seperis | Stripped Down

Probably going to use this one primarily on Mastodon: https://fandom.ink/@seperis

Post: mastodon: a very vague overview

I do not in any way want to discourage people using it; in fact, the opposite. I think it's great fun and is definitely fulfilling a need for me.

It does not, however, replace anything we're using now (though it's not a terrible alternative to twitter even though it's not that either, at all). Like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook (I assume), LinkedIn, LJ/DW, Reddit etc it doesn't replace or replicate so much as create a different beast entirely. There are similarities to other sites but it's really its own thing. For me, it works gangbusters in that really weird area of Category of Thing I Am Super Into but avoids Only About This Thing I Am Super Into All the Time Forever At a Very Very High Professional Level That Is Terrifying and WTF.

If you're interested but intimidated, my best advice is to join a Very Large Generalish Site, which may seem counter-intuitive but you can be sure you won't be personally noticed immediately while you flail about wondering what the hell is going on (I joined the open source software server and posted and I had three people like "Hiya Person!" and me going "I don't even know HOW TO REPLY OH GOD WHAT" which was fine and funny but that may not be your thing).

Now.

As I am getting my degree so I can go into open source software, I'm very into exploring mastodon and other Federated software options, so I am thinking of opening one specifically for me to learn the backend, watch the API calls (web service) and explore how the database works. I'm currently researching how much it will cost me monthly and getting advice on setup and how much work I'll need to do and if I have time for that matter. But the concept of the Federation is most likely the future of the internet in some way so this is probably something I need to really catch up on.

If I do, I will need guinea pigs for that to be users, and who better than my friends? So I may post here and a few other places to get volunteers to make accounts. If you're interested vaguely in joining a server but would like one where you know for a fact your admin knows less than you do, or vibe on the idea of a server that will literally be my lab to post random macros for me to see how the server processes and stores data, or want to learn how to administer one in a controlled environment, or learn with me the backend, I'd love to hear from you while I research and decide what to do. Yes, this will include me randomly turning different things on and off to see what happens, but everyone will be warned ahead of time Experiment #15 What Does This Do? is in progress. It'll be fun!

I figure if we flail, we flail together, I always say.

I wrote this up on twitter a few days ago: much better for long form. I'm going to edit with some updated information but feel free to ask me anything or correct me so I can clarify/fix.

Six days on #mastodon and I'm not sure what to think of it now. I like it, but some caveats. I've also been reading the API and github documentation and source which has influenced me. If you haven't joined yet or have but are still screwing around wondering what the heck:

1.) Do not think of mastodon as social media; if you're familiar with mailing lists, mentally recalibrate to this: a fancy live-action mailing list using a messageboard structure with some vague IRC features.

2.) There is no concept of 'private' as understood in social media.
a.) The owner of your server can see everything you post no matter what.
b.) Possibly the owner of any server who has someone following you who is reading your posts. I still reading API calls so hold that one.
c.) There are four settings for posts: Global, Unlisted, Followers Only, and Direct Message. Let me break down what that means but look at Followers-Only there. That means WHO FOLLOWS YOU. Not WHO YOU FOLLOW.
You cannot only post to those that YOU follow.
- Global - everyone who exists on a Mastodon server can can potentially see it and boost/reply/etc .
- Unlisted - same as above, but your post will not appear a public feed line your local server or federated.
- Followers Only - This is NOT 'who you follow' aka your friendlist/circle/etc.This is WHO FOLLOWS YOU. There is only one way to specifically select like that.
- DM/Mentioned people only - This will ONLY go to people you # in the post but you only have 500 characters and names count

Refresh our definitions here: FANCY MAILING LIST. But with loose affiliations to other mailing lists. Okay now we'll talk about follows and posts, the local timeline feed and the Federated timeline feed.

3.) Feeds, Timelines, and All The Things
a.) Home - that is your personal feed, equivalent to your friendslist on LJ/DW, your roll on tumblr, and home on twitter.
b.) Local - this is the posts of everyone on your server.
c.) Federated - next tweet because this one takes time.

Federated is: all the public posts of everyone on your own server's friendslists in a single feed, including yours It is not ALL THE SERVERS or ALL THE USERS. It is individuals from multiple servers who are being followed by someone on your server. It can also be servers that are on a relay if your server subscribes to that.

That means that everyone on your server can also see every public posts of every single person you are following on the Federated feed and you can see the posts of theirs.

4.) The community you choose actually is really goddamn important depending on what you want.
a.) If your server is tiny, the Local feed is going to be tiny and the Federated feed will follow.
b.) What you see on the Federated feed is very dependent on what everyone on your server is interested in. In other words, if you pick a FurrysUnite or WeOnlyLikeBach servers, your Federated feed may not be heavy on variety.

5.) Lets talk about Mastodon As Fancy Mailing Lists: each server is its own country run by its own admin with its own rules, regulations, and quirks.
a.) Admins can backend block entire servers. You can't see the people on it, follow them, see their posts, and same for them.
b. ) There are levels of blocking below Disappearing an Entire Server, sure. But you seriously seriously need to research your community first to find out what those are and ideally, a list of blocked/block-lite servers and why they're blocked.
c.) Just like with mailing lists, you are subject to an Owner who is making the rules, blocking the sites, and all the things we took as life lived back in mailing list days, but now with the fun of many of these and implicit crossposting, and hey, that.

4.) Your posts are at least implicitly subject to the rules of any server that has someone following you. So yes, your post may be fine for WeAreCoders and DestielIsOurLife, but maybe not so much on CrazyAdminServer where you have a follower and yeah, you're blocked from that server

Mastodon isn't like any social networking site out there, but it's not the Old West of Collective Internet Memory, either. Decentralization does not mean you personally will have any more control than you do right now on twitter or tumblr or lj or dw or anywhere else. You don't.

Decentralization means control is now in the hands of not one corporation or person, but many of them. Primarily whoever owns your server and who they delegate to run it, and secondarily to the admins and staff of other servers.

So I can't say this enough: if you join, recalibrate your brain to "mailing list but fancy, modern, and interconnected with other mailing lists". A mailing list run on someone's home server or space they personally pay for on a web server.

The first rule: Sysadmin is God.

Note: I'm on the Fosstodon.org server: https://fosstodon.org/@seperis

So went to see that today and just--did not expect it. The trailers really did not prepare me for it.

Short version: yes, go see it right now.

( the king is dead, long live wakanda, spoilers )

This week of yet again playing Social Media Roulette has apparently done something to me. Cross-posted from cohost (actually, I now have two new identities!), because I think I just broke.

The dangers of going back to college later in life and applying to it the focus, obsession, and enthusiasm of a fangirl whose practiced all three of those things for decades (and we're very, very good at it) does have it's disadvantages: you spend an awful amount of time reading code for fun because you're used to doing that kind of thing.

I am seriously enjoying mastodon, and reading the API and Github documentation has told me a lot (including how much I don't know), but it overlapped heavily with a feature that most social media sites don't have but you can do with mastodon because it works in instances; you can transfer your account to a different server.

Of the top of my head, I can't remember the scope of transfer, but you do get to stay effectively 'you' after the transition instead of the usual method: when we join a new social media site, our online identity is brand new and we effectively experience--within the scope of that site--digital amnesia of our entire (outside that scope) online life.

Sure, we have the photo albums and diaries--link back to our old identities--but within the scope of Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, Mastodon (the whole), we start over every time. We're not even permitted a passport; we're always and forever only citizens of that country with no reference to any other citizenship we have, have had, or will have before.

There is, actually, one social media exception to that: Dreamwidth. Off the top of my head, it's the only one that didn't require me to ignore all history that was not created within it; you could fully import your account from LJ into DW. For that matter, it let you keep doing it regularly so your entries and replies were kept synched.

Anyway, back to Mastodon: it does allow the transfer of your account--that being, your Mastodon identity--if you want to join a different server. Which in my social media history is rather new and kind of exciting; I'm allowed to keep my own identity between servers! I get to exist as me and keep my history!

I am allowed to keep my history. I am permitted to keep my identity. The words I wrote, the conversations I had, the friends I made: I must be allowed, permitted, to keep those things, because obviously, I have no right to them. Because quite literally they aren't mine to keep. I've been graciously allowed to download my data from a site, but no other site will let me use it there; the only identity I'm permitted is the one that the site will give me.

I've been doing Social Media Roulette for twenty years, and it has annoyed me every time that I have to recreate myself from scratch at every new site. It's been that way from the beginning, so I suppose it didn't occur to me for a long time to ask why. Now of course, I know why--from the point of view of those who own or run a site.

I am not a site admin, however; I am me. And right now, I have no idea why on earth up until now, I was okay with not actually owning myself and only existing as borrowed, vaguely maybe-related identities within the scope of multiple sites that I will inevitably lose.

I called a vote among the roughly twenty-three different iterations of Seperis, and for your consideration, we submit the following: if the future of social media is not be owned by a single corporation or entity and so cannot be taken away, then maybe we, the users, could own ourselves, both within the scope of the site and outside it. I have the right to my history no matter the platform, the right to my friends, the right to my identity, and not only can I take it with me when I leave, I can bring it with me when I join.

Or...we just keep doing what we're doing. Because that's worked out super well for us.

So sayeth Seperis of Livejournal, on this day in the year of our Lord 2022, born on November 1, 2001, twenty-one years ago, and didn't know she would not be the only, just the first.

Crosspost: https://cohost.org/seperis/post/272559-i-think-i-m-hurting

So it's been a while since I posted and also a while since I posted a book review. Between school and work and moving my brain noped out on anything new, so getting this pre-order this week combined exciting--NEW BOOK--with wary, as Anne Bishop took a turn for the wtf in the Black Jewels series to the point I didn't even buy the latest book in that series.

Crowbones is the third book from her series The World of the Others, which is an offshoot of her series The Others.

The Others
Written in Red
Murder of Crows
Vision in Silver
Marked in Flesh
Etched in Bone
Summary: Urban Fantasy/AU Earth - Meg, a cassandra sangue (prophet whose prophecies are triggered when her skin is cut) escapes the equivalent of slavery to basically hide in a city's enclave of terra indigene, who are both a single species made up of many subspecies, the least terrifying of which are vampires, werewolves, werecrows, werebears, werepanthers, weresharks, etc; Elementals (Winter, Summer, Spring, Fall, Water, Air, Atlantica (yes, the Atlantic Ocean), etc); and ponies that are horses that are also Tornado, Hurricane, Fog, Tsumani...you see where this is going

Those are the less terrifying terra indigene; the Elders are worse. And then there is plot, disaster, predation, and a surprising amount of found family/mixed species family. I reviewed the first and third books (I am annoyed I didn't do the fifth; i could have sworn that I did), so you can check under the tag on the first to see if ti's your speed. I recommend; it's multiple pov, with primary povs from the protagonist, Meg, Simon, a very cranky werewolf/bookstore owner (all Anne Bishop's characters are voracious readers so book store owners really come into their own in the two Others series), Vlad, a vampire, and Monty, a cop sent to the city of Lakeside for punishment after saving a teenage female werewolf from a rapist (humans are generally going to suck). The cast will grow, so be prepared.

World of the Others
Lake Silence
Wild Country
Crowbones
Summary: This series is set after the first series and follows up on some tertiary characters and towns mentioned in the wake of the Great Predation (spoilers but the word 'predation' probably gives you a hint of something going terribly sideways).

Book 1 and 3 are about Victoria Devine, a recently divorced woman and DV (extreme emotional abuse/gaslighting/etc) survivor who gets a rustic hotel in her divorce settlement that is located near a terra indigene controlled village and is basically the border between human-occupied (but not human-controlled) land and wild country, where the most powerful and dangerous terra indigene called the Elders--who don't have human forms and sometimes don't have much of a form at all--live. Book 2 is about Jana Paniccia, who wants to be a cop but sexism, so gets her chance in a small town that's occupied by both humans and terra indigene (shapeshifters, vampires, basically the kind of terra indigene that both have a human form and also hold down jobs. Yeah) to be deputy to a werewolf who doesn't really like humans. It's great.

Link to my review of Lake Silence, but you can find everything Anne Bishop's done in the tags.

( lake silence: a very short recap )
( crowbones: the world of the others, book 3 )

This has been an essay that went on much longer than expected.

Okay so yes it's been five months since I posted, but in my defense:

1.) Spring Semester got intense (4.0 for two classes!)
2.) Summer Semester was an eight week hellscape (3.5 for two classes, almost learned to hate databases)
3.) Fall Semester is my first semester of three classes (nine hours) and there's been some adjustment.
4.) ...I moved.

Wait, what?

The last time I posted in April, I was really only thinking seriously about it but without commitment. then Child got a tech support job, and he really wanted to move pretty much anywhere else, which--this being Austin--is not cheap; worse, the areas he wanted to move to were really not cheap and stuffed full of new, shiny, very trendy new complexes which were really really not cheap...none of which either of us could possibly afford on our own, which is when he said we'd split the rent down the middle.

That made it surprisingly doable. For those who know Austin, our final area choices (that at least were vaguely possible, was the North Lamar area south of 290 where a lot of new complexes had and still are popping up and south of the River (South Austin). Downtown was not doable without selling some key organs that don't have backups and cant' be replaced. We also checked a few other areas, but North Lamar was our first choice for a.) the center of everything, b.) buses everywhere and access to the train, and c.) it's just super cool, okay?

The total rent we could afford was $2200: go.

( Apartment Hunting )
( The Two Contenders )
( You Would Not Believe How Relieved I Am For This Turn of Event )
( My Apartment )

I still live in a Box Jungle but I'm sitting on my porch doing homework at night overlooking the pool right now. I've been imagining being here and doing this for months and honestly? It's even better than I thought.

Home Assistant

WHEE! My Home Assistant Blue arrived! I did the migration a couple of days ago, and so far, I'm impressed.

1.) I did not realize the case was metal. Sweet.
2.) It seems to run more smoothly than Home Assistant ran on the Pi, which I'd expect since the Blue was purpose-designed to run Home Assistant.
3.) The resource usage is much better; process temperature is 25% lower and there's a minor but definite increase in speed. And this despite the fact that my Pi ha 8G of RAM and Blue has only 4.

DIY NAS - A New Thing to Do With a Pi

This means that my Pi is now free. Or was, because since it was available, I decided to experiment with diy NAS (network attached storage). Basically, download OpenMediaVault to the Pi, connect my external four-bay enclosure that holds my media to it, and go to town.

I'm still learning OpenMediaVault, so while I did get it working smoothly (with some early annoying hiccups), I want to do some more experimenting before doing a write-up. I'm not married to it, so I am considering trying a few other OSs.

GUI
The GUI is nothing to write home about, and while it's very organized, the design choices are sometimes redundant so it feels more cluttered than it actually is.

I admit I'm spoiled: Home Assistant has a gorgeous user interface and that's just the default; most of what you do in Home Assistant is make it even better and more responsive and more customized. If you have an imagination and a vague grasp of any programming or web design, you can do anything.

OpenMediaVault's UI, like DD-WRT's UI (if you're playing the home game, DD-WRT is the open source software you can use for routers), is--not any of that. It's functional and I will say you can tell no one there made the mistake of trying to break barriers or disrupt the system or rebel against convention and do weird shit with javascript and too much time on your hands, and that's something.

It's utilitarian, and like I said, the design is both clear and redundant. On the left is the sidebar, which is divided into sections, and each section name can expand or collapse all items within. On the right is the main screen, and in a narrow header above it, it has an icon of a house (Home). All items in each section are clickable, taking you to their individual pages. Fine so far.

If you click on Home, the main page shows all the sections in rows, and beneath each section name are all the items in that section and their icons. Everything is clickable: section name on the Home Page takes you to the section page, where all the items are listed; item icon on the Home Page takes you to the item page. A bit redundant, but okay; maybe someone fears sidebars and you can minimize it.

Back to the sidebar; same thing. The section name isn't just a name; it's also a link to the section page with all the items, all clickable to their own pages.

On the header just above this, it shows Home in a button, then the Section Name in a second button. If you click an item--either on the sidebar or on the section page--that appear as a third button. Those buttons are also clickable so you can move forward and back, though you never--so far--get more than three deep and if you have the sidebar open, it doesn't matter, but okay.

It's not easy to explain why I find this weird, except I can't work out why you need three (four?) ways on the same screen at the same time to go to the same place. Basically, this design means you are always at most one click deep anywhere, which would be good but you are only one click deep in three separate ways. It's confusing if you don't expect so much redundancy but it's pretty much impossible to get lost.

I can't tell who it was designed for; DD-WRT was made for intermediate to advanced network and programming people (and it shows in the documentation like whoa), while OpenMediaVault seems to be for everyone and anyone, at least as far as GUI You Will Never Get Lost In Really (so far, there's nothing hidden in nooks or crannies or only appears if you know the right places to check on another random page or tucked somewhere random because fucking with users' heads is fun).

But there's some things I'm not sure an average user is going to know to do or know why using the documentation and quickstart, and if their drives already have media on them--aka not blank or brand new--there are some things are going to be baffling as shit--though super easy to fix--but I'll save that for my write-up.

Verification/Validation

It's an Okay/Apply system. You do an action, click OK, then you have to hit Apply before you do anything else. And almost everything requires it. The first registers the change; the second applies it to the system.

I am not fond of these, but I get why they exist. Most other systems that make me do an OK and Apply is to save time and resources; you can make several changes and click OK for each to store then, and then hit Apply so the system will do all of them at once. On my DD-WRT routers, it was a time saver since each action would take a while individually but massed together much less.

Which I thought this was at first because there's a variable pause between OK and Apply. Long enough for me to want to leave the page and it won't let me and a banner appears at top with Apply. Like, the pause is just long enough that you're ready to go and then BANNER APPLY. Argh.

Then--new and frustrating--after Apply, there's a third check "Do you really want to..." and seriously????? I can get a legal gun* in Texas with less hassle than wanting to have SMART notifications sent to me.

* That is hyperbole, but honestly, not very much. And the fact I have to say its hyperbole demonstrates that.

In Closing

I got it up and running, scrubbed Plex and added all my media from new home NAS, and gotta give credit, Plex plays smoother, faster, with a lot less hiccups than playing from my external attached as a share on my router. This is not a bad alternative to buying a NAS; I'll do a price breakdown when I do the write-up, but not including hard drives, I'd say around $250 or less.

School

We're a little over two thirds through the semester; in Intro to Computing, provided I finish at least three more of the four assignments and get full credit on each, I should have an A (if I do all of them and get full credit, I also get an A along with a glow of accomplishment).

Programming Fundamentals is chancier; I have an A right now, but that only includes my first four projects and my first exam; there are two projects ungraded, one I'm doing now, four more projects in the future, and two more exams. My first exam was an 83.75, which was upsetting (I studied for that one), but provided I get a perfect score on all my projects, I can afford a minimum of 67 on each of the other two exams. Which, hopefully, it won't come to that, but I seriously studied for that test (I took notes and reviewed them, even) and as he hasn't yet released the test for us to review what we missed, I still don't know what all I got wrong and that's haunting me. And not making it easy to prepare for the second exam, either.

Finished registering for the summer semester for six hours and fighting myself not to try for nine hours until fall. I mapped out my degree assuming nine hours a semester spring and fall with six in summer, but I want to try and go to 12 per semester within the next eighteen months.

It's not the workload that worries me, actually; I can do it and pass (very probably), but this time, I want to do it with As, and not just an A, but a dramatic A, like a 96-100 in each class across the board.

Educationally Speaking

When I was in high school and college the first (and second) time around, I was never sure that I could do it and was constantly surprised when I did, and not surprised at all when I got a B or even a C; I didn't like it, but the ways of the grades and my brain were mysterious and I had no idea why I couldn't just sit and study and have that actually work and instead have to depend on my ability to learn fast in gulps and short bursts of short term memorization. Back then, I couldn't even take good notes: I either reproduced the book or lecture (until I literally couldn't concentrate a second longer, which was often) or all the wrong things; I could not work out the alchemy of how you decided what mattered and for that matter, how the fuck anyone could stare at that Wall of Text Textbook and learn anything.

