Computer related stuff
Since I wrote my last article about Trakt.tv’s fairly botched up major update to v2 they have managed to fix two of the issues although I have to say that this is not that impressive given how much they managed to screw up. One is the constant requests for logging on. It now appears that, once logged on, you are not asked to log on … Continue reading Trakt.tv fixes some issues but is still fairly botched up.
If you are (were) using trakt.tv to track which TV shows you are following and have been watching then you might have noticed that they recently made a major upgrade. This was a bit of a surprise, at least to me, since I had not seen any warnings about this, but the site was rather poor so an update was a bit overdue. However, to me, this … Continue reading Trakt.tv screwed up with their latest big update!
Last weekend we went into Geneva to buy some stuff for the family and while there my dear wife made the mistake of letting me and my oldest son wander away by ourselves in the Fnac store at Balexert. So we stumbled on this stand where they had the new Microsoft Surface Pro 3 on display. I had already been looking at buying one of … Continue reading Got into a bit of a shopping frenzy and got myself a Surface Pro 3. Really happy with it so far.
Quite a while ago I settled into using Book Bazaar e-book reader for Windows 8 in combination with Kindle reader for Windows 8 for my reading. Since the Kindle reader doesn’t support personal documents like Amazon’s own Kindle devices I of course had to use something else than Kindle for non-Kindle ebooks but I also liked Book Bazaar reader for its more fine-grained control over … Continue reading Bookviser: Quite nice ebook-reader for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8
OneDrive is a great idea. It really is. But Microsoft’s implementation is so buggy that it is bordering on useless. For a solution like OneDrive, which is really a core part of the operating system, to work it needs to be reliable and today it is not reliable. Far from it. I have had so many problems with OneDrive (as well as the old SkyDrive) … Continue reading Microsoft, for Christ sake fix your buggy OneDrive!
Yesterday I stumbled on a news article mentioning Nokia’s live Lumia upgrade status page and I of course went there right away. To my surprise I noticed that the entry for Lumia 925 on Orange France listed the WP 8.1 upgrade as released. Surprise because I had not gotten any notification on the phone. Naturally I went to the phone and tapped “Check for updates” … Continue reading Got my Windows Phone 8.1 Upgrade. Has a few useful new features.
I do not just read books but sometimes I read comics as well. It is a bit of a nostalgia thing actually since mostly I read old stuff that I used to grow up with. Over a year ago I wrote a post about how unbelievably bad the Comixology Windows 8 app was. Comixology is a major digital comic book provider and their service works reasonably well…unless … Continue reading Okay, that is it! Comixology is not getting any more of my money!
I have been using Invelos DVD Profiler together with Collectorz Movie Collector for quite a while to manage my movie collection which now stands at around 930+ titles on Blu-ray and DVD. DVD Profiler was actually the first software I used since it appeared to be the best one around with a detailed and accurate community feed on-line database of discs. All you needed was the EAN … Continue reading DVD Profiler = Abandonware?
As the site header states this site is dedicated to my interests, namely books, movies and computer stuff. As you might have noticed most of the site is about books, some of it about movies and not so much is actually about computers. Well I read more books and watch more movies than I buy new computer gadgets so I guess the ratio pretty much reflects … Continue reading TV Closet: A simple Trakt.TV client that works
So, the latest somewhat hyped update for Windows 8.1 have arrived and have been installed on both my desktop PC and my tablets and it does indeed contain some features that makes the OS more usable on a desktop PC with a mouse and keyboard. Having said that, it also has to be said that none of these features are very impressive in themselves and, more … Continue reading Windows 8 Spring update adds a few more features that should have been there from the start
Although Internet via fiber optics have been available in our neighbourhood since a few years I have not felt compelled to opt in but have instead retained my ADSL connection despite its moderate 6-7 Mbps download rates. There have been a number of reasons. I really never felt the need since what I was doing never really required a lot of bandwidth. The regional council … Continue reading Fiber Optics and Netgear R7000 Nighthawk
A short while ago SkyDrive was renamed to OneDrive. Actually the name change is still ongoing since, although SkyDrive on my Lumia and on the web-interface have been renamed, the Windows 8 app and the entire Windows 8 SkyDrive integration still refers to the service as SkyDrive. I have to say that, in my opinion, this was a totally needless waste of money. It must have cost a … Continue reading SkyDrive becomes OneDrive – What a useless waste of money
Last weekend I was more or less forced to reinstall, or rather refresh, my Windows 8 tablet. This I had to do because somewhere along the line SkyDrive had simply stopped syncing properly. This in itself almost merits a post actually. Previously when SkyDrive was just an application that you installed separately it was so much easier to fix things. In worst case all you had to … Continue reading Windows 8 Refresh pretty useless. Not much different from a full reinstallation.
