Rubbish free headphone
Far be it from me to look a gift horse in
the mouth, but this particular beast should be put to sleep and used in a
frozen lasagna. Having taken several hundred pounds from your wallet, some
smartphone manufacturers think the best way to thank you is with a pair of
poor-quality in-ear headphones. Not only are they usually uncomfortable, with
an uncanny ability to fall out of your lugholes, they don’t exactly provide an
impressive showcase for your new handset’s audio abilities. To the companies
that bundle decent earphones, we salute you.
The pirate bay block
What
people trying to access The Pirate Bay actually see
I’m not condoning piracy, but the
court-ordered blocking of the Pirate Bay hasn’t benefitted anyone. If you’re a
pro-piracy ‘freedom’ fighter, then you obviously disagree with it on a moral
basis (and because you can’t illegally download the latest installment in the
Twilight series). Meanwhile, rights holders and artists haven’t been served
well by it either, because it simply hasn’t worked. The Pirate Bay is still
very much accessible thanks to various proxy sites, and that doesn’t look
likely to change. Even worse, it doesn’t encourage media companies to think
about changing their business models, which they so badly need to do.
The single-button mouse
Remember when Mac users had to get by with
a single mouse button and had to use the Ctrl key instead of a right-click? Oh,
how we used to laugh. Although this is no longer the case since Apple came up
with the revolutionary, world-changing idea of a two-button mouse (about 20
years after everyone else) and called it, amusingly enough, the Mighty Mouse,
its legacy remains. Many a Mac user will still instinctively reach for the Ctrl
key for right-clicks and will assign the second mouse button to something like
revealing the desktop, making all the open windows dance a merry jig, which is
apparently more useful than a context menu.
Captcha codes
Is that a zero or latter O? Should I type
that space in or not? Welcome to the world of Captcha codes. Let’s be clear:
website security is important. However, so is the sanity of your visitors. In
spite of that, the many websites that require you to sign up will ask you to
respond to a Captcha. Sometimes, you’ll be lucky and get it right first time,
but other times you’ll spend five minutes refreshing the stupid thing, waiting
for one that’s vaguely legible. As annoying as that is, it doesn’t compare to
typing one and then finding it didn’t work because it’s case sensitive. The
good news is that some websites have abandoned Captchas recently, so that at
least provides a narrow slither of hope for the future.
Apple
The
future of mouse technology, with two (yes, two!) buttons
As the proud owner of an iPad and a Macbook
Pro (and a few Android gadgets as well – they’re all for work, of course), I’m
not totally against Apple, but so many of its actions are annoying or
counterproductive. It produces some great technology, but its products are
often highly derivative, and yet it tries to enforce patents on just about everything,
including, quite memorably, the idea of a rectangular tablet. On top of that,
it has a habit of leaving prototype iPhones in public places and then trying to
crush those who find them. As a consumer, I also find it annoying that it
doesn’t offer refunds on apps like Google does, in spite of the fact that most
of the ratings and reviews in the App Store appear to be fake.
In-app purchases
Nothing gin life is free. It’s a cliché,
but it’s one that’s worth bearing in mind when it comes to free apps with
in-app purchases, which are worryingly very common in children’s games.
Downloaded a free app that lets your kid play with about if you want to buy it
a new ball or a Spider Man mask? You’ll need ‘coins’ for that, which you have
to buy with real money. That’s all well and good until you realize that to get
all the extra bits you’ll have to buy $750-worth of virtual currency – all for
a game that’s no bigger than a few megabytes. Based on this kind of logic, the
first Sims game would have cost around 25 grand.
Comment sections
The
unmistakable look of someone who’s finally succeeding in connecting to a Wi-Fi
hotspot
One of the great things about the internet
is that it gives everyone a voice. Sadly, one of the worst things about it is
that it gives everyone a voice. A lot of it’s just trolling, but unfortunately
it’s likely that some of the idiotic, racist, homophobic and sexist vitriol
that’s spouted in comment sections on sites like YouTube is real. Also, some
readers of online journalism seem to think they have the right to personally
insult the author of an article, just because they disagree with them. If
they’re not attacking the writer, they’re arguing with each other, and not in a
useful, constructive kind of way either. Clearly, lacking opposable thumbs
doesn’t stop you operating a keyboard.
Ink prices
If printer manufacturers are to be
believed, putting non-official ink in your printer is akin to filling up a
Ferrari with strawberry yoghurt, but I’ve been using refillable cartridges and
bottled ink for well over a year without any problems. Maybe the official stuff
if slightly better in the long run, but there’s no way it’s worth the
exorbitant prices that printer companies charge for it. Of course, they often
price their printers extremely low but, like in-app purchases, the cost of the
ink soon outweighs the initial saving.
Bloatware
There’s nothing worse than turning on a new
laptop or smartphone and then watching the poor thing struggle to start up,
thanks to an overabundance of preloaded applications and manufacturer-designed
widgets dragging it down like an obese albatross around its delicate neck. To
make matters once, with mobile phones, the network enforced Bloatware is
usually resistant to any attempt to uninstall it.
You’ll never use the rubbish maps app, the
proprietary app store or any of the other bloat, but you absolutely must keep
all this crap on your phone (unless you root it and possible void your warranty
– yay!).
