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The computer/OS/interface/webpage annoyances thread

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Comments

  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    I thought installing anything pops up that dialog.

  • a little muffled
    What pops it up is doing something that requires elevated permissions. Installing into a directory you own does not.
  • BeeBee
    edited 2014-12-23 13:41:29

    Yeah.  Windows has done a lot of updates recently that clamp down even harder on administrator access to certain directories, to the point of making it difficult for even administrator accounts to get shit done.


    One of the overnight updates they did a few months ago stopped most of our developers cold for several hours because we couldn't edit our own dev directories even though we were both the owner and the admin account (you'd get a message said that you need permission from $USER, where $USER was the account you were currently signed in as).  We had to have IT come in and override the whole thing with even higher admin accounts.


    They'll also switch User Account Control on every few updates, and you have to turn it off every fucking time for the same reason.


     


    And while I'm here, this one is more of a complaint about the OS, but web design in general.


    Sites like facebook or urbandictionary will have an absolutely-positioned sticky header that remains at the top of the page as you scroll down.


    If you value anything in life, you won't do this.  You will put your header at the top of the page, then size the content div with height: calc(100% - #px) so it has its own scrollbar (the last browser not to support this is IE8, and if you still have to support IE8 then you have paying customers who need to understand that their dinosaur browser is doubling your development time and thus costs incurred to them.  I recommend this approach).  If you don't do this, the page-down key is rendered completely useless because the header covers up the top inch of the next page.


    Actually, Facebook appears to have some kind of special handling for page-down, because it lines up anyway.  But it's a very elaborate exception.


    Also, you will make sticky headers small.  If your header is ever thicker than the browser toolbar, it's either doing something absolutely critical to basic nav functionality -- preferably collapsible -- or it needs to be in the content.  One of my friends linked me to some WACKY pop culture list.  I couldn't get through it because their sticky ad header took up almost half the fucking page, and they also had a sticky footer a good 80px high that did nothing at all.  There was literally less content space than header + footer.  Don't make your viewers read the page through a fucking speakeasy door.  Really now.

  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    Mousing over the Styles in the default ribbon of Microsoft Word 2007 has the effect of instantly previewing that style for the paragraph where your typing cursor is.


    If you happen to be typing at the same time, it'll triplicate your keystrokes.


    Why would you ever do this?  No one would do this on purpose, but if you have a touchpad, and the palms of your hands are all over it...

  • edited 2014-12-24 10:20:31
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    Also you know what's really horrible?


    Touchpads that have combined click zones with their touch zones.


    I commonly open threads in my Steam notifications and various other places by right-clicking then pressing T, to open the link in a new tab.


    Synaptics ClickPad V1.1 has a SmartSense feature, which is supposed to tell when you are clicking vs. typing or something like that.  I think it determines the threshold at which it presumes your palms are resting on the touchpad.


    Using this feature AT ALL means that there is a short pause in touchpad functionality after pressing T, because the computer thinks that I am using the keyboard.


    Turning off this feature means that my page will randomly scroll and do all sorts of funny things while I type.


     


    Oddly, when setting up this computer, I remember running across a different setting that explicitly had to do with "turn off my touchpad while I type", and I can't find that setting anymore.

  • I intentionally set the "wait a couple seconds after typing to enable the trackpad" option on my laptops because I am a big hulking idiot who has a tendency to rest the palms of my hands too close to the trackpad.


    It certainly doesn't help that trackpads nowadays are so much LARGER than they used to be. More surface area = easier to accidentally touch.

  • a little muffled

    I just disabled the trackpad when I had a laptop.

  • Nyktos wrote:


    I just disabled the trackpad when I had a laptop.



    I do prefer to use a mouse most of the time, but that makes it less "portable" since it means I always have to have a surface to use the mouse on.

  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    My touchpad is oddly placed, such that it is centered relative to the main QWERTY keyboard...but this laptop also has a numpad, so the QWERTY keyboard is actually a little bit to the left of center.


    Make that, a significant bit to the left of center.


    The touchpad is also one continuous piece of plastic.  It's clickable on the bottom...well, actually, it's clickable along most of its surface.  About 30% at the top won't respond to pressure, but the other 70% or so will, of which about 50% is left click and 20% in a long rectangle along the bottom and to the right corner is right-click.


    But the fact that it's just one piece of plastic means that when I use my right hand to operate it, I frequently right-click it when I mean to left-click, because I'm used to reaching down and clicking on a mouse button down there, and I often don't reach far enough to the left.

  • edited 2014-12-30 13:47:02
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    I've finally found an actual explanation (with mechanism) of why I seem to randomly be interpreted to be hitting Ctrl while typing on my laptop keyboard, even when I'm not: http://ask.metafilter.com/136604/Why-does-my-laptop-think-Im-pushing-ctrl


    Basically, the pinch zoom feature works by applying Ctrl.


    Having two hands on the touchpad causes it to activate randomly, which then combines with my keystrokes to produce strange results -- such as random tab closings (Ctrl+W).


    Thankfully, I rarely ever use pinch zoom.  Time to disable it.

  • I'm glad my laptop doesn't have pinch zoom.

  • After who knows how long, I learned that GMail has multiple tabs for ages, i.e. a primary tab for mostly everything, a social tab for arbitrary social things (twitter, tumblr, etc.), and a promotions tab for who knows what. It made me get lost unable to find a confirmation email I was looking for, and I want all my stuff in one place anyways (which I can probably configure it to, but whatevs).

