Yesterday I did a fairly long run in downtown and west Oakland past some slightly taller buildings than in my first set of GPS comparison tests last month. I’m glad I had the Garmin 67i for this one, not only because its track logs were the cleanest overall, but because both my Fitbit Charge 6 and Pixel 6 Pro Runkeeper app had problems preventing me from having a complete tracklog. At least this put me over 55 percent completion for Oakland for my running every street project!
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I recently picked up a Garmin GPSMAP 67i off eBay to compare the GPS accuracy to that of my phone and my Fitbit Charge 6. Long story short, the results have been so wonderful I will henceforth carry an extra device heavier than my phone on every run and hike.
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I didn’t realize my fwupd installation was not working till I noticed my BIOS is still running 1.5.1 instead of the latest 1.6.3. Upon investigation, I realized I did not have the Linux Firmware Update boot entry above the Linux Boot Manager entry. When I fixed that, or tried to manually select after F12, it still was not working. It took some time to notice there was an extremely tiny message flashing for less than .1 seconds. I had to use my DSLR to zoom in and record a video of the corner of the screen to figure out what it says:
Found update fwupd-7ceaf7a8-0611-4480-9e30-64d8de420c7c-0
WARNING: No updates to process. Called in error?
I realized I could boot to the laptop’s native BIOS update utility with F12 and then navigate to the .pac file in \EFI\arch\fw\, so I did not need to solve this problem.
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Amazon pioneered consumer confidence with their product ratings system, but my confidence in that system is greatly diminished. As if the SEO driven keyword soup product titles were not bad enough, many vendors now differentiate their products with false descriptions and claims backed by fake five star reviews. The products are often cheap enough customers likely don’t bother with returns or complaints, but at the same time I am surprised the fake reviews are submitted by accounts that did not first buy the product. It would only cost vendors the small Amazon fee to ask their employees to actually buy the products and give them back to the seller. Clearly vendors see no point in even that small expense since Amazon’s system enables fake, unverified reviews to drive search and sales. As it stands, you can only filter by verified purchase status and eliminate many of the fakes once you are on the product page. It’s a shame Amazon includes the fake reviews in the ratings by default and forbids filtering out the fake reviews from the product search.
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I recently pieced together a list of my mobile phones from journal entries and emails, which I have going back only to 2006 when I switched to Gmail. That could have been easier had I written a journal entry each time I switched phones, but better late than never. So, Thursday, June 22, I switched phones. To the Samsung Galaxy S8.
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I’m a bit frustrated right now trying to work through a small cascade of issues so I can file some claims for some corals that arrived yesterday. This is a quick entry to document where I am in the process.
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I spent a bit of today taking photos of creatures in my saltwater tank, and while I had my Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens out, I figured I would take a photo of Alan’s eye and then my eye. One thing led to another, and I tried to figure out how to tether my Nikon D800 to my laptop so I could use the screen as a viewfinder, making self eye portraits easier. It was not easy.
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Creative released a Sound Blaster Omni Surround 5.1 firmware update that allows the SB1560 to work with macOS Sierra. Despite the notes claiming it must be installed from a computer running either Windows or a version of OS X older than macOS Sierra 10.12, I was in fact able to install it directly from within Sierra. This entry serves simply to document that fact.
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I just completed migrating my weight and heart rate information to a new Withings account because they are incapable of figuring out why my Wi-Fi Body Scale (WBS01) (new version) can no longer be associated to my original account. Their export and import process does not support temperature data, so I need to continue using my Thermo with the Thermo app signed into my original account, while using my blood pressure monitor with the Withings app is signed into my new account. Additionally, the import process ignores comments, so I needed to manually copy and paste all the comments for each measurement. What a pain!
I thought I had low confidence in Fitbit based on my experience over the years, but man, now I don’t know who I would recommend for smart body devices. I really want to support the pioneers instead of the big companies, but if they keep screwing up, I guess there’s no point.
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I can only seem to sync my Fitbit Charge 2 on macOS Sierra with the Fitbit wireless dongle and with my system Bluetooth explicitly disabled.
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This entry is simply documentation of a phenomenon that might be of interest to future or past historians.
You’d think after years of collective experience, companies relying on crowd funding would get better at their shipping claims. The KANOA earphones I ordered in May were promised around July, then pushed to August, then September, and now October or November. I hoped to have them before the San Francisco Marathon and then before the Burning Man 50K. Now Apple’s launching the AirPods and will probably ship them before I get the KANOA set. Also I ordered a laser projector on Indiegogo, but it was canceled altogether apparently due to issues shipping to the United States. At least I supposedly got a refund on that!
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As explained in the first entry, I bought a microscope mostly so I could look for tardigrades, aka water bears, and hopefully make lovely videos of them. Within hours of getting my scope set up, I managed to find some!
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The microscope I bought arrived, and I spent a day getting familiar with it and the lenses. I was generally pleased, but ended up buying a bunch of new objectives and condensers to see if I could get better images. This post is regarding the initial purchase except the images at the end featuring the darkfield condenser.
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It took me a while to locate the manual for my new microscope. I was not surprised to have trouble since the lone Amazon review warned of no manual being provided and a broken link, but it was more difficult than I thought it would be to find the manual online.
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As an early birthday present to myself, I bought a microscope despite many other priorities. I’ve spent a few days using it over the past two weeks, and while I have mixed feelings, I don’t regret the purchase.
