09:12 – Barbara is back at work today, for the shortest workweek of the year. Monday and Friday rolled into one. She’s going to the gym after work, which will confuse Colin. He’s used to her going on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but I guess she wants to get in as many visits as possible before the New Year rush of newbie gym members arrives and all the machines have people waiting in line to use them.
Building and shipping science kits continues, as does work on the prepping book.
Audio experimenting in Linux continued for much of yesterday. If I did not know better — and I really don’t, — I would say that Linux in general is being abandoned. Mint has announced there will be nothing but LTS releases in the future, and the next LTS is not scheduled until 2019. They were producing a release about once every 8 months. Documentation for everything is very out-of-date — audio is just one. Lots and lots of forum questions and answers back from 2008 through 2010, when nobody had anything else to do, but zero updates to things like the JACK audio patch panel software since about 2009, it looks like. Things HAVE changed, so some development is occurring, but the documentation does not reflect any of that.
Supposedly, it is possible to start JACK automatically at start-up if a thing called “jackdbus” is running. The page of JACK documentation for that has been removed and I get nothing but a 404 error. This is typical. Even stuff that appears to be only a few months old, is no longer accessible. Whereas a decade ago or more, people posted their working configurations and how they arrived at them. None of that anymore; only snippets of small parts of overall configurations to answer some specific questions. Very, very little overview.
I have jackdbus installed on my system, but it works backwards from what the documentation says is possible: in my case, when I start JACK, it starts jackdbus. Now supposedly, I should be able to run Pulse Audio as a source and destination in JACK, thus making every audio source that works on the computer, available to Jack through Pulse. And Pulse appears there; but nothing comes out of it. What is so irritating about tech forums these days — aside from many wanting you to fork over money to get the answer to some question (which is probably not even answered) — is that some recommendation is given by a respondent as ‘try this’, then nothing! No confirmation that a solution worked. The Ubuntu forums are horribly moderated. Yesterday I came across one where the moderator interjected that it was a family forum and to watch the language. What language? Not even a hint of one bad word or attitude — just sincere answers to honest, positive-attitude questions. In another Ubuntu thread, somebody asked a question, there was no response at all, but a moderator interjected ‘Please mark your Subject as “SOLVED”’. Mark solved? With not a single response and the issue clearly NOT solved by that thread?
One thing that is pretty clearly misunderstood about Linux, is that — just like Windows — it needs to be rebooted often after various configuration changes. Stopping and starting software is not enough. Even developers note this. Since I operate with about 30+ windows opened to various stages of work in different processes, rebooting is more than a pain. And although it seems harder to bork Linux with experiments (easy to bork a whole box permanently in Windows), config changes in Linux are sometimes massively complex, and I am sure there are some trials I have abandoned, but forgotten to undo. Occasionally I try something for days to weeks, and then who knows what all was involved and should be undone? Not me. And memory is not improving with age.
I should not be experimenting with my main computer, but at the moment, time does not exist to remedy that. How is it that there was seemingly infinite time to play with configuring computers in the ’90’s and early decade of the century, but now there is zero time for that? I suppose it is because just about everything we do is now done on a computer, and the need to turn out more work has increased. I remember in the ’90’s, a tech friend objected to making the computer into a universal do-everything unit. Need to listen to music? Put it in a hi-fi system. Need to record a TV show? Use the VCR. Need a calculator? Use that one sitting on your desk.
Wow. That is not how it turned out for me. Everything I do but cook is done on the computer. And it is the best Hi-Fi and video player I have ever owned.
Actually, I thought I would be a lot farther along in my Linux forays by now. But the largely unexplained complexity of the OS and its software, all of which need lots more manual tuning than software on Windows, has slowed me down considerably. I really do not see Linux overtaking Windows anytime soon. It is just too complex for non-techs, and very, very poorly documented. The only thing that has kept it alive, IMO, is that Androids and an increasing number of manufacturers are turning to it for specific uses, in order to reduce costs. And Macs are nothing more than a *nix machine, but highly-tuned so all of the applications available for Macs just work. Too bad Linux does not put more emphasis on this.
