Weird Issues After Upgrading to Debian Bullseye

Edited to add: "hey, it's been sooo long since I posted, how weird is that, amiright?" I fucking hate computers. But god bless search engines, because I'd never be able to get shit done on my home machine without them. I can't remember if I've posted about my first foray into running Linux at home back in 1998 or 1999, but even without Laurie saying she hated it because she had no idea how to use anything on the desktop, it was a massive pain in the ass for ME. 

It's still a pain in the ass sometimes, but now I have a magical electronic hive mind to use as reference instead of massive, poorly written book authored by a dude who smelled like musk and Cheetos cheese. 

Anyway, I'm adding MY two cents to the magical electronic hive mind of knowledge. I can promise you I only smell of Tide, sandalwood & pomegranate (the fancy way of saying Axe Anarchy deodorant), and Dr. Bronner's almond soap. 

I'm also going to crank this out as quickly as I can while it's still fresh in my memory, so ignore any grammatical gibber jabber and technical wonkity woohahs (e.g. jargon) that I may flesh out at a later date. 

So...I decide I'm finally going to fix my dual boot issue on my home machine. I can't use GRUB to get into the Win10 NVMe disk ("Invalid Signature") I added last year so that I could play a Cyberpunk 2028 and Witcher 3 (both of which I've played literally twice, haha...what a waste of $$.) Anyways, I've been putting off fixing what I though was wrong. I finally took a look yesterday and figured "hey, if I'm mucking around in this shit, I might as well finally update from Buster to Bullseye.)

I do a bunch of stuff, mostly following the instructions from Debian's site, and things are looking preeeetttttty okish. I start mucking around with what I think I need to do to fix GRUB ("hmm, well UEFI IS already setup for Win. Secure boot isn't enabled. OOOHHH, ok. Well, fuck.") and realize that the reason GRUB is that my fucking Linux partition is setup as MBR and not GPT because even though it's running on a pretty modern and fancy SSD, 

I wasn't paying attention when I upgraded from my 10ish year old hard drive and basically just continued to use a partition scheme that's almost old enough to have it's own Judd Apatow movie (This is 40...come on.) OK. I'll stick with switching disks at boot time in BIOS for now. But hey, I'm upgraded! Everything is great! 

Ron Howard Voice: "Everything was not great."

I opened Spotify this morning to get some motivational tunes going and it's just a black screen. Well shit. Do some hive mind searching with no luck--if you think it's tough troubleshooting general Linux issues (hello, 11 year old forum posts!) try doing it for a specific application, even one as widely used as Spotify. SURE, I could use my phone's Spotify client to stream to my office speaker, but then it eats up my battery. Anywho, the Linux forum on Spotify's site is sometimes useful, but not today. I try opening it via command line to see what's up and this is what I get: libva error: vaGetDriverNameByIndex() failed with unknown libva error, driver_name = (null) Very helpful! I try uninstalling/reinstalling Spotify and it's the same shit. 

I start looking for troubleshooting libva error shit. Well, i must be missing the libva packages from the upgrade. Yes sir--let's apt-get that shit and, well it's installed and the lasted version. OK, I should use vainfo to check versions? Well, I dont' fucking have that anymore. Ok, let's install. Hmm, ok--that looks like what I should see. Check chrome://gpu (edge for me, homie) to see what's up? Done. Looks fucking fine. Is xorg.conf right? Uh, yes. lspci | grep VGA? YES IT'S THE RIGHT MOTHER FUCKING DRIVER. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggggggggggggggggggGG. 

Ok, let's try some basic Spotify troubleshooting. Well, yes--aplay is recognizing my sound cards. And wow, starting it on command line with a log dump was SOOOOO helpful. I know have a single line text file that says "libva error: vaGetDriverNameByIndex() failed with unknown libva error, driver_name = (null)" 

That's some very NEW and super helpful information. Ok, let's try playing the test audio file...but first, looks like i need to raise my speaker volume. 

Hmm, why am I not getting that annoying gnome bubble pop. 

Hmm. Why isn't there a fucking output device in Gnome Settings. 

 *Sigh* More googling.

And I come across a Reddit post of something not entirely dissimilar from my audio issue that was resolved with a reboot, but one of the comments talked about grep'ing dmesg for firmware shit. So let's try that: sudo dmesg | grep firmware and hmm..."Unable to load firmware rtl_nic/rtl8168h-2" 

I've been seeing that shit since last year after a kernal update and I've been ignoring it because my NIC card has been working fine. But ok, let's try to fix that.  Back to the keyboard and well, hello 11 year old AskUbuntu post, haha. 

It wasn't exaaaaacccttttlly the complete answer, but close enough for me to run sudo apt-get install firmware-realtek and then sudo apt-get install firmware-realtek and then reboot and voila..EVERYTHING FUCKING WORKED AGAIN. 

Fucking audio drivers for both speakers and HDMI, missing web cam, missing mic, and of course, missing video driver that caused Spotify to not load. 

I fucking hate computers.

