The Icon Bar: The Playpen: List of things annoying me today
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List of things annoying me today |
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Andrew Poole |
Message #111291, posted by andypoole at 19:05, 11/9/2009, in reply to message #111290 |
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(Fortunately, I did get back my contacts, email and calendar stuff from MobileMe, however all my text messages, photos, notes and app data/settings from the phone are gone) Your contacts, photos and notes should be backed up on your Mac in the address book, iPhoto and Mail, and the iPhone backup is in /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup within your user folder.
I know all of that, but the hard disc that contains that lot won't mount. At all.
Do you have Time Machine backups of these things? If you have another Mac you should be able to pull those items off the disk directly (or when you buy a new hard drive, insert the Snow Leopard DVD and choose to install from the time machine backup) No, I don't use Time Machine.
Andy. |
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Phil Mellor |
Message #111292, posted by monkeyson2 at 19:17, 11/9/2009, in reply to message #111291 |
 Please don't let them make me be a monkey butler
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No, I don't use Time Machine. Oh no!  |
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Blind Moose |
Message #111293, posted by Acornut at 20:18, 11/9/2009, in reply to message #111289 |
 No-eye-deer (No Idea)
Posts: 487
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... tickets for the Bestival ... Who needs tickets?
I've been working, all day, down wind, of the 'bloody' thing!  |
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Steve C |
Message #111297, posted by Steve at 22:42, 11/9/2009, in reply to message #111293 |
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... tickets for the Bestival ... Who needs tickets?
I've been working, all day, down wind, of the 'bloody' thing!
At least it's not quite as bad as the Isle of Wight Festival - when that time comes we just abandon the office, as they redirect all the traffic down our road, and it takes us forever to get anywhere. Pity that with remote support stuff these days we don't actually get time off (unless we're at the Festival itself!).
[Edited by Steve at 23:42, 11/9/2009] |
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Martin Bazley |
Message #111309, posted by swirlythingy at 16:08, 12/9/2009, in reply to message #111290 |
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Do you have Time Machine backups of these things? If you have another Mac you should be able to pull those items off the disk directly (or when you buy a new hard drive, insert the Snow Leopard DVD and choose to install from the time machine backup) But where does the Time Machine back things up, if not the hard drive? The Internet? (That sounds bandwidth limit-busting.) |
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Andrew Poole |
Message #111310, posted by andypoole at 16:13, 12/9/2009, in reply to message #111309 |
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Do you have Time Machine backups of these things? If you have another Mac you should be able to pull those items off the disk directly (or when you buy a new hard drive, insert the Snow Leopard DVD and choose to install from the time machine backup) But where does the Time Machine back things up, if not the hard drive? The Internet? (That sounds bandwidth limit-busting.)
An external hard disc.
Andy. |
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Martin Bazley |
Message #111312, posted by swirlythingy at 16:16, 12/9/2009, in reply to message #109000 |
Posts: 460
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This is more "things annoying me most days" than "things annoying me today", but: Windows running out of some kind of internal resource and failing to create windows properly until I close an open program. How am I meant to work if I can't have 3+ copies of Visual Studio open, 3+ PDF's, 3+ CHM files, 2+ text files, ~5 web pages and ~10 filer windows? I know - it sucks, doesn't it?
Somebody seriously ought write an operating system that fixed problems like these. Something with a properly developed GUI. No limit on windows or problems with them chewing up memory and/or speed. A 'back' button to control the stack better, and an option to not to have to give the input focus to the foremost window. A system that wouldn't slow down, the more you installed on its hard drive, and perhaps something along the bottom of the screen which meant an application didn't have to always have at least one window open at all times...
Oh, and co-operative multitasking might be nice too. |
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Eric Rucker |
Message #111313, posted by bhtooefr at 16:17, 12/9/2009, in reply to message #111309 |
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Posts: 337
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It backs up to the hard drive in the overpriced wireless router that you also bought from Apple. |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #111315, posted by filecore at 16:25, 12/9/2009, in reply to message #111313 |
Posts: 3868
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But it's good a 'cool' name, surely that makes it worth the money? |
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Eric Rucker |
Message #111319, posted by bhtooefr at 17:23, 12/9/2009, in reply to message #111312 |
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Technically, you could run out of WIMP resources - I think if you opened (I could be off by a factor of 2) 2 gibiwindows + 1, you'd overflow the window handle numbering. Also, I believe menus count against that. But, your point stands, because Windows (at least before Vista, not sure about Vista and 7 running the DWM, but I think they're the same) can only handle 65536 GDI objects per session - and each window, button, text box, etc., is a GDI object. There have been two situations where I've run into the GDI object limit: one, when a beta version of Opera I was using had a GDI leak, and it hit the 16384 GDI object limit of Windows 2000 (Windows 2000 had a registry setting to restrict it to that,) and the second when I left the volume mixer in Windows 7 RC open (while running the DWM, BTW,) and it leaked GDI objects like crazy. (I hear that it's since been rewritten for the final version to not do that.)
