Who wants to see this with me when it hits theaters? It's like the greatest love story of our generation, but about rocks and mountains and shit.
Slashdot article about (tech.slashdot.org) how user interfaces affect 'old users'. Kinda hits home for me.
I've always had respect for Dave Grohl, man is a music machine but also does love metal (literally brought up Sepultura in an interview one time), but this (loudwire.com) definitely justifies that respect. Damn son.
SPDCA: Garmin Vivosmart Smartwatch
A few years ago, I had an impulse buy on a watch that looked to be sorta sporty. And by "sorta sporty," I mean it had the ability to take your pulse. Other than that, it was just an electronic wristwatch.
I liked it. It wasn't fancy. But it gave me someting to look at, and something to do with my hands when I didn't know what to do with my hands. It got me out of the habit of whipping out my phone ever so often to check the time, and having time on my wrist worked out really well for biking.
Then the battery on the thing ran out. And in replacing it, I destroyed its capability to take my pulse (though, I didn't really miss it that much).
Then the plastic band started to wear. And then it eventually broke. And now it just sits on the small shelf in my bathroom, reminding me that I have 10 minutes to dress, eat breakfast, and brush my teeth after my shower.
This last December, Someone was being bad about the control of sensitive information, and let leak their Christmas gift idea for their spouse. It was the Garmin Vivosmart, which I thought was intriguing. It wasn't the gaudy, wrist-calculator smartwatches I'd seen before, but instead a smart band that didn't have an interface except for when you interacted with it. About a month later, the giftee demoed their band at a party and I was still pretty interested as someone who is a fan of subtlety and obscure human-computer interfaces.
The band is black, and the display is an array of white LEDs that shine through the band's surface. You "double-tap" the band if you want it to wake up, lighting up the LEDs to display one of the display mades it has. By default, it will show you the time, but if you "swipe" the current screen left or right it will cycle through your current step count, how far you are in your step goals for the day, and if you have any notifications on your phone. Other than the step counter, most everything on the interface is read-only. You can start/stop/play music from your phone, but after accidentally trigger it at home, and almost doing it again at work, I turned that shit off right quick. It doesn't do the Johnny Quest microphone thing, but I don't feel bad about that. It sort of just makes you look like a tool.
I haven't quite figured out how the step counter feature is implemented. I've been walking outright with the step counter up and it hasn't been counting, and I've been running full speed on my treadmill and it's been counting by twos. It definitely knows that I'm at the computer, not doing anything, because it will vibrate and flash briefly at you if you need to move. I like this, and I don't like this. It makes me want to figure out a better way of getting up and moving around at work. However, if I'm in all-day workshops or whatever, most times I've been notified I have to just ignore it. I can even tell the difference in vibrations between the "Move!" notification and the other normal notifications. So I know when I'm being lazy without even looking at it.
Notifications from your phone work quite well. If you get a text, email, or really any notification that you can subscribe to using the Android notification system, the band will buzz and it will light up with a short summary of the notification. If you keep tapping on it, it will slowly scroll through the contents of the notification message.
The application on my phone is functional, and provides a pretty nice way to subscribe / unsubscribe from notifications (which I've made good use of). I haven't been making super great use of it for exercise, so I haven't gone back to look extensively at the exercise data it collects. I like that it does, and I get a weird pat-on-the-back feeling when it puts up a "GOAL ACHIEVED" in front of a fireworks display. Usually this happens when I don't expect it, and I laugh.
Battery life has so far been awesome. It's supposed to last for seven days, but I don't have any clear indication on whether it needs charged or not. It's been running without complaining for about four days, so we'll assume we can get this far.
The real test will come when I start biking. The "double tap to wake" thing may be a problem, given that I have to keep my hands on the handlebars. However, I'm slowly learning that I don't necessary have to double-tap with my other hand, as I can just tap on any hard surface to get the same effect. Also, about half the time I can flick my wrist twice and get it to trigger. Aaaand as I tried it again just now, it took me, like, 5 tries. Sometimes it's a little consistent. However, I have the feeling that it's because I wear it upside down. Not that it should really matter with an accelerometer, but here we are.
So far, I am enjoying my first foray into "smart wear." I hope I don't wear through this watch band like I did my last.
Photoshop idea: a poster of the Oculus VR headset on Gordon Freeman in Black Mesa, with caption: "facehuggers"
SPDCA: RAID Arrays
So, I built a new computer. Records show I started writing an upgrade log, detailing for whoever cares my learnings/progress in getting a new PC built. However, from the looks of it, I abandoned it to play Diablo 3. Because I had a new computer. And it could play games. And then I decided I needed to get a new phone. It's like I don't own my technology, but rather, it owns me.