Truthfully, until now, I really genuinely did not realize the extent of a.) my ADHD and b.) the effects of medication. Back in 2007 when I went back for a semester, I noticed a difference--this was right after I was medicated--but I got an incredible promotion after one semester and learning that job took all my attention for a while.

When I started this semester, it was pretty much how I started every semester; hopeful but resigned to a best 'better than last time maybe?' I downloaded a program for notetaking (and eventually started using it, but that's skipping ahead), and as these classes are pure online without online or RL class times, read my syllabus carefully, got my online text books (I love love love online textbooks now), and settled in to read productively or die trying. Honestly, I half-expected the latter to become a real possibility, because sometimes, textbooks are really fucking boring.

( Now, an ADHD Sidebar )

So yeah, this time, I want A's; I want to turn in projects that exceed not just minimum but maximum requirements and involve many bells and whistles; I want to perpetually have read a chapter or two ahead before class and be overprepared for any assignment; I don't just want to get through class but learn and I mean learn everything.

I mean, I always wanted those things, but now, I think I can actually do them. I live in hope, anyway, and that's new, too.

Home Assistant Blue

My Home Assistant Blue shipped and will arrive by April, and I'm trying to work out when I'll have time to transfer Home Assistant from the Pi to it.

Taking a backup of HA on the Pi and moving it to the new device is the easiest method--with Home Assistant, you can genuinely just do that and not lose data or crash--but years of computer and tablet upgrades (and regular nuke-and-scrub of my Ubuntu Server) have taught me the value of starting with a clean slate when it's feasible. There's always extra customization I no longer need or code I refactored but commented out the original or updates to the base code that mean some code no longer works.

See, the thing is, until I finalize, I almost never, ever delete code.

If it's inconvenient or makes a script nightmare long or confusing, I'll move the original to backup, just in case. If it's a minor update, I comment out the old code for at least a few runs or until I forget why the hell I'm keeping it. If it's new code or a minor refactoring, I create a backup first. If it's a full refactoring, I usually create a copy of the original, give it a name like codeName_Refactor or something, and keep the original clean and working until I'm done testing, then rename the original to codeName_old or codeName_orig, rename codeName_Refactor to codeName, and move the old code into a folder. And in some cases, I'll just move all the old code or experimental code that won't quite work to the bottom of the script and just comment it out because there's a chance I'll need it back and it's really annoying to paste code between multiple nano terminal windows.

(In VBA in Excel or Word, I move it all to a module named OldModule and add an 'x' to every sub or function name. In Googledocs, I do the same with Javascript. There is code in both older than two thirds of my nieces and nephews. It's like the code version of hoarding or something IDK.)

A clean slate is maybe the one time I can do housekeeping. After doing all the necessary basic configuration and adding in all my integrations, add-ons, etc into the new device, I can move code over either in entire pages or a piece at a time and reload to make sure it does what I think it does (or work out what the fuck I wrote it for).

Fortunately, Home Assistant makes that incredibly easy; the last time when I got a second Pi to run Home Assistant on, after I finished configuration of the second Pi and it was ready to run, I disabled the integrations that couldn't be run on two HA instances at the same time on the old Pi, then just left them both running while I went through all my custom yaml and python and moved it over sometimes a single function or script at a time.

This, by the way, is my idea of the Best Friday Night Ever.

Depending on time, I'm going to try to write up a detailed step by step tutorial on how to set up Home Assistant on the HA Blue. One of the biggest advantages of buying it--other than supporting open source development and the cool blue case--is that Home Assistant ships on the HA Blue already installed, so it's very much plug and play; you literally plug it in, add ethernet cable, then go to your computer, open a browser, and go to homeassistant.local:8123. That's it. The only things you need to do is if you need z-wave or zigbee functionality is buy either usb sticks or a compatible hub, but if everything in your house is wifi, that's pretty much it for hardware. Now its just onboarding, adding your integrations, and trying out all the different theme colors on your dash.

School

Intro to Computing

We're now in Week 5 of School. I'm currently about a week behind in the Intro to Computing self-paced course but while that was mostly due to work + winter storm + other things, honestly it was also because it was the class I could fall behind without penalty. The class is a basic catch up to current technology and the internet and how to use Office; it's shockingly useful for someone who may be coming back to the workforce or needs an non-terrifying intro into current tech and current internet.

Also, it's the one that is ironically both the most work and also the one that's probably easiest to pass without a super amount of effort, which follows the course's purpose. All you really have to do is do all the activities and also create for yourself an Excel spreadsheet to keep a running calculation on the lowest grade you can afford in each activity and still get an A (or B).

But it is a lot of work. For the first six weeks, each week is
1.) one (1) or two (2) book chapter on something about technology (there are six total chapters)
2.) one (1) graded skills test for each chapter
3.) one (1) graded practice exam for each chapter
4.) one (1) or two (2) of three modules on how to use a Microsoft Office Product (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Access). (There are three to five modules per office product in the course.)
5.) one (1) graded project for each module

On top of that:
1.) One (1) Capstone Project for each Office Product: total of 4
2.) One (1) Exam for every two chapters: total of 3\

Except for the practice exams and two-chapter exams, to get an A you really just need to follow the instructions to do the projects like "Create a Flyer" or "Create a Powerpoint Presentation" or "Create a Business Letter". It's auto-graded so you know immediately your grade, you get a report on EXACTLY WHAT IS WRONG AND HOW TO FIX IT, and you get to submit three times and it takes your highest grade. The graded skill test is a graded review; I'm not sure it's possible not to get a perfect score.

The exams are--not so simple. They aren't exams; they're thirty five to a hundred questions, shown one at a time, you cannot stop until you're done and you cannot change your answer once you go to the next question. No, I'm not kidding; I've never been this stressed by testing in my life.

Now, because of the number of activities and the weighting: you can, actually, get a zero on every single exam and as long as you get a perfect grade on all the projects, capstones, and skills test, you can get a D. With the Skills test, perfect scores are built in; with the projects, you get three attempts; my lowest grade on a project is a 97/100 with one attempt left (that I can still do until the end of the semester) but just didn't feel like fighting footnotes for those last three points. THe lowest grade I got on an attempt was an 88 before I fixed the problems; this is not undoable at all.

Right now, for me to get a B, as long as I nail every project and capstone, I can fail every remaining exam (I have two two-chapter exams and three one chapter exams left) with a 52 out of 100 or 14 out of 25 (52%) with an extra two points to spare.

For an A, however, I have to average an 80 on each exam and get a perfect grade on every single project and Capstone that remains, though I have an eight point buffer. The lowest I've gotten on an exam is an 84 out of 100; I shouldn't be worried. I read the chapters; I take notes; I study. It autogrades when you're done and you get a full report with every question and your answer and whether its' right or wrong; you can take the exam up to twice.

But. When you start an exam, you cannot stop; each page has only one question and when you answer it, it goes to the next page and question and you cannot change it; there are many questions, which is good for grade weight but very bad for what is already low-grade paranoia. And I say this as someone who tests insanely fucking well; I have answered questions in ways that baffle even me on wtf I was thinking. I have to pause and think about obvious questions like 'what is a CPU'. It's--something.

I had to stop short in horror because I was asked the question "Which of these represents a billion bytes?" and for the life of me could not work out if it was megabytes, gigabytes or terabytes even though a.) I literally do know this, I spend a lot of my free time doing video editing and ratioing sizes, and b.) If I didn't, all had to do was fucking divide by a 1000 to get kilo, divide again to get mega, divide again and if the answer was greater than 999, tera, otherwise, giga. I can literally do that in my head instantly.

I spent three minutes staring at that question without any idea how to math.

I am not in love with those exams.

Programming Fundamentals

Incredibly fun. Well, for me: for my professor, maybe not.

There are ten projects and three exams, one project for each chapter, each project one to five or so scripts to write to do a thing; we just finished chapter four this week, and as it's an online class without class meetings but with hard deadlines, its' one I can't put off.

But also, it's not one that I really have any ability to put off; this is like falling into a few fandom and reading all the fic. The only reason I'm not reading ahead is spoilers; so far, the only way to keep me on pace is taking notes. Most of it is stuff I know already from writing python, but there's a lot of very basic stuff I skipped that I'm learning now and lots of generalized concepts, so it's great.

Then there's the projects.

The project exercises start with me following the instructions to the letter; that part is fine. But that takes me maybe an hour or two. Projects are assigned on Monday; I'm done reading by Tuesday and have my project done by Wednesday at teh latest. Due date is the next Monday; I have free time.

This time is spent methodically going through my scripts and adding bells and whistles. I challenge myself by trying each time to use every single element in every single chapter and preceding chapter in every script and where there's a will there's a way. Then I start adding bells and whistles. Chapter Three was If/Else, and conditionals are my jam, but at least I couldn't trap you in a script forever; it would, eventually end.

Chapter Four was Loops.

Which make my feelings for conditionals look like vague liking; I adore loops. My C++ class I'd trap people in elaborate loops in that horrifying tic-tac-toe game where the only way out was to work out what character I secretly designated for the only escape. I nest loops like Russian dolls and left to my own devices it would never end.

To be fair, I (mostly) restrained myself in the first two exercises; they're optional repeaters but not horrifying. But my resistance crumbled when it came to the third.

I got to ask the user for input three times. That is Christmas.

Short story: it's now four times longer than the first working draft, lets the user correct their answers as many times as desired, run the program indefinitely, and when they're done output their statistics on how many times they ran the program, how many times they corrected their data during all iterations, and how many times they corrected their data during this iteration before saying goodbye. I spreadsheeted test data to validate all conditions and possibilities. The only reason you can escape is we haven't reached error control yet and I can't use it until we do or that's cheating; right now, they can escape by just entering a string instead of a number and killing the program if they get desperate.

The exercises for Project 3 were all overkill, sure, but they're nothing to Project 4 Exercise 3.

And I can tell you now, it will only get worse from here. I mean, for other people: this is how I have fun on Saturday nights.

Question for anyone who knows video compression/encoding:

Assume the following:
1.) In MakeMKV, I'm using a cleanly ripped movie with all English audio and subtitle tracks. All the same settings are used as literally hundreds of other movies.
2.) In Handbrake, I'm using the same well tested profile to create a 2160p version of a 4K movie that I make with extra AAC streams for each DTS audio stream.

Under what circumstances would the 2160p increase the size of the video stream?

I verified it's the video stream offending, and we're talking a 3-6 GiB to around 20 GiB increase in video stream size (and therefore file size).

This has only happened with these movies (in order of size increase of video stream):
Groundhog Day (2018 release) - less than 2 GiB
Ghostbusters 2 (2016 release) - less than 2 GiB
Pet Sematary 1989 (2019 release) - 6-8 GiB (estimate)
Ghostbusters 1984 (2016 release) - 30 GiB
Scarface Gold Edition (2019 release) - 15 GiB - 30 GiB (estimate)

The second weirdness the 4K of some of these movies is grainy.

Example: Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters 1984. I changed the 2160p profile's Constant Quality from RF-18 to RF-20 for Groundhog Day and RF-22 for Ghostbusters; the 4K lost a lot (most to my eye) of the graininess.

The third weirdness is that Plex does not like these rips very much, especially Ghostbusters 1984; it would nope out at 37 minutes. I watched it end to end on my laptop using VLC; it was fine, there was no flaw. It's possible there's one VLC won't pick up, but Plex is almost as good as X-Box at playing anything provided the codec is supported and it was. Noping out generally means there's a real problem but none.

With the re-encoded 2160p version, it doesn't nope out.

I feel like I'm either missing something, or there's off about that video stream. I get this is an upscale, but in general, compression shouldn't improve video quality.

So I've been meaning to write up a more or less comprehensive beginner's guide to ripping movies with MakeMKV for a while but always got distracted by shiny things like servers and home automation and (potentially) water cooling.

This will be fairly specific to the requirements of MakeMKV, but some of this is fairly universal. So we'll start with hardware.

( Hardware )
( Software )
( MakeMKV: An Introduction )
( MakeMKV: Advanced Preferences and Settings )

Okay, I think I hit most of it. Anything that's unclear or anything I should add, tell me.

This is being edited for clarity

So among my accomplishments this year, I have successfully flashed my new bluray drive back to older firmware to gain unlimited read/write speed and also to rip 4Ks. My old drive is starting to be quirky, and as my pandemic sanity project is ripping and encoding movies, I went ahead and did some budget magic to upgrade it. Now I did not--at the time--realize that the winter storm had quite literally killed all my refrigerated/freezer food, granted, but I can't say that would have actually mattered; in fact, it getting here for me to play with is kind of helping me deal with replacing everything.

(Note: I still haven't cleaned out the fridge and refrigerator, but that's because until yesterday afternoon, all the dumpsters in my complex were overflowing as no one had done pickup in a week and change and I will not, not, not make the horror worse by putting two trash bags of dairy, meat, and assorted to the nightmare when temperatures are normalizing into the sixties--a week ago single digits, that really happened--and make everyone live with that kind of hellscape. I don't blame people who did--their power was completely out and stayed out longer than mine--but I would have been a lot less prissy if I had to deal with that smell in my apartment, too.)

MakeMKV added speed control to their software, but it has to be set in the settings, not GUI. This drive isn't quite getting the same speeds, but a.) it's a new drive, b.) I just flashed it so I may need to do some finagling, and c.) every disc is different, even accounting for DVD/Blu-Ray/4K Blu-Ray. I tested Ant-Man and the Wasp 4K yesterday and got the rip up to 6.2X, but today with The Stand 1994 bluray (not 4K) it only went up to 5X (at best). And yes, there is a difference in speed reading toward the edge (faster) and the interior (slower).

Notes on Movies

It occurs to me that I haven't actively watched a disc in over a year, but that's only an escalation. Before that, a disc was removed virgin from the case and ripped first; only then did Child or I put it in the X-Box for watching. This is because discs are goddamn fragile and I've had to replace them way too many times (hi, Iron Man II and III and X-Men Apocalypse and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, you fuckers).

And not just fragile as in "looked at it too hard'; I mean, invisible errors that are there when I get them out of the box. Catching one of those in rip means a 75% chance it's going to be a problem watching and a 25% chance of an unplayable disc, as in, it will not play movie at all. If the rip starts debugging weirdly, it's a warning--not necessarily 'here be dragons', but something I need to watch for in the main movie. If the rip stops dead--and to make sure, I have retry set to 51 times when MakeMKV is running, so it will keep trying past sanity--it's either Error That I Will See When Watching Disc or Unplayable. Sometimes--sometimes--it's in the extras, but not often.

Yes, I know that some ripping software can be caught on errors that don't show when playing, but I've used MakeMKV for roughly a decade--and paid for it this year when I realized that while yes, they provide it for free, this is literally the best ripping software in the world--and I made it as sensitive as possible to errors for that reason. If MakeMKV can't read it (and usually correct it) we're talking losing five/ten minutes of a movie to unplayable. If it can't even image it, it's a return; that's a manufacturing error.

Say what you want about VHS, short of throwing it in an acid bath, they were very hard to entirely kill. The ribbon might get messed up--you just skip through it. Ribbon torn? Tape. If you got desperate to save the X-Files episode "Never Again", you could find a way. Even if the tape got twisted and it looked messed up, you could usually fix even that; a few (careful) fast forwards and rewinds to use the weight of the rest of the tape would flatten the tape and smooth it.

Discs? There are workarounds, yeah. If you know someone who has the thing that can resurface? Yes. Toothpaste when you're really desperate? Yes. I do know many (some horrifying) methods, but there are stop points where nothing can be done, and then there's invisible errors that make you want to die that kill an entire disk. A tiny fuckup on the edge can kill an entire disc. Not 5:10 to 5:20 but the entire goddamn movie. In theory you can image it and use a program to fix the image, and I did get that to work a few times, but a.) depending on the software it was incredibly difficult, b.) there was no guarantees even if you did fix it (you think?) it would work, c.) and that's only when it would image, which with invisible flaws it would not, and d.) I say this as someone who enjoys that kind of thing: it was not worth it. I sat on the floor with scissors and tape hand-piecing VHS tape together for $10 X-Files episodes; I do not say 'not worth it' lightly. It was first season with the tapeworm guy; I loved that episode.

VHS? Acid bath or (maybe?????) a nuke. I was sitting here trying to think if I ever had an unrecoverable, and no. There were a few I threw away back in the day and replaced but usually Wal-Mart had a sale and it was like, $5. They were still watchable if you ff'd through that bit at 5:13 that was messed up.

For Your Ripping Needs: MakeMKV

This is my semi-annual shill for MakeMKV, which is as of 2021 still the single best ripping software I've ever used. If it is possible for the disc to be read, it can read it; if it can be ripped, it can rip it;if it can be imaged, it can image it. It works on Windows, Macs, and Linux (I primarily use it on Ubuntu but I keep a copy on my laptop now for testing). It's incredibly simple to use, the settings are straightforward.

( this got long )

If you read the above, now I explain.

Okay But What About that Thing You Said About Bluray Drives and Unlimited Speed

To rip a movie, you need an optical drive that can do that. This is not as easy as it used to be--assuming it was ever easy--and we're at a place where it requires active effort.

First: I never recommend what I haven't done myself when it comes to sketchy shit like flashing your drives. SO I would not be posting this at all if this wasn't both successful and almost anticlimactically easy to the point I was almost disappointed.

I did it yesterday, it was both anticlimactic and easy to the point of almost disappointed.

Until this week, this wasn't a problem for me; the bluray drive I used was the LG WH14NS40, and when I bought it in 2017, it was still running the 1.02 firmware (I got in under the wire), which allows MakeMKV (and other programs) to rip 4K movies. It's actually the second time I got that drive; by sheer chance, back in 2010ish when I first got my server, that's the drive I chose and it turned out it was the best for sketchy ripping things. Even better, LibreDrive--which MakeMKV uses--finally unlocked unlimited read/write speeds and as my firmware was 1.02 (the old firmware), I got that and lets just say whoooaaaa.

However, all good things become slow and quirky, and my LG WH14NS40 was getting to that. So I needed to get a new drive, and as one does, I went to MakeMKV forums to get the list of drives that are compatible with ripping 4K/UHD movies and decide which to buy.

Ultimate UHD Drives Flashing Guide Updated 2021

When you read that, it looks terrifying. It's not--I'm going to break it down in this entry.

It's now 2021, not 2017, and manufacturers patched their firmware on all drives now being sold to stop people ripping their own movies from their own discs because that's--bad? So this was now a two-step process: I needed to pick a drive and then flash it to downgrade the firmware to the latest unpatched--and also, unencrypted, thanks for that shit--firmware. And while yes, I am comfortable flashing my routers (perhaps too much so) to DD-WRT and back again, the routers I flashed were either old ones I don't use or ones I bought used on Amazon for under $20 and also for fun. This I'd be investing a minimum of $60ish plus external USB enclosure to hold them because my new server case doesn't have space for an optical drive (I knew that when I bought it, so that's on me).

Being me, I decided instead of getting the LG WH14NS40 again, since I'd be flashing anyway, I'd try something new. The slim drives were tempting, but their max speed would always be slower than a 5.25 drive; after reading the forums, the ASUS BW-16D1HT was actually in my cart when I stumbled over the fact that you could get the LG WH14NS60 up to 16X read/write on blurays and sure, it was twice the price of the Asus, but potential 16X read speed.

From the list of enclosures, I picked the OWC Mercury Pro 5.25 case. My LG WH14NS40 is actually using the Vantec NST-536S3-BK 5.25 case, but it was a pain fitting everything correctly and fought me; the OWC Mercury was effortless.

I got it yesterday, put it gently into the enclosure, connected it to Windows, opened MakeMKV, and checked the settings to assure the drive hit all the criteria, carefully read the requirements, downloaded the zip file with all the firmware and unzipped it, then opened youtube and watched the video how to flash it. Twice.

Note: the youtube video is incredibly reassuring. What you see there is literally exactly what happens, especially since it was done with a LG WH14NS60, which was also somewhat influential in me choosing that drive. It also walks you through double checking that your drive meets requirements.

