While we understand a scratch or dent on a product caused by a customer would constitute cosmetic damage, we’d call this situation something other than “cosmetic.” As a result, we contacted HP…

…[after offering a newer-model keyboard to the complaining customer] HP researched support calls for the reader’s original product and didn’t find other customers experiencing this issue, so the issue appears isolated.

As I scanned through old issues of the magazine and found this, I have to admit that I squealed my frustration. Since the earliest computer keyboards, I’ve been calling for deeper laser cut letter embedding instead of “stick on” or “paint on” letters and numbers on keyboard. I even spent a few months working with the Microsoft hardware group on testing and reviewing their new line of keyboards to ensure the letters and numbers stayed and weren’t worn off within a few months or less.

Unfortunately, my highly vocal complaints to the keyboard manufacturing community continue to go unheeded as I personally continue to wear out keyboards. Microsoft does have the only keyboard I’ve found that lasts the longest, Logitech the next longest in my information research.

I trained to type on a manual keyboard but quickly switched to an electric as soon as they gained popularity. Yes, I have a strong key strike, and yes, I have long nails, but the keyboard should should put up with any form of abuse for more than two or three months. Few do.

If your keyboard wears out sooner than you think is appropriate, please nag. Nag them to replace it. Nag them to make the letters and numbers last.

Too few people just get a new keyboard or stick on new keyboard number and letter stickers or use a permanent marker.

Complain. Complain loudly.

Unless you are heard, companies like HP are going to continue to think that worn out keyboard keys are isolated cases.

The current bitch and whine is also a lesson in what not to do even if it will let you do it. You won’t get away with it.

After the rash of 10 cent apps on the Android Market, Tech Hubby and Nag got addicted to the constant hunt for new apps. Discovering new ways to get those cool apps faster, we installed Chomp, Best App Finder, Ondroid – Top apps chart, Best Apps Market, and My Daily Free Amazon App.

I did say addiction, right?

As you fill up your phone with a ton of apps, even if it’s got more RAM and SD Card space than your laptop, you want to play safe and move some of the space wasters from the phone’s storage to the SD card. The newest phones play well with this…to a point.

The point is that if your App has a Widget, it cannot be moved to the SD card. Don’t risk it if you use that widget on your launcher screen. Experiment with it if you do not use their widgets, but take care if you change your mind.

The App 2 SD is brilliant at showing you the options for which apps you can safely move to and from the SD card. It gives you a warning to alert you that you should think twice before doing so. appSaver helps you backup and save apps on your phone. It also now features an App 2 SD feature, unfortunately without really clear warnings with the latest update segregating what you can and cannot move to SD Card. Unfortunately, that came a bit too late. I went forth and blew my phone up.

Symptoms of a Smart Phone Crisis

The phone suddenly started losing wifi signals. I was two meters from my wifi router so this was odd. Then it flashed the Sprint logo and did a fast reboot. When it came back on, it couldn’t find the wifi connection. Thirty seconds to three minutes later it would reboot again, no matter what I was working on, and whether or not I was holding it or it was sitting quietly on my desk. Within an hour, the battery was dead, and I was pulling my hair.

Thinking virus, I started to uninstall the last few things I’d installed. With the time to reboot so short, I could barely get one thing uninstalled when the phone rebooted.

Instead of going through all the 36 hours of nightmare trial and errors, let me tell you what my solutions could have been, and then what it was. I’ve found that these symptoms are the result of several possibilities, all with much the same answer. These things are trial and error resolutions, so best you have all the possibilities in one spot, unlike me who hunted and hunted with little sleep.

Battery Doesn’t Fit Right

If you are using a Samsung S2 phone, international versions prior to Fall 2011 had a slight flaw. The battery area was a tiny bit too large for the battery. Jump around, run, bike, or walk down the street and the battery could shift away from the contacts, causing the phone to reboot.