Keywords: Debian, Bullseye, Spotify, Linux, libva, Spotify black screen after upgrade, computers are the debbil.

Sourdough Rye Bread

"All sorrows are less with bread. ”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

So it looks like the last 18 months or so of posts have only been my Instagram crossposts.  I think that all my real posts are prefaced by "hey, it's been sooo long since I posted, how weird is that, amiright?"  Well, get used to it!  You will get what you get and be happy with it, god damn it!  How dare you presume to tell me how to run my blog.  I was blogging when you were shitting in your diddies, Mr. or Ms. or Mx. Zoomer.  Back in my day, you posted on a free webpage from Geocities, or Open Diary, or Xanga, or (pour one out, homies) MSN Spaces.  And it was a JOURNAL, not this fancy schmancy weblog shit you youngins call it. (*sorry, that made me laugh since there's no fucking way anyone under 40 is actually using a blog.  Tumblr? Sure.  But an actual blog, nah.)  Any of y'all still have your blogs up?  I think John's the only one still in my RSS feed and he hasn't posted in almost a year.  Let's get a blog roll going in my comments, bitches.

So Val asked me for a recipe on my Instagram post, so here it is.  This turned out really good, but it could have been better.  Usually my sourdough bakes are a two+ day affair, but I needed this bread done the same day to make Reubens with homemade corned beef.  They were fucking amazing, but not really a real Reuben since I didn't have swiss (I used Barely Buzzed cheddar)and my Russian dressing was more like a Koryo-Saram dressing since I was using kimchi mayo I had leftover from Kenji's Kimchi brined KFC (Korean Fried Chicken) sandwiches as the base.  That's a sandwich recipe you need to make too, btw.  OMFG.

So if you want to make this taste better, you can reduce or eliminate the extra yeast and just use your starter.  But if you do that, you'll need to bulk ferment for a much longer time and do an overnight ferment once you've shaped your loaves.

I had pulled my starter (it's 100% hydration, e.g. 1 part water to 1 part flour) out of the fridge the night before and topped it off with 200 grams of filtered water and 200 grams of bread flour, since I wanted about 240 grams of starter to serve as the levain and I needed some left to throw back in the fridge and some to make a batch of sourdough buttermilk pancakes the next day.

Look at those bubbles

I was shooting for a 75% hydration level, but I know I miscalculated the amount of water.  I still don't know what I landed at, but we'll figure that out here in a sec once I start writing out the recipe.  Whatever it was, it was great for this purpose and was super easy to handle and shape and even better, didn't stick to my fucking banneton.   JFC, I screwed up last week and put the wrong water in a recipe and it was like a thicc ass batter.  That shit stuck to EVERYTHING and I had to hand wash the linen cover to my bannetons.  Pro tip--after you measure your water, get rid of the container that doesn't have your measured water.

I'm going to add approximate times, but your mileage will definitely vary.  That, I think, is one of the most important lessons I've learned from baking bread--you have to be flexible.  Bread will rise when it rises.  Although you can speed it up by using commercial yeast like I did this time, haha.

Ingredients:

240 grams 100% Hydration, Mature Starter
772 grams King Arthur Bread Flour (KA is my preferred since it's probably the best I can get in the area)
108 grams Spelt Flour
108 grams Rye Flour (both Spelt & Rye are Bob's Red Mill, I think)
10 grams fast rise yeast (eliminate if you want to do a slow proof/ferment)
20 grams caraway seeds
22 grams of fine sea salt
2 Tbsp molasses
650 ml filtered water (or grams)  Did you know they're the same for water?  The metric system is awesome.  

So, since I used 650 ml of water (and had 120 in the starter) it looks like I came in at 69 (nice) percent hydration.

I use water filtered through my fridge since my city likes to heavily chlorinate the water.  I was going to say if you don't have a filter, you can leave it out overnight to let the chlorine dissipate, but apparently that doesn't work anymore now that water treatment is done with chloramine.  If you don't have a fridge filter, go buy a Brita or something.  I saw a generic version at the Walmart last weekend for $9.99.

Like I said, I fed my starter the night before and just left it out on the counter.  The temp on my counter is usually in the low 70's, so it's a good spot for a nice, long fermentation.  When I'm doing a regular sourdough bake, I usually just do an overnight bulk fermentation on the counter and things turn out great.


11:45 a.m. Autolyse the flour and 550 grams of the water.  This just means mixing up your flour and water and letting it sit.  I usually go for about an hour.  The link above gets into the science and shit, but basically it allows the enzymes in the flour to break shit down a bit and allows your flour to get fully hydrated.  

My water temp was about 110 degrees and that was a little too hot.  According to the experts, you should be shooting for a dough temp of 78 degrees, but again, I was shooting for a short and fast proof, so it wasn't a big deal.  My dough temp was 92.2 degrees after adding the water, so I really should've had my water 15 degrees lower.

