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.