network notes

 "T-mobile keeps stopping" unless you perform some ritual that appeases it.

T-mobile never rings the phone (see above)

And a revelation (this is from a dated page

https://www.t-mobile.com/support/devices/android/samsung-galaxy-exhibit-t599/icons-indicators-and-buttons-samsung-galaxy-exhibit-

"minutes used while connected to the wifi network count against available rate-plan minutes"

Opened my eyes to something that may or may not be true anymore.

WiFi-calling, or so I thought, was to economize on rate-plan minutes, when those things existed.

No, it's counted as regular calling.
Then it hit me, that the popularity of skype and a zillion other funny-sounding names were because of greedy-bastard money-grubbing piggy rules like this one.

If you're using Skype the phone company feels cheated

I'm still reading a polyanna proselytic site, but basically (to my way of thinking)
If your cell-phone tower is disabled, why would they have wifi working, which means you've either hopped on like a leech or using an ISP, so WHY does it count against you?

If you're calling central-support in Dubuque and are put on hold for ninety minutes, it counts if you tried to economize by using "wi-fi-calling", whatever that is (yes, you've discovered the last remaining human on earth who does not really know what "wifi calling" is, exactly.)

"Whatsapp" is an app, apparently from Facebook.

It does what my phone cannot, talk to someone outside of T-Mobile.
T-Mobile tries and fails.
Not sure why, but Whatsapp works. 
Apparently people also use it to record calls, and if you're talking to anyone, that "anyone" is probably recording the call, it's kind of a default on setup.
(where's my Google-drive so's they can save conversations??)

So leave off on the drop for the ar15's and the crack.... 

I'm only here to decipher the weird icons next to my clock, appearing and disappearing.

Let me guess, they're network icons of a sort.

"r," and the arrows looking like a loop are what I was most interested in, and the page above does not show them.

This could get very long and uninformative.
A note to look up "cheugy" Or some similarly spelled word you all made up to describe me, an uninformed technology user.

Any troll (pedo) not in your inner circle and not agreeing with your forum-thread's POV

Ghetto chic
(Golden Goose shoes for that used, broken-in look)

So now I have a richer-than-god christmas shopping list and a fair-assumption that "r" means roaming and the arrows mean syncing (email)

No one I know of represents "state-of-charge" as a voltage, they use percent, and damn the voltage, which people seem to want to be as high as possible (eg, 20v)

https://www.theverge.com/c/22807871/apple-frontline-employees-retail-customer-service-pandemic

--

What exactly Is "USB-C-PD" as it pertains to most cell phones?

Yeah, I read you've improved it, the cables are no longer directional, and they can handle more power,

but there are several power schemes; why is "PD" so great?

If you thought I was being bombastic, read (one single itty-bitty)the source https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/usb-pd-power-delivery-charger/

But it's a standard to rule all standards, until they upgrade it, in a month or so.
Samsung vs Qualcomm vs Huawei are all supposed to stop mid-quarrel to stare at the lovely PD, but she'll change in the wink of an eye (you watch.)

Assuming there's no harm in hooking a phone to a dead-charger, an outlet-timer is the most fantastic solution ever. Fuck technology. beee cause, This:

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/56886/is-it-okay-to-store-a-battery-in-its-unplugged-charger

insert rant here

---

Let me see...I really like a remote-controlled version because I don't get around easily.

A programmed outlet-controller, easily run for maybe an hour (as needed, whenever,) would be best. The link above has a fantastic feature called "My Countdown Timer" And does not need a computer to use.

---

Imparted-wisdom from an unreadable comment:

1. Figure out what GSAM means

2. Spend money on WEMO (whatever that is)

3. PAY someone to invent IFTTT

4 Mourn your wasted unfulfilled life

So, um, the phone is not smart enough to know when it's being overcharged, you must hack it or buy something, (?)thank you, good night.

 🤔

spotify (toots at midnight) (New! Improved! Border stuff!)

 https://insider.windows.com/en-us/podcasts/the-kitchen-sink-of-conversations

There's always a train of thought associated with these things.

My first rant, why they (Microsoft) use "Spotify" and audio-only for lighthearted tooting (bullshit) about a major product.

And buried in here somewhere is an edit about HTML bordering. I can't (right this second) find the past-rants I've done on HTML borders, they're here but I use them so rarely, I've lost them.
https://orphanrocks.blogspot.com/2021/10/fodmap-reprinted-i-think.html

You Nearly own, you almost paid for, the product, so you're One of Them already, a sheep in the fold, a choir to be preached to, so why are they making it so difficult to listen to their podcast?

I don't want spotify (I didn't know that until just now.)