I found many solutions in the various Android forums on using a piece of paper, preferably a small sticky note, to stick down into the battery compartment with the “tail” of the paper laying beyond the compartment’s edge opposite the contacts. Place the battery in properly and allow it to fold at the edge. Cut the remaining visible paper and this should add enough compression to keep the battery wedged up against the contacts while you move.

For many, this was the perfect solution. Not for me.

Viruses and Evil App Attacks

Some virus attacks will drain the battery and disable the wifi capability to force the phone onto 2/3/4G. Per the norm, never download anything not tested and checked by others and only from known verified sources. If you like risk, make sure you have a solid virus protection app installed and keep it updated.

My research found that the majority of my symptoms matched a virus attack, but the rebooting didn’t. A reboot or two, maybe, but not consistently and in a timely manner. I couldn’t keep the damn thing on long enough to download another anti-virus program, but evidence led me in another direction.

App Conflict Battles

Occasionally, apps won’t play nice together. If they are sitting on your phone turned on only when you need them, this isn’t an issue, but when they are TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) living in the background or foreground together, they can be worse than siblings in the back seat.

The solution is to uninstall each “live” app, especially those with active widgets, and test to see if this resolves the issue. Be patient as sometimes it takes a bit for them to figure out the evil sibling is out of the room. It’s a hunt and peck game, though, so watch a movie or television show while you’re at it so you feel like you aren’t totally wasting your time.

A possible solution for many was to do a a hard reset and cache clearing on the Samsung Galaxy S2 and cache wipe. This is not a factory reset that will clear out everything and make you start over. Your apps and data will be saved, but it clears the cache (and possible problems). This simply “flushes” the cache and hopefully removes the problem.

1. Remove the battery and let it sit batteryless for a few minutes.
2. Replace the battery.
3. Hold down the UP volume key and the ON button until you see the Samsung logo and a DOS like colorful menu pops up. This is the factor reboot menu which can be the life or death of your phone. Move cautiously.
4. With the volume key, move down to wipe cache partition.
5. Press the menu button (the house).
6. Move to the reboot system now item in the list.
7. Press the menu button to select it.
8. The phone will reboot.

This worked for a few minutes longer than usual, so I knew I was on the right track, but it wasn’t the issue.

Moving Widget Apps to the SD Card

This was the winner for me. By moving apps with widgets I was using to the SD Card, the timely nature of the reboots was a sign that when the widget refreshed its data, it couldn’t find the files it needed, forced it off WIFI, and the conflicts caused a reboot.

The clue I’d found the right solution? I removed the SD card and the phone worked perfectly, though the apps that required the card didn’t work.

I worked for hours with the Apps 2 SD program to move everything I could back to the phone from the SD Card and uninstall anything suspicious, but the reboots happened often faster than the actions I was taking. The processors on the phone got so hot, I couldn’t touch the phone from the midway point up. I removed the SD card but that wouldn’t move or uninstall the apps that were causing the problem.

As not to bore you with all the things I learned along the trial and error trail, here was the solution.

1. Turn off the phone.
2. Remove the back and the battery.
3. Wait a few minutes.
4. Slip the SD card out. One press will bring it out far enough. No need to remove it completely.
5. Turn on the phone normally.
6. Carefully remove EVERY widget from your screens. All of them. Even the ones you aren’t sure of.
7. Turn off the phone.
8. Remove the back and battery and wait a few minutes.
9. Slide the SD card back in.
10. Turn on the phone using the cache clearing method above and reboot.
11. Using App 2 SD, go through all the apps stored on the SD Card and move anything with an X in the lower left corner off the SD Card and to the Phone.
12. You may need to restart the phone again, but by now, everything should be working perfectly.

Again, NEVER put anything on the SD Card that has a widget or really shouldn’t be moved. Widgets can be deceptive. They may not “look” like widgets and you’ve forgotten where they came from as they’ve been sitting there for months. Apps critical to your daily phone activities shouldn’t be moved unless they are completely safe and it’s recommended to do so, so sayeth the Tech Nag.