Oh, I should note that unless I'm making rolls or something else that needs (kneads, heigh-oh) a long knead time, I do all this shit by hand.  Since this bulk ferments for quite a while, even with the acceleration of the instant yeast, you don't need to use a mixer or do any intense kneading.  Time and the "stretch and fold" technique will get your gluten developed nicely.  Be sure you are really getting everything mixed up well.  In the bread I fucked up last week, I was using a spatula to mix (I was making a double batch, so there was a shit ton of dough) and I didn't do a good job.  I had lumps of dry flour and it was just a total shit show.  Still tasted good, but man, what an embarrassment.

There are several other methods of kneading your dough--slap and fold; coil folding, using your mixer, etc.  Whatever works for you is what works for you.  You do you, boo.

12:45ish p.m. You should see a difference in your dough now.  It should look more relaxed and less shaggy.  I failed to take a pic prior to adding the rest of the ingredients in there.  This is the point where you'll add the rest of your stuff.  Usually it's just your levain and salt and remaining water.  But I had some extra shizz for this one, so I heated the remaining 100 grams of water a bit and dissolved the 2 Tbsp of molasses in there and then used that liquid to do a quick proof on the instant yeast.  

I sprinkled the salt over the autolysed dough, poured the levain and caraway seeds over the top and poked the entire surface many, many times.  I then added the molasses/yeast mixture and pinched/poked/flipped/kneaded the whole shebang until I was confident everything was evenly distributed in the dough.

It's like a giant stress ball.  But it sucks if you have arthritis in your thumb.  Every squeeze is a bit of agony, but you must endure and sacrifice to make delicious food.

Now you just let it sit and proof for a while.  How long depends on the dough temp, the ambient air temp, the quality of your yeasties, etc.  Since I had my oven on 300 and was cooking a corned beef, I sat my bucket next to the stove, where the ambient air temp was about 85, so that I would have a faster rise.  I've taken to using a post-it note to mark where my dough level is at the start, so that it's easier for me to tell when it's doubled in size.

 

1:30 p.m. So the next pic really isn't helpful, but that's what it looked like after I did my first stretch and fold (see gif below my pic for how that works--you basically stretch the dough from top to bottom, turn, top to bottom, turn, until all four cardinal directions have been hit.)

Gif Shamefully Stolen From Hint of Vanilla but I'm not a complete monster, so I didn't hotlink the image and instead have moved it to my own host instead.

I usually do four sets of stretch and folds.  The first one about 30 minutes into bulk fermentation.  And then every 45-60 minutes after.  After the fourth, just leave it alone to rise.  The first couple of months I got back into baking, I was fixated on watching the time.  "Hey, this recipe said I should bulk ferment for 6 hours, so now it's time to move on."  I've learned that your dough doesn't give a fuck about your time, homie.  Dough is going to do whatever the fuck it wants.  So instead of focusing on time, you want to look at how the dough is behaving.  Look for it to double (or more, depending on what you're doing) in size. When you poke it (gently, you fucking monster!) it should slowly pop back out.  By the time I was ready to shape, the dough was up to about the 4 QT mark on my bucket.

Now is the time to shape your dough and get a nice "skin" formed on your dough.  You're looking for the tight cheek skin of a 60 year old millionaire.  In my case, I normally make boules, since that's the type of banneton I have.  I want to start making some batards, but I need some other baskets for that.  You'll notice a lot of these links go back to The Perfect Loaf and that's because Maurizio is the fucking man.

Check out my giant, smooth boules.  You want to touch them, don't you?

After you shape the loaves, let them sit for like 10 or 15 minutes to relax the gluten.  Then tighten your balls of dough back up using your hands and/or a bench scraper and flip them upside down into your prepared bannetons.

At this point, if it were a normal sourdough, I'd throw them into the fridge for an overnight+ of fermentation.  That's where you get the wang dang sweet poon-tang of sourdough flavor.  But since I supercharged this mofo with instant yeast, I just need to do a secondary proof in the banneton.  

If I'm doing an overnight fermentation, I put the basket in a big poofy plastic turkey cooking bag (I reuse them because they're not cheap) but since today's bake was going to be fast and furious, I just covered the bannetons with damp paper towels.  Which I guess is pretty luxurious during this fucking Covid-19 induced paper goods shortage of 2020.  Man, what dickhead science lab fired up the particle accelerator and put us into THIS fucked up timeline?  Someone get me a DeLorean so I can get the fuck into the timeline where we have a normal, functioning government and I'm not locked in The Overlook hotel.

 

While I was playing around with my dough balls, I had an oven preheating for about an hour at 500 degrees and in that oven was an enameled dutch oven.  If you are swaggy enough to have an oven with a steam injector, 1) go fuck yourself, but 2) you can just bake your loaves on a baking stone.  Us poor folk (not really--I'm doing quite well, thank you) have to make due with our low end gourmet oven in our custom built kitchen and an enameled crock to get some steam powered oven spring.

Carefully pull your dutch oven out of the oven (that sounds weird and I've said "oven" quite a lot over the last few paragraphs.  Oven. Of. Ven.  Did I get pulled into Gilead?  Where's my red robe and white cowl?) and take off the lid.  I throw a piece of parchment over the banneton and flip it over, hoping that the loaf stays in place on the parchment.  Do your scoring (quick and decisive!) and carefully place the dough into the dutch oven.  Put the lid on and then put it in the oven.  Drop the temp to 475 and bake for 20 minutes.

