Cell phone troubles

Well, the other day I pulled my 14 month old Droid 2 Global from my pocket, and found it powered off.   That’s unusual.   What was worse, it wouldn’t boot — I got a text bootloader screen telling me the battery was too low to load code.   Not good.   Figuring the battery had croaked, I ordered a new one ($3 or so eBay special).   Unfortunately, it seems the problem runs deeper.   The phone won’t charge the battery regardless of how I try it, and the new battery didn’t last long enough to load a firmware image from my PC.   I believe the phone is now expensive scrap.

So off to the Verizon store I went. I’ll spare the details, but suffice it to say that I left there, as usual, with no working phone and a serious intent to just cancel ALL our Verizon service.   Seriously, where do they find these worthless little retards?   A call to their customer service line was a complete waste of time…   I ended up finding out that their phone reps have to use a web site that sucks even worse than the consumer site (quite a tall order) and it’s actually cheaper to just use the web site.   Sigh…

After wasting most of a day on this — well, more than a day, since I’d spent several hours on it before today — I have a new Droid 3 on the way, at zero cost, with a vehicle mount and the desk charging dock.   I just had to go somewhere other than Verizon.   I found a place on eBay with a killer upgrade deal, did a little research, found out they were legitimate and that, in fact, even NewEgg uses them.   So I went through NewEgg, since I have more confidence in their ability and willingness to strong-arm a vendor if they don’t deliver.

Now, why I have to jump through so many hoops and do so much work for the exact same end result is beyond me.   In the end I get a brand new Verizon phone, and a new extension of my existing Verizon service.   Just like if I’d done it in 10 minutes at the Verizon store.   The only difference is that NewEgg and the company they use are both making money — and Verizon isn’t.   In fact, as far as I can tell Verizon is making a few hundred dollars less than if they’d just sold me the phone in the first place.   It’s beyond stupid.

In the end I get a new phone, but I’m about 50% less satisfied with VZW than I was before.   So much so, in fact, that I plan to see if I can get my phone to work on AT&T and T-Mobile networks (there is a way) so I can try out prepaid SIM cards from them and see if they suck less.   Maybe, maybe not…   but VZW has really gotten to be a pain in the ass to deal with.

On top of all this,   we were supposed to fly today but it’s too damn cold.   Oh well.

Back in the saddle – at last!

Well, after a few days of weather-induced delays, I finally got in a training flight yesterday.   Hey, it’s only been 9-1/2 years since my last flight! No matter that no CFI who has ever flown with me is still a CFI… and who cares if half the planes I have flown are no longer flying?

So I preflighted N5533F, tucked my new CFI (John) into the right seat and off we went. I was able to taxi much better than I remembered doing before. This was my first time flying from a tower controlled airport — Eppley (KOMA) instead of Millard (KMLE) where I’ve flown before, so I got to put my ground school self-study knowledge to work. We got taxi clearance and I was able to follow the signs and tell John (before he asked) where we’d be stopping, and why. Cleared for 14L, and up we went… after a little veering and white knuckles. Let’s say it was not my smoothest takeoff, and that stall warning light will definitely get your attention, but we got off the ground and out of the area.

The weather was not the best. 6 mile vis, overcast at 3500 AGL so we stayed under 3000 (2000 or so AGL). Flew up to a practice area and did some basic maneuvers, and after getting over the initial jitters I was pretty comfortable. I had forgotten how much flying a Cherokee feels like piloting a soda can in the ocean. I did OK, though, especially holding altitude in turns and such. The ceiling was dropping and visibility was getting noticeably shorter, so we headed back. John took the yoke on the base leg because by now the crosswind was a bit more than he thought I was ready for.

I have two previous training flights in the log book — one from 1999, and one in 2002. Hopefully now that some of the pre-emptive priorities are not as big a factor, I’ll be able to get scheduled regularly and finish up soon. John’s feedback during the post-flight debrief was that he thought I’d be ready to solo in a pretty short time. On the next flight we’ll likely go up to Blair (KBTA) and do some touch-and-gos.

While I was not able to meet my goal of doing an unassisted landing on today’s flight, at least I was prepared for the sight picture on approach and knew what to expect — John just felt that it wasn’t a good day for me to make my first landing. The other two times I lost confidence on final and asked the CFI to do it. I hadn’t done an approach in a small plane before; airliners come in with a significantly nose-high attitude, and it kind of freaked me out to point the nose at the runway and fly it into the ground. This time I was ready for it, and even was able to watch the PAPI lights and know we were a little low and needed power. But… I’m confident I’ll be able to bring it in all the way on the next flight.

