Monica

My cell phone (Samsung Galaxy S4) had been showing signs of its age, and then more recently it started spontaneously (and unpredictably) rebooting, sometimes several times in a row. This happens with both of my batteries, so it's probably something in the hardware. (Yeah, checked for seating, dust, etc.) It's also running Android 4.4.4 and Samsung has no plans for further updates (aside from security patches, when they get around to it); meanwhile, the current Android release is 7.something. So I started shopping and reading reviews.

I would have been willing to get the latest Samsung, on the theory that after the fiery-batteries-of-death fiasco they're probably being careful with the next one. But... ugh, aspect ratio! I do not want a long, skinny phone! I'm mot going to watch super-wide-screen movies on my phone, and the thing is too skinny to read web pages, email, or anything else once I apply a bit of zoom. Meanwhile, the extra length (height) isn't helpful and further challenges pockets. Ick. Remember back before smartphones, when the two form factors were flip-phones and candybars? I hated candybars, too.

Sadly, "longer and skinnier" seems to be becoming more common; the Google phones are the same way. So, criterion #1: reasonable aspect ratio (and size).

Criterion #2 turned out to be even harder. When did removable batteries stop being a thing? I've replaced the battery somewhere along the line on my last two phones (to get extra life out of them). Actually, with the S4 I got a spare battery fairly early on, which allowed me to carry an extra, charged battery in my pocket on phone-intensive days, like when taking lots of photos on vacations. There are still phones out there with replaceable batteries, but they're a dying breed. I only found one that got ok reviews, and it had some other weirdnesses.

I went to the local T-Mobile store to see if they had anything interesting that I'd missed in my searches (and, you know, to fondle the phones). Long and skinny rules the shelves there too.

In the end I bought a ZTE (who?) Axon 7 (whazzat?). It has a good screen size and aspect ratio and lacks a removable battery. I'm a little concerned about the latter (how many times can I charge this phone before the battery dies, taking the phone with it?), but I assume if it modern batteries were terrible that way, I'd've heard. I've never bought a phone without seeing one first, but I took a chance.

I took it to T-Mobile today to have service transferred, came home and took a 1.8G OS update to 7.0 (the phone shipped with 6.something), and at this point I think I've got most of the basic settings right. So far I'm happy.

It's too early to evaluate the software, but the folks at ZTE clearly put some thought into other usability and user-experience considerations. I don't usually care about the "opening the box" experience (just gimme my stuff), but their packaging stood out as well-designed. The box includes the wall charger of course; it also includes an adapter to use with your micro-USB cables because this phone (like many newer ones) takes USB-C in. They could have just said "hey, we gave you a charger; you're on your own for the rest", but they didn't. The box also includes a case -- not a high-end one or anything, but I've never seen a phone that included one before instead of making you buy it separately. It also includes a screen protector -- ditto, always a separate purchase in the past. In short, the box not only contained everything I needed to use the phone, but it even included an adapter I could stick on my car charger or power pack. (There's also a set of earbuds, which I don't care about.)

There is one mystery object in the box, a piece of rubber(?) of a size to cover the (rear) camera and fingerprint reader (why would you?), but with no obvious place to snap it in, and with what looks like a pin buried in it at one end. The guy at T-Mobile was mystified, too.

Price-wise, this is a mid-range phone, not inexpensive but also not in the Samsung Galaxy S8 range. I hope the battery lasts a few years, to give me a cost per year that's comparable with the last one.

Today my phone buzzed with an emergency notification. The icon resembled the hurricane symbol used by weather alerts. The text said "shelter in place". I looked out the window at the clear blue sky.

I opened the notification and got a slightly longer notice (maybe this was a Google Card?) saying something like "sent on behalf of the emergency something-or-other, Allegheny County, shelter in place". Still confused, I opened that to get the full notification...which said people in such-and-such township are to shelter in place because of a fire at the site of a chemical spill.

Needing to get an alert out and using a system already in place for that (the weather service) makes sense. And, of course, you'll have to use their icons, and of the weather symbols on tap, a hurricane is probably reasonable.

Sending alerts based on current location is a well-understood problem. My provider -- or rather, whatever computer at my provider pushes these notifications -- knew that I was, in fact, in Allegheny County.