Problems with software chewing up memory? That's just the software in question, try running 5 Firefox sessions on a RiscPC (I'd do it, but I'm not patient enough.) Speed? A side effect of having virtual memory, I'd rather have them chew up speed than just get "Out of memory."
The only reason why Windows boxes slow down the more you install is because of applications that automatically decide that they should always be running. It wouldn't be hard at all to bog down a RISC OS system much, much more, doing the same crap that application developers on Windows do. (And, could you imagine the way an icon bar would look if typical Windows software and users hit RISC OS? It'd be unusable, because most of the crapware at least hides in the system tray on Windows.)
Oh, and pre-emptive multitasking would be nice on RISC OS.  |
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Martin Bazley |
Message #111326, posted by swirlythingy at 21:42, 12/9/2009, in reply to message #111319 |
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Personally, I'd rather the system was honest to me and told me I was running out of memory (questions of how the hell you could ever run out of memory in a computer with, typically, upwards of 2GB of RAM aside...) than simply tried to fake it by using the hard disc instead, usually making a complete mess of it so the disc ends up swapping practically all the time, to speak nothing of fragmentation (I have never had to defrag a disc on RISC OS, and some of the ones in this house are pretty damn old).
I don't get your point of 'applications that decide they should always be running'... that slows the system down how? In fact, I thought one of the advantages of pre-emptive multitasking over co-operative was the removal of the need to continuously poll each application in turn, which is the only way I can envisage an overfilled icon bar on RISC OS slowing the system down, if not noticeably. And even that problem can be almost completely eliminated by a simple matter of passing 1 to R0 in Wimp_Poll.
And how does an application decide it should always be running anyway? In the icon bar scenario you describe, judicious use of the Task Manager's one facility would soon put paid to that.
My sentences are degenerating into incoherent and opinionated babble. That's generally a sign that it's late, I'm tired and I'm about to start a flamewar. Common sense dictates I really should shut up now, but it's soo tempting to hit the Post button...  |
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Eric Rucker |
Message #111327, posted by bhtooefr at 22:28, 12/9/2009, in reply to message #111326 |
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Posts: 337
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Well, let me put it this way - if there's a choice between failing to run a program, or crashing out, or not failing, and actually successfully running the program, even if it's slower than normal, not crashing is always the better option.
And, fragmentation isn't the issue - if you really think it is an issue, you can create a static swap file that always stays in the same place on the disk, and is the same size. And, Linux uses static swap partitions usually. But, NTFS is very fragmentation resistant, and only very obsolete hardware (think ARM710-era) would be slowed down by NTFS fragmentation. Beyond that, the only reason to defragment NTFS is if you're intending to shrink a fairly full partition.
As for applications that decide that they should always be running, they put themselves in the startup folders, in .ini files (outdated, but it does happen sometimes,) and in the system registry. Then, they eat up memory and clock cycles. Even in a pre-emptive multitasking system, if the program asks for the CPU time, it'll get some, bogging the system down a little at a time if it's heavily loaded already - and usually the developers of that sort of program don't WANT it to sit there idle until you ask for it, so it'll ask for CPU time.
One could very easily make a RISC OS machine get horribly slow with the terrible code that many Windows devs (which isn't necessarily the fault of Windows) make, with zillions of background apps that all want CPU time all the time. Granted, it'd be easier to kill the resulting mess, without having to dig through four or five different places.
[Edited by bhtooefr at 23:30, 12/9/2009] |
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Phil Mellor |
Message #111329, posted by monkeyson2 at 22:36, 12/9/2009, in reply to message #111313 |
Please don't let them make me be a monkey butler
Posts: 12380
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It backs up to the hard drive in the overpriced wireless router that you also bought from Apple. Or any other USB or Firewire drive (providing you format it to HFS+). |
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Andrew Poole |
Message #111331, posted by andypoole at 08:43, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111329 |
Posts: 5558
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It backs up to the hard drive in the overpriced wireless router that you also bought from Apple. Or any other USB or Firewire drive (providing you format it to HFS+).
