In the Mood

When I was young the (broadcast) radio was pretty much just background noise, nothing much really appealed to me. It was just there. When I wound up with access to an old tape recorder (tube-burning reel-to-reel) and some tapes, I found music: the tunes from The Glenn Miller Story (Yes, the movie version of In the Mood is pure Hollywood hokum, but it is fun – the tune scored with V1 buzzbombs, exploding at the softest point and the powerful resurgence of the music as if it were a F-U to the Nazis.)

There are many covers of In the Mood, of course. Glen Miller (it was first recorded by Edgar Hayes), Glen Gray, Nat Gonnella, Chet Atkins(..), Roy Clark(!), Henhouse Five Plus Too (Ray Stevens), Xavier Cugat, and a good many others. In the last few days as I was driving about, with the satellite radio set to the 1940’s as suual, some tune I didn’t care for or felt was overplayed came on and I switched to the 1950’s. And I got a bit of a jolt as I heard what, to me, sounded like The Muppets doing a version of In The Mood. It was Ernie Fields’ version:

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A New Used Phone

I have an Honor 8 smartphone, that I’ve just retired from daily service as a phone. In its place I am now using a OnePlus 3T ($HOUSEMATE upgraded to a 7 Pro, and due to OnePlus’ craptacular instructions on resetting their OWN PRODUCT the trade-in value was reduced to ‘don’t bother’ so now I have the 3T). I set it up rather slowly (Ox slow, yes.) and finally had most applications I figured I truly needed installed.

Then I set about doing what was necessary to make it work with the Superbook. It seemed to almost work, but it took an extra step (as if the ADB setup wasn’t ‘extra’ enough – the future phone-laptop system cannot help but be more user-friendly. This wasn’t actively user-hostile, but “Plug and Play” it ain’t. DisplayLink is nice, but not quite automatic, let alone “automagic” (that’s when it works so seemlessly that even us jaded Ancient Creatures are in genuine awe of the expertise that achieved it. This Ancient Creature managed to avoid LOUD cussing. Good, but FAR from the Grand Ideal. When Ancient Creature has no reason to cuss – that’s the Ideal.)

So for a while, the Superbook was a keyboard and a trackpad (that is a bit impressive – whether the trackpad works or not seems almost random in many cases) but no display. Once DisplayLink was forced and then permissions/conditions set, things “Just Worked” — as they damn well should. [NOTE: There are those who denigrate ‘Just Works’ but considering how UNUSUAL that is for new-ish technology, they are full of [FERTILIZER]. When a new(-ish) technology ‘just works’ it’s NOT ho-hum, it’s FREAKIN’ ASTONISHING! As in, if it “Just Works” every time, buy EVERYONE in the design/engineering/support group a bottle of $FAVORITE_BEVERAGE_OF_CHOICE price be DAMNED! Oh, Alright, nothing over $1,000 a bottle – GREAT cognac gets insanely expensive. Go with Great Scotch – it’s less expensive. NOTE: If anyone wishes to send me a sample of something to convince me I’m full of manure… we can talk, aye.]

But, getting the Thamn Ding working, I did. Thus I shut down both the Honor 8 and the OnePlus 3T and transfered the SIM card from the Honor to the 3T. I likely still have a few things to set up or add or such, but the truly critical ones are taken care of. The rest is mere details and (hopefullyu minor) annoyances.

Oddly, one minor detail that annoys me considerably is something as minor as alert tones. The Honor 8 had an “arrow” sound (THWIPAW!) that the 3T lacks. Might need see about rectifying that. And the Honor has an annoying classic electronic clock alarm sound that was if not exactly, close to, my Westclox alarm clock sound. I’ve woken up to that since… 1985? Annoying (to others, anyway) and now “ancient” but it’s effective if no other reason than I KNOW it means “WAKE UP!”

