Monica

Dear Brain Trust,

I have a technical problem that I'm a few clues shy of solving. Can you help?

I have a personal web site, which I built using an SSG called Yellow. I'm using a few of their extensions, most importantly Blog. The way you use Yellow is to download and unpack a ZIP file, download any extensions you want into that directory structure, and add your content (also into that directory structure). The source is on GitHub but they also give you these ZIP files.

Last summer I downloaded those ZIP files, unpacked them, started tweaking things, and added my own content. I never cloned their repositories; I just took the ZIP files. Eventually I figured out that the easiest way for me to deploy my site was to use GitHub: I created a private repository, into which I added my then-current versions of both the tooling and the content, and I update it as needed (for example to add this post).

Yes I now know this was the wrong way to go about it. Apparently we won't have gotten "send clue back in time" working in my lifetime.

Since then, they've made some updates that I would like to take advantage of. I want to update to the new version, incorporating the changes I made to the previous version (figure out what they were and how to apply them). And I want to figure out a better way to organize this so that the next upgrade is more straightforward.

I imagine that what I wanted to have done instead was to fork their repos, apply my changes, make a separate repo for my content, and (do magic here) so it all works together. I don't know what that magic is. I'd like to check my assumptions about this being a better approach. Is there some other way I should be managing this? Another way to think about it is that my project (my site) has GitHub dependencies (those other two repositories); I'm not familiar with how dependencies are typically managed.

I mentioned I'm using GitHub for deployment. More specifically: I make edits on my personal machine, commit and push, and then on the hosting server I pull and, wham, the site is up to date. There's no explicit build step and I'm not fussing with rsync. My "aha" moment was that git can already figure out what's changed and needs to be pulled, so why should I have to? I like this simplicity.

I have found the version of the blog extension I started from (thank you for explicit version numbering), so it is possible to identify the changes I made to the original.

Should I create new repos (or forks) from the previous version, apply my changes, get that working, and then try to do the upgrade from there? How should I manage the multiple git repositories so that everything ends up in the right places? There's one repo for the base system (yellow), one for all the extensions (which overlays the file structure of the base system), and then I need a place for my actual content. How do I do this?

I am starting to think new-phone thoughts, and I'm looking for some meta-advice: advice about traits and how to research stuff more than specific models. (The latter are welcome too, but my questions are a litlte higher-level.)

One of my strongest concerns is about size, both physically and digitally. My current phone has the following stats:

• Dimensions: 151.7 x 75 x 7.9 mm
• Display size: 5.5 inches, 82.2 cm2 (~72.2% screen-to-body ratio)
• Resolution (this is very unusual): 1440 x 2560 pixels, 16:9 ratio (~538 ppi density)

In recent years phones have reverted to worse-than-2:1 aspect ratios. They've reinvented candybars, dammit. But maybe that's ok, if I can still see stuff. So, can I?

I almost always use my phone in portrait mode, as I think most people do. I don't watch movies; I read text. Web pages, mostly. That text needs to be able to be wide enough to be comfortable to read, and for web sites to not break if (when) I need to zoom. For context, on my current phone I have Chrome text scaling at 110% (minimum size, starting from whatever their default is), and "force enable zoom" because some web developers are rude that way.

The aspect ratios I'm seeing on modern phones are generally in the range of 1080:2400, give or take a bit. That 1080 width is significantly smaller than my current width of 1440. I assume that just means that, for phones of equal physical width, my phone is just packing in a lot more pixels per inch, so the display is a little crisper. I don't think I've seen pixel densities that high on specs I've looked at.

Pixels, schmixels, maybe: I don't know why this matters. Does it? I would naively expect that lower pixel density means a little more blurriness, but since I have to zoom most things to see them at all, do I care?

But there's a wrinkle. In order to get that physical width, with the change in aspect ratios I'd need to accept a phone that's about a centimeter longer. I'm concerned about pockets. Women, especially curvy women, if you carry a larger phone in your pants pocket, what's the secret? I assume that "butt-dialing" is just a figure of speech and folks don't actually carry phones in back pockets, right? (I tried putting mine there and it felt both uncomfortable and unsafe.)

So at current aspect ratios, I need to either settle for a narrower phone, raising questions about whether that width can meet my vision needs, or accept a longer phone, and figure out how to test that with front pockets of my jeans and chinos, because buying a whole new wardrobe to accommodate a phone is ridiculous. Phone in pants pocket is a hard requirement: purses, belt pouches, backpacks, "on the desk next to you", and dresses are unacceptable solutions. I want the safety of having it actually on my person (harder to separate from me), and I want to be able to feel vibrations because most of the time the sound is turned off in public. (Granted, "in public" has been rare of late, but I hope my next phone outlasts the current restrictions.)