But didn't that same system also know that I was nowhere near such-and-such township? And would it have been too hard to put that very important location information into an earlier phase of the alert, instead of waiting for people to click through twice?

I sure hope nobody in such-and-such township got the alert, looked at his phone, looked out the window, said "hurricane? are you nuts?", and went out to rake his leaves.

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?

I have a personal Skype account, which I use very rarely via my personal tablet. That's all fine, or was the last time I checked, anyway.

I also need Skype for work, so to prevent mingling I created a work account (6+ months ago), using my work email address for the account name. I log in to Skype using that email address and password on a (work) tablet all the time. That's all fine.

It would be convenient for me to also have a Skype client on my work laptop, so I went to download one. Along the way I tried to sign into the Skype web site, using that email address. Whereupon it told me that my account name can't be an email address and I need to either give it a proper account name or sign in with my Microsoft account. I've no idea what they think the former is nor do I have one of the latter so far as I can tell. There's a "forgot user name?" link, but it leads to a login page for a Microsoft account. After making a few failed guesses about all of this I found my way to their support page.

Their help pages are useless for this particular situation (no I didn't forget my password). They don't publish any email addresses for support, of course, but there was a link for "support request page". Great, I thought -- so I clicked on it. And it demanded that I log in.

Earth to Skype: If you require login for people to get support, you aren't providing support for identity/password issues! Sheesh.

I verified that I can still log in on the tablet, then went back to their web site for one more try at "forgot account name". At which point it told me I've tried too many times and come back tomorrow.

By the way, neither help@skype.com nor support@skype.com is a valid address. I'm not even going to bother with postmaster or webmaster; most customer-facing sites I've tried to contact send those into a black hole, never mind that at least the former is supposed to always be defined.

Grumble. It was to be expected that Microsoft would be bad for Skype in the end, but this particular set of failures puzzles me.

By the way, I tried downloading the Windows client anyway just to see if I could log in there with my email address -- break the tie vote between the tablet (yes) and the web site (no). But it wants to make Bing my default search engine (no obvious way to turn that off) in every browser on my machine, so, um, no thanks. It has a checkbox (on by default but can be unchecked) to change my home page (again, in all browsers), but there's nothing about disabling the Bing thing. I'm willing to give IE over to Microsoft (and/or corporate IT) to violate however they like, but I draw the line at inviting tampering with the browsers I actually rely on.

Skype: this is not the way to build customer engagement. Maybe I'm better off just using my cell phone.

The first time I traveled for work with my employer I saw that I could register frequent-flyer account numbers with them and they would do the right thing there. I didn't yet have a frequent-flyer account on the carrier we usually use, but I figured I could come back and add that later.

I downloaded the airline's app, used the confirmation number for the flight as an entry point, and created an account with them. The app did all the right things for that trip.

I recently booked another trip and noticed that I hadn't yet entered the frequent-flyer account number in my travel profile (and so the app couldn't find it for me). Ok, I figured -- I'll just ask the app for my account number so I can add it to the profile. (Meanwhile, I had to use an actual phone to talk to an actual human being to connect this flight to my account.)

Nope, no way to get the account number in the app -- I'm signed in, but I apparently don't need to know the account number so they're not going to trouble me with a line in "settings" or some such.

I searched my email and found the "welcome to (us)" notice, but it didn't contain the account number either.

So I went to the web site, at which point I had to log in. After failing with my standard password algorithm I went down the "forgot password" path, which is when I discovered that my algorithm wouldn't work with them (see rant below), hence the failed login. So I reset my password with their insecure rules, logged in on the web site, and therein found my account number, which I then added to my corporate travel profile. I suspect I'll need this password at most one more time (if the app challenges me for it because it changed, which it hasn't yet).

All of this could have been averted if either the app or the welcome email had a way to find the account number. Sheesh.

In theory, now, everything should be wired up: next time I need to book corporate travel on this airline the flights will automatically show up in the app and I'll never need to directly interact with the airline. That wiring makes things easy, but it was way harder than it should have been to get the information in order to effect that wiring.

Rant: In these modern times, why in the world does anybody have password rules that do not permit any low-order ASCII character? No punctuation except periods and underscores? What is this nonsense?