The actual process of flashing took about three minutes. To wit:

1.) Open Windows Powershell in Admin Mode (Start Menu, Windows Powershell folder, right click on Windows Powershell, under Tasks click Run as Adminstrator)
2.) Enter C: and hit enter to make sure you're in C
3.) Enter cd.. and hit enter, then repeat to get to root of C as needed.
4.) Enter cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\MakeMKV" to get to the MakeMKV program folder (if you're in a 64 bit system, otherwise you can leave off the (x86))
5.) Paste .\makemkvcon64.exe f --all-yes -d [Drive Letter of Bluray Drive]: rawflash enc -i "[Drive Letter]:\[Path To Firmware]\HL-DT-ST-BD-RE_WH16NS60-1.02-NM00100-211810291936.bin" and hit enter.
6.) Watch the entire less than thirty second process.

Yeah, it was pretty low-drama.

7.) Opened MakeMKV and verified settings. Everything was fine.

Now, about flashing a drive and that terrifying page.

( the uhd master post: a breakdown )

I hope for those who were interested this demystified the process for you. I've ripped one 4K and one bluray with the new drive and no complaints at all.

Back at my apartment, and most of my (very large) complex is up and running, though some buildings are still having problems with power and/or water. Austin is under a boil notice, so our complex has an empty apartment where you can pick up water, but fortunately my mom sent over bottled water for me and Child so I don't have to take away from those really in need.

(Personally I think those without power and/or water entirely should be sent giant care baskets complete with whiskey as needed because holy shit.)

School

School was canceled all last week and up to Wednesday, so first week assignments aren't due until next Monday (March 1st). Last Tuesday, before they made the announcement killing first week, I desperately did and turned in both first week assignments and started second week for Intro to Computing as quickly as possible. However, of the two distance learning classes, it's the most self-paced so it probably isn't affected which is a shame; it's kind of sometimes--boring.

Intro to Computing - the Drama
Okay, so here's the problem: it's a required class for the AAS or BAS, and it's important in that it hits that vast array of knowledge of computing in the 21st Century just in case you don't know some of it. I get this is important and is going to go into details I don't know, and I need it.

But.

I have the privilege of having been inducted into fandom in 1998, and for those of you in fandom in 1998, everyone wasn't just computer literate; it was like eeevverryyone but me had PhD's in Computer Shit and the Internet Thing. So to do what I really wanted--write porn about Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres like anyone sane--I had to learn things like 'webpages' and 'mailing lists' and how to post to usenet and 'search engines'. And as fandom is always two steps ahead of the general population, I had to learn backward as well as forward at the same time. So a lot of the class so far is very much like a technical re-reading of my literal internet history, so much so that I keep glazing over when reading and missing the technical terms I actually don't know and need to that are basically defined by 'your life circa 1998 to 2003 as we talk about the Early Web'.

The thing is, I was twenty-one when I got online; I don't actually remember how things worked before I had the universe at the click of a keyboard. I mean, if you had a gun to my head and told me to relive my childhood RIGHT NOW I remember 'pen pals' and 'encyclopedias' and 'microfiche searches of multiple libraries to find this book I really wanted when I was in my teens'. I remember it as a thing that happened, but I don't remember entirely what it was like to live in. Now I think of it in horror--the frustration! the annoyance! the hellscape! the SLOWNESS!--but in my teens I didn't have any other context so best guess it was those things but like, in the context of 'normal life' not 'how did I survive?' My digital citizenship may not be from birth, but my entire adult life has been here; I've gone native.

The Office modules are an entirely different story. They're all about the basics of Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and Access and how to use them effectively.

I use Office very much--I have folder named Spreadsheets that is stuffed with the beauty of Things I Like to Turn Into Spreadsheets; I write my own VBA for Excel and Word. I have personalized settings saved into Normal.dotm to set my Normal style and in it are modules with an array of functions and subs I use commonly so they're available to any document I open and assure all my documents are saved in the exact same template. In Word and Excel, when I upgrade computers here or at work, I have a list of settings I immediately change in Options, on the ribbon, in the Quick Access Toolbar, registry edits I make, changes I make in accessibility...I barely even think about it.

However, I also skipped over Vast Tracts of Basic Shit I Never Cared About Because I Didn't Ever Use That. Which has more than once been a problem but not enough for me to learn more than just enough to make a note to "Do this thing whatever it is when that happens, no idea". There are quite a few of those, by the way. For a surprising number of what most people would call basic tasks, I know nothing.

Not anymore.

The Create a Flyer Project was a trip; I found things like Borders and Glow and on the ribbon there's a single button that changes everything to All Caps or All Lower or All Something Else, did y'all know about that? So the Office Modules are incredibly exciting because they're--for me--Brand New Information as taught to probably first graders these days. There's Themes and Colors and basically I'm having a super good time; for the first Word Module I did all the optional exercises just to see what else you could do to a flyer (beveling pictures with round edges and shadows at Blue Accent 2 25% Darker!!!!); it was great. Next Word Module is How to Make a Research Paper and the third is Enhancing Documents (?!?!!?!): I am at the edge of my seat. The three spreadsheet modules I'm almost slavering for; what magic will I learn there??????

And while Access I sort of have used (years ago), it and Powerpoint are effectively Here Be Dragons on my mental map of Office and just--can't wait. At all.

It's the non-Office stuff that's getting to me.

I am learning technical terms and concepts and also there is stuff I don't think I knew, and I missed two questions--TWO--on my first test and got a 23/25 instead of a perfect score so obviously I need to study much harder (when I wanted to retake it--you get at least one retake, highest score is selected--Child told I had lost my mind, but I am not entirely reconciled to this stain on my grade).

Just. Brain-glaze. Ugh.

Fundamentals of Programming - Less Drama

This class is actually on a regular weekly schedule, which means I can't jump ahead (Project 2 hasn't been posted), which means I am going out of my mind. I want to do everything and reading ahead just doesn't cut it or doing the practice exercises to entertain myself until the next project comes out, and if you're baffled on why, I'll tell you.

Coding is probably the highest form of entertainment to me, second only to writing and not by much. This can be a problem.

I already write in Python, and probably I could read straight through doing exercises and learning it without need for Projects to guide me (I just go back and complete the projects as assigned). But: I need to learn it right.

The same problem I have in Office above comes up for me in computer languages; at least in coding, my pattern recognition works extremely fast. Variables, functions, structure: once I've identified each, I start editing immediately, and once I hit a certain edit point (when I rewrite an entire script into something else entirely and realize hey) I start writing from scratch. I learn the advanced level coding--to do something new, you kind of have to--but there vast, vast tracts of basic stuff that if I use it, I just copy paste or memorize without actually understanding it; if I don't use it, I don't know it exists. Which means I am far too often surprised by behavior I didn't predict because I have no idea of a basic principle. And much like Word, I google, correct it, add a paragraph comment explaining it and where I found it, and go on.

My best example of this phenomenon is regex and related concepts.

It's ridiculous, but I have to google the base principles every time and actually have at this point a copy/paste library. And I have, actually, used it enough (dear God enough) to have at least by accident learned it, but my brain, for reasons unclear, does not consider it coding but a really annoying convenience.

( a illustrative bash script and explanation )

Explanation
So this script searches my media directories for all movie files, removes the path, then takes apart the file name. My name template is [movie name].[movie year]-[resolution].[extra information].extension.

Example:
spider-man.into.the.spiderverse.2018-4K.extended.edition.mkv

It's a variation of the standard naming scheme for Plex, but I use periods in the place of spaces in movie name and extra information and to separate the movie name from the year (instead of using () around the year) This is because I generally only access my media files using command line and didn't want to mess with strings so simplified into something I could type without hitting shift or remember to use " ". Plex recognizes it for sorting and metadata retrieval, so I'm keeping it.

The code breaks down the file name for a text file and a csv file into Movie Name, Movie Year, Resolution, Extra Information (that I don't need in the spreadsheet so gets deleted), extension (that gives me the specific container), and then some extra code at the end to get date added and file size. The csv file I import into excel, where it's sorted into a master list of all movie files.

(One movie can have up to I think six files for multiple resolutions and added AAC versions. If 4K, a 2160 file that's a sane size if I really want to stream it remotely and also includes AAC versions of all non-Dolby audio streams if it's DTS; a 1080 bluray also needs an AAC compliant version because a lot are DTS only, etc.)

If you're wondering what the problem is, scroll down to first do statement and note all the #comments. Specifically the text of them. Specifically, how many are explanations of what a single small piece of code assigned to a variable does. The same piece of code, in multiple variations.

Example:


# remove everything before the last period
fileExt=${xfile##*.}

There's only four variations of this. Before first, before last, after first, after last. The only things that change between these functions are which of these (#, %), how many (1 or 2), and the location of the * (before or after the dividing character).

Again: there are only four variations of this. Four.

Variations:


# remove everything before the first /
mRoot=${aPath#*/}

# remove everything before the last period
fileExt=${xfile##*.}

# remove everything after the first dash
aname=${afile%%-*}

# remove everything after the last period
afile=${xfile%.*}

I cannot remember them for love or money. That's why every single one not only says 'what specifically I'm removing' but also 'exactly what this tiny piece of is doing to make that happen'. I just checked and some of my comments are wrong (again) because I cannot identify which is which just by looking and have to read the definitions (again) to remember.

This is an example of something I first memorized because it was basic, I only needed it for this one thing once, and now cannot make pattern recognition add it to knowledge base. I can see the goddamn pattern--this is not rocket science--but I can't internalize it enough to recognize one of those four in isolation (or which is which of those four when seen together without notes). Except the *, which is because it matches before (it's before the split character if splitting before, after if splitting after) but I have to think about it to make it happen and keep double checking. It's not that I can't see how it relates to each other; my brain simply will not do it. I can memorize it, and that will work for the discrete session I am writing or editing the script; it will be gone the next day or after I sleep.

I will learn it--eventually--but for reasons unclear to me, frequent usage won't help (this script has been refactored and updated multiple times over two to three years and items moved around quite a bit). One day, for no reason, I'll open this one and suddenly have no problem reading those pieces of code the same way I read the rest, or read a book; that day, however, is not today.

That first printf statement? I know what it does--it's printing to file in columns of x spaces--but I can't take it apart without referring to my notes. If I want to do this with other data, I'd copy paste and very carefully change the numbers. It simply doesn't stick.

This problem happens a lot.

Yeah, that was long.

Anyway, with this Python class, I have an opportunity to be force-paced by the instructor and the lessons to learn first principles instead of jumping ahead to 'Thing I Want to Design' and cheerfully write sixteen nested loops with random if/elif/else or switches. So I'm carefully reading every word of every lesson and examining the examples and using the class structure to avoid jumping ahead and indicating to my brain to discard something as 'unimportant details'. It is interesting, this works for my brain; if i jump ahead too much, however, my brain can and will start deciding what is 'just details' and I am screwed again.

Will this way work? It should: that's how I learned C++. Granted, that was an entirely new language to me at the time, but I'd been writing Javascript enough that it was less unfamiliar territory than a new dialect with a compiling chaser. I can still read all my C++ programs perfectly; all I need to refresh myself is checking my notes, and back then, my notes weren't exactly illustrative.

Other News

Nothing really. Work today should have most of us back, so we'll find out the damage to this sprint. I can't even judge what the decision will be or if they even have one yet; last week was--would have been--Week Two of a four week sprint for a March release. They might decide to scrap it and start everything over at Week One starting this week; they may scrap some items and leave other that didn't require a lot of code changes or already had the code changes done in Week One; they may scrap nothing and just do four weeks of work in a badly interrupted three weeks for everyone. I don't even know if all our data centers are up, if they stayed up, if they went down and came up and error checking found them fine, if they're still error checking....

For that matter, production will take precedence; it's possible they'll scrap the sprint and send us all back to All Regression Testing All the Time to make sure everything in production works which is like if boredom was an Olympic Event.

Oh yeah, can't wait for that.

So we're now (hopefully) in the tail end of the winter storm that brought down--literally--the state of Texas. Which means I can (hopefully please) go home today.

The Setting

So because of the probability my apartment would lose power and water fairly quickly in a winter storm, Child, the bunnies, the puppy, and I went to my Mom's house to stay what I thought would be to Monday and what Child worried might be Wednesday so as not to freeze to death and also be hydrated.

(As it's Friday now, we were both very wrong about the timeframe. And also how bad it would get because holy shit.)

My apartment lost power I think at some point Sunday; my middle sister's apartment was the same. So as of Sunday night, my mom's house contained:
1.) three daughters
2.) one BIL
3.) four of six grandchildren (Child was staying with a friend he was helping move)
4.) three dogs (one mom's, one youngest sister's, one mine)
5.) six rabbits
6.) two cats.
Total:
Humans: 8
Pets: 11

Monday night, above with addition of:
1.) two (2) grandchildren, as the power went out at Child's friend's apartment so they went to their respective parents/grandparents, and my eldest niece, who lives with her dad, lost water and power.
2.) one (1) cats who does not belong here but stalks the house until a door opens and we gave up.
Total:
Humans: 10
Pets: 12

Tuesday night, above with addition of:
1.) two (2) neighborhood friends of my middle nephew (age 12)
Humans: 12
Pets: 12

Utilities Sometimes Optional

Fortunately, we didn't lose power except for about four hours on Tuesday morning (I think?) but we lost internet on Sunday and water Wednesday night. Internet came back veerrrrry early Thursday morning. Water is still pending.

My sister's apartment got both back sometime Wednesday afternoon, so she, BIL, and two of four grandkids went home that night. My apartment came back up yesterday but is going down again today for repairs at an unknown time for an unknown period of time and I don't even know. I just want to go home so much.

So That Happened

So I've visited Chicago in winter (I was prepped by Madelyn beforehand) and in my late teens I was an exchange student to Finland August to January, so I am distantly conversant with temperatures below 30F. Vaguely. As in I remember it happened.

But I cannot say enough that it happening here was utterly insane.

On Saturday night, there was a light sprinkling of snow on the ground that continued through Sunday; Sunday night, it apparently started snowing more. At 2:19 AM Monday morning, my sister told me to look outside and after a glance outside, I woke up in the house to come look. There was a blanket of snow on the ground. On a metal folding chair in the backyard, snow had piled, it was roughly five inches.

Austin had the third highest snowfall in its history at five (six?) inches; on my phone, the temperature went down to 6F on Monday and 4F on Tuesday. The official low was apparently 9F, which seriously is still insane.

The entire state is still reeling. There are still people without power; there are even more without water. We're on a boil notice in Austin and doubtless in other parts of Texas (excluding El Paso and the panhandle, who are part of the national grid and therefore were actually functional.

People froze to death. Others died of carbon monoxide poisoning in their vehicles trying to stay out of the cold. There's a not zero chance we'll find people who starved to death before this is over. The grocery stores--if you can get to one--are stripped bare and the state of delivery trucks seems to be 'pending'.

Pipes have burst, causing flooding in apartments and houses and the street. There are tree branches falling, in the process of falling, or are going to fall literally everywhere, which is a problem if a car or house are beneath them. Repeat that but with whole trees, which aren't as many but in relation to a car or house are even worse.

We actually don't know the extent of the aftermath yet; some people are still dumping snow in the toilet for flushing purposes; if you have electricity, you may or may not be boiling it first. Because I couldn't stop myself, I went to check the news and also noted the disaster continues for agriculture, livestock...well, everything.

Notes

I am unbelievably lucky that I could go to my mom's house, because my apartment, like most places in Texas, isn't made for these kinds of temperatures, especially without power, especially without power for roughly four and a half days. We were astronomically lucky that my Mom's house never lost power, which is actually weird.

So her house and some unknown number in this neighborhood are part of the grid that apparently couldn't be taken down during the failed attempt at rolling blackouts because, unlike most parts of Austin, they couldn't bring the power back up after. So far as we can work out, it's something to do with how old this neighborhood is; it's at minimum fifty years old and probably north of sixty; only a few streets away is the house we lived in when I was five years old before we moved into the country: that was forty years ago and it wasn't new then.

Which means that if our power and the neighborhood's power had gone out, that would (possibly?) mean that the electric grid was entirely FUBAR'ed instead of only mostly--like now--which I am very glad I didn't know.

The temperature outside right now is 34F. The snow is melting, and it doesn't feel real. Living it didn't feel real either, though, so no surprise there.

Texas Tribune: Texas was "seconds and minutes" away from catastrophic months long blackouts, officials say

When I posted on January 9th, and said I was stressed and had updates, I--never got back to that. So her we go.

Back in December, a few things happened. The first is my grandmother, my mom's mom, died. IT wasn't expected, but it wasn't entirely a surprise. Right on top of that--and probably related--Child went and got a puppy. And six days after we got him, the Saturday before Christmas, he was diagnosed with parvo.

So with a kit from Austin Pet's Alive, we treated Parsnip (yes, like the vegetable; no, I really don't know why Child picked that name) at home with an IV in the back of the shoulder/neck and three shots daily. It was very dramatic; it also ended with us still having a very living, very into inappropriate pooping puppy, so that ended well. Then a week and change later--six days before I posted in January--I was six days into home quarantine for COVID exposure and not taking it well.

Yeah, up until inauguration, I was really doubting like--everything.

Now to update to today:
1.) I start college again next Monday. This is going to be interesting.
2.) Me and my mom got vaccinated with the first dose of the Moderna vaccine on Saturday.

I posted a thread on twitter, but I'm going to reproduce it here for those who are worried about the vaccine or want some reassurance on how it went, etc.

Spoiler: for what I think we can consider a pretty fucking epic personal event--Vaccination in a Time of Pandemic COVID: An Autobiography--it was about as exciting as changing socks. Not even wet socks for dry or plain for fancy: just standard sock change.

In other words: awesomely, wonderfully, gorgeously mundane and unexceptional.

( vaccine in a time of covid )

So I am always in search of working universal remotes for my mom and myself because it's guaranteed you will lose or break it and a lot of TVs now don't come with any physical buttons or a limited selection.

I've been using the Logitech elite; hideously expensive, but it worked with literally all my media. I love it, it was definitely worth the money. But I wanted one for my TV in my room specifically and also get one for my mom, since the grandkids (and uh her kids) lose teh remotes like a lot.

I found this: BroadLink RM4 pro IR RF Hub - $47.99

It's not a remote per se: it's a wifi hub you put by your TV that translates your phone commands in the app to IR/RF for your devices.

What you do is plug it in, get it on your wifi network, download the app, then in the app, say add a device. Then you use your existing remote and the pre-installed codes to basically recreate your remote in the app. It then creates a neat little interface for each device, some more elaborate than others. So far, it works on my Samsung TV--though that's a gimme--and my Polk Command Bar. If the preinstalled codes don't work or don't have the functionality you need, you use your existing remote to show the command for the hub to learn and replicate. For my Polk Command Bar, I added HDMI switching since it has two HDMI ports, and lowered my stress considerably since I hate having only one remote for that.

Going through the device list, however, this isn't limited to TVs/entertainment. It apparently can do this with anything that has a remote, either RF or IR. I haven't tested that yet but I'm hunting up my old remotes now just to see.

It interfaces directly with Alexa and Google Assistant, and Home Assistant, among others.

On Broadlink's Website:
Device and Specs

Note:

1.) wifi controlled devices work; bluetooth-only, not so much. There are workarounds for that (a lot, actually), but it's something to consider. My NVIDIA Shield TV is going to take some work, in other words and I'll post when I get it working. However, it looks like all the most common devices and brands are represented, and for my Polk soundbar, there was community support as well ('unofficial' community created codes are also in the app).

2.) there is a distance factor like with any remote or wifi. Generally you probably need to be in the same room whenever possible to use it.

There are actually several versions of Broadlink's universal remote; I picked this one because it had the widest range so I could check if it would be a good fit for my mom and also be able to control my Polk Soundbar if I lost the remote (it is also an Alexa device, but I consider voice control of my soundbar a secondary way to control, not primary).

I'm mostly reccing this because of ratings, universality, and price.