Nevertheless, I am committed at this point. My available free time will be in short supply after 1 Jan, so I have to make the best of the upcoming week.
http://jackaudio.org/faq/pulseaudio_and_jack.html
http://forum.renoise.com/index.php/topic/41843-linux-howto-pulseaudio-jack-server/
Dunno if either of those pieces are helpful, but they were relatively recent, Mr. Chuck.
I may be playing around with this at some point on the Ubuntu Studio machine here.
Overcast today but the wind has died down, finally. Fotties for the next several days and then temps should start dropping again by Monday, to the teens on Tuesday.
Agree, Chuck, except my universal computer is an Android phone. I can do far more on it than on any Linux computer I bave seen. I am eagerly awaiting Android for x86. Great potential.
I haven’t restarted my one remaining Windows computer in months (use Hibernate,) but don’t do much with it any more. My Mint 17 KDE desktop has now gone over a month without a restart. Obviously, I don’t stress my systems a lot. I was wondering if I needed to restart the Linux box after routine updates, but some Googling found a post that said I would be told when necessary. Note that I have avoided the systemd (?) thing, which apparently does require more frequent restarts.
WOW, not a scientific sampling but people I know who got “technology” for Christmas had a high rate of DOA or dead soon after starting. Manufacturers across the board: HP, Acer, ASUS, Apple, Samsung, Amazon (Fire and Kindle). All purchased direct or from first line online or big box stores. No common thread other than the rapid failure.
A lot of neighbors must have received new WiFi routers for Christmas, a whole lot of new unprotected signals started showing up yesterday and are still there this morning.
In our house the most fun yesterday was had by our cats. Wrapping paper and ribbon is the best prey ever. We have to bring presents out one at a time, other wise the cats would unwrap them immediately. And yes, our tree is in a cage.
Life is back to normal for everybody here today (well excepted for my now unemployed daughter). My wife was on call Christmas Eve (even though she is most senior she always takes Christmas Eve call). This was another year when they got called in and saved a life so a family had another Christmas with a loved one.
@Chuck W
In the spirit of the Linux community…. The documentation is outdated? Contribute some updated documentation. You found a bug? Submit a patch. Don’t like how this works? Code your own.
I gave up on that bunch of assholes years ago.
Had an interesting experience with Best Buy at the first of the week. One of the bearings is going out in our clothes washer, a five year old high energy Whirlpool cabrio top loader. I really like that 1,000 rpm final spin to wring the water out but looks like it kills the bearings over time. Plus the valves have gotten very noisy so I am going to throw away this screaming banshee instead of fixing it.
So anyway, Best Buy had the LG WT5680HWA (the top rated top loader by Consumer Reports) on sale for $850 over the weekend. I tried to order it but the system would not take my order. Chatted with one of their “need help chat with me” people and found out that the sale was only going on in those parts of the USA where they had inventory. So, I guess that is the last time that I will darken their door XXXXX website.
I checked Lowes and they had the machine on sale for $989 with free delivery. I decided to wait a little while and on Christmas Day they reduced the price to $849 with free delivery. Nice! Ordered with delivery in two weeks.
http://www.lowes.com/pd_543812-49317-WT5680HWA_0__?Ntt=wt5680hwa&UserSearch=wt5680hwa&productId=50157910&rpp=32
Checked Best Buy and they are back down to $850. Go figure. This internet pricing stuff is all over the place!
I am adding a bathroom / utility room to my house. Does anybody have any advice on ADA toilet bars and shower ? The inside dimensions are going to be 26 ft by 6 ft. I am planning on a walk-in (no door, no step over ledge) shower at the far end that will be 6 ft long by 42 in wide. Something that I can run a wheelchair into if necessary.
Our hard water plays hell with appliances. It’s like liquid concrete. I suppose that’s what happens when much of your water is pumped out of the lime stone underneath your state. I’ve tossed around the idea of having a water softener put in. Unfortunately, they never plumbed the house right for it, so I’d have to pay to have the outdoor faucets split off from the softened water as well as the kitchen sink and refrigerator water line (soft water is great for your appliances, but doesn’t taste right when you’ve grown up on hard water and you don’t want to waste salt pellets watering your yard).