Pre-flip dough and ghetto lame made from coffee stirrer and safety razor.  It legit works better than the one paid $3 for.

After 20 minutes, remove the lid and continue baking for anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes.

#humblebragthatlecreuset

If you notice, my bottom is a bit darker than I like.  I had my bottom rack too far down--I forgot to move it up a couple of notches prior to firing shit up. 

This is a fairly mild rye bread.  Just enough rye flavor that you know what it is, without punching you in the face.  It was great for my quasi-Reuben and good when I ate it toasted, with butter and orange marmalade.

Converting Picasa XMP Face Tags to Usable Exif Metadata Tags

Is this the future?

2022 already?

I guess I finally broke the delayed post pattern now that I'm finally finding a good use for this thing--psuedomemory for the technology shit I always forget about.  I spend half my life trying to Google shit I Googled five years ago (and again three years ago, and again eighteen months ago...)  Bookmarking pages hasn't really done me any good, because I forget that I bookmarked a site (and also because there are times I find the bookmark, but can't remember why I saved it, haha.)

So today's episode of "Chris' only reason to post an entry on this elderly blog" is brought to you because I have like 15,000+ pics that aren't really organized.  Back when I used Windows, Picasa made things easier because of the face tagging technology.  If you wanted to find a pic of a certain person, you could just click their name and voila, you were good to go.

However, Picasa typically writes those tags to an internal DB and not to the images themselves.  There's a way to get Picasa to do that, but it writes them to a weird XMP field that isn't typically used by any other photo organizer.

I'm using Debian and GNOME as my desktop environment, so I'm using the default image manager that comes with the distribution.  Unfortunately, it does not use XMP tags for organizing or searching, so I was basically stuck trying to find some way of migrating those Picasa XMP face tags (mwg-rs: Regions/ mwg-rs:RegionList[1]/mwg-rs:Name) into something that another application could search.

The solution is actually really easy to use, but the hard part was actually finding it!  Google searching was a little wonky and the results weren't all that clear.  I finally found this post in the Exif forum, but if you didn't phrase your search terms precisely that way, you'd never find it.   Here's my useless search history:

shotwell search xmp

mwg-rs:Name to exif tag

mwg-rs:Name

linux photo program that can read xmp face

how to search xmp tags 

The post I linked to above was exactly what I needed and it actually was super easy to do.  It's literally one line, assuming all of your photos are in a hierarchical directory.

Here's a video walk-through of how to make that happen:

It only took around 20 minutes to run through about 17,000 files in 254 directories.  Not too shabby!

Here are some links to the stuff that powered today's post (all excellent, Open Source projects)

ExifTool by Phil Harvey- "a platform-independent Perl library...for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files."

Shotwell- A digital photo organizer designed for the GNOME desktop environment.

Kazam Screencaster- The screen recording software I used to record the above video.

ComicTagger Error StrpTime

Long time, no see/speak/etc.    You can thank an annoying, seemingly obscure technical problem I ran into for breaking my 42 months of blog silence.  These hiatuses (yatus #bigbrother) seem to be getting longer and longer over the years.

So anyways, I decided to try to organize my electronic comic book collection yesterday and installed a program called ComicTagger, which helps grab and write metadata for comic books.  

I get it installed and ran into my first problem right off the bat.  The application wants you to put in the path to WinRar (or any RAR/UnRAR program) but the little tool you use to navigate through your filesystem doesn't actually navigate anything.  It'll open the box and show you your root folder, but none of the contents.  The workaround for that was to just manually type in the path.  Since I'm running Linux, my path was "/usr/bin/rar" and "usr/bin/unrar"

Problem solved!  Let's get to tagging comics!  I drag and drop a file over to test and wait.  And wait.  And wait some more.  The dialog box that popped up is just sitting at 0% for a few minutes before I realize that there's an error in the terminal window and I'm stuck.  Here's what I see:

Traceback (most recent call last):  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/taggerwindow.py", line 540, in dropEvent    self.fileSelectionList.addPathList( self.droppedFiles )  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/fileselectionlist.py", line 196, in addPathList    row = self.addPathItem( f )  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/fileselectionlist.py", line 271, in addPathItem    if ca.seemsToBeAComicArchive() :  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/comicarchive.py", line 618, in seemsToBeAComicArchive    ( self.getNumberOfPages() > 0)  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/comicarchive.py", line 775, in getNumberOfPages    self.page_count = len( self.getPageNameList( ) )  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/comicarchive.py", line 751, in getPageNameList    files = self.archiver.getArchiveFilenameList()  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/comicarchive.py", line 395, in getArchiveFilenameList    for item in rarc.infolist():  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/UnRAR2/__init__.py", line 127, in infolist    return list(self.infoiter())  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/UnRAR2/__init__.py", line 122, in infoiter    for params in RarFileImplementation.infoiter(self):  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/UnRAR2/unix.py", line 171, in infoiter    data['datetime'] = time.strptime(fields[2]+" "+fields[3], '%d-%m-%y %H:%M')  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 478, in _strptime_time    return _strptime(data_string, format)[0]  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/_strptime.py", line 332, in _strptime    (data_string, format))ValueError: time data '2006-03-29 18:32' does not match format '%d-%m-%y %H:%M'