Negative Results: ComputeStick & Superbook

I had it working. Had. Then I tried to load a particular web page. Just that, load a web page. While it might well be “heavy” it is not malicious – I regularly check it from various computers and even my phone. But it was, evidently, just too much for the ComputeStick. It wedged. It wedged hard.

I went back to the HDMI video to find… it had even hosed that up so bad it looks like I’d need to do a re-install of the Operating System. If a mere web page can do that, it is FAR too fragile to use portably for anything of note.

I am not above re-installing the OS, but the question becomes: To what end? It’s a fair enough machine – for several years ago, for some dedicated and relatively mild purpose. But since my (aging) phone out-classes it and unless I am working or bathing, the phone is handy.

Ah well. The Raspberry Pi 4 still looks interesting, but it also looks like it has a few issues to be sorted out. I’ll wait. The NexDock still looks interesting, too, but the number of phones it works with is limited at the moment and it would be another expense. Again, if I even do it, I can wait. I do have $HOUSEMATE’s old OnePlus 3T that might work with the Superbook. Evidently the Superbook won’t charge it, but maybe it will at least not discharge it. I’ve not yet gone far into checking that out. And the 3T might be a good replacement for the Honor 8. It would lack the IR port (so no remote control) but I’ve found I didn’t really use that after the initial burst of enthusiasm – I simply don’t use IR-remote controlled devices to any significant degree anymore. And some that I do use, are so old that the “universal” controllers do not include them – and seemingly cannot be convinced to, either.

The Rodent Liberation Front Strikes Again

I’m not sure why it’s me or my vehicle at which they strike, and I cannot identify precisely which rodent did it – though I do figure a squirrel high on the suspect list.

A few years back I started the car.. and it ran very rough – barely able to move, as I discovered upon trying to pull out of the garage and partially succeeding. I managed to back it back into the garage, and then took $HOUSEMATE’s vehicle to deal with the short errand I had just then. The CHECK ENGINE light was not merely on, but flashing – a bad sign indeed. If you are not familiar, if the light is just on, steady, that means “Have this looked at soon, please.” But flashing? That means, “FIX THIS NOW!”

In that case, a check under the hood made it plain that the fix would be simple: At least one of the spark plug ignition wires had been chewed up and severed in a couple places. When I could manage, I went to a local auto parts store and got a set of replacement wires and installed the new set – saving the remains of the old set as spares. Turns out that was a Good Move.

A few nights ago the CHECK ENGINE light somehow did NOT come on at all (it does light up when I check) and the car ran if not rough, odd. I had to run it at higher revs than normal to keep it going, but I made it the mile or so to work. Later, at a break, I checked.. and sonuvagun, I managed to get there on only two (of four) cylinders. Two ignition wires had been chewed up.

In the morning, I was able to drive home on all four cylinders, after pulling the chewed up wires and replacing them with the ‘spares’ I’d kept. When the local parts shop opened, I purchased another set of wires, but did not install them immediately. Instead I went to a taco place and ordered a take-out breakfast – and asked for some packets of hot sauce.

The new wiring got a couple coats of hot sauce, which took some time to dry. I ran on the ‘spares’ for a few days (with one unchewed wire in reserve). This past night, the new wires (with hot sauce coating) were put into service and what they replaced went into the box-o-stuff in the trunk. Hopefully squirrelly (or whatever) doesn’t like things spicy.

I related the hot sauce coating bit to a fellow at work. “Yow! Do NOT cross Orvan!” was his reaction. And before anyone asks, there are young kids about the neighborhood and I now reside within city limits, so the most effective pest control (such as those made by Remington, etc.) is not an option.

Moo.

Yes, moo.

Shakespeare for the 21st Century

“First, we kill all the marketers.”

The $40 (or so) Compute Stick

Was that cheap as it was made in 2015 and set up with Lubuntu 14. The current *buntu is 19, with the last Long Term Support version being 18.04.

Connected by HDMI to a TV (the HDMI monitors all being in use, the TV being rather idle) it came up and I tried to do the right thing – run an update. That was a flop as the update broke networking which was wireless only. Broadcom strikes again.