You know that "System Administrator" message?

WE used to see "Call Key Operator."

Both messages are pretty meaningless....I'm at a dead end.

"(du-Du-du "Welcome to Microsoft! The place whe.......")

So if it was an MP3 with an embedded player, like below (yes, I'm editing this,)

It would work fantastic. 

They're hitching a ride on Spotify though, and we don't cotton to Spotify around here.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6DvFZwxLsK3Fmg9XQQZyJY?go=1&sp_cid=ba1a37417d40f833acf618642e7c72a8&utm_source=embed_player_p&utm_medium=desktop&nd=1 (Brandon is mad about Legos)
Something is blocking it, at least from Microsoft's website.
Very strange.
"Who invited YOU?" some computer must be asking.
Hey, I don't know, here's my golden ticket...Ya know what, forget it.
But it rankles I'm blocked or hobbled or stymied 

(whatever the term is for being unable to use a podcast)
I was Sure podcasts were little videos, now I find out they're reinventing AM-radio and charging $15 for the privilege.
Think of all the things they could charge for: 

This blog, Spellcheck as an addon, Color, Stereo sound.
Hi-res pictures (you bought that monitor to use it to watch hi-res, now pay for your transgression.)

I slept through most of Laser-discs, and All of Blu-ray, I can survive without podcasts.
Still...

Podcastiness, as fun as a medicare commercial?
I wouldn't know (yet)
https://insider.windows.com/en-us/podcasts

I shall now attempt to find a damn podcast, an obscure one, just to see if they work.

Because if they do, and they're better than "Media Player" or youtube or MP3's, um,

Geez, You-all just love them,

 and you with your 32 gigs of memory. 

So ok.

https://archive.org/download/WeirdSistersBk7Ep66/WeirdSistersBk7Ep66.mp3

(O wait, that's an mp3.

Works great, though)

Remind me someday to ask, 

what dot-net is.

https://milan.milanovic.org/post/a-brief-walk-through-net-ecosystem/

Not a language, not an IDE (like visual studio) It's a framework.

A what???

I have no frame of reference.

Seriously, wtf??

If it's a framework, why does it get updated so often?

A framework sounds like a set of rules, like some constitution. Or, is it just some library? Please speak more plainly.

So it's the same, but different.
A new paradigm
(I don't know any buzzwords besides "Paradigm")
Leverage...watch your language.
Use vs leverage, paradigm vs program, 
Framework vs package (that you buy)
It's all in the verbiage

"Office" is both a paradigm and a framework that people "leverage" to inculcate.

There. FU-RIO

It must be such a thrill to be in the AV department, setting up the sound system in the auditorium.
"Testing 1,2,3" instead of just tapping the mic.
Or doing your first few podcasts.
"Hi, and welcome to whatever" in your thick accent.


How many times they gotta test it?

Testing 1,2,3

o, that felt good. Or it was supposed to.
(Not for nothin' but they deprecated the shit outta the above, making an easy procedure in previous HTML versions, so hard it's nearly unreadable.

If not for a site you can paste attributes from, the above wouldn't work (if it even worked at all on your browser)"border-color: #FF0000; border-style: solid; border: 13px solid rgb(255, 0, 0); font-size: 50px; padding: 1em;"

and...the horse they rode in on (I forgot)

If you only fart, should you flush?

THIS

 

unsung hero tried to explain it, and failed, but your opinion may vary.

at position 1:30 https://youtu.be/D_MO9vIRBcA?t=93 He starts talking like a computer.

He's way too specific for me to grasp the concept, and makes a misstatement (I think) about code I've written in the framework on the server, and me being a client with no access to the framework at all.

If you trigger something, YOU(r code) is the caller, unless maybe you flirt so brashly with the framework, 

using perfume, makeup and lashes, that the framework cannot help itself calling you.

 

The framework makes calls to your code (Because someone told it to call)

but your code makes calls to the Library.

Libraries mostly sit gathering dust and reading romance novels, until someone calls.
They'd never call *you*.

If they said that 

1. your program, the entire executable, all whole and complete, would not work at all without a library, and this keeps executable files relatively small
2. your program might use the library to call up a paradigm for a properly formatted action-message to the framework, and the framework knows how to respond Beeee cause, the library has told it how.
3. The framework sends a digital response (all scrambled and full of biggie words) and your library tells you(r program) how to interpret the response.
   ("phhht Heeello??) 
   ("BEECATA")
4. so them calling it a framework instead of shared library's is a choice of linguistics and salesmanship.

Then I kind of get it;

This is being typed in the framework of english, so I could quote inspirational stuff, or mostly-unreadable stuff, to persuade.