The highlighted section is the actual error.  There's nothing about this on the project Github site, the Google site the code was originally housed on, or the application's web forum.  NOTHING.  There is literally one post on an Ubuntu forum where a dude asks about the issue in 2016, but no one ever responded!  And if he ever discovered the fix, he didn't post it in that thread.  DON'T EVER DO THAT.  If you fix your own problem, update the fucking thread!

Anyway, I DID figure out a fix and I decided to post it on my blog, so if anyone else runs into the problem, it's a 30 second fix and not hours of googling like a moron (me!)  I should've just sat down and worked through the problem like I finally did this morning. It took me about 45 minutes and 25ish minutes of that was trying to find and install a text editor that had line numbers on it, haha.  I tried Sublime and it wasn't.  Now I know why the editor war has been ongoing for over 30 years.

In this case, ComicTagger is choking while trying to strip out and reformat the date it finds in my CDisplay RAR Archived Comic Book (CBR) file.  It looks like the (or A) programmer hardcoded the date format as %d-%m-%y %H:%M, which is Day-Month-Year (two digit) Hour:Minute (Military format.)  However, it looks like the file date that was getting pulled from my CBR files were in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM. The strptime Python module was throwing up an error because the date that was getting passed to it wasn't matching. 

Here's the fix:  I went into /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/comictaggerlib/UnRAR2/unix.py and edited line 171 to reflect the actual format that was needed:

data['datetime'] = time.strptime(fields[3]+" "+fields[4], '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M')

There you go.  Now I've wasted another 90 minutes writing this up. I hope you appreciate all that I do for you!

See you in 2022, bitches!

Bleeding Me

Why am I such a technology whore? I fucking LOVE it. Computers, TVs, Blu-ray players, handheld devices, shit with wires, shit with LEDs, 802.11G & N & Wimax & LTE, air cooled with fins, heatsinks cooled with flourescent liquids, liquid crystal displays. If it's got the juice running in it, I WANT IT ALL.

Consequently, I gots lots of bills that are generated as a result of my love of the integrated circuit.

I was reading an article in Gizmodo over the three-day weekend (The Subscription War: You're Bleeding to Death) and was interested in seeing how my stuff stacked up to the "norm"

Holy shit.

Some of these are annual fees that I'm showing amortized over twelve months (Flickr, domain names, Xbox live, magazines). Sweet baby Jesus, I'm spending over $5,500 a year on subscription entertainment services. This doesn't count the cash I spend on music (a few hundred a year?), spur of the moment PPV movies/Blockbuster runs, trips to the movie theaters (again, a few hundred a year--a trip for a family of four to a flick is not an inexpensive proposition).

What can I do to stop the bleeding? My biggest monthly expense is Verizon Fios, which has my land line phone (and unlimited long distance), my Internet (20 Mbps symmetrical), & my TV service (a brazillian channels, including HBO/Cinemax/Showtime/TMC/Starz/Encore/etc).

My first step is seeing what I can live without from Verizon:

1a) Land line phone

The only time I personally use the home phone is when I'm passing it over to my wife or kids when I get stuck answering the phone. (Quick aside: why the fuck do I have to answer the phone? It's never for me, yet 75% of the time, I'm the one that has to get my fat ass out of my chair and grab it off the wall). All my friends call me on my cell. Most of the time, my wife uses HER cell. We could lose the land line and drop $50 off the bill.

My biggest hurdle is that my alarm monitoring is done over the land line. I could change that to cellular monitoring OR switch to a VoIP service (like Vonage) and do a bit of wiring magic to have it feed into the whole house through the existing wires.

1b) Decrease my Internet service speed to a slower bandwidth. The 20Mbps service currently runs me $61 a month after my "bundled discount"

1c) Kill some of the extraneous channels. Do I REALLY need 73 premium movie channels (NOT counting the HD channels)? I pay an extra $29.99 a month for those.

Apparently I DO need all those channels and I need a FASTER Internet service and I'm too lazy to do a five minute wiring job because instead of killing my services, I signed up for MORE when I hit Verizon's website yesterday. Under a two year contract. Sigh.

Here's what I have now. Same phone service, I now have a 35Mbps symmetrical Internet service, and a new channel package that has an EXTRA movie channel (EpixHD).

But I saved $18 a month by signing up for it! And I got 3 months of free movie channels! I got more for less! Yes! Fuck!

Alright, let's try something else.