Doesn't have to be HFS+ 
I did once upon a time use Time Machine, but it killed that disc when it decided to spin it up and down every few minutes all of one night 
Andy. |
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Martin Bazley |
Message #111332, posted by swirlythingy at 11:20, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111327 |
Posts: 460
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Crashing with an appropriate error message lets me know I've pushed the computer too far, and that I should quit some of the unnecessary applications. The only circumstances in which I actually end up having to do that are generally when I've spent a good few hours loading things and forgetting about them, so being encouraged to clean up regularly is good practice. (Or whenever I run NetSurf, one of the two. )
Why do such applications demand CPU time? What do they do with it? I can understand that sort of thing for anti-virus software (not excusing the reports I've heard from people who install Norton here...), but what would, say, a screen resolution picker want with it? |
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Eric Rucker |
Message #111339, posted by bhtooefr at 14:36, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111332 |
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Posts: 337
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There is also the situation that some computers nowadays have less RAM than some programs want all for themselves. (Netbooks and graphics editing software, anyone?) So, you start a program from a fresh boot, open a file to edit it... and "Out of memory."
I still say that it is always better to fail gracefully (which includes not failing at all,) than to fail ungracefully. Also, out of memory errors can cause data loss if everything isn't handled well by the program.
Yes, swapping is bad. I don't like it, and nobody does. It's also a necessity of life on modern machines, unless you get thousands of dollars of RAM. And, when it happens, I can take a look at what I'm running, and close out stuff I'm not using. Of course, usually, once stuff is swapped, I don't have to worry about it, until I switch programs... and swapping is usually faster than relaunching the program, so why should I close it?
Oh, and the screen resolution pickers usually aren't the problem - they tend to be well behaved.
Media players, printer drivers (yes, printer drivers - thank you, HP, for your dreadful drivers from the past few years,) security software, and that sort of thing tend to be the worst offenders. (I'm not including spyware purely because spyware is actual malware.) They also generate a fair amount of network traffic checking for updates.
Also, a lot of the dragging the system down comes from the boot time. |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #111341, posted by filecore at 15:36, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111339 |
Posts: 3868
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(I'm not including spyware purely because spyware is actual malware.) I didn't understand that. Spyware, viruses, trojan horses - they're all malware. It's there in the name. Why would you even have spyware on your computer in the first place?
Also, a lot of the dragging the system down comes from the boot time. That's why my Vista box automagically wakes itself up every morning, at least half an hour before I do... |
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Eric Rucker |
Message #111343, posted by bhtooefr at 16:47, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111341 |
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Posts: 337
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I didn't understand that. Spyware, viruses, trojan horses - they're all malware. It's there in the name. Why would you even have spyware on your computer in the first place? Some spyware actually does perform the advertised function, in addition to the malicious functions.
And, some people just want the purple gorilla on their screen, and will go to any lengths to get it. (Bonzi Buddy, in that case.)
[Edited by bhtooefr at 17:48, 13/9/2009] |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #111344, posted by filecore at 17:41, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111343 |
Posts: 3868
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Some spyware actually does perform the advertised function, in addition to the malicious functions. Yes. That's called a trojan horse, where malware is bundled with a legitimate app. Generally it's because people want warezd copies of legitimate pay-for apps, so they deserve everything they get. Sometimes they download it from an untrusted 3rd party source and don't scan it, so they deserve everything they get.
And, some people just want the purple gorilla on their screen, and will go to any lengths to get it. (Bonzi Buddy, in that case.) See above about scanning. And if you will go to any lengths - including knowingly exposing yourself to a (potential) spyware infection, then you deserve to have your bank accounts emptied by scammers. A person who would do that is obviously the sort of person who would allow the same thing to happen with real-life conmen, even if the internet isn't involved.
It's common sense (which seems to be particularly uncommon these days) coupled with education or even just reading the popular press, neither of which people seem to do much of these days either. I reckon there should be a compulsory basic computer certificate, and you're not allowed onto the internet until you pass. You can do a lot of harm (or allow much harm to come to those around you) by being careless online; it's the virtual equivalent of driving a car without having passed your driving license. It's going to come as no surprise when you crash into a tree, a wall, or an innocent pedestrian.
</sermon> |
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Eric Rucker |
Message #111346, posted by bhtooefr at 18:28, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111344 |
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Posts: 337
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I don't know how big of an issue it is in the UK, but here in the US, the internet license thing would never fly due to freedom of speech issues - there's already "Obama = Hitler" propaganda all over the place, and people would spin any attempt at internet licensing into Nazis destroying the US.
And, really, unless you made the test ineffectively easy, and impossible to revoke the license, fears of issues with freedom of speech would be valid.
However, ISPs can and should (and some do) disconnect users that are running botnets, spamming, and such. |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #111347, posted by filecore at 19:08, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111346 |
Posts: 3868
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"They're restricting my freedom of movement by forcing me to have a driving license before I can drive! Wah!"