My T-Mobile Galaxy 4S has, for a few weeks, been intermittently telling me that it has a software update ready but I need to take it over WiFi. (The first one came at Pennsic, I think.) This morning I got the notification while I was actually home and could connect to WiFi, so I said "yeah, sure".

Note to self: if the phone wants to use WiFi that's probably because it's a large download. That idea you had that it could do its work while you were feeding the cats and checking email? Um, no. It wasn't clear what would happen if I left before it was finished, so I let it have its half-hour.

It was only at the end that I found out what it was (though I guessed from the file size): OS update. I got a popup with words to the effect that some settings might change and I should back up my data, and would I like to install now or postpone? Yeah, that has an obvious answer.

Note to T-Mobile/Samsung/Google: you could improve the user experience there by, in that message, providing a link to a description of the differences between the current and new versions. Just sayin'. They didn't, so I found a report of this upgrade on this phone on my own. It sounds safe. I can't help noticing that that article is dated November 2013 and I'm only receiving this now. The article is silent about settings changing.

I'm also not clear (and this is not the upgrade's fault) on what data I might need to back up. Anybody know? I use my phone to take pictures which are automatically backed up already. I don't think I do any other content creation, aside from text messages I've sent I guess. Do I need to worry about application settings, like Gmail configuration, browser bookmarks, and stuff like that?

I learned a lesson about customer service in the 21st century this week. If you call a place like, say, Verizon to complain about misleading sales practices, they make some token offer like a few months of a movie channel (that you better remember to cancel later). And you'll wait on hold for a long time to get there. If, on the other hand, you tweet about it, you get a helpful response leading to something more significant within minutes. Nice to know.

So I now have HD signal coming in (yay), which my TV understands just fine but I'd like to be able to record in HD too. I currently have an ancient TiVo -- version 1, I think before they had version numbers. Obviously that doesn't speak HD, nor can it act as a tuner (I have to set the channel on the FiOS box). New TiVo boxes are pricy and then you have to add the lifetime subscription fee (up to $500 now!) because that's "lifetime of the box", not "your lifetime" so your old one doesn't transfer. This all suggests that I should be looking for a used TiVo that's newer than mine but older than the current offerings, one that already has a lifetime subscription that the seller can transfer.

It looks like the TiVo Premiere HD DVR was their first HD box and is a few years old at this point (sample offer on eBay, TiVoPedia page). I'm a little confused about FiOS integration; this takes "cable in" but I've read that FiOS or cable + HD + DVR means you need a "cable card" (rented from your service provider). How does that work? And is it user-installable? Or are cards "new" and older DVRs use the cable box?

I'd like to be able to record, in HD, and be able to program (time and channel) the DVR directly (not set the channel on a different device). I don't need to be able to record two different shows at once, or record one and watch another, or anything fancy like that. I don't need a huge hard drive. I want to keep costs down but want something that works pretty much out of the box, not "get a spare PC and...". I prefer to minimize ongoing fees (subscriptions) in favor of up-front purchases.

Please guide me, oh LJ brain trust. Most of you are way ahead of me on TV tech.

As part of a system upgrade at my shell provider, I'm now using Alpine to read mail instead of Pine. Pine showed me plain old dates/times in the list of messages, but Alpine tries to be clever and I haven't yet figured out how to turn it off. So instead of a date it'll say "Yesterday", or "Monday", etc. Very annoying, but it did produce a laugh:

I was unprepared for Alpine's treatment of the message I just got from somebody more than halfway around the world: "Tomorrow". Yes, tomorrow's mail today! Sadly, tomorrow's mail, so far, has not reported usable lottery numbers.

Recently while driving somewhere unfamiliar I made a wrong turn and wasn't sure how to recover. My new phone's search widget has a voice-input option, so on a whim I pulled the phone out and said "navigate to (location)", and it did the right thing: it correctly understood my speech, launched the navigator app, queued up my destination... and did not put the navigator app in "talk to me" mode.

So close, and yet so far. So I had to find a place to pull over so I could fiddle with the phone.

On the other hand, this is still way better than paper maps. :-)

In the last two weeks we lost both merle_ and pedropadrao. I will miss them both. :-(

And there's no good transition from that to, well, miscellany, so this paragraph will have to serve.

