complaints – Technobabbles

Archive by category "complaints"

Sneaky ATM Fees with US Bank

dgw 2010-05-25 - 19:27 2010-05-25complaints 3

OK, I’ve about had it with ATMs. It’s bad enough that some of them charge ridiculous $2 and $3 (or more) fees for transactions, but at least when you’re making a withdrawal they tell you about it. Always.1 So imagine my surprise when I logged into my bank’s website today to find a $2 fee from US Bank for a transfer I made using one of their ATMs. When I made the transfer, no mention was made of a fee. I’m more than a little irritated with this—I think justifiably so. Since when is it acceptable to charge a hidden…

tr.im: An Exercise in How Not to Run a Service

dgw 2010-04-09 - 13:18 2011-10-30complaints, internet, opinion 1

It recently came to my attention that tr.im has decided to stop accepting new URLs shortened through the website and asked developers to remove tr.im functionality from their applications, and plans to shut down the redirection service in a year or two. I went there to shorten an address on Tuesday but came upon this page instead: Ever since discovering the service about two years ago, I have shortened almost every URL I post to Twitter, Facebook, and several other such sites through tr.im. That will have to stop, apparently, because those addresses will no longer work in the not-too-distant…

“No Evil”: My NET10 Wireless Experiences

dgw 2010-02-24 - 09:30 2014-05-22AT&T, complaints, Google Voice, ideas, iPhone, opinion, technology 38

Update (2012-02-26): Apparently NET10 now sells SIMs for use with AT&T, T-Mobile, and unlocked GSM phones, if you’re willing to pay for the $50/month Unlimited Talk/Text/Data plan. Thanks to Anna for her comment. Last summer I began using a prepaid cell phone (an LG 300G, the cheapest, most basic model available at my purchase location) from NET10 Wireless, supposedly the “high-usage division” of TracFone. NET10’s rates are flat: 10¢ per minute (even if it’s actually one second, like any other per-minute charge) and 5¢ per text message in or out. The phone’s been very handy for some important calls and…

Updated Topify Gmail Filters

dgw 2009-05-06 - 21:08 2009-10-31complaints, fixes, hacks, internet, Twitter 1

Well, Twitter got prettier follow and direct message notifications today. Bully for them. Now I have to publish this update. Update (05/07, 22:45): My update was broken, so the update had to be updated. The filter should now catch DMs, too. Believe it or not, I was wrong that Twitter changed the address that direct message notifications come from; it stayed the same. So that part of the filter didn’t need to change. All’s well that ends well, right? Update 2 (05/07, 23:05): Well, scratch the new filters. Twitter went back to the old From addresses tonight. Y’all can use…

Gmail Chat FAILs with Ping.fm GTalk Enabled

dgw 2009-03-03 - 17:15 2014-05-22complaints, errors, Gmail, Google, Google Talk, internet, technology, tools 3

Image via CrunchBase Last night, I found a chat in my Gmail account that I’d never seen. It was sent an hour after I left the public library on February 26, while I was offline, but never showed up in my Inbox. It wasn’t even labeled as sent while I was offline. I was baffled completely until I realized this afternoon what I’d been doing that night at the library. February 26 (a Thursday, the day of #snowmageddon here in Minneapolis/St. Paul) was the day I discovered that Ping.fm—my very favorite social networking tool, second only to Twitter—had added support…

How Should I Respond to Copied Photos?

dgw 2008-08-17 - 09:24 2009-11-02complaints, copyright infringement, internet, opinion, photography, questions 7

Update (2009-11-02): I had the content removed this summer. Pretty fast, too; Facebook’s DMCA team had both offending albums deleted within about 24 hours. All right, it’s time to get this issue out there. I tweeted it a few times before, many months ago, but last night I was just reminded of the issue by an entire Facebook album of photos uploaded by someone I went canoeing with last summer — but represented as original works. No credit, no acknowledgment, not even anything about the fact that someone else took the photos! Fine, I did upload the photos to Picasa…

Hampton Inn Internet Issues

dgw 2008-08-15 - 23:32 2009-11-02complaints, hotels, internet, opinion, technology 0

Image via Wikipedia All right, so obviously I managed to get online. But it took about half an hour. Let me begin the saga… (And this was after something of a disappointment at the NHSI Musical Theatre extension’s presentation… but I don’t think I’ll blog about that.) We checked into the hotel around 22:00, then got up to the room. I set up my computer and started looking for clues as to how the Internet access was delivered (RJ-45 plug or Wi-Fi). I finally figured out that it was wireless (the amenities book gave the impression that it was wired)…

Google, Please Don’t Disrupt the Continuity of Google Page Creator Sites

dgw 2008-08-09 - 07:00 2014-05-22complaints, Google, Google Sites, ideas, internet, opinion, tools 1

Don’t worry, I’m working on a post about my summer at Northwestern University. It’s just a lot of writing, thinking, and recalling, so it’ll take some time. Meanwhile, this post has a very important message I wanted to get out. All right, someone needs to think. Hard. Someone at Google, that is. Why? Because a lot of people, including me, will be potentially made unhappy when Google Sites takes over for Google Page Creator. Google Blogoscoped published “Google Slowly Closing Page Creator” a few days ago, which got me thinking. How much do I use Google Page Creator? For its…

Twitter’s Problems: Getting Worse

dgw 2008-06-27 - 13:30 2015-10-29complaints, internet, Jaiku, opinion, Twitter 3

I once told myself I’d never write about Twitter‘s downtime, because everyone in the tech blogosphere writes about it. Today I’m going against that. The problems have simply become ridiculous. Back when I first started using Twitter, it was very responsive. (I tried to find my first tweet as an example, but there’s currently a paging limit of 10 which blocks everything but the 200 most recent tweets.) Posting was nearly instantaneous, the API allowed 70 requests every hour, one could get replies to one’s own tweets using a convenient tab on the site or simple call to the API,…

SPAMfighter Tagline is Just Spam to Me

dgw 2008-06-05 - 23:25 2015-10-31complaints, email, Gmail, opinion 0

This is what I was doing while I was supposed to be finishing my coursework for the year. Don’t worry, I’m working on homework now; this was supposed to publish four hours ago and didn’t, so I tried again. Manually, because scheduled posting is temporarily borked. Image by Josh Walker via FlickrSpam is something everyone’s heard of, and probably gotten at least a few times. Messages like the one on the right have been going around with different month names for a long time. These are the kinds of things most of us know to ignore (but somebody must be…

Category: complaints