Cellphones: $130 a month. I can't shave anything off of that. The $130 a month is for my G1 (including text & data), Laurie's phone (including texts), & Evan's phone. This bill will only INCREASE. Sometime in the next couple of months, I'm putting Laurie onto some type of smartphone (most likely moving her over to AT&T for an iPhone [$80+ a month]). Evan is getting to the point where he's texting his friends (need to add a texting plan for HIM). I'm sure Chloe will soon want a phone. Ok, scratch that one.

Netflix: $17 a month. Actually that one just went up to $17 a month from $9 because I changed to the two-disk a month plan with Blu-ray (can't watch NORMAL dvds now that I have a Blu-ray player. Posh. The intent is to stop getting shit from Redbox & Blockbuster. This will save me money. I swear.

Tivo: $17 (it's slightly less than that, more like $15 with taxes). In THEORY I could lose the tivo and replace it with a DVR from Verizon, but it's the same price and I like the functionality of the Tivo. I could actually roll my own DVR and use XBMC, but I'd have cough up the cash upfront to build a HTPC. I'd lose my On Demand stuff in the bedroom, but gain Netflix streaming, Hulu, website streaming, etc. Hmmm, that sounds fun. That's a big "maybe" sometime soon.

Xbox Live: $5 (that's slightly higher because I forgot to add Evan's account). Have to have this for Netflix streaming on my big screen and killing zombies with my friends over the Internet.

Flickr: $2 ($24.95/year). Easiest way to share pics with friends & family; easiest triple backup of my pictures (which are also backed up on my ipod and my online backup set). Nope, can't do it.

Domain names: $2 ($20 a year). $10 a year X 2 for my email domain & Laurie's too. This may increase when my free service on my photography blog dies next year. I like that domain name too much to get rid of it (http://www.littleretard.com/blog), so this will probably triple next year.

Online backup: $5. Shut your mouth. This $5 a month is the only thing that stands between my balls and Laurie's scissors if our PC ever dies. Can you imagine how much stuff a teacher keeps on her home PC? She'd have to start from scratch at the end of a three month summer break and that ain't happening.

Kid's games: $5. Webkinz are to Chloe what computers are to me. That's all I gots to say about that.

Audible.com: $15. I pay $15 a month for one audiobook per month (on top of the free ones I download from the library). This $15 assures my sanity in the 45 minute to 1 hour commute ONE WAY from Sachse to downtown Dallas. This $15 also assures the life of many individuals who share 75 Central with me. Without me being entertained by my books, I would cut a bitch every day. NOTE: This was a trade off from my "old" entertainment of Sirius.

Magazines: $10. This may be a somewhat conservative estimate. Laurie gets People, Soap Opera Digest, & US Weekly (which needs to be renewed). I get D Magazine & Wired, but I never pay more than $10 a year for mine. You want to tell Laurie she can't get her gossip? Me neither.

Newspaper: $29. Are you fucking kidding me, DMN? $29 a month for the fucking paper? I've tried to kill this, but Laurie is a newspaper fiend. I wish she'd get with the times and get her news off the Internet like I do, but whatchugonnado?

Man, I'm thoroughly fucked. I'm not willing to part with any of this. In fact, it's only going to go up.

Next Topic: The box full of surveillance equipment in my garage that I want to install on my house and why my wife won't let me.

G1 vs iPhone Review

Until it died a miserable death in New Orleans, I had been using a secondhand iPhone that I bought from my coworker last fall. I LOVED that phone. The whole cult of Apple thing annoys the shit out of me, but I drank about half a cup of Steve Jobs flavored Kool-Aid once I started using my iPhone.

I tried to get a new iPhone via a swap at the Apple Store, but the phone had been out of warranty for FOUR months. I could have paid $199 to replace it with another 2nd gen phone, but I was really interested in upgrading to a 3g phone. My problem: I wasn't an AT&T customer and I was only six months in on two-year contract with T-Mobile.

I debated buying a 3G for $199, paying the activation, cancelling, and then eating the early termination fee of $250, but there was no way my wife would be OK with me dropping almost $500 for a phone.

Once I made that decision, there was really only one other choice that could get me even close to the capabilities of the iPhone: the G1.

I bought the G1 last week from T-Mobile for $97.97 (a price match with Wal-Mart) by adding a third line to my account for Evan. He's been using a prepaid T-Mobile account for a while and I'm probably averaging close to that in prepaid minutes. We put the phone and data plan ($24.95 per month for 3g Internet & 400 text messages) on my number. I don't have an exact total yet, but my total bill will be around $110 a month for three lines.

Technical Specs

iPhone:
Size and weight
Height: 4.5 inches (115.5 mm)
Width: 2.4 inches (62.1 mm)
Depth: 0.48 inch (12.3 mm)
Weight: 4.7 ounces (133 grams)
Display: 3.5 inches (diagonal) 480X320 resolution @163ppi

G1:
Height: 4.6 inches (117.7 mm)
Width: 2.16 inches (55.7 mm)
Depth: 0.62 inches (17.1 mm)
Weight: 5.6 ounces (158 grams)
Display: 3.2 inches (diagonal) 320X480 resolution

All of my comments should be prefaced with this: if you've never had an iPhone, you'll without a doubt, love the G1. If I had started on the G1, I would have never wanted an iPhone.

