Vakkotaur

"Instruments don't lie, but they can fib."

I got curious about TV channels the digital converter might detect as having signal but not have enough to be useful and so went through the channels listed for my location on AntennaWeb.org. It was promising. Each station I tried eventually switched from 'no program' to 'weak signal'. But the more I considered it, the less right that seemed. I then tried other channels and sure enough, every channel seemed to do the same thing. I tried channel 37, which is allocated to a protected frequency range and thus there are no stations transmitting on ch. 37. Even on ch. 37 I got 'weak signal' after a while.

The problem is one of poor indication. The "weak signal" includes effectively zero strength, which ought to be "no signal" but evidently that wasn't done. So that indication is useless for what I wanted to use it for: see if there was any signal just detected, but insufficient to display. There is a strength meter setup, but it requires some menu fiddling to get to. And it shows nothing at all, not even on ch. 12. That's not encouraging.

An update or so ago LiveJournal made (yet another) boneheaded move and added a misfeature from snap.com that does nothing but get in the way. I have yet to see anyone besides the folks making the announcement claim this was a good idea. But, it can be turned off. In a disappointingly limited way. I can, and have, set the "never show this on MY account" flag. Alas, not everyone has set that flag so. And not everyone can. There is no simple flag that does the Right Thing, which is "never show this crap to me, ever."

Ah, but there's a link when it shows up to let me turn it off. What a freaking joke. It doesn't work. It doesn't even have a button to make it work. It only has the CANCEL button, when it has a button at all. What moron designed that interface? Oh, I know, someone in snap.com marketing. Driven to distraction, I resorted to visiting the evil snap.com itself and finding the rather hidden (and javascript dependent!) control that sets a freaking cookie that says, "Don't bother me." Great! It worked. Then I closed the browser. And when I started it up again, all was well until just a while ago when I started to read a page then *wham* it changed and this snap crap appeared again. Granted, if I don't override CSS (which I do to make other journals readable without having to constantly click the button that reloads a page with ?style=mine appended) then it doesn't appear. But it should even be there. The waste of bandwidth should never have been sent.

This sort of crap is why Orvan's journal is on a different, more competently run, site.

Now to look for a way to turn that crap off so it stays off.

ADDENDUM: Haven't found the ideal solution, but did add the KILL SNAPSH*T link to the link list so I don't have wade trhough snap.crap to find the only thing on the entire wretched site worth using.