vCards aside, nearly all QR code use that I encounter is simply pushing a web address. I know some people disagree, but I can generally always open my iPhone web browser and tap out a URL faster than I can open a QR scanner, wait for the camera to wake up, scan the code, wait for translation, tap the link, switch to the web browser, and let it load. And before someone asks something like, what about long URLs such as www2.fooblahfooflah.co.uk/?id=123456&stupid=sk30s&anynumberofotherURLoperators — My response: if you’re marketing a URL that’s any more than shortURL.com/something, then you’re doing it wrong.

Fine, some people like scanning QR codes, so I acknowledge that I’ll be seeing those ugly squares (a graphic designer’s nightmare) printed all over stuff for a long time to come. Doesn’t mean I have to scan them.

But now, these wretched abominations are creeping into venues they have no business in. The whole point of them is to bridge the physical world with the digital world—providing a means on a physical piece of paper to connect you to something online. Lately, however, I’m seeing them incorporated into social media profiles and such. Most recent example is Firehouse Subs’ Twitter page. They’ve got two of them on their background image pointing to their mobile apps for iOS and Android. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Firehouse sandwiches. Yet, QR codes on web pages is, as I commented to them on Twitter, simply ridonkulous.

Completely bypassing the fact that Twitter profile content covers over these QR codes unless you have your browser window stretched wider than the Mississippi River, I’m already online!!!! Just give me a link to click or tap!!

Put another way, providing a QR code on a web page to take someone to another web page (digital to analog and back to digital) is like recording a music CD to audiocassette and then digitizing it back to a new CD! Inasmuch as a CD can be directly/digitally/perfectly duplicated to another CD, can we please kill the appearance of QR codes on web pages and just provide clickable links!?

A local news station, WESH Channel 2, posted a story today about The Journal of Animal Ethics calling for a change in how we refer to animals.

My social media response about this story was:

Out: “pets.”
In: “companion animals.”

Out: “pests.”
In: “free-roaming animals.”

GAH! #gagmewithaspoon

By inventing the phase, “companion animal,” these people are just creating what I’m going to call “companion language.” It’s ridiculous, stupid, and foolish. We don’t need phrases unnecessarily created for the purpose of making us feel good.

We’re all fans of eliminating animal cruelty, but I assure you that our PETS and PESTS don’t care what we call them. Can we stop adding needless syllables to words and phrases that work perfectly fine as they are?

I’ll leave you with a transcript of George Carlin’s most excellent monologue on the subject:

I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse.

I’ll give you an example of that. There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum. Can’t take anymore input. The nervous system has either snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago.

Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and the very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock.

Shell shock!

Battle fatigue.

Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, were up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now.

Operational exhaustion.

Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

Then of course came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon.

Post-traumatic stress disorder.

I’ll bet you if we had still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I’ll betcha. I’ll betcha.

Zoom mode is helpful when a station broadcasting 4:3 shows widescreen content in letterboxed format. I can zoom it to fill my 16:9 screen.

Stretch mode, however, is stupid. Its purpose would be to make widescreen content squeezed into a 4:3 broadcast fill a 16:9 screen. But I’ve never once seen this happen. What I have frequently seen is the opposite: 4:3 content stretched to fill a 16:9 screen.

Dear Bright House, please convert your useless stretch viewing mode to a more helpful squeeze viewing mode.

For many years, my practice has been to create a unique e-mail alias for every company with which I e-mail regularly or need an address for a registration. Presently, there are nearly 150 address aliases defined.

The result of this effort is that I get practically no spam to my personal e-mail address, and when I do, it’s a pretty sure guarantee that I know who instigated.

It’s been many months—probably more than a year—since I’ve received any spam at all to any of my e-mail aliases. Yesterday, one came to an alias I had created for AppZapper, a utility that aids in removing preferences, caches, libraries, and more when uninstalling an application. Giving AppZapper the benefit of the doubt, I e-mailed to inform them that I didn’t appreciate my address being sold off for spam lists, but that if that didn’t happen, they may need to investigate a compromise in their database security.

The reply I got was essentially, “We don’t do that,” as in, they claim to not sell off e-mail lists.

