A1E1

Doing the Chromebook "thing"

2016-02-23T17:07:00.000-06:00

Typing this from an Acer Chromebook 15 - core i5 model with 4 gigs of RAM and decent (though not particularly generous) SSD. Boots in approximately 7 seconds, as advertised. Ties into my google accounts and so all my "stuff", at least the online portions, is already there.

Of course, that's what you would EXPECT a Chromebook to do, right? You'd expect it to excel at navigating the web. So the fact it does so I would imagine hardly generates even a yawn.

But then you start looking at the difficult stuff. On my Windows boxes, connecting to my office computer involves installing the Java JRE, finding and configuring IE (since Edge is a no go at this point), logging in, typing in my PC identifier, waiting for the rdp client to time out, then loading the java version of the client, then making sure to specify the right domain, and finally I have a decent (if a little hard to read) connection to my desktop.

On the Chromebook it was install the Cisco Anyconnect VPN app, configure the app, install the FusionWare RDP client, connect to the VPN, type in my PC identifier and domain, and then I'm there. By default the RDP window is 3/4 screen, and the domain and PC identifier are stored so I won't have to type those in every time.

That was NOT something I expected to be easier on a Chromebook.

Of course the CB 15 is a full 1920x1080, which does a nice job of replacing my Yoga with it's "interesting" resolution. It also comes with a full 802.11ac connection so I can get onto the faster side of my WiFi - something the Yoga (which given it's age isn't really surprising) could never do.

Trackpad is slightly larger and more sensitive (though hardly anything to write home about), but can't figure out how to convince it to accept a right click. Works just fine (including the right click) with a USB mouse however.

Have not tried pushing the battery life yet, but will be interesting to see how close to the 9 hours I could get. Prominent speaker grills on both sides of the keyboard mean you aren't surprised to get nice, possibly too loud, sound from it.

Of course what I'm REALLY looking forward to doing is getting out and about with it, and see if I can be productive from places I was less certain I could work from using the Yoga. More on that to come.

Long story short, if you're not doing a lot of Video editing or major game playing on a daily basis, you may want to give a Chromebook a second look.

To Build the Perfect Car Phone Holder, first start with TWO Car Phone Holders

2016-02-22T17:19:00.000-06:00

Since about December, I have been trying to find a way to use my Nexus 6 with Google Play Family to be my main music source in the car. I was getting a bit tired of the Slacker pre-recorded bits playing several times a week (not sure if their DJs aren't getting paid to do as many or...), and a quick two-day trial with Sirius XM reminded me of all the reasons I hate radio in the first place (can't skip a song, can't mark a song to never play again, lose the signal going into the parking garage, etc).

The problem is that a Nexus 6 is not only a large phone (nicknamed the Whale during development for a reason), but I have a protective case that allows it to snap onto a clip for my belt. So that adds even a bit more. The majority of phone holders are about a quarter inch shy of what they need to be to hold that. I was finally able to find one that opened big enough (barely) to clamp the phone. But then there was the issue of how the clamp actually mounts.

There are several different formats for these. One popular one uses a magnet attached to a rubber end split to hold onto your car vent. Given the big phone and my Jeep Patriot's flimsy vent louvers, I generally had to position the phone so it got additional support from the in-car entertainment console - usually blocking one or more switches. Worse, using the heater would inevitable cause the glue holding the metal plate that attached to the phone case to soften, and plop would go the phone.

Another popular type uses a suction cup to attach to your dash or the windshield. On the Jeep Patriot the dash is curved one way or the other in most places (at least those within arm's reach of the driver), and the windshield is at an angle and forward such that the phone was either out of reach, or blocking your view of some or all of the rear view mirror.

Next up is a type that goes in the cup holder. These are deep enough and far enough back that you either can't really see the phone, or you are blocking the shifter.

Then there are the ones that go into your DC Port (or cigarette lighter though they are rarely used for that). Again, on this particular car that puts the phone either blocking the heat/ac controls or the shifter.

My final solution was to buy two holders. One was the item I mentioned at the start (made as part of a 3-in-1 kit by Omaker), and then to use a kit that stretches back from the Windshield to the dash with a holder to keep it in place by IPow. Using the tightening spinner that came from the Omaker on the ball end of the Windshield arm (bit of a push, but it fit) the phone now rests just on top of the dash.

We don't want to talk about how many of these I went through to come up with this Frankenstein solution, but let me say I find it difficult to imagine so many of these products have 4 and 5 star ratings given my personal experiences.

Refreshing Yoga with Ubuntu 15.10

2016-02-07T15:40:00.000-06:00

Note - The following is a bit long because I think it's useful to see how I got to where I am from where I started. You have been warned... :-)

So this started a couple weeks ago when I was trying to figure out if for my yearly technology refresh I wanted a monster laptop (i7, 980m, SSD) with minimal battery life, or if I wanted to try and use a Chromebook that would have great battery life and use either Teamviewer or Chrome Remote Desktop to access one of my desktop machines and do video editing and other work that way. I recently upgraded my Verizon to 12 gis/month so it was less likely I would blow through my data plan, and the idea of a less expensive and lighter weight machine seemed right up my aisle since I am always trying to optimize and simplify.