Other factors besides size:

• I want this phone to last for a few years, so 5G seems prudent. All the 5G phones except iPhones seem to be huge?
• I'm pretty solidly on Team Android. I'm not a fan of either Apple or Google when it comes to how they treat people, but I'm less of a fan of Apple and I'm already used to Android. (Also, my tablet is Android.)
• I take pictures sometimes, and am even trying to learn to use the non-default settings on the camera, but "has a camera that doesn't stink" is likely to be good enough. Lots of phones these days hype their super-megapixel 4-lens cameras; I don't think I care. If I should care, please clue me in.

Does anybody make a phone that might meet my requirements with a more pleasant aspect ratio (and thus form factor for vision and pockets)? Short of reading specs for phones one at a time, how can I find out? Searching for things like "5g android 16:9 2021" isn't producing hits.

[Update to the update, 2020-12-14 13:15 EST: Lost service again this morning. After much discussion with a T-Mobile rep, I've learned that they are doing work on my tower to upgrade it for 5G, this work will continue for a few weeks, and while they don't think there are general outages despite my reports, "brief interruptions" are possible during this work. Uh...]

[Update 2020-12-13 15:45 EST: Problem went away on its own; see comment below for more info.]

I generally don't keep my phone's WiFi on; even though I could use my home network, I don't tend to run into throttling on the cell network, this frees up some home bandwidth for other things (like my work computer, since March), and I'd rather not have other WiFi networks passively tracking me when I'm out and about (not a consideration since March, but someday again I hope).

On Thursday my phone started dropping the cell connection -- flaky, not outright reporting errors, but almost entirely not working. (In timing that somehow just fits in 2020, it dropped two minutes before an important phone call.) I've switched to WiFi, which seems to demand more battery, but eh, it's a workaround.

This, however, leaves me with the underlying problem: what the heck is going on? I've already power-cycled, reseated the SIM card, reset the network connections (but not messed around in APN), toggled into and out of airplane mode... none of that helped. I even got a new SIM card from T-Mobile (on Friday) and swapped that in; still nothing. Another device on the same network (and plan) gets low bars but gets bars. This feels like a recent degradation, but in the course of debugging this I learned that Dani uses the home WiFi all the time, so I don't have good data from a second device.

I talked with an actual human at T-Mobile (in order to get the new SIM card), who told me that he's not surprised that a phone released in 2016 (I bought in in 2017) is having problems on "modern networks" (by which we mean the 4G LTE that's been there for the life of this phone). His take is that technology moves on and my phone's antenna probably isn't powerful enough any more. I don't know how to test that hypothesis; if the antenna were completely gone it wouldn't work with WiFi either, but it does.

Is there some other debugging I can do, or any simple repair I can make? Or am I in "buy a new phone" territory?

A new phone wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing; mine is stuck at Android 7.1.1 (because of US trade blocks against China that happened mere weeks after I bought the phone). But the phone otherwise works fine, so if it's fixable then replacing it would be a waste. And, more significantly: WTF is with phone sizes and aspect ratios these days? My phone has a 16:9 aspect ratio and is 6" long. This is a good size for me. Anything bigger won't comfortably fit in my pocket; much smaller and I'll have trouble seeing. And that's where the width comes in: modern phones are too freaking skinny for text! They've all been designed around the idea that you'll watch widescreen movies on your phone, I guess, which I consider ridiculous -- I'll watch movies on my TV or at least my full-size monitor, or if really pressed, my 10" tablet. Not my phone. But to make them support that, they've made the portrait orientation tall and skinny, and that does not work for me.

Remember when cell phones were new and not yet smart? (Some of you might not.) There were two basic styles: flip-phones and candy bars. I never understood why anybody liked the candy bars; they were large and prone to butt-dialing. A flip-phone fit in my pocket fine and its keys couldn't accidentally be pressed while closed. While locking has presumably cut down on butt-dialing, I still don't want the candy-bar form factor.

(My phone is a ZTE Axon 7. I would like as close to its aspect ratio and size as I can get, if I have to get a new one.)

--

A tip led me to Network Cell Info Lite, which has gauges with needles that hover between the orange and red zones (not completely static). I'll collect some more data points when getting take-out tomorrow.