Continuing to give them the benefit of the doubt, I responded to say they should investigate the breach since they do not sell e-mail lists, and I provided the complete source code of the e-mail and header.

The next reply from AppZapper was advice to contact my ISP (more correctly, my domain host), suggesting that the compromise is there. BZZZT. Wrong answer.

Seriously, I ask you: Spam arrives to a single e-mail alias among nearly 150 that have gone spam-free for a number of years. If a compromise of access to the database is the reason, where do you think that compromise occurred?

No, AppZapper, if the compromise was with my domain host, it is quite certain I’d be receiving spam to many of my e-mail aliases—not just the one for your product. Because of this dodge, I no longer believe a compromise is the explanation. If it were, you’d be willing to investigate and resolve the breach. By dodging the issue and blindly claiming it’s the fault of my domain host, I’m simply convinced that you do, in fact, avail e-mail lists to spammers.

Consequently, AppZapper will no longer live on my computers and any relevant venue I’m part of will hear about the shenanigans.

Moreover, a trusted friend has further reason to believe AppZapper has limited ethical standards. Apparently, AppZapper chose the Camino web browser as a sample application in its demonstrations for application removal. As a result, many users who don’t quite understand what’s going on are following the example and, expectedly, losing all their web site bookmarks. My friend, who is on the Camino development team, says they have repeatedly asked AppZapper to stop using them as an example, especially since AppZapper never asked permission in the first place. The requests have essentially fallen on deaf ears, and Camino support is getting the fallout of distraught users who’ve lost their bookmarks, caused by activities suggested by AppZapper. My friend’s supposition: “They’re probably assuming that we don’t have the legal resources to put up a fight if it comes to that. ‘Hey, let’s pick on an open-source example.’”

AppZapper is an AppFailure.

I appreciate as much as anyone else the mentality of not being wasteful, but you’re being less green with all those plastic food service gloves you plow through during the day than by dumping out a portion of a batch of iced tea when you close at night!

Before I get into it, I’ll acknowledge that for those of us who’d previously paid the Apple Tax for QuickTime Pro luckily still have the previous QuickTime Player application. It’s been moved to the Utilities folder—and thanks to someone at Apple who had the presence of mind to allow it to retain all its functionality.

As for the new QuickTime Player, I have numerous observations of behavior and gotchas. As much as Apple might have you believe that the new version folds in all the features that were available in QuickTime Pro, I most heartily assure you it’s only a half-baked effort:

1. Definitely the least important of my list, but what purpose does it serve to have jumped the version number of QuickTime Player from 7 to 10, banning versions 8 and 9 to presumably never see the light of day?
2. No preferences? Anywhere? Both the app preferences and System Preference pane for QuickTime are gone?
3. JKL editing is gone. This is the function that lets the J, K, and L keys act as the “shuttle” portion of video jog/shuttle control. In QuickTime Player 7 Pro, the L key plays forward and J key plays backward. The K key stops playback. Successive presses of the J or L keys will play increasingly faster in the current direction: 2x, 4x, etc. In addition, If playing forward at 2X and the J key is pressed once, playback slows to 1X.
4. Command+Left and Right arrows sort of serve as JKL editing now, but using them immediately starts at 2X playback. I find no way to play backward at 1X.
5. Also, use of Command+Left and Right doesn’t exist in Trim mode where it would be most useful.
6. I and O keyboard shortcuts to mark In and Out points for trimming are gone.
7. The playhead in Trim mode has no counter associated with it and you cannot drag it.
8. It is now impossible to find edit points based on the audio track since JKL editing is gone and Command+Left and Right arrows are mostly useless. In QuickTime Player 7 Pro, I have often swashed forward and backward in a small region of time to find an edit point just ahead of where someone starts talking, for example, hitting the I key to mark that spot as an In point when the playhead is where I want to start.
9. There was a trick of clicking the counter to switch to frame numbers instead of time. That’s gone in the new QuickTime Player.
10. The Information window is still the same but the Movie Properties and A/V Controls windows are gone.

