Existing users, 
User Name atritium
Member Since 2005-09-23
Total number of Feedback Posts: 7
Total number of comments: 2
Last 10 Feedback Posts by atritium [ Search for All ]
Delicious Library 2.2 (Mac OS X)
Delicious LIbrary V2 "phones home" on start-up. It wants to connect to the company for some reason, presumably logging, but who knows: Transferring data about you, your system, your database, pass along files it looks at on your system, etc. If the connection is prevented, the software doesn't work thereafter. So it appears not to be just a check for updates. They want to mandate/force the connection. Inquiries to the company get only an automated response with the latest story about how tiny they are and how overwhelmed they are. In four years, I've gotten only 1 meaningful response to 6 inquiries (a refund for DL2 because of the privacy issue, as I reverted to DL1). DL version 1 did not phone home and only connected to amazon for look-ups. Database software that initiates connections to the manufacturer's site without (normal) user knowledge should be considered DOA. The potential for mischief is extremely high. [alert admin]
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Tuesday, September 01 2009 @ 11:36 PM PDT
Mozilla Firefox 3.5.2 (Mac OS X)
I've never liked Firefox because it "phones home" behind your back. Starting it up, it contacts at least these sites without your knowledge, presumably logging your activity in the process. www-mozilla-com.geo.mozilla.com fxfeeds.mozilla.com ocsp.thawte.com www.google.com sb-ssl.google.com I've seen it contact something called "safesites" too, but haven't reproduced that one. [alert admin]
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Saturday, August 15 2009 @ 05:06 PM PDT
RadioRocker 1.1.3 (Mac OS X)
Working Better! Most problems were on my end ...
The tip another user posted about clicking "play" after connecting to a station solved the problem I was having getting only 20% of the stations I tried. When first trying the program, some stations would start if you just clicked the station list. Many others it turns out require the additional step of clicking "play" after it indicates it has connected. Well, OK. As far as the massive audio distortion I was hearing, it occurs when I send audio to external Logitech USB speakers. Playing RadioRocker through the internal iMac G5 speakers sounds good -- no distortion and good volume control, music, voice, everything. Why the external speakers don't work well for RadioRocker is a puzzle. It is the only application I've encountered with the issue. iTunes and other audio programs are improved by playing through the better quality external speakers. So some quirks and some work-arounds, but now it's usable. I like it. Nice piece of work. [alert admin]
Friday, July 11 2008 @ 11:50 PM PDT
RadioRocker 1.0.2 (Mac OS X)
This is extremely cool and could be a "fundamental" application on my Mac that I would use all the time (like EyeTV, etc.). I'd pay $20+ for this, except for some issues -- mostly, the audio seems flakey. I don't know if that's due to the application or the broadcaster (all stations seem to have the same problem though), but I have to set the Mac (G5/PPC iMac) volume on the lowest level above shut-off to avoid blasting out the windows. Even with that, it remains too loud, especially when considering how distorted the audio is. You can listen to voice for awhile, but the distortion becomes tiring after a couple minutes. It sounds like a speaker somewhere being massively over-driven, except the Mac is turned down to one notch above off. Listening to music isn't possible. Maybe only 20% of the dozen plus stations I tried at random actually came in. Sometimes it would say "stream unavailable", which is fine, but most of the time it would seem to connect and there would be nothing. Again, I don't know if this is because of the broadcaster or the RadioRocker application. It would be great if the stations could be tagged for city and state, not just state. So I'm really enthused and would pay for this, but realistically won't be able to use it because of the borderline painful/headache inducing audio problems I encountered. Will definately be keeping an eye on this application. [alert admin]
Friday, July 04 2008 @ 05:43 PM PDT
Garmin WebUpdater 2.0.2 (Mac OS X)
2.0.2 Works Fine ... given prior clean-up 
I used AppDelete to wipe out the prior WebUpdater 2.0.1 sw, which never worked on my G5 iMac. Once the old sw was removed, the new 2.0.2 package installed just fine and updated my Nuvi 660 firmware from 3.70 to 4.20, updated the GPS code, traffic receiver sw, and bluetooth. No problems. Everything was slick, and the Nuvi 660 is fine afterward. [alert admin]
Wednesday, December 12 2007 @ 10:50 PM PST
OSXplanet 1.0.1 (Mac OS X)
Very nice application I have enjoyed greatly! It worked fine when I upgraded my iMac G5 to 10.5, then stopped working when I went to 10.5.1. Upon start-up, the progress bar spins, then quits after a minute or so without updating the Desktop. Deleted app and reinstalled with the same result. Also tried turning off firewall. The preview pane shows the correct image, but it never gets to the Desktop. Sent to developer, hope it's repairable. Console log reports: OSXplanet[589] NSDocumentController Info.plist warning: The values of CFBundleTypeRole entries must be 'Editor', 'Viewer', 'None', or 'Shell'. OSXplanet[589] unknown stream error code in FTP domain - 425 OSXplanet[589] Something went wrong while downloading Cloud File. Cloud download Failed [alert admin]
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Monday, November 19 2007 @ 02:22 PM PST
Delicious Library 1.5.3 (Mac OS X)