"They're restricting my freedom of defence by forcing me to have a firearms license before I can shoot! Wah!"
"They're restricting my freedom of speech by forcing me to have a computer license before I can use the internet! Wah!"
You can see where I'm going with this, can't you? If people weren't such arrogant, egoistic, selfish, temperamental, and straightforwardly stupid idiots without an ounce of common sense in them, then there'd be no problem letting them have cars and guns and the internet, without any form of regulation. Sadly people prove time and again that they can't. I, for one, can't wait for the day when only decent people like me can access teh intarwebz0+z!!!!!1111111!!!1!!11!1roflcopter |
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Blind Moose |
Message #111348, posted by Acornut at 19:44, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111347 |
No-eye-deer (No Idea)
Posts: 487
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when only decent people like me can access teh intarwebz0+z!!!!!1111111!!!1!!11!1roflcopter Err!! I think you might need to UP the medication?  |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #111349, posted by filecore at 19:45, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111348 |
Posts: 3868
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when only decent people like me can access teh intarwebz0+z!!!!!1111111!!!1!!11!1roflcopter Err!! I think you might need to UP the medication?
What, you don't speak skiddie/l33t? |
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Eric Rucker |
Message #111350, posted by bhtooefr at 19:50, 13/9/2009, in reply to message #111347 |
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Posts: 337
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I didn't say the argument made complete sense (although there are some good points,) I said the argument would be successful in preventing internet licenses. |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #111358, posted by filecore at 05:36, 14/9/2009, in reply to message #111350 |
Posts: 3868
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Yes yes, we all know Obama = Hitler because Hitler was black. All the bad people must have been black, because all the black people are bad. Stands to reason, really. |
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Blind Moose |
Message #111361, posted by Acornut at 07:47, 14/9/2009, in reply to message #111358 |
No-eye-deer (No Idea)
Posts: 487
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..because Hitler was black... Naa! He had a compound, Tannenberg in the Black Forest, but I don't think HE was black!
[Edited by Acornut at 08:50, 14/9/2009] |
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Martin Bazley |
Message #112383, posted by swirlythingy at 22:28, 15/12/2009, in reply to message #108929 |
Posts: 460
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People who refer to JavaScript as Java. And who also refer to the iPod Touch as the iTouch.
I saw that one in the Guardian only today.
And they sounded like they were making such an effort to get down wid da bloodz with their iPhone app, too... |
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Jason Togneri |
Message #112386, posted by filecore at 08:29, 16/12/2009, in reply to message #111361 |
Posts: 3868
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..because Hitler was black... Naa! He had a compound, Tannenberg in the Black Forest, but I don't think HE was black!
You failed to follow the 'logic'. Hitler must have been black, for the reasons outlined above. |
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Trevor Johnson |
Message #123121, posted by trevj at 11:50, 14/3/2014, in reply to message #111312 |
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Posts: 660
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I know - it sucks, doesn't it? WinXP grinds to a halt when I run the following at the same time:- AutoCAD
- Outlook
- Word
- Excel
- a handful of file explorer windows
- a (slightly larger) handful of tabbed web pages
Now that the Win7 roll-out and some remote Citrix thing is in use (which, incidentally, won't be employed for CAD) I thought I'd be clever and just run the bare minimum under WinXP and do the rest remotely.
I can tolerate the compression artefacts, although will probably enquire as to what settings they're using. The snipping tool will do the job of PrintKey, although the first helpdesk person told me that it couldn't grab individual windows when I've now discovered that it can.
But what's mostly annoying me today is why the file explorer/Outlook gives me the default option (under 'Send to... Mail recipient') to send an approx. 400x400 pixel PNG file as 1024x768 size, then proceeding to convert it to a fucking JPEG! The default picture size is obviously 'Original Size' for a file using lossless compression.
...Oh, and there's also the small matter of not including my signature either, when using 'Send to'... which is why I normally drag files into newly composed email windows rather than using the other method.
So does anyone know which is mostly to blame, Windows 7 or Outlook 2010?
[Edited by trevj at 11:51, 14/3/2014] |
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qUE |
Message #123122, posted by qUE at 17:03, 14/3/2014, in reply to message #123121 |
Posts: 187
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Trouble with moving away from Outlook is Exchange, it's afaik the better of calendar/contact/sync systems about. Unfortunately the client Outlook has some serious oversights like the local e-mail database happily starving the system of storage. As for any Windows beyond XP, I've heard nothing but gripes about it, and I personally hate supporting it. But some of the software available for Windows you won't find equivelent elsewhere. |
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The Icon Bar: The Playpen: List of things annoying me today |
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