Archive for category: Rant by the Curmudgeon

The April update to Windows 10 has a bad feature in it. If you use Photoshop or Clip Paint Studio and draw fast, after three strokes, the pen or brush tool will change functions and you don’t want it to. I find the pen tool will become the move tool or alternate between the move and pen tool.

I took my Surface Pro 3 to the Microsoft store and they did not know about this problem. The tech there tried three different versions (old, very old, and new) of the pen that goes with the surface. They all gave the same results. He checked my drivers and they were all up to date. They did not have a computer with a drawing program installed other than Microsoft Paint. Microsoft Paint worked fine, so Microsoft knew there would be an impact and spent the time and money to up date the Microsoft Paint program.

At a presentation at the San Diego Comic Fest the presenter had the same problem with a Cintiq drawing tablet. It’s very embarrassing for a professional artist to stand before a crowd and have the equipment go nuts. Makes you look very unprofessional when that happens.

Attending the presentation was a programmer from Adobe. He said to turn off Microsoft Ink. That also turns off many pen functions.

Someone from the audience loaned the presenter an Apple computer and the presentation went on. Microsoft and Wacom lost a user who now is an Apple user.

The Adobe programmer said that Microsoft did not notify any drawing program developers or vendors that they were changing the basic way Windows 10 works with drawing programs. Microsoft did change their paint program. It will take weeks for Abode and Clip Paint Studio to change their programs and make sure the bugs are out of the changes.

This is too convenient and sounds like Microsoft did this to get rid of any old paint like programs. This accident will force users to drop the old programs if the program is no longer supported and go to Microsoft Paint. Microsoft Paint is not a photo editing program and does not have the power or features of Photoshop or Clip Paint Studio. I do not use Coral Painter or GIMP, but I suspect they no longer work correctly. If you are a windows 10 user who makes a living from a paint program you will have to take much longer to do your work. Many users will give up and go to Apple. They don’t have the time or patience to wait for a fix, and there is no guarantee that this will not happen again.

My main computer died and I was thinking of buying a Wacom Cintiq or just settle for Surface note book, but not any longer. I don’t like the over priced Apple computers, but I need a computer that works.

Stay strong, write on, try Linux

Professor Hyram Voltage

California is short of water. Since water doesn’t grow on trees we need to stop wasting water and stop now.

Early the other morning I was driving a friend to breakfast. We stopped two blocks from my house to turn onto a major street through town. The sprinklers system was on watering the vegetation in the center median of the major street. It was also watering the street from one side to the other. Cars were zipping through the wet street sending water every where. This was during daylight not some midnight accident.

Several blocks later we drove past the Department of Motor Vehicles offices. Their sprinklers were on full blast. Those sprinklers did not have near as much over spray but one sprinkler head had broken off and a fountain of water was shooting straight up four or more feet.

My recommendation to remediate this type of problem is to put someone in charge. Both these instances were before normal working hours and it would be expensive and inefficient to have someone watch the sprinklers. But during working hours a person at the city or state office could be charged with making sure water is not wasted. Offices for the state and many city offices are not owned by the state or city, still the office water Czar could work with the owner of the building and the ground keeping contractor to insure there is no over spray, no broken sprinklers, that the timers for the sprinklers are set to come on only twice a week and only come on after dark. All these measures would show the tax payer that the state is trying to save water (even when it is the building owner who is wasting water).

Additional action could be for state owned building to put in artificial turf or rock gardens. A visit to Tuscon Arizona could show how well that can be done.

The state could help fund cities so that they can put in drip irrigation systems to replace spray type sprinklers.

These simple measures would make the state and cities look like they are not wasting water.

Write on, draw on.    Professor Hyram Voltage

 

This time it’s different, is a phase that should strike fear in your heart if you invested in stocks and lived through the dot COM bust.

In the dot com bust of the stock market showed that things may have changed but people and society had not. People and society change very slowly but they do change.

The other day I went to a Radio Shack store that was closing. The place was clean (a tip of the hat to the guy that was running the place) but almost sold out of everything. And there were customers in the place. Sure some of the customers were older but not all.

One article postulated that Radio Shack make a big mistake getting into cell phone in a big way. There was and is nothing to stop anyone from getting into selling cell phones and under cutting you.

Another article talked about how you use to be able to buy radio controlled cars at Radio Shack at Christmas time and the cars were something no one else had.

Another article remembered how you could buy a computer at Radio Shack and it was as good as many other computers.

Today there is a second hand store in town that sells new cell phones. There are a half dozen store fronts selling cell phone in the poorer part of town. How can even AT&T and Verizon compete with those stores?

The Motley Fool calls it having a moat around your business. Something that keeps others from competing with you and undercutting you. Radio Shack does not have anything different to sell.

I remember Radio Shack before computers, back when it sold vacuum tubes and glow in the dark was a warm and good thing. I also remember when Radio Shack was going to have a store within 10 minutes of anyone in the continental U.S. Those were the days before overnight express delivery. Ordering a couple of resistors to repair or build something could take two week to two months for the parts to get to you. There were not that many mail order places to get parts from either. Today if the part isn’t on their doorstep in two days people go ballistic.

Hardly anyone remembers Lafayette Electronics. It was a smaller chain of stores than Radio Shack but it had a big mail order business. The company even sold musical instruments before electronic keyboards were available to consumers. In those days you could buy a guitar in your local drug store. Lafayette stuck with the hobbyist and repair man instead of mass marketing and went out of business in the 1980s.

You could also order parts from Allied Radio and if real cheap you could get parts from Poly Packs. I sent a lot of dollar bills to Poly Packs. In 1960 paying $8.00 to $10.00 for a vacuum tube is like paying $50.00 to $100.00 dollars for a very simple semiconductor like a basic transistor.

Things have changed, people don’t build things anymore. Vacuum tubes are a specialty hobby or elitist item. Surface mount electronic components have made building electronic devices at home very hard and requires special tools.

If you do want to build something then there are many places to buy the components on line. Hobbyist and experimenters no longer grab the old TV set that someone has set out on the curb so they can salvage the parts out of the set. Parts out of an old computer are so out of date that they are unusable before the computer has stopped working.

A few people who are mostly labeled wide eyed fanatics still wonder what will happen if the over night delivery system breaks down, or the country that makes the needed electronics stops sending the equipment to the US for some reason, or if we have a big war or depression where you have to make it work longer or do without and the equipment can not be repaired (because repair parts are not available or the equipment was not built to be repaired).

Society has changed, but is it for the better?

Good bye old friend, you are not the Radio Shack I knew but I will still miss you.

Write on, draw on.  Professor Voltage.