I love you. I worship you, so it comes with great pain to ask you the following.

Please come up with a way for irrelevant WordPress.com blog posts to stay out of my WordPress searches.

I don’t know how to do this myself, other than by restricting my searches to remove WordPress.com from the results, which is self-defeating as I’m on WordPress.com. A lot of amazing bloggers and WordPress fans are on WordPress.com and doing this will remove them from the search results.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about relevancy.

I search for WordPress fill-in-the-blank needing help with whatever WordPress thing I’m working on and I’m flooded with twits babbling about things that have absolutely and completely NOTHING to do with WordPress, and the word WordPress not found anywhere on their site other than “Powered by WordPress” and in the URL. This just shows you how powerful the keyword “WordPress” has become.

So I’m asking you for relevancy. I want my WordPress searches to matter. I don’t want to dig through who broke up with whom, who got drunk last night and crashed their car, some twit arguing with another other the current state of the world when it’s clear that neither understands the state of the world, and a million lolcats.

I want to find WordPress help, resources, and techniques that make the world work better and make my life easier.

Thank you, and keep up the fantastic work otherwise.

Lorelle
The Tech Nag

PS: This nag applies to all you dummies who installed WordPress into a WordPress directory on your server, please see Giving WordPress Its Own Directory « WordPress Codex for moving it into a non-WordPress name so you don’t mess up your own SEO and end up in irrelevant searches.

I’ve run across a few websites and blogs recently running interstitials (the modern term for “popup windows that overlay not pop) and a variety of scripts and bad code that cause browser errors.

Please stop this.

The reasons are many, but here are a few.

1. We hate them.
2. Interstitials require effort on our part to close which is not a good first impression.
3. Interstitials work on the clueless not influencers, so check your stats to see if these are really turning into conversions or annoyance.
4. Browser errors popup warnings in our faces, which is ridiculous in this day and age when it is easy to fix all these and prevent them.
5. Update your site’s code regularly, for our sake but mostly your own, especially for security reasons. It makes us think bad things when your site is so out of date our browser warns us.
6. If your site is out of date in look, feel, and functionality, what do you think that says about your content, purpose, and business?

Thank you for updating your sites and fixing all errors today.

Lorelle
The Tech Nag

When it comes to changing the world, few do so more than TED videos. Your tag line, ideas worth spreading, is a humble way of describing the power and influence of your presentations by amazing people.

However, when it comes to presenting your videos, please help improve the world by making your videos not play automatically.

I will often cruise through and open several tabs of TED videos in my browser, then life will charge back in and I’ll have to feed the cats, take a phone call, pay bills, and respond to the mundane life a tech nag leads. If perchance I have to close and restart my browser for a million different reasons, I have to plow through fifty or more tabs to find which ones have the TED videos on to stop them from playing. I’ll suddenly have 3 to 7 voices all talking at me and the video downloads will slow down my computer and browser, not to mention my horrible Internet connection.

While I’m not sure it’s a web standard yet, it is should be. Either way, TED, you exist to change the world. Please set an example for all to follow and give us our control back. Allow us to press PLAY to lose ourselves in the wisdom of others and don’t force yourselves upon us.

Thank you,

Lorelle
The Tech Nag

Please fix the comments feed icon.

Currently, if a WordPress or WordPress.com users chooses to showcase their feed links on their WordPress blog, it shows the same RSS symbol for both feeds: posts and comments. If the user chooses to only show the icon, there is nothing to inform the reader that there is a difference between the two feeds.

While we can choose to use the icon and text, why force us to clutter up simple common icons with both.

Please change the comments feed icon to indicate it’s the feed for comments on the blog.

I’ve included an example to inspire you, but I know Matt Thomas or the WordPress Community can come up with something more stylized.

Thank you,

Lorelle
The Tech Nag

I’ve put up with a ton of issues from Adobe Flash crashing my browsers. Now Skype is my main crash deviant.