There’s probably lots more that I’m not thinking about at this time, but will be sure to turn up soon. All I can say is, it’s clear that QuickTime Player 10 SHOULD NOT be regarded as a replacement for version 7 of QuickTime Player Pro, and those of us who used those features should keep our collective fingers crossed and drink plenty of the Kool-Aid that even if we have to use a different player application, Apple will not drop any possibility of using the features in any way, shape, or form in QuickTime.

The opinion to which I refer is: I loathe the fact that formatting e-mail in HTML (a.k.a. Rich Text) instead of plain text is far more prevalent than it should be. And I don’t even fault the majority of us who do the e-mailing. I fault e-mail application developers who now make HTML/Rich Text formatting the default.

STOP THAT!

The most common purpose of an e-mail is to send a few thoughts in written form to another person. Period. Plain text is all anyone needs for just about all their e-mailing needs.

There are many reasons to stick with plain text. For one, it’s more compatible across all e-mail systems. HTML/Rich Text is an interpreted and rendered format. It’s not as simple as just typing a few characters. Some sort of tag is used to apply some sort of styling to all the text, and it’s in those tags that problems can occur if one e-mail application represents a particular tag differently than another e-mail application. The result: what the sender sees is not necessarily what the recipient will get.

Second reason: bad ju-ju can live in those formatting codes. Never mind that virus scripts can work their way into that code—do you know how spammers usually know that you’ve opened (even if you didn’t read, but at least opened) their e-mail? They include a link to a graphic—maybe even just an invisible single-pixel graphic. The URL path to that graphic is coded so that every spam e-mail has a unique number. If the e-mail is opened, usually the e-mail application will call out to the internet to pull in that graphic so it displays in the e-mail message. Because the URL to that graphic is unique in every message, the spammers then know that the e-mail address associated with that URL number is a valid address because their server registers that the graphic was requested.

This is why I always use the option in e-mail applications to never automatically download images from remote servers. Entourage (and many other applications) includes a link that I can use to download the images later if I determine the e-mail is from a trusted source. But even for trusted sources, the e-mail message will look bad, with broken image link icons, when I first open it.

Third reason: size. I just sent three sample e-mails to myself, all with the exact same text. There was a header line, then there was several lines of repeating asdf asdf asdf asdf…

In the text-only e-mail, this message weighed in at 1.6 kilobytes. Switching to HTML formatting, the exact same text without a single change to formatting went up to 2.65 kilobytes. In the third sample e-mail, I still left the actual text alone, but I italicized one of the several lines of repeating “asdf” characters, and on the header line of text where I typed that it was a test e-mail, I boldfaced it, enlarged the size, and changed the typeface. Other than these style changes, I did nothing to the actual text. The third sample e-mail went up a little more, to 2.76 kilobytes.

Okay, yes. This is tiny. Why am I complaining about 2-3 kilobytes as opposed to 1.6? Because this is a very lightweight example. The content was very short and was was only comprised of text content. E-mails of more typical length will grow considerably larger. And, don’t forget all those silly e-mail themes that e-mail clients provide which throw backgrounds, colored graphical headers, etc. throughout the message. There’s also the many people who think it’s nice to have a graphic scan of their handwritten signature in the e-mail.

As a result, the e-mail file size begins to grow seemingly exponentially. It suddenly takes a few dozen kilobytes instead of just a 3-4 kilobytes to let me know that a meeting has been rescheduled for a half hour later in the day. Multiply this by the dozens and dozens of e-mails I process every day, and—well, let me just say that I have a cap on the maximum amount I can store in my work e-mail account, and I constantly have to purge the big stuff out of the Sent and Deleted Items folders.

People have been all abuzz about the Twitter notification e-mails that inform users of new followers. Twitter, for the love of Pete, please give an option to go back to text-only e-mails. The old text-only notifications were about 2 or 2.5 kilobytes. The new HTML-formatted e-mails that not only contain links to remote graphics (which show as broken image link icons since I don’t auto-retrieve them) but also has several graphics embedded in the e-mail are now 7-8 kilobytes.

