Osprey backpacks

Well, here's a thing.  More of a rant, actually.

As some of you may know, I live in the French Alps, and work as a chairlift driver.  When I'm not working, coding, or playing ice hockey, I can often be found trekking up and down mountains.  Backpacks, and particularly technical backpacks, are a pretty large part of my life.  I've got a good few of them, and use them almost daily.

So, anyway, my old 30L pack has died.  My last trip involved 3 days with the damned thing held together with bits of string.  Not fun, especially as it was mostly raining, so my stuff was getting wet.  Time to replace.  List of requirements:

• 30L ±
• Ventilated back (gets hot around here in the summer)
• Integrated rain cover
• Hydration system

Now, I'm a fan of Osprey packs, and have been since I bought a "Variant" 52 litre pack.  Well designed, comfortable, and built to last.  So the first place I started looking was Osprey.  I ended up looking seriously at Osprey's "Manta 28" pack, which had pretty much everything I wanted,  a few things I hadn't thought of, and one thing I didn't really want but could live with (it's a framed pack).  It's sold as a "hydraulics" hydration pack.  All the reviews mention the included 3 litre hydration sleeve as being one of the best on the market.  The goddamned Osprey website mentions its "Internal Hydration Sleeve".  So, when I ordered one (not direct from Osprey, but through an Amazon seller, tight-ass that i am) for 85 euros, I was expecting to find a hydration sleeve in the pack or its packaging.

I was disappointed.

"Hrm", I thought.  "The seller must have forgotten it.  Or maybe 'forgotten' it".  So I contacted them.  

"Osprey don't include the hydration sleeve in Europe.  We can sell you one for 35 euros plus shipping"

What the fuck?  Osprey's official Eurozone price of 100 euros is very close to the US-market price.  Nothing on the Osprey europe site indicates that the hydration sleeve isn't included.  "Maybe I've misread", I thought, and went off to compare between osprey-europe.com and ospreypacks.com.  Problem - ospreypacks.com redirects to osprey-europe.com immediately.  In order to hit ospreypacks.com without a redirect, I eventually had to use a US-based proxy.

Keep that in mind.  A european client cannot hit ospreypacks.com without taking specific and non-obvious technical steps to do so.  Which is a shame, because on the ospreypacks.com page for the Manta 28, we find the following, in bold italic text :

Reservoir sold separately in European and Asian markets

Yep.  The one thing a customer from Europe might want to know, before ordering, about this pack, is not available to them.  A bit more "spot the difference" gives us the following 2 images from ospreypacks.com on the left, and from ospreyeurope.com on the right.  Can you see the difference? 

That's right. The ospreyeurope.com version has had the visible bit of hydration tube photoshopped out. Well, nearly all of it, anyway - there's still a bit visible on the right shoulder strap. Beyond that, and the fact that the euro site doesn't explicitly say "Hydration system" as opposed to "internal hydration sleeve", which latter apparently means the place in the pack where you'd put an - ahem - hydration sleeve, there's bugger all difference.

So I've got a new pack (and, if I might say so, a bloody good one), but I'm feeling ripped off.  Because my "Hydraulics" "hydration pack" has a 75cl bottle of water in each side pocket, rather than the 3l hydration pack I was supposed to have.

Adding in the supposedly supplied 3l sleeve is going to cost me half what I paid for the pack itself, and bring the price up to twice that of a more or less equivalent pack with a separately bought sleeve.

So FUCK YOU, Osprey.  You've lost a client.   Yeah, I know.  First world problems.  Call a whaaaambulance.  But fuck you anyway.

What the *fuck* are Microsoft smoking?

So, seeing as I'm blogging again, here's a bit of a rant.

Boy #1, who is now 14, decided that his computer, which had been happily running some form of Ubuntu, wasn't up to scratch.  Specifically, that he couldn't get in on the F2P revolution - his friends had moved on from Minecraft to League of Legends.  As such, he *needed* Windows.

"Okay", say I.  I have a valid license for Win7 Pro that I don't use (came with my new laptop, which is *ahem* hackintoshed *ahem*), you can use that.  But beyond doing the install and owning the administrator password, as they say around here, "demerdez-vous".  I deal with Macs and unix boxes, I know nothing much about Windows apart from "when I have to use it, I don't like it".  In short, I'm willing to set him up a machine, and occasionally bung in the administrator password, but it it gets pwnt, or stops working, or generally starts buggering about, the response is going to be "Reinstall.  From scratch."

Now, as he's 14, computer time is restricted.  With Ubuntu, I'd installed timekpr, which is an impressively flexible tool for managing computer time usage.

Windows 7 comes with "parental controls", which purport to do something similar.  Well, on the surface, it looks like they do, anyway.  Once you've scratched the surface, it becomes patently clear that Microsoft's parental controls are seriously lacking.

Time usage controls come down to "user x can use the computer between hour y and hour z".

That's it.  Nothing more.  Want to allow your kid to use the computer between 10am and midday, and from 6 to 8 pm, with a maximum screen time of 2 hours?  No, can't do that.  Even better is Microsoft's response to its customers.  It's "brillant", for those who remember The Daily WTF :

Only administrators can set the parental control and not the standard user. So if you wnat to set the time frame of 3 hours per day usage, you will have to ask the user first as to when they want to use the computer and set it under parental controls.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_vista-security/parental-control-time-limit-question/98543dfa-783b-4ae8-b464-c274bce895ec

This shows a(nother) complete misunderstanding of what people might actually want to do with their computers.