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I’ve been getting acquainted with my new microscope and its digital camera software. I initially decided to buy a microscope based mostly on the USB camera resolution finally exceeding a few megapixels without costing thousands of dollars. After these tests, it looks like I may end up not using the USB camera much after all, due to difficulty getting the colors right. Thankfully I decided to try a Nikon SLR adapter, as photos through that look much better!
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While I haven’t found a great solution for optical digital surround sound on OS X, I’m accepting my current setup. Using an external sound card device, I am feeding three separate audio cables into my surround speakers, and everything seems to work reasonably well now.
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In my endless endeavor to optimize my data storage scheme, I changed my Drobo 5D‘s drive redundancy setting from dual to single, such that I would only be able to sustain one drive failure, but I would gain an extra six terabytes of space. The free space has fallen below 20 percent, and I’ve ready reports of Drobos becoming incredibly slow once past three quarters full. I also had some issues connecting Drobo to Gmail, but got it working using Port 587 and checking the SSL box, despite this being against Google’s documentation.
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After troubleshooting surround sound on OS X El Capitan all week, I bought a USB digital audio adapter in hopes of circumventing the problems using the digital audio port on my motherboard. Well, those hopes have been dashed! It seems I can only reliably get surround sound through the Micro II using the annoying Plex Home Theater app, which is exactly the situation with my onboard optical port. Oh well!
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Update: I’ve settled on a solution using the Creative SB1560 and three audio cables, giving up on optical digital audio.
This week I’ve been trying to get true surround sound from my desktop’s optical digital port. I haven’t been totally successful yet, but I do have a much better understanding of audio formats and channels and and technologies involved. Using Windows, everything works splendidly, but I’m primarily running OS X El Capitan. Needless to say, it’s been frustrating! I currently can only get reliable DTS surround sound using the Plex Home Theater app, but that’s clunky and won’t play any video file like VLC player.
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Two of my roommates let me know Friday the Internet sucked in the kitchen. I knew this used to be the case, and I suspected our metal framed kitchen table of causing issues, but I thought it was solved.
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A few weeks ago I got addicted to installing SmartThings in my house, and I wrote of my initial woes getting that set up. This is just to say I managed to get mostly everything working as desired, mostly using the default provided “SmartApps”. I am still having consistent problems …
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Soon after I moved in here last year, there were a number of suspicious incidents in the shared garage. I’m told a rental car was stolen and later found by police, and another time a rummager took some items, including keys to some motorcycles. At least one of the incidents did not involve the door being accidentally left open, but we weren’t sure if they had a key or taped a lock open or something.
Anyway, it seemed some more theft might be imminent, so Paul bought a Nest camera and installed it in the garage. It’s worked pretty well, sending notifications to all our phones on activity in the garage. There are false notifications due to light changes from vehicles driving by, but it’s alerted me to the door being left open many times. One such time, we got the alert in the middle of the night and found a video of someone poking around. He took a few things, but we’re not sure what exactly.
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Last week I built a hackintosh, and it took a few days of troubleshooting to get the USB ports working properly so I could access all my data, which is stored on a Drobo 5D. I had to wait several days before I could fully access my data, and now it seems I have to wait yet again.
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As explained in my journal, I built my first hackintosh this week. While it’s functional enough, I hope, I still have some potentially major problems with the USB ports, lowering my confidence about using an external drive to store all my data.
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Since I bought my first (Micron) computer when I was 10, I’ve had a thing for desktops and customizability. I did buy a giant Dell laptop in around 2003, but after that, I always built my own desktops.
Moving across the country in 2012, though, started convincing me to try to make a laptop work as a primary computer. I had to fit everything I owned in a small SUV, and desktops take up a lot of space! MacBook Pros around that time were starting to get sufficiently powerful to use with external monitors and play movies and everything else, so it seemed it was time to chuck the desktop. Also, all the travel I’ve done in the last two years was infinitely more feasible while using a laptop as a primary.
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A few weeks ago, my Fitbit Charge HR rather quickly deteriorated from needing charging once a week to needing charging every day and a half. Thankfully it was within the one year warranty, and Fitbit pretty easily sent a replacement after I sent an email inquiry. I suppose had it happened just after the warranty ended, I could have gotten a replacement through my credit card warranty service, but it was nice Fitbit didn’t make it a big hassle.
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I’m in Singapore right now, but more on that later. I’m trying to get through some of my email backlog… Tim emailed me a month ago with a recommendation:
Have you heard of David Bohm? Physicist/philosopher, died in 1992. I think you’d be interested in his work. Listen to this summary thing and see.
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Earlier this year in February, I broke my Nexus 5 screen and opted to buy a new Moto X (2nd gen., XT1095) since I was going to be leaving the country for six months soon, and wasn’t sure if I’d have time to repair it. Since I had to transfer everything to a new phone, I rooted the Android 5.0 installation right away so I could use Titanium Backup, which would supposedly let me do a full backup and transfer in the future without much hassle.
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I'm running a fresh installation of OSX Mavericks on my MacBook Pro. My mobile phone is an Android, and I listen to music exclusively with Spotify. I therefore believe I have no need for iTunes, and wanted to remove it. OK.
sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app
Not so simple.
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I replaced my Samsung Instinct yesterday with the Palm Pre, and what a frustrating day it’s been!
The first thing I did when I got the Pre was enter my login information for Gmail, Facebook and AIM. I had no idea what that would do… but I soon found …
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…and I hate it. If I have 80 percent of my internal memory remaining, and more than 7GB on my MicroSD card remaining, why do we need to be deleting my messages?
When I first got the phone, I never noticed texts getting deleted except for occasionally when I’d …
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