Our dishwasher and clothes washer get the worst of it. Though, I imagine there’s also a fair amount of sediment in the hot water tank as well. I think water heaters are supposed to last 12 years and we’re 10 years into ours. So, perhaps I’ll be proactive and swap it out this year.
I had to replace both hot water heaters last year when we moved into this house. The heaters were 10 years old and both gurgling like an old steam boiler. I flushed them but did not get anywhere. I am fairly sure that our water, which is ground water also, is full of sediment. The new heaters are the hydrojet models so we will see if that helps with sediment. The plumber hooked up the new heaters in parallel like the old heaters and we just about have infinite hot water.
http://www.bradfordwhite.com/hydrojet-total-performance-technology
Problems with cops probably just overblown, exaggerated, mythological, and we should be grateful for their heroic warrior achievements daily, if not hourly:
“[A]n unfortunately large number of people who are fully convinced that police brutality and police state America are solely black community issues and white people should mind their own business because these things don’t affect them. Then of course there’s this other large group of people, the “cops are just doing their jobs” and “being a cop is so stressful” and “there isn’t actually a problem, it’s being blown out of proportion” people. I wanted to do something for both these groups of people, to help them see reality, to help them see the absurdity of their positions, and to reinforce my previous post. Both groups are doing harm to a cause that is ultimately going to decide whether future America will be a free country or not. They need to get back in touch with reality. So, without further adieu, I give you my list…”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/12/robert-wenzel/ways-to-be-killed-by-the-cops/
Just a few bad apples…nothing to see here, folks, move along now…
Dunno if either of those pieces are helpful, but they were relatively recent, Mr. Chuck.
Been there, but thanks!. Those are among the pages that reference the dead links. I have some ideas but need some time when I can repeatedly reboot after trying some startup config changes. That is not today.
I had to replace both hot water heaters last year when we moved into this house.
I have had to replace the hot water heater twice in 4 years after I took over maintenance issues at Tiny House after my dad died in 2004. They tell me that what I have now — at 6 years — is not working perfectly, but since it has no leaks, keep it running until something happens. I have new plumbers (a father and son) that seem to care about satisfying customer concerns more than my previous ones, who kept telling me just exactly how it was going to be; they are history in my book now. However, these new guys say what they are seeing is an average water heater life of about 3 to 4 years on the limestone wells that feed Tiny Town water. The days of 15 year water heaters (what my dad expected when I was growing up) are long gone, and the fact I got 10 years out of the one that expired shortly after my dad did, was extraordinary, they said.
Second problem, according to them, is that there are now very few manufacturers making water heaters, so competition for quality is pretty much non-existent. One manufacturer supplies most hardware and DIY stores (with different branding in each store), so escaping their lack of quality control is difficult, if not impossible.
I recently noticed that the clock running the water softener, is losing about 3 hours a month — it is a mechanical affair, not electronic. Doubt that has any chance of being fixed, and I am done doing that kind of stuff myself, which I would have back when I had 2 kids at home and a mortgage to pay.
I grew up on soft water and really cannot do without it. Limestone sediment is so prevalent in our water (just one notch below acceptable Fed standards) that they say you will not find any plumbing leaks in Tiny Town, because they will plug themselves soon after they sprout. Which reminds me, I need a new shower head, because most of the jet holes are now plugged. That head is entirely plastic, and is supposed to unscrew, but the screw holding it together is molded into the plastic, and I know if I actually apply enough force to actually open it, the thing will crack apart. I have already tried, and it is pretty much welded together.
BTW, I found out the other day that y’all are helping pay to renovate an old building here in the Ghost District of Tiny Town. The property is not well built (nothing in Tiny Town was, because it was a boom town in automotive days); the architecture is not worth saving; the building has been entirely abandoned for more than 15 years (as are most buildings in downtown Tiny Town), but you guys are contributing tens, if not a hundred thousand to renovating it in some kind of Federal subsidy to reclaim things that ought to be destroyed here in the rust belt.