IT IS SNOWING! WITH SNOWFLAKES!

Due to so much current stress I've been skipping out on my posting here. I really am not feeling doing an update on life at this time, but I want to spread this far and wide.

I talked about starting to use open source Home Assistant for my home automation needs with a Raspberry Pi. since then I updated to an 8 GB Pi and added booting from an SSD.

Now there's something a thousand times better: Home Assistant Blue - $150

This is Home Assistant's own Automation Hub built by them. You do not need to build anything, like a Pi; it's a single board computer with 4 USB hubs, 1 ethernet, 1 HDMI, with a 128 eMMC hard drive and 4G RAM with Home Assistant pre-installed and a very cool blue case.

It's plug and play. Literally, you plug it in and turn it on; that's it.

Below the cut is a copy of my tumblr post on a reblog about open source that breaks down everything you need to know

( home assistant for everyone )

Home Assistant also has addons for running your own DNS server, DHCP server, database, Samba, HDMI CEC scanner, SSH, code editors, ABD server, Tor, encryptors, Plex, and I think the equivalent of pi hole (either official or community) and that's just to start. It can do kind of everything.

Official Stuff
Official Integrations
Official Add-Ons

Community Supported (non-official):
HACS

The number of community integrations you can get in HACS are an order of magnitude more than the official and then there's the UI stuff. And then there's the ones not even in HACS yet which you can find if you just google "Home assistant" and "Your Thing" which are like--well, a lot lot lot.

If I can get enough people interested in trying, I want to start a DW comm where people can ask questions, post tutorials, code, or just get support and help. It can be intimidating to start something like this, but help and support make everything easier and fun, and I'd love love love to work with/help/talk/support and/or be main venting person to anyone who jumps in.

New laptop arrived! Her name is Medea.

( about medea )

Manhattan entered my mother's custody on Sunday. I understand they're doing very well together.

So the Thanksgiving Menu is complete and I'd like to take this opportunity to plug Paprika 3 app if you were a fan of Pepperplate. It has a recipe browser powered by google and so far can download almost any recipe anywhere.

So, the planned menu for Child and I (subject to change by ingredient missing, laziness):
Brined Whole Turkey
Baked Spiral Cut Ham
Apricot Glaze with Herb Butter
Green Bean Casserole with Bacon and Gruyere
Roasted Brussels Sprouts
Sweet Potato Casserole
Baked Parmesan Cream Corn
Pea Salad
World's Best Key Lime Pie
Cranberry-Orange Sauce

Yeah, at least two of the side dishes won't make it, but I can make them this weekend to go with the leftover turkey. That's part of the fun of Thanksgiving; the leftovers and the cooking of other dishes to go with the leftovers.

The only one that's really new to me is the Baked Parmesan Cream Corn; the turkey and glaze are my standard favorites to make, the pie I used to make a lot, pea salad is standard in my family, the ham just need to be warmed, and the rest are fancy variations on common dishes I've made or helped make. The biggest problem has been hunting down some of the ingredients, the last delivery of which is coming this morning along with both cooking milk and drinking milk and eating butter (as opposed to cooking butter). We do no blur lines during Thanksgiving.

Though I am kind of sulky that Mill King milk is not available right now. Mill King is state-local (though yeah Texas is a big state) and is pasteurized but is not homogenized so it's overall slightly heavier than standard milk and cream floats in it and tends to gather on the sides and on top. The first time I got it, Child was horrified--it looked bad! Floating bits!--but hands-down it makes the best hot chocolate and chocolate milk you can imagine. Just rich enough but not too heavy and doesn't throw the balance off like cream or half-and-half do if you add them (unless you're one of those people who's really good at mixing them).

Last grocery order should be delivered soon. I should probably get ready for that.

So I ordered a new laptop and am starting prep to refurbish this one for my mom.

The new laptop (name pending) is a Dell XPS 17 9700, upgraded to 32 GB RAM and a 4K touchscreen. I left the drive alone since I'm upgrading it myself to a much faster Samsung Pro 980, but happily, unlike Manhattan, this laptop has two M.2 drives and I seriously, seriously missed having that option.

Manhattan, my current laptop, is a Dell XPS 15 9575 Two-In-One with a 4K touchscreen; the screen folds backward 360 degrees into a very weirdly shaped tablet and you can write/draw on it with a pen. This is a lot of fun, but among my acquaintance, all the artistic types had a blast playing with it. And drew me pictures, some of which can be viewed by non-me company.

This option is not available for the XPS 17s, depressingly. I will miss it.

Why 2 in 1's Are Awesome (It's Not What You Think!)

I recommend this style for every laptop on earth, but not necessarily for the tablet option.

The tablet functionality wasn't bad and in fact could be useful if you like to make handwritten notes or basically any reason you like to use a tablet. The tricky part is the size; this is a widescreen laptop; 3840 by 2160 or 16:9. In the vertical, it's unwieldy as fuck and I don't mean weight (though yeah, that too); it's just not the right proportions for a tablet when you shift to the vertical. However, some may be fine with that, and anyway, that's not why I think this is brilliant innovation.

It was being able to open the laptop screen as wide as I wanted.

Most laptops open to just over or under 135 degrees then stop. As it turns out, my most functional working angle is closer to 145-150 degrees.

I've opened it to a full one-eighty when I was working and I needed to sit very straight; I had to lift my hands a little for keyboard but not as much as if it were just barely passed the 90 degrees most laptop screens allow. With one of my laptop stands, I generally have the screen at 145 degrees from the keyboard; it's much easier to sit straight (or straight-ish) if I can have the screen at near eye-level and the keyboard at nearer-hand level.

Which really just begs the question: why for the love of God are laptops still limiting opening angle to roughly 135 degrees or less? Even if you don't need a full 360 degree bend (which make it look like your screen is on top and your keyboard is on bottom), a 180 degree is super useful (see above).

When I took my laptop apart after I got it (to upgrade the hard drive also because I always take my laptops apart when I get them before anything goes wrong so the first time isn't when I'm stressed), I paid attention to how the cables thread from the body to the monitor to make a 360 degree bend work; suffice to say, it's not particularly dramatic or lifechanging; you use hollow hinges to thread the wires through. It's not easy to do it--yes, I did test that, I always take apart my laptops to the base so I know where everything is and how it connects--but it's not hard, just delicate. t didn't take special equipment or magic; like, in a pinch, you might get some tweezers to help move or two, but that's also because I have an intermittent tremble in my right hand.

This is a huge improvement on the way non-2 in 1 laptops work in that the cables are far better protected threading through the hollow hinge itself; no danger a cord that wasn't affixed right will eventually slip due to normal daily activity and get caught on the hinge when opening or closing and be cut (and yes, that happens even if you never opened your case and moved things around). I can definitely see room for improvement, but from a internal cable management perspective, this shit is the boobs. This also allows thicker, more resilient cabling if they'd consider that; the hair-thin ones that are so fragile breathing on them is worrisome should be a thing of the past.

(I have been watching the Big Foot ep of Psych and now I really want to use that in public. Everything cool for the foreseeable future shall be 'the boobs'.)

Preparation Is Key

So far, the only thing on Manhattan needs cosmetically is a new keyboard, but honestly, I think replacing the keyboard and touchpad (basically the entire front panel) is going to be the best option because if there are problems with either, at this point, I wouldn't notice as I've been using it so long it would be a forgotten quirk my hands know.

I am really, desperately going to miss opening my laptop to whatever angle I want, but I take consolation that my mom is going to love this laptop more than possibly her children.

( the passing on of a computer )

Upgrades and Repairs

So I'm prepping now for the upgrade as well as the handoff.

In general, I pick the easiest method;

1.) Buy (or use an existing) portable drive and copy the OS partition and move the Data partition.

The OS partition will be factory reset so it doesn't matter what I leave there, but Data partition is my private data and my brain gets weird about that. I cannot make myself reformat the Data partition while I can see data on it, even after copying it to the portable drive and seeing it there. But if I move the data from the Data partition to the portable hard drive, it's fine; the Data partition is now empty and I can format it.

2.) Copy relevant data to new laptop from portable drive

3.) Move all data from portable drive to the backup partition on Watson Server under computer name (Manhattan) and date of transfer then forget it exists unless something goes wrong.

( how I learned to almost not hate backups and deleting )

This has been an infodump of my brain today. Carry on as you will.

I actually love Psych more than I'm comfortable with sometimes. It has some yikes parts (the 00's have a lot of that), but it also had a main character that the show had no problem making fun of for being ridiculous even when he was right and a main female character/love interest that about a season in they realize hey, we should develop her into a person which is depressingly rare. It also has Gus, which no other show has and really should.

It has some of the most ridiculous plotlines that shouldn't work in any sane world but do, because their main characters are Shawn and Gus and they're crazy.

(Seriously, the vampire ep alone is one no other non-supernatural show could hope to pull off with other than 'really bad why are you doing this?', but you add in Shawn and Gus? Of course they believe that woman is a vampire; have you met them?)

I will argue to the end of the world that Psyche's 4.16 "Mr Yin Presents" is one of the most beautifully done episodes of Psyche (maybe the best, tbh), a strong contender for among excellent TV in general, and one of the most interesting and well done in the very often boring/stupid/sometimes traumatizing "serial killers are among us" genre. I've actually gone back several times to just rewatch it; it's just really, really well put-together on the plot level and the emotional fallout level, and that's rare.

I say this as someone who enjoys the serial killer genre; they are almost all boring as hell, overelaborate to the point of stupid, full of ridiculously dumb plotholes, and end up stupid, or in some cases, all of that and traumatic and gross. This would maybe work if the serial killer was supposed to be dumb, but no; this bullshit is always supposed to be unparalleled genius. And everyone eats the stupid cookies before it starts.

This is because shows generally misjudge what the audience wants to see; we are not, in general, here for the gross and horrifying murder of innocent people--that's what horror movies and Criminal Minds are for (though CM used to be less that); we're here for the weird-ass elaborate plotlines, weird motivations, and time limits with astronomical stakes and smart people versus smart people running down the clock.

"Mr. Yin Presents" is the second in the Yin/Yang trilogy. The first is interesting and fun and fantastic set up; the third is the stupidest thing on TV possibly ever and you lose nothing in the show if you just skip it forever and pretend there are only two. I promise, you'll be happier that way.

( mr. yin presents - yeah, i talk a lot )

Note: the third ep makes everything dumber and then makes no sense whatsoever combined with speechifying villain who is breathtakingly dumb but presented to be smart (??????). Worse, it manages make the first two Yin/Yang eps make no sense and wrecks the best parts of why the eps worked and then burned everything down the rest. It's just so dumb. So very, very, very dumb.

In continuing stay-at-home avoidance of watching anything new, I went to watch Chuck.

Full disclosure: I didn't get much past season one the first time around: I think early season two. So as it turns out, that's why all my memories were so positive and pleasant.

If you haven't watched, this may encompass the experience: I finally understand what it means to hatewatch.

I thought it was a voluntary process, like, you can stop if you don't like it. No, it's not; you can't stop, how quaint of anyone to think so. There's just some grim form of geas or some shit--I don't know, do I look like an evil witch who does this to people?--that drives you onward and downward into the bowels of hell.

The worst thing is: this was insane enough that it could have been my favorite show.

( maybe spoilers? )

This has been a vent.

So full disclosure: I saw Dune 1984 when I was eleven, read the books when I was twelve, understood them much later.

Excluding Children of Dune miniseries from this comparison.

Dune 1984 is my standard and yes it's--yeah insert quite a bit here--but it's gorgeous and it looks and feels like epic scifi in the very epic future. Whatever the fuck was going on with the script (cocaine probably?) David Lynch created a visual spectacle that pretty much makes you not care wtf was going on. Gurney, Stilgar, the Emperor, and Beast Rabban were incredibly good casting and Baron Harkonnen is fucking legendary and memorable.

The miniseries, though way more accurate, suffered from both some very weird choices of color (I always remember it as orange even though it wasn't actually all orange), some very weird acting choices, and some very questionable choices of actors: Chani was maybe the only flawless choice and outdid Dune 1984 by a mile.

That said: I cannot deny that Kyle McLachlan as Paul Atreides worked very well--about ten times better than the miniseries--but also has the same problem: both actors were old to play Paul and I don't mean chronological age; both visually and how they're performed, they acted like full adults and Paul--well, wasn't.

( some thoughts on paul, casting, and dune )
( liet-kynes owns me now )

So news:

1.) I let Child get a snake. Yeah.

He was sort of owed it, tbh. After I hurt my back and up to today, he's taken over most of the housework and cooking. It's not that I can't now, but that I have to be very moderate in how often I bend over or carry anything since part of the problem is my posture is still in progress. So yes: snake.

It's a tiny ball python he named Belt, a thematic companion to his tiny lizard Boots and the psycho iguana who lives in my room that I can't remember the name of. This is my life: there is a snake in the apartment.

2.) For comfort, I'm rewatching select Spartacus scenes (aka anything Agron and Nasir and/or men fighting with swords). I recommend this form of therapy very heartily. Can't lie, I can happily watch Agron (or like, the entire cast) walk around in loincloths or naked or sweat through battle.

Say what you like about modern warfare improvements, the clothing sucks, as in, people wear way too much. I see no reason bazookas are incompatible with a Roman kilt or comfortable loincloth, maybe some strategically applied oil.

I have to admit, however, how often the actors were allowed to eat. I'm guessing on alternate days?

Agron and Nasir playlist for anyone who needs that kind of thing in their lives (everyone?).

Adding my favorite vid: Leave Me Blind by Mary Bell - warning for fast, fast cutting like a lot, so if you're sensitive to that, be aware now. Not super explicitly violent, but putting out a whee for inclusion of Nasir's grief-driven fight scene.

Beautiful choice of clips, fantastic narrative, and I love the building up of tension to the climax. But again, this is all fast cuts.

Adding because I'm watching it in repeat: 1:43 to 2:04 is impressive as hell. The clipping leading to it from 1:31 is good and hits paydirt at 1:43 like no one's business.

No period romance watching is ever complete until you watch Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Is it a masterpiece of cinema? Groundbreaking in reinterpreting the role of women in nineteenth century Britain? A fascinating dip into the culture and psychology of Regency-era zombies? Perhaps the greatest piece of media ever created on earth?

My opinion is yes; if you think otherwise, you're wrong. You're very wrong and must be put right one way or another by God.

If you're on the fence, though why I have no idea, but here's why you need to watch:
( there's a zombie church )

I rest my case.

I still contend the best Pride and Prejudice is the 1995 version, and current watching only confirms this, but--it's actually not all Colin Firth. It' not even mostly Colin Firth, though IMHO no Darcy has matched him.

It's Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth, who is absolutely my favorite Elizabeth. Specifically, because of how incredibly expressive her face is.

Elizabeth Bennet is kind, generous, affectionate, and sarcastic as fuck, which she inherited from her creator, as Austen spends two thirds of every novel deadpanning like its going out of style both textually and metatextually.

Sadly, most Austen movies tend to err on the side of earnestness (and depressingly, readers do too, which is how we get the insane Knightly Is a Pedophile), but Ehle spends a lot of time offsetting it with weaponized expressiveness.

(This may or may not be a paean to Ehle's eyebrow action when talking to Darby, Lady Catherine, Mr. Collins, the way her mouth twitches when someone is being ridiculous, the half-beat she pauses when before answering when someone is being a dick, and her gleeful weaponizing of the rules of civility. I don't think anyone ever has ever conveyed 'fuck you so very much' with an eyebrow.)

I also vote for this being the best Lydia; the actress looks and acts like a ditzy, spoiled sixteen year old gloriously.

However: there's the problem of Jane Bennet.

The thing is, I don't think it's the actress herself so much as the problem of Jane Bennet's entire character being the ideal Regency gentlewoman: quiet, sedate, well-bred, kind, earnest as fuck. She actually does follow the book Jane, and that characterization works fine in text, but when you take it to the visual medium, you're sharing the screen with Elizabeth and Mr. Bennet's sarcasm and mockery, Mrs. Bennet's pseudodrama, Lydia Bennet's melodrama, Darcy's mandrama, Bingley's overwhelming perkiness, and Mr. Collins mortifyingly earnest smugness (and that's just the people who share a screen with her; Catherine de Borough eats scenery almost as well as Mrs. Bennet).

To put it succinctly: Jane Bennet is boring. And the thing is, she's pretty much supposed to be.

Most of more engaging Jane Bennets had actresses who made her much more animated, which yes is more interesting to watch, but is also just not Jane Bennet. Jane is quiet, sedate, not one to show her feelings, reserved: when Darcy the Repressed is commenting on someone being Too Reserved, that's like, wow. And Elizabeth acknowledges that as true (as does Charlotte early on). That's a fairly important characteristic, since that sets up a major plot point.

The 1995 version also benefits from being five hours long, granted. Like, a lot. And not just to capture all the major and minor plotlines; if you're an Austen fan, you're aware how a two hour Austen movie butchers Austen's humor and slaughters every joke before it gets a chance to gasp the punchline.

Note: I'm about to engage in a Mansfield Park re-reading and once again be baffled how different it is from literally everything else Austen wrote. I mean, I would take the argument that it shares some characteristics with Sense and Sensibility, but only very superficially. There is no goddamn way it exists in the same Regency universe as Pride and Prejudice or Emma or Persuasion (and oh God not Northanger Abbey).

And I say this as someone who loves the book and has at one time or another loved and hated every character in it by turn depending on my mood during re-reading (I can write a condemnation and defense of every single character except Mrs. Norris who I always hate). Honestly, it's the one I re-read the most because there's so much in it, which makes no sense since there's actually only one real major plot (yes, there are a lot of subplots, but they all literally are offshoots of the major plot).

(Last read, I was eighty percent sure the ending was supposed to convey the good luck of the Crawfords in escaping matrimony with anyone in that family. I continue not to get how anyone, anywhere, ever, would be attracted to Edmund Bertram. He has no sense of humor. Sure, neither did Fanny, but as he was her primary influence growing up, she never really had a chance. With Crawford, I don't say she expressed the possibility of having one, but the potential was definitely there.)

As many of you know, it's Amazon Prime Day (1), and I felt it my duty to bring unto you the latest Alexa-enabled objects.

Oral-B Guide, Alexa Built-In, Amazon Dash Replenishment Enabled, Electric Toothbrush, White, Smart Brushing System

Yes, that's an Alexa-enabled toothbrush.

From the website, because when I try to summarize this I begin to scream (no idea why):

- You will receive 1 Oral-B electric toothbrush, 1 Amazon Alexa enabled smart charger base, 1 Oral-B brush head and a quick start guide to get set-up

- The smart charger has an LED quad pacer to help guide your brushing, the white light represents 30 seconds in each quadrant, red for over-pressure and green when you complete 2 minutes of brushing

- The smart charger is a WiFi enabled base that works like a fitness tracker, it captures information about your brushing sessions, which you can access via the Oral-B Connect App or optional email summaries. Improve your habits and track progress over time

- Handle includes 6 cleaning modes: Daily clean, gum care, sensitive, whitening, tongue cleaning and pro clean. The round oscillating and rotating brush head removes 100% more plaque vs. manual brushing

- Use Amazon Alexa during your daily routine to play music, answer questions, read the news, control your smart home, check the weather, set alarms, and more. And, its designed to be water resistant with 360 degree high quality sound

- Never run out of brush heads with Amazon Dash replenishment service, get genuine Oral-B quality refills delivered to your door

- Oral-B guide sets up in minutes, simply download the Oral-B connect app, pair your brush to the base and create an account. You're ready to brush smarter.

Yep. You're ready to brush smarter.

So I'm like, eighty-six point three percent sure we're currently under AI rule already, so I think we can safely say Terminator and The Matrix gave us really unrealistic expectations regarding the intentions of our robot overlords (to tempt us with voice controlled everything), and also our own collective resistance against them (didn't). Truthfully, I have no idea how I feel about this.