Dear brain trust,

On my domain, I have email addresses that collect a local copy (i.e. I can use webmail on my domain to read them) and also forward a copy to my Gmail address. This is particularly helpful for low-volume addresses that I might not otherwise check frequently.

Today somebody with whom I'd been corresponding contacted me via another channel to report that his email was now being rejected -- by Gmail. Sure enough, the copies are sitting in my domain mailbox just fine, but there's no sign of them at Gmail -- not in trash, not in spam, just not there. Gmail seems to have decided to reject them and not even tell me.

I have questions.

1. How do I get Gmail to stop doing that, at all? If email is sent to my Gmail address, especially by my own forwarder!, I want it to show up there. In the spamtrap is fine if Google thinks it is. Silent deletion is Not Ok.

2. If I can't get Gmail to stop doing it, can I get notifications somewhere?

3. I expected the forwarding from my domain to Gmail to be a private matter between those two parties. Why did the Gmail rejection get all the way back to the sender? Why did I not receive a notice of the rejection at my domain address, which is what sent it along to Gmail? Is there something I can do, presumably via CPanel, to intercept rejections by forwarding addresses?

4. Gmail has filters, which can be used to process incoming email in various ways. I've used them to whitelist a few senders that Gmail thinks are spammers that aren't. When in the pipeline do filters get applied? I think it's after this rejection it's doing, since the message goes nowhere that I can see, but I've whitelisted this particular address now in any case.

I am using an HP docking station (I think it's this one) with my laptop. I actually have two of these docks, one at the office and one at home.

At the office, everything works correctly.

At home, the dock successfully handles video (external monitor) and power, but it does not "see" the USB ports or the ethernet port. I've been working around this by plugging USB directly into the laptop and using Wifi, but I'd like to actually solve the problem. Any ideas?

Everything I've found on Google leads to suggestions to update Thunderbolt drivers or change BIOS settings, but I repeat: it works at the office. That tells me the problem is not with the laptop but with the dock.

Does the dock need software updates of its own? I tried asking Google about that but kept ending up at instructions to update Thunderbolt drivers on the laptop.

I don't want to do anything to the laptop. I don't want to get back to the office (I assume that will happen someday) and find out I've broken things there. I can use these workarounds at home.

But it seems like I ought to be able to fix this so I don't have to?

The TiVo that I bought (used) 4.5 years ago is showing signs of malaise -- probably the hard drive (again) but it's hard to tell. This is my second TiVo and I'm not exactly enchanted by their subscription model -- required if you want program data, which is pretty essential for programming recordings, but when they say "lifetime subscription" they mean lifetime of the box. If I watched a lot of TV that might be worth the cost, but it's hard to justify for the amount I watch. And their monthly subscription is a non-starter; that's just a way to pay them even more money for the relatively small amount I watch. I'm also not enchanted by the tendency of their technical-support people to respond to every problem with "you should buy a new TiVo".

I'm looking for an alternative and appealing to my DW brain trust for suggestions.

Some specifics: ( Read more... )

I don't know a lot about the nuts and bolts of responsive design (the "how", I mean), but Stack Exchange is moving toward it so I'm starting to pay attention.

Meanwhile, my ancient tablet seems to be in its death throes, so I've started to look around at what's out there these days, and I realized something. I'm looking at some 10" tablets with resolutions like 2048x1536. My 30-inch monitor at work is something like 2500px wide. These are, of course, not even remotely the same size pixels. Pixels have always varied with the size of the monitor, of course, but a ~10" tablet used to be in the range of 1024 or 1280 wide (landscape), not twice that.

I've seen discussions of SE's upcoming responsive design that say things like "and at widths under 900px it does this" and "the max width for the content area is (some number of pixels)".

How does this work? How can I see reasonable "real-world" sizing of things on both my big monitor and my tablet when designers are measuring things in pixels and tablets are doing crazy-dense things with pixels these days? I guess the same can be said of 4k displays (which I don't have). Do these ultra-dense devices somehow tell the browser "no, really, treat me as half that for layout purposes"? On a tablet will I need to have tons of zoom -- but still struggle to see the actual application's controls, because those don't zoom when you make content bigger?

I must be missing something obvious. Anybody want to enlighten me?

My (Android) phone alerts me when traffic is bad near me. This can be handy at the end of the day because I work downtown. Except... it's telling me about traffic on roads I don't use to get home. Sure, there's spillover so it's not unhelpful, but it'd be great if I could tell it -- maybe by gesturing on a map -- what paths I care about, so it could tell me about those ones.