So, anyway, parental controls are out.  They suck, and MS don't seem to understand why, or care enough about their clients to try and improve them.  Which leaves 3rd party solutions.

The only one I've found which doesn't suck (indeed, it's better than timekpr, which I considered to be pretty damned good) is timeboss, from http://nicekit.com

Time limits, times when you can't use the computer at all, forced breaks, it's got everything you need to properly restrict usage.

The *only* downside to it is that, even allowing for the massive flexibility it provides, the UI is over-confusing and cluttered.

It's an enormously powerful piece of software, reasonably priced for the peace of mind it provides (although it should be said that no piece of software can replace proper parental oversight); Microsoft would do well to ask themselves why companies like nicekit are making money providing something that should be standard.

Still, if you're a parent who, like most of the world, is tied to Windows, it's definitely software to have.

Black Piday

So, I didn't get a Raspberry Pi.  I'm not feeling overly bitter about it, as I wasn't actually expecting to, if nothing else because I was already at work before the 6AM GMT deadline. What I am mildly miffed about is that I can't currently do anything other than "express an interest in buying one" (or, in supplier-speak, "become a mailing list asset") from the major suppliers.  I've had an interest since May last year.

As I type this, the Raspberry Pi site is still showing a static page.  There's no official news about what happened, who got one, who didn't, what the details of the deal with Farnell and RS are, apart from Twitter.  The unofficial news (i.e. the stuff in print) is almost all wrong in fundamental details.

I wouldn't want to have been one of the inhabitants of #1 Fruity Loop recently. It was becoming increasingly evident that there was no way 10,000 Pis were going to suffice.  With every hour, new "news sites" were picking up on the Pi as a "$25 computer that does XBMC". None of them were picking up on the actual goal of the Pi itself, or mentioning the limitations of the Pi as an XBMC machine, or even any of the actual hardware features of the Pi beyond "it does XBMC". The wave upon wave of new users descending on the Pi forums and asking if they can install Windows on the Pi bore witness to this. What had started as a dream was rapidly becoming a monster. It was totally out of control, and there was no way the foundation would ever be able to meet the demand.  Hence, I guess, the throwing up of hands and handing control of the hardware delivery side of things to a pair of corporate rapists[1]

When people start realising what the limitations of the Pi as an XBMC machine is, the nerd rage will be spectacular.  We probably have a week or so before they start being delivered to homes around the globe, and the "this thing's a fucking pile of shit" threads on the already overloaded forums start sprouting up by the thousand.

The foundation themselves are largely to blame for this turn of events, as recent news has all been about multimedia and XBMC, and nothing to do with education at all.  Indeed, the "About Us" page on the Raspberry Pi site has been changed from a short and sweet statement of the goals of the foundation into a bunch of word salad.  From being about teaching programming, it's suddenly become

We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children.

So, when 6AM GMT ran around, Farnell, RS and Raspberry Pi.org went down simultaneously. Not taken down by wave upon wave of pent up demand for educational computers, but by scalpers and people from hotukdeals.co.uk. These are not people who are going to do educational projects with the board, they are going to stick them to the back of the telly with blu-tac. the foundation wanted "the community" to take the board and supplied software, run with it, and create interesting projects.  Installing XBMC is no more interesting in terms of computer science than editing a document in Microsoft Word, the kind of crap that's being taught in ICT, the kind of thing the Raspberry Pi was suposed to fix.

None of the people I know who are planning educational projects managed to get one from the first batch. Only one of them managed to get a preorder rather than "expressing an interest".

There are probably less than a hundred people on the forums who are planning interesting stuff.  putting aside 1% of the first batch "for them", even if it was done behind the scenes, would have done far more for the foundation's erstwhile goals than selling a million Pis to people who want to make Mame machines and set top boxes.

So, like I said, I'm not bitter.  But I am fucking angry.  The emphasis has gone from producing something important, i.e. a machine that helps in teaching kids (and adults) how to actually control the hardware they own, on to simply producing another gadget.  That emphasis has been changing slowly since around December.  The sale itself was a total fucking mess, and, it appears, fucked up by both the foundation (setting a solid date and time for server meltdown, days in advance, and thus further engorging the until-then self-sustaining hype machine, was never gonna be a good idea), and RS/Farnell, by all accounts, don't appear to have been even close to ready (from denying the existence of the Pi through to stating that they will only be available to resellers).

I remain totally committed to the originally stated goals of the foundation.  The ones that don't appear on the site any more.  I truly believe the Pi could change the nature of computing in a way that no other computer has ever done, that it could make an understanding of computer science part of basic education.  Indeed, even if the foundation had never managed to get a single board out of the door, it has highlighted fundamental issues in education today, raised questions, and shown that, with a bit of will, something can be done.

But all that is being lost, being driven into obscurity by a botched sale of millions of cheap, credit card sized computers running XBMC.

Badly.

I hope the foundation people at least get to pay off their personal loans, but I assume Farnell and RS are taking a substantial cut of the already slim margins.

[1] Arguably, the handing over of sales to people like RS and Farnell should have happened around December, when the beta boards landed.  At that point, the hype was containable. But that's with hindsight, and I guess at that point the foundation guys and girls still wanted to (and believe they could) keep control, which is understandable.