Once again, I realize this is still tiny amounts, relatively speaking, and I’m going to get people telling me, “So what? Can it, will ya?” Fine. But if the size rationale means nothing to you, my first two rationales should do a bit better. Yes, there are some times where an HTML-formatted message is useful—and I have been known to use them in certain cases. Most commonly, I’ll use HTML formatting when editing an article that someone sent to me via e-mail. Text that I ask to have removed, I’ll change to red color, but leave it in place so the other person sees what text I asked to remove. Text that I want added, I’ll type in green. But, the times when HTML formatting is useful is generally the exception—not the rule.

My hope is that you’ll realize plain text is most adequate for the majority of your e-mail and that you’ll change your e-mail application to default using plain text, manually switching to HTML formatting on an individual message basis, as needed.

Let’s define a text message, shall we?

From here on out, I’m going to assume we all know what SMS means. It stands for Short Message Service and is also known as a text message. So, I can now use “SMS” throughout the rest of this post, right? Good.

SMS is essentially the barrel-scraped lowest common denominator when it comes to resources required of a cellular carrier to support. The entire service is a holdout from texting pagers that people carried before cell phones got inexpensive enough for most people to carry. So, you may ask, how little a hit on resources do SMS texts take?

In terms of computers, a single character (such as the letter A) occupies one byte of space. Not one kilobyte—one byte! A kilobyte is enough to hold 1,000 bytes (characters). For the sake of simplicity, let’s not bother with the 1,024-byte math. It doesn’t matter for the purposes of my point.

So, how big is a text message?

Best I can tell, SMS has a 160-character maximum. Assuming that’s true, a single SMS would be 160 bytes. There’s certainly some overhead to that—you’d need at least an additional 20 bytes for the two 10-digit phone numbers involved: sender and recipient.

If that overhead is kept at a minimum, a single SMS would conceivably be less than 200 bytes, and I won’t even touch on whether or not the data is compressed or the fact that most text messages don’t use the maximum number of characters.

Assuming my supposition is remotely accurate, it means that a fully loaded SMS requires one-fifth of a kilobyte—or five texts per kilobyte. Scaling this up, since 1,000 kilobytes make up a megabyte, you get 5,000 texts per megabyte!

I’ll put a little more perspective on this. A typical MP3 audio file, such as a song, often weighs in approximately one megabyte per minute. In other words, the same amount of bandwidth a three-minute MP3 song would occupy is enough to carry 15,000 text messages!

Hey, I’ll give the cellular carriers a huge benefit of the doubt. I certainly know virtually nothing of the details for this, but suppose I took for granted that these carriers have to factor a minimum packet size. In other words, no packet of information (such as a single SMS) can be smaller than the minimum. Maybe that minimum is one kilobyte. On some hard drives I’ve used, I seem to recall the minimum packet size was four kilobytes. So let’s run with that.

To make a tiny packet of information (again, such as a single SMS) meet the minimum packet size, that packet will have irrelevant padding (such as, but not exclusively, zero-value bytes) added to it. Assuming a four-kilobyte packet, we’re talking more than three and a half kilobytes of padding on top of that 200-byte text message. Making an allowance for this hefty amount of padding is good for my illustration because it allows for a lot more overhead beyond the 200 bytes that may have to accompany a single SMS—something about which I’m admittedly uninformed.

So if a single SMS now requires a whopping four kilobytes, that’s still in the neighborhood of 250 text messages per megabyte or 750 in the space of that three-minute MP3 audio file.

Okay, Lee, we get it. What’s your point?

All I’m trying to say is the same thing many people before me have said. The amount of strain a single SMS puts on a cellular network can be likened to the amount of strain a single drop of water puts on a gallon bucket. Most people could never measure it! Why, then, does it cost more to communicate the same amount of information via SMS as it does to make a phone call.

Comparing SMS to smart phone data

To further illustrate how ludicrous this is, consider that most smart phones, such as the Apple iPhone, are offered with an unlimited data plan. You pay the monthly data fee, such as $20 or $30 as it is for the first- and second-generation iPhones, respectively, and you can potentially transfer hundreds of megabytes (or more) in and out of your smart phone. Apple even specifically capitalizes on this. Thanks to the iTunes Store being available on the phone, you can instantly snag multi-megabyte songs, iPhone applications which range widely in amount of data downloaded, etc.