Does anybody reading this know of an app that does that, or a way to get Google Maps to do it? It needs to be fire and forget; I don't want to have to open the map app to look for red lines on it.

It feels like all the information is already there, if only my phone were making use of it.

(This would also let me know before I leave in the morning if traffic is still bad at the other end. At that time I don't really need extra information about traffic near my house; I need it 3-5 miles away.)

Can you believe that I've been online since the ARPAnet and yet, in 2017, do not know the nuts and bolts of domain-name management? Perhaps you, dear reader, will point me toward the clues, and I promise not to be offended that you're quietly snickering there.

The recent LJ upheaval is far from the first signal that really, if you care about durable links, you need to own your own domain, but it's the one that's finally gotten through to me. Instead of relying on Livejournal or Dreamwidth or Medium or whomever else to provide a durable path to my stuff, I ought to control that, so if a service goes belly-up, the old, public URLs still work (with content migrated elsewhere).

What (I think) I would like (please tell me if this is flawed): some domain -- I'll use cellio.org as my example, though that one is taken so I'll need another -- where www.cellio.org points to my ISP-provided web content (which I can easily edit), blog.cellio.org points to my DW journal, medium.cellio.org points to my Medium page, and I can set up other redirects like that as needed. So I can't do anything about links that are already out there, but I can give out better URLs for future stuff (stop the bleeding, in other words). Bonus points if the durable URL stays in the URL bar instead of being rewritten (unlike pobox.com redirects), but that might be hard.

I do not want to run my own web server.

Now I already pay pobox.com for, among things, URL redirection, but it's to a single destination. And it's not at the domain level -- www.pobox.com/~cellio redirects to my ISP-provided web space. It'd be ok, though a little kludgy, if I could manufacture URLs like www.pobox.com/~cellio/blog that do what I described above, but unless there's something I can drop into my own web space, without requiring access to my ISP's web server, I don't think I can do that. Also, this leaves me dependent on pobox.com; owning my own domain sounds like a better idea. pobox.com has been solidly reliable for 20+ years, but what about the next 20?

I understand that I need to (a) buy a domain and (b) host it somewhere, and if I were running my own server then (b) would apparently be straightforward, but I don't know how to do that in this world of distributed stuff and redirects. Also, I'm not really clear on how to do (a) correctly (reliably, at reasonable cost, etc).

So, err, is this a reasonable thing to want to do and, if so, what should I do to make it happen?

Dear Brain Trust,

Years ago I bought the iWorks office suite for my Mac. This consists of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. When I got a new Mac, the applications didn't transfer correctly; they're there, but they crash on startup. I don't know if this was because of the new machine itself or because of the OS change. (The old machine ran 10.6. The new one ran 10.8.5 when I migrated, and I've now upgraded it to Sierra.)

I had assumed that I would just have to buy the suite again (or replace it), though today I found a two-year-old article that said that it comes with new Macs. Not mine, it didn't. I looked in the App Store and I don't see the bundle any more, though I can buy the applications individually for $20 each.

I'm not heavily invested in these particular tools, but I need some way to occasionally edit Word documents and spreadsheets. (I've never edited a slide deck on my Mac.) I don't want to spend a lot on this because it's in that aggravating niche of "occasional need, but important when it happens". The old Mac is still on the network because my very-rarely-needed scanner doesn't work with the new Mac either (drivers, I assume), and also the old one has a CD drive, but I'd rather edit documents locally than via remote desktop.

Any recommendations?

For the past couple weeks -- but not before then -- both Firefox and Chrome have been randomly seizing up on me on my Mac at home (running Snow Leopard). When this happens, first that application and then (about 10-15 seconds later) the entire machine become unresponsive, presenting the spinning beachball of doom. After a minute or so, but occasionally longer, things go back to normal. Sometimes I see a Chrome pop-up about an unresponsive site flash by. When this happens and I can watch in the Activity Monitor, neither CPU nor memory is pegged. Sometimes this happens once a day; sometimes it happens a couple times in an hour. It's becoming a pretty big usability problem.

All browsers are up to date (and not beta versions). This doesn't happen on my work machine (Win7). Dani says this happens to him on his brand-new iMac with maxed-out memory, but only with Firefox. (So he uses Chrome -- problem solved.) For me on my dusty old Mac Mini, it's happening with both browsers. I can't figure out what changed -- why is this happening now?