If this editor answered me with an error message (it just did) it uses the framework of english couched in verbiage.

My typing comes from the library in my head, and the framework (OK, I officially got lost, WHY do I need a framework, but even if you persuaded me that I did, WHY is it updated monthly??

How could an older program work with a new framework?

So confusing.

I'm done here but I had one more ROTD to add.

You're the girl with the short tweed skirt, crossing the quad,  and you see a handsome guy standing next to a table.

He's a website advertising something you saw and were initially interested in, maybe for the things on the table (you would like to know the reason for the table and the pretty things it has on it)

Mr. High-pressure sees you as a sales target, and requests that you fill out a form (mostly who you are, where you live, and which other tables you stopped at recently)

well.

They've automated this process, such that every site you visit does this, not all are high-pressure (most are)

And .net is helping those sites, with the ultimate goal of winning friends, influencing people, and making money.

"Making money" emphasized, big letters, underlined.

Whatever the technical reasons and obfuscating verbiage, it's to keep you from using games and products without internet-authorization, and to (eventually) try to sell you stuff, or sell your identity and location and interests. (the blatant example in the link posts mind-numbing statistics with dancing commercials and a close-up of a hot administrator) (And I've got nothing against advertisements, but why do they need javascript, or (supposedly) dot-net??)

I clicked on what looked like an actress' face and she wasn't on the webpage, until I enabled Javascript.

So she appeared, saying people need shots, but a hundred commercials did as well. Now tell me again what dot-net is used for. (as opposed to curl, perl, javascript, etc)

Most people below a certain age don't care and proudly flaunt where they live and what they do, so it's all friendly and benign, but there isn't a whole lot of choice involved.

ROTD toots at midnight

 https://www.factinate.com/editorial/pantone-klein-blue-vantablack-bizarre-world-color-copyright/

The above link is a train-car in the "Lithography" train.

This was made by "Grogan", I think. The right side ran out of Ink.
Apologies for failing to find a lithographic-quality example.

A famous-er example

I am not an artist nor a designer, and maybe that picture in my head of some guy setting up his 3-color print-job is from a dream, or I was a janitor in a print-shop, for a day.

Ignoring the technology for now, what was it Used for?

Line drawings, maybe for books? 

Or maybe Artists have this underlying thought about selling exact copies of their limited-editions...

Van Gogh Liked Lithographs, https://www.vangoghgallery.com/graphicworks/, I don't think "Starry night" was one of them.
Not sure.

I don't know the subtext, which is sort of what this started out to be in search of. 

(note, lithograph vs unspellable daguerreotype, and maybe "photogravure" https://ezstamp.com/easily-differentiate-photo-litho-stamps-simple-explanation/)

o. NVM

Anyway.

Apparently artists and designers care about stuff which you know nothing.
So me knowing jack about Modern-Lithography (and this after reading for an hour) is maybe by design.

Like magicians 

A link (one of many I glossed over)https://www.alocalprinter.co.uk/faq/litho-and-digital-differences

A memory: Of a college-studio tech reluctantly explaining to me the differences between a film-movie camera and an electronic camera (like the one in your phone.)

I was attempting to discern the difference in lenses. I still am, kind of (not really, but it's an unanswered question)

And none of this makes any sense, is not blog-worthy, it was just a very pretty ROTD.

Putting this into perspective, knowing what a hemi engine or slant-six is, is fantastic, I guess.
Which is more efficient, which is more cost-effective, which wins more races, why would anyone care, is the template for a zillion arguments (toots at midnight from trains of thought)

cable tidbitties

 The blue connector says (whatever it says) and a blue label was tacked on as an afterthought saying 
"To PC"
And the red side has a tacked-on label saying "To Sink".
Once people figure out that a sink isn't actually a sink, (shorting out the cable and ruining it)
(I mean, as an afterthought they could have just said "To Phone" but that would piss off anal techs)
At first, the phone (I don't know about the PC) just said "Charging" and re-plugging the cable did not help.
Then I restarted the phone.
With very little fanfare, (no boopity-boop-boop,) it hooked up to the PC and showed the phone in explorer.
Unfortunately I have not had a chance to check out the charger...it's charging too fast on the PC. OK I'll plug it in now.
These cables generally are stiff and appear brittle, and who would want to prove that wrong?
Not me, get the guy who breaks iPads on YouTube.
Anyway it seems to charge correctly with the charger.
Fast charging, 95% charge, and it tells me 21m until full
Which is actually kind of nice; it's easing the current down.
Source=PC, Source=Charger, and the phone can be the sink forever, no reversals needed. But Reading the manual (yes, it has a manual!) It says that the phone is the source, to a (for example) "docking station", which I'll need to research.