Display/Touchscreen

Although .3 of an inch doesn't sound like much, it seems like a lot when you're looking at the screen, especially when watching videos in landscape mode (which is the ONLY mode you can watch videos in on the iPhone. That said, the G1's display is more than adequate for watching videos, streaming YouTube vids, or general web browsing.

There's a lot of hype surrounding the iPhone's multitouch capability, but it's miraculous qualities are a bunch of marketing crap. Yes, the pinch and stretch feature is useful when surfing the web, but I really don't miss it. Both the default browser in the G1 and Steel (which is a free download from the Android Market) do a great job of easily zooming in and scrolling around pages that are too large to display on one screen. Opera Mini does NOT do well with it. I downloaded, installed, and kicked it to the fucking curb all within 30 minutes.

The sensitivity on the G1 is slightly kludgy. I'm fairly certain it's a software issue, as some apps are better than others in recognizing where you are touching. As Android and it's related apps mature, I think (and hope) that this will improve

The winner on the display is the iPhone by a SMIDGE.

User Interface

The iPhone user interface is pretty fucking sweet, but after using Android for a week, I think it's much better.

1) You can have apps run in the background. This is awesome for things like Twitter (using Twidroid as the Interface), Facebook (FBook--we'll get to that later), Calendar items, etc. With those items running in the background, you can actually get notifications up in the top toolbar. When an email comes in, I get a "@" symbol, when a new Tweet comes in, I get a little robot, with Facebook, you get the F square icon. You can then touch the top toolbar and drag it down to see the notification and launch the app. I have a Calendar app that puts your upcoming appointments in the dragged down section of the toolbar so that it's always easily available.

As I stated earlier, the touchscreen is a little flaky, but once you get accustomed to the flakiness (mmm, biscuits) it's easy to get around. There are three desktop views (similar to the ones on the iPhone). You can dock apps on those screens and switch screens with a swipe of your finger. You can also set bookmarks on the desktop (for frequently used sites) and also add folders (I'm assuming for categorizing apps).

In addition, there's a dock at the bottom (the square with a triangle). If you touch that dock, it will open and show you all the apps installed on your phone.

If you want to move something, just press and hold it for a couple of seconds, you'll hear a beep and feel a little buzz (that's what she said) and you can move the icon around (even from the docked folder to a home desktop).

NOW, I really like the trackball. The first day it took a little getting used to. It's awesome for scrolling down webpages (especially Google Reader). There are a ton of non-intuitive things that you can do, so if you buy a G1, hit the web for tips (like clicking the alt key before using it to make it move faster, among others).

My only hardware bitch is that the camera button is hard to press, even if the keyboard isn't open (why yes, yes this does have REAL keyboard). Thankfully, once the Camera app is launched, you can use the trackball to take a pic. Another issue is that it takes a few seconds to take the pic because the camera (3.2 megapixels) actually has a focus mechanism that is engaged prior to snapping the picture. But, it takes pretty decent looking pics.






























The keyboard is pretty decent too. I have big, fat fingers and haven't had a lot of problems adjusting to typing on the small keys. From my experience playing around with my sister-in-law's Blackberry, the G1's keys are bigger and have a better feel. Compared to the virtual keyboard on the iPhone, the G1 is like heaven. It IS slightly annoying, however, to have to open the keyboard when you're in portrait mode and just want to type in a URL. Steel is cool for that, as it also includes a virtual keyboard for just that occasion. The newest version of the Android OS (aka Cupcake) is supposed to address that and make that available at all times.

Call Quality

It's pretty much a tie. I really don't notice any difference in the quality of voice calls.

Data Speeds

My G1 is faster than the iPhone, but I went from a 2nd gen iPhone (Edge) to a 3g phone. My cubicle-mate has a 3g iPhone and I'll do a side by side test once she gets back in the office to compare speeds.

Apps

As fucking annoying and douchey as the iPhone app commercials are, they really do have an app for everything (explosive diarrhea? There's an app for it). Android gets beat the fuck up in a head to head battle. The Android store is still in it's infancy, so I hope that improves as more hardware companies turn to Android for the OS.

Here are the apps that I used constantly and miss: Mint*, Chase Mobile*, Yelp*, Amazon.com*, Zynga Poker, Facebook**.
*Can use a browser based workaround on G1, but it's not as good
**Similar app on G1, but it sucks balls

There are several apps that I didn't have on the iPhone that rock (particularly Barcode Scanner), but overall the Android Market is stinky like feta.

Battery Life

Good lord, if you had told me there was a device even WORSE than the iPhone when it came to battery life, I would have called you a pinche mentirosa. But there is...the battery life on the G1 is a fucking JOKE. The only positive is that you can actually GET to the battery, but I usually have to throw it on a charge around 3pm with modest usage. Sure, you can kill wifi, location awareness, GPS, data syncing, etc, but those are the things that make the phone fucking cool. Thankfully, you can charge via a USB connection, so I just plug it in to my PC at work to give it a refresh in the afternoon. God help you if you are ever on the road and don't have a mobile charger.

