More fun with Frontier Communications, who took over my Verizon Fios service

Already been pretty unhappy with Frontier Communications, who took over FIOS from Verizon in Southern California. They had many features not working, like being able to add your family to video users so they can also watch streaming video (which they seem to have added now, though in a much more difficult way than Verizon did, but it isn’t working right for my mom and she can’t watch Showtime), and the internet just seems less responsive and slower, and their tech support is not nearly as good as Verizon’s. Plus there is the fact that I never got any notification of the change and one day could not longer log into Verizon to see my account.

Well today we have been having weirdness with our home phone, where the people would call and there would be nothing, and if we called the phone never made any sound and never connects. So their phone service seems completely down.

So I decided to contact customer support, but low and behind, while Frontier’s sales site is completely up their account site is completely down.

All I get is Internal Service Error.

So I tried tweeting them on Twitter, but have not heard anything back and see tons of people from all over the country seemingly having problems. And even better they are saying you need to submit to them to try to even get money back for their downtime (which should just be automatic).

So far the service from Frontier has been very substandard. I used to love my FIOS, but now I am so unimpressed with their service!.

More fun with Xmarks and Safari

So I am still having major xmarks issues. On my Mac on El Capitan 10.11.5 I am running Firefox 47.01 and Xmarks 4.3.19, and I am running Safari 9.1.1 and Safari Technology Preview 9.1.2 (which was recently updated, and maybe the issue) and Xmarks for Safari 2.0.19.

After creating my clean bookmarks in Firefox and making a clean backup of them I kept uploading them and overwriting the xmarks servers, but when I uses Xmark for Safari it has been seemingly just wiping out all my Xmarks in both Safari’s, but leaving my completly messed up bookmarks on both my iPhone and iPad. So this time I turned off iCloud Sync for Safari on both iPad and iPhone and deleted the bookmarks then overwrote the Safari bookmarks on my mac with the clean bookmarks from Xmarks, and it left Safari empty of bookmarks once again. Weird. So I let it sit overnight with no bookmarks in Safari on my Mac, iPhone or iPad, but when I woke up that was no longer the case. Once again Safari had messed up bookmarks on my Mac (though nothing on iPhone and iPad sync iCloud is off completely) and the server copy on Xmarks is messed up again too!

Great! So now I have also turned off iCloud on my Mac and have re-installed my good backup bookmarks into Firefox and re-uploaded them to Xmarks, and redownloaded them with Xmarks for Safari (which I have also uninstalled and re-installed) and once again I have no bookmarks in Safari. Maybe having iCloud though on all my devices it will eventually clear the bookmarsk in iCloud which are obviously totally messed up, though eventually I do want it to sync to my iPhone and iPad.

I have contacted Xmarks support to see if they will do anything.

I am thinking after this I may just need to kill Xmarks for Safari and just work from an exported bookmarks from Firefox and put them into Safari, as for sure something is not working with Xmarks!

The Palette Gear Controller

I can’t believe I never heard of the Palette when it was in it’s Kickstarter campaign, but this is a fully customizable controller with analogue controls. It has 4 levels of kit from $199-$899mfor a wooden controller,mand you can also get additional buttons, controllers and sliders which are all controllee by the core untit, amd they have programable lcd lights, so you can remember which button is set for what.

This sounds very cool, and I would love to try one out, though the lack of SpeedGrade control makes it certainly not as impressive, though it does work with basically the rest of the suite.

Jonny Elwyn has an awesome review, which goes heavily into the details.

Adobe Creative Cloud blog on the Essential Sound Panel in Audition CC

Durin Gleaves at the Adobe Creative Cloud blog has an awesome article on the new Essential Sound Panel in Adobe Audition for mixing DIalogue, Music, Sound Effects, Ambient or Environmental Audio in easy, but powerful ways. It can even retime or recompose a music clip to match a certain time!

Well worth a read, I am looking forward to trying this out, though wish it was integrated into Premiere so I don’t have to do a separate mix, but could instead have it happen with the timeline (which I already put on different tracks for different mix types).

More fun with Xmarks on Mac, huzzah for Xmarks for Safari (if only it worked)

So I finally got X-marks to sync, but it was a total pain in the arse. In fact I had to wipe my whole Firefox profile, and use Firefox Sync to get all my plug ins back and then re-log into everything, and then import my clean bookmarks backup and use that to Upload over the Xmarks server. I then did the same at work where I have a portable Firefox setup, though after checking my x-marks bookmarks online they were still old, so I synced again this morning and the server ones finally seem to match.