  • "I've come to the conclusion that this is a VERY STUPID IDEA."

    So TVTropes had a new layout, and it has... problems. At first, it wouldn't keep me logged in, and now it won't let me log in at all.

  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"

    Who knows, perhaps that'll reduce my TVT addiction, since I don't feel like logging in again even if I can.

  • Aesthetically it is far superior to what it replaced. They are still working out the bugs, but for the most part it looks like a website should in 2015.


    And the people there who are complaining about it should be happy that the site remains USABLE. Toon Zone has degenerated into a horrendous nightmare. Even Wikia is a pain in the ass now - to edit, at least.

  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    I logged in just fine.  Like yesterday or so.

  • "I've come to the conclusion that this is a VERY STUPID IDEA."

    Problem was fixed, thankfully. Don't have any particular issue with the new design, but the login thing was annoying.

  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    Is there a way to make the Windows taskbar place (never-combined or non-combined) taskbar tabs in a grid, up to a much larger number than is typically the case by default?  And then NOT group things by application but instead by order opened, and then NOT have them move to all align left (or up and left if you have a multi-line taskbar) when you close a window but just have them stay where they are, even if there are "holes" in the middle?

  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    I've figured out why Thunderbird was giving me so much trouble what with my touchpad being a jerk.


    So I've had that problem with my touchpad being unresponsive for a second after typing, unless I set it to completely ignore palmchecking or whatever that feature is called.  So I told it to do so.


    The problem with that is that this causes me to randomly scroll the page in small amounts and the cursor to randomly move while I type.


    Now this is usually not that big of a problem.  But on Thunderbird, it does much more.  I'm typing an e-mail, in a non-maximized e-mail window, with my Thunderbird main window in the back.  And suddenly that window will regain focus and then all my keystrokes will be interpreted as inputs to that window -- which can be devastating since Thunderbird has a lot of single-key commands that can cause e-mails to be skipped, archived, ignored, marked as read, etc..  (They would be good things otherwise, but...)


    It turns out that the reason for this is that Thunderbird's main window absorbs focus, when I am in another Thunderbird window (not just any window, but specifically another Thunderbird window).  Not sure how to fix this...


    And if only I still had access to Pine for my e-mail...

  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    FUCK.


     


    I just accidentally archived an e-mail from my school e-mail account.  It uses Microsoft's Outlook web e-mail service and I have no idea how to access the archives.  At least with GMail I know to pull it back out of the archive and into inbox...


    and worst of all I don't even know what the e-mail was

  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human

    Oh, it turns out they became locally archived by Thunderbird.

  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    So I was looking up how babby is formed today and then I noticed that Yahoo Answer's top bar apparently includes a link to Mozilla telling people to get the newest version of Firefox.

    Not actually an annoyance, just a curiosity.  Though maybe it is if you hate Firefox.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Is there a way to force webpages that normally don't let themselves be cached, to be cached by my browser?
  • So I was looking up how babby is formed today and then I noticed that Yahoo Answer's top bar apparently includes a link to Mozilla telling people to get the newest version of Firefox.

    Not actually an annoyance, just a curiosity.  Though maybe it is if you hate Firefox.


    I first noticed that on Flickr, where it is kind of annoying, if only because the Yahoo! navbar is obviously tacked onto a Flickr design that was not intended for it.
  • Maybe On Earth. Maybe In the Future.
    For some reason embeded videos on firefox tend to stutter constantly for me now. I'm not sure if it's because of the browser itself or if it's because flash is kind of shitty itself.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    I have a Waterfox portable installation on this machine.

    It is starting to run into weird problems.  I would like to upgrade it but the problem is that upgrading it seems to just cause far more problems, as the upgrader doesn't think of this as a portable install and instead tries to install "normal" Waterfox on it.

    I'd have to find my profile folder and figure out how to transfer it from the portable to the normal one at least, if not also figure out how to transfer it back to a portable copy afterwards if I still want to go portable.
  • Why can't you just do a fresh install of the portable and then copy your profile folder from the old installation?
  • edited 2015-02-08 22:56:41
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    I'm not sure where the profile folder is; I remember I had trouble finding it before.  If this were a non-portable version, I could just look it up, but it's not normal Firefox, nor even normal Waterfox, but portable Waterfox.
  • edited 2015-02-09 07:41:43
    The IRCs want you(r soul): irc.esper.net, #ijbm
    I'm not sure where the profile folder is; I remember I had trouble finding it before.  If this were a non-portable version, I could just look it up, but it's not normal Firefox, nor even normal Waterfox, but portable Waterfox.
    Hit up about:support in your portable install, hit Open Directory next to Profile Folder. Yay browsing about:about randomly.
  • BeeBee
    edited 2015-02-11 23:38:47
    So here's a nice lunker I saw earlier today.

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908356

    Basically IE11's browser tools will sometimes deny themselves permission to do FUCKING ANYTHING and you have to add localhost to trusted sites as a prerequisite to debugging your own shit.  Which doesn't always work because they changed the way the Trusted Sites list works too.  If you do not do this, the debugger starts throwing scads of errors that prevent most of the script on your page from firing at all.

    Oh, and you can only add https to trusted sites.  Again, even if it's localhost and doesn't have an SSL because it's a goddamn localhost.
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