Comment Re:Visit your local IRS office (Score 1) 6
I'll be at the Budapest embassy Friday getting my kids passports renewed. Maybe I can ask on the side while I'm there. My guess is gonna be that they aren't gonna do much for me.
Comment Re:So I go to the page with a phone number (Score 1) 6
No - that page acknowledges reality. And I have used the number there for people outside the US. It's a long wait to talk to some person who sounds miserable. I have no idea if the wait is any different than calling from inside the US.
I've been calling them a lot because at the same time they are keeping me from efiling for my 2014 taxes, I still haven't received my 2013 return. So I keep calling them and waiting for a an hour or so to let them tell me it's "In process" and that they don't have any other details. They tell me there are no problems on my end so I'm not sure what is up.
I may end up mailing in my stuff - it's just that it is slow and expensive.
Journal Journal: Catch 22 6
I got a thing from the IRS and they want me to fill out an on-line form.
To successfully complete the form I have to enter my filing address and it has to match my return. The form fields don't allow me to correctly enter the address.
Comment Re:Moo (Score 1) 2
Not this stuff. It's mostly just lectures. But it all took place in a sensitive country and wont be publicized. But the tool is pretty decent for what it is.
Journal Journal: Youtube Video Editor 2
The video editor built into youtube is surprisingly decent. It lets you cut videos up, add transitions, add photos, add text, put in music, all kinds of stuff.
With it running on their side I was able to edit up a bunch of separate videos, and then leave them processing while I did other stuff. It made it possible to do a lot of videos in parallel and not have my machine bogged down with it. Not bad.
It's not the greatest but for simple stuff that you just want t
Comment Re:We in the US avoid renumbering at all costs (Score 1) 5
Here it happens. Renaming streets is even more frequent and the names depend primarily on the party in charge of govt. at the time.
Comment Re:Moo (Score 1) 5
I'm not sure - my wife handled it. Probably not too much. Tipping here isn't as common or as high as in the U.S.
Journal Journal: Tesco Home Delivery 5
We did our first home delivery from Tesco yesterday. My wife ordered on-line and they brought our stuff inside the window we were given for the delivery. The fee for delivery was 299 HUF which is about $1.10 right now.
It was a pretty awesome deal. The guy brought everything right in. There was a slight mix up - but that's because when people use GPS to come to our house it always takes them to my neighbor a little down the street. I don't know how it works in other parts of Eu
Comment Re:Moo (Score 1) 4
I like them a lot.
My wife has an ipad that she gets to use. (She's a teacher at a school, it belongs to the school.) I'm not a big fan of iOS. It feels too restrictive to me.
Comment Re:Google backup (Score 1) 4
No - not settings.
I move around between devices a lot - phones and so on. You can set what you want saved but for me it is photos, contacts, apps - not sure about what else.
Stuff that normally lives in the cloud anyway (keep, gmail, so on) of course all come back.
On this one it gave me the option to put my icons back on the home screens and I chose it but it didn't work.
But I'm pretty good at getting things back to the way I want pretty quickly on account of doing stuff like this so often.
Journal Journal: Lollipop on 2012 Nexus 7 Wi-fi 4
I got a message that the OTA update to Lollipop was available for my Nexus 7 so I installed it.
It made the tablet unusable. Performance was atrocious, battery life could dropped to a couple hours. It couldn't play music. Doing anything took so long (if it worked at all) that it was really not worth it.
I googled around. One suggestion was to clear the cache. I tried to do that but when I tried to boot into recovery that always failed with an error about "No command found."
Journal Journal: Compile FFMPEG 1
To get the most out of ffmpeg on Fedora - as far as I can tell - it needs to be compiled, not installed from a package manager. This is the only way I could find to get it with libfdk_aac support. I tried other stuff and then just went ahead and followed the very thorough guide on installing from source, right here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/Centos
Comment hmmm (Score 1) 2
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
Journal Journal: SELinux and Web development
I use my Fedora desktop to work on development of all kinds. I love that with a Linux machine I can have a machine that matches my production environment very nicely and all the tools I want are there and work pretty well together.
I appreciate SELinux since it is there to keep me safe.
Comment Re:Moo (Score 1) 4
kickass.so
We are heavy netflix users as well. There's a British series on there - Black Mirror. Sort of a technology related Twilight Zone-ish kind of thing. Whoever writes the stories has the ability to come up with some really disturbing stuff. My wife and daughters have been on a huge Gilmore Girls kick.
I watch more and more youtube as well. A lot of esports type stuff. My son watches Minecraft on youtube more than he actually plays it lately.
What was interesting to me today was that it hit me that while I listen to my mp3 collection at work, at home we never listen to locally stored music. It's all pandora. My girls do have music locally on their devices (phone and tablet) but that's not much. The latest Taylor Swift or whatever else they get into. We buy that via Amazon so I can download the drm free files and they can just copy them off the PC that is hooked up to our TV.
It's fun living in the future. I remember looking at the tv guide that came with the sunday paper every week to see what good shows would be on that week and hoping they would be at times I'd be able to watch.
