Paypal has a new trick that makes me want to punch faces with extreme force. I was logging in today to pay for an Orycon membership (because that’s the only payment they take online), and I got this stop dialogue:

Dung.

Now, this is a load of donkey dung, because I have a laptop I’ve been using for exactly this stuff for four years. Same laptop. Never even reformatted. But I’m all, ‘okay, fine, whatever.’

They give you two options. One is to receive a phone call at a predetermined number. Another is to verify data. Or let me put that more specifically, like they did: verify public data. That’s an important difference, and they think they’re being oh-so-very-clever, and I almost fell for it.

See, I didn’t want to deal with a telephone, so I chose verify data, thinking this would be some sort of account information validation. WRONG. They’re trolling public records and (presumably) credit report information to tie together a more complete – meaning more saleable – identity profile, and asking me to “verify” data I’ve never given them, ever. That’s when I realised what was up.

In short, you’re not “verifying” anything. You’re drawing them a comprehensive historical map of your life, connecting all the little dots they think they might have for you, on their behalf, all under the guise of some sort of security check.

You get: inconvenience and data mining! They get: A far more saleable and more complete historical profile of you, under false pretences.

Just to see what happens, I tried my other Paypal account, after verifying my computer on this one. OH LOOK, said Paypal, WE DON’T RECOGNISE THIS COMPUTER!

Dung twice.

And the same set of options. So, yeah. If – or more likely, when – you get this dialogue, pick a disposable number and have them call you and enter a pin. Because this? This is horseshit.

Paypal is just awful.

eta: IT GETS WORSE: In comments, check this:

Michael Hanscom: Did you see the recent story about their new TOS’s authorizing robocalls from them or their associates for basically whatever reason they want? It was enough for me to just flat out close my account.

Really. No, I missed that. So either way, you’re screwed. You give them a legit number they can phonespam or you let them datamine you. Awesome. Fuck, I wish I could close my accounts. But I have business need. Goddammit.

eta2: And here we go – the first spam call has already arrived.

Anybody got experience with those little 12V electrical in-vehicle 12V coolers? I can get this one with credit union rewards points. The maker has a smaller model (really tiny) which has a small number of reviews that are highly mixed, and a larger model (substantially larger)which has a large number of reviews and is thought well of overall.

This model, though, lacks reviews. It’s 14L (a little over 3.5 gallons?) and… um… well, it looks like this:

Cooler than … what, exactly?

I don’t expect miracles, but it’d be nice to keep things cool in the Raptor without hauling around ice and/or burning uselessly through cold-packs. Mostly because let’s face it, after day one, all of those things are dead, while this thing would in theory keep going.

Subtle, as intended. I was worried it would be too subtle, but I think this works well. I don’t want it to jump in your face, but I want it to be there.

There’s a duplicate on the other side, in the opposite window. Now if the callsign frame (RAPTOR 312 LIGHT) would just get here…

What with The Thrilling Adventure Hour going away to my great sadness – the Sparks Nevada: Marshal on Mars theme makes me happy every time I hear it – I want suggestions for anything like it as a replacement podcast. No, not Welcome to Night Vale, I’ve been on that since about six months after it started. Something else.

I mean, I’ve got Big Finish Audio Doctor Who, and I suppose I really could fill in with that, but… it’s just not the same.

Wow, I will miss Thrilling Adventure Hour. Goddamn I am so sad they’re wrapping things up. Ah, well, I can’t blame them, it has been ten years. But still.

Recommendations, anyone?

Oh yeah, and as a reminder, as part of the big NIWA sales event, Bone Walker’s digital download is on 40% Bandcamp discount – enter “NIWA” as your discount code at checkout. It won’t be this cheap again unless somebody pays me, so now’s the time. 😀

I’m making something. Effects test here. Everything has to fit inside a 9mm tube. Here’s a closeup of this component’s mounting hardware:

When it’s done it’s going to look like a little metal penlight and that’s all. That’s not bragging, that’s kind of wondering at myself why all the effort. But I’ll finish it anyway. Thank you, sunk cost fallacy – today, you’re working for me.

There’s a Northwest Independent Writers’ Association event going on, so Anna has put two of the Free Court of Seattle works on sale – Faerie Blood, the novel, and “Blood of the Land,” the newest story. This is the series that Bone Walker accompanies as soundtrack, so it’s a good time to get a toe in if you’re on the budget.