Re-reading Temeraire, as I anticipate hitting all my favorite parts--impression, Laurence and Temeraire Torn Apart by Lying Airpeople, every instance of Temeraire's or Laurence's jealousy, meet-cute with Tharkay, Treason Drama, the Incan Empress, etc, I have to admit I most anticipate hitting Dragons Learn About Finance.

That's probably my top re-read portion. On occasion I skim entire books (or skip entirely, which always feels dishonest so I never do either anymore) to get to it. Why?

I just don't know.

I have a theory it has to do with Temeraire's reaction to interest mirrors mine when I first a.) learned about the stock market (something I'd assumed all my life was rather mythical, like Avalon, Atlantis, and the Free World) and b.) got my very first dividend. It was like, twelve cents. Still blew my mind.

But it's not just that. It's very soothing. The entire thing from Nice Bank Guy Basking Under Dragon Attention to Dragon Investing in the 'Change (I assume?) is just so wholesome. I'm just starting Black Powder War so I won't get to Banking With Dragons until probably tomorrow night or Monday morning, but already I feel excited.

Note: if anyone can rec semi-canonical or author-approved illustration of all dragons with an emphasis on relative size I'd be grateful.

I've seen separate bits in the books and online but that confuses me badly so I need them all in reference to each other. This is especially a problem when the issue of Temeraire's mating with Iskierka comes up and my entire brain shuts down on how...that worked. Relative size and for that matter shape seem to fail me badly even in drawings (sometimes, that just makes it worse). I'm hoping if I have working references I won't spend an inordinate amount of time combining bafflement with doubt about my understanding of physics as well as horrified curiosity how Temeraire escaped without some third degree burns on places one should not ever be burned. Water burns really, really hurt. Then I want to cry. It happens.

(Yes, I could email the author and I would if it were a question about literally anything not related to her books, but in this context, it's like like emailing Stephen King about a map of Salem's Lot or asking about the route to Boulder they took in The Stand. Even if there might be an answer I'm horrified at the idea of asking.)

So super-cool PT appointment in which I had my first dry needle treatment, which I've been looking forward to trying. As she did it, she explained the different types, then what it does, which everyone who's done it already knows but I didn't. She also did manipulation of the muscles around the spine, and we talked about the possibility of scheduling a therapeutic massage. Apparently, we do have them at the downtown and Round Rock clinic and at $65 an hour, that's pretty reasonable, and my insurance and its clinics are very strict on COVID-19 restrictions, so it's very safe.

(At least two or three people in my Flist or DW Circle trained for therapeutic massage and yeah, I expect to pay for the skill and education it takes to do that job and would not feel reassured if it was any lower. Frankly, I would have expected higher and assume part of that is offset by my insurance. I just need to check if my health savings account covers that. If it does, and my first appointment goes well, I need to change my witholdings next year to cover one a few times a year.

I think this is going well. The process is going to be slow and I have to remind myself I'm not going to notice progress much except by absence.

In other news, we're at two episodes of GBBO, and I was going to restrain myself but that so isn't happening I think.

So first, I'm going to tell you about one of my personal things: the Balsam Wood Test.

In SGA fandom, there's a fanfic--I cannot remember which--where in a throwaway scene, Rodney and co are testing an unknown Thingie for reactions to common substances. It reacts to nothing at all, great. Then someone throws in a piece of balsam wood, and as it turns out, Thingie reacts badly to it.

To balsam wood.

Anyway, that stuck in my head--I love that kind of thing--and eventually, the idea turned into a concept of how to reliably test reality when all you have is your subjective self to work it out. The Balsam Wood Test.

Now, Eureka's Matrix: I love it. I love it for so many reasons, but all of them are relationship and people based. I love the characters dealing with it. I love the drama around it.

I hate the fact that anyone, anywhere, would think the Matrix could, even by accident, forward the study of science as it pertains to anything but the study of artificial reality and maybe the limits of computer programming. That's not just insane, it's--I need a word here, just go with 'are you high and have been since the Enlightenment?'

It can't be done, full stop. Even if it was run by an AI, it couldn't; if the AI actually could do that, you wouldn't need a Matrix because you wouldn't need people to discover anything; the AI could do it all. A computer could not, ever, reliably reproduce science as we know it--much less Eureka-level science--well enough to fool actual scientists for more than five seconds and maybe not even then.

(I'm not entirely sure it's really possible to create a Matrix reality indistinguishable from reality-reality, but that's another story.)

You see, there's no such thing as random numbers in programming. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We have no idea what objective reality is; it's all subjective to varying degrees. Physics tries very hard, but even things we designate laws are very much 'well, nothing has contravened this yet so here we are'; anything lighter is 'current best explanation we have but we're open to suggestions' at best. Entire swathes of science exist based on math with the understanding we also haven't discovered all the math. To be generous, we're not even aware of about 99.999999999999999999% of physics. Of the part we're aware of, we maybe are sure of none and best guess a very tiny amount of that. And i won't even begin to describe where we are in pure math; maybe a little better? But probably not.

Like, this is true of all science, but I'm focusing on physics because the Matrix kind of requires it; that's the baseline on pretty much everything.

The Balsam Wood Test: in the Matrix, if Rodney had thrown a piece of balsam wood into that machine, there would have been no reaction because even best guess anywhere in history would not have prepared anyone for the idea that combining Thingie and balsam wood would go bad. That's not even a maybe; no sane programmer would throw that into a probability table because it wouldn't occur to them. So if that had happened in Matrix Eureka and they used the machine in the real world and someone was wearing a balsam wood necklace and it fell in the Thingie, boom: so much would have gone wrong it's ridiculous.

It's absurd; it's ridiculous; it's insane. Balsam wood: who would have called that as the nemesis of Thingie? Who would have called injecting the pus out of a smallpox blister into someone as an early form of inoculation would actually (kind of) work? Inoculation wasn't even a thing that existed when someone tried that.

(No, seriously.)

Balsam Wood Test: reality is absurd.

Science is the discovery of all the ways its absurd and try to work out why (sometimes, it doesn't fail completely). You cannot create something new within a structure where nothing is new or can ever be. Unlike computers, reality has no constants, just variables. Some of those variables are persistent as fuck, but as I said: nothing has change them yet. Binary is yes or no; there's no such thing as maybe. The only questions in the Matrix already have answers; you cannot answer a new question and you cannot change the answer of an existing question. And that is the opposite of science.

Exception: the study of programming. Then fuck yeah, you can find out all kinds of new things...as they relate to code. Probably a fuckload on engineering virtual machines for gaming, modeling, maybe--no promises--some advances in pure math and definitely some revolutions in graph theory, but not the fundamentals of the universe and reality as we know it. And nothing in math that would radically change our understanding of math either; that's because there's no such thing as random numbers when it comes to computers.

I'll come back to that, promise.

And even all this assumes it is possible to program a reality for greater than one person to believe, which is a huge maybe in itself. Perceived reality is subjective, and jacking directly into people's brains would actually make it much, much harder. We're all of us constrained to a certain extent by the physical limitations of our bodies and how they interact with the brain and much like physics, science is well below 1% at best when it comes to pretty much most shit including biolog. I cannot even imagine how to programmically recreate the body of someone with an autoimmune disorder or insomnia or hell, chronic fatigue syndrome well enough for them not to feel something is off above and beyond, much less individualized experience with such. And that leaves off psychological conditions and I am seriously stumped how on earth no one seems to consider the problem of the brain's ability to randomly override pretty much any function for the fuck of it but sometimes for also legit survival related reasons.

In other words, if I get chased by a bear in the matrix, if the brain thinks my body has been sleeping in my bioprison, it probably is going to hit me with enough adrenaline to knock me out of the matrix and/or cause heart failure because BEAR DEATH WHY ARE YOU SLEEPING YOU IDIOT. And unlike the Matrix, the real world's rulesets are persistent variables and you cannot program my real life brain not to do the unexpected. The brain does crazy shit for fun and wtf; hook someone into the Matrix, there's no way to know how the brain would react to that. It may not even let a person accept that as reality even on the off-chance it was perfect. The brain regularly rejects reality as reality for fuck's sake.

In other words, biology is fucked in the Matrix; for fuck's sake, how do you simulate unknown mutations, much less frequency to match something even passing for real and useful in the real world? With random numbers? Heh. I'll get to that.

And every bit of this assumes programmers won't make mistakes and as a professional QC analyst: oh God, that's funny. It also assumes that mistakes are the reason programs sometimes don't do what you want and sometimes do something you didn't expect: that's even funnier. Computers be crazy; they're subject to reality, where there are no constants, only variables, and only a very few persistent. The more complicated the program is, the more chance even perfect programming will interact in unexpected ways; not because anyone did anything wrong, but because that's the nature of complex systems. You cannot predict the unpredictable.

Now, my biggest and seemingly minor problem except it's a major one: random numbers.

Well known but not appreciated fact: there's no such thing as random number generation in a program.

It look random, and we're developing very sophisticated ways to simulate the random number, but--it's not and can never be truly random because the basis is and will always be a formula. It may take a very, very long time to work it out, it may require a massive amount of data before you can see it, it may be incredibly difficult and very improbable you will work out the pattern, but there is a pattern, all starting with a function (or program) who's only job is to produce seemingly random numbers. Which means that every single thing inside the Matrix would not ever be random, ever and reality is--well, really really random.

Like I said, the formula can be very sophisticated: it could be 'use my gps coordinates right now, add six, and divide by the age of the president of the US who was born closest to this date at his time of death'. It could be that 'plus the number of cats in this pound in Chicago on this day five months ago, then translate the number to binary, and divide by the date of the nearest holiday to this date'. Add in 'Let's base twelve this entire thing now' to round it off.

That's still a pattern.

Maybe not one a person could work out on their own, but. A computer could find the pattern. They're actually pretty good at that, provided you know what you're doing and sometimes when you don't. And if you have a computer sophisticated enough to build reality and you are the type who really believes--insanely--that you're doing this to Forward All Sciences, then short of hobbling your Matrix-reality computers to not work--and truthfully, that's so meta my brain hurts--all you'd need to break the Matrix is someone to track random storms, random tornadoes, random hurricanes, random anything and given enough data, a pattern will emerge eventually. A normal scientist, maybe not: but building a Matrix for Science means you want the best minds in the world, so yeah, they'll find it. Which means a.) broken immersion or b.) illegitimate science because in the real world, random number generation patterns do not predict when tornadoes happen. We don't know anything but conditions that could make them happen; to predict in the Matrix, all you need is to know the formula and once you know there's a pattern, finding the formula is just a matter of time.

(Not to mention the sheer amount of processing power needed just to create seeming randomness. The more power, the closer you can get to random, but--seriously, you'd need entire machines dedicated to nothing but creating those 'random' numbers. Now my head hurts.)

This little problem with random numbers will also cause problems in pretty much any higher math and all of physics--random chance and chaos are actually really really really really important to the very fundamentals of science--as well as really fuck up any legit programming people in the Matrix try to do, and that's just the shit I understand well enough to write here (no promises on if I understand more than the problem exists); there are entire branches of math and computer science that simply won't work in a programmed reality at all.

On any other show, I'd go with it, but Eureka--which is literally About So Much Insane Unknown Science--I just cannot deal with a Consortium who seem to at least know what science is (though maybe not) thinking 'this is a really brilliant idea' like--ever.

I needed that rant so badly. I feel better now.

Okay one more thing: for fuck's sake, your insane matrix made a dragon in like the first week. A. Dragon. The programming created a dragon. Dragon.

DRAGON.

You think your Matrix can be a haven for real, legitimate scientific discovery when it randomly makes fucking dragons? The Matrix can't even manage to reproduce known reality but you think unknown reality won't be a bit of a problem? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Okay, really done before I lose my shit over rendering errors and how it didnt' seem to occur to anyone that when the brain is jacked directly into the matrix, your physical body isn't actually involved, especially say, the optical nerve or like, the physical eye. Rendering errors occur exclusively in a visual medium with a physical body looking at something.

The Matrix is not a visual medium; what they see is what is programmed into it. This isn't happening on a computer screen or hologram for them; they are not physically inside some kind of super sophisticated chamber of Matrix doign shit with their own bodies; this is happening inside their minds. The only way a rendering error should even exist is if their physical bodies are involved in a simulated environment. THIS IS IN THEIR BRAIN. THERE WILL NOT BE RENDERING ERRORS.

There will be weird shit like birds in rocks, yes. There will be even weirder shit that can happen. But the only way they will see a rendering error is if you specifically program it in to happen under certain conditions, and why would you do that?

Dragons and rendering errors and random numbers and balsam wood causing destruction of everything. Okay, really done.

Really done. Promise. Mostly.

Random observations since I'm sometimes going out of order to follow storylines:

1.) I hate Beverly Barlowe so much. She's lied to herself so much about her own intentions--and that of the Consortium--that she actually believes they have good intentions. She also believes that good intentions always matter and justify anything. And when she has to acknowledge that hey, they don't always, it's an exception and not her fault.

2.) OTOH, I was surprised to realize that Henry's actions after his GF's death, though imprudent and thoughtless, weren't nearly as bad as I remembered or thought. His intentions weren't necessarily always noble, but they weren't always driven by revenge or even that tiny streak of power that comes standard for scientists in Eureka. His actions were sometimes questionable, but most of what happened with him came to 'things he almost did or thought about' most of which he didn't do and sometimes even chose not to do, which I can't hold against him.

Overall, he caused a lot less damage himself personally, and contributed to even less, than pretty much any scientist in Eureka on a bad day. Far more important, when given the choice, he chose to do the right thing and acknowledged he'd made bad choices. And honestly, in balance? He tried to be worse than he was and failed; he's just fundamentally not a selfish egomaniacal, or immoral guy, and it says a lot about him that to get him even close took a massive and extremely condensed trauma.

Yes, I was mad he went to prison. At worst, he should have gotten like, a disappointed speech from Carter, which yes is painful but that's what you get for lying to your friends. Carter totally deserved half an hour of being verbally disappointed over beer with Henry.

(I love Henry and Carter's friendship so much; Henry perfectly understands Carter and effortlessly translates for him when needed for geekspeakers. And they're so fun together. And I hugely appreciate how marriage/relationships for them both actually added to them and their relationship instead of pulling them apart or cutting into it. The depressing thing is that I think the only show I remember that managed that balance well was fucking Friends.)

(Note: I do absolve Henry for pure selfishness in taking Carter's memories of the lost years. One, he did ask first and two, Carter was in fact on the edge of crazy and while yes, Henry did want more freedom to do his thing, he was also aware Carter was suffering like he was and genuinely didn't want him to go through this if he didn't have to. Whereas, however misguided, Henry did think his suffering was for a greater purpose.)

3.) Nathan Stark's death was gutting this time around the way it wasn't before. Multiple rewatch, I paid a lot more attention to him and honestly, his coming to Eureka felt like the end sequence of a character arc where the arrogant character realizes how much he lost and starts coming to terms with it and fixing his life. I have thoughts on this but they're disorganized, so yeah.

And I do better appreciate Nathan with Allison. He's arrogant, selfish, scientifically classist, but he also is trying--with success--to get better and it shows. Not around Carter, but to give him credit, Carter is very obviously going after Alison and Allison is showing interest so I can see why he's reverting around him.

4.) Related, I felt terrible for Allison even more this time around. Watching again, it's fairly obvious on the wedding ep that she's massively overexcited but trying to be casual and whatever when no, she was not. She was getting back the second great love of her life (Allison is A-type; she's sure as fuck isn't going to be limited to just one; she gets three and deserves them all).

(This explains a lot about her planning with Carter on their wedding; this time she was milking every drop of joy she could get openly and without shame.)

5.) Zane before and after the 1947 are way more different than I thought.

( this time, it's all about zane, thanks miss porcupine )

I have so many feelings.

I'd been back and forth about trying Home Assistant for my home automation needs, mostly due to a.) inertia and b.) SmartThings pretty much covered what I needed.

Then: SmartThings has been transitioning to a new platform and app for two years, and they managed to break a lot of my custom code and other people's--basically, half of why I loved it. Worse, you could not longer choose what devices to expose to Alexa through it.

This is probably where I should go into a little more detail before I start.

( the home automation wars: zigbee, z-wave, and wifi )
( example: my home and my home automation, a breakdown )
( the home automation wars: this is where it got complicated )

Back to Now

With that perspective, the changes to SmartThings--the loss of a lot of functionality--have been disappointing and frustrtaing. Until now, I used it as a central Hub of Everything with Alexa for voice; now, I couldn't, especially when it became impossible to selectively decide what devices in SmartThings were exposed to Alexa.

Example: my Philips Hue lightbulbs were already compatible with Alexa, so they were directly connected to Alexa. To use them in SmartThings, though, I had to direct connect them there as well. So when I connected SmartThings to Alexa, my Hue lightbulbs would connect again to Alexa through SmartThings and I'd have two of everything.

(In some horrific cases, I had three copies of everything in Alexa, all with the same name, the only difference if I opened properties and could see where the device came from. Worse, some had slightly different names, and Alexa would get confused.

Can't lie, it also bothered me on an anal retentive level; everything was messy.)

My two choices were to
a.) remove everything from Alexa, add it to SmartThings, then let everything go through SmartThings to Alexa. That wasn't feasible; some of the wifi stuff wasn't compatible with SmartThings, and I'd never bothered to test the wifi workarounds available because I'd never needed to.
b.) remove everything from SmartThings that was already in Alexa. As it turned out, that was everything but my z-wave and zigbee devices.

I depressingly chose number two, which was only marginally better than one. This, as a result, mae Alexa my central smart home hub, not just my central Voice Stuff.

Alexa is a terrible central hub; there's limited access when not on a mobile device (the web interface is--horrific). Worse, all connections to Alexa were in, not out. With SmartThings, I could connect them into Alexa, see them and use them in Alexa, but anything connected to Alexa did not connect back to SmartThings. Worse, the automations (routines) you can create in alexa are functional but integration with devices isn't perfect. Alexa's routines simply didn't connect well with zigbee and z-wave devices even when they said they worked. There was delay, a pause, or most likely, not work at all.

In other words, my bathroom lights stopped coming on when I came in the room and that meant war.

(I seriously don't remember how to turn on and off bathroom lights when I enter a room; this is not going to change. I live Star Trek; I'm not going back.)

When I got the NVIDIA Shield TV to take over Plex, I had a Pi with nothing to do with it. So last weekend, I sat down and started the process of learning about Home Assistant.

Home Assistant is a program that makes your Raspberry Pi into a home automation hub. It can connect to any almost existing hub you have with their integrations, bringing them all together. Much like SmartThings but even more so, Home Assistant depends on community integrations, so there's even more made by the community, mostly for devices/ecosystems that don't have an open API.

Basically, it's what SmartThings was doing for me before: I connected all my devices to it and it controlled them, I can create automations for lights or whatever. Better, it allows me to connect to Alexa only things that I want to, so I can connect my Hue Lights to Home Assistant and they won't travel over to Alexa and show up twice or five times or whatever.

There are a billion awesome differences between Home Automation Pi and SmartThings (and other home automation hubs) but there's one big one: the Raspberry Pi does not come with z-wave and zigbee functionality. You either have to buy the parts--a z-wave stick and zigbee board--and make the connections yourself (not hard), or use an existing z-wave/zigbee hub that can be connected to Home Assistant.

In my case, I had my SmartThings Hub, so that is my z-wave/zigbee device. And while SmartThings has made itself more annoying, it does still possess the ability to connect to almost any z-wave or zigbee device in existence one way or another, and much to some ecosystem's despair, even when the break the zigbee or z-wave standard so you can't

(Apparently it took about a day? for users to work out how to connect Aqara devices to SmartThings, even though they deliberately tried to use non-standard zigbee so you'd have to buy their overpriced hub. Good try, Aqara.)

( home assistant, an introduction, finally, with pics! )

I'll do a second post about configuring Home Assistant as time permits, but hopefully, this made you curious. As I want friends in my journey and will get them any way I can.

Due to social distancing, I am making my way through every show I've ever watched in my life, blessed be Netflix and Prime. Apparently even new seasons of shows I've seen are too much for my fragile brain or something. Though Great British Baking Show is supposed to release a new season so hopefully I'll get an exception for that.