I took advantage of the restore partition and rolled things back. That got me wireless again. And more frustration as the thing kept tossing up dialog boxes about problems – but never any specifics. And 14 is so old that reporting the issue will no longer do anyone any good, so the dialog was doubly worthless. The high point was finding an old USB wireless dongle that let me bypass Broadcom’s idiocy.

I found a respin script that supposedly would make a regular *buntu ISO into something suited to the Intel Atom processor and company. I tried it, and got nowhere. I could see it run, but couldn’t install it – the option simply did not exist. Direct install failed, claiming it needed to work with a *buntu system… gee, Lubuntu 14 wasn’t one?

Then I gave in and tried to install DisplayLink (on Lubuntu 14.04) to use the Superbook and it sort of worked. I could get the Superbook to work, as long as I booted and logged in with the HDMI TV active. This rather misses the point of things, so I spent much of a night trying to be able to boot with the USB-connected display. Nothing. Most of the fixes managed to make things worse. And I still had all those annoying error dialogs.

Somehow in all that I chanced upon an already respun version of Lubuntu 18.04. I had nothing to lose, really and tried it. It worked. It came up. It installed. It even got the execrable Broadcom wireless to work (though Bluetooth was a bust). Now I have something that is current and will remain current for a while. It doesn’t throw error dialogs at me (alright, there is one, but only one, on login. Annoying but tolerable). DisplayLink installed… but.

But now I was back to the old issue of needing the HDMI monitor to log in. I did find an older USB Bluetooth dongle that seems to work, so there’s that progress as well. After spending much a morning trying various work-arounds to get things booting with DisplayLink showing up before login and getting nowhere, and breaking things, oh joy (the Superbook trackpad worked, then didn’t. And that’s the minor one. One “fix” screwed things up so bad I had to dance my way into a recovery mode to undo it.) I gave up. Almost.

Then I had that peculiar thought. Someone, replying to a person also trying to get a DisplayLink display to work on boot (or at least OS start…) rather than demand HDMI for login, was “helpful” and said, roughly, “Well then leave the HDMI monitor connected” which misses the whole point of this. The point, for me, is to be able to use the Superbook without need of the HDMI monitor. That thought? “Can an HDMI monitor be faked?” And it turns out the answer is yes. There are HDMI terminators, used to convince “headless” (no monitor) systems to use a resolution that isn’t the lowest setting. This is done to make remote viewing/control tolerable.

While I was waiting for the delivery, I decided that I didn’t have anything I had to preserve on the system and the easiet way to fix all the screwiness of the attempt fixes was to simply start over. Yup, a re-install of the 18.04 respin. This actually occurred twice. I goofed and went a bit too ambitious with cruddy results. So I dialed things back to as minimal as seemed reasonably sane, and has more success. One change was that I went with “automatic login” from the start – and that works and gets to a useful screen without any password or button click or such needed. Not at all secure, but there it is. The thing still demands the HDMI display (TV) be connected or DisplayLink doesn’t start up. You bet I checked that.

And then the HDMI terminator arrived and I realized the hard way that I was missing a piece. The ComputeStick wanted to plug into an HDMI port. And so did the terminator. One adapter later… things still didn’t work, as I just replaced the TV with the terminator in a trivial swap. However, that omitted a setup step. One more boot with the TV, followed by the swap on the live system, and then a visit to the Monitor(s) settings. With things properly set up, the next reboot came up nicely on the Superbook. And to be sure, I did a full shutdown, and brought things up again – and things still worked.

Alright, it’s not a mere $40 anymore, since the terminator and adapter bring it closer to $50 in hardware, still, I have a(nother) small (trans)portable computer. Somehow I lost the trackpad function again, but since that seems more to be way to screw up typing and I prefer a trackball, that’s not a real loss. It is a bit of an annoyance since I know the hardware does indeed work.