That is the kind of Fed spending I want to see an immediate stop to. The whole Tiny Town downtown ought to be leveled. There are 3 banks in town and the storefronts immediately next to each of them survive with businesses; the other dozens sit empty. Dreamers here think the town will come back. It suddenly occurred to me why Tiny Town has failed, when many other similar-sized cities around this part of the state have not. When I was a kid, everything moved in and out by rail. There were half-a-dozen rail companies with tracks running through Tiny Town, and practically every serious business in town had a rail siding that brought raw materials and hauled off finished product.
When I-70 went through, it was located 6 miles south of Tiny Town. Eventually, the rails were all pulled up, only 1 track remains, and they carry only non-stop through freight traffic. All the thriving competitive towns around are directly adjacent to an Interstate. People in Tiny Town say 6 miles is nothing for trucks to drive. Apparently, it actually is.
In the spirit of the typical whinging Linux user… It doesn’t do what I want! It doesn’t do things the way Microsoft does it! No, I’m not going to send money to the development team! Why should I have to learn how to set it up? Why doesn’t it come pre-installed on my computer? Linux sucks!
I gave up on that bunch of assholes years ago.
ChuckW, spend a bit and get one of these:
http://neatitems.com/Shower-Heads/8-Jet-Giessdorf-Shower-Heads.html
Talk about pure luxury. Comes apart for easy cleaning too.
Don’t get the cut-off valve, though. Even when open the water pressure goes down bya third.
Lynn, I don’t know about ADA bars, but I hate showers with no doors because either they stay cold, or steam up the entire room. If that bothers you too, there are doors that can swing totally out of the way yet close to allow a hot shower with a cool room. A competent finish carpenter should be able to do this.
“When I-70 went through, it was located 6 miles south of Tiny Town.”
Bingo! Exact same thing happened to countless towns and small cities across the country, including here in Nova Anglia. Another big hit on the older city and outlying ‘burbs was when they dumped the trolley car systems. Happy Motoring Forever!
“People in Tiny Town say 6 miles is nothing for trucks to drive. Apparently, it actually is.”
It is when the trucking company owners and freight haulers pinch every sliver of every red cent to cut costs and generate more profits for themselves. They’ve got trucks and their drivers now on RFIDs and routinely track every damn move the driver makes and probably what he or she says and thinks.
“In the spirit of the typical whinging Linux user…”
My experience has mostly been very positive in getting answers and solutions to my Linux issues, since I started playing with it in 2000; and to top it off, the distros like Ubuntu, Mint and a bunch of others, bend over backwards to make it easier for longtime Windows dependents to move over to it, almost to the point of not much difference at all. But with less bloat and better security. Sure, I’ve been frustrated at times and had to screw around with arcane syntax in CLI, but I just kept plugging; YMMV if you depend on it to run a small business and it’s also different when you’re working with enterprise-level Linux like RH and CentOS in a corporate setting. YMMV also if you need it to run all kinds of media-intensive stuff and/or rely on exact carbon-copy relationships between M$ Office apps and OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
But I hear Mr. Chuck and Mr. Chad; the Linux developers make it hard too often for us to just become constant cheerleaders for it. It’s just that in my case, I don’t mind Windows at home on one desktop and wife’s laptop but despise and loathe the idea of ever again doing support for it for a job. And I don’t put my Linux machines through any kind of wringer on an hourly basis, either.
My complaint about whinging Linux users is that they get the OS and applications for free, don’t contribute time* or money to projects, complain about the app or the support, demand that features be added or changed, and never even leave a “thanks, guys, I use this every day” message on the team’s website.
* Not being a coder is no excuse. Almost all FOSS projects need documentation, which does not require professional auctorial skills, and testing, which requires almost no skills or abilities except a methodical approach to tasks.
I hear you, too, Mr. SteveF, and agree; projects like Tor and Tails, for instance, are always asking for contributors who are willing to write docs or do a little research or help report bugs, etc., etc. Don’t gotta be a code wizard. I am also guilty of not pitching in and will add that to my short list of New Year’s resolutions. Eventually I may also be able to help with a tiny bit of coding, too.