I mean, I do get why; nothing is certain right now and hasn't been for a while and that's thrown off my brain's ratios, so something has to give somewhere. My tolerance for uncertainly extends right now to learning new things only (and upgrading my tech); my visual entertainment, on the other hand, ain't going there. It doesn't just want lack of uncertainty; it wants predictability. I'm actually okay with the trade off; for me personally, losing my motivation to learn and explore is much more dangerous personally to my mental health, so if my brain compensates by watching Bones eighty times, fine.

My only real compromise on that so far is older shows I don't remember well, which is how I ended up marathoning House, which hit that sweet spot of "I saw five seasons of it live" and "But actually I don't remember almost anything but like three of the eps very well". That shit went over gangbusters (House, OTOH, got much, much crazier in later seasons).

I'm currently re-watching Eureka, which is incredibly satisfying because while yes I've seen it, I never really get tired of a town of sci-fi adventures. Also I can watch by storyline, and man, I want this show to get a reboot. Warehouse 13 disappointed me with all the focus shifting to the warehouse supervisor to the point I was skipping too much to work out what was going on when an ep wasn't about him, so these five seasons have to last.

Observations:

1.) I am way more into Zane/Jo than I ever was and I was really into them before so double that.

2.) Also triple down Henry/Grace: I completely forgot how cool she is and how she settled Henry after those grief-driven, frantic seasons. He had so much bad shit happen to him--including alternate timeline shit--that he simply couldn't settle. In the pre-1947 timeline, if that had continued, I'm not sure he would have been able to settle and trust enough to make a relationship with anyone (including Grace), but the fait accompli kind of did the work for him. GRACE IS AMAZING; YES HENRY YOU DO INDEED DESERVE TO BE WITH SOMEONE THAT GODDAMN AWESOME ACCEPT IT.

( more observations, lots of Henry )

In short: fun.

I am taking a month off social media--by that I mean tumblr and twitter--to see if that helps calm me down. I'm officially bored with anxiety; I didn't know it was possible to experience both together, but here we are.

In the last few weeks;
1.) learned new exercises for PT.
2.) installed Home Assistant on my Pi, which is something like SmartThings hub but like, so fucking much cooler and better and more awesome.

After problems with SmartThings meant I de-integrated everything that wasn't z-wave or zigbee. SmartThings went to a new standard and also new app and lost functionality, so it was no longer fun; all my scripts were being killed and all the ones from the community were dying. However, it's still an exemplary z-wave and zigbee hub, so it could be used for that (a z-wave stick is about the same price as a SmartThings hub and that's without zigbee), so I finally sat down with my Pi and installed Home Assistant.

It's about a thousand times better than SmartThings. For one, it's web based, not app based, so the web components are both not an afterthought and also exist; for another it uses Javascript but mostly Python and YAML, and I've really been wanting to learn those two.

I will do an entry on this eventually because holy shit, this is fun.

Related....

3.) Did my first fork and pull on github to bug fix a python script. Yes, I'm finally using github as intended.
4.) Am finally learning python (and yaml). I learn by doing, which generally means I need a project to work on, specifically one that does something I really want to do and can't make work in any language I already know. Making my Sengled Color Bulbs work, as it turns out, was the trick.

When doing the integration for my Sengled bulbs into Home Assistant, the Sengled script had some problems and since python is Javacript With Indents, I went to read the script then read the developer's notes. He didn't have some of the bulbs I did, so I sent him my logs and then made some corrections to the scripts since it would be harder for him to do that part without the right bulbs to test (Sengled doesn't have a public API so he was doing it all with the app, a Sengled Hub, and watching traffic and jsons). Anyway, he invited me to submit a pull instead of sending him script bits, so I learned github while python to do the corrections. It was fun.

( adventures in scripting )

Adventure indeed.

So here is what I learned: my back is probably fine, in itself.

The problem is my hips and related muscles.

The following were performed for her totally professional amusement after she did resistance checking of my legs, feet, and toes:

1.) get on the ball of my foot, lift the other leg, and kind of bounce my heel up and down
2.) repeat with other leg
3.) bend over from standing position
4.) bend backward from standing position
5.) lay down and pull my bent knee to my opposite shoulder
6.) repeat with other leg
other numbers.) I don't remember exactly but variations

From what she said after evaluating me, checking my flexibility, and asking me a series of questions and me volunteering more related to my answers: my back is uninjured, no vertebrae are being sketchy, nothing unaligned, etc. Good. The problem is my hips are stiff as fuck and my back has been pressed into compensatory service for way too long in ways that are not in the original design. There could (maybe?) be other problems but she's pretty sure its asshole hips.

Basically, my hips are hurting my back and need some correction to be brought to stop their freeloading ways.

Example (used several times in different variations):
Her: Your hips are immobile doing [this thing]
Me: What are they supposed to do?
Her: *look of very professional 'oh boy'*

Having a very very tight hamstring (all my life) has been a problem and did not help, which combined with stiff hips is why I was also having periods of intense left leg (rarely but sometimes, right leg) pain that felt like a nerve was being sawed along its length from hip to knee (or sometimes, mid-calf) for weeks or months at a time over the last few years.

So my orders: get a three foot long foam roller and while supporting myself full-length, roll my body, hips to knees, on top of it for thirty seconds on all four sides (face up, face down, and on my sides with only the necessary upper body parts touching the floor to keep myself aloft upon the roller (when on my sides, the opposite foot gets to help!). Then a series of simple exercises ('sit on bed with feet on floor, straighten so your pelvis is over your hips, and flex your foot for thirty seconds' for each foot; 'using your bed, place folded leg on bed and other foot on floor, lean over folded leg and slide folded leg forward without moving foot on floor' and others helpfully sent with my after-visit summary and report. Pelvis over the hips is super important to more than one).

When she took out the foam roll and demonstrated how to use it on all four sides:
Me: What's this for again?
Her: It will help loosen your muscles before the exercises.

After rolling myself over foam roller on all four sides mostly successfully from a certain point of view:
Me: Wait. Am I being tenderized like a steak?
Her: Yes.

So in short, 'tenderize, then exercise' is the solution to the pressing 'hips like idek'. And PT once a week for a while. Sometimes with dry needles: I am honestly looking forward to it. It just sounds cool.

I have to admit, this does help give context to all the times people say 'bend from the hips not the back' like that was something bodies did. Apparently, that's a real thing you can do and not some kind of weird way to annoy me with nonsense; the more you know.

And that explains something: after Child was born I took jazz dance for one of my college credits and also to help fix my balance and endurance. I told the teacher I had a bad back sometimes--that started coincidentally after I quit athletics when I was sixteen--and so she'd come to assist or watch me with some of the positions and moves and see if I needed to skip any. I never did, actually, and I forgot all about my back.

Part of this was because I was fucking exhausted; to keep up, I'd go an hour before class to do the stretches she taught us and then the entire warm-up routine, so in class I'd be less obviously really bad at using my body on beat. But the actual reason is now kind of horribly obvious.

By the time that class ended--it was an nine week summer course--I could not only touch my toes, but flatten my hands on the floor, and I could do a split on a turn from the barre to the floor with either leg forward, things I had never in my life been able to come close to doing or even thought possible without literally cutting those muscles. I was eighty percent getting to the front split, maybe closer. That's just the dramatic stuff; there were a ton of things my body apparently could actually do and boy was I surprised every time.

And she taught us the single most useful exercise I learned, that I've been trying and trying to work out why I can't manage since I strained my back; no matter what I do, I can't get the position to start it. I used to do it often years ago and it was only when my PT therapist was talking about hips near the end of the visit that I realized what the problem was.

For the exercise you stand away from the barre and bend over, grab the barre, then do a slow motion arch and release by muscle group up and down your back from hips to neck. She watched me doing that one, and to teach me, she'd put a hand on my back to indicate where to tighten or release in sequence.

(When it comes to movement, I'm a very physical learner. As in, for a lot of things, after demonstrating it for us all, she'd take me aside and physically move my body herself until my body clicked. Reinforce that shit with a beat, and I could easily keep up with the class when performing no matter the speed, whereas without music, I was always too slow. When I played basketball and was a cheerleader, same thing for anything very new. I got better at translating it, but if pressed for time, more than once, a teammate took me aside and physically moved my body through something that I just wasn't able to get no matter how many times I watched.)

I loved those back exercises; it took a lot of control, but it relaxed the fuck out of my back after (and felt like my whole body), and by the time class ended, I could do it going from flat footed to the ball of my foot and back both in sequence and during the exercise without thinking about it. I could do the entire exercise mid-floor without the barre before class was done. It was part of my pre-class routine, in fact, as soon as I learned it well enough to use it. Afterward, all my stretches were much easier and I could more easily perform a lot of the positions and steps.

Today, I realized:
To get to that initial position--back straight, arms stretched full length to hold the barre, upper body perpendicular to the floor--I need to bend at the hips, which very obviously I could do then pretty goddamn well and completely forgot was humanly possible since. It was, in fact, a necessary component for most of the stretches I used to do and haven't been able to while wondering why why why.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why the hell I didn't realize that until now. Seriously, what the fuck.

I completely forgot to post this here:

Title: The Game of God, 24 & 25
Author: Seperis
Series: Down to Agincourt, Book 4
Codes: Dean/Castiel
Rating: NC-17/Explicit
Summary: You can't win a war for humanity by sacrificing all of your own.
Author Notes: Thanks to nrrrdygrrrl and scynneh for beta services, with advice from Tkodami and MollyC and WarKittens.
Story summary from a comment by Infie.
Thanks to bratfarrar for the series name and summary from her sonnet Harry Takes the Field.
Spoilers: Seasons 5, 6, and 7

AO3 Links for Down to Agincourt:
Series: Down to Agincourt
Book 1: Map of the World
Book 2: It's the Stars That Lie
Book 3: A Thousand Lights in Space

AO3 Links for The Game of God:
All
Chapter 24
Chapter 25

A good one!

Review: NVIDIA Shield TV Pro - a dissertation apparently

Two months later:

I am seriously glad living in semi-isolation made me crazy enough to buy this, and that's apart from the Plex server, which has had some growing pains.

Streaming

This is an incredibly good media streamer. I cannot emphasize enough that it's upgraded my entire viewing experience a lot. Everything looks so much better and crisper. Due to a (unsettlingly good) sale, I got a TV for my bedroom that is more recent, also 4K, and moved the SHIELD in here. It's not as nice a TV as my main one, but 2019 4K has definitely made some advances, and it still upgraded my picture noticeably. Which led me to compare the living room TV with bedroom TV on SHIELD objectively.

My living room TV, although 4K, is from 2017 and trust me, comparing the two TVs, it shows, but comparing SHIELD on both, it upgraded my older living room TV significantly in sharpness, clarity, and after some finagling, color. It's almost as good as the newer TV. So if your TV is older than 2019, this might legit improve your TV watching experience. I can't promise, but it's something to consider, especially if you've had to put off upgrading your TV this year but need a new media streamer.

Also: with 2019 TV, we didn't have to do any finagling with color at all; it worked fine out of box.

SHIELD Specs Regular and Pro

The NVIDIA SHIELD TV comes in two flavors: regular and Pro. Here are the differences in the Pro:

RAM: Pro: 3GB of RAM; Regular: 2 GB
Internal Storage: Pro: 16 GB; Regular: 8 GB
MicroSD: Regular only
USB: Pro only, 2 USB 3.0
Network storage: both allow you to mount network shares
Plex Server: Pro only
Ethernet: Gigabit
Wireless: 802.11ac 2x2 MIMO 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi
Bluetooth: 5.0

Storage

The USBs allow the Pro to have expanded storage of two types; you can attach a USB drive and choose to format it as internal and it will be treated as internal storage. You can also attach drives as removable storage. The former is incredibly useful to expand that 16 GB storage--especially if you use the SHIELD for gaming--but with this: while pretty much any SSD or flash drive will work for extra internal, using the one NVIDIA recommends works better.

SanDisk 128GB Extreme PRO USB 3.1 Solid State Flash Drive - $42.99

There's also a 256 GB version

I started off using a 128 GB Kingston solid state I had and it worked okay but was cranky and SHIELD complained it was slow sometimes, which was something I'd noticed but didn't connect to the drive specifically. The SanDisk is faster and required no effort to add to the SHIELD.

This is important especially if you want to run a Plex Media Server on your SHIELD.

Plex

So I did run into problems, but not due to SHIELD, but a known issue with Plex: the database got corrupt. Because Plex has no backend access (and no way to backup, and ugh, don't start me on the issues)), the solution is basically 'erase' either the specific library or just start over from scratch. Generally, with a corrupt database, its better to scrub and reinstall. I ordered the Sandisk, waited for it to arrive, then reset the SHIELD to factory, moved it to my room, and did the configuration/Plex installation.

So far, there is nothing Plex can't handle playing on the LAN without a problem. I tested with two friends, all of us watching the same movie at the same time, and watched the stats; for the most part, the only thing that affected playback was internet speed.

Speaking of, if anyone would like to help me test Plex watch together, email me or leave a comment, especially if you have or are interested in getting Plex; this would be a good way to get introduced to it. All you need is me to send you an invite to share my library and when you get it, set up a Plex account, then we'll meet on Discord so I can get live feedback while we watch and talk about the movie. It can be watched via browser, computer client, app or on a client app on your TV, streamer, tablet, or phone.

I was thinking we'd watch Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Legally Blonde. Or Clueless!

Other Features

1.) Google Assistant is built in if you want to use it.
2.) Chromecast is built in.
3.) It is Alexa compatible; all you need is an Alexa-enabled speaker.
4.) SmartThings skill can be downloaded from the Google Play Store app on your SHIELD and the SHIELD can be a hub for home automation. To control Z-Wave and Zigbee devices, however, you need SmartThings Link, which is a USB looking thing that is not easy to find at this time.

Note: If you have Alexa at home, you can tell Alexa to find the SHIELD remote and the remote will beep. We live in the future indeed.

Other Notes

Hitchhiker's Guide to the SHIELD TV (Everything you need to know) - this was posted at the NVIDIA SHIELD forums and is a great resource if you have a SHIELD or think you may want one and want to see what the fuss is by other users.

Partially to share in case anyone else uses Alexa to control their TV, but also in case I lose (again) my list of working commands that I've tested. This is not exhaustive but the ones I know work. Organized by type and configuration, because each has quirks; will update as new things found.

( Using Alexa on Sonos Speakers to Control TV )
( Using Alexa on an Alexa-enabled Speaker to Control FireTV Stick/Cube )
( Using Alexa on Echo Dot/Speaker to Control TV And NVIDIA SHIELD TV )

If anyone is still interested in/need a portable monitor, one by the same company I bought my beloved monitor from that I recced here is for sale on Amazon at a hell of a discount:

Lepow 15.6 full HD USB Type-C Portable Monitor - Regular $194.98, on sale for $164.99, but with the $15.00 coupon it's $149.99

It's a lightning deal, so no idea how much longer it will last; ti's at 80% now.

I've now confirmed there is nothing that needs a screen in my house that it doesn't work with and we're a gaming and computer geek family.

If anyone has a sodastream or equivalent, I'm trying to get Orange Vanilla Cola to work, since Orange Vanilla Coke now qualifies as an addiction.

This is the closest I've gotten so far for 1 liter:
1 tsp Molina Mexican Vanilla Blend Extract
1/4 tsp Simply Organic Orange Flavor

The vanilla isn't the problem, as this is my favorite vanilla and it's working; the orange is throwing me. I can't tell if my proportion is off or the type of flavoring; I can sort of taste th orange in aftertaste, but it's also a little bitter. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free.

Also! Share your favorite recipes for home soda!

Like most people living Life in a Time of Coronavirus (and Trump Adminstration Year Four), I am forever searching for new ways to stave off anxiety attacks, panic attacks, a full nervous breakdown, and extreme boredom while leaving my home as little as possible.

Masks For All Occasions

Sometimes, I buy new masks and now I buy just from here: Bizzy Bates Creations

So far, these are bar none the best masks I have found anywhere. I talked about it on twitter but forgot here so: why I love these.

1.) They fold out to fit your nose and your chin without gapping.

This is my favorite part. The designer was an LPN and obviously got what faces are like in three dimensions and what masks need to do. It fits to the contours of your face amazingly.

2.) Fits under your glasses so no fogging!!!!!

3.) Adjustable straps to fit me and Child, whose head is bigger than mine.

4.) A lot of options for fabric that changes frequently and excellent design work. These are pretty and the fabric is excellent. We have five so far and I just made my July order.

5.) Preinstalled cotton filter and totally washable.

I cannot emphasize enough; I've bought many masks from different places and people, but hers are the best and most comfortable I've tried. The fit is incredibly good, and it fits close but not too close; the fold out means you can fit it to your face. Like, the only way I could get a better fit would be hire a seamstress to custom design one to my head.

Also! She also now sells silk-lined bonnets for textured hair that are gorgeous.

Note: Sherry is amazing; she's warm, kind, friendly, and responds to email promptly. I've emailed her a few times, including today today about the bonnet since I want to surprise a friend with one but since I'm not black and don't have textured hair (and I wanted to surprise her so couldn't ask her), I wasn't sure about maximum hair length or type, as friend does many kinds of updos and braids as well as extensions and Marley braids. She wrote back very quickly to assure me it would fit. I just ordered two--one adult, one child--for a friend and coworker whose been very stay at home since she has a five year old with asthma.

Hobbies in the Time of Coronavirus

I feel like my Shelter At Home learned skill is Ripping with MakeMKV and Encoding With Handbrake Every Movie I Own in All Possible Formats to Play on Anything Then Buying More Movies to Do It More.

And I am well on my way. Currently, my media server is technically 22 TB, because I had to add another 8TB hard drive. Yeah.

After getting NVIDIA Shield TV Pro--RECOMMENDED HOLY SHIT--I hooked up the four bay hard drive enclosure directly to my router via USB 3.0, which works gangbusters. And so.

Drives:
Video
- Size: 3TB (actual 2.68TiB)
- Used: 354 GB
Television:
- Size: 3TB (actual 2.68TiB)
- Used: 1.56 TiB
Movies:
- Size: 8TB (actual 7.22TiB)
- Used: 3.34 TiB
- Movies without a 4K version
Movies2: - NEW!
- Size: 8TB (actual 7.22TiB)
- Used: 4.14
- Movies with a 4K version

The reason for having to get a second 8TB hard drive is my Shelter in Place hobby.
( video encoding is a drug )

I Blame Spreadsheets

My Ubuntu Server Spreadsheet is the reason this happened, by the way. I wanted to get a full list of all my movies, and I thought, why not organize it? Then I thought, why not pull all vital statistics on a video file? Then I thought, why not create multiple sheets to break down the raw stats into readable information?

This was a process, is what I'm saying. A terrible escalating process. But what, I ask you, is more soothing to someone with ADHD, anxiety, and depression than finding new and amazingly anal organization schemes?

Which means there are the following separate sheets:
DATARO - this is a text file created by a bash script on my server that gets a list of all movies and formats it using information from the file name and location and imported into Excel.
DATAROM - this is a text file created by a bash script that run mediainfo on every single movie file and gives me vital statistics like: number of audio streams, number of subtitle streams, video encoder, source, and the name of each and every audio stream. Yes, this is where everything went wrong.

SPOILER: DATAROM is where eeeeeverything went to hell.

MoviesAll - created by VBA from DATARO. This is a straight list of all movies with the following fields: Title, Size, Unit, Resolution, Format, Date Added, Subdirectory, File Name, and Bytes, which is how I get Size and Unit.

That sounds great, right? No, it's not nearly anal enough. I now had DATAROM.

MovieType - created by VBA from DATAROM. This consolidates all movie files by title and resolutions, so I can see on a glance how many resolutions a movie has and its format(s).

SPOILER: this is how the 'create 720p for everything' began.