Bloody Wx

Had a training flight scheduled for this morning, but of course weather moved in overnight and it’s not going to happen.   With ceilings at 1200-1500 AGL, it’s not exactly a good day for primary training.   Instrument training, maybe…   or maybe not, depending on icing conditions.   So…   time to re-schedule, I guess.   Wish I’d have set it up for yesterday!

Back in the saddle… almost

Today I went down the Eppley (KOMA) to meet with the chief pilot of Flight Nebraska Group.   I had never been on the GA side of Ellpey before.   I found out that Elliot Aviation sold out to Signature a few months ago, so now we’ll have an overpriced FBO if we need it.   🙂   The Tac Air FBO (where FNG is also located) is really nice, especially compared to a couple of much smaller places I have visited.   That’s really not so much a factor, since it’s not like I’ll be bumming around there a lot.   But, if you have to be somewhere, you may as well be somewhere nice.

The overcast was too low for flying, but we had a good long chat covering a lot of ground.   We discussed FNG and their operations and aircraft, my goals for training, safety, war stories, general hangar talk.   Looks like a good bunch of people, so I have a lesson scheduled for next Tuesday morning – weather permitting.

It’s time.

 

We love Carnival

Lisa and I recently spent a week on the M/S Carnival Valor.   We visited Key West, Grand Cayman and Ocho Rios, Jamaica.

Key West was a lot of fun.   We did a little wandering around and shopping, then took a ride all the way around Key West — 27 miles — on a jet ski!   I believe it was the first time I have ever hit 50 MPH on the water.   What a rush.   We did a good part of the trip at full throttle, with a nice little stop for some “play time” in a place where there are a few miles of water that probably averaged less than 6 feet deep.   I actually stepped on a few sponges while walking on the ocean floor on the Gulf side.

Grand Cayman…   well, the beach was really nice.   We did some bumming around, sunning and swimming at Seven Mile Beach.   The rest of the place, though, is the most shamelessly overpriced tourist trap we’ve seen so far.   And avoid Margaritaville completely…   trust me.

Ocho Rios was its usual charming little place…   OK, it’s a little dumpy, but friendly and cheerful.   We got offered weed I don’t know how many times.   We did some shopping (not for weed) and stocked up on rum cream and cigars from my favorite little Communist paradise.

The real star of this cruise had to be our cabin, though.   We lucked into a cabin on the aft corner of the starboard side, with an enormous (by cruise ship standards) balcony that wrapped around the rear and side of the ship.   No searching for deck chairs or fighting 30 MPH winds on the upper decks; we got sun most of the day right outside the cabin.   You should see our tans.   😉

As usual the food, service and facilities were great.   I have noticed that the buffet food on the Lido deck is not quite as good as it was a few years ago, and there don’t seem to be as many wandering waiters delivering drinks as quickly.   And we did kind of miss the steel drum band.   But — it’s not enough to complain about, really.   It’s like saying it’s gone from a 10 to a 9.5.   We’ll do it again.

 

Killing annoying search engine customizations in Firefox

I’m pretty satisfied with Linux Mint, for the most part.   However, one thing does bug the hell out of me — their “branding”.   Listen, if you want to make my desktop background a cute little Mint logo, fine.   I don’t care.   But when you start screwing with the Firefox search bar and sending me to some oddly-formatted, mint-filtered search page, something has to change.

Fortunately it’s not difficult.   Just delete one file and edit a couple of others…

rm /etc/linuxmint/adjustments/15-mint*firefox*
vi /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/google.xml
vi /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml

In the two XML files, you’ll see the customizations that send you to the Mint customized page.   When you finish, the tail end of the file should look like this:

<Url type=”text/html” method=”GET” template=”http://www.google.com/search/”>
<Param name=”q” value=”{searchTerms}”/>
<Param name=”ie” value=”utf-8″/>
<Param name=”sa” value=”Search”/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>

Kill and restart Firefox, and your search should be back to normal.

Mint Linux is the new hotness, I guess.

After a few days with Fedora16, I’d had it.   I’m sorry, but the new Gnome 3 interface is just unusable.   Maybe if you want your desktop to be just as horrible as an iThingie…   but as a desktop, it’s just unusable.   Yeah, I read about “change your workflow” and all that nonsense.   Excuses for a really, really poor user interface.   I shouldn’t have to completely change the way I work to make my desktop happy.   It kind of sucks, because I’ve been happily using Fedora for years.   But, after all this time they managed to find a way to chase users off.