The problem was, I don't have a Chromebook and if it turned out that there were going to be some issues doing what I needed to do with it, then I would still have to buy the monster as well and would now have $300-$500 less to do it with.

Asked a few questions over on the Reddit ChromeOS subreddit, but didn't get any answers that left me feeling like anyone was trying to do what I had in mind. However that did point me to Neverware and their CloudReady distribution that suggested I could run the next best thing to ChromeOS on my Lenovo Yoga (original generation). Since the Yoga relies primarily on the Intel Integrated graphics, and has an older core i5 and 8 gigs of RAM it seemed like a good match.

Downloaded their file, added the Chrome Restore Utility to my Windows chrome setup, inserted a freshly formatted 8 Gig Flash drive, pointed the Chrome Restore Utility to the Cloudready file, and 30 minutes later was ready to reboot the Yoga off the flash drive and do my install. Of course to get the Yoga to boot from the USB I had to first turn off Secure Boot in the BIOS.

A couple boots later, and I was running CloudReady off the USB for the install, and noticed it said that there was no network available. I chose "Enable WiFi", but that didn't do anything. Figuring I could fix it after the install, I went ahead and told it to proceed, and to setup as a dual boot rather than take the whole disk. Idea being that in the worst case I could reboot into Windows, and move on.

Did the install, rebooted, and still no network. Tried a few things, including plugging in an external USB WiFi adapter, and no luck. So figured I'd boot into Windows 10 and do some more research. However, when I told Grub during the reboot to bring up Windows, there was a moment of loading, followed by a Critical Error and a reboot.

Several more reboots later, and it was clear that Windows was not going to come up again, and that Windows couldn't find the recovery partition any more. My suspicion is that the CloudReady setup presumes there is only one Windows partition on the primary drive, and so carves out space from what is left and labels accordingly. However the Yoga has a recovery partition that is also on the primary drive, and so GRUB and Windows were expecting the Windows partition to be somewhere other than where it was. At this point a little investigation showed I had more than 20 partitions now (logically, not sure if they were all real), which is actually in a note about the CloudReady support for dual boot as something that they are working to fix.

Time to fall back on my old favorite for such situations - Ubuntu. Put the Flash drive back on my desktop and... hmm... it only has 1 gig available after formatting? Sure enough, the Chrome utility creates a protected partition. A little research shows that it also has the ability to blow that away, so I did that, then brought the flash drive up in Windows Disk Management tool and created a single partition, and it was back to creating my Ubuntu USB boot drive. Got that done, booted into Ubuntu, told it to go ahead and blow away the whole disk on the Yoga, and half an hour later I had Ubuntu 15.10 up and running.

Was working to get that setup right when I noticed that the wifi kept dropping the internet connection while showing that the WiFi connection was still connected. Some research turned up that the latest Linux Kernels will automatically load a Realtek module that is close to, but not really the right one, needed for the internal wifi on the Yoga. Recommended solution was to blacklist the Kernel driver (using modprobe -d >> blacklist.conf), install github (which I would have to do eventually anyway), and use an open source driver that was the right one. Then setup DKMS support to ensure that future Kernel upgrades would force the open source driver to rebuild and load rather than go back to the default state. Once all that was done, my wifi has been rock solid since.

Of course the Ubuntu issue suggests that the CloudReady distribution may have done the blacklist by default, and might not have the replacement driver. My other USB WiFi adapter might be new enough it didn't have a driver either, and so that could be the source of my ongoing issue. I am tempted to setup the Yoga with a Powerline network adapter and try it all over again, but at the moment I'm not sure I want to know badly enough to possibly have to retrace my steps in Ubuntu again.

The again, setting up Chrome in Ubuntu and adding apps to Chrome through the Web Store gets me 90% of what a Chromebook would give me anyway, so I may yet do a couple experiments with that setup once I get my CC account setup with Adobe later this week.

In fact, if you haven't looked through Chrome's web store for a while, you may want to give it a browse. The best part of it is that since apps work like web pages, you can use Ad Block Plus to block the ads in apps. Figuring out I could do that made a couple of so-so apps for Weather and Time into my now favorite apps. I do wish that more authors would consider having a "Premium" offering so I can pay a couple bucks to have a supported version without ads, but this comes close enough for now.

Long story short, if you've got an old laptop or desktop lying around, trying CloudReady or Ubuntu with Chrome might be worth some of your time!

Why the Maven should be your next "car"

2016-01-23T16:52:00.000-06:00

Hopefully everyone has seen GM's announcement about their new "Maven" service which has just started in Ann Arbor, Michigan this past week, and is supposed to roll out to the rest of the country over the next year or so.

For $12 an hour, with no membership fee, you use their app to find the car, unlock it, use it, and then park it at the same or another Maven location.

Am hoping GM will be setting up a Maven Calculator soon. Am also hoping they are planning to work with Schools, Shopping Areas and Large Employers to set up sites. Schools because they could use the funding and often have space in their parking lots they could afford to put aside. Large Employers and of course Shopping Areas, would be natural targets.