Googling told me that disabling the Flash player extension/addon/plugin/whatever could fix this, but it didn't. I've also looked through extensions and disabled anything I'm not actively using; it's pretty bare-bones. I do have several userscripts, none written by me, but I don't see anything glaringly suspicious in their code. I've already disabled the ones I can live without at least for a while, but a couple of them really are critical. I'm not finding any help on the Apple forums.

I've been thinking about upgrading my hardware anyway, as even before this started my Mac was starting to get sluggish sometimes. I bought it in something like 2009, so that's not too surprising. But the Mini hasn't been updated since October 2014, so this is the wrong time to buy -- something better should be coming before too much longer.

Meanwhile, I'd like to diagnose and fix this problem. But I'm out of ideas. :-(

I've been thinking about updating my streaming. You can help. :-)

Apple TV (forthcoming) and Roku are both attractive and are clearly competitors. Both offer voice input, and "hey Siri, find $movie_title" would be way, way easier than using a remote control or phone to type a search, perhaps multiple times (once per channel/app). How well it works, and whether Siri will make it hard to find free alternatives to things in the Apple store, are open questions. I do not care one whit about playing games on my TV.

I have a first-edition Roku ("Roku 1", except it was just "Roku" then) and its user interface is pretty good, though I haven't gotten software updates for a year or two now (no longer supported) so I don't know what the modern UI looks like. One thing that I find annoying on my Roku is that you can only rewind or fast-forward in "steps" that are about 10-15 seconds apart, and when you jump it pauses to contemplate its navel before resuming (at which point you find out if you hit the spot you meant). So advancing to the end of the opening credits or backing up to hear that dialogue again is tedious and should be seamless. I much prefer the conventional rewind/fast-forward of my DVD and TiVo, where you see sped-up video as it goes by.

I mentioned TiVo, which streams. But TiVo's UI for streaming is really bad for people with less-than-stellar vision and measly little 42" TVs. If I can't read the titles from my chair, it's not very useful.

I also have a (new) Chromecast, an inexpensive experiment to see if that would do the job. I like it in principle, and you can't beat either the price or the footprint, but I've run into two issues. One is that it needs my phone's WiFi to be on and that sucks battery. That's probably livable because I keep a spare battery charged. The other is that Chromecast is only as good as the phone apps that drive it, and I really, really need a better Netflix app and haven't been able to find it.

The Netflix Android app is all about the eye candy. When viewing either my queue or search results, it shows me the cover art for each title -- but not the names in plain old text. Consider cover art, three to the row, scaled for a phone. I can't see that, and the app doesn't support zoom. I've found no setting to toggle between cover art and a text list. I've searched the app store for "Netflix" hoping to find third-party apps, but no luck so far. (By the way, the Crackle app has the same problem.)

Also, rewinding or fast-forwarding by moving a YouTube-style pointer really, really stinks. Netflix, where are the rewind/fast-forward buttons?

I'm mentioning Netflix a lot because that's really the only thing I stream from now. Roku has hundreds of channels but you have to interact with them individually, so I never do -- a unified search, on the other hand, would provide an entry to that. Since I'm already paying for Netflix I'm otherwise only interested in the free ones; I had thought that included Hulu but the phone app suggests that it's all paid now.

Dear readers who are technologically way ahead of me, any input?

We sometimes hear about mandatory evacuations because of storms (hurricanes, winter storms, etc). Hearing about one a couple of years ago that was announced on a Saturday morning prompted me to ask this question about evacuations on Shabbat. Now the question of timing has come up.

I've been fortunate to never have to evacuate my home or city. (Buildings yes, but that's different.) I have this impression, perhaps informed by Hollywood rather than reality, that announcements get broadcast far and wide and then police or National Guard or whoever start going through the area making sure people clear out, and you maybe have an hour or two to get underway at best. But then I thought about the logistics of that, and I'm wondering if you really have several hours, maybe the better part of a day, to do your prep and get out.

I'm not talking about cases where the problem is immediate (there's just been an earthquake, the missile will strike in half an hour, etc), but about other cases where the threat is dire enough that there is an evacuation but it might not be "drop everything and go right now" -- the storm is making landfall tonight, cases where you have (or think you have) time to get everybody home from work/school so you can leave together, pack your car, contact people outside the affected area to arrange for shelter, etc. I realize it's a good idea to get out as soon as you can, if nothing else because of traffic, but we know people don't always do that (and can't always, if not everybody is together to start with).

So for those of you who've been through these kinds of evacuations, or who know more about it than I do, what's the timeline usually like? How long do people take to clear out?