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Tech fails

If you don't learn from the past you're doomed to repeat it.

Audio

  • Dell Latitude 5501 sounds even worse than my MSI MS-16P7 due to ratting its plastic case. Interviews sound like a poor phone connection. Iron Maiden - Can I Play With Madness on the other hand is tolerable and even has some bass, almost enough for Robbie Williams - Angels, which sounds like a not-quite-tuned FM radio for the vocals (too little power), particularly noticable on U2 - Discotheque. Without "audio enhancements" disabled, its audio jack adds a rumble to videos like this. Worst audio hardware I've ever used, especially playing this. Then again, using my Logitech X-230 the cymbals at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxnN05vOuSM&t=54 sound more clear than on my MSI GL63 9SD, but that doesn't run hot during normal use because it has more than one side vent, so is less noisy overall.
  • HP
    • EliteBook 850 audio jack fail, possibly due to Apple headset with its abberant standard.
    • 2nd EliteBook 850 audio crackle while speaker set to 24 bit.
    • 3rd HP laptop had crackling audio with hardware acceleration.
  • Jay Sound guitar triple pickup crackles on amp and Rocksmith.
  • Lenovo ThinkBook 13s-IML 20RR has shrill loud high notes on Angel Dust by Dieselboy and Mark The Beast which is otherwise not tinny compared to my MSI MS-16P7 GL63 9SD.
  • Logitech X-230 - Affordable but its subwoofer is too powerful, even at lowest volume. Intro of The Number of the Beast (Official Video) is also a bit weak compared to my Target TRG-S 120 that has dirty tweeters but makes less noise when plugged in.
  • MSI MS-16P7 GL63 9SD laptops have:
  • Sonos is part of the Internet of Shit.
  • Various tinny speakers. I guess 10 cm is the minimum for good audio, judging by my Sony radio and Target TRG-S 120. Then again, my Sennheiser earbuds and iPhone 12 (despite weak bass on Angels) sound amazing. Small Bluetooth speakers inside of a belt bag sound fine, too.

Image

  • My only bitrotted DVD is from RCV, article K4330DVD. The data side says: Sono Press 50812869/K4330DVD S 01 1FP LB 46. Going by this video i should check The Matrix as well.
  • DVD players:
  • Online services like Amazon, Netflix, and Sony pulling content.
  • LCD
    • Philips. (5 phone handsets with half-broken displays)
    • Sharp. (1 dead TV, 1 microwave with half-broken display)
    • TV from Samsung. (UE55NU7170S dead on arrival. Red LED blinks twice and sometimes once long, attempting to display and playing a bad tube light blink sound softly. Bad caps? PSB? Where is the error guide?)
  • Optical mouse cursor jumps in 2022 by 2022 QWare QW GMM-3200, and wiggles by 2022 Gembird MUSW-4B-04-MX.
  • Printer by Canon(? It was gray.) started shredding paper.
  • Printer by HP, DeskJet 2620:
    • Poor manual. Instead of spamming me about WiFi printing, tell me how to get rid of white lines (hold Power, press Cancel twice, Resume, and release Power), that a blinking power light means it's busy, and that a reconnect via USB fixes a stuck printer queue in Windows 10.
    • Driver causes spoolsv.exe to max out one CPU core on Windows 10?
    • Fails to complain about nonfunctional 304 black still showing 2/3 full. Shows nothing when red stops working even after a head clean.
    • Ink dries after a few months.
    • Paper increasingly failed to feed. Dried or dusty rollers? I replaced the whole thing with a laser printer by Pantum that also has better dust covers.
  • HP printers are now remotely disabled when you cancel their ink subscription or use cheaper cartridges.
  • HP scanners also need ink!
  • Printer by Pantum, P2500W. Only outputs a single page of garbage after two years and <20 pages. Turns out i just had to (re)install the Pantum driver as it still printed properly via direct WiFi (not WiFi Direct according to Android) via the Mopria app and its own WiFi button, which adds a QR code containing my printer password and sends it to Pantum just to download their untrusted apk instead of sending me to their apparent app in Android's Play store.
  • SD:
    • HP laptop MicroSD card reader stopped working after first few uses?
    • My first "Made in Taiwan" 32GB Kingston SD card Only writes FF after 8 GB. Fake product from a dodgy phone store? That would explain the shoddy lock slider on the adapter that stopped working within a month or two (and/or it was HP's reader).

