Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with annoyances

Marquee Tag 2.0

gum — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:59:30 -0800

What do web designers call the slideshowy flipbook of stories that appears in the upper left corner of these news websites? Are there effective ways to block or replace these (browser plugins, Greasemonkey scripts, etc.)?

Put a name to this awful sentence structure

electric_counterpoint — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:34:03 -0800

What do you call this ugly form of conjoined sentence, and am I right in thinking it's ungrammatical? I edit a lot of academic writing, and there's a particular sentence form that I keep running into. I call it the "Stossel," because it sounds like something the execrable John Stossel (of 20/20) would say. Needless to say, it's horrible. Here's an example:

"The appellate court relied on facts found at trial, facts which could reasonably be questioned."

What I'm talking about is that conjunction. It sounds awful. Every instance of this I've seen has separated the two clauses with a comma, but even using something more sensible (it looks to me like it needs a dash) leaves it sounding like it should be introducing Tonight's Top Story.

The thing is, I need to be able to refer to this error by name — authors will correct "split infinitives" or "dangling modifiers," but they don't much care about "electric_counterpoint's delicate sensibilities." I do, though! So, if this thing is ungrammatical, what's it called?

Get rid of Picasa floating tab.

signal — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:11:59 -0800

Using picasa 3 to make a movie (as per this). The rendering will take over 1 hour. How to get rid of the useless "Making Movie" tab. It floats on top of any other application, and if I try to close it it asks if I want to abort the movie making process. The right hand side is where most 3d and graphics applications' panels are, so it's very, very annoying to have to constantly shift around the pointless Picasa floating tab.
How to turn this off or, if this is essentially impossible, move it to the left side? Using Vista, if that makes a difference.

erase the virtual stonehenge from my desktop, I beg you

mecran01 — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:15:41 -0800

I am using a borrowed Toshiba Tecra M7 laptop, and three phantom dropshadow rectangles have appeared on the screen. They overlay any application I open and are annoying. Does anyone know how to get rid of these? I've turned off all the desktop effects I could find. Thanks!

IMAP Annoyances

Zinger — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:58:19 -0800

Incredibly annoying IMAP problem - Any ideas? We are constantly getting dialogue boxes popping up in outlook 2007 with the following message:

"Your IMAP server has closed the connection. This may occur if you have left the connection idle for too long"

Under details, the error code is: 0x800CCCDD

These boxes are popping up *at least* every 10 minutes - sometimes you can get 5-6 of these in a row in the space of 20 seconds! They are exceptionally irritating not least because they require us to click OK, but also because they almost always steal focus away from the window we're working in. It's like being poked with a sharp stick all day.

We have tried (based on searching Google):

- changing the Outlook server timeout settings to 10 minutes
- disabling automatic send and receive for the IMAP emails

Neither of these have improved the situation. Help?

What's accessing my hard drive.

Zinger — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:43:09 -0800

What the blazes is making my hard drive work so hard? My hard drive light on my Dell Latitude D620 keeps coming on every 5-10s - this is making my fan run like mad and is playing hell with battery life.

I'm having a hard time pinning down what's making it do it. I've tried Diskmon from sysinternals, but all it tells me is that there's drive activity every few seconds, which I'd already figured from the light. I've tried shutting down various programs for a while but this doesn't seem to be helping me pin it down. I don't think it's malware or a virus - scans turn up nothing and I have regularly updated virus software on at all times.

Thoughts? This has only been a problem in the last few weeks, yet I've not changed the system configuration.

Unstick Me

pinto — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:21:24 -0800

I'm experiencing a strange bug on my macbook pro: with little cause (perhaps a slight mouse gesture, though I have no mouse gesture programs installed), the os will switch to the Stickies application (and sometimes iTunes, when I quit Stickies). I can't figure out what's going on. I am running Mac os x 10.4.11. It seems to be switching to the 'oldest' application to be launched--eg, stickies launches when I start up, so it's the first app to be launched in a particular session.

It's as if there is some secret apple-tab function being activated by my mouse, but I can't figure out the cause for switching.

I am running Virtue Desktops, though it happens even when I quit, and the problem predates that installation.

Help!

Explorer constantly crashing on video file thumbnails, can't take it anymore!

bradn — Fri, 11 May 2007 09:33:08 -0800

Windows XP / Explorer: MPG and WMV file thumbnails constantly crash Explorer, sometimes taking the entire OS with it. How can I fix this? I have a folder of small clips, mostly MPEG files, some WMV. When I leave this folder open in thumbnail view while I work with the clips, Explorer constantly crashes. Usually it just hangs and I have to kill the explorer process and rerun it. Sometimes everything locks up and I have to hit the restart button. If I keep it in List view, this doesn't seem to happen, but I need thumbnail view to identify the clips easily.
Help?

Why did Word forget how to spell?

mauglir — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 08:02:47 -0800

Why is Microsoft Word suddenly marking correctly spelled words as misspelled? This is driving me nuts. Word is marking words such as this, cat, retail and silver with the red squiggly line, as if they're misspelled. It must be a problem with the document and not the application because the same piece of text pasted into a new document looks normal. What gives? Is this just a corrupt file, or is there some doc setting that could cause this? I did not create this file, I'm just trying to edit it.