Clearly, data plans take a far bigger hit on cellular network infrastructure than text messaging does. Yet, without a monthly SMS plan in place, you’re charged, typically, 20 cents for every one you send or receive. If you translate that price to data service, depending whether you consider a single SMS as 200 bytes or four kilobytes, the cost is now anywhere between $50 to $1,000 per megabyte! Even if you consider the packages instead of a la carte pricing, assuming AT&T’s 1,500 texts for $10 plan, that ranges between $1.66 to $30 per megabyte. Even at only $1.66, given the way smart phones can chomp through data, that’s a lot more than I’d want to pay each month for the data! But that’s what we would be charged if data were billed at the same rates as text messaging.

Are you starting to see how idiotic SMS pricing is?

All of the big is a huge digression from what is really on my mind. Time to completely shift gears.

I want to send texts inexpensively to Canada

On AT&T (and probably many other carriers), multiply the a la carte SMS rate by 2.5 to send a text to Canada—50 cents vs. 20. This is in addition to whatever flat rate you pay, if any, for a domestic SMS plan.

Funny: it wouldn’t matter if a web page I accessed was hosted in the States or in Lithuania, the flat rate for data access remains the same.

Up until now, I’ve been considering (more like contributing) the $20 flat monthly fee for AT&T’s package to get 100 text messages outside the States—specifically, in my case, to Canada. The reason I probably won’t do that, after all, is those 100 texts would be $50 if I paid a la carte, and I probably wouldn’t use all 100 any given month. In other words, paying individually probably would cost me in the same ballpark as the flat monthly fee.

No definitive answers

Before I did the math and realized AT&T’s international SMS plan is really not all the great a deal, there was one aspect about the package that I wanted to confirm, and no one was able to definitively tell me. What I wanted to know was, how would the incoming texts from Canada be regarded once I added the international plan?

When a domestic SMS plan is purchased, texts, including incoming, are counted against your monthly allotment. My allotment is unlimited, but it wouldn’t matter if I did have a limit. My point here is that I don’t pay for individual incoming texts—they are deducted from my allotment, unlimited or otherwise. Fortunately, even if the incoming text is from Canada, it still is simply counted against the allotment. For me, it means a person in Canada can text me all they want and I am not charged any differently. (At the moment, I return texts by using the e-mail gateway. Inconvenient, but free.)

The thing that AT&T is apparently incapable of telling me is, if I add the international package, do incoming texts from Canada continue counting against my regular (unlimited, in my case) SMS plan, or do they suddenly start counting against the 100 international package? If the latter is true, I’d suddenly be paying AT&T for the privilege of only being able to receive 100 texts from Canada instead of unlimited like now, minus however many texts I send up to Canada!

I’m not sure which I find more nuts—the idea that paying more money might result in fewer free incoming texts from Canada, or the fact that AT&T is either incapable or unwilling to tell me which scenario would happen.

No lie, the last answer I got after calling on different occasions was advice to go ahead and add the plan and see how the incoming texts are handled on my next statement. The representative said she put a notation on my account about my question with the vague promise that the international SMS fee for that month would be refunded if I was unsatisfied (meaning incoming texts counted against the 100).

BZZZZZZ. Wrong answer.

The person who texts me from Canada uses a Blackberry 8830 World Edition and has unlimited texts both in and out of Canada. I don’t know the rate for that, but I understand it’s pretty affordable and, if it were offered by AT&T for iPhone users, I’d be on it in a second. As it is now, this person sends me a text, and I use the e-mail gateway to reply. This means the person in Canada can’t directly reply to my message because it originated from Telus’ e-mail gateway server and not my phone number. In short, it means both of us are basically setting up a new message each time rather than easily hitting “reply” to the previous incoming SMS.

Like I said earlier, it’s inconvenient, but it’s free, and it’s what I’ll keep doing until I find a better way. Yes, I am, indeed, considering utilizing Twitter and private messages, but this is someone who really doesn’t want to maintain a Twitter account. I haven’t abandoned this as an option yet, but I’m not holding my breath.