MovieInfo - created by VBA from DATAROM. This goes movie file by movie file, pulls the name of each audio stream, and categorizes it in a easy to reference table under one of four audio stream types and twenty-three subtypes: Dolby (8 subtypes), DTS (7 subtypes) , AAC LC (5 subtypes), and Other (mpeg, pcm, and other).

The last one is my beloved because it took me for fucking ever. This is where I learned all about how names have no meaning, all the meaning, multiple names for the same thing, and sometimes, astrology, I have no idea.

Behind the cut is a (very guesswork) breakdown of categorization of audio streams. I cannot emphasize enough how much google and guesswork went into this. If anyone sees this--and bold of me to assume anyone read this far, I don't think anyone is that bored--and wants to correct my interpretation of audio stream types, feel free please God I may canonize you when I get my new religion off the ground.
( VBA Select Case Table for Audio )

Anyway, that visual breakdown is what alerted me to the DTS-only problem and how I ended up here today. I have no regrets, and that may be worrying.

I asked this on twitter, but there are vidders here who may have the answer that might not see it.

Hardware:
1.) 500G SSD in an exteral USB 3.0 enclosure (It was like super on sale)

Places:
1.) Windows 10 PC (Manhattan)
2.) Kubuntu 20.04 Server (Watson)
3.) RAX Router via USB 3.0. (To which a five bay hard drive enclosure is attached)

Why:
Moving 4K rips and 2160, 1080, and 720 encodes in any video format to and fro at will.

I need to format the hard drive in the best way to assure compatibility and mountability to all of them and be able to transfer files to and from all. Yes, there's the LAN but sometimes you want your 4K rip transferred in under an hour and change to the other machine five feet away. Yes, I will indeed have to actually stand up and that's a genuine shame.

NTFC and ext4 are both no, but fat32 or exfat or something else? Which one would work best so they'll be recognize, read-write without trauma and automount (or rather, I can easily update the fstab for automount in Kubuntu)?

In between my last post and now, I have a.) thrown out my back again, b.) six days after breaking a tooth and so needed to make a dentist appointment which was c.) the day after I threw out my back.

However, my life is not all disintegrating body and the slow encroachment of insanity:
1.) I now play Animal Crossing with my Switch, and yes, it's worth it.
2.) I got my NVIDIA Shield TV Pro

Due to the first sentence of this entry, all I managed until this week was basic setup, getting streaming up, and my Plex server transferred over. This week, however, I got to finally sit down and pay attention to it as well as actually make my Plex server work correctly.

NVIDIA Shield Android TV

If you're in the market for a premium media streamer, consider the NVIDIA Shield TV, retailing at $149.99 ($129.99 on random sale) or NVIDIA Shield TV Pro, $199.99 on the very rare times it's in stock.

Currently it is not in stock pretty much anywhere (as of right now, could change at literally any second) but it goes in and out of stock at random intervals. Much like the Nintendo Switch, the reason is that whenever a site updates to say they have it, bots buy them immediately and then they're sold for twice to five times their price on Amazon and Ebay.

The story of how I got my Pro (and my Switch for that matter) involve the website NowInStock, SlickDeals alerts, and absolutely normal human behavior that in retrospect isn't odd, worrisome, or alarming.

( it's all very normal here )

Moving on.

I wanted the Shield Pro for one reason: Shield TV was the only streamer whose Plex client app could consistently stream and transcode 4K and Dolby Atmos media, and the Pro model came with the ability to run a Plex Server on it as well as play Plex content. I'm a simple girl with simple needs who Paypal also foolishly issued a shiny new credit card and a separate no-interest credit line less than three months ago and I hadn't really gotten a chance to use.

(No idea what the hell they were thinking, either, but here we are.)

Which is why, to my own shock, I am not starting my review with All the Plex; I'm going to start with what I didn't even care about when I bought it; the media streamer and Android TV box.

The Media Streamer (and Android Box)

The price tag is high for a media steamer, yes, which may be part of the reason why I didn't at any point consider it something that could also play Netflix.

Comparatively speaking, media streamers are among the cheapest Way To Get Entertainment On Our TV Not Involving an Antenna. If you wandered with dinosaurs like me and remember Olden Days, a VCR was expensive even on the low end for almost a decade even at Wal-Mart. DVD players and then Bluray players got cheap much faster, but media streamers... you don't even need a separate machine; it can come free on your TV, and I mean TVs under $200 at the last big Amazon sale. You can stream on your tablet or phone, or pick up a FireTV tablet for under $50 to do it on. All you need is an internet connection and if you don't want to pay for your stream service, there are free ones.

When it comes to quality media streamers that require you pay money, the competition isn't exactly light, either; they include:

1.) FireTV 4K Stick, $49.99, and frequently on sale for half that price. Just as importantly, it can easily and without effort gateway you into the cheapest Surround Sound Home Theater possible, which I talked about in this entry; specifically, a Dolby Atmos Home Theater system for as low $179.97 if you buy two Echo Dots and an Echo Sub during one of Amazons extremely frequent sales. That, by the way, is less than the price of one (1) Sonos One speaker. And that price includes the Fire TV 4K stick.

2.) Chromecast Ultra, $69.99; like, half my friends that don't have a Amazon Prime have on of these, and more than a few have both.

3.) Roku Ultra, $79.99 and comes with free headphones; Roku was my gateway drug into media streamers because they gave me a mid-range one free when I signed up for three months of Sling TV.

4.) Apple TV, $179; frankly, this being Apple, that's almost the equivalent of a Wal-Mart low end VCR price circa 1989. I have heard it's awesome, but no idea. When I finally sold my soul, it was to a mega corporation that was technically within my income bracket. Also, after testing our apps on iPhones at work for almost five years, I genuinely want to collect them all and catapult them into the sun along with Apple Headquarters and the literal apple fruit, just to assure the very memory of apples will die. I dream about it sometimes; I'm always so happy until I wake up.

These are just the first and most popular that came into my head by major companies and been around for years. The market is not light on media streamers, is what I'm saying.

The Shield TV is more a premium Android TV box, made for geeks to enjoy and also Plex, which lets face it, is geeky as fuck even though everyone pretends its super consumer grade, whatever. And yeah, it also you can do some streaming, I guess.

The thing is, while I knew theoretically it was an Android TV Box (which I didn't care about) that also played Netflix (which I had like, several things that could do that) and did other things, I--didn't care. At all. I was in this for Plex; the Plex Server you could install on the Pro could stream all my 4K and even Dolby Atmos or at least Dolby 5.1 sound.

So when I did set up, it was all prep for moving my Plex server over, and so I was genuinely shocked when I went ahead and automatically entered my logins for Prime and Netflix--they were right there, why not?--and since I was testing anyway, went ahead and opened Prime to watch a few minutes of one of the shows I'd watched most recently.

(Spoiler: it would be several hours before seperis remembered Plex existed.)

The Shield is many many (many) notches above my FireTV 4K Stick and a mid-rise building above my TV's streaming apps in quality. Not like "oh, this seems better" but stop and stare before hitting back to make sure this wasn't a high-res version I hadn't ever seen before that just appeared.

In the almost three weeks using it and one week actually sitting down to examine it and playing Netflix and Prime through it, there's a considerable increase in overall picture quality and crispness and amazing consistency on most--not all--of the shows I had watched recently enough to make a definite comparison; if 4K is available, I can get it clear and crisp without artifacts, skipping, or loss of speed. If 5.1 sound is available, I get it. I also noticed--though three weeks is no proof over the long term--there's been no buffering, no stuttering, and no stopping.

Among the many many settings I've just started to explore is AI upscaling of non-4K content. I enabled it when I was doing initial setup because why not, but generally, I don't notice a difference on most shows. This--this, I noticed, because I'd been rewatching Leverage on Prime on the FireTV stick, which is why it was my test stream for the Pro. It wasn't just 'huh, I think that looks better'. It was stop and stare at the screen; it was cleaner, crisper, and while no, even it could not fix IMDB's fuckup of the subtitles, man, the picture....

I tested with Bones, Psyche, and a few random shows as well, and while I definitely know Psyche and Bones look better, it's been too long since I last watched to know exactly how much, just definitely "better, amount unknown"

Interesting note: on the Shield TV, Netflix and Prime don't nag me when I watch too many episodes and ask snottily if I'm still watching (Netflix) or return to the intro page of the current episode and do nothing until I interact or it turns off (Prime). I accidentally streamed all five seasons of Leverage end to end without interruption and Shield's Prime app didn't stop me. 'Accidentally' up until I woke up the next morning circa ep 2-3 of season two, realized Leverage was still playing, I was working from home, sod decided to leave it on and check in every hour to see how long it would let me. That would be first heist to very last, friends.

Netflix, I tested it with--I think Great British Bake-off?--and Child checked out his regular anime. There was no nagging to ask if I'm still watching, though only to about a season and a half there before I remembered hey, I should try out why I bought it, my Plex server. That yes, I'd belatedly finally loaded when the shock wore off (around two-three in the morning) but as work and other stuff interfered, I hadn't had a chance to do more than basic configuration.

The Shield Home screen is fully customizable; you can pick what apps you want to show or get rid of, there's a huge library of apps, games--cut me some slack, for reasons I'll do another entry on, getting the Plex Server running was easy, but getting my media on it--not so much.

I'm actually kind of glad I finally decided to accept reality and get the Shield to run my Plex Server. Otherwise, I never would have ever bought it for just streaming media or Android TV when my FireTV Stick seemed to be doing everything I needed for streaming and Android TV is sort of--something that exists. And I'm saying this after only a week of active work with it, and ninety percent of that was getting my Plex Server up and running. I haven't even really explored advanced features. I mean, I have but I keep finding new ones.

Now, we'll talk about Plex before I get inspired to write some examples and end up playing with the settings until dawn.

Plex, finally

My original reason for this purchase.

Up until now, when Plex was on Watson Server and then my Pi, all of them--servers and TV--hardlined on ethernet to my router, I couldn't reliably stream 4K content and had buffering sometimes even with 1080p. I could unreliably get 5.1 sound but mostly it was 2.1. There was a lot of transcoding going on where it would basically downgrade my stream to make it play. Nothing I did helped, and even after I read the article I linked below on the only thing that would work (I read it last year), I refused to believe it and kept trying.

After so much googling, however, I finally got a clear answer on exactly why I couldn't by sheer work fix it; the problem was both the Plex server and the Plex client apps on most TVs and media streamers.

1.) The Plex Client App

The Plex app on media streamers, gaming consoles, SmartTVs, etc isn't generally developed and maintained by Plex, but by the company--Amazon, for example, on the FireTV--and that means its subject to the limits of the streamer, whatever their developers decide to do/not do, and when/if they felt like updating it when Plex updates, and Plex wasn't necessarily a high priority. Enough people used it that it was worth having the client app, but it's still firmly in geek territory and wouldn't be a deciding factor for most non-geek people. Whereas fa media streamer lives and dies on the ability of the general consumer to access and watch Netflix, Disney+, Sling, Prime, HBO, you get the idea.

As it turns out, the only Plex client app that everyone (in Plex land) consistently said worked perfectly with the server was Plex for Windows, which was made by Plex and you can download on their site. It was the only app that I could almost get what I wanted: it could stream 4K and 7.1 sound, since my laptop could get both, but that meant the only place I could watch my own media in the original resolution was on my laptop or possibly, my phone.

Which brings me to...

2.) The Plex Media Server.

( but first, a story )

Short version: oh hell yes.

The Shield runs the Plex server like I always dreamed. It can play everything in my library at the highest resolution and audio that my TV and my laptop can do. Last night, I tested it with multiple streams with a friend and one 4K rip and one 720p encode of Oceans 8.

It played the 4K with Dolby Atmos to me on my laptop and also simultaneously--and effortlessly-- transcoded the 720p encode of the same movie for a friend fifteen miles away with no stuttering, no stopping, no buffering. And the transcoding problem, I remind you, is why I flirted with--very briefly--buying a chip that cost half my laptop's price (not including the rest of the hardware needed for a server, God). The Shield not only does better than the chip would have and cost me at least eighty percent less than the CPU, the Shield is also less than half the size of a Playstation and fits on my small wall mounted entertainment center (aka Fancy Shelf that looks cool and I'm scared to put too much weight on and collapse the wall or something. It won't, no, i had this checked its in the studs. I just don't trust it).

There Are Some Issues Though

Now the other parts.

1.) It's more complicated to set up than a Fire TV or Chromecast.

Not because initial setup is hard; it's pretty much effortless, you'll have Netflix, Prime, Disney, Vudu, Sling, whatever, up and running as easily as any other media streamer. This is more--a side effect of the Shield being what it is.

You see, it's ready to interact with the latest TV and sound system to give you the home theater of your dreams. And if you happen to have a 4K TV less than two years old with HDR 2.0 and all the video bells and whistles, you'll be delighted how easy it is. And even some older than two years might be fine.

Some, however...might take some finagling.

Totally random example: If, say, your 4K TV is two and a half years old, you might click on Netflix and after a moment, check Prime and the other streams since there is definitely still color, it's like color if all media was viewed through a soft grey mist. Like being doomed to watch a Snyder film or one with gritty filter for the rest of your life.

The colors are dull, is what I'm saying. Prime, Netflix, Plex, everything.

Now, this is fixable! It's easy! There are instructions! This issue has been thoroughly discussed! It's not complicated!

a.) Using the instructions for your TV model, you may need to go into your TV Settings and change one or two or two items under Video/Display.

b.) After that, you can look on your TV or on the website or google for info on your TV's video specs, then you open the Shield TV Settings and under video/display, there's a glorious list of all the video profiles possible and you just have to find the one that matches, activate it, done! Yes, it really is there!

But.

I say this as someone who loves complicated configuration shit: this isn't complicated, it's not hard, it's boring, breathtakingly so, like watching paint dry on snails who are so slow they may actually have died years ago, but unable to conform that, you have to just keep watching. Not forever. I mean, so they say.

You see, they really do seem to have all the profiles possible, and by that I mean, I really do hope that's true because there are so many holy God. Yes, you could go and research your TV specs and use that to help but--this is the one time it may not be not worth it. Sometimes the official specs are--not entirely accurate (or lying their asses off) and that's the parts of the profile that I didn't have to research to find out what words meant, and I mean, these were words I thought I knew. Apparently I did not. Sure, it might help--but honestly, I'm not betting on it.

So unless your career is in Video Tech Shit As Relates to TVs and Screens (and Lying TV Making Corporations), it's probably a matter of simply starting at the top and trying every one or--if you're incredibly lucky--your googling sent you to where someone who has your TV model already fixed this. Again, not hard at all, and very likely if your TV is from a major retailer it's going to be fairly fast, but the older your TV and the less billions the company that made it is worth, the farther down the list you'll have to go.

Of course, this may not be a problem for you! Just--its' possible.

2.) It's Origins as a Geek Machine Are Kind of Obvious

The thing is, this is an attraction for me in this case, one that I didn't even know I wanted, but even among ultra geeks, we all have spots where we want simple, consumer grade, not requiring us to do more than hit obvious buttons or choose from a very few very obvious, pre-selected options and call it a day. Sometimes, you want to build a murderbot with proximity awareness, but sometimes, Amazon has a sale and you get a Roomba, strap a nerf gun to it, and call it good. Sure, you have to pretend you don't secretly love your much cleaner carpet and floors, that it's really all about the nerf gun and irony, but it's a cute, low-effort robot that also cleans. Dude, I get you; when we were kids, we all wanted a robot best friend. Roomba is pretty close, even though it won't scare all the mean kids and make them pay for making fun of me some hypothetical child. It's late--noon, I mean, early. Something.

Moving on.

The problem is, if some visiting friend hacked your roomba and suddenly you had access to the firmware and could edit or replace it with your own custom configurations, fuck clean floors; you'd be mathing up how many kitchen knives would fit on it or training your furry pet army while making them tiny velcro boots like, yesterday. We're geeks; if we're careful and avoid temptation, we can mimic normal, but one roomba firmware hack and hello cat army, a mild case of scruvy, and a somewhat alarming drop in sanity conditions in our homes that some might characterize as 'incompatible with human life' and then it's all dramatic hazmat suits and a potential ripped from the headlines made for tv movie based on a true story.

We're geeks; it happens.

(I genuinely anticipate and am terrified of the day I buy a house and therefore must buy all my own major appliances, because yes, they will inevitably be wifi enabled and honest to God, I don't know how long it will be before I try to hack my goddamn oven to flash it with something open source that I can edit at will with a command line option and scripting capability. It will be glorious, at least until I die of food poisoning from a badly programmed fridge or my kitchen appliances revolt, declares themselves autonomous beings, and execute me for sentient being rights violations dating from the day I put fish in the microwave and forgot it for three days.

I'm a geek; it happens.

Don't buy smart major appliances, you say? Tell me not to breathe; it's not about 'want' but 'must'. I don't want to in the traditional sense, but I will because that's what's going to happen when I'm in that store. I'll be asking for wifi specs while significantly lowering my credit score and googling how to flash a refrigerator before the delivery guy finishes hooking it up (the oven and washer/dryer guys haven't even arrive yet). Will I have any idea what I'm doing? No, of course not; not even a guess, my dude. And that won't stop me? That has literally not once in my entire life so much as slowed me down; in fact, you might say it's an inducement to continue my education.)

Anyway.

It's not that the Shield isn't almost basic consumer-level now; the veneer is almost complete. If you're not a geek, you might not even notice and wouldn't care. There's maybe one or two things the average consumer might need to google about (like the color thing, but it's not really that common).

However, if you have any geek tendencies that like to come out at random....I was googling how to enable ssh this week (you have to jailbreak it, which I am not ashamed to say I bookmarked, just you know, no reason) and there are settings in there and capabilities that make my fingers itch. Again, the only reason I cared this existed was the Plex server; I spent an hour the other doing nothing but going through all the menus in the settings and did it again two days ago when I accidentally found something new.

Yeah, I'm having a blast.

I completely forgot Monday is a holiday. This is what WFH does to you; you forget holidays.

MediaInfo - Everything You Didn't Know About Your Movies and Videos

So I think I mentioned it before, but anyone with a media collection they want to analyze or vidders who want an easy way to document all their source super thoroughly might like to try Mediainfo, which does a full analysis of your media to get literally all the information about it--audio streams, video streams, all the encoders, bitrate, a billion more things than that, etc. It works on any platform. If you have a large media collection, this is for you.

Here is a mediainfo file on The Martian. This doesn't show all the possible options, btw, just like a lot of them.

About Templates

However, that's pretty slow to do one movie/video at a time; instead, use command line to do in batches. Better, to get specific information you want instead of All Of It My God, you can create a template for mediainfo to read.

I have written several templates; my latest is one that will get everything in a movie that I want and place it in a csv file in a single line, so when it's done, I can see all my movies and info in a single spreadsheet. All you'd need is a script or program to loop through your movies to add them to the file if you use Windows; if you use Linux, I have a bash script you can use as a template or I can tell you how to adapt it to your file locations. The limitations are how wide you want your spreadsheet as each movie has about five billion or so characteristics and a lot lot lot of redundancy.

How The Template Works
If you look at the xml or text of a mediainfo file for a movie (see above), it's split into groups: General, Video, Audio, Text, and Menu. In the template, each group gets its own line; you cannot mix them up. You don't have to use all the groups, but no matter what order you have them in on the template, it will still write them into the file in the order above (General, Video, Audio, Text, Menu).

To Create a Template
Open notepad or something plain text.

You start with the group you want, semicolon, then a list of all the properties you want from that group, each one surrounded by '%'. You can use any delimiter.

This is the command:
mediainfo --Inform=$template $movie 1>>$file

Here's my template that is stored in a plain text file:
General;%FileName%,%FileSize%,%Duration%,%AudioCount%,%TextCount%,
Video;%Format%,%InternetMediaType%,%OriginalSourceMedium%,
Audio;%Format/String%,%Format_Commercial%,%Title%,

Note: I put a comma at the end of the line for the future csv file to import into a spreadsheet. If you plan to import into a spreadsheet, make sure you put your delimeter at the end of the line.