Boy, Tor turned out not to be so secure, since the FBI hacked it to get to Ulbricht. Looks like the judge is seriously prejudiced against him, too. Which makes the whole thing look not good for the future of digital privacy rights in this country’s justice regime — if there ever actually was any justice. I have heard too many stories from lawyers in the family to believe our courts are any fairer than our cops have turned out to be. The New Order is for law enforcement to commit as many crimes as convenient to catch the crooks.
On Linux, I am one of the millions of common users that will not ever be coding, documenting, or giving back to the “community”. Either developers want us to use their stuff or they don’t; I can take it either way. I am on Linux for 2 reasons: 1) to get a handle on the Rivendell radio automation system, which runs only on Linux; and 2) to see if Linux is a useful replacement for XP. Answer to #2 is yes, and at present, I have no intention of abandoning Linux. Even the pops and clicks I was experiencing in Audacity have gone away for some odd reason — possibly from something I did in all the configuration experimenting, so I have been back to Linux for audio editing for quite a number of weeks.
I have never been satisfied with documentation for software, — including the books we used to get from Micro$oft when they thought documentation was important, — EXCEPT for Xerox’ Ventura Publisher. There were really good people working on that project. I have long called for every numerical option to specify the range of acceptable entries and the gradations it recognizes. No one but Xerox has ever done that, as far as I know. How difficult is it to put that in a tooltip when one hovers over the entry field? Even user experimenting does not always reveal the necessary range or gradations. This is pretty basic stuff, IMO, and not even M$ wants to spend time on documentation anymore; they all want you to call them for support and pay a contract fee for that, and sink if you don’t do that.
I am not at all sure that free-as-in-beer software is a longterm viable entity — especially in view of the wide diaspora of Linux distributions out there. It is clear to me that this world network of developers has lost considerable momentum. Too many well-paying coding jobs out there for people to do that work for free forever. Apparently, young kids are no longer happy to spend some years living in mom’s basement to code. I have always compared that to new lawyers who hire on as prosecutors: no money, but lots of quick learning. Again, plenty enough employers to pay for on-the-job training, so why live with mom?
At the moment, I am still of the opinion that Mint 17 is not yet the equal of Mint 16. They bit off a whole lot of changes with 17, including completely reinventing the file manager (Nemo), radically changing the updating software which was just radically changed again in the lastest update, and making applet changes that sent developers back to the drawing board for lots of work to make their applets and widgets work on 17. I think a lot of developers said ‘screw it’ because a couple of my favorite widgets are completely off the list now, including the weather bug that I really liked in Mint 16.
There is a lot to learn in Linux. My method was sink or swim by using it every day, and I have definitely benefited from that. But there is so much more yet to learn.
BTW, this guy gives a scarce, rambling overview of audio on Linux (Ubuntu specifically), and while it lacks the coherence of tracing audio through the path it actually flows, it is the best I have come across. He claims it is out-of-date, but the newer things he mentions have not travelled very far from where they were when he described them — except to vanquish some major bugs.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5931543
but I hate showers with no doors because either they stay cold, or steam up the entire room.
Hey, I had not thought about that. I do like a warm shower, especially when I am cold.
Chuck, you remind me of Billy Joel’s “She’ll take what you give her, as long as it’s free…”
Mr. Chuck has legit complaints, and he’s been willing to tinker with it and stick with it for quite a while now and is pretty much reliant on it for his main machine. That says a lot in my book, when he’s running a biz and doing media stuff, too.
Yes, it’s free, as are almost all the apps, but it’s also been around now for years and some things still ain’t workin’ right, as one might think they would, regardless of whether or not we as users contribute to the “community” in some way. And we pay beaucoups piastres for Winblows licenses and some of THAT still don’t work like we think it should.
Agreed. However, it’s sometimes too easy to blame the software. For example, I’m using an app called DeVeDe to create video DVDs from assorted video files in various formats. It worked fine until last week, when it started blowing up every time with a message about unable to create ISO and suggesting a disk space problem. That problem goes back to at least 2008, and I thought it was the software. As it turned out, I had some corrupted video files.