Other

Yes, the G1 plays music. Yes, the headphones are proprietary too! Memory is expandable to 16Gb via SDHC cards. It doesn't support Flash either (yet).

Things to Get

Apps: Twidroid (twitter), Fbook (sucks, but not as bad as the full-on mobile interface), Steel (web browser), Sky Map (fucking AMAZING app that uses GPS, location awareness, & the accelerometer to show you astronomical data), Useful Switchers (allows you to toggle on/off Gps, Wifi, Location, etc), Ringroid (turns MP3s into ringtones), Quick Calendar (puts your appointments in the taskbar)

Other: Invisible Shield-excellent cover for your screen. Be careful when you apply it!

Overall, I'm really please with the G1. It took a week of using it to really appreciate the things it does better than the iPhone, which offsets the things it still lacks.

The G1 gets a B. If they can fix the battery drain and get some better apps, I'll be a happy end user.

Party Like a Mock Star

Another year has ROCKETED by. Time is a cruel bitch when you get older. It always seemed to drag on in my youth, but now that I've hit middle age, it's a greasy pig that I can't wrap my arms around.

Laurie and I were talking about what we're doing with the cars when they're paid off. I think her Explorer will finally be paid off next year, mine not until 2012. I mentioned that I was going to hold on to my Focus and give it to Evan, not realizing actually how close that is. He'll be old enough to drive in just over four years. Even more immediate is the fact that he's going to be a teenager in just over a year.

How the fuck did that happen? It's seems like it was just a short time ago that he was the little baby pissing and puking all over me at the drop of a hat.

Although there were some craptacular moments this year (Chloe getting infected with crypto [like she's some kind of fucking third worlder or something], cancelling the summer vacation because we had to pay off a lawsuit, the little misunderstanding in March that almost ended my marriage), 2008 was a damn fine year in our household.

2009 will be a year of the fat wallet. Financially, we're doing better than ever. 2009 will be even more so with me getting an almost 8% raise. If things work out, I hope to get a grade increase too, which would be another $10K a year. Now I just need to get a reign on our expenses because we piss our money away like, uhm, piss. Hence the term, piss away.

2009 will be the year that I drop all the weight I gained over the last three years. In 2005, I lost almost 60 pounds. When I got sick and quit running (and started eating like Kirstie Alley at her most voracious), I gained over 80 fucking pounds. 80. Eight. Zero. I started dieting a two weeks ago and I'm down about 10, even with the slacking over Christmas (and all the boozing). There are 8 people in my office that have all thrown $100 in the pot and we're having a Biggest Loser contest. Whoever looses the highest percentage of weight gets the pot. Hello flatscreen TV when I win.

2009 will be a year of more traveling. We had planned on starting back the annual trip to Panama City Beach again in 08, but we were derailed by those douche drinking cock monkeys at Capital One (choke on my money, fucknuts). We also had planned on taking the kids back to Colorado, but instead we spent my 35th birthday living it up in Vegas. In 2009, the plans are: January: I'm working 11 days in New Orleans and Laurie is coming out for the first weekend to hang out and partay; June(ish): 1 week in Florida; October/November: 3-5 Nights in Vegas (no kiddos); Christmas: New York City (get a rope). Mix in a few weekends in Shreveport and or Austin/San Antonio/Houston and you got yourself a lot of travel.

2009 will be a year of more business travel. Man, that's a beating. In 2008, I spent a little over 60 days traveling. I'm starting the year out in New Orleans from the 9th until the 20th. And that's just for one job...I have seven other relocations that are going to be ramping up next year, so I anticipate a LOT of time drinking Abitas and eating crawfish in New Orleans (Gretna & Covington), Houma, New Iberia, Lake Charles, Natchitoches, & Minden next year. The upside of all the traveling is that several of my personal trips are done using free airfare and I make a shitload of money in overtime. In 2008, that came out to a cool ten gees.

2009 will be a year of more partying. I think both Laurie and I are hitting our midlife crises. Now that the kids are a little older and we have a couple of friends, we're drinking a little more (at least she is, I've been boozing it up for a while) and socializing more. Now if I can only talk her into some fishbowl parties, then I'm set like Boba Fett.

So, unless somebody dies, 2009 should rock the hizzouse. However, it will be coming in with a whisper since we have no plans tonight. Our usual social buddies are in NM visiting relatives, so we're just going to sit around the house tonight. I think my in-laws are coming over to play Scene It Box Office on the Xbox360 (thanks, Santa!) I'm sure I'll drink a few tasty beverages and pop a few tasty pills...but there's a distinct possibility that I'll be zzz'ing out by 11pm.

Happy New Year to all and to all a good night.

My Kids Rawk

This is why my kids rock. Chloe scored at the 99th percentile in her reading. She's reading at a 5th year, 8th month level (pretty much at the beginning of 6th grade). She's in her second month of 2nd grade. Yay, Chloe!