Anyhow. As is always the case with building a PC, there are always things. I say things, and anybody who has had to slap a computer together from component parts will have an idea what I'm talking about. No matter how well worn the path is that you are following, how popular or standardized your methods, there will always be something that causes you to sink an incredible amount of time. It's the nature of the game, and in some cases, the journey is more rewarding than the destination, but more often than not, your things will be annoying as shit.
I'll spare you the details of my first two weeks with the computer. Describing the tweaks one does to a workstation to make it "right" is like telling somebody about an incredibly affecting, emotional dream you had, the kind you wake up from a changed man/woman, but in reality and in its retelling it is actually boring as hell.
I maintain, however, that mine has a sort of cautionary tale element to it. Sort of like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner... but about drive redundancy.
Anyhow. One of my things was getting a RAID mirror set up on my computer. I have an SSD for my boot drive, and two HDDs I wanted to serve in a 2-disk drive mirror for performance and having some redundancy in the event one disk goes before the other (I have backups aside from this, but in this instance, my redundancy is about reducing down-time).
Initially, setting up my RAID array, I went through my motherboard's built-in hardware RAID setup. This setup is ideal, as the operating system does not have to care about the RAID setup, the maintenance of the array, or really anything. The RAID just works at a low level on the system, and I can potentially have multiple operating systems have partitions on the RAID array and everyone just plays nicely.
This, however, failed miserably. Absolutely miserably. No matter what I would do, whenever I enabled the RAID driver Windows would refuse to boot. I would disable the driver, and it would boot back up happily. I thought to myself: Well, damn. I have a buggy RAID controller in my motherboard. Buuut, everything else seems to be working okay... I'll try out a software RAID configuration.
In a software RAID configuration, the operating system controls the disks according to its own rules, sort of "manually" maintaining the RAID array by reading/writing to both disks of its own accord (and not relying on a lower-level function to do it for the operating system).
Trying that, I found out that Windows 7 Home Premium does not support this kind of RAID, and that to support it I would need to upgrade to a version of Windows that cost twice as much. Fuck that, said I, and I tried to go back to getting the motherboard hardware RAID working.
A few dozen iterations of knob-twiddling and subsequent frustration, I was ready to give up. No amount of BIOS, firmware, or driver upgrades would get Windows to boot into the proper mode.
However, magic happened. Much like you are guaranteed that things will happen during PC building, something magic happens. This is when, despite all of your efforts at troubleshooting, something magically starts working, and you have no idea why. For someone who operates on the assumption of a knowable universe, this kind ofmagic is infuriating. And also worrying, for the reason that eventually, all magic eventually ends.
The magic was that the RAID array started to work. Magically. My RAID array appeared as one drive, and I could hear the clicking of two disks, not just one. I thought to myself, Maybe I didn't give it enough time? After all, RAID arrays take some time to build. Maybe the underlying hardware wasn't "ready," and just didn't know how to tell me.
Then two months passed. I got complacent. I started doing real work, where it mattered whether I lost what was on the drives. I did the thing I should not have done. I relied on the magic.
And tonight, the magic ended. I was playing Borderlands, and Windows reared its ugly head, minimizing everything I was shooting at. Windows claimed "You no longer have a genuine copy of Windows! Please buy a genuine copy of Windows!" To that I also said Fuck that, given that I can see my legitimate registration key sitting on shelf. I investigated. Then investigated some more. It's been a number of years since I ran Windows at home, after all. There's bound to be odd things I haven't seen since Windows XP. Plus, I know that Windows ties all sorts of things in its "registration" process to the underlying hardware, and between recent driver and Windows updates, maybe something had changed in its consideration of that. Either way, I decided I would attempt a restart.
After restarting, my RAID array came up as two drives. This is bad. This is very bad. Once a disk goes into a RAID array, it should not come out unless it has failed. If a drive that was previously RAID comes out of the RAID, and an operating system like Windows sees it, and mounts it, you have basically destroyed your RAID (because you can almost guarantee that Windows did two slightly different things to both drives, making them no longer identical mirrors of each other).
I investigated. I investigated some more. I restarted a bunch. I started going down the original hardware RAID path I did back in September, and ended up at the same fail-booting loop I was in before. I was distraught.
