All the Clocks are Broken

5 years ago
Now that it's Power Failure Season again, I'm reminded that I live with too many clocks. Why does every damned thing in my apartment want to know what time it is? "Oh, we need a display here for another reason, let's put a clock on it!" Gaah. I'm just not that interested in the current time that everything needs to be telling me! And that aside, things shouldn't have clocks that you can't turn off unless they run NTP.

I think I have 6 clocks in here, and only two of them are on purpose.

One of them makes a token effort to get the current time from GPS, but of course in Power Failure Season it's too overcast for that to work properly.

My microwave doesn't even have the decency to sit there blinking 12:00 -- before it will let you cook anything, it starts counting up from midnight.

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Current Music: Cop Shoot Cop -- All the Clocks are Broken ♬

Is there a long German word for:

5 years ago
that stark feeling of dread you get when there's a new release of software that you use all day, every day?

"7 features Apple killed off in iTunes 11."

Until I learn how badly their replacement for "iTunes DJ" sucks, I guess I'll put off installing this as long as possible. If they broke the ability for it to draw its choices from a smart playlist, or the ability for anonymous iPhone users to request songs, I'll never be able to upgrade the version that we run at DNA Pizza.

The removal of multiple windows also sounds like it will make the construction of my mixtapes be much more of a pain in the ass.

Since I'll be forced to come to terms with it eventually anyway I'd like to test it out myself, but I assume that, as usual, the only way to downgrade is to restore the whole system from backup, since iTunes gets its claws into everything. Blah.


Update: Yeah, it's not looking good. Ars Technica:

While Up Next seems intended to replace iTunes DJ, it lacks some of iTunes DJ's functionality. For example, there's no more ability to stick to higher rated songs. There was also a related feature that let iOS device users "upvote" songs to play sooner or more frequently. Overnight, these fantastic features have been stripped away.

Another missing feature is the ability to open playlists in separate windows. There's a new dedicated view to edit an existing playlist. [...] But some users simply prefer to have multiple windows open in order to search for various songs and drag then drop them to a particular playlist.

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