Rise of the Machines

It is official. I hate all forms of technology. However, all of them hate me a LOT more. Truly the rise of the machines is inevitable and I will have to accept the day when my computer overlords stop toying with me and REALLY begin to punish me.

Over the last few weeks I have spent many, many hours of my life trying to reason with my computer overlord to try and get it to do simple tasks like connect to the internet or actually connect to the network it things has a maximum strength signal. You know, really challenging things like that. I have come to accept that Vista is actually the Devil Incarnate (don’t think Linux is any better…) but now I am learning where the acolytes hide.

I have an iPod nano and an iPod shuffle. I have had them for ages (both were presents, I am too tight fisted to buy things like that) and they used to work fine. However, since the Rise of the Machines has begun, they now make my life hell.

Over the last three weeks, both have intermittently ceased to work and forced me to reinstall their software from scratch several times. This is not normal behaviour for them – I’ve had the nano with no problems at all for two years… This was annoying but I could live with it.

Also in the last month, my Nikon Picture Project software (I use it to download images from my camera to the pc) has decided to stop noticing when the camera is attached. This forces me to use explorer to go into the camera (it is treated as a drive) and copy the files. The problem with this, is I now have to rename and batch process in separate stages. Time consuming but not life threatening, I suppose.

After a week of working fine, every time I attach my phone to the PC to update calendar / contacts, I get a slew of error messages saying some unknown driver hasn’t installed properly. Again, annoying but I can live with this.

The spell checker in Firefox (which I use to write this, so I am pretty dependent on it..) has decided to only work 1 time in 10. This is not one of those times so I will apologise for all typos now…

Today’s FINALSTRAW©™® is iTunes. When I got my new computer I backed up all my old music to an external HDD and copied it to the new machine. For some reason iTunes decided that meant it needed to have three entries for every song – giving me over 3600 entries. I spent what felt like 10 years deleting the spurious entries and everything worked fine. Tonight I have opened iTunes and they are all back. All of them. For good measure, there are even more entries this time. It seems that all my podcasts have now been duplicated. I am sure it is doing this to see if it can push me to a nervous break down. It is close…

I am about to search google to see if I can find an automated way to delete the spurious entries (as they dont actually point anywhere), if my internet connection dies as I try to find the solution it will be the final proof my PC is now sentient and is waging a guerilla war against me.

4 thoughts on “Rise of the Machines

  1. iTunes has a duplicate “detector” of sorts, I believe it’s accessed through ctrl+, (comma) or via one of the menus. I will say though, it works like crap. If you have songs that have the same name but are in fact different, they’re dupes. I have songs that aren’t even by the same artist or have similar names that are dupes because they have the same time length. It doesn’t work 100% but between using it and Explorer, you can weed out actual duplicates.

    As for Nikon Picture Project, just use something else! Picasa can import and catalog for you and it’s free. Been using it for years, never a problem. There’s a few out there for Linux but they’re not very good at all including Picasa For Linux (which is just WINE+Picasa). There’s also Adobe Lightroom if you want to pay for something, my girlfriend and I use this for our professional photography.

    As for spell checking in Firefox, I have no clue, I rarely depend on it, mostly because it sucks if you’re using en-US by default and spell lots of non-English English words (like colour). If I wonder how a word is spelled, I simply type “define: WORD” in Google and it can point me in the right direction or I use dictionary.com . This stuff is no fault of Firefox, it’s a fault of the dictionaries it uses (usually aspell and ispell).

    As for the iPods, you can use another manager such as Anapod or Winamp or many others. Ipods work in Amarok in Linux by default.

    As for wireless connectivity, I’m having the same issue. Been using the same router for about 2 years and nary a problem but in this last week, the wireless connectivity out on my patio (where I do most of my surfing) has gone from awesome to almost unusable. No reason for it either, the router hasn’t moved and I haven’t swapped out my beefy antennas for crappier ones. There’s nothing new as far as interference-inducing electronics either. I believe it’s a case of the overwhelming humidity we’ve been having but I’m not sure.

  2. 😆 I’m too having this nagging issue with the wireless connectivity, where it gets disconnected too often. Didn’t change anything, and still it works when it wants to and when I want, it’s again down!

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