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User Journal

Journal Journal: Question for any reading this 1

My wife is looking for a Wifi network security camera for the daycare. Ideally, we want one that we can set up an account on a remote server with a username and password that we share with parents.

Anybody have any suggestions?

User Journal

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."

So finally I just flashed it back to Kit Kat.

I'm wrapping that up now. Google backup is reinstalling my apps and such. Hopefully things will improve. I know it's 3 years old but I really like it and I don't think it's too much to ask for it to still run well.

My son updated his too (he has the 2013 model) and he's been complaining. So this was a good run through if he wants me to do the same for his. I don't think the impact on his was as bad. He may just not like how lollipop looks. I'll talk to him about it this week-end and see what he wants to do.

Fun times.

User Journal

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

Though there was one thing I needed that they didn't have in the dependencies - libtool. That was quickly rectified. So if you do this - might as well add that on the front end. I noticed the need when there was an error with autoconf for one of the parts.

User Journal

Journal Journal: After Several Months Not Bothering 5

I visit a few threads here, on reasonable topics - like Barrett Brown case, etc.

The level of discourse has really troughed. It's like "conversation" between the Dufflepuds..

It's not worth even trolling these people. There isn't enough signal-to-noise for this to even register.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Verbiage: Scales and "fake repeatability"

I love Amazon reviews:

A review on a scale explains how (cheaper) scales provide repeatable numbers.

People love repeatable numbers. Consistency is more important than accuracy. Of course some get the two mixed up. But that's okay, as long as you get what you want.

(Cheap) bathroom scales are affected by slight differences in foot placement. Another scale compensates it otherwise. Other people just go for three consistent weightings.

Similar to the 80/20 Rule, perhaps, most people just want a decision made for them. Sure, we all know the numbers change, but which do i use? Three weightings? That's unscientific! Proximity to the last time? That's silliness! Yes, what if the manufacturer of the scale is willing to do just that for you? Finally, an accurate, consistent scale!

Currently, it has 12,639 out of 15,649 5-star reviews. That's ~80%. Who woulda thought?

User Journal

Journal Journal: I logged in. 2

I was doing some research for a project and happened back here. Hello slashdot.

Find me on Twitter, or put dot com after my user name.

User Journal

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.

But sometimes - it is a frigging pain. I'm messing about with Yii, a PHP framework and I kept running into problems with permissions. At first I thought it was regular permissions but quickly realized that wasn't it and google pointed me to SELinux. Apache can't write to stuff in /var/www/html.

I did lots of reading. I found one way to fix it, though that way quit working after I had to log out to get a change to a group setting to go into effect. And I read a lot more and it was hard to understand it all, confusing and finally I setenforce=0 and got to work.

I realize that this is a bad habit and I shouldn't do it - but I just need to finish stuff. I'd like a nice way to manage this. Any of you may feel free to make that happen.

User Journal

Journal Journal: In Passing: To the gym to all those 2015 resolutions

Leaving the office yesterday, i got in at the 6th floor. First it stopped at the 5th and a man got on. At the 4th floor, another man and woman entered. From there we went straight down the other 4 floors unabated.

Mr. 4th floor recognized Mr. 5th floor and they chatted. Moments before the gates to freedom something like this transpired:

Mr 4th floor: "Now off to the gym to say hello to all those 2015 resolutions."
Mr 5th floor: encourages him that he'll be able to keep them.
Mr 4th floor: "No, i have no problem with the gym. I mean all the other people."

User Journal

Journal Journal: Moving Streams in Kmix 4

I am in the office today. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the building. So today I'm doing something I almost never do - I'm listening to music via my speakers rather than using my headphones.
 
When I kicked off Amarok I went to switch the audio from the headphones to the speakers and realized I hadn't installed pavucontrol. I pulled it up in apper and saw that it was a gtk program. Not a big deal in itself. I have other gtk stuff already installed. But it just made me think - KDE must have a way to do this itself. That got me looking at Kmix but I couldn't find anything that would let me switch the audio from one device to another. So I installed pavucontrol, started listening to my musics and thought, this is a situation that should be fixed.
 
