 "We're sorry!" message each time. Had to pay through live chat.
POE Hosting thinks I paid for some kind of domain protection and it won't send the email to the address it thinks it needs to send it to. I tried to send it again and it said "it may take up to 60 minutes!!" to send this email.

I am so. fucking. sick. of enshittification. I hate what programmers and product teams have done to the internet. I want out. I hate all this shit.

I pay for a bunch of throwaway domains which wasn't a big deal when they were $10/year. Now they're $20/year and while that's not a huge hit it's enough to make me reconsider some of them.

Me too. I'm tired of paying for this shit. Part of it is that I'm reviewing my expenses lately and just canceling the waste. But the entire thing with domains is a garbage heap.

POE domains never bothered sending the email. Beautiful implementation, security through never sending anything out.

I bought 3 Wyze cameras that used to work perfectly. If I had an SD card in them they'd save a timeline. They could all show video snippets on movement.

Wyze, through software updates, ruined all that.

First they wanted 2 bucks a year to enable video snippets. Stuff it used to do for free. Now they want $20 a year per camera. I hate them so much.

Does anyone know of a camera that just records to an SD card and can save motion events?

I am so sick of subscription culture. What Wyze did was worse because they crippled their cameras. But I hate living in this world where everything HAS to get worse.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Mon Aug 21, 2023 3:45 pm POE domains never bothered sending the email. Beautiful implementation, security through never sending anything out.

I am on the phone with their support. They are just a reseller that goes to the same spot as countless others. Why they are $17.99 a domain I have no idea.

Guys, it's the WEIRDEST THING that the email that allows a transfer DOESN'T GET SENT. The guy on the phone is going to come back in 3 minutes to see what else we can do.

Maybe I'll be stuck paying this markup for the rest of my life, who knows???????????????????