I like food. Both eating it and cooking it. Thus one of the first apps that I downloaded for my Windows 8 tablet were cooking apps. Well, at least one of the first after the essential movie, and book related apps. Not that there were that many out when Windows 8 first appeared though but now there is a reasonable amount of them around. Although traditional … Continue reading Bing Food and Drink is actually a quite nice app for Windows 8
Orange France, who happens to be my internet provider, have decided to jump onto the cloud train some time ago. Not really surprising seeing how much hype there is about cloud services and cloud computing right now. I have not really paid much attention to their service. I am quite happy with SkyDrive (soon to be OneDrive) and I did not feel the need to … Continue reading Orange Cloud – What a useless cloud service!
Yes, this is another one of my rants that I have a tendency to splurt out when something frustrates me. Keeping track of which episodes of various TV-shows that you have watched can be a bit problematic. At least if you , like me, have a bit of a “teflon-memory”. It does not help that the French TV channels are absolutely abysmal when it comes to TV-shows. … Continue reading Please make a decent TV-show tracker with Trakt.TV sync for Windows 8
While browsing the news in front of the TV yesterday I saw that the Lumia Black update had started to roll out in a number of places and when looking at Nokia’s update status page it was written that it should be available for Lumia 925 in France so, naturally, I grabbed my phone and pushed the “Check for Updates” button and voila, there it … Continue reading Got my Lumia Black update yesterday. Not as much good stuff as I hoped for.
It was difficult for me to put a title on this posts since there are so many things I wanted to express. I want to bash dumbass region coding and regional limitations, I want to bash trade borders, I want to bash national protectionism, I want to bash developers that cannot see beyond their own little backyard and I want to bash bickering politicians that fuels … Continue reading Nook is useless for me, why can they (almost) never get the language right ?
Ever since I got my Iconia W5 tablet with Windows 8 I have wanted to get myself a smaller one, around 8 inches, to use at work for taking and bringing notes around, looking at documents etc. Despite the various hickups and more than one poor choice that Microsoft have made I am still far more happy with my Windows 8 tablet than my Android … Continue reading Acer Iconia W3 – Not at all as bad as some reviews states
I was tempted to write something like “What e-book reader to use on Windows 8” or “Best e-book reader for Windows 8” but this post is in no way a professional or exhaustive review of e-book readers for Windows 8 so I really do not want to lure anyone into thinking otherwise. This is just one of these moments when I felt like rambling about … Continue reading What e-book reader do I use on Windows 8?
I am one of those people who have not really shown much interest in the various social media sites that are around and hyped up to various (insane) levels by their supporters not to mention media. Sure, I have a Facebook account but I have never used it very actively. Most of the posts on my account are automated ones from more specialized sites like Goodreads, … Continue reading Tried out the new Windows 8 Flipboard app…and ventured onto Pinboard
Pretty much since I started to have a blog on WordPress I have used Windows Live Writer as the tool of choice for writing posts. In the beginning I found it to be an excellent tool. It still has many good points but it appears that it is not fancy enough for the “new Microsoft” today so it is slowly but surely becoming obsolete. That … Continue reading I have finally given up on Windows Live Writer
Update 1: This afternoon I noticed that a new update for Windows 8.1 is available. According to the Knowledge Base article that accompanies it this update are supposed to “Improve the reliability of Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2” That can mean anything. Hopefully they have discovered that there was a serious problem and fixed it. I will install … Continue reading Windows 8.1 seems to have Android quality…and yes I mean that in a bad way!
A couple of days ago I saw that there was a new update of Amazon’s Kindle app for Windows 8 available. Naturally I quickly made the update and opened the updated app with hoping that this time they would have actually fixed the app. But again my hopes where in vain. Not one of the things that needed to get fixed where actually fixed. What the … Continue reading Amazon still cannot be bothered to fix their Kindle app for Windows 8
PG's Ramblings 