For myself I would ideally be able to walk the one block to the local school, rent the car for an hour to get to work (which is more than enough time), and then in the evening repeat the process. If so, that would be around $300/month all in since they are handling all the other costs of car ownership. For my newer car the all in (maintenance, payment, etc) is closer to $600/month. You can imagine how something like this, done right, could quickly disrupt auto ownership. I presume this is GM's attempt to be their own disruptor and own the experience given the likelihood of this kind of model to eventually replace individual ownership all together. Throw in the ability to drive from my home to the Maven spot using an autonomous feature, and perhaps getting GM to offer an "all you can ride" monthly fee, and you can see how close we really are to having "car as a service".

Not a moment too soon if you ask me :-)

The Problem with the Cloud is it's still Physical

2016-01-23T16:36:00.001-06:00

Trying to do an rclone sync today and keep getting:

2016/01/23 16:23:18 Amazon cloud drive root '': Couldn't list files: Get https://cdws.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/drive/v1/nodes?filters=parents%3Ad7yxwkFUSFSm_K8YMmQwMA: dial tcp 176.32.102.133:443: connectex: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

Started around 10 am (Central), and each attempt since then has been similar. I presume the location may be affected by the current blizzard, but would have hoped that AWS would maintain more than one copy of my data and could route accordingly. Guess this makes the argument that I should stay local and physical at home and at work a little more tellingly.

On the plus side, looking around for the reason did let me notice I needed to get an updated copy of rclone.

Using Amazon Cloud Drive with 4+ TB

2015-12-24T09:04:00.000-06:00

February is coming, and I am in the planning period for my yearly tech upgrade. Every year since 2009 this has included buying two external disk arrays to allow me to hold my increasingly large collection of photos and videos with some semblance of a chance to restore everything if an array crashes.

However, the problem comes that I am distributing risk by having backups (effectively) in two places in the house, but still both of them are in one location. This is problematic since a fire or flood or disaster-scenario-of-your-choosing would likely require me to try and grab an array as I make my way out the door. Not to mention that it does get a little pricey to buy faster enclosures and several disks on a yearly basis.

I have looked at online backup solutions before, but generally they have been as expensive as buying drives and/or offered by someone I'm not sure I would trust to keep that large a collection available and maintained.

So when Amazon had their Cyber Week special of $5 for a year of unlimited storage, I had to check it out. The first step was to see what the future years would cost. After all, Google and Microsoft have both made one year offers that seemed decent until you saw what the bill would be for following years. Fortunately, Amazon only costs $60 a year going forward - and (at least at the current time) that rate is the same even if I decide not to re-up for the Prime membership.

Next, was to see what "unlimited" really means. Some services (not to name names, but CB as one example) have a TOS that explains that unlimited is some amount that they think is reasonable, but is less than you are going to need. Any resemblance to "Unlimited" data plans for Cell service are purely coincidental (not). While I am sure that there is SOME limit to Amazon's service, I saw nothing that suggested that 10TB would exceed it.

So far so good, but then there's the little matter of getting the data up there for the initial load, and keeping it synced going forward. I first tried using Amazon's own uploader, and it was rather slow and did not do well with a typical Windows upgrade cycle. By which I mean any interruption would cause the transfer to stop and it was not just a single step to restart.

Fortunately, there is another option - Rclone. While it does require some command line knowledge, it has documentation on how to setup specifically for Amazon Cloud Drive (as well as Google Drive and other services you may use), and it has modes for both your initial upload, and to sync (either one way or two way). Now, it did take me two weeks (!) to complete the initial upload of all my files. Granted that was partly due to reboots thanks to Microsoft and nVidia. But it was essentially run and forget, which made it not that horrible to do. It also was decent about not swamping my UL channel to such a point I couldn't do everything else on the machine. Once uploaded, a full sync takes about 15 minutes if there are no changes, and 30 minutes to an hour depending on how much new stuff I have to add or delete on the cloud drive.

So this year I will be moving to a proper NAS with 4 disks for my local use, and syncing to Amazon Cloud Drive daily. Cost will be a little less this first year, and I will also have the remote backup that should give me a little more security as well as easier access when I need something remotely without opening up my home LAN to all sorts of things just to make it possible to share files.

Worth checking out if you have a substantial collection of files you can't just re-download from somewhere else.

Amazon Cloud Drive link.
Rclone link.

Buying or Selling a Connected Home - Some Issues to Consider

2015-11-21T15:42:00.000-06:00

Just finished setting up a Nest home with Nest Protect and the like. First issue that came up was how to let the SO be able to set the thermostat, check the cameras, etc. While the dropcam app used to allow you to SHARE an account, there is no such capability in the Nest app. Your only choice at this point is to give the other person your account credentials. Gee, can't see anything wrong with that, can you?

OK, so not the best start. But then I got to thinking about what happens in a couple years when I sell the house. Would take the cams with, but the thermostat and the fire alarms, not so much. After all, not the greatest likelihood that a buyer is going to bring their own - though obviously as these get to be more common that may not be such a big deal.

Look up the FAQs, and it appears you have to setup a second house in the app, move at least one of your devices to that house, and then delete the first house which should (!) free up any devices attached to that house as well. Of course if you are making a temporary move between selling and buying you are going to have to go through this all again when you get the next address.

And let's consider the buyer's POV. If I don't specify in the contract that some of the devices will stay behind, I could conceivably take all of them with me. Ever lived in a house with AC and Heating but no thermostat? Suddenly you could end up with several hundred dollars of move in expenses. Summer in Texas might make that even more expensive when you need overnight delivery.