I’ve put up with your terrible new reinstall that spawns web pages and took FOREVER recently.

You think I’m kidding.

I’ve had Skype installed since Skype began. I’m frequently teased as I’m “Lorelle” on Skype, not “Lorelle254″ or some other silly name. I’m the first Lorelle that signed up for Skype, probably in your first 500-1000 registered users. I also pay for your service, so I’m qualified to rant and rave about your growing problems and my increasing frustration.

Logging in today, I was greeted by two confusing “Skype” disguised Internet Explorer browser windows. They were filled with ads but also with options and choices I had to make. I was in a hurry for a meeting and didn’t have time to mess around with reading all the stuff. I just needed to find my login.

It appeared that I would have to install Skype, so I did. Twenty minutes later, I’m now 15 minutes late for my online meeting and Skype is still not installed. Things are loading, whirling, clicking, and my state-of-the-art, powerful computer is locking up and dragging as it consumes memory and hard drive activity. Ten minutes later, it installs, but I’m still clicking around trying to just find a login. I finally find the familiar buttons and open it up, only to have those two damn Internet Explorer windows pop up, covering everything, selling me more Skype crap.

I apologize to the client and life goes on, both of us cursing Skype and browsers, and Internet software in general.

When I’m done, I’m so furious, I completely log out and quit Skype.

Then my browser crashes. Why? The installed Skype Toolbars that I worked so hard to remove multiple times because they crash both Chrome and Firefox on a regular basis, usually at the worst of times.

I have to go into the Extensions and Plugins of each browser and disable the Skype Toolbar Plugins.

A few hours later, I’m up against a deadline when my computer goes wonky. I’ll save the long, horrible story and sum it up as an hour and a half of wasted time spent banging my head against my desk as I couldn’t get control of my mouse or keyboard as everything turned to molasses speeds. I rarely ever use Internet Explorer and it hasn’t been my default browser for nearly ten years and yet two Internet Explorer windows filled with Skype promotional crap kept popping up and wouldn’t close.

I managed to crawl through my Windows Task Manager and found NO evidence of Skype on, active, or in process, and yet something kept spawning these Skype Internet Explorer windows. I finally turned off my computer, losing much of my article, and rebooted.

I went through everything and cannot find anything that activates Skype without my manual permission and action to ensure this wouldn’t happen again, but I now don’t trust you, Skype.

I don’t trust you for this, nor for the battle I’ve fought for months thinking I had some virus disguised as a Skype toolbar or functionality as it came with the softage.ru URL in the error report. Why the hell you would have anything with a Russian extension on the domain name or function is beyond me, but I got the error every time I started Firefox:

Error: Components,classes(@softage.ru/skype/skypeF

And I’m not alone in the suffering of the softage.ru error.

Please fix this immediately and offer up a sensible fix for the rest of us still struggling with this.

Here is what I’m specifically asking for.

1. Please provide an option for installing Skype’s Plugins and toolbars to my browsers. This used to be an option and it is now gone. Put it back.
2. Don’t make installation a long and tedious affair unless you give us fair warning like providing the size of the download file or a time estimate based upon bandwidth options.
3. Do not assume I’m using Internet Explorer or any browser. Let my system handle which browser to showcase your promotional crap.
4. Don’t spam windows for any reason, no matter how good your sale or discount or deal is. Email us or put it in the Skype app.
5. Don’t use suspicious file names or error codes that make us waste our time thinking we’ve had our computers hacked.
6. Don’t make us work so hard to enjoy and use your service. While most use it for free, many of us pay for the privilege. We deserve your respect.

Please stop crashing my browsers, Skype.

Are you listening? We aren’t going to take this crap any more.

Lorelle
The Tech Nag

While I love what you are doing with your new annual default WordPress Themes, and love the features of 2011, please don’t mislead us regarding the layout.

Previewing a post, The sidebar was gone! I felt naked and exposed with no where to go from the post I was viewing. I was frightened, worried for my three readers and my mother visiting the site and getting lost without a clear way to navigate around to all the goodness I’m sharing here.

