Don’t you love it when your “Sorry, you sent your complaint to the wrong company” email bounces because the complainer left a bogus address?
Category: Annoyances
Power Down
Subject: An old G4 PowerBook laptop which locks up after several hours of use.
Goals:
- Test the memory so that, if it’s good, we can resell it instead of recycling it.
- Wipe the hard disk so that we can recycle the computer.
Tools:
- Tech Tool Pro 4 disc
- Tech Tool Pro 5 disc
- Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard install disc
- Mac OS X 10.3 install disc (came with laptop)
You’d think this would be easy… Continue reading
Hear me!
A few minutes ago I was trying to fix sound on my Linux box. Nothing would play, until Katie heard it beep to notify me of a new Twitter message. I closed Twhirl and suddenly my music player worked. The song lined up? Vertical Horizon’s “All is Said and Done.” The first line of the song? “I need you to hear me.” That gave us both a good laugh.
I thought a major point of PulseAudio was to let applications share the sound card cleanly. *grumble* Sound worked fine before Fedora switched. I can’t even blame it on a bleeding-edge distribution, since from what I hear, Ubuntu has similar problems.
At least now I know (sort of) why it stopped again after applying the Complete guide to fix PulseAudio and video/audio VLC Media Player issues.
Bad Polls
Facebook polls need a “This is BS” option. Too many are based on false premises or are of the “Threat or Menace?” variety. 🙄
To Do? Too Late!
I thought of several things to add to my to-do list on my way to work this morning. I just opened my list & can’t remember any of them. 🙁
Don’t Plug the Automatic Sink!
The restrooms in the office building where I work have sinks with automatic faucets, triggered by some sort of sensor, probably motion detectors. I walked in this afternoon and noticed one sink was completely full, with a skin of soap bubbles on top. From past experience, I had my suspicions about what had happened, so I tried to look through a clear spot to the base of the sink.
Sure enough, someone had plugged the sink with a paper towel, then walked away.
That’s inconsiderate enough in any public restroom. But when the sink is automatic, there’s another problem: Once the water reaches high enough, it trips the sensor, and it can get into a feedback loop. As near as I can tell, it filled up the sink until it hit the overflow drain, and eventually the sensor stopped registering movement and shut off.
I rolled up my sleeve, reached in there, and pulled the soggy paper towel out. It started draining, and I started washing my hands in another sink. As I watched, the movement of the water triggered the faucet, and it started running, though fortunately the drain was faster. By the time I was finished, it was clear. Problem solved, though it had already wasted a whole sinkful of water (or more — I have no idea who long it was running before it shut off).
So please, if you must plug a restroom sink with a paper towel, especially if it’s automatic, take two seconds to remove the paper towel before you leave.
G1: No Android 2 for You!
Okay, I get it. By buying the first device of its kind (i.e. an Android-powered smartphone), I’m an early adopter. In a sense I was helping out in a massive public beta as Google, mobile phone carriers, and handset manufacturers worked out the kinks in the design and realized things like, “Oh, we really do need more memory than that, don’t we?”
But it’s still annoying to read the early reports that Android 2.0 “Eclair” won’t fit on the G1.
We have done this dance before, when rumors surfaced that the G1 wouldn’t be able to handle Android 1.6 “Donut.” Fortunately, engineers managed to squeeze it into the space available, and T-Mobile sent out Donut as an OTA (over the air) update to MyTouch and G1 devices alike. But I’ve had time to think about the issue, and my thoughts basically come down to this:
- New software eventually reaches a point when it can no longer support old hardware. You can’t run Snow Leopard on a G4 or Windows 7 on a Pentium II.
- When the hardware is usually tied to a fixed-term service contract (in this case, 2 years), the provider really ought to fully support it for the length of that contract. The G1 launched 1 year ago with (in most cases) a 2-year contract.
- Even if this is the last major update, my phone is still better now than it was when I bought it.
It will be very nice if history repeats itself, and Google and/or T-Mobile finds a way to cram Eclair onto the G1. Even if it means dropping the convenience of OTA updates and instead requiring you to download it to a PC and update over a USB cable. More likely, though, they’ll freeze the G1 on Android 1.6 except for bugfix and security updates, and it’ll be up to unofficial distributions like cyanogen to bring a newer OS to the older phone.
Because I don’t really want to mess with rooting my phone and installing a third-party distribution, if this is the end of the line for the G1, well…Android 2 has some really nice features that I’d really like to be able to use, but nothing that screams “must have!” The only real worry I have at this point is that app developers might start requiring newer versions of Android.
The other option: buy a newer phone. I’ll probably want to do that anyway in a year or so, but I’m not there yet. It still feels like I just got this one.
Update (February 26): It turns out the G1 will get Android 2.1 after all, but will probably require wiping the phone. That makes sense, because it would allow developers to reassign some of the space set aside for over-the-air updates and use it for a larger system instead — and maybe more space for apps.