PC

  • AMD's Vega 3 drivers crashed almost every day on Windows 10 on yet another HP laptop with crackling sound issues. Disabling Chrome's hardware acceleration helped that but not the battery.
  • Apple: See above. Their wares are overpriced (except MacBook Air M1 vs Dell XPS) and inflexible (MacOS only comes in black or white and doesn't even show where deleted files came from, for example.). Also, feeling the 50 Hz electricity due to its lack of grounding was worrying. Lenovo ThinkBook 13s-IML 20RR also has that but only near the power plug. Both more than my dimmable metal 100 W lamp.
  • Dell XPS13 QFHD with Ubuntu expects a Windows partition for the UEFI restore feature.
  • EVGA PSUs fry your SSDs!
  • Hama OTG USB C/A bent and stopped working for even a mouse.
  • HDD from Toshiba. (Fortunately it was only the enclosure's controller. Unfortunately they also worked on Fukushima. Fortunately that emits over 10 times less radiactive waste than Chinese fission plants, which itself is probably way less than its coal plants' radioactive waste).
  • HDD from Seagate. (Fell asleep and coudn't get up while slowly tranferring thousands of small files from Windows 10.)
  • HP:
    • Like Apple, they have their own incompatible hardware since 2010. A common practise since then.
    • HDMI and USB signals glitch randomly. Possibly related to above audio issues.
    • Printer and SD issues above.
  • Lenovo installed insecure malware on its laptops. PrtSc key is stuck on F-lock, only producing "O" and an annoying screen overlay for "Skype for Business 2016" despite me having uninstalled Skype and rebooted. (Fix.) Acer offers better value, maybe also beating this Lenovo ThinkBook 13s-IML 20RR's poor audio described above.
  • LG fails at analog connections like VGA (static on D2342) and WiFi (dropped 2.4 and 5 GHz connections on TV, despite WiFi repeater in the same room, but it turns out congested areas need a mesh according to my ISP, which is worse for neighbors somehow but better for me).
  • Medion:
  • MSI MS-16P7 GL63 9SD laptops have:
    • Terrible speakers. See above.
    • Bad media keys: Two hands needed to adjust volume.
    • Rather loud fans.
    • No num lock light.
    • Bad TN view angles. From 45 degrees up the white circle is full and from 45 degrees down it's almost black. Banding is actually slightly better than on my Lenovo 13s-IML 20RR IPS, perhaps thanks to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 vs yellowish V540_13.3_INX_Dolby.icm.
    • Useless gaming software that lies about being installed successfully.
    • Shady review practices & ethics.
  • Nvidia CUDA: PyTorch needs torch.Generator() because (device='cuda') produces different results after first batch of 2 images and changing model!
  • POCO F3 has poor GPS reception in Pokemon Go.
  • Sony:
    • CDs: Hack your PC.
    • Phones: Too square for me. Automatic and manual backlight adjustment as well as automatic and manual transferring of data is terrible if it even works. Their update app only appears to spam the Booking app instead of giving me a list of changes or even security updates! The Sony Xperia XA1 does not support USB-C to HDMI (aka MHL), nor changing the ring volume in "do not disturb" mode, nor Google Cardboard where the QFHD premium model still beats the competition from Oculus etc at preventing the screen door effect but is too hot and heavy for long term use. 2018 Xperia XA1 in 2022-01 lasts less than 5 hours in safe mode and can't charge or hold a charge, unless the battery store sent me a bad replacement battery twice in a row. At least they didn't explode like Samsung's.
    • TVs: My fairly recent Sony Bravia only has 2 HDMI ports and no 5GHz WiFi, leading to choppy Miracasting from Android. (Enable WiFi and WiFi Direct, choose screencast input from inputs, and connect from phone.) Older Sony WiFi dongle also unsupported. LG's Miracast combined with Raspicast worked more smoothly & LG's passive 3D TVs are also great.

Misc.

  • Bosch GL-30 vacuum blows exhaust right up in your face. Maybe that's why it says "Allergy".

Politics

  • 2:07 Climate change due to brown people breeding too much due to high infant mortality due to war due to slavery due to religion is part of the video, it's a bit worrying to focus on excess humans instead of excess nonbiodegradable waste created by large companies paying the media to blame the consumer for not depositing their packaging in the nonexistent recycling bins, perhaps due to big oil preferring single use produce or because their subsidies make it cheaper than recycled plastic.
  • The meat industry is inefficient, deadly, oversubsidized, and often cruel. Banana companies are better and/as humans are frugivores.
  • Cliques/cults excluding people or solutions for no good reason.