The only bits of good news I’ve discovered are: 1) settings that we were informed might be lost weren’t, and 2) there’s now a percentage indicator of how full the hard drive is.

Let me reiterate. These two items are the only bits of good news, and only the second can be considered a feature improvement. All other “improvements” listed by Bright House I knew were of no consequence to me even before the update occurred.

So far, I’ve come up with a list of a dozen features I enjoyed from the old firmware that are missing in the update. I am sure there’s more than this list, I just haven’t noticed them yet. One is a feature I never realized I had on the old firmware, and now wish I had realized it.

1. I can no longer skip through favorite channels in the guide. Pressing the FAV button exits the guide and changes to the next favorite channel.
2. Keyword search is gone. I can only search by first characters of program title.
3. Guide no longer shows programs that were scheduled to record but won’t because of a conflict with a higher-priority recording.
4. Manual frame-by-frame advance is gone. (The 15 minute (second?) quick advance apparently is gone too, but I never knew this existed.)
5. Only a single Picture-In-Picture size is available. Prior firmware had small and large sizes.
6. I can no longer reorder the list of recorded shows in order to let desired shows be the lowest priority and, consequently, deleted in favor of a new recording. Yes, you can set a show to not be deleted, but sometimes I’ll record something that I may or may not watch. I used to move it to the bottom in order to let it be the one deleted if I need room for something else.
7. Pause mode screen saver I think is gone—not 100% positive. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt that maybe it just takes longer to appear—but my bet is it’s gone. It apparently comes on after a longer period of time, but the screen saver is still there, except now it just floats a message saying to press a button on the remote control to continue instead of the still frame of where you paused.
8. Scanning forward and backward doesn’t move as rapidly as before (in other words, takes longer to fast scan through an entire show).
9. Not technically a feature loss, but a problem with the old firmware still exists…if a TV show produces a still image for more than a second or two, the audio will intermittently cut out until the show returns to a moving picture.
10. The position I last highlighted in menus and guides is not remembered. For example, every time I want to turn on captioning, I now have to hit Settings, arrow up twice, press select, arrow to “On,” and select again. Before the update, since I always left the settings position at the captioning menu item, I could just hit Settings, Select (to toggle ON/OFF), and Exit. Three steps. Done.
11. The position at which playback continues after fast scanning is far more unpredictable than before. I can reverse scan just for a second or two, then it play, and playback continues further forward than the point at which I started scanning backward.
12. In old firmware, I could highlight a particular show in the Guide, perform a title search, and that show would be “searched” by initial default, letting me quickly see future airings of that show. Now, searches always begin at the top of the alphanumeric list and I have to key in the letters of a show’s title, even if it’s the currently highlighted show in the Guide.

(The above 12 are the original dozen. All new issues I find are below.)

It might be understandable if there was only one or two odd things that I found over a long period of time, but the very fact that I came up with a dozen feature problems in only two days of typical use is completely inexcusable.

Mr. Craig Saari, Bright House senior director of engineering, you would please essentially every one of your customers by reverting all boxes back to the old firmware, provided it doesn’t zap out recordings like the upgrade stated it might (even though mine remained). Since I’m sure that’s out of the question, I feel a petition should be submitted demanding steep discounts on our bills until the features we previously enjoyed have returned.

I’ll be updating this entry with more feature issues I discover as time goes on. Book mark this page if you’d like to keep track, and add a comment if you’ve found something that I haven’t found yet.

Additional issues I discover will be continually added here:

1. Since the A, B, and C buttons were reallocated for other functions, I have found no other way to skip the Guide listing to the next 100 block of channels.
2. Can no longer specify in a series recording that a show should be recorded regardless what channel it comes on. (My recollection may be off on this one, but I seem to recall being able to specify “any channel” in a series recording prior to the firmware update.)
3. The show description in the Info window truncates longer descriptions with no apparent means to read the rest. Old firmware allowed me to page up/down through the description.
4. In the old firmware, if there was a recording conflict, when the first recording causing the conflict ended, the show that was not being initially recorded would start at the point where the conflicting show was no longer overlapping. In the new firmware, the entire conflicted show is not recorded, even if the priority recordings end.