Oh, and do I now have to pay the home inspector to make sure there aren't extra cameras left behind by the previous owner? Perhaps less of a concern in many areas, but imagine if you knew the next person buying your house was the sister of some starlet...

Don't get me wrong. I am obviously interested in appifying my house and appliances. It's just that most of these IOT items and systems are barely thinking about how to talk to one another, and so haven't really built an answer to the use case of moving after installation. That doesn't mean that YOU can't think and plan for it though.

Kido'z - Best of a horrible, horrible bunch

2015-08-11T09:44:00.001-05:00

You may have heard about damning with faint praise, well I suppose this is an example of this. Except for how much worse the alternatives are.

As I've discussed on this blog several times before, I am always on the lookout for tech aids for my middle daughter who is mentally and physically handicapped. We got a Nabi 2 not long after they came out, and while it was a pain to keep up, it was constructed in a way that it could tolerate being manhandled by my daughter and her aides, as well as generally keep a sane interface while minimizing the tablet being used by folks who were bored for other purposes.

Sadly, Nabi has not seen fit to update the model's specs, and their latest offerings are rehashed versions of the same. Worse, it uses a proprietary charger that is easy to break, and expensive to replace. Even worse than that, it also has a mini-USB port that looks to the untrained eye like it could be used to charge the device. Not surprisingly this has led to the tablet getting fried after one too many helpers tried to charge the tablet for her with their phone chargers.

Buying another Nabi was out, and the reviews of the Kindle Fire for Kids tablet left me with visions of horrible maintenance times and huge unexpected bills.

I had gotten a Win 8.1 tablet that I rarely use anymore, and there is a seller on Amazon that makes cases for the Samsung 8 inch tablet that fits most of these if you are ok with the camera not always being available. In addition to being available in a number of colors, it has a handle and a decent amount of padding.

The question then became how to make Windows 10 Kid Friendly? Microsoft has some options for setting up a Child account, but the interface is designed mainly to let you lock out certain programs or sites, not to make a truly touch-friendly, kid-intuitive menu. You might be able to do something fancy with Tablet mode, but I couldn't find anything that made that look sensible.

So then it was time to see what programs are out there. There are a couple Linux distributions out there that are supposed to be for kids, but in addition to trying to make them tablet friendly (which they aren't out of the box), they are not well maintained and frequently have issues with packages that are no longer in the mainstream. Edubuntu is probably the best known, and best supported of these, but it's main menus are text based and not particularly geared to a pre-reading audience.

Which meant a special browser for Windows geared toward kids. Several of these were created and released in the 2010 - 2011 timeframe, however all but two of them are no longer supported. That narrowed the choice to Zac Browser or Kido'z. One huge caveat on both of them is that they are dependent on their project site being up. This allows you to do some configuration remotely as a parent, but means that if the site is down, the browser shows just an empty shell.

Zac is still available, but only lightly maintained. Prominent messages on the website discuss a planned port to iPad and Android in 2012 as an example... The person behind the effort seems to mean well, but like many one man operations, that means it works, or it doesn't. And on Windows 10 it was wonky as all heck. As a one man operation it also seems to have more issues with keeping the main site up.

Ultimately, this led me to the least bad choice, Kido'z. The Kido'z browser works fine under Win 10, and can be configured (using usual Windows tricks) to start when the tablet is logged into. It is, however, a rather horrific piece of work to manage. You can setup any site you like through the parent portal online, where it claims to create a new snapshot to show on the menu. But while the link then shows on the child's display, the snapshot never does. So you have a number of links with text and only the same default image. You also can't configure the order that items display in. You are reduced to visiting pages and marking them as favorites so you can at least minimize the number of icons displayed by default. You can remove sites, but then they are completely removed. Oh, and the Windows version has issues with rendering that make all of the Nick Jr sites appear horrible.

I still ponied up the $60 for the lifetime subscription (which I suspect is the lifetime of the company not of your use) since it at least DOES let me setup and configure sites to be shown on the menu, and by asking for payment I have some reason to believe the site will be around long enough to get a couple years use out of it. Their support is active, if slow. However I had to tell them several times I was using the Windows version to get any decent answers from them (which should give you an idea of where their market is - Android).

I get that it appears to be hard to market a truly kid-oriented tablet given the many notable failures in this space. And for a lot of kids, mom and dad's tablet or phone are "good enough". But there is a decent need out there for more. I only hope something comes along in the next year that I can replace this "least bad" option with.

Adding and managing programs that start automatically in Windows 10

2015-08-11T08:57:00.002-05:00

Process discussed here shows how:
http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-add-or-remove-startup-apps-in-windows-10/

Just in case you (like me) need to know :-)

WIndows 10 Weather Apps Reviewed - One Clear Winner

2015-08-10T07:34:00.000-05:00

My laptop also serves as my alarm clock, and in Windows 8 and 8.1 it was simple enough to setup a split screen with my clock and alarm program on the left and the MSN Weather program on the right.

While I am sure there is some way to coax Windows 10 to run in full screen mode like that (I'm thinking I could force it into tablet mode, but I HATE tablet mode), I have had to go with two windows sized to fit side-by-side on the desktop. This isn't all that bad, but it did lead to me having to do more work with Windows 10 weather programs than I would have liked.

