unreadable capchas

[barba]

does anyone else have trouble reading the capchas at uploadable.ch? i stick my monitor under a microscope that i have leftover from my days as a microbiologist, and i still can only read a small percentage of them. what gives? i understand they are purposefully meant to be an annoyance. but there are limits. to be fair, in the magnification process i found several nasty organisms that, if left undetected, might have given me one of those awful new strains of influenza. but that's not the point. how do you people read those things?

 

[jugulear]

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By now, most porn downloaders have a sense of the worst CAPTCHA offenders, and there are some that causes an absolute feeling of dread... as the one that deforms the letters and spaces them so closely apart, it's easy to mistake one letter for another. Then there was a horrible variety that I have luckily not seen n a while, where one had to sort together like photos (of fish, or houses and that sort of thing), but the photos were sometimes so non-descript, you had to guess, and you could be stuck playing that puzzle forever.

I'm not too troubled by the Uploadable CAPTCHAs, as murky as they usually are (have to stick my nose very close to the monitor, usually); the saving grace is that we often deal only with numbers that are just three or four digits, so the agony is short-lived.

With the more impossible CAPTCHAs, I keep cycling through the "try another" button until I hit one that is clearer than most.

A great pleasure to read Barba's posts, with his always-welcome sharp sense of hewmah.


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[needs more loli]

Try cranking up the brightness on your display. I usually have my brightness set to low in an effort to preserve my vision but it makes reading those capchas impossible until I make it brighter.

 

[jugulear]

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Need More Loli's thoughtful response made me realize there may be a good chance that Barba has one of those old-style "CRT" monitors rather than the flat "LED" kind which usually is backlit. If so, while we know the CRTs work perfectly fine, Barba, computing life becomes noticeably easier if you pick up one of the latter style -- and not just for CAPTCHAs, but for all around. We would be talking around little more than a hundred bucks for one that is not too gigantically-sized (like this, if you can catch it on sale), and I believe you will realize this would be a smart investment. (If you go ahead, make sure to check out the kind of connection that is on the back of your computer, ... options are HDMI, DVI and the old-type VGA that goes with the "CRT" monitors, I think the "analog" to what is now "digital." You might also have to get a cable with two different connector types -- for example, if your computer only has VGA, and the monitor does not).

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[barba]

while i do have a reputation for making obsolete technology merely obsolescent, these days i generally use digital monitors. if others aren't having problems reading the captchas, at least i know that the problem lies with me. probably my eyes. it's fair to say that they have seen better days.

i recall having crt problems decades ago with one i bought from dell. it kept dimming erratically. so after de-gaussing and de-thissing and de-thatting with no luck, i called the dell help line (yes, they had one back then) and after many hours, i got through. they assured me that theirs was a fine product and that they never had any such complaints as mine. they figured my problem must be with power spikes. so why didn't i call my power company? and i did. and, marvelous to say, they admitted there had been some recent power spikes. they apologized and said that a crew would soon be working in my area to resolve an array of problems. alas, too late to benefit of my crt monitor which went into permanent dim mode. fortunately, the one i bought afterward reaped the benefits. no dimming. the moral of the story: choose your power companies with care. those guys can ruin your equipment.

 

[pikuseru]

Generally all expensive electronics should be connected to a power outlet via a surge protector, which will suppress power surges and prevent damage such as you describe. Otherwise even a passing thunderstorm can has the potential to kill your monitor.

A few years back I had NetTALK (VOIP Phone) adaptor that died mysteriously after a thunderstorm even though I connected the power cable to the surge protector. Apparently the electricity traveled through the phone cable, which I unfortunately neglected to connect the surge protector.

As for the captcha issue, it might be a problem with monitor resolution compared to the screen size. Too high or too low resolution might make the capcha unreadable. E.g. my (Dell) monitor is 22" and the native resolution is 1680x1050 which is a perfect pixel pitch. If your mouse has a wheel, you can use the wheel to zoom into or out of the captcha image.

Other potential causes could be incorrect gamma, brightness, contrast, and/or colour balance. Adjusting these settings in the monitor or in AMD/NVIDIA control panel, perhaps even going as far to calibrate your monitor, could make the captcha images much more easier to read.

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/