Asus gaming machine. It turned out to be pretty good, but two years later, I'm looking for something new.
(See online!)

At the time I bought this, ASUS and MSI were the two top contenders. Both were solid brands with good history and all the features I wanted, but MSI has a weird obsession with making the keyboard perfectly rectangular at the expense of shoving all the keys together. As soon as I noticed the ASUS had a more spaced out keyboard and even a few media keys, the choice was obvious. In practice the keyboard is easy and natural to type on, though for some unknowable reason, there's no light indicating Num Lock status and no easily accessed END key which is REALLY annoying.

That aside, the coloration and controls are good, the performance is good, it's much thinner and lighter than my Qosmio and, most importantly, there's an empty RAM slot so I could upgrade from 16GB to 32 very easily (which I did).

The screen is crazy bright and I don't think I've used it on even 50% brightness yet because I'd likely get a burn from the glare. I think the macho ROG symbol is a bit childish but I wouldn't mind it too much if I could at least customize the color of the glowing ROG eye on the back of my screen.

Grr. So manly! Chest thump! WOOO. Look at my menacing laptop!

At the one year mark, I noticed two other problems. The function keys are shifted slightly further right than they should be making it too easy to hit the wrong one or the delete key when you mean F12. Additionally the fun keyboard color feature is less so when the color is weak and without definition. Either it's weakened considerably over the year or it was never as bright to begin with. Either way, the advertised color and reality are starkly different.

It's a shame. It's not an important feature, but I thought the lighted keyboard would be cool; not dim.

Second: I noticed this problem early, but didn't want to deal with it because I waited so long to buy the laptop that I just couldn't bring myself to return it. Every now and then it has problems with the disk hanging. I can move around, click windows, and so on, but disk-heavy programs (in particular VMware which I use for virtual machines) seem to lock hard. After that, the computer becomes incredibly slow in all programs (particularly any that would use the disk). If I try to shut it down, it hangs for so long that I usually just force power it down and when I restart, my login screen is wrong and I have to reset it.

I'm still not entirely sure if it's Windows 10 problem, a VMware problem, or an ASUS problem, but I figured it was better to point it out in case others had a similar issue.

In the end, it's a good laptop that did what I wanted it to. It has a few downsides that aren't critical enough that I wouldn't choose Asus again; but it wasn't great enough that it's my top choice for the next laptop either.

Netflix! Bro! You can be SO much better than this.

One of the reasons that Google because THE Internet search engine (though DuckDuckGo is better because it protects privacy) is because they have clean, no frills interface and they WORK. They get the job done. Those two key features made it the juggernaut that it is. Netflix is basically on the same path except for a few obvious design flaws.

Autoplay

The first is auto play. I really don't need to say much else: it's a feature almost no one wants or needs and they shouldn't have shoved it down our throats. If you want to "opt-in" fine, but making it the default and forcing us to turn it off (which doesn't even work fully) is obnoxious to say the least. Don't play, don't preview, don't do anything at all until and unless I tell you. No one wants an interface that goes rogue and has a mind of it's own.

Originals

This one is probably petty, but it ticks me off when I see something labeled as "Netflix Original" that is neither. They slap that label on Anime that they didn't create, produce, or otherwise do anything with other than make it available. Giving it a "Netflix Original" label is much like seeing Apple juice in the store labeled "100% juice!" when in reality, it only has 10% apples in it.

I'm 100% aware there are some linguistic and legal shenanigans at foot that make this not technically fraud, but I don't care. It's dishonest and manipulative.

Watch forever

Recently I've been enjoying something that is actually Netflix original: Netflix comedy specials. It's fun to have on when I'm working on other stuff, but I'm not interested in watching the same show multiple times in a short period. Much as I might like Dave Chappelle or Gabriel Igelsias, it's going to be several months or years before I can really enjoy seeing it again. Meanwhile Netflix keeps showing me the same stuff over and over with no way to filter it or even indicate which ones I've seen.

I contacted Netflix about this and they said I could either check the watch history in my profile and manually keep track or thumbs down my favorite things instead. So my current choices are to build a crime-scene wall of watched photos to keep track myself or gut-punch my recommendations (and favorite shows) with undeserved thumbs-downs. I think they can do better than that.

No indication of what's been seen before. No option to filter. Really?

Pandora has a neat feature where you can say "I'm tired of this, shelve it for a while" which would be great. Or if I could just say "seen it" and filter it to only things I haven't watched before, that would help me find new stuff instead of accidentally starting the same John Mulaney special 5 times in the course of a week. The thing that kills me is that it would be so easy to do. It's not difficult to have a little icon marking "watched this". Maybe even a counter, but WAY better would be a way to push them aside if I don't want to see it again for a while.

To prove this is as trivial as I claim, I wrote a greasemonkey script to give basic ''watched that'' functionality. It's pretty basic, but it's better than what Netflix is giving you.

