Adobe AIR 2.0 beta might fix your TweetDeck non-installs and grey blank screens November 30, 2009
Posted by spicycauldron in Technology.Tags: Adobe AIR, Adobe Integrated Runtime, Beta Releases, TweetDeck, Twitter
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Image via CrunchBase
After my last blog entry @amethystdragon on Twitter suggested I try installing the latest version of Adobe AIR to fix the non-installs and grey blank screens of TweetDeck ever since the 0.31.3 update. I already had the most up-to-date official release but then I noticed that a 2.0 beta was available.
I installed AIR 2.0, reinstalled TweetDeck and–at long last–it works. There’s no guarantee this will be the fix for everyone who’s been dealing with the same annoyances but if you’re one of those affected, give it a try.
Thanks to @amethystdragon for the tip!
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TweetDeck upgrades to 0.32, still won't run here! November 30, 2009
Posted by spicycauldron in Technology.Tags: Adobe AIR, crappy error messages that are no help to anyone, installation problems, technical support, TweetDeck
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I was, until version 0.31.3, using TweetDeck all the time. Ever since upgrading (ah, how that word suggests a better experience is imminent but alas, no) to 0.31.3, and now with the newly-released 0.32, I am unable to run TweetDeck. At all. It tells immediately after installation that my data is mangled, suggests I press a non-existent ’submit’ button to wipe my data and start again, so I press the button that IS there, marked OK, and then I have a blank screen and cannot access any functions whatsoever. I just have a horizontal slab of grey with buttons along the top. Lovely.
TweetDeck works fine on the iMac, but not on my MacBook Pro and yet, in terms of softwares installed and general configuraton, both machines are pretty much identical (differences in processor speed and hard drive size aside). I can run the BBC iPlayer application using Adobe AIR just fine (which is what TweetDeck also uses) but the failed TweetDeck install tels me my computer is unfortunately one of those that can’t run Adobe AIR–which, in short, is rubbish.
How to kill boring websites: start charging people to be bored November 30, 2009
Posted by spicycauldron in news and politics, perspectives.Tags: boredom, charging for website access, local newspapers, suburbia
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I can’t somehow imagine the Worksop Guardian, the Ripley & Heanor News, the Whitby Gazette and the Northumberland Gazette getting much site traffic now they’ve started charging for access to content. The Johnston Press websites will either ask users to pay £5 for a three-month subscription to read the full articles or direct them to buy the newspapers.
For those who don’t know from outside the UK, the most obvious difference between our national and local press is that the latter tend to think ‘girl wins trophy for skipping’ and ‘cat rescued from tree’ are hot news topics, while the former, um, don’t. You can purchase almost any local paper if you’re desperate to find out who won darts at the local Labour Club last Tuesday, or if you’ve heard that the hooded chav at number 37 has been done for growing a cannabis plant in his dad’s greenhouse. Exciting, edge of your seat stuff, with every page offering up reminder after reminder of just why everyday suburban living in Little Bumfuck-On-Sea beats climbing the world’s highest mountain in ballet pumps or sailing down the Amazon on a plank of MDF.
That’s all on the few pages in the middle that aren’t festooned with ads for sofas, vacancies for piss-pot changers at the local care home, and double-page LIDL spreads notifying us of 3 for 1 offers on real Zimbabwean butter that risk dangerous stampedes when the stores next open. And then we have the bi-annual Smiley Faced Baby Brat competitions, that often take up three or four pages, where we are treated to a rogues gallery of squishy-faced infants photographed by strange men in tweed suits wearing owl glasses who spend two weeks camped outside the aforementioned LIDL and the slightly more upmarket (okay, that’s a lie) ALDI tempting single mothers with prams with the promise of maybe winning £15 in shopping vouchers for the pound-per-item discount store and a trip to Skegness to see Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown’s progressive comedy routines.
One online bookshop to rule them all November 27, 2009
Posted by spicycauldron in Technology, creative, news and politics, perspectives.Tags: agents, Amazon, booksellers, Borders, e-readers, Kindle, monoculture, publishers, Waterstones, writers
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Like Sauron’s Ring, the notion of a single red-eyed Amazon sweeping all competing bookstores aside has long filled with me horror at the decades of darkness such domination could usher in for publishers and authors around the world, and, eventually, inevitably, readers as well.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against Amazon per se. I use the company myself on rare occasions, because it simply is so huge that almost every conceivable book can be found within its online store. I do, however, have a problem with the way in which Amazon has been allowed by the legislative modus operandi of laissez faire (now that’s a turn of phrase!) in the US and UK, and other countries, to unfairly use its giant musculature to offer such unbeatable deals that traditional bookshops on high streets are now rarer than a banker with a conscience, and it has even managed now to fell another titan that had epic ambitions similiar to its own, namely Borders, which has gone into administration.