Now is where the real fun begins! So I went to Xmarks for Safari and told it to Download my bookmarks, as it’s bookmarks were by far the most messed up. The first attempt seemed to merge my server bookmarks and Safari ones so they were an even bigger mess, so I tried downloading again, and now I have no safari bookmarks at all! YIPPEE!!!!

So in Xmarks for Safari I did a Reset Xmarks and relogged in and told it to keep data on server, and discard data on this computer (of which there is none). And Nothing. ABSOLUTELY NO BOOKMARKS IN SAFARI, nor in Safari Tech Preview. Good job Xmarks!

So finally my bookmarks are clean on the server, but I have absolutely no bookmarks in Safari, and my iPad and iPhone each still have the really messed up bookmarks from the strange merging of my clean bookmarks and my clean bookmarks, and they all have iCloud sync turned on.

And it looks like the solution I have used in the past is no longer viable. I used to boot into Bootcamp and let Apple’s iCloud Sync Extension work to sync my Safari boomarks, but posts online I am looking at seem to imply that the extension no longer functions with the latest Firefox and the plug in has been pulled. Thanks a lot Apple. Really appreciate the help!

Can’t Apple make a damn syncing plug in for Bookmarks for those of us that don’t use Safari on the mac, since we are forced to use Safari on our iOS devices?

Anyone else have major problems with XMARKS on Mac?

So I am a Mac user, but I do not use Safari as my browser of choice, but I still want my bookmarks to sync between browsers and get to my ipad and iphone. And my browser of choice is still Firefox (I used Chrome for a while but missed all the plug ins with Firefox) as I like it expansion abilities (and yes I know in the near future it will lose them and start using Chrome extensions, and I will likely re-evaluate then).

So to keep my Bookmarks synced for a long time I have been a user of Xmarks. It works with Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and nominally Safari. On PC Apple has released a bookmark sync plug in for iCloud that works very well, but they have never released it for mac. So I use XMARKS.

The problem is I think with Xmarks Safari, which is finicky at best, and often if I am not paying attention to my bookmarks, they all get mixed up and unorganized. Things get pulled out of folders and moved all over, and yes in XMARKS you can go see old sets of bookmarks, but it isn’t exactly a quick or easy process, and often to find a clean set of bookmarks I need to go back far enough that I lose any recent bookmarks that I have added, so I end up just re-organizing my bookmarks once again.

I just spent the last 2 days doing that gain, and am doing a force overwrite of my server bookmarks, so hopefully all my browsers end up with my nice clean freshly organized bookmarks, but I don’t expect it to work, as old things always pop up and things get completely disorganized.

Plus it makes me nervous that my upload has been doing this for the last half an hour!

Which even though I am doing a forced overwrite of the server, I can bet things will get messed up (and yes I have exported my bookmarks and made a backup from Firefox, as this organization took a long damn time).

And somehow my bookmarks never seem to make it to Safari or my iPad an iPhone correctly no matter what I do. And I often end up manually importing the bookmarks into Safari, but then the sync gets all messed up.

Let’s hope for once this actually works.

(EDIT)

 Yup, well now that I have my clean set of bookmarks, it seems I can’t get them to Force Overwrite on the server! Xmarks just seems stuck at synchronizing. And Firefox keeps locking up so I have to force quite. Yipee. I guess I can manually delete Safari’s bookmarks and import the firefox ones and see how that goes, but I have never had a good experience with that! SHIT!

(EDIT AGAIN)

 Walked both dogs and when I came back the sync was done, but when I checked the bookmarks online, they were the old ones, so it didn’t seem to work. SHIT! This is really annoying!

Adobe has licensed Apple ProRES playback for Wndows

Adobe today announced that they have licensed playback of Apple’s ProRES, so it will be natively supported within Adobe Creative Cloud, without having to use Apple’s Quicktime to do so (since it has been killed for Windows). Now it won’t be able to write out to ProRES (so Window users will need another format), but it will be able to be read, and should be out soon.

They are also adding export support of mov wrapped DNxHD and DNxHR as well as playback of AAC audio and PNG compressed frames, and the native reading and writing of the legacy Animation format.

At least this gives ProRES a lifeline, though it is really too bad that it won’t be able to write it as well, as ProRES is a great format, that looks to be in decline from now on.

I love that Adobe is doing this, but I still can’t wrap my head around Apple’s thoughts on this. Sure it saves them money in development, and in licensing fees, but to have a really pro format it needs to be cross platform!