Initial idea was to go with the MSN Weather for Windows 10. They changed the look of this in a manner that gives you more data, although that detracts from enjoying the backgrounds. It appears that the initial release also would pick a default location, and then you were stuck with it. As the default location was often not YOUR location, there was a bit of a complaint section on the Store about this. FWIW, the default Alarms and Clocks had the same issue with it's World Clock option. So quickly loaded the update, and was able to get my home weather. Unfortunately, I was not able to find any option to set a refresh interval, and testing on a couple different machines indicated that it no longer seems to refresh itself unless you keep it in "Live Tile" mode, which is rather unusable for my situation.

I then quickly tried the AccuWeather offering. It has some great animated backgrounds, and some HORRIBLE ads that are rather in your face. It also does not appear to have any option to upgrade the ads away for any price, so that was a quick delete as well.

Finally I loaded the Weather Channel app. This one has nice backgrounds (though not animated), proper settings for locations, and updates at least hourly. It is not the ideal app (I'd like to be able to set more frequent updates, and have a little more control over the default screen), but it is far and away the best of the current bunch. Recommended if you like to keep an eye on the weather in Windows 10.

Gear VR - $200 of MEH

2015-08-08T08:32:00.000-05:00

The moment of clarity hit me yesterday evening when I realized I was having more fun solving the puzzle of trying to get my content to compile so I could put it on the Gear VR than I had gotten from anything ON the Gear VR.

Having spent some time with Google Cardboard, I expected that something made of higher quality materials and tuned to my particular phone would be just that much more awesome. Silly me.

The TLD;DR version is that there is no there, there. IOW, there isn't much content and there is actually less every day.

Slightly longer version is that neither Samsung nor Oculus is really targeting the Gear VR any longer. Many of the items that were advertised in the store have not been updated since the version that was released for the Note 4 many months ago. That means that a lot of content won't run at all, or is glitchy as all heck.

There are actually three Oculus storefronts as well as the Samsung storefront you have to look through to find content. And by find I mean scroll since there is no concept of a keyboard nor does there appear to be an option to hook up a Bluetooth keyboard as you can a Bluetooth speaker or gamepad. Of course given the relative lack of content it's not like you can't scroll through everything in a little less than an hour...

One of the Oculus storefronts is Oculus Theater - which is just short 2D films "projected" in a virtual theater. This would be much more useful if you could at least choose to watch YouTube or Netflix in there, but at the current time you can only watch a small number of selected films - several of which are just trailers anyway.

As far as games, the number one game is a VR Kart racing game for $5 that requires one of the aforementioned gamepads (around $20), and that has issues around actually filling the track with enough racers to play. No AI cars, so if you're the only one there at a time... hope you like looking at the lobby.

The number two game is a game of Solitaire where the cards are 2D, but suspended in front of you for play. There's $2 well spent, right?

You're probably getting the picture. I am sorely tempted to just send this back for a refund, but part of me refuses to believe that Samsung and Oculus have really given up. Conversations I've been having with other developers, however, suggests that most of them are waiting for a commercial option (there already is a hack out there) to let you play Google Cardboard content on the Gear VR. Which rather sadly reminds me of owning a Commodore Amiga when the PC was taking off...

If you're thinking of getting anything prior to the main Oculus release, I suggest thinking otherwise unless you just HAVE to spend $200 right now for some reason.

Windows 10 - The Patient Way

2015-08-07T09:12:00.001-05:00

Finally got Windows 10 on my tablet and my laptop overnight. Turns out they both may have been ready for some time - Microsoft doesn't send you an email to say it is ready, and even on the devices you have to click the little icon that normally tells you it has been reserved to see that it actually is finally ready to be installed. Perhaps they could have made it pulse, or colored it, or something to let you know?

Upgrade on the laptop was uneventful. A little disappointed in the redesign of the weather app as I liked the big, changing images that reflected the weather. But I'll live.

On the tablet, however, things were uneventful for the upgrade itself, but the Tablet mode of Windows 10 ends up being the worst of Windows 8 merged with the worst of Windows 7. Essentially the full screen of metro apps is replaced by the start menu being open at all times showing just some of the metro apps, and then whatever app you choose goes full screen. And, of course, the option to turn off Tablet mode is rather hidden. Makes me wish I had put the Technical Preview on that as well so I could have given them early feedback that they were about to make a mess of things. Oh well...

Long story short, you need to keep checking to see if the software is ready, but once you do the process is relatively painless. Since it doesn't tell you you're ready until it has already downloaded it, the time isn't too long. Except for the part where it reconfigures apps and tells you "This won't take long". Someone at Microsoft either has a cruel streak or a warped sense of humor.

On to the next task on my list!

Maybe I don't need Google Fiber after all?

2015-08-06T14:49:00.001-05:00

I am the last person I ever would have thought would be writing this article, but the experience over the last 24 hours has me wondering if I actually need Google Fiber?

Given that only two of my computers can take the full 200 Mbps that Time Warner provides, and that I do more uploading than downloading, I am not sure that $80/month for 200 Mbps isn't better than $100/month for 1 Gig. I mean, if I can't use a higher speed, why pay even a little more for it? There is the question of support, but I wonder if Google support for Fiber will be any better than their support for GMail or other products - where you post to a forum and hope someone notices. I'm not saying I have suddenly discovered a love for Time Warner - far from it. But I wonder if switching at this point isn't a bit more like jumping out of a frying pan and into a fire?

