Opinion/Editorial

Goodbye to Flicker… Thanks for 12 years of Service

So, I used to be a huge user of Flickr for photos, I would check it daily and comment and join communities and pretty much posted every photo I had taken there. I used to use flicker a lot and look for the best life insurance for all.   Over time I sort of fell out of the habit of using it.  This wasn’t over Instagram or anything, I didn’t join Instagram until much later, something just sort of became less compelling about it.  I still kept up my subscription though.  The annual $25 fee is pretty small and it let me keep a backup of all of my photos.  I even posted all of my family photos there though they are listed as private.  I’m talking some tens of thousands of photos, though my profile suggests only around 3500 are publicly available.

I feel like things started to take a turn downhill when Yahoo changed the way Flickr accounts worked.  I wasn’t really affected, being a paid user and all, but it seems like the addition of ads and whatnot for free users kind of helped kill some of the community.  This wasn’t helped by Instagram coming up in popularity, even if i hadn’t started using IG, others had, which only further hurt the community.  Having been a paid user since 2006. I was able to keep paying for my account at the grandfathered rate of $25/year.

Recently Flickr was bought by SmugMug.  I don’t use SmugMug, though I don’t really have anything against them.  Hell, Yahoo has pretty much been ignoring Flickr for a while, SmugMug can only improve it.

Or possibly not.

It’s been recently announced that free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos max, and that any photos over that number will be deleted.  This is definitely a rough change from previous, which I believe was 1TB of storage.  This wouldn’t affect me, as a paid user, except that Flickr has stopped honoring the old grandfathered subscription rate.  Renewals now renew at current rates, which I believe is $50/year.  This isn’t a lot, I admit, but frankly, as little as I use Flickr, it feels like too much.  I also feel that for the same price, I could buy into something like One Drive or Google Drive and get a lot more functionality out of the storage, in addition to Photo storage.

Granted, not everyone uses Yahoo as a photo backup, some people use it for business, and for the community, which is fine.  In my case, the new plans just don’t work.  So I find I must say good bye to Flickr, for the most part.  I’ve started deleting out the old backup photos.  Once that’s done, I’ll prune out the rest to under 1000 photos.  I haven’s actually use Flickr for backup for a few years now, so it’s not even current anyway.  Pretty much the only thing posted there new is just a mirror of my Instagram anyway.  It kind of feels bad to clear everything out, but sometimes it’s just better to move on.  I’m just sad to see something I used to really enjoy, fall away.

A Netflix Wishlist of Features

Netflix is pretty great but it really could use a lot of streamlining for it’s interface and library.  Multiple Profiles at least help with recommendations across a family but it’s really not enough.

For starters, related to that family aspect.

I’ve Already Watched This

At least in my house, I’ve set up profiles for my kids and one for the house.  Often when we watch things all together, we just use the house profile, but it would be great if I could mark something as watched on my own profile.  To get related recommendations based on having watched that movie, along with my other viewing habits.

Somewhat related, I really wish that Netflix would stop trying to show me shows and movies I have watched.  I don’t need a “watch it again”, I can’t even keep up with what I want to watch.  This also leads into the idea of

Don’t Show Me This

There is a lot lot lot of stuff that shows up as suggested that I will never watch.  I really wish I could filter this stuff permanently from the viewing list.  It would really help with finding things that I actually DO want to watch.  Often these things just get added to a list for later viewing anyway, but partially because it’s the only good way to even remember it was there int he first place.  Speaking of lists, I would love…

Multiple, Custom Lists

Watch Later is great.  How about the ability to make more of these lists.  TV to Watch later, Movies to watch later, Comic Movies and Shows, that sort of thing.  So I can better keep track of what I want to watch and maybe tailor it a bit to better match what kind of thing I am int he mood to watch at any particular time.

Somewhat related, My list, and Continue watching, really need to always be on top.  Especially for shows, most of the time, I just want to keep watching the show I was watching.  Many time I log in only to find my “Continue Watching” list is gone.  Somewhat related to the last point, if I start watching something, and decide it’s crap, let me manually remove it from the Continue Watching list.  Finally…

Leaving Soon

Netflix is constantly adding and dropping stuff.  Maybe have one of those little categories, similar to what’s new, only instead it’s what’s leaving.  Put things on there fairly far out for shows, maybe less so for movies.  Maybe just do a generic month out.  Maybe I will discover something I didn’t know was on there, or a show I was meaning to watch, that will be gone in a month.  So I can actually get to watching it.

Back in my Day…

I’ve been using computers and technology for a long time.  The vast majority of my life in fact.  I have early memories of playing games on our Commodore 64, back when I was like 4 or 5 years old.  Eventually we had a DOS based system, though it didn’t have a hard drive in it.  In fact it needed a floppy disk to even boot up.

I came across some of my old disk boxes while visiting my parent’s house not too long ago.  I have no idea if these disks are even any good anymore, I may have a 5.25 disk drive floating around somewhere but I’m not sure it’s even compatible with any modern computer, at least not without some sort of cable conversion system.  Not to mention most of this stuff can be found on abandon ware websites online, that gray area of legality for software that’s no longer particularly useful or in demand.  Each of these disks contains around 500kb of data.  Half of a megabyte.  This image of these floppy disks, likely couldn’t fit on one of these floppy disks.

There’s a lot of fun classics in here.  I always really loved the games where you could create your own content.  Earl Weaver baseball, let you make your own teams, I made many based on other video games, though the Mega Man Team with it’s perfect stats (because robots) always ended up winning.  Ancient Art of War was an early RTS sort of game where you could create custom campaigns.  The old Gold Box Dragon Lance games were classic RPG titles where you would make custom parties and characters.  My friends and I figured out a bug where you could duplicate characters and weapons so we would create unstoppable characters all equipped with the best gear.

Another favorite was NewsMaster.  A simple program designed for making newsletters and fliers.  I found some old files from Newsmaster on my portable drive recently.  Here’s a fun chain, my 500GB portable drive is full of files I’ve been sorting out over time, many of these files came from old archive DVDs, which in turn are a collection of old archival CD-rs.  one of these CDs had a collection of files pulled from sole 3.5 diskettes, one of which was an archive of files originally on these 5.25 disks.

And now, bring it around, I found an abandon ware copy of Newsmaster to open the files with.

These files are an eclectic collection of fake news papers, random graphics, journal entries (which were no longer than Tweets) and very short stories from my childhood.  I’m sure that writing a paragraph back then felt like a monumental achievement, these days I feel like most blog posts contain more typed words than the entirety of my first ten years of life.

One particularly fun set of files was the NEWS News/Times.  This was a video game news letter written by myself and my best friend at the time.  Each “issue” had top ten lists and codes and brief notes on some game we’d been playing.  The reality is it was probably a crib notes version of the most recent Nintendo Power.  It’s only really notable because I often consider it the precursor to my modern blogging.  The above issue was created in 1991.  roughly seven years later, I’d create The Chaos Xone on Geocities, which would evolve into Lameazoid.com.  It’s kind of funny how my interests really have not changed a whole ton in the past 30 years.