Having input a book library of 2500 items (90% of which were published in the last 10-15 years) on a 1.8 GHz iMac G5, I'd give the software a "B-" due mostly to the luke-warm end result. The book cover graphics are indeed nice. But about 40% of the books ended up as "brown-wrappers", no cover art being found. This includes at least a few cases where the art DID exist on Amazon, but wasn't retrieved. I noticed this because I found the most effective way to look up books that didn't have an ISBN was to do a keyword search on Amazon directly, obtain an ASIN/ISBN number and then manually input that into DL for retrieval. This was necessary because "Title" look-up in the DL software itself is poor. I think it may attempt an exact match ... but, given the state of the Amazon catalog, that is a steep requirement. Your book title may be "X Y Z", but appears in Amazon as "X Y and Zz; (stuff)". So no exact match. A "title" search in DL would grind away, producing a menu list to pick from whose items had absolutely no discernible connection to the book title specified, including even DVD's/CD (indicated by different graphics), etc. But if I went to Amazon and did the search directly, the item I was looking for would pop up right at the top. No problem. So the DL title search needs work, even for effective Amazon fucntioning. Anyway, I would obtain an ASIN code number from Amazon this way for an item (observed to have cover-art), input it for DL, and no cover-art would appear in the susbequent entry. So the graphic had to be manually cut and pasted in. Generally, I found that about 30-40% of the books had such minimal information retrieved as to mostly meaningless entries. Often, you get just a title and "Unknown Binding". So it means A LOT of hand-entry and correction. Even for a mostly modern collection. I used the bluetooth scanner and can't imagine using any other input method. I tried a "CueCat" barcode scanner (about $10), but it was tricky to get "just right" and had so many false reads, I went to the scanner. Never tried the video camera method, but it's hard to imagine it being faster than the scanner. You can snap off ~3 scans per second. But all is not well here either. Books published more than ~ 15 years ago tend not to have any bar-codes to scan. Books published more than ~25 years ago tend not to have ISBN numbers printed in them at all. Maybe 2% of books have incorrect ISBN codes printed in them. Even for modern paperbacks, the bar-code scan returns a UPC code instead of ISBN which, 90% of the time, does not look-up the correct item in Amazon (that is, no match or incorrect match). All these things mean having to abandon the very-slick scanner and go to manual input mode AND verify the correct item was downloaded. With modern paperbacks it was so bad, the scanner actually doubled the work, since you had to go back and delete the incorrect/UPC codes it scanned and re-input the ISBN required for correct look-up. Probably 30% of the collection had to be entered manually, at the keyboard. Which meant carrying books from other rooms to the computer. And back. And then there are the mysterious disappearing scans. Many of the books were in different rooms, out of Bluetooth range. No problem, since the scanner can store up to 500 items and then dump to the software when it comes back in range. However, in practice, sometimes shelves and sections of shelves just "disappeared". I would walk the scanner back to computer and either nothing would happen when the link was re-established, or a partial dump would occur, where groups of items would never get transferred but others would. Which meant a walk back to the other room and analysis to try and find out where the holes occurred so they could be rescanned. I often see the spinning multi-colored beach-ball when using DL, which sometimes appears for 30-40 seconds when doing something innocuous like clicking the box to manually input a new ISBN. If you are getting the idea "much pain for little gain" you aren't far off. But I did learn some interesting things along the way. Science books (professional, texts, AND popular) more than ~10 years old collapse in value to be worth pennies on the dollar, while books on history and religion hold their value much better, if not increase in value. That includes one book I paid $24 in 1992, but which someone is now trying to sell used for $500. But that's rare. Buying books based on information content is a financial loser. Mostly, the experience cured me of the tendency to buy books before they go out of print. Because just about any worthwhile book, no matter how obscure, is readily available at a tiny fraction of the initial price in a year or so. So despite the dubious value of the end-result, I would say the price of the software and scanner was worthwhile in my case. To improve DL's grade from "B-" to "A", they need ... 1) To expand source catalogs/extract more information about the books, 2) Fix "title" searches, 3) Fix scanner "amnesia", 4) Do better with "Genre" identification. When it's all done and you want to know how many mathematics, physics, history, etc., books you have, you just can't tell. No useful "subject category" is available. They have a "genre" field that gets a value maybe 5% of the time, but is so specific as to be useless. For example, a book about the Chicago World Fair of 1893, which one might think would be categorized as a history book, is flagged as "Illinois" genre -- a useless categorization. 5) Have a Bluetooth scanner with buttons to manually key in ISBN's when away from the computer (in another room,etc.) .. so the book doesn't have to be carried to the computer to be entered. 6) Fix all the rainbow-ball freezes. 2500 items is a lot of books for a person, but a small database. There's no excuse for routinely locking up a modern computer for 40 seconds of CPU time at a gulp just to handle a database of 2500 items. Cover graphics aside, the total text in the database can't exceed ~ 40 pages of information. [alert admin]
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Friday, September 23 2005 @ 01:07 PM PDT
Last 10 Comments by atritium [ Search for All ]
It's annoying to have to manually configure the application everytime you start. You don't have to manually tell it to load your bookmark file each time, do you? The real question is: why isn't private browsing the default? Why is anyone content to have people they don't know, with a wide range of possible motivations, tracking what they do? Why don't you want to live in a glass house? …
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Friday, July 31 2009 @ 10:42 PM PDT
A poor and meaningless review ... the program does exactly what it says and is quite well done. The installer is minimal and convenient, allowing you to over-ride and put the sw where you think you want -- if you are foolish enough to do so. People putting software wherever they want is the main reason they later end up complaining their system is broken by the next OS update, or something stops working, or is lost…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Saturday, April 26 2008 @ 04:07 PM PDT