I suppose, technically, if you're not sure if a TV show has jumped the shark, then it hasn't. But, that said, I doubt I'll be back for the next season of "Once Upon a Time", a show that got off to a good start in season one, carried it through part of season two, and then started going farther and farther afield of its original context. In addition to links to "the enchanted forest", the land of fairy tales, they mixed in an Arthurian knight (short-lived), Captain Hook, I think a couple other odd ones, and now, in the season finale, it's clear that Never-Never Land is going to be a major factor. If they were doing the work to tell a Gaiman-style story about all these realms being intertwined or some such I'd be on board for that, but it sure feels like they're just making things up as they go along now. Oh well.

Links:

Full moon silhouettes, a really gorgeous video of the full moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, NZ. (Link from Dani.)

Best court sanctions... ever! from osewalrus. As Ose says, best use of the term "Red Shirt" in a legal decision. And you thought court decisions had to be dull...

This is great (given that such idiots exist, which is not great). Bill Walsh was riding his bike and happened to be running a helmet-cam when a cab made an illegal U-turn across the bike lane, after being warned that it was illegal, and promptly got pulled over by an oncoming police officer. The video is short and cuts out before we get to see the expression on the cabbie's face, alas.

Feast of the ravens, a photo with an interesting story behind it. What do you expect to find when a large group of ravens congregates? Not this. From shewhomust.

siderea posted an excerpt from (and link to) an essay about libraries, mandatory internet use, and the very poor that is well worth a read. As more and more stuff moves to "online only", whom are we leaving out in the cold? The ones who can least cope, it seems.

I hadn't realized that 3D printing was advanced enough to make medical implants... a year and a half ago. Ok, this was an airpipe splint, but are plastic organs in our future?

Sad cat diary, a video in the general style of Henri (but not just one cat), from Talvin over at DW.

I'm typing this from my new Android tablet -- an ASUS Transformer with keyboard dock. It's quite spiffy! (And a well-timed gift, as I was still cogitating over my dead iBook.)

It works well as a tablet -- nice display, the apps work the way I expect, and it didn't take too long to figure out some of the interface quirks (which may be real or may be signs that I've used an iPad). The on-screen keyboard is "fat"; I don't know how else to describe it, but it works (and, not surprisingly, with better accuracy than my phone). The hardware keyboard is of course smaller than a conventional one, so currently I'm making lots of typos but I'm touch-typing. The keys are closer together than I'm used to and it feels like I'm hitting them harder than I'm used to, particularly the keys toward the edges (that are less likely to be struck "straight on"). I'm still faster with the hardware keyboard than the on-screen one, though, and it doesn't take up half the screen. So, bottom line, when I want to do extensive typing I can slip it into the dock, and otherwise its a nice 10" tablet.

Please feel free to tell me about all your favorite Android apps. I have an Android phone so I know a few, but tablets and phones are different.

Good news: somebody has ported emacs to Android and it's in the store (free). Bad news: it seg-faults for me on start. It's a known problem but the suggested work-around didn't for me. I've contacted the author.

The dock provides a USB port and there's a file-browser app. This is very promising.

How in the world do I get the Google+ web site to let me use the regular, not mobile, site? I know there's an app but I don't like it; the web site is just fine with the real-estate available on a tablet. But when I try to use it it forces me into the mobile version, which isn't as good. (Not as bad as the app, but not as good as it could be.)

The previous paragraph might describe a specific symptom of a more-general problem. General solutions also welcome. :-) (Stack Exchange, by way of contrast, uses the mobile site on my phone but the regular one on the tablet, so it's not as simple as checking for mobile devices.)

There are two browsers pre-installed, "browser" and Chrome. I wonder why. I wonder what "browser" is.

LJ oddity: I'm typing this using the (regular) web site, not an app, and when typing this text is a smaller variable-width font. When focus is elsewhere (like when I typed the tags), it changes to a larger fixed-width font (Courier, I assume). I want that all the time! (This is the HTML editor, not the rich-text one.)

I'm not very good at finger-based cursor placement yet. I wonder what typos Ive introduced while editing. :-)

More to come as I use it more, I'm sure.

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

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