Need help with two iTunes annoyances

ontic — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:33:35 -0800

Any way around these two (Mac) iTunes annoyances? First, iTunes apparently cannot remember my password for "Check for Purchases". Second, iTunes always jumps the focus back to the next song it's playing despite how much further down I'm browsing and adding songs to playlists. I take it that the first one has something to do with security, but given that my Mac is willing to remember every other password it comes across, how do I get it to remember the password for "Check for purchases"?

Umm, duh...

yalestar — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 08:53:29 -0800

It drives me effin' crazy when people say "um" while speaking. Yet, curiously enough, other forms of verbal static (e.g. "uhh," "like," etc.) don't bother me in the slightest. What's the deal with that? And is it possible to get past my severe distaste of other peoples' verbal static?

How do you turn off an annoying Outlook 2003 "feature"?

zooropa — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 18:49:56 -0800

How do I turn off this annoying Outlook feature? In Outlook 2003, I will have an email message open and every so often, the Research pane will open with "live data" to various sources of online research. The problem is that every time this happens, it locks up my PC for 10-15 seconds. It doesn't sound like a lot, but I work in PR and send/receive dozens of emails every hour.

My question is simple -- is there any way to disable this feature? I've looked in the Outlook Help and Googled around a little, but I've come up empty.

Please help!

How can I stop a bird from playing on my car and leaving its crap all over?

mathowie — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 16:35:25 -0800

How do I get a bird to stop sitting on my side mirrors and shitting all over my car? I park my car outside the garage and a couple weeks ago, I suddenly noticed a veritable waterfall of bird droppings along both sides of both our cars. A few days ago, I was working in the garage and witnessed the culprit: it appears to be a robin (brown feathers, orange breast) that flies from our fence or lawn, up to perch on the side mirror. It looks at itself in the mirror and dances around on the perch for long periods of time, eventually leaving droppings all down the side of my car.

I've been washing my car every 4-5 days since this started because there is so much bird poop on the side mirrors it can be dangerous to drive (I can't see who is behind me and to the sides). Yesterday I got it washed totally clean only to find my car door completely covered in poop this morning, worse than it ever has been. It's getting really frustrating and old, so I'm wondering what to do about it.

Should I setup a harmless decoy mirror in my front yard somewhere that the bird can play with? Should I do something to scare the bird away? Should I give up and clean out the garage and park in there or park down the street somewhere?

TV commercials are too damn loud!

devilshgrin — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 21:50:46 -0800

Is there a way to keep TV commercials from being so much louder then the program that I'm watching? When watching a television program, I often have to fumble around for the remote control during commercial breaks to keep the volume from being too loud. Is there a practical way to 'normalize' the volume?

If it matters, the television is a Panasonic TH42PX25. The service is Comcast Digital Cable. The tuner is a Motorola DCT6412 III.

Here is a link to the TV's user manual in PDF format though I couldn't find anything useful...

Here is a link to the tuner's user manual, (I didn't have any luck)

Thanks for your help.

hack hack hack moan * hack hack hack*

kaseijin — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 18:55:10 -0800

Ever get a sudden and annoyingly strong and tenacious throat tickle that forces you into spasms of dry coughing (being that there's nothing to cough up), in a futile attempt to relieve said tickle? Yeah, how the hell do you get rid of that?

A portable Windows sysadm for the common man?

furvyn — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 03:56:27 -0800

What would you put on a CD to give to non-technical Windows users to help them clean spyware off of their PC and doing other related easy technical tasks? When people discover that I'm a programmer, they tell me about problems they'be been having with their machines (invariably, windows users). Sometimes I end up giving them a lot of URLs for tools I'd use to troubleshoot problems, and I'm left with the feeling that they'd have a much easier time if I just gave them everything on a CD along with a list for what everything is used for.

I love Sysinternals's tools. They're usually the first thing I think of (no, wait the first thing I think of is that I wish they were using Firefox instead).

Bonus points for listing descriptions with the tools that are easy for a naïve user to understand. perhaps say what the utility is for, and a simple narrative for what one would do with it.

How can I prevent iPhoto from auto-launching when I plug in a card reader?

jdroth — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 10:10:30 -0800

How can I prevent iPhoto from auto-launching when I plug in a card reader? When I plug in a card reader, iPhoto assumes that it is being summoned and auto-magically launches itself. I don't want this to happen. I don't want iPhoto to ever launch without my permission, which I might grant once a year or so. Yet, every day I have to cope with it launching multiple times as I attempt to transfer photos to my hard drive. It is a minor annoyance, true, but it is an annoyance. My question, then, is how can I make iPhoto stop doing this? I've searched its settings high-and-low, but to no avail. I've searched the System Preferences high-and-low, but to no avail. There must be something I'm missing.

Corrupted Windows XP display

grefo — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 17:59:44 -0800

Why does my Windows XP Home display get short, green lines and "vibrates" intermittently? These symptoms occur intermittently and usually coming out of hibertnate. But sometimes on a cold start the display is corrupted. Sometimes my anti-virus toaster message seems to cause the problems, sometimes not. Plus the mouse (USB MS Optical) gets turned off.

All drivers are current, but I am downloading/installing SP2.

Anyone have any ideas?

Make it die

selfnoise — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 08:41:38 -0800

In Windows XP SP2. The little yellow window that pops up in the lower right hand corner when you print something and says "Document sent to printer." HOW DO I KILL IT? Seriously, this little thing is really pissing me off and everyone else I know. Can you turn it off somehow? I can't find any way to do it.