And as part of that, I’m putting the digital download of Bone Walker for 40% off, if you use the discount code “niwa” – so if you don’t have the newest album yet? Now is a good time to get it.

Novel and short story details here, Bone Walker the album here, don’t forget “niwa” discount code.

Have a good weekend, everybody!

I’ve been looking over music display apps for Android, and right now, I’m really liking MobileSheetsPro. I’ve been testing using the Free version, which is fully-featured but sharply limited on number of songs and playlists and set lists. Does anyone have any other software they’d like to suggest before I dive in?

(BEFORE YOU SAY IT, iPad users: forScore is not available for Android. Which I don’t mind – I’m not thinking of anything I’d want that MobileSheets doesn’t do, it does a lot of things I wouldn’t’ve thought of, and the features list vs. forScore is pretty comparable.)

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I’m already feeling a lot of confirmation about having bought this thing – the ability to have my entire music sheet library around on any gig and the ability to pull it up at any time, even stuff I never play? That’s pretty damn awesome. I’ll be able to have stuff always that I normally just don’t bother hauling around.

That would be the tablet I mentioned earlier.

Does anybody have any suggestions for Bluetooth page-turning pedals? I’m looking at the AirTurn PED at the moment, even though it’s a really new device. It’s small, it has fantastic battery life, it’s silent, it’s listed as supporting MobileSheetsPro, and is a Bluetooth SMART READY device, which means you don’t lose bluetooth sync across power saving mode. I like that part a lot.

One big question is whether this tablet supports SMART READY. But it claims to be Bluetooth 4.0, which means it should support SMART READY intrinsically. I have a question in to support to make sure. The odds are good – SMART READY has been around for a few years now and is pretty core to the 4.0 spec, so I don’t even think you can claim Bluetooth 4 without it.

Anyway, if you have any insights, I’d love to hear ’em! Let me know in comments. Thanks!

The Raptor has this huge cargo area in two-seater mode, larger than that of all but the largest SUVs. It’s also got a three-seat mode, which might actually be useful, as well as four and five (if one person is small) modes. Three-seat mode will be particularly useful for Leannan Sidhe gigs, since that’s usually a three-person band, and we’ll still have quite decent room for cargo in that configuration.

The vehicle comes with a cargo-area tray for all-seats configuration (again, in theory five, really four adults), but you can’t even buy something specifically made for two-seat mode. Even most universal cargo-area liners simply aren’t big enough, which is hilarious – all these SUV toys being too small for my Honda Fit Raptor, lol – but I found a one that was, and stared modifying it.

Pictures below the break…

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I’ve set up a redirect so that mobile users going to the front page from outside the site will, by default, go to the mobile version. But unlike with the blog (where I can’t do this because reasons), you can actually and properly exit to the desktop view – there’s a link at the bottom of the mobile page to do it.

It’s the same mobile version as the one you’d get by default if you went to the blog on mobile, so there’s not really much new. But I didn’t want to have to add a “go to mobile” link on the front page or anything, so this seemed like an adequate solution for now.

Anyway, if you’re curious:

Browser-dependent: http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com

Forced desktop: http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/index

Mobile front page: https://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog/mobile-home

That’s not perfect because the mobile front page will be shown as a desktop blog page but with mobile content if you go there from desktop, because again reasons.

Next version won’t do that sort of foolishness, but that can wait a couple of years – I hope!

It’s still early days, but doing all that mobile view work (and turning it back on once it was usable) seems to have had a pretty decent impact. Here are some stats from Google Analytics:

Before

After

The bit in red is mobile; above that is desktop; below that is tablet. The tablet audience is surprisingly small; it’s swamped by both desktop and phone. The “bounce” rate is the percentage of people who hit the site and only look at one page. The pages per visit is a mean, and includes the bouncers. The time-on-site thing I consider kind of unreliable, to be honest. (It’s regularly internally contradictory within a single day, is why.)

Anyway, as you can see, phone users used to bounce off the site at a dramatically higher rate than other kinds of users; now they’ve moved into line with everyone else. Pages per visit on phone is up, time on site (unreliable tho’ it may be) is also meaningfully up. Mobile users had been dragging the whole site average down; now it’s back in line with other formats.

So I guess that mobile view is kind of important! In retrospect I guess that seems kind of obvious, but I tend to hate them personally, so I guess that kind of affected my impression of their value. I wish I’d done the work earlier, now. Ah, well, live and learn.