Douglas Adams talks about Mac Computers


Frank the Vandal

The Macintosh came out five years ago, and I seem to have had the builders
in my house for almost that long. Someone asked me the other day what they
were doing, and I explained that I had been trying to pluck up the courage to
ask them that myself.
Things are rather complicated by the fact that one of them is an electrician
called Frank the Vandal. That is, his friends, if he has any that aren’t in
hospital, call him Frank, and I call him Frank the Vandal because every time
he needs to get at any bit of wiring, he tends to hack his way through anything
else that’s in the way to get at it—plasterwork, woodwork, plumbing,
telephone lines, furniture, even other bits of wiring that he’s put in himself on
previous raids. He is, I am assured, very good as an electrician, though I think
he is maybe not very good as a human being. But I’m digressing here from
the point I was trying to make, and have rather lost the thread because Frank
just cut the power off since I did the last save. So, where was I? Ah yes.
The house was virtually a complete wreck when I bought it. Not quite as
much a wreck as it is when Frank’s been here, but nevertheless, it was pretty
much an empty shell into which walls, floors, plumbing, and so on had to be
put. When the walls have to be built, an expert (or so I’m told—not so sure
about that myself, but in principle an expert) bricklayer comes into the house
and builds them. I need floors and stairs and cupboards and things, so a
carpenter, whistling a merry carpenter’s tune, comes round and plies his trade.
Then a plumber comes round and dittoes. Then Frank the Vandal comes round
to wrench some wiring into place, and of course the carpenter and plumber
and so on have to come round again and make extensive repairs. I’m going to
have to drop the subject of Frank because he’s not a part of the analogy I am
by slow degrees attempting elegantly to construct. It’s just that he preys on
my mind a bit at the moment and it’s difficult not to sit here feeling nervous
while he’s in the house. So forget Frank. You’re lucky. You can.
Now the point is this. The house is here. Building this house is the purpose
of the whole exercise. If I want anything done in it, I pick up the phone
(assuming Frank hasn’t hacked through the line trying to get at a light switch)
and someone comes round to the house and does it.
If I want to have some cupboards installed, I don’t have to do the
following: I don’t have to have the house completely dismantled, shipped up
to Birmingham where the carpenter is, put together again in a way that a
carpenter understands, then have the carpenter work on it, and then have the
whole thing dismantled again, shipped back down to Islington, and put
together again so that it works as a house that I can live in.
So why do I have to do that with my computer? Let me put that another
way so that it makes sense. Why, when I’m working in a document in one
word processor, do I keep on finding that if I want to do something else to the
document, I have virtually to dismantle the document and ship it over to
another word processor that has a feature I need that the first one doesn’t?
(Why don’t I just use the second word processor? Well, because it doesn’t
have other features that the first one does, of course.) Or, if I want to put a
picture in it, why do I have to go off to another program entirely and do the
picture there, and then go through all the mind-numbing palaver of
discovering that for some reason the WP I’m using doesn’t know how to
handle graphics in that particular format, or claims that it does but then just
goes all black and sulky or makes the machine go bing when I actually ask it
to. In the end I have to paste all the various bits into PageMaker, which then
refuses to print for some reason. I know that MultiFinder has made all this a
bit easier, but it’s really just the equivalent of making Birmingham easier to
get to, if you follow me.
I don’t want to know about PICT files. I don’t want to know about TIFF
files (I don’t. They give me the willies.) I don’t want to have to worry about
what file type to ask MacWrite II to save my work in so that I can get Nisus to
read it and run one of its interminable macros over it. I’m a Mac user, for
heaven’s sake. This is meant to be easy.
The Mac started out as a wonderfully simple and elegant idea (give them so
little memory that they won’t be able to do anything anyway), and it’s time
that that degree of simplicity could be brought to bear on the much, much
more powerful and complex system that the Mac has now become.
What I want to be able to do is this:
1. Turn on the machine.
2. Work.
3. Have a bit of fun provided I’ve done enough of 2, which is rarely, but
that’s another issue.
When I say “work,” I mean I want to be able to start typing on the screen,
and if I feel like putting in a drawing, I draw on the screen. Or I bring
something from my scanner onto the screen, or I send something from my
screen to someone else. Or I get my Mac to play the tune I’ve just written on
the screen on a synthesiser. Or, well, the list obviously is endless. And if I
need any particular tool to enable me to do anything complicated, I simply
ask for it. And I mean simply. I should never have to put away the thing I’m
working on unless I’ve actually finished it (fat chance, say my publishers) or
want to do something else entirely.
What I’m talking about is the death of the “application.” I don’t mean just
when they “unexpectedly” quit, I mean it’s time we simply got rid of them.
And getting hold of the tools I need should be as simple as pasting a button
into HyperCard.
Ah! HyperCard!
I know it’s unfashionable to say this, because a lot of people feel that
HyperCard simply isn’t powerful enough to do useful work in. It is, after all, a
first stab at an idea that’s in its infancy. The list of things you can’t do with it
is almost as long as the list of macros in Nisus. (What are all those things?
The very act of pulling down the macros menu causes lights to dim all over
North London.) But it’s a sensationally good idea, and I would dearly love to
see something like it become the whole working environment for the Mac.
You want the number-crunching power of Excel? Paste it in. You want
animation? Paste in Director. You don’t like the way Director works? (You
must be mad. It’s brilliant.) Paste in the bits you like of any other animation
tools you find lying about.
Or even rewrite it.
If it’s properly written in object-oriented code, it should be as easy as
writing HyperTalk. (All right. You can’t write HyperTalk. It should be easier
to write than HyperTalk. Just point at the bits you like and click.) We should
not have to be tyrannised by application designers who don’t know the first
thing about how actual people do their actual work, we should be able to just
pick up the bits we like and paste them in.
I’ve gone on a bit about electricians. I would now like to talk about
cupboards. One particular cupboard. It’s a cupboard in the corner of my study,
and I daren’t go into it, because I know that if I go into it I will not emerge till
the end of the afternoon and I will emerge from it a sad and embittered man
who has done battle with a seething black serpentine monster and lost. The
seething black serpentine monster is a three-foot-high pile of cables, and it
both taunts me and haunts me. It taunts me because it knows that whatever
cable it is that I want at any particular moment to connect one particular
arcane device to another particular arcane device is not to be found anywhere
in its tangled entrails, and it haunts me because I know it’s right.
I hate cables. They hate me too, because they know that one day I will
simply be able to go into that cupboard with a flamethrower and get rid of the
lot of them. In the meantime they are determined to extract from me the last
ounce of frustrated misery that they can. We do not need the bastards. We
shouldn’t need the bastards.
Take my current situation as an example. In order to be safe from Frank the
Vandal, I have transferred this article onto my portable Mac (I know, I know,
you hate me. Listen. We’ll all have one in the end. They’ll bring the price
down, trust me. Or rather, don’t trust me, trust Apple. Well, yes, I see your
point. Please can I get back to what I was saying anyway?) and I have taken
the additional precaution of taking it round to a friend’s house which is
entirely electrically isolated from anything that Frank may be up to.
When I get back home with the finished piece, I can either copy it onto a
floppy disk, assuming I can find one under the debris of half-finished chapters
on my desk, then put that into my main Mac and print it (again assuming that
Frank hasn’t been near my AppleTalk network with his chainsaw). Or I can
try to do battle with the monster in the cupboard till I find another AppleTalk
connector somewhere in its innards. Or I can crawl around under my desk and
disconnect AppleTalk from the IIx and connect it to the portable. Or . . . you
get the picture, this is ridiculous. Dickens didn’t have to crawl around under
his desk trying to match plugs. You look at the sheer yardage of Dickens’s
output on a shelf and you know he never had to match plugs.
All I want to do is print from my portable. (Poor baby.) That isn’t all I
want, in fact. I want to be able regularly to transfer my address book and diary
stacks backward and forward between my portable and my IIx. And all my
current half-finished chapters. And anything else I’m tinkering with, which is
the reason why my half-finished chapters are half-finished. In other words, I
want my portable to appear on the desktop of my IIx. I don’t want to have to
do battle with cupboard monsters and then mess about with TOPS every time
I want that to happen. I’ll tell you all I want to have to do in order to get my
portable to appear on the Desktop of my IIx.
I just want to carry it into the same room.
Bang. There it is. It’s on the Desktop.
This is Infra-Red talk. Or maybe it’s microwave talk. I don’t really care any
more than I want to care about PICTs and TIFFs and RTFs and SYLKs and
all the other acronyms, which merely say, “We’ve got a complicated problem,
so here’s a complicated answer to it.”
Let me make one thing clear. I adore my Macintosh, or rather my family of
however many Macintoshes it is that I’ve recklessly accumulated over the
years. I’ve adored it since I first saw one at Infocom’s offices in Boston in
1983. The thing that has kept me enthralled and hypnotised by it in all that
time is the perception that lies at the heart of its design, which is this: “There
is no problem so complicated that you can’t find a very simple answer to it if
you look at it the right way.” Or, to put it another way, “The future of
computer power is pure simplicity.” So my two major wishes for the 1990s
are that the Macintosh systems designers get back to that future, and that
Frank the Vandal gets out of my house.

