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.

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!

Automatically using the Multipurpose Feeder on a Dell B2360DN Printer

Why is this like sacrificing a goat to an angry and judgmental dark lord?  All I wanted to do was be able to print stupid UPS shipping labels without a lot of hassle.  I want the print from the Multipurpose Feeder if there's something in the slot, but from the tray if not.  Automatically.  But, the default setup on my Dell B2360DN printer makes that impossible.  Sure, I could just load up my Tray 1 with all those free, delicious UPS labels, but then I still have to manually tweak something when I send a regular print job.  

RTFM?  Not anymore.  Dell's documentation is shit.  But it can be done! It’s a multi-step process that I’ve pieced together from a few different forums and a bit of dicking around.

After these changes, I can now just send a print job to the printer and unless I shove something into the Multipurpose Feeder (MP Feeder) it’s going to route out of Tray 1.  If I want to print one of my UPS labels, I just stick it in the MP Feeder and the B2360DN will THAT instead of the paper out of Tray 1.  You know, like pretty much every other printer I’ve owned has done out of the box.  But no judgments, Dell.

1. 

   Front of B2360DN

   Change the default MP Feeder settings in the Diagnostic Menu:
   1. Power off the printer
   2. Hold the OK and left arrow key
   3. Switch the printer on
   4. Release the keys once the amber light comes on
   5. Scroll through the Diagnostic menu using the right arrow.
   6. Select Printer Setup
   7. Select ENGINE 2 (push the right arrow 5 times to reach this option)
   8. Change ENGINE 2 setting to 8* and press OK
   9. Press the return arrow key to return to the Diagnostic Menu
   10. Press the left arrow to select EXIT DIAGNOSTICS
   11. The printer will reboot
2. Change the Default Source and Paper Type for the Multipurpose Feeder
   1. Press the Wrench key to reach the Admin Menu
   2. Press OK to reach the Paper Menu
   3. Press OK to select Default Source
   4. Press the right arrow to select MP Feeder and press OK
   5. Press the right arrow to reach the Paper Size/Type Menu and press OK
   6. Press the right arrow to select MP Feeder Size and press OK
   7. Select Letter and press OK
   8. Press the right arrow to select MP Feeder Type and press OK
   9. Select Plain Paper and press OK

Oh, Good For You, Christian Bale. Good. For. You.

Ever since Christian Bale went batshit crazy on the set, I like to be obnoxious with my wife and drop the "Oh, good for you!" line as much as possible.  I keep saying I want to use it for her text tone, but I can never find a clean copy of that stupid thing!  Every "Good for you" drop/tone/ringtone I've found has either been on a soundboard and you can't download it, or it's in Flash (same problem.)

Luckily, I found a clean, MP3 version of the Christian Bale rant today online (link added for your convenience.)  Through the powers of Audacity (a bad ass bit of shareware, if I do say so myself) I extracted that magical bit and made it into an iPhone formatted tone (M4R.)  For those of you that play with other phones, I've did an MP3 version too.

Enjoy, mofos!

Christian Bale "Oh Good for you!" iPhone ringtone

Christian Bale "Oh Good for you!" Mp3 format

P.S--don't be scared of the littleretard.com URL--that's mine.  I couldn't pass up an awesome domain like that when it was suggested by the registrar a few years ago.  I use it for a picture blog (www.littleretard.com/blog) but it's not updated often.

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.

Harder Than Chinese Arithmetic

So last night was yet another reminder of how big of a stubborn dumbass I am.

It's 8:30pm and Evan comes into the living room with tears of frustration welling in his eyes. He's been working on a make-up quiz for TWO HOURS. And he's still on problem one.

Evan's a pretty sharp kid (he took the SATs last month and scored in the 40th percentile of graduating seniors--what, what) and is in AP math. It's a quiz on similar triangles and all of the background info was covered when he was out of school due to the dreaded pig flu. But, he has a intuitive grasp of things, so his blind flailing into figuring this shit out was pretty much the same as mine. But he got stuck because he didn't know that proportions were the key to figure out the size of the bigger triangle.