Anyone who has Google Fiber that would be willing to comment?

P.S. The irony that as I went to post this, Time Warner had a brief outage (modem was rock solid throughout though) is not lost on me :-)

Windows 10 and nVidia - What's wrong with this picture?

2015-08-06T14:39:00.001-05:00

So a couple days ago I mentioned how I had found a way to get my TV to work with my PC connected via HDMI so it wouldn't overscan. The problem is, as I've found out over the last couple of days, that after a few hours the picture "jitters", and then goes back into Overscan mode. Which since I had adjusted the driver not to compensate, makes some menus and the task bar difficult to access.

I had put it down to being more likely a TV issue than an nVidia driver issue since telling the driver to resize the desktop has been, and continues to be, rock solid. Still, it's odd that if it were the TV that I haven't seen any signs of it switching modes in any other form.

WIthin the past 24 hours, my other desktop, which has an nVidia GTX970 has had the driver crash twice. I can tell because of the entry in the system logs, and the nVidia controlled HDMI sound is disabled and some of the text on the screen is garbled.

Which makes me suspect that the driver may not be all that stable in general. On the plus side, if it IS the driver, then I don't have to buy a new TV. In the meantime, however, having to deal with the daily (and sometimes multiple a day) restarts is getting old fast. Not so much as to convince me to switch to AMD and run into the issues I've had there, but it does make me think another look at the high end Intel graphics might be worth doing.

Of course, if you have any insights on this, I'd love to hear about them!

Fix for TWC - Partly Them, Partly Me using 802.11ac "right"

2015-08-06T07:09:00.002-05:00

Worked with some of the folks at TWC after my last posting, and some "fun" was had. As I suspected, part of the problem was their system had an issue with the way it had registered the new modem. Once that was fixed, the treacert into their system started looking more normal. But I still wasn't seeing as much improvement as we both expected. I agreed that I would setup a time for a tech to come out, and then proceeded to start looking at everything else on my end first to avoid having to actually kill a day waiting around for one.

Of course, part of me still felt that part of the issue was on their end. Take a look at one of the later tracerts I ran to Google's DNS at 8.8.8.8 - first two hops removed to avoid too much info about "my" setup:

3 28 ms 21 ms 21 ms tge7-4.snaxtxfp01h.texas.rr.com [24.28.133.73]

4 48 ms 11 ms 17 ms be24.snaptx1901r.texas.rr.com [24.175.33.96]

5 52 ms 17 ms 14 ms agg22.snavtxuu02r.texas.rr.com [24.175.32.160]

6 119 ms 23 ms 25 ms agg23.hstqtxl301r.texas.rr.com [24.175.32.156]

7 66 ms 22 ms 14 ms bu-ether16.hstqtx0209w-bcr00.tbone.rr.com [66.10

9.6.108]

8 31 ms 30 ms 30 ms 66.109.3.206

9 30 ms 31 ms 27 ms 0.ae5.pr0.atl20.tbone.rr.com [107.14.19.99]

I would have expected 3, or maybe 4 hops internal. Seven seems more that a bit excessive to me.

In any event, spent some time reading back through the documentation on my router. I had actually run a firmware update before changing the modem just in case, but wanted to make sure I hadn't implemented a QOS switch or something that might be messing with my results.

All looked ok there. I thought about moving to my upstairs computers, but the system that is plugged directly into the router via ethernet is older (though still a core i7 with a few gigs of RAM), and the other system is connected via Powerline which would not be able to go faster than about 100 Mb/s regardless.

That got me to wondering if I had misunderstood what I had read when I first bought my 802.11ac setup, and I went back through the documentation on that standard. No, as I read it, I should be more than capable of those speeds since with the banding it could theoretically do around 860 Mb/s.Oh, but what's this? All of the beamforming and good stuff is ONLY on the 5ghz side. IOW, while 802.11ac routers almost always have both 2.4ghz support and 5ghz support (for legacy devices, etc), the 802.11ac goodness is ONLY on the 5ghz side.

Sure enough, the downstairs computer was defaulting to the 2.4ghz side. Once I forced it to only go on the 5ghz side... well, see for yourself. First is the before (2.4ghz):

As you can see, a bit better, particularly on the download and ping sides. Now let me switch to the 5ghz side:

Now THAT is what I'd expect from a service billing itself as Ultimate 200. Of course, that fixes things for the downstairs and the older upstairs computer. But what about my Powerline one? For that one, I took the other 802.11ac adapter I had been holding onto for the last year, and plugged it in. Connecting to the 5ghz side gave me readings that were close to the "before" shown above (about 90-95 Mb/s) - but that was still almost twice as fast as it had on the Powerline setup. However, as I had found previously, testing of moving files around the home network showed a dramatic fall off by using the WiFi adapter over the Powerline adapter. So even with slower internet speeds, I won't be switching up there. Since the upload speeds are about the same, I can still do my heavy lifting video work on that one, but I definitely wouldn't want to do a lot of downloads from there.

So, if YOU are using 802.11ac, you might want to make sure you're actually using the AC portion of it!

