When you use the following CSS:
-webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
You are disabling text resizing on ALL Webkit browsers. If you are trying to fix a problem with font resizing on a portable device — iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, etc — then you should take additional steps to ensure that the CSS is not applied to desktop browsers.
The Internets thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Lately I’ve been noticing a bunch of web sites that have defeated the text-resizing capabilities of Chrome and Safari. Usually these are the sites of design-obsessed douchebags whose opinions I would have considered to be crap anyways, but the latest site I’ve encountered to do this is the frickin’ Apple Store.
The online store for Apple products have broken a basic feature of their own damned web browser.
For reals.
Amusingly, Apple’s site resizes just fine in IE8.
Was going to ride my motorcycle to work this morning. Took some patience and liberal application of the throttle to get her started, which is typical when she has been sitting for more than a couple of weeks. Got my gear on, dug up my tire gauge, and of course…
The front tire was completely flat.
Not too surprised at that — on my road trip, every morning when I checked the tire I would find a drop of the tire goo coming out of the hole. Oh well. New tire has been ordered. If I’m really lucky maybe it will get here on Wednesday…
The people who complain most about “non-existent documentation” are the ones who never bother searching for it in the first place. It is documented, you lazy fucking bitches.
Earlier this year Comcast launched a failed DNS redirect “service” called Domain Helper that redirected NXDOMAINs to an Advertising / Search page. Needless to say, the first time I saw one of those pages my first priority was figuring out how to make it stop. Unfortunately our Comcast account has never worked and tech support has never been able to resolve the problem so using dns-opt-out.comcast.net was not an option.
Luckily, I run a caching DNS server on my router and it supports a parameter called bogus-nxdomain. Give it the IP addresses of the Domain Helper servers and it replaces any DNS queries that return those addresses with NXDOMAIN responses. This worked well enough until the IPs changed.
So tonight I dug a little deeper and found that Comcast now has a DNS information site. Complete with a list of all of their DNS server IP address that don’t implement Domain Helper. I re-configured my router with the two servers closest to my location plus the national server nearest me and hopefully this is the last time I have to think about Domain Helper.
As mentioned in a pre-vacation posting, I’ve been giving a new netbook a whirl — an Acer Aspire One AO751H. This is an 11.6″ screen model with an Intel Atom Z520 1.3GHz, the particular SKU I purchased came with 2GB RAM and Vista Basic but was otherwise your basic netbook recipe. The pokey CPU speed made me nervous about its usability so I made the purchase thru Costco.com because their return policy on computers and electronics is superb.
From the physical perspective, the AO751H is nearly perfect. The 11.6″ screen is a nice step up from the 8.9″ screens of earlier models and the keyboard is exactly the same size as Apple’s compact / laptop models. It had all the usual ports, 3 USB, three-in-one memory card reader, etc. The only faults I have with the design are the keyspacing — the keys are larger than on Apple’s keyboards, the minimal gap between keys makes it slower to touch-type on than an Apple — and that the touchpad doesn’t support the ubiquitous two-finger right-click action. Oh, and of course, the damned screen is glossy but I find that to be less annoying on smaller displays.
Unfortunately the great physical design is marred by the fact that it is a completely unreliable computer. It regularly locks up. No blue screen, just a straight-up freeze. I downgraded to XP, side-graded to Vista Ultimate, and even gave Windows 7 Premium a whirl, all with the same disappointing results. Using the out-of-box Windows drivers, the latest WHQL drivers from Windows Update, and bleeding-edge drivers directly from the vendors involved had no impact. I also applied several firmware updates without any improvement.
Reading several netbook-related forums it appears that freezing problems with the AO751H are not uncommon but not so widespread as to imply that the entire platform and drivers are flawed. It’s just the luck of the draw — probably you will get a good one but many are bad.
Needless to say, I took my work MacBook Pro on my trip — wasn’t about to jeopardize my own MBP for nearly 4K miles on the back of a motorcycle. I took the AO751H back to my local Costco warehouse this afternoon after another round of driver and BIOS updates this week failed to improve the stability.
I’m still in the market for a new netbook. Right now the Intel SU4100 has my attention, a real Core2 Duo @ 1.3GHz, presently available as an upgrade on the Dell Inspiron 11z. It is a little pricey right now for the configuration I want but I expect we’ll see better deals once more systems with that CPU are available, I think there will be a flood of them after the Windows 7 launch. I’m also keeping my eyes peeled for a good deal on a Lenovo IdeaPad U110, a nice little ultra-portable with a bit more punch than the SU4100.
My cable and Internet have been down for at least 30 hours. Comcast customer service claims the outage affects several neighboring cities and will be resolved tomorrow…
Smells like bullcrap to me. Not a peep about large-scale outages in the local news websites or the usual broadband forums. Hopefully I can catch some of my neighbors in the morning and ask if they’re having probems too.
Update: Did an online chat with Comcast from work in the morning. No outage:
I’m 99% certain that what happened was someone was dispatched on Tuesday to connect or disconnect a neighbor, and they either stole our line or disconnected ours by mistake. Of course, they won’t give me an appointment to correct their fuck-up until Saturday. I’ve escalated but they way Comcast works I probably won’t know if a technician is coming on Friday until one shows up at my door. Well, actually, they probably won’t come to the door anyways… It’ll either suddenly start working tomorrow, or it won’t.
Update 2: Also confirmed with a neighbor that there was no outage. I’m saddened by how well I know how these people operate…
Saturday Update: The technician they sent said he couldn’t fix the line problem. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that it was raining and the end of his day. Now we’re supposed to wait until Wednesday for another tech to come out. I really would love to ditch Comcast but the fastest DSL I can get is 1.5Mbps / 256 vs my current 16Mbps / 768.
Wednesday Update: I’m finally back online. Yay.