My saving grace was that I turned off the "Automatically Restart After Fail" option. You can do this by holding F8 before you get to the "Windows loading..." screens. This means that even if you Blue-Screen-Of-Death, the machine won't immediately restart, clearing the message on the screen. The message that I saw was about as helpful as any I'd seen: a bunch of hexadecimal codes that mean nothing to a human being. I happened to take a picture of that screen with my phone, and moved on.
I started getting desperate. I started researching to see if there was some known problem with my motherboard. Or if there were more updated version available from the vendors (looking at Intel, rather than MSI, in hopes that an update to a BIOS/firmware/driver might help).
In my desperation, I went here (www.intel.com). And while I normally don't pay a whole lot of attention to the admonitions on driver download pages (as they are mostly the vendors divulging all legal liability for their product), I happened to notice a familiar hex code: 0x0000007b
Don't ask me why I recognized that. It doesn't mean anything to me. It's like any other number. But it stuck in my mental craw, and forced me to read what it said:
If your RAID controller is not enabled, enabling the RAID controller is not recommended or supported when a SATA hard drive is the boot drive. Enabling the RAID controller might cause an immediate blue screen with the error code, 0x0000007b, followed by a reboot. To enable RAID, reinstall the operating system.
A memory stirred again. There was something strange I found with my motherboard. My motherboard has a strange design to it, in that almost every human-configurable component has a redundancy to it. For instance, it has two onboard BIOS memories that you can switch between at will. They do this, because the more you fuck with something, the more likely you will wedge something. In this case, it is certainly nice to be able to restore to a previous known good state rather than having to start over from the beginning.
I had noticed when initially putting my stuff together that my motherboad had not one but two SATA controllers (this is the hardware that interacts directly with your hard drives, and can do interesting things with them, like RAID mirroring). For the SATA ports 1-6, they go to an onboard Intel controller. For the SATA ports 7-8, they go to an ASMedia controller. At the time, I didn't understand the reason for this. Maybe if a controller failed, the other one could be used? No, because they have different numbers of ports, and you wouldn't be able to boot with the same configuration... (shrugs)
It was something I had initially discarded as one of the board's redundancies. But, reading that information from Intel, now I see why. Intel's controller, if configured for RAID, will completely shit the bed if you end up trying to boot your computer from a SATA slot that is not configured in a RAID array (but is still connected to your Intel controller).
Because I boot from an SSD, and because that SSD is not part of any RAID array, the Intel controller threw an unrecoverable hardware error whenever Windows would try to load the RAID driver. Why does the Intel controller do this? Why would they not just provide a nice error message when this happens? Or at least a warning when you try? I don't know.
Figuring this out, I switched my SSD over to SATA port 7, running it through the ASMedia SATA controller. I booted it up, and everything was just fine. My drives, still incredibly wedged in terms of RAID mirroring, at least still had their data on them. Even though Intel sort of screwed me when it came to underlying hardware configuration, they did provide a nice tool to migrate existing data from a known drive at he same time you were creating a RAID mirror from it. Currently, it is chugging away, and is supposedly at 7% completion to rebuild itself.
So, my question now is: what magic has been going on these last 2 months? If both drives had come up, but the first drive looked completely different than the second, I would guess that I was simply operating outside of RAID and I didn't notice. However, both drives were within ~5MB usage, which meant that they were nearly identical at the time they came out of the magical RAID.
This is something I will probably never know. It might bug me a little, and for a little while. But now I can sleep better, knowing that magic died a little tonight, and that the discreet, knowable universe inched a little bit forward.
SPDCA: New Phone
I ended up getting a new phone. My prior device, the 2011 Motorola Atrix 4G, had long since been obsoleted by its manufacturer, leaving it up to me to find operating system updates. As such, I could keep up with the individual application updates, but it was still running Android 2.X, compared to the now 4.4.X. Often, features of newer applications would be disabled due to my inability to find updates, if the features would work at all:
Group texts all but rendered the phone unusable, especially if MMS messages contained any sort of multimedia.
Video players quit for a month. Then came back after an update. Then quit again. Then started to work randomly, but had a chance of hard-rebooting the phone, or causing a strange "overlay" effect when the video would render into a layer that could never be written to again.
Software keyboard would randomly insert Z's.
The hardware was also falling apart. The protective filter in front of the camera had shattered at some point, causing understandably blurry and greenish photos. The touch screen would only work on every second or third unlock, and the metal speaker cage had eroded allowing the speaker diaphragm to be punctured, making for weird gaps in the sounds it was capable of (notably: most of the alarms were whisper quiet).