Oh the joys of a new phone number - Calls from the creditors of the old number

2015-08-05T17:08:00.000-05:00

Given that so far I have only given my new Verizon number to my wife and one of our children, I was a little surprised this afternoon to have several calls from places that according to their lookup data are collection agencies. A reverse number lookup for the new number shows an address in a rather poor part of town (thought about giving the Street View link, but figured that might be messing up someone else's privacy), and I wonder if this was once their number - or if they had been using this number as "their number" for sometime to avoid just such calls.

The reason I suspect the latter is that this number was actually assigned to my MiFi previously. Wouldn't have gotten any phone calls as a data device, and since I had to pay "per text", I had turned those off as well. So if it really WAS someone's number previously, that would have been over two years ago.

Now, the reverse number lookups indicate that the three places that have all called so far are known for being a bit... "unsavory". So I guess it's not impossible they may have been chasing this for that long. But it all seems a little odd to me.

At the moment, it is easy enough to let them roll to voicemail. None of them have left a message, and I can hope that hearing my name might convince them to try other means that don't involve me. But I have a sneaking suspicion that might take a while.

Of course if you have similar stories, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

It's official, TWC is at it again

2015-08-05T14:12:00.001-05:00

SO, the good news is that I haven't seen my internet connection go down once today, and I am no longer paying a monthly rental for my cable modem.

The bad? Check out the results of my Speedtest run (and this was the fastest one so far today) on my advertised 200MB/s service:

Look like I'm getting what I'm paying for to you? At least the upload speed is pretty close to what I'm paying for. Let me add that I made sure there was NOTHING else running on the line at the time. I know I shouldn't be surprised, and with Google Fiber having formally announced they are coming to San Antonio, I should only have to put up with this for another year or so. Still...

NoSleepHD is Windows 10 Compatible - and sadly still necessary

2015-08-05T12:33:00.001-05:00

Again, one of the big things I'm trying to do (with varying levels of success) over my vacation is fix various tech issues I've just been living with or working around for the last few months.

One of the more aggravating, at a low burn level, is that the external USB enclosure I use for my drives downstairs has a tendency to go to sleep even though I have turned off every power setting I can find that is supposed to do that.

My suspicion, particularly since the enclosure on the upstairs computer with the same drives by the same manufacturer doesn't do this, is that there is some setting on my PCI or the USB chip itself.

Fortunately, it turns out that a tool first (and last) released in 2009 still works. SO if you are facing the same aggravation, you will want to DL a copy of NoSleepHD for yourself.

Prepping for the Gear VR

2015-08-05T07:42:00.000-05:00

Since the S6 is now working fine, I can turn my attention to the Gear VR coming tomorrow. Of course one of the first questions was how to develop my own apps for it. There are a number of tutorials out there for building using the Unity engine, and a couple for using the Unreal engine. However, Unity still has a much more robust Asset Store (as compared to the Unreal Marketplace), which has me leaning that way. Also, Unity can run on all my machines, including my Yoga laptop. Unreal will only run on two of my three desktops, and laughs at my laptop.

I am planning to get a beefier laptop next year, but want to get at least a couple things done before then. So...

Of course there is also the question of using Cardboard, and possibly developing for it as well. Using an app called "Package Disabler" is supposed to allow you to suspend the Oculus service so you can do so with the Gear VR setup. Also found a note that if you enable the "Developer" version of Oculus before disabling the service, that is supposed to make Cardboard apps run smoother in the Gear VR. Should be interesting all around.

Tomorrow is also when I plan to hit the other part of the Mission Reach portion of the San Antonio Riverwalk, so should be a good day overall :-)

The Rest of the Story for Verizon, and my Adventure with Time Warner

2015-08-04T18:22:00.000-05:00

So while I waited to hear back on my ticket at Verizon, my new cable modem arrived. Instructions were a small sheet showing where to plug it in, and then a listing of a website for more info. Which made troubleshooting difficult since if you can't get to the internet to DL the manual on how to troubleshoot issues with getting on the internet...

First issue turned out to be Chrome pulling a Nanny on me. It was blocking me from redirecting to the site I needed to go to in order to activate the modem due to what it considered an invalid certificate. While I'm sure TWC takes a little of the blame for this, given the website was also mentioned on the Modem sheet I suspect it's an industry standard one, and so whoever runs it at Motorola or wherever should be sharing the blame.

So pulled up Microsoft Edge (I do hope a new name is coming), and tried again with more success. Until I got to the identification page. My two choices were my Zip and Phone Number, or my Zip and Account Number. The Phone Number on that account is the one from when I first moved to Texas in 2002, and multiple attempts to get it changed have failed. I couldn't remember what the old number was, so time for the account number - which I would normally look up by logging into TW (nope) or Evernote (nope). Run to the laptop, login using my MiFi (which Verizon had not yet turned off), get the account number, start to compose an email on my old Note so I can type it, and then run back into the other room to type it in.

Activated fine, but then when I went to the account page to confirm, it still was showing the old modem. Didn't think much until I tried to upgrade to the faster plan since I now had a modem that could handle it, and the site refused because my model was incompatible.

Contacted their support, and the lady I chatted with (who seemed to be overcoming a language barrier) eventually got across that the data appeared in her system, but would not be updated for 24 hours (hello batch job). Since I have to take the old modem back tomorrow, I may see what my options are then.