Honestly with Apple’s history with Pro Products (constantly making them great then killing them), and with the MacPro not being customize-able or upgrade-able at all (and not having been upgraded since it release in 2013), it looks to me like Apple is moving completely out of the high end pro market, and I worry that any of their high end software may not survive either!

Apple has released iTunes 12.4 and made it even more of a pain to use!

And yet another update to iTunes, with version 12.4, and once again Apple has made things harder to do.

Yes the sidebar is back permanently, instead of having to turn it on, but they have made it harder to use. Instead of tabs that were always up, now you pick, music and videos from a drop down menu. which is much slower than individual buttons. And now if you want to listen to your music list by songs, you have to scroll to the top of the playlists, which is obviously much slower than having a dedicated menu to do it (I think the menu was slow, but having to scroll to the top of the playlists to do is just dumb).

And then Playlists. When you create a playlist it puts it in a playlist format, where you can’t change order or see different ways to sort it at all, and there used to be a dedicated drop down to change it to Songs, so you can edit the order, or see if the order is by track or whatever. I hated having to do that, but now you have to go to the view menu, and go to the sort as Drop Down menu! Much harder and slower! And come on apple, lets us pick our default setting for Playlists! The default Playlist setting is useless! You can’t change anything, which is the whole point of playlists! Let us chose our own default choice, especially if you are going to make it even harder to use!

And now to create a new playlist from a selection of your music you used to right click, and select create new playlists, now you have to go to the add to playlist drop down and go to the top and select New Playlist. Additional drop down menus DON’T MAKE THINGS EASIER, THEY MAKE THEM HARDER APPLE!

And the back button. I don’t understand how it works. If I go to a playlist then to teh Songs in the Library and a new Playlist, and hit back, it goes back to the first Playlist, not the Songs that I was just at that I have to scroll all the way to the top of the list to get to. These items should stick to the top!

I do like that when you make a new playlist it is selected and shown on the left (which was gone as of recent versions), but it makes it hard to get back to sorting music by songs, since that is at the top of the sidebar!

I don’t know why Apple who is supposed to be all about making things easier thinks they have to change things and make them harder or even remove features with an update! First they took away the ability to open multiple playlists, then they made playlists default to an unchangeable playlist view. And now they have just make everything take more steps and be harder (and there aren’t even keyboard shortcuts to make it easier). What is next?

I really wish someone could come up with an interface to replace iTunes that works with the iTunes back end, and lets you customize it and use it like you want to, instead of being forced to do it how Apple wants, which seems to constantly be a harder and harder method! WTF APPLE!

Frontier Communications has taken Over FIOS from Verizon on the west coast, and so far things are not good

So Verizon recently sold it’s West coast FIOS division to Frontier Communications, and the transition so far has been anything but easy.

First off I was given absolutely no notification of the change, in fact the first time I realized it had happened was when I tried to log into Verizon to check something on my service and they said I was no longer a customer! WTF! And it means that any Tripple Play service you had where you got TV, Internet and Cell Phone through Verizon for a discount, is literally not longer active since they are no longer Verizon!

Sure my TV and Internent have kept working, mostly. Actually TV seems fine, with the exception of some stuttering on shows, which doesn’t look so good. I use TIVO though so I don’t have the On Demand issue that everyone else is having, as I don’t get on Demand.

The internet, now that hasn’t been so good. While Broadband Speed Test still shows good results, as I pay for 75/75 Mb, and am getting 83.24 Mbps down and 90.98 Mbps up, but that isn’t the whole picture. As since the switch all my iOS devices get constant drop outs. Where the internet or an app (live the Marvel Unlimited App) will completely stall out. Now I have a current Verizon Router with WIFI as well as an Apple TV connected via Cat 6 Ethernet. And usually I have to drop whichever router I am connected to and manually switch to the other for Internet to come back. This never happened when it was Verizon, and is even weirder as one of the routers is also the modem, so why it loses connection I will never know. And yes I have restarted both routers many times.

And even worse is the services not implemented, with no time frame for their implementation! The two biggies on these are the aforementioned VOD, and also internet streaming of TV shows, with services like HBO GO. Yes the streaming exists (though with a new log in, that is much harder to find, especially with the crappy Apple TV remote interface), but Verizon you got 9 accounts you could set up and allow internet access to, so your family could all have their own accounts. Now you only have the main account! This is totally unacceptable. And Customer service can’t get the answer straight. My first call about this, said it would be implemented by that weekend, which was more than a month ago, and today they said they have absolutely no time frame to implement the feature.