MacUser magazine, 1989

I would like Alt tab to actually work on macOS.

Meaning.

If I alt tab and go to another app

I'd like it to ya know come up.

Why on earth does it not do that?

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Fri Aug 25, 2023 5:22 am I would like Alt tab to actually work on macOS.

Tf you talkin bout bro? There is no ALT key on these Macs!

But no seriously I know what you mean. The only time I use the Command-Enter for the same effect usually these days is for Ultima games (V at the moment) running in DosBox. And that is usually to hit the Fn key as well as hitting CTRL while hitting an icon on my magical bar thing on the macbook that displays the F11 key 4 times to get the game to the exact proper timing.

"Think Different", damnit. God what a stupid fucking slogan..

We had been buying music off Amazon Music for MP3 stuff.

They limit how many times you can download things. Awful.

I am trying to get all the music I have bought for my wife on a flash disk for her, so she can listen in her car. Amazon is RATE LIMITING me, downloading a few dozen MP3s. "Try again in 15 minutes." Hey richest piece of shit corporation in the world, how about you fuck off, you cannot rate limit people AND limit the number of times they can download digital media they bought. I mean, they are doing it, but what a desperately shitty media.

Congrats Bezos, I will never purchase music again in my life, I will just pirate it because you were a greasy maggot about it.

Also for some reason this base is not showing to people who are not logged in.

Why would you ever buy it in the first place?

Music? Your question is who would ever want to buy music? Try it with the sound on, you might like it more.

It's free for the asking, why subject youself to Bezos' large intestines? That's my point

It's not free for the asking, unless you steal it. Your point sucks.

AArdvark wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2023 2:46 pm Why would you ever buy it in the first place?

To support the artists, to have a permanent digital copy, to have it in an MP3 format that I could get whenever I wanted, unlike iOS's way of locking you in.

But then Amazon broke all the reasons I was buying it for. I am ok buying a single for $1.29. Well, I was.

My, the air is thick with disparagement today.