Downstairs, and decided to go chat on the Verizon line since I still hadn't heard back from anyone. Got hold of someone who actually seemed to know what he was doing, but gather that part of it was that he had to essentially recreate the account with a much smaller data plan to get the old MiFi plan out of the system, and then bump it up to the desired level. Phone is now working and it's time to figure out what all I can/need to do with the Galaxy S6 that I couldn't with the Note 3. First up will probably be the Gear VR device :-)

Today's Adventure in Tech - Trying to get the phone I bought from Verizon to activate on Verizon

2015-08-04T14:26:00.000-05:00

A few months ago I had considered doing the same upgrade I just did yesterday, but at the time it said it couldn't do it online, and I didn't want to spend my time online in hold "heck".

So today I got the new device, followed the instructions to call in first, went through the prompts, clicked "1" to activate now... and then my fun began.

First was level 1 support. Nice lady, pleasant to talk to, couldn't see anything wrong. We tried turning it on and off a couple times, and she couldn't seem to make it accept the SIM - even though it was in the phone they sold me and the SIM was preinstalled. Was amused when she asked if it was a device certified to run on Verizon. I would hope that they didn't sell ones that weren't, and we both got a chuckle out of that.

About 10 minutes and she decided to transfer me to level 2 support. And of course the call dropped. A couple minutes later I get a phone call, and it's level 2 support. Start by running through the process again... "yup, no reason that shouldn't work". While I agree, that doesn't really solve the situation. So they have to confirm I accepted the terms and conditions, I said I accepted a few pages of them, and their review of the order agreed, and we were back to "I wonder why that doesn't work." Needless to say, not much I could add to that.

This was followed by several minutes of my getting to listen to her work through her process. Fortunately I'm on vacation this week, so the half hour I figured this was going to take wasn't as horrible as it would have been then, but you can sort of see why I was reluctant to do this.

End result is that they are getting me a help ticket and a "date they expect resolution". Geez, I kind of thought that if I paid for something I should get it when I paid for it, Guess that was expecting too much, huh? Needless to say, I am giving consideration to whether I should just ship the device back and go with my Project Fi invite even if I know the coverage sucks in some of the places I am looking to visit over the next year.

Looking forward to finding out more about "Henry"

2015-08-03T17:03:00.000-05:00

One of the things I am looking to get as a first "accessory" for the Galaxy S6 is their VR headset. In part because I really want to check out a short called "Henry". Interview and a bit of a trailer here:

If there is any tech that really gets my juices flowing for the next couple of years it's thinking about the myriad ways that VR and AR can make us better able to understand the world around us.

Calm Before the Storm - Reading the Manual makes Quick Work of a Problem

2015-08-03T10:17:00.001-05:00

I am off this week and next for vacation, but due to the wildfires and some issues with pet care I will mainly be doing short trips near home. Will still probably be hitting Google Photos hot and heavy though :-)

Today's main task was figuring out an issue I have been dealing with ever since the Win 10 TP started. The PC I had that on is downstairs and connected to a Samsung 46 inch LCD TV. Nice color and everything, but for some reason the setup kept resulting in the PC being overscanned a bit. This meant that I had to keep using the nVidia driver option to resize the screen, and of course that would get reset with each build.

Now, I KNEW there had to be an option to tell the Samsung not to overscan, but for the life of me I couldn't find it in the OSD for the TV. I suspect I still have the paper manual from 2011 when I bought it somewhere, but decided to look online. Not surprisingly, Samsung has minimal online documentation for this. SO had to go to one of the Manual Bundle sites and put up with a couple annoying ads to download the "free" PDF version.

Looking through it, I fairly quickly found that:

1) Advanced Setup is only available in certain picture modes, and not the one I use by default
2) This particular Samsung TV expects you to connect a PC to HDMI 1 and ONLY HDMI 1 if you want it to be at all smart about how it handles it
3) There's a button on the remote control called P-Size that (surprise, surprise) has a setting to prevent just this problem if your PC is connected to HDMI 1

There you have it. Probably a few hours of workarounds I could have avoided by just taking the time to find the manual in the first place. Hopefully I have learned my lesson well enough that my new tech arriving tomorrow will not get me so excited I forget it quickly. In addition to the new Cable Modem (we'll see if the online activation is as simple as TWC implies) I am getting a Galaxy S6 to replace my Note 3. Had planned to go with the Note 5, but since it ALSO is losing the replaceable battery and the SD slot, there really isn't enough there to justify the additional cost.

As for myself, I'd be happy to make the NYT Top Ten List with a book I HAVE published

2015-08-02T17:38:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of one of my fellow authors' blogs (though obviously needing someone with design sensibility for his website) the story of how the author of "A Christmas Story" managed to get a book on the NYT Top Ten list that hadn't even been written yet.

Sadly, while I did do time on the radio myself, it was not in a market anywhere close to large enough to pull off this kind of caper :-)

You just know this will end well - A pic of the 2022 Grand Slalom course taken this past January

2015-08-02T17:22:00.001-05:00

Notice anything in particular.... um.... missing from a skiing course?

Picture and article about 2022 Winter Olympics Course

And I am sure the environmental impact of making all the snow they are going to have to make won't make staying near by even more unbearable than usual...