Basically, here's the problem:

Triangle VTC ~ Triangle VWY



How big is line WY?

WTF? I don't think I EVER had math like this. The most advanced math class I had was high school geometry 20 years ago. Granted, I'm sure I was high the whole time, but I don't remember ever doing this type of shit. But, I do remember the Pythagorean Theorem (one of the few things college era THC & years of alcohol abuse haven't scrubbed from my dying brain, so here's how I attacked the problem.

1) If the two triangles are similar, then if I can figure out the size of the small one, I can back into the big one.

2) I have the length of two sides of a triangle. Using a2+b2=c2, I should be able to get the length of the third.

So I start my dumbassery with

(40*40)+(25*25)=(c*c)

1600+625=c2

C2=2,225

Squareroot of 2,225 is 41.169905, round that bitch down to 41.2.

OK. If these triangles are similar, than I can use what I have to figure out the rest. If I divide line VZ by the total length VY, that will give me it's proportion to the whole line! (38.4615%). Once I have that, I can divide line segment VT (47.2) by that figure to get the rest of line TW (75.39). Add those together and that's the hypotenuse of triangle VWY. I can THEN do the following:

a2+104 squared=122.6 squared.
a2+10,816=15,030.8
15030.8-10816=a2
4214.8=a2
get the square root and voila, the answer is that line segment WY is 64.9.

Yay, me...I'm so smart!

Yeah, right. Here's why I'm dumb:

It took 30 minutes to get to that solution. It aggravated the shit out of me because I wasn't feeling good about the process. It was TOO long and involved and the fractional answer was leaving a bad taste in my mouth (TWSS).

Google failed me when searching for hints on how to do this shit last night (but for some reason EVERY link I could find today was perfect), but I epic failed by not remembering that Evan could view his math book online.

I should have figured that there's a much simpler way to do this. There's no way the 7th grade math teacher would have them doing this if it required a calculator (which you'd need to get the square roots).

We move on to problem two, which is the old "You're 5 feet tall and have a 12 foot shadow. The flagpole's shadow is 32 feet tall. How tall is the flagpole" question.

Shit. We should have started there first, because once I googled that and took a look, we hit pay dirt. Pay dirt that takes literally 30 seconds to solve the problem.

Here's how using the first example:

1) Setup a ratio equation using the known numbers
40/104 (the length of VZ [your shadow] over the length of VY [the flagpole shadow]) is equal to 25/x (the length of TZ [your height] over WY [flagpole height]). From there, it's basic cross multiplication to get the answer.

40 25
--- = -----
104 x

40x=2600

40x = 2600
---- ------
40 40

x=65

Sigh.

So, if Google fails you and brings you here, that's how you do it. Here are some really good Math sites I found today (when Google decided to allow me the privilege of seeing them) that are even better. I'm sure the folks that wrote them aren't retards like me.

http://www.mathopenref.com/similartriangles.html
http://www.aaamath.com/rat-prop-crossx.htm

---

Be happy that I totally fucked that shit up, because it gave me a reason to actually post something to this wasteland of a blog. It's been over TEN fucking years since my first posting in my "online diary" back in the 20th century. My, how time flies. But even though it's 2010, the cars STILL don't. I want my money back, bitch.

Things are going great for me. I still dig my job. I just had my 14th anniversary with Laurie. Evan turns 13 in a couple of months (jesus) and Chloe just turned 9. Still live in the same house. Still drive the same automobile. I went to New Orleans a bajillion times last year. Went to FL for vacation. Went to Vegas in October. Was GOING to go to NY last month, but airfare skyrocketed and I couldn't afford it. I'm still bald and still fat.

Ha...now that we've moved on to me, I've lost interest in writing. How droll.

I'm sure I'll be posting more in the near future, as I'm about to embark on a historic nine trillionth diet at the beginning of February (once I get checked out by my ass loving doctor). It will be EPIC.

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.

This is why I love Fark.com

Sproing!

I just popped a nerdy boner.



Yes, that is a floppy drive motor playing Darth Vader's theme.