Tuesday, September 3, 2013

More Samsung annoyances

I was getting a little sound all hours of the day and night.  Unlike when I first got the first phone, I figured immediately that this was because of email.  I do not need to be notified when email arrives.  I check email at my work, mostly.  When not at work I am not a slave to email.  I do not like getting notifications at 3am when the latest piece of spam arrives.  Or perhaps some collaborator in China needs a key--but they can wait until working hours.  Important people, right now mainly my lady friend because nobody else important enough does text, though possibly someone else temporary like a contractor if they ask, and the occasional AT&T offers...  Anyway, I still get far fewer texts than emails, and emails can be put on hold, texts usually need immediate awareness.  So I need audible alerts for texts at equal level as calls.  Emails, I don't need to know.  If I want to know, I'll open email.  I think those would make the most generally applicable defaults.

No obvious thing in Settings would take care of this, or at least that I could find.  It was easy to find the required settings in iPhone.  Here I resorted to Google, and there found I could open the menu in Mail and change the notification there.  OK.

Now I get a curious picture of candles and wine bottles every time I try to view the pictures in any of my galleries for the first time in a few minutes.  In front of the bottles, it says:

Weather
In Location
With Passion
Date

Then below it says

If the following conditions are met when you take pictures, information, such as people's names, or the weather, will be shown briefly when viewing pictures:

The weather widget has been refreshed before/after taking pictures.

I've pressed the OK button for this stupid dialog hundreds of times, yet it keeps coming back.  How can I get rid of this damned thing!!!!!  I'm not interested in having my photos tagged in multitudinous ways. Please just tag them with the date, exposure settings, and the like, you have on tap.  Don't ask me to do indecipherable things so that the tagging can be made more wonderful.  Each time I try to look at my pictures.  Besides, I wasn't taking pictures just now, I was going to look at them, believe it or not I look at pictures more than I take them, wouldn't that make sense???

I tried the menu button instead of OK.  That does nothing.  It doesn't respond at all when this glorious Tag Buddy dialog appears.  So I need to learn a new trick.


Oh yeah, I did open the menu just after I got past this stupid dialog.  And sure enough it has a Tag Buddy option.  I turn that option OFF.  And I still get the stupid Tag Buddy dialog every time I open a picture folder anyway!


Once again, there is no obvious setting to turn this thing off either.  This time I haven't even a clue as to what to google for.  Oh, wait, at the top of the page it says "Tag buddy".  I googled that, and got lots of information about a feature that has little interest to me.  I only want to get rid of this stupid reminder.  I'll probably have to ask my android guru friend about this.  Don't these Samsung people test these things?  Don't they have any sense of what it's like to have a real life, to just want to have the smart phone obey orders, not give them, not require endless learning and adjustment merely to make the damn thing civilized?  Perhaps the only testers are serious fanboys and fangirls who already know all the tricks, not some poor schmuck trying to get along, moving from one gleaming appliance and platform and universe after another as they keep appearing on an endless treadmill, usually just after he's barely figured out how to get on with the previous one.

That's pretty much what I've felt about all Samsung products since I bought my Samsung LCD TV in 2009.  I heard far less positive things about the monitors Samsung made in the early 1990's, while I don't remember owning one myself, I think I remember seeing some in action and inaction at Amiga conferences.  So it's a great new Samsung, though still not perhaps the one we want.



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