WTF is a docking station?? Is it the same as a charger???

I had this idea to box up and put away my only other USB-c cable that transmits data, but that was stupid because I don't want to mess with the new cable very much.
OK maybe this once, to test a theory about source(s)

This next part is strange and cannot be explained easily: 
The phone must Always be restarted to get data to flow across the cable.
This was true before, It's true now (it isn't the cable.)
Then there's the electronic-thingy in the *middle* of the cable, looking exactly like some switch.
Or like a snake that swallowed lunch, whatever.

Maybe it's OK that my "docking station"(charger) works backwards, the old men in the meeting for this stuff must've been told to mellow-out, because no one ever in the history of identical-connector-cables ever heard of one-way cables.

But

Just in case they were irascible assholes, apparently my phone should be the source when hooked to a charger.

FINE! Whatever (geez)

"Your finger couldn€™t  be recognized" is an inside-joke, right?

Wash your hands, pray, Reinstall windows (Please mark this as helpful)
Longwinded (and unhelpful)

O. NVM & H.A.N.D.
(They cared about the apostrophe but the keyboard was too much work)

Total non-sequitur: How much of windows is contracted out? Do they let others do the windows, while they dream up large-scale paradigms?

And when were these versions written, months ago?
And in a time too long ago for me to remember, drivers were on the installation CD, all whole and complete, and all a person had to do was copy them over or point windows to where they were, but these days, they're buried DEEP within the (SSD, whatever) and I cannot extract the ones that work.

Yes, bits are coming back to me now...the drivers were in numbered cab-files. If you knew the cab-file number of the driver you wanted, or were good at wildcards, you could extract the driver you wanted.

NOW it's a damn-PITA that I'll have to google the rest of the night, or give up and wait for the update.

(The update to the Beta, because the released-version on the SSD works great, if I could access it)

It takes three devices to power my keyboard; Currently none of them work correctly.
(At this exact second, I'm not even sure those are the right devices; but there are three for one)

So this cable must be some snide joke about cable-design, but so far it does not seem to matter.

But I have one last experiment to perform:
Instead of, as above, making the phone always be "sink", I should try hooking up the phone to my computer, with the phone as the "Source".

If it works fine, then whatever anyone does, shouldn't matter, and you bringing this up at parties or in forums is an inside joke against you.

Yes, It works to my PC with the phone as "source" (with the blue label, the one saying "to PC" hooked to the phone.)

so....It works either way, probably due to some fancy circuitry in the phone.

NOTE: I cannot (or don't know how to) take a screenshot of the screen that the phone put itself on just now:

< USB Settings
   USB Controlled by:

•    Connected Device (couldn't switch)
•    This Device

The point (if there is one) is that the phone is capable of switching roles (except it isn't, but it *could be*)

And this page on the phone is using the OEM white non-directional Samsung cable.

More intense scientists would have to experiment to see which connection is faster; I have no way of knowing.

The SanDisk-USB drive is recognized but the phone says that it would need to be formatted to use.

I'm happy it's recognized, and on the extremely rare occasions I'd hook a drive to a phone, My phone (in theory) would be the source, and the drive, the sink (or more probably, a much shorter non-directional cable would be used)

-------------------------------

File this under "Annoying things people do"

and don't EVER DO THiS https://www.wikihow.com/Hack-Lights-on-Keyboard

You migHT RemEmbER (PrOBaBLY not) tHAT i Wrote MY keYboard wAs seemingly broken And the CAPs And the num-lock woRKED UNexpeCTEDLY.

wELL, it's been a weEK, mICROSOFT has no fix yet, BUT I woNdered hOW hard IT WOUld BE TO toggLE the liGHtS IN A PROGram, WHICh is MAYBE WHAT mIcroSOfT WAs Trying to AVoid (sqUELCH, quash, SUBSUME, ETC)

So I RAn the liTtLe pRoGRAm IN THe Link, AnD THIS is The ReSUlT.

FOOLiSH ME, for RUNNInG A PrOgraM.

bUT IF THIS IS more than temporary, I'LL BE PISsED.

YOU GOTTA UNDERstAND, mY LIGHTS HAVE not done aNYTHing, they're jusT SITTING there.

mY TEXt looks like A sERIAL KILLER.

Imagine maybe that the resident geniuses at Microsoft were bored, so one of them sent morse-code indicator-light messages to another. (F-A-G or somesuch.)

So they cancelled that, but it really screwed up the relatively simple keyboard interface program!

