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Posts tagged with "wtf"

Web design tip: a link should look like a link

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Bad web design sucks. It feels even worse when it comes from a mainstream newspaper website.

People who make websites should learn that a link (also called hyperlink) should be styled to look like a link, and normal text should be styled to look like normal text.

Please, look at the following screenshot and tell me how many links can you see:

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Nokia and the Daylight Saving Time

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I have a Nokia 6120 classic mobile phone, as well as a Sony Ericsson K750i. I've already posted a review of K750i. I also wanted to write a review about this Nokia phone, but the lack of time and motivation prevented me. In one sentence, Nokia 6120 classic (or any Nokia S60 phone) is very powerful, has lot of nice features, but also has an awfully bad interface. Sometimes it is so bad that it felt like Windows.

Right now, however, I'm not talking about the interface, but about a mis-feature that Windows also has: hard-coded daylight saving time settings.

God damn it, Nokia! Why do you have a hard-coded DST setting? Why? And again... Why?!?

Thanks to you, Nokia, I'm now awake 1 hour earlier than I should.

I use this Nokia 6120 classic phone as my alarm clock. Its flexible alarm allows me to set different alarm times for different days. Basically, I can set as many alarms as I want. It's very flexible and useful.

But it loses the usefulness when coupled with hard-coded daylight saving time dates.

Windows always had this very same issue. Not sure if it's fixed by now, but it was very irritating in the past.


So, how Nokia could have implemented it? Basically, the same way as Sony Ericsson did. On my good and not-so-old SE K750i, there is a small setting where the user says if DST is currently active or not. Just that, nothing else. Okay, the user must manually set that, at least you do it once and it works. In Nokia with its hard-coded DST, the user must fix the time once, and then fix the time again when Nokia automatically (de)activates DST.

And there is more! Now I'm pretty sure that it will happen again next year, whenever DST ends. So, next year, I might wake up 1 hour later than I should. (or maybe 1 hour earlier, it depends if actual DST ends before or after the hard-coded date)

Damn you, Nokia. Damn you.

Setting nVidia control panel to English language

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I'm Brazillian. I speak Portuguese. However, I often prefer to have programs in English because it is easier to communicate with the rest of the world, and because almost always the translations suck. Sometimes they suck so bad that we can't even understand what some options are supposed to be. What's more, many technical words should not be translated, else users won't know exactly what the developers meant.

Today, I managed to make NVIDIA Control Panel be displayed in English. This one is particularly troublesome because there is no option to change the language.

The solution is quite simple, but damn quick and dirty: just delete the DLLs that contain the localized strings. Yeah, that's it, delete them and be happy with your NVIDIA Control Panel in English. Please look at the following links for complete instructions:
Also note that those forum threads are from september/october 2006. Today is May 2009 and we still have the same issue. Let me quote what RejZoR said in one of those forum threads:

Why is there no language selection? Shouldn't be more than 30 lines of code to do that.

That's exactly what I keep asking to myself...

Windows Explorer folder type in Vista

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Windows Vista sucks, everybody knows that, even Microsoft knows it (so that Microsoft is working to release Windows 7 as soon as possible, while at the same time extending XP lifetime).

Among the tons of Windows Vista annoyances, there is one that made me really angry: the automatic folder type detection of Windows Explorer.

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Please use a sane date format

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Have you ever found a date at some site and you couldn't understand it? Even trying hard, you can't figure out which number is the year, which one is the month, and which one is the day. Well, I found I site with such cryptic dates.

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May 2013
S M T W T F S
April 2013June 2013
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31