It seems like if this were going to happen in KDE it should happen with Kmix. So I looked up the project and got ready to email the maintainer. Then I thought, "There must be a place to put feature requests." I ended up at the KDE bug database and that is when I decided to search and see if this was already something in work. Searching the database was a little tricky - but I did end up seeing a bug report for kmix crashing when a stream was moved to a different device.
 
So I went back to Kmix. Right clicking on a stream brings up a menu that includes "Move" and there it was. I'm glad it already does what I want. I just wish it was easier to know. The Kmix handbook doesn't mention it and opening the Mixer it still works the same way - there's no menu that does the same thing without right clicking on a stream. I have this fear of a future where I just go right clicking all over the ui of everything I use, looking for stuff I need.
 
I love KDE and appreciate all the work that goes into it. Shoot - maybe this is a chance for me to contribute something. This is the kind of easy thing I could probably figure out. Anyway this is a note to myself for when I forget later. Plus it might help someone else.
 
On an unrelated note - when I hear Lorde's Royals - I can't help but hear the Weird Al version. He really nailed that one.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Fedora 21 Virtual Box Guest Additions and the Debug Kernel 1

I run a Vbox instance of Fedora on my mac. It was Fedora 20 but I used Fedup to upgrade it to Fedora 21.
 
When I did that and updated everything I ran into a problem where guest additions wasn't working. And I don't know about other situations but in this one when Guest Additions isn't working then the VM is pretty much unusable. So I was digging around trying to figure it out. The install would run and complain about not being able to find the kernel headers but they were installed. Along with all other necessary packages.
 
I found a note where someone realized that using a debug kernel was there issue. I'd seen that listed as a kernel option when I'd booted - I'd never noticed it before but I didn't really think about it. So when I rebooted I just chose the kernel that didn't list -debug and then everything worked. I'm not sure just what's going on and I need to look into getting it so that the right kernel is automatically chosen every time, rather than my having to manually choose it. But at least it works now.

User Journal

Journal Journal: In Passing: if talking about pesos, there'd be more zeroes

Overheard a coworker in mid sentence, "but if we were talking about pesos, there'd be _a lot_ more zeroes"

On a side note, i've been at the office for a year. How do i know? Building access was denied. Happy anniversary...

User Journal

Journal Journal: trouble in paradise... 2

okay since the idps box has been running the wasted bandwidth went down sharply. but a new issue has surfaced, devices have stopped working online especially at evening hours. not every device certain windows machines always boot and work fine, with a few small exceptions. outages that are small. my linux laptop is one of the machines that has trouble using the network. my neighbors box has trouble streaming at night time if it was used that day. yet my custom built windows 7 box never has an issue. my linux laptop is less likely to have issues if i power it off at night.

oh and the tablets are sporatic in working/not working, with no real rhyme or reason behind it. they also have issues with bluetooth keyboards. torrents of linux isos almost always download with no issues, but i may have to switch which pc i am using to get the functionality of downloading. my connection was slower, before but was always reliable. i have considered trying a different linux flavor of linux for the idps and i generally keep it up to date with apt. i have considered letting the neighbor use my dual channel wifi stick, to see if that helps but it is almost like she is on a rolling bandwidth plan or some machine is throtling her streaming at night time. yet i have unlimited consumer cable internet so the only tracking possibility is in the packets formed on her machine eg super cookies... i haven't tried removing the idps box because the whole point of it is to protect the network, by identifying the threats so i don't have to. sigh. and yes i realize i am running a mixed network of windows and linux machines, but plenty of other people do this and my attempts to get my parents off the microsoft teat were unsuccesful, and when i got back into computers i made the call to use a windows machine again.

i realize some of you guys think i should get every machine under my control off windows. linux works great for me, but there almost always is a problem that crops up which is why i tradiationally had a dual boot laptop when i mostly stopped using windows at home, but wasn't keeping up to date on modern hardware. blah keeping up to date is overrated some days i feel like selling off everything but the laptop and make it a dual boot... but i don't know if i would really like booting to windows to do blurays and booting linux for everything else. especially since that would leave me with 4 windows machines on the local network and i wouldn't be keeping up on my windows skills.

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