 (I made that story up, but the alternative narrative, that they're so mind-bogglingly incompetent that they released this, even in beta, is too horrible to contemplate.)

I've been told they're (someone is) starting to write code that scans for child-porn.

Maybe they're going to scan for cusswords, for disrespectful muslim/christian words as well.

"You are being monitored" on every webpage doesn't seem to perturb anyone...

Maybe TOS's worded carefully so as not to alarm, saying they monitor this-and that information, applies (at least experimentally) to keyboards now?

It's a thought.

------------

Ble? (whut?)

Oh.
I thought maybe (o nevermind)

Topical ROTD

Mars is a sandbox for the very, very rich.

You might disagree, and say the sandy blob is a gold mine of jobs and grants for science.
They say that machines on Mars can collect and look at sand, and here is the culmination of their efforts:

But why are they really there?
No, really. They haven't seen any martians,they haven't discovered any lakes, and the zillion dollar theory that the mars planet could have been teeming with life and water, could just mean it was part of a larger planet.
But now that they're there, mining for precious stones and minerals, maybe a dinosaur or two, is something to do.

The articles I've read from google's front page, don't say much about the size of the picture or the distance taken.

Six inches or 60 feet? A mile or a foot?
Let me (probably mistakenly) assume it's a foot - around, taken from inches away.

With no frame of reference, none at all, the photos in this link look like someone had their camera in their pocket. https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/WSM_0250_0689143205_000ECM_N0080000MEDA00000_0000LUJ

They dropped two rocks on Mars to see if anyone would notice; no one did.

77kg,

Then I googled images of sandy beaches (o gawd, this looks preachy now)

So I'll skip to the end:

You can't legislate trash, noise, morality, and people want money; it's why they do whatever they do.

Sales Also DF/UF/USB-PD-PPS

 

It's said in various places that 

• Vendors will try to convince you that only OEM chargers should be used;
• Some of the OEM Chargers are fake

I'm wondering about the first one,

and the second one as well.

Here comes the confusing part, *not* from the net but from the charger itself:

PDO 5.0V = 3.0A or 9.0 = 3.0A

or

15V= 3.0A or 25V=2.25A

PPS 3.3-11.0V = 4.05A or 3.3-16.0V = 2.8A

or

3.3-21.0V = 2.1A

An old Samsung charger is not PDO nor PPS,

9.0V = 1.67A 

5.0V = 2.0A

(that "equals sign" I keep typing is inaccurate; it is actually a symbol for DC volts, and the other sign looks like a wavy line (For AC)

These are no simple 5-volt chargers, one is 9 volts potentially,

One is 20 volts potentially.
That's a real punch in the arm for the wrong phone.

https://www.gsmarena.com/dont_just_buy_any_45w_pd_charger_for_the_samsung_galaxy_note10-news-38837.php

Very long cable works, sort of (not really)

https://www.techspot.com/news/61874-usb-type-c-get-less-confusing-through-more.html

Hello? (Phhht) Heello??
I ordered an "Active" cable for three-times the cost of mortal cables, that has all the specs I'd need. 
Not "100w" but "60W" (the freaking charger is only 45)

And it's not a hairy cable, it's smooth and thin.

A reviewer states that it has chips inside.
Well, whatever, it better dance and sing, for the price.

Before Madness ensues (see below), I think that the charger is a host, and the phone is a sink.

"so, let's change sink and source to DFP and UFP, just to keep them guessing"

OTG (must be democrat)

Embittered Psychotics might remember the poster from 1979
(Pre cat "Hang in there Baby") 
But this is all I could find quickly.

But I did not come here to denigrate the pissant clowns coming up with this stuff, but to buy a 2021-era cable that should last through a couple more brain-farts

It's not a question of *slow*, it's a question of "not working at all" for whatever the hell greek fucking reason, and that is why I'll overbuy,  because the newer versions, coated with snake-oil, will please windows and the damned phone!!

O, fine, slither away in horror....

------------

My keyboard's Num-lock, Caps lock key were frozen. I ERASED Windows (which amounts to some capital offense, I suppose) but it was cheaper than buying another PC or another keyboard! 

A hint was, in BIOS the keyboard worked perfectly.

No, windows got a hair up its gigantic ass and stuff died.

The Official windows (22000?) has the keyboard perfect, but

the beta 22494 kills the num and caps-lock.

Amazon seems to have about as vague an idea of what you want, as Microsoft does when you report a problem.

"Usb c to c" "10 ft" "10gbps"
brings up HDMI and extension cords, 3-footers.

Google takes me seriously and finds what I want ON Amazon.

Except, there are hosts of cables (tons, scads) and it's hard to know if I picked the right one.