It's time for my next installment of "Why is @Amtrak service so terrible? It doesn't need to be this way." Check out the last chapter at https://twitter.com/jikamens/status/1217620947781541889. Today's topic: how to make a pre-trip Covid-19 check form as difficult as possible to fill out. #TrainTwitter 1/ I got a notification on my phone that I… Read More »
I recently received a shipment of cat food from Petco which, as far as I know, I had not ordered. I did have a “repeat delivery” order scheduled for that variety of cat food, but usually when Petco is about to send you a repeat delivery order they notify you by email to give you… Read More »
Recent releases of GNOME on Ubuntu, and presumably in other distributions as well, finally support remote access to your GNOME desktop on both Xorg and Wayland from a VNC client. However, they do not allow you to connect to your desktop when it is locked, and similarly if your desktop locks — either because you… Read More »
UPDATE [August 9, 2021]: It turns out DisplayLink doesn’t quite work in 21.04. See this blog posting for the latest on how to work around the remaining issue. Thanks to Peter Boros for pointing out that Canonical and Synaptics have made the fixes necessary to make DisplayLink work with Ubuntu 21.04 without any of the… Read More »
Dear sales representative who wants me to buy your company’s products, If I’ve emailed you a link to this blog posting, it’s probably because you’ve sent me multiple unsolicited sales emails. Welcome to the club of vendors from whom I’m unlikely to ever purchase anything! No unsolicited sales email I have ever received from a… Read More »
I have been trying for three months to open a @AskSynchrony account for the @Google store. It has been an unmitigated disaster every step of the way. It boggles the mind that Google has chosen such a terrible partner for providing this service. For background, I have never been a victim of identity theft, I… Read More »
A billion people have written about this before, but I like my approach, so I’m sharing it in case someone else finds it useful. Most of my passwords go into a password manager; those are long and random and generated by the password manager and I don’t care whether they’re easy to type or memorable… Read More »
I am often running prerelease versions of Ubuntu, for three reasons: (a) in general I like to help find with finding bugs in prerelease software that I use and benefit from, to give back to the community; (b) I specifically want to find and report bugs that impact me in Ubuntu prereleases to increase the… Read More »
UPDATE [August 9, 2021]: It turns out DisplayLink doesn’t quite work in 21.04. See this blog posting for the latest on how to work around the remaining issue. UPDATE [June 3, 2021]: DisplayLink works on Ubuntu 21.04 now without any of my fixes. If you’ve installed my fixes, see this blog posting for uninstall instructions.… Read More »
[For the record, as of January 12, 2023, this bug still isn’t fixed in the current version, 7.2.1, of Synology Drive Client for Linux, more than two years after I reported it to Synology. The workaround described below still works. However, thanks to the assistance of an extremely helpful and competent Synology support engineer, I… Read More »