PDAs are teh suck

Okay, I know I bought a PDA not a phone, but still. I’m pissed off. I went to UNSW end-of-semester party tonight and didn’t want to be car­ry­ing some­thing the size of a quarter-kilo slab of choco­late with me, so swapped SIMs with another phone and took it.

Point of irri­ta­tion #1: None of my con­tacts are stored on-SIM. There is no way to STORE con­tacts on SIM that I have yet dis­cov­ered, only to import them off it. Hence, hell will ensue if I ever decide to change hand­sets (as it did when I moved from a CDMA hand­set to a GSM one a few weeks back… this point is fresh in my mem­ory, and still rather painful).

Point of irri­ta­tion #2: Because I swapped the SIM out, I left the phone with the SIM socket read­ily acces­si­ble so I could eas­ily replace it when I got home. This meant leav­ing the bat­tery out. PDAs can sur­vive a few min­utes on resid­ual charge (backup batt?) some­how, but appar­ently leav­ing it alone for… three hours (? I wasn’t out long because I’m work­ing tomor­row and… well, a few rea­sons) means that it’s prone to nuk­ing every­thing in ROM/RAM/whatever the heck it stores its stu­pid infor­ma­tion in.

For­tu­nately I’m pretty good with my back­ups (2/6/6 was the last). But I still lost a hand­ful of cal­en­dar items, more than a few mes­sages, one or two con­tact additions/modifications, my lat­est email sync info, and, more sig­nif­i­cantly, Bejew­eled high scores. I know, I know. I nearly threw it into a wall when I dis­cov­ered this. But that would have been unkind to the wall.

# by Josh on June 9th, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
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Old-fashioned Nautilus location bar in Ubuntu Breezy

Regretably, the loca­tion bar has been dis­posed of in the lat­est ver­sion of Nau­tilus, in favour of but­tons to nav­i­gate to the present direc­tory. This sucks. Espe­cially when try­ing to access hid­den fold­ers quickly and eas­ily. Today, I dis­cov­ered it’s pos­si­ble to use Ctrl + L to achieve the same thing, but I really don’t see why a series of but­tons should be used to do what I could do before. In my case the but­tons take more time, because I’m a key­board per­son and mou­s­ing is, except for when very tired, a sec­ondary action.

So I changed the default back to what it should have stayed as, fol­low­ing these instruc­tions I found online. I say “should have stayed as” because the change intro­duces insur­mount­able bar­ri­ers (e.g. nav­i­gat­ing to hid­den files/folders) to the user expe­ri­ence, in favour of a very dubi­ous UI enhance­ment. Dic­tated not only by con­ven­tion, but also practicality.

Fur­ther­ing my irri­ta­tion was the dif­fi­culty of chang­ing it back. The steps described on the post I found aren’t par­tic­u­larly com­plex, but this is some­thing that should be acces­si­ble via the Edit → Pref­er­ences menu within Nau­tilus itself: it is akin to show/hide hid­den files, which is in there where it should be (also via Ctrl + H — but I con­sider this poorly imple­mented, too, as it requires a man­ual refresh of the page to restore initally-screwed up icon positioning).

# by Josh on October 24th, 2005 Tags: ,
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