Installing

Click here to learn more about Greasemonkey and how to use it. If you already have GreaseMonkey (or similar), you can get install my script by clicking the install button on this page. Otherwise, here's the raw script if you prefer:

// ==UserScript==
// @name	Netflix saw it button
// @author	TheGeekProfessor
// @description	Fix netflix thumbnails so you can mark them as watched
// @include	https://www.netflix.com/*
// @require https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.4.1/jquery.min.js 
// ==/UserScript==

// license	Creative Commons Attribution License


$(document).ready(function() {  
  $('[data-ui-tracking-context]').each(function(){
    // It's  query string that's actually JSON that's actually an array
    id= JSON.parse(decodeURI($(this).data('ui-tracking-context')));
    id = id.video_id;
  	if(localStorage.getItem(id))
      $(this).closest('.title-card-container').addClass('g_watched');
  });
  $('[data-tracking-uuid]').closest('.title-card-container').append('<div class="watched_eye">&#128065;</div>');
  $('.watched_eye').click(function(){
  	$(this).closest('.title-card-container').toggleClass('g_watched');
    id = $(this).closest('.title-card-container').find('[data-ui-tracking-context').data('ui-tracking-context');
 	  id= JSON.parse(decodeURI(id));
    id = id.video_id;
    localStorage.setItem(id,$(this).closest('.title-card-container').hasClass('g_watched'));
    console.log(id);
    console.log(localStorage.getItem(id));
  });
 
  $('head').append( `
    <style>
    .watched_eye {
      font-size: 57px;
      padding: 10px;
      position: absolute;
      bottom: -40px;
      left: 0;
      background: gray;
      border-radius: 6px;
      height: 30px;
      line-height: 30px;
    }
		.watched_eye:hover {
			opacity: .3;
			cursor:pointer;
		}
		.title-card-container.g_watched {
			opacity: .3;
		}
    </style>
  ` );
 
});

MeWe: A Facebook alternative based on protecting your right to privacy.

It's been great watching DuckDuckGo rise as a major Google competitor. I've been thrilled to see Firefox taking a more aggressive approach to protecting people as a way to combat the invasiveness of Chrome. Now we might finally have a solution to the Facebook problem. "Which problem", you might ask?

If you didn't already know, Facebook has a long and sordid history of taking and misusing your data, profiling you, selling those profiles, losing and mishandling the data as well. They're essentially a data-broker masquerading as social service. This means harvesting every piece of information they can find about you so they can package and sell it to others. It's nasty business, but everyone's doing it… everyone except a few who are building a new paradigm that proves you can make a business work without abusing customers.

Data-brokering is nasty business. They learn about your habits, your private business, your medical information - all of it packaged and sold with nary a thought to whether that will be used for ID Theft, skeezy marketing, law enforcement and so on.

That's what I hope to see in MeWe. I did some research since I'd never heard of the before today and they've actually been around a while. They used some business-focused "gofundme" services (Angel.co and wefunder) to get capital and have built up MeWe.com from that. There are various reviews of the site around including Forbes.com who claims they already have 8 million members (though that's rapidly growing).

If that's the case, they hardly need my review on top, but I still reached out to the CEO (his email is listed online… something he'll want to change if the site is growing this rapidly) to point out some room for improvement. For example:

It's not actually clear in the policy what happens if they change their mind later. I read on another post (their about page or one of the reviews perhaps) that they would notify you of changes and you could opt out… not very reassuring. Better would be to make it clear that minor changes to the policy that are still in-line with the philosophy would result in notices, but major changes would not affect you until you logged into your account again and manually accepted the change. This is a bold site with a bold plan; let's see bold assurances as well!

They're actually doing pretty well already in having a conversational tone, keeping it short, and avoiding legalese, but I think it can be even better. For example, the font is pretty small and they're not making great use of whitespace. Some pics might be good to break up the wall of text. Some of the detail is a little over-kill (maybe summarize and then link/expand for people who care).

Did you know? Internet law requires at least one cat pic per post.

There are precious few companies trying to take on the giants and it would make sense for them to join forces; even if only in cross endorsement. Obviously they should first review their business model, security plan, and a deeper look at their tech strategy, but then, if they're convinced, the endorsement of someone I already researched and trust would go a lot further than online posts.

So far going through the privacy policy and terms of service, I'm generally impressed. There are some neat features like "secret messaging" that even MeWe can't see (end-to-end encrypted between you and the recipient), full right to download all your MeWe content to your local computer, and messages that will auto-delete once they're received. Of course there's the question of "how they get paid" which they answer on their FAQ page.

It's a bit lengthy so let me summarize: they make money by charging businesses for a PRO version, by selling extra emotes (if you care), and other add-ons that are optional.

Last Thoughts

Signing up was easy and, though I will never let a website scan my contacts from other services, at least there's SOME assurance this site wouldn't abuse that function. The home page is clean, easy to understand and features some posts from the CEO about important privacy issues (like the growing concerns over how Amazon uses Alexa). Nice…

Not bad. If you combine the promised privacy with a good tool, this might be the tool that saves us from Facebook.

The jury's still out for me, but at least I can feel comfortable using MeWe in my regular browser instead of having to isolate Facebook in a private window to keep it from stalking me on the web. That alone puts MeWe on top for me.