However, it’s sometimes too easy to blame the software.
I am finding that most of our problems with computers are hardware issues. For instance, our last major PC problem was an intermittent short in a computer case somewhere.
That said, Windows is amazingly tolerant of hardware faults nowadays. This is a sign of a mature product that the market demands. After all, Grandma depends on this PC to get a little time with her kids and grandkids. We cannot have the O/S crashing randomly while she is skyping.
This is the major problem with Linux. It is just not mature yet but it is very close. The Android smartphones and tablets are pushing this maturity along quite nicely. The next major problem is availability of device drivers for less than mainstream products and I have no idea how to address this.
Same sort of problem here with creating music CDs and vid DVD’s, whether Linux or Winblows; it’s easy to have corrupted files that the apps won’t work with correctly.
Another thing peeps forget is that everyone’s hw is different, whether desktops, laptops, phones or printers. What works today on one desktop won’t work on someone else’s, different manufacturers, model numbers, etc. So Ubuntu 11 or whatever worked with some audio files wonderfully until today when some update or other, or an upgrade to 14 messed it up. Or what worked fine with Windows 7 now won’t on 8.1. Etc., rinse and repeat.
It is what it is.
Hmm. Funny how the impressions we give are often not correct. I thought I made it clear that I do not mind paying for trouble-free software. Actually, I have lots of stuff from Adobe, M$, Peachtree, and others that I paid for and some still occasionally gets used. Everything on the Windows computer from M$ was paid for, in addition to others that I no longer have need of.
Actually, for the Linux experiments I did in Germany back in the mid 2000’s decade, I paid for both Red Hat and SuSE to try them out and bought a couple of Linux books from O’Reilly.
The recent switch to Linux was not because it is free; I needed a working Linux platform to run the radio automation software on. I did investigate how much it would be to upgrade to Win7 and the current M$ Office equivalent of all the programs I have on the Windows computer. Around $900, and that was with a small discount through the radio station, which is eligible as a non-profit for a tiny discount M$ offers them; it would be over $1,000 without that. Nothing like the educational discounts M$ gives out to people in those institutions. But the bottom line was that I had to have a working Linux platform; cost was not the factor in the switch.
I have never demanded that computing be free as-in-beer, — not sure where that misapprehension occurred, — but I thought I was pointing out that neither money nor love will get you accurate and useful documentation on anything anymore — even for paid products. And yes, I do object to that. It is the reason why I am a Goldman anarchist (although without the fondness for communist collectivism); customer service positively sucks these days, but until we are ready to break up the monopolies who now call the shots, we citizens will be the servants of those businesses, just like immigrants, including children, after the turn of the century were slaves to the industrialists of that era, working 10 hours days, 6 days a week, until the Haymarket affair began turning things around. However, these days it is clear that unrest in the streets will not cause change like it did back then. The police gestapo is now well-fortified for stuff like that.
Funny, putting your Christmas tree in a cage. We have a young cat, but she’s not a problem, not even with the dangling ornaments. I suppose nature is more fun. My wife is particularly unthrilled by one habit the cat has: She has discovered that mice cannot get out of the bathtub, so she stores live ones there. Yesterday, I went into the bathroom to find two mice scampering around the tub, and a third had been dismembered for breakfast in another room.
Re hard water and appliances: We have rock-hard water, but we have no real problems with appliances. For the washing machine we put a scoop of water softener in with the soap for each load (Calgon, dunno if the brand exists in the US). The dishwasher can be stocked up with it’s own salt, which we have to refill every few weeks. For the boiler, every 4-5 years it has to be decalcified, which requires a plumber, but the thing is unkillable – it was old when we bought the house 15 years ago.
I hear what Chuck says about hard water plugging leaks. Our house is old, with iron pipes. The plumbers tell us never to install any sort of water softening, because a protective calcium layer has built up inside the pipes – if this were ever to dissolve, we would have massive rust problems and likely leaks throughout the house.