Zision Interactive » Geek Stuff http://zacaj.com/zision Sun, 01 Jan 2012 02:20:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Stupid Kindle http://zacaj.com/zision/stupid-kindle/ http://zacaj.com/zision/stupid-kindle/#comments Sat, 04 Jun 2011 23:18:21 +0000 zacaj http://zacaj.com/zision/?p=326 Background Got a new router today, on a trial basis.  I needed a router that had a range of at least 200ft, so I grabbed a random router from Walmart, in this case a Belkin N300.  Then I came home set it up, and walked 200ft away, turned on my kindle, and looked for signal.  Slightly surprisingly, it found it, although I now know it reaches about 275ft, but when I tried to connect it just said failed to connect.  Then I realized Id forgotten the scientific method, and walked back (up hill!) and tried it right next to the router (for a control).  Of course it didnt work. So now Im confused.  I tried again, disabled the password, etc, but nothing worked.  Then I went back inside, got my laptop, and tried it, and it connected fine at 275ft.  Even weirder.  I tried my kindle with my old router, and it worked fine.  I almost sat down to start googling "kindle belkin n300 wont connect," but something in the back of my mind clicked:

The Point

On the kindle forums someone had posted about how the kindle is always connecting to amazon.com, uploading logs (and GPS position), without ever telling you, and it also pings amazon.com when you connect to WIFI, to verify the connection.  He posted a way to change what site it pinged, in case, for instance, you were on some internet that for some reason blocked amazon.com, so you could still access other web pages.  Once I remembered that, I switched my internet to the new router, and voila! the kindle connects fine. Now, that seems like a fine design decision.  I mean, what network admin in their right minds would block amazon.com (besides from schools and China.  Coincidence?)?  They could at least have added some other servers if amazon.com failed, just in case.  But you cant really blame them for that.  The sole purpose (as far as amazon is concerned) of  having wifi on the kindle is to let people buy books off amazon.com, so theres really not much point in connecting otherwise.  I dont begrudge them that, at least not much. The problem is the error message.  If some techno-luddite comes home with their shiny new kindle after seeing all the other people with them and thinking, that seems pretty cool, and then they try to connect to their wifi, and get an error message like "cannot connect to wifi", theyre probably going to call up whoever set up their wifi, or is the family/local computer wiz, and ask them help.  Theyre going to come over, and get the same error message, and spend an hour looking at router settings, etc, and give up in frustration because, as far as they can see, theres nothing wrong: the kindle is just refusing to connect.  All some programmer needed to do was change the error message to "could not connect to amazon.com, theres most likely something wrong with your internet", and thered never be any problems, besides linux geeks complaining on their blogs about how the kindle shouldnt require an internet connection to connect to wifi.  Id have wasted four hours of my life trying to fix that, if I hadnt had that little kindle hacking factoid stuck in the back of my head.

Anyway...

Now, youre probably thinking: "The kindle IS useless without being able to connect to the internet, so whats the big deal?"  In this case, it isnt an extremely big deal, but the fact that, if this rare occasion should pop up, it could have been completely avoided by saving a different sentence as the error code, or designing the connection software differently, is really inexcusable.  The kindle is otherwise fairly well designed, although there are many other cases where it could be easily improved in about 5 minutes of editing. The point is that Im seeing this sort of thing everywhere.  All the good software out there that Ive used doesnt have it, and all the bad software does.  Comparing my stupid-piece-of-crap cell phone to my iPod touch, the cell phone has little things like this EVERYWHERE.  Any programmer who took even a bit of pride in his work, or even any tester (if they had any), could have made the user experience that much better.]]> http://zacaj.com/zision/stupid-kindle/feed/ 0 8/17/2010 http://zacaj.com/zision/8172010/ http://zacaj.com/zision/8172010/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:29:19 +0000 zacaj http://zacaj.com/zision/?p=22 Project DUST looks AMAZING, at least from a tech standpoint It appears I somehow deleted the /usr folder on my computer...]]> http://zacaj.com/zision/8172010/feed/ 0 8/16/2010 http://zacaj.com/zision/8162010/ http://zacaj.com/zision/8162010/#comments Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:42:25 +0000 zacaj http://zacaj.com/zision/?p=18 zacaj.tk, and the old links (zacaj.com/forums,forums.zacaj.com,etc) now redirect to it, so go and reregister! Ive decided to change my post formatting (each paragraph is its own topic) to have multiple small topics and status updates in a single daily post, however large post on one subject will still be separate. Still working on an emulator interface for my arcade cabinet, it turns out black buttons dont show up well on black backgrounds, so I have to redesign everything.  Once thats fixed, the cabinet should be about done though, and Ill soon have a post about it.]]> http://zacaj.com/zision/8162010/feed/ 0 Site Down http://zacaj.com/zision/site-down/ http://zacaj.com/zision/site-down/#comments Sun, 15 Aug 2010 03:19:49 +0000 zacaj http://zacaj.com/zision/?p=10 http://zacaj.com/zision/site-down/feed/ 0 Bloxz and Frik are off the App Store http://zacaj.com/zision/bloxz-and-frik-are-off-the-app-store/ http://zacaj.com/zision/bloxz-and-frik-are-off-the-app-store/#comments Sun, 15 Aug 2010 03:13:11 +0000 zacaj http://zacaj.com/zision/?p=6 http://zacaj.com/zision/bloxz-and-frik-are-off-the-app-store/feed/ 0