We lost a battle, not the war – the fight against the big banks goes on, with new tactics November 26, 2009
Posted by spicycauldron in news and politics, perspectives.Tags: banking, Co-Operative Bank, consumer fight-back, ethical banking, high street banks, money, striking back, unfair bank charges
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We may have lost the battle yesterday but we have not lost the war. The fight over unfair bank charges is not over, and there is something you can do to strike back at the big players, whatever your beef with them–not just charges–and that is to switch to the Co-Op, the UK’s only high street bank with an ethical policy meaning it does not invest in environmentally unsound or morally dubious businesses.
What’s more, Co-Op customers, whatever their income and investment in the bank, are all shareholders and determine policy annually. They have some high street branches but not as many as the biggest players. All your transactions can be completed at any Post Office as well, though, which gives a boost to a truly great and valuable national institution and means, with at least one if not more Post Offices in every town, you’re never going to be without over-the-counter access. And remember, the other banks are increasingly denying us that most basic human interaction unless you’re wanting to withdraw or deposit big money. If it’s what they see as small change–which can be as much as depositing £250–you’re expected to dump your cash in a metal bin with a form you’ve filled in yourself.
I should have switched banks years ago, frankly. Yesterday’s verdict was the rocket up the backside I needed to finally act. My current bank is HBOS and the idea now is to prevent what money I have coming in ever being added to its slush pile again to be used to fund big bonuses, dodgy trade, greedy and never satisfied shareholders, and the deployment of comment trolls seeding online forums (as yesterday) with such incredibly forthright pro-bank statements they had to come from bankers or their wage slaves.
58,413 words in 25 days, with more to follow November 25, 2009
Posted by spicycauldron in creative.Tags: creative writing, first draft, NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, novel-writing, Scrivener, word count
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Okay, so we all know bragging is not the most appealing of things to do. It’s only a one time thing, so bear with me okay? I’ve had my words so far validated by the text robot on the NaNoWriMo website and it returned this lovely image and a link for me to download my winner’s certificate.
I also get access to some other goodies, including a 50% discount on Mac-only writer’s software Scrivener, which I am now a complete evangelist for because it’s wonderful and I will shortly be parting with a ridiculously small sum of money to register the software.
Mulder and Dorcas: how chicks grow, and grow, and grow! November 25, 2009
Posted by spicycauldron in animals.Tags: chickens, cockerels, Copper Blue Marans, hens, pullets, Silver Dorkings
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Bank of England helped housewife out with secret loan now revealed November 24, 2009
Posted by spicycauldron in creative, news and politics.Tags: Bank of England, banking, comedy, Mervyn King, public finances, satire, spoof
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The Bank of England has revealed for the first time that it lent a housewife in Bolton £61.60 in emergency funding last autumn. Bank governor Mervyn King told a committee of MPs it “was to stop the woman from having her gas and leccy cut off, innit, to pay for food and clothes for her kids, innit, to keep the roof over her family’s heads, innit, and to make sure the woman don’t suffer cos us establishment c***s are pouring the rest of the dosh we control secretly into the banks as pay-off for fuckin’ up big style and livin’ it large”.
“Brixton, like,” was King’s reply when asked where he learned to speak such colourful language. The money was repaid in full by January this year, he added. The housewife in question is now said to be working part-time in the red light district in the centre of Manchester, providing a service for bankers in the area who like nothing more than something that rhymes with banking.
When asked if the Bank of England might give out a larger amount of money–say, £61.6bn–to all the people in the UK currently struggling with personal debt and the high cost of living, King laughed for several minutes and then farted before informing the committee that “the public can fuck off, yeah, cos I’m gettin’ hungry now and want to go to a posh place that serves oysters and fish eggs–besides, we got that amount, right, but we is savin’ it for the people who really needs it, and they’s the ones in sharp suits as work in the Square Mile, my mates basically”.
Why do people pay for friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter? November 24, 2009
Posted by spicycauldron in Technology, perspectives, strange universe.Tags: Facebook, marketing, social networking, Twitter
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Why on earth do some people buy friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter? I say friends, but of course I don’t really mean friends at all when money has changed hands to acquire them, I mean online identities attached to your own as friends or followers, according to the parlance of the two social networking sites.
On Twitter, followers can be bought in blocks starting at £53 for 1,000. They’re not cheap. The biggest block marketing firm USocial is selling is 100,000 people. Nobody has 100,000 friends. I don’t know anyone with 1,000 friends. Not real ones at any rate. A few hundred, sure, but how many of those are friends and how many are mere acquaintances, passing ships in the night?
Most of us can understand the human drives involved in paying for company, paying for sex, whether we object to such transactions on moral and religious grounds or not. Loneliness and lust are the most obvious factors involved in reaching for your wallet in order to get the chance to touch and caress someone else’s body. But forking up serious money just to stack up the number count on a column on a website?