This give me:
General--> movie name, size, duration, how many audio streams, how many text streams (subtitles)
Video-->The format (HEVC, AVC, MPEG), internet media type (encoder sometimes) and the original source (bluray, DVD, or if blank, that means I did the encoding myself)
Audio--the string name (MLP FBA 16-ch, DTS, AC-3), the commercial name (Dolby TrueHD with Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital, DTS), and title which is specific type (7.1 surround sound, 5.1, etc).

Here's what my spreadsheet looks like using this template: Media Spreadsheet

That Spreadsheet Is Kinda Big
Yeah, all this on one line--especially with nine to seventeen audio streams--gets big (see sheet above). You can also do multiple templates, one for general, one for video, one for audio, etc, and run them one after the other.

mediainfo --Inform=$genTemplate $movie 1>>$generalFile
mediainfo --Inform=$vidTemplate $movie 1>>$videoFile
mediainfo --Inform=$audTemplate $movie 1>>$audioFile

The only problem with that is with the video only and audio only template, you'll also need to have General as well so you can get the movie name, since General is the only place the name property appears. so for a Video only, you'd do something like this.

General;%FileName%,
Video;%Format%,%InternetMediaType%,%OriginalSourceMedium%,

Mediainfo - All Properties List

For reference, here is a complete list of all properties available, separated by group (General, Video, Audio, Text, Menu).

Generally, to work out what is what, run mediainfo on a few movies (a bluray rip, a DVD rip, one you encoded yourself, one with DTS and one with Dolby, a vid you downloaded, etc), get the XML document for each, and contrast/compare what information is given. It's not always clear what does what--or if it does anything--until you check it in multiple formats. Some properties are very specific to the video type, audio type, or subtitle type.

I highly recommend this program. I'm currently adapting a script and template to use on my vid collection to find old formats/bad formats/redundancy/etc.

If you have any problem accessing the linked files, tell me; I set it to everyone but well, google is gonna google.

So after last month's less than stellar mental health and an incident, I decided I needed a project during Our Time of Covid.

There's a reason I have lots of hobbies, and it's not just because I have a short attention span and I love learning new things; I do not do well idle, specifically mentally idle. Cleaning all day every day would make me busy, but unless I was redesigning our storage or reorganizing the kitchen--aka things for which I made spreadsheets--as far as my brain would be concerned, I'd be doing nothing and so have plenty of time to worry, be anxious, overthink everything, consider my life and choices, and...every single person reading this with Depresion or anxiety just twitched, sorry. You know.

Reading, writing, maintenance on Watson and my Plex server, Pokemon Go and minor refactoring of my scripts were not cutting it, or a portion of April suggests; what is needed here is something new aka, a project.

So I checked my budget, recalculated everything, and decided to upgrade Watson Server.

Watson Server was born 10/7/2010 when I built my very first computer from components (as opposed to upgrading existing ones). Here I went into how I built it. About two years ago, Child was upgrading his computer to a gaming machine, so I took his old parts to build Watson Server (Second of That Name), but while it was a decent upgrade, it was still pretty slow. Moving the Plex server to the Pi a few months ago helped, but not much.

Enter Watson Mark III.

( Watson Server, Third of His Name )

Can't lie, I built it around this case, which I fell in love with. Also? I can finally try out watercooling.

I think this will keep me busy for a bit.

Currently, however, w e

So, accomplishments in the last month:
1.) Paid off one of three personal loans early. Of the two remaining, one will be paid off in January, and then I'll settle how to get the third one done.
2.) I got my first credit card in five years after some unfortunate...it's unimportant, but this is my fourth attempt to have a credit card and not destroy my credit.
3.) Re-consolidated my student loan so I qualify for the public forgiveness program in ten years and six month covid deferment. Also, my payment went down by four dollars.
4.) Used excess funds from 1 and 3 to pay down some but not all my outstanding debt.
5.) Banked most of my tax refund and all stimulus checks without spending them immediately.

Why not use it for all debt?

Most of my debt left is now interest free (other than the personal loans) and therefore I want to keep them to show regular payments over a two year period. Also--since I bought an eighth of a cow--my food budget changed, and I started budgeting for delivery anything once a week from local restaurants for the foreseeable future, and every two weeks from my local vape store (TWO HOUR LOCAL DELIVERY TO MY DOOR!). But that is not the main reason.

See, I need a couch, and in light of the pandemic, I'm limiting my options to local businesses. So I'm grimly searching through my local furniture stores, which is great, support local businesses, great, high quality products, awesome, but I live in Austin and 'local' is not cheap, even after eliminating those using the words 'artisan' or 'hand crafted' and places with showrooms that are ice white walls hung with tasteful art littered with understated living room sets with neutral patterned earth-toned rugs with names starting with 'urban' , I close the tab: I can't afford the accent pieces, much less anything with an actual function.

So this is going to cost me.

I'm leaning toward Austin's Couch Potatoes, which is not only where my mom got God's Own Amazing Massive Sectional of Eternal Comfort, but in the old days when we shopped in person, the salesperson would direct you to a refrigerator for water, soda, or beer before leaving you alone to shop to your heart's content and play with the remote control mattresses advertising zero gravity.

(Note: they have many and I rode them all with a Coke in my hand and a song in my heart. Some had speed functions!)

And by leaning toward, I mean I'm buying from them: during lockdown, they didn't furlough but employed their staff making PPE gowns and masks for frontline workers and selling bulk masks to the public at 100 for $100. And are still doing it, if you want to check it out; they're running a GoFundMe to help with materials since a lot of suppliers are still closed. They're technically open now but it's very limited and the salesguy I talked to says generally, it's far preferred by appointment.

(He also sent me the full options for a sectional I was interested in--similar to my Mom's--with prices on each individual piece as well as the most common configurations and their price. No, seriously, the actual goddamn full fact sheet. Didn't even argue. Literally no furniture store has ever just handed me an information sheet on their sectionals with a breakdown by piece. It's fully customizable; I pick the pieces, the fabric, and the throw pillows and they build it for me. It's also their own brand and locally-built--yep, 'local', fuck my life--so you can imagine the price. I did not realize I could feel guilty about not buying something, like I'm letting down the local economy. This is so weird. It also looks so incredibly comfortable I'm wondering how much I really need two kidneys or an entire whole liver; livers regenerate, after all.)

To be fair, yes, I do have a couch, but it also is the reason I strained my back so I couldn't move for six hours, couldn't walk for three days, couldn't bend for almost a week, and still have to be careful doing shit like unloading the dishwasher or climbing on a ladder to hang new blinds or slumping or basically anything that requires that part of my back. I haven't needed the muscle relaxants or anti-inflammatories for almost three weeks, but I still carry them.

It is not a bad couch; it is a bad couch for me. I remind myself of that to avoid setting it on fire while performing an exorcism.

On my porch after hanging the second set of blinds up so I have full frontal coverage from the sun; it's glorious.

So at work, they upgraded eight of the phones we use for app testing, and I am the proud not-owner-but-keeper of:

Upgraded
Three (3) iPhone 11
Two (2) iPhone 11 Pro
Two (2) Samsung Galaxy S10+
One (1) Samsung Galaxy Note 10

Not Upgraded For Regression Testing
One (1) Samsung Galaxy S8
One (1) iPhone 7

How Did This Go Wrong, Though?

I'm glad you asked.

When we order phones for testing, they are in a different group from work phones aka phones used as phones for work.

The initial and first upgrade, they came to us, I charged them, transferred the SIM cards from the old phones to the new, upgraded the OS, installed the App Center where test builds of the mobile apps we test are uploaded and we download for testing, etc. Easy.

This time, the Samsung phones performed as always. The iPhones...did so very not.

The iPhones were locked down like a Crusader's wife in a chastity belt. The second I turned them on to do the welcome and they connected with the internet, they downloaded the Work Profile and you can literally do nothing with the iPhones but make calls; you can't even change the wallpaper. It wasn't just locked down in general; everything I need to do, including download the Apple Store to get anyconnect so we can test over VPN and install the test profile--nope.

Me: Fuck my life.

Here's where it gets complicated: I don't know how we get these phones.

The state buys them, sure, I know what department does ordering, and there's a name on the box of who made the order, but that just tells me who was in charge of ordering shit that day in IT not who actually gave or approved the order. This is like the work version of fairies dropping off shit in the night; I still don't know entirely how I got all those USB cords I wrote about in an earlier entry, I just sent off the list with prices picked from Official Major Retailer Wholesale Book and sent the email out to my manager. I know who I got the book from, and I know it was sent to IT (another IT group), but after that, it may be witchcraft or something.

(My manager also doesn't know, because they don't tell him. He just sends it to IT and witchcraft, as I said.)

The Journey Begins Here

Manager, Part I

Me: *explains*
Manager: ...
Manager: Let's start with help desk.
Me: This is going to take a while, I think.

The IT Help Desk: The Ticket

I say this with respect; they aren't qualified to deal with this because this does not fall under their area, they have nothing to do with phones. This is literally nothing to do with them; this part of IT deals with passwords and permissions and resets and software installs. But that's where I had to start because witchcraft.

First, I explained what I wanted; then I explained my job; then I explained how my job (testing mobile apps) related to the iPhones. I don't blame them--a surprising number of people don't realize software does not fall from the sky like manna, much less there's a testing process and help desk simply does not deal with any of this--but it took a while. They made a ticket and said wait. They were great.

Me: This isn't going to work.

Ticket Answered: The IT Guy

The IT Guy has been helping me with a variety of things I want to do with a work laptop that is inexpertly locked down after far too many times, I unknowingly hacked it and had to stop and belatedly find out if I was breaking state law or work rules. I won't apologize for wanting certain things in a certain way in my workspace. Seriously, that was stressing.

(IT Guy is Awesome.)

Now, IT Guy does know my job, but again, help desk does not do this; their job is going in and fix people doing weird shit or installing software if we get special permission or reset our password when we enter it three times in capslock--that kind of thing. After a lot of chatting, he sent it to Mobile IT.

Me: ...oh God no

Mobile IT: The Reckoning

Mobile IT Guy was also awesome, but now we run into a problem. He does know phones for work use; he knows about mobile apps the state creates that clients use; he does not know about the testing process of those apps that clients use or that there existed a category of mobile phones that are for testing.

So I had to explain my job--twice--then how no, these aren't phones that clients can borrow in offices to use the app, and no, this ins't my work phone, it's a test phone. He was baffled; I didn't blame him.

He did however realize this bullshit.

Him: [Analyst] might help.
Me: Thank you!
Me: *after hanging up* I am never getting these phones unlocked.

Manager Part II

I called him to shorten the horror.

Me: They said to call [Analyst]. Can you email her and find out if she's our person?
Him: Sure.
Him: *emails the IT ticket to her asking for help*
Me: Thanks!
Me: *after seeing email* He forgot to tell her who we are, what we do, and what we want.
Me: I hate fucking everything.

The Analyst

She emails promptly, properly baffled, and I broke down my job, what the phones were for, why we can't use them like this, and asked if she was the right person or if she knew who we should contact. I did not cry.

Her: [Name] might help. I'll forward your email.
Me: This is Hell and...wait, I recognize that name.

The Name I Recognize

Him: Oh, they just need to be removed from Mobile IT's list. Send me the serial numbers and I'll do it.
Me: You're fucking with me.

Aftermath

Now, they're still working on it, but. It took me a few seconds to realize why I knew his name. When we first got testing phones for mobile--that's almost five years ago--his name was on the Galaxy 5 boxes. I had to look at it every day for two-ish years before our first upgrade and apparently, it stuck. None since--they have some random name of someone that I'm not sure even works for the state--but that first shipment, it was him.

I went to look at his profile in outlook. I still have no idea how his department, area, and unit have anything to do with this--his job title is not helpful--or how my testing phones got into Mobile IT or what kind of hellscape this is; all I learned is his name and that he can Do Shit With Mobile Testing Phones. And this poor man now has been labeled in my Contact List as just that.

Sure, my iPhones are still useless, but I did beat bureaucracy, so there's that.

But I still have no idea how we're getting these phones.

I am moving out to the porch as long as the weather is nice (aka not broiling hot death). Even with my new desk, sanity should not be fleeting. I need sunlight and Vitamin D, even if it's indirect. It may also inspire me to regularly change clothes, something that might have been sketchy for a bit. Also, apparently I chose better porch furniture than I thought; it's firm (hard) and the cushion barely helps. You bet your ass I'm sitting straight.

I may look into moving my desk out here, actually; it does have wheels.

So, updates:
1.) Child got a sewing machine dropped off at our door by mysterious means and plans to learn to sew. For cosplay, he says, but I say, cool masks made out of old flannel sheets.
2.) I adulted in a new way: I (and three others) bought a portion of a cow. Like, maybe an eighth of a cow, not sure, but so much meat holy shit. As Mom is the only one with a freezer--as they are out of stock for all reasonably priced, reasonably sized ones literally everywhere--she's holding the meat for us. Child is supposed to spreadsheet it for us at some point so we can do an equitable split.
3.) I found out my favorite vape store hand delivers in two hours. Joy can be found in the oddest places.

So I mentioned it on Twitter but I forgot if I ever recced this series here, so I'm going to go for it.

A Mortal Bane (Magdalene la Bâtarde Book 1) by Roberta Gellis.

I've recced her before for her Roselynde Chronicles novels, which are all Women Who Inherit Huge Estates And Rule Them (And The Men That Love and Really Desperately Want to Marry Them). Some of the attitudes are slightly dated--though not very much--and some of the historical detail may be a little off, but the author was a historian and knew her shit so it's very much a matter of New Research Giving Different Interpretations, not Bad Author.

(Most of Gellis' books are Women Doing Shit (And the Men Who Want to Marry Them); there's also a really good one on a female merchant that gives a really good view of London merchant society during the reign of King John, but I digress.)

The Magdalene books follow, but our heroine runs an extremely expensive, extremely exclusive, extremely tiny brothel during the reign of King Stephen. She has a Mysterious But Noble and Tragic Past, and to escape that, became a prostitute, and things happened and she got patronage of a Great Man and now has the Old Priory for her brothel which used to be a guesthouse for the Church and so she pays rent to the Bishop of Winchester. She only keeps three women there, all of whom enjoy sex and she treats very well, and all were chosen for their specific--characteristics, and no I don't mean beauty or sexual hijinks--and the reason she can do it like this is that her house is designed for wealthy people--merchants or lords--who want discretion, intelligent companionship, women who genuinely enjoy their work, and to maybe plot treason or war on occasion. As one does.

Throughout these books, these things will never change, so know that going in; they will develop, however. Also, these books are Romance but also actually Mysteries. Which our prostitutes will be solving.

Welcome.

( I put off reading these and regret it so much )

Profile

seperis

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Page Summary

Mastdon - Fandom.ink location
note for those reading my mastodon post
mastodon - a very vague overview
Black Panther:Wakanda Forever
i think I'm hurting my brain
book: crowbones by anne bishop
the things i have seen and done and moved to
this has been a week
home assistant and school, respectively
a tale of three weirdness
MakeMKV - Introduction and Basic Guide
flashing drives and ripping things
monday of the week after
the week of deep winter
this week of all weeks
universal remote
BREAKING WEATHER NEWS IN AUSTIN
home assistant has released its own open source hub
meet medea, our lady of flaming chariots and not fucking around when it comes to revenge
thanksgiving planning
the time has come for a new laptop
psych - a monologue on one of my favorite episodes
chuck: i have seen all of it now
Dune 2021 - I am really liking this.
it's already thursday?
pride and prejudice and zombies: living the dream
austen viewing
alexa toothbrush brushes smarter
temeraire - re-reading worries
updates on life
eureka - because I'm watching this part now and it bothers me.
eureka - the continuing adventures
Home Assistant - An Introduction
rewatching eureka
coding and education in home automation aka learning home assistant
first pt appointment for my back - an adventure
spnfic: the game of god, 24 & 25
NVIDIA SHIELD TV PRO - Update to review
random - working alexa commands for firetv, sonos, and nvidia shield
portable monitor sale!
sodastream in a time of coronavirus
hobbies in a time of coronavirus
question on hard drive formats and movie files
NVIDIA Shield TV Pro - a dissertation apparently
mediainfo - all you need to know about your movie and video file
Watson Server, Third of His Name
the beauty of consumerism
work warfare in the modern era
wfh day 28: happened
books: a mortal bane by roberta gellis

Quotes

If you don't send me feedback, I will sob uncontrollably for hours on end, until finally, in a fit of depression, I slash my wrists and bleed out on the bathroom floor. My death will be on your heads. Murderers
. -- Unknown, on feedback
BTS List
That's why he goes bad, you know -- all the good people hit him on the head or try to shoot him and constantly mistrust him, while there's this vast cohort of minions saying, We wouldn't hurt you, Lex, and we'll give you power and greatness and oh so much sex...
Wow. That was scary. Lex is like Jesus in the desert.
-- pricklyelf, on why Lex goes bad
LJ
Obi-Wan has a sort of desperate, pathetic patience in this movie. You can just see it in his eyes: "My padawan is a psychopath, and no one will believe me; I'm barely keeping him under control and expect to wake up any night now to find him standing over my bed with a knife!"
-- Teague, reviewing "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones"
LJ
Beth: god, why do i have so many beads?
Jenn: Because you are an addict.
Jenn: There are twelve step programs for this.
Beth: i dunno they'd work, might have to go straight for the electroshock.
Jenn: I'm not sure that helps with bead addiction.
Beth: i was thinking more to demagnitize my credit card.
-- hwmitzy and seperis, on bead addiction
AIM, 12/24/2003
I could rape a goat and it will DIE PRETTIER than they write.
-- anonymous, on terrible writing
AIM, 2/17/2004
In medical billing there is a diagnosis code for someone who commits suicide by sea anenemoe.
-- silverkyst, on wtf
AIM, 3/25/2004
Anonymous: sorry. i just wanted to tell you how much i liked you. i'd like to take this to a higher level if you're willing
Eleveninches: By higher level I hope you mean email.
-- eleveninches and anonymous, on things that are disturbing
LJ, 4/2/2004
silverkyst: I need to not be taking molecular genetics.
silverkyst: though, as a sidenote, I did learn how to eviscerate a fruit fly larvae by pulling it's mouth out by it's mouthparts today.
silverkyst: I'm just nowhere near competent in the subject material to be taking it.
Jenn: I'd like to thank you for that image.
-- silverkyst and seperis, on more wtf
AIM, 1/25/2005
You know, if obi-wan had just disciplined the boy *properly* we wouldn't be having these problems. Can't you just see yoda? "Take him in hand, you must. The true Force, you must show him."
-- Issaro, on spanking Anakin in his formative years
LJ, 3/15/2005
Aside from the fact that one person should never go near another with a penis, a bottle of body wash, and a hopeful expression...
-- Summerfling, on shower sex
LJ, 7/22/2005
It's weird, after you get used to the affection you get from a rabbit, it's like any other BDSM relationship. Only without the sex and hot chicks in leather corsets wielding floggers. You'll grow to like it.
-- revelininsanity, on my relationship with my rabbit
LJ, 2/7/2006
Smudged upon the near horizon, lapine shadows in the mist. Like a doomsday vision from Watership Down, the bunny intervention approaches.
-- cpt_untouchable, on my addition of The Fourth Bunny
LJ, 4/13/2006
Rule 3. Chemistry is kind of like bondage. Some people like it, some people like reading about or watching other people doing it, and a large number of people's reaction to actually doing the serious stuff is to recoil in horror.
-- deadlychameleon, on class
LJ, 9/1/2007
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Fan Fiction is John Cusack standing outside your house with a boombox.
-- JRDSkinner, on fanfiction
Twitter
I will unashamedly and unapologetically celebrate the joy and the warmth and the creativity of a community of people sharing something positive and beautiful and connective and if you don’t like it you are most welcome to very fuck off.
-- Michael Sheen, on Good Omens fanfic
Twitter, 6/19/2019
Adding for Mastodon.
-- Jenn, traceback
Fosstodon, 11/6/2022

Credit

Base style: Open Spaces by seperis
Theme: New Green by seperis

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