Polymers

Power

  • Batteries:
    • Albert Heijn alkaline AAA best before Nov-2017 were starting to leak in Dec-2021.
    • Duracell Plus AAA leaks in 6 years, even breaking the side of an AAA cell.
    • Kodak Zinc Chloride Extra Heavy Duty AA 08-2011 leaked in 2021.
    • Sony Rechargeable Li-Polymer Batteries from 2017 and 2018 die before they're 4 years old, charged rarely or every day.
    • Top Craft Ultra Alkaline AAA (and AA) leaks fluid after 9.8 years, shorting out components.
  • Induction plate from Scholtes. (Repairman said they are all less reliable than coil heaters, but the good brand was bought by a bad company. Lasted from 2007-2016, while rarely used.)
  • Uninterruptable Power Supply caused more power failures than it prevented.
  • NS abused its power.
  • Solar road scams. Why can other countries like Germany and France make roofs to put them on so they're 10+ times more efficient and might actually pay for themselves compared to regular roads? Corruption from Big Oil like Shell?

Software

  • apt - Sometimes metapackages require too much, leading to wanted packages being marked for autoremoval when removing unwanted packages.
  • C(++): Unsafe legacy language that lacks proper input handling so instead of making the stack pointer only writable to control statements, the operating system marks data as not executable, so when due to lack of bounds checking the stack pointer is overwritten, it's not executable, which it wasn't in the first place, so execution resumes with your data, which can't be executed due to DEP, so use the executable heap memory instead of the stack and poorly-written code to overwrite the heap pointer with a known function and your choice of parameter such as a path to an executable into a popen.
  • Google:
    • Search opens YouTube links in a wrapper that isn't logged in so shows ads despite me paying for YouTube Premium.
    • Gmail doesn't preview attached image from draft.
    • Chrome doesn't show downloaded image from Gmail draft!
  • HCL:
    • DX is WordPress but more expensive, complex, and obscure.
    • iNotes doesn't refresh inbox after moving sender mail to junk folder, nor does it move all sender mail.
    • Verse seems to lack the anti-spam feature entirely.
  • KDE:
    • Opens context menus on mousedown and menu entries on mouseup, so many terminal windows were closed by opening the context menu too low on the screen while accidentally moving the mouse a few pixels.
    • Knows it's rebooting yet panics about it shutting down Konsole unexpectedly.
  • Linux distros in general:
  • MacOS:
    • Not free.
    • Legally limited to Apple hardware. (Hackintosh not allowed or needed with GNU distros like elementary OS or Pop!_OS.)
    • Window list lacks the minimized windows.
    • Trash lacks item origins.
    • Menu bar colors are limited to white and black (if even).
    • Needs an Apple ID to update preinstalled software.
    • Lacks window tiling shortcuts.
    • Finder hard to remove from Dock, and litters .DS_Store files everywhere.
  • Meta (formerly Facebook)
    • Deletes features like movie ratings and reviews.
    • Deletes posts using poor AI. ('60s Batman & Robin intro GIF is not porn!)
    • WhatsApp doesn't retry failed deliveries. Its tiny error indicators lack error messages and the messages itself only contain a Retry option if they contain an image.
  • Mozilla development was too slow, and Firefox prefers its cloud to single files like MHTLM (supported by IE, Edge, and Chrome) or MAFF (no longer supported by its lone dev) on your local storage. Firefox themes also pale in comparison to Chrome themes, not even supporting new tab backgrounds.
  • Patreon lacks dark mode and hides membership control in settings and behind other logins from the same gmail address. Support on Twitter points back to online form that lacks an option for my issue.
  • Tinder and most other dating apps with poor controls and filtering.
  • Windows:
  • zsh: argument list too long: rm when trying to remove 30,692 files. Even Finder can, slowly.

Video

  • Dailymotion lacks dark mode, comments, and button to watch "sensitive content". Looks like a dying tech demo held up by ads.
  • YouTube:
    • Lacks a feed for only my paid content.
    • Can't block clickbait/spam channels/comments.
    • Linked comments don't appear unless other comments are hidden.
    • Comments disappear for no apparent reason, even without using the k-word.
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See also tech prefs.

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