It still had its charms, though. Standard USB cable recharging, mounting as a USB drive, replaceable battery, upgradeable microSD storage, and a sense of elitism, entitlement, and a sort of "you kids get off my lawn" feeling.
However, spending a weekend trying to communicate with people over MMS pretty much sold me on an upgrade. It'd been three and a half years, after all. In phone years, that's a healthy age.
In researching, I found that some things had stayed the same, and some things had changed. Android is still the Wild West. I still don't want to go back to an iPhone. Windows phones were barely on the radar in 2011, but I'm still not super interested in a non-*nix based platform. Phone are now also huge, the reign of the 1080p and greater displays pushing most phones into what would have been considered tablets a few years ago. I laughed. Then grumbled.
I did briefly look into the stranger things out there. I took a gander at the Jolla, FirefoxOS, and Ubuntu Touch stuff they had out there, but the developer ecosystem and overall support for the devices seemed comparatively small. I even found a small, exclusivity-driven phone called the OnePlus One, supposedly a "killer" phone, but you have to have an "invite" just to buy one. Reports were that they had a decent product, but their support was disorganized, at best, or non-existent at worst.
Leaning towards Android, that still left me with a lot of options. The Google Nexus 6 looked like a decent contender, but wasn't available anywhere I checked. Plus, it was godawful expensive.
There was the Moto X, which I was somewhat excited about in its first generation (enough to put myself on a mailing list, which I unsubscribed from after a while). Looking again, I found they had released a second generation of the phone, which had a number of nice features:
The problem with the Moto X was that it is a sealed product: no removeable back- plate, no replaceable battery, and no upgradeable storage. Also, the pain of being outright abandoned by Motorola for software updates with my Atrix still pissed me off.
The alternate was the Samsung Galaxy S5. (Slightly) smaller than its Note companions, it has almost the exact same specifications as the Moto X, has a removeable back-plate, as well as boasts that its case design is intended to keep dust and moisture out (by way of some meaningless certification), as well as be able to be submerged for short periods of time. For how many times my phone emerged sweaty and gross from my pocket, this seemed pretty valuable.
There's also that Costco put the S5 on sale for $150 off yesterday, putting it down to $50 for a 2 year contract renewal. So, that's what I went with.
As some of the reviews had said, Samsung does weird things with its software, and a lot in terms of bloatware. I spent about three hours configuring the phone last night, but I probably spent 45 minutes uninstalling/replacing the things I didn't like or wasn't interested in. I spent some time finding a drop-in replacement for the AMOLED low-light notifications, which I ended up being very happy with. Also, a few other things I'm trying on for size:
I also did a test last night. MMS, both in groups, and with images, work swimmingly, which I feel is sort of a game changer. I'll never have the right colored bubbles for my friends with iPhones, but that's okay. I'm alright being the weird bubble.
This is why living in Alaska sucks. (www.polygon.com)
You folks in the real world know what to do.
Robbie, I'm getting to your bullshit post. But in the meantime: WTF Sennheiser (mikebeauchamp.com). I own some Sennheisers. This makes me sad.
Why I listen to vinyl. (mic.com)
In fact, I'm in the process of upgrading my turntable right now. It is not an easy process.
I honestly never thought I would find a series of ads (www.youtube.com) this entertaining.
I love cats.
Assumed this topic had already been discussed but couldn't find the thread. Maybe that's for good reason.
I've been rewatching some S4 ST:ENT eps. I've complained before about how awful this series was, but always believed that the fourth season redeemed the series. I think I was wrong.
The multi-ep arc with Brent Spiner and the augments was pretty decent. The several ep arc about the corrupt Vulcan government and their eventual political restructuring and theological reawakening is great, on par with some DS9, but ultimately pretty niche in its appeal.
The one-offs are wretched. The one with the wheelchair bound inventor of the teleporter. The silicon based life forms that take over their bodies. Temporal Cold War.
I'm struggling to find why some episodes are pretty decent and many are unwatchable. Certainly, there are some episodes that appeal to me mostly based on their significance in the Star Trek universe, and this can make a middling episode much better for me although I recognize that this benefit is reserved for a very small segment of the viewing audience.
Mostly I'm just posting to bait Erik and maybe Josh into another conversation about ST. Sorry everyone who doesn't care.
Speaking of xkcd rescently. The "What If" book tour is coming to Seattle September 9th... in cause anyone of you happens to be traveling through.