On the Appearance > Theme Options, I can choose the design layout I want. Left sidebar, right sidebar, or no sidebar.

I clicked VERY hard on right and left sidebar options and I still see only the single post with no sidebar on my posts.

If I choose a layout style, I expect it is the same for every page on my blog, not just the front page. That doesn’t make sense.

Maybe it’s broken in the Theme. I’ll except that excuse. Please fix it.

Thank you,

Lorelle
The Tech Nag

PS: I’m starting to have nightmares of the original Default/Kubrick WordPress Theme, so please fix this.

I just got a good look at this brilliant graph by Brad Colbow illustrating what people pay attention to on the Internet.

Seriously?

So we pay attention to the really great stuff and the really bad stuff and tend to ignore the in between stuff.

This explains so much.

As I stand in line at the grocery store checkout, I’m constantly reminded of Joan Rivers’ famous comment about good the National Enquirer is for constipation. It’s horrible.

And television. WTF? Seriously. Good actors are now flooding Broadway and theaters around the globe as “real people” doing stupid human tricks are placing them.

Please, Internet Users and everyone, let’s find some room in our hearts for the in between stuff. Let’s once again celebrate the truly remarkable middle of the road stuff. It’s all remarkable.

Let’s appreciate each other more like Doctor Who, so famous for defending humanity in all its shapes, sizes, and ridiculous characters and their actions.

Thank you,

Lorelle
The Tech Nag

Here is my holiday wish list.

1. The ability to mark a plus post as read so I don’t see it again unless there is new activity. Mute doesn’t cut it.
2. Get past the +9 thing. Give us +10.
3. The ability to add more than one photograph within a post, not just as a gallery.
4. Give us some HTML characters beyond bold and italic. I want strikeout, HTML Anchor Tags (link dumps are so ugly as are link shortener links), and headings.
5. The ability to use HTML character entities so I could write URLs as examples and not have them turn into clickable useless links, and other things that character entities are good for.
6. The ability to write math, scientific, and coding formulas and formats with ease.
7. A better understanding of what “people in common” means in circle notifications. I still don’t get it.
8. Stop on auto scrolling. While auto updating and scrolling are nice, I’m constantly fighting to read or watch something in my stream. I have to click through and wait for another page load to just view that post. Give me a pause button, please.
9. You got the goo.gl shortener so please incorporate it into Google+.
10. A skin or layout option that would put active conversations I’m involved with on one side of the screen (for larger monitors) and my stream on the other so I don’t have to wait the long load times to view notifications.
11. If you are serious about penalizing folks not using their “real” names or legal names, then be serious about it. I’m getting tired of finding clearly spammy names in my comments and circle notifications.
12. Blogspot and Blogger suffered because of Google’s permissive policy on hosting (and profiting) on spam/scam/scraper blogs. We, especially Google, is wiser now. Let not the same thing happen with Google+. I’m seeing the edges fray already.
13. When I want to share something and write a bit, please don’t make me hunt for the share overlay as it scrolls out from under my fingers as I’m typing. I just spent 30 minutes 50 minutes trying to find the share window when it scrolled away. I don’t want to lose what I’ve written, so damn you, please stop the auto scrolling when I’m sharing something. Update: I lost my post and had to rewrite it. I’m sure it’s not as good the second time around.
14. Give us a draft option. Sometimes it takes me a few minutes, or I’m distracted with a phone call or something and I want to save what I’m writing on Google+. If I share it with myself in a closed circle, I can’t edit it and add in an image or video as that is locked down, and it looks strange me sharing a post that I wrote when I do share it. Sometimes I hit share and didn’t notice the link wasn’t added or forgot the video, so give us the option for drafts and for adding media after publishing.

I ask these things because I adore Google+ and want to see it grow and thrive.

Thank you,

Lorelle
The Tech Nag
Original post on Google+ used with my permission