I’ve never been an Ubuntu fan, and CentOS just doesn’t do it for me.   I made that mistake twice, and one of them I’m still living with.   Not again.   So I decided to try Mint Linux.   Mint is a Debian distro, like Ubuntu, so I’m learning to live yum-lessly, but at least I can use the desktop UI like a normal computer.   It’s still not perfect.   For example, if you drag a window’s top bar too close to the top edge of the screen, it “snaps” to the top and assumes you really wanted to FULL SCREEN your Gedit note pad, not just slide it up out of the way a little.   Urk.   I can’t find a way to turn that irritating little quirk off.   I’m also not terribly impressed with the cutesie workspace switching, but I don’t use it often enough to be an issue.   So, Mint for the win — for now.

Fedora 16 released (and Gnome3 sucks).

Fedora 16 has been released as of, I think, yesterday.   I’d give it a mixed review, if not downright negative.

I upgraded my Fedora 14 system in the office to 16 yesterday using preupgrade.   The upgrade went relatively smoothly — thought for some unfathomable reason, it didn’t bother to install the new kernel.   The result was a system that took forever to do anything, was running the cooling fans flat out, and failed miserably to give me a working desktop.   once I noticed it was still running a 2.x.fc14 kernel, I had to reboot in single user mode, install the new kernel and fix grub.conf.

The biggest loser here is Gnome3.   While it’s visually kind of nice on the surface, it seems a lot of change simply for the sake of change…   and none of it good.   It’s actually much less convenient and less easy to use than Gnome2.   For example, I no longer have the drop-down menu structure for starting apps.   Now there’s an “Activities” link in the top right corner.   Any time I want to start a new application, I click that — and it rearranges my desktop, shrinking my running windows down to tile them on screen, while popping up a short bar of frequently used apps.   Or, I can click another word on the screen and see ALL of my apps, all at once, alphabetized.   No grouping, of course.   Oh – wait!   There are the groups, clear the hell on the right edge of the screen.   Why?   Did we move to Iraq or something?   Left to right, folks.   It’s almost as if they want to make Linux look like an iPhone or Android, which works OK (kind of) on a   phone sized screen but definitely not on a 1600×900 monitor.

Gone are the admin Settings menus.   How do I set video card resolution and color depth?   Beats the hell out of me.   Apparently it doesn’t want to let me log in as root now, either…     a choice that has always been MINE to make, not someone else’s.   I had to do a Google search, then edit two files to get that back.   My bottom screen bar is gone; minimizing windows makes them disappear completely, and you have to go through the stupid application click dance to see them.   Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I’m hoping they haven’t irreparably broken the “fallback mode”.   I’m switching to it.   Gnome3 is a loser in so many ways I’m not wasting any more time with it.

 

A recipe for disaster — or at least telemarketers.

We’re getting more and more telemarketing calls lately.   Quite a while ago, we would get calls almost daily trying to con us into buying worthless “extended warranties” on our cars, or promising to reduce our credit card debt.   How they planned to reduce it below zero is a puzzler.   Well, it would be, but the answer is — they’re just thieves.   Dregs of the earth, operating with impunity out of that haven for con artists and thieves, the great state of Florida.   Anyway, the scum who were behind that operation were eventually caught and sent to jail for apparently very short terms.   The calls have started again, with a vengeance.

So here’s the scenario.   You’re sitting at home and a call comes in.   Caller ID is almost always out of state (often GA or FL).   The CID name is something generic or is missing altogether.   You answer it and get a recorded robo-call pitching some scam designed to separate suckers from their money.   Nothing lost, except your time and a little aggravation, right?

When I’m feeling ambitious, I try to get a live person on the phone. I’ve learned that it is completely useless to ask them politely or impolitely not to call.   They don’t care.   They’re already breaking MANY laws.   So, I’ll play along long enough to get either a web site or a number where I can call them back to sign up for whatever crappy scam they have.   The old “Oh, I need that, but I don’t have my wallet with me and I’m on the john – can I call you back or sign up on line?” usually works.   Armed with that bit of information I file formal complaints (which can be done on line) with the FCC and the FTC.   I also have sent many letters to state Attorneys General, but they seem to be routinely ignored.   The last time I did that for a year or so, I got a nice letter from the Justice Department telling me that I might be needed as a witness int he scumbags’ criminal prosecution, but it was unlikely.   THAT was a nice letter to get.

Anyway, I’m not always that ambitious, and I’d like to be able to squelch these calls permanently and let someone else fight the fight for a round or two.   So the question becomes — how do you know which calls to not answer?

Enter Asterisk.   Asterisk is a free, software based PBX that runs on Linux.   It gives you the ability to make your phones do pretty much anything a very expensive, incredibly powerful business phone system would do.   In fact, you could use Asterisk to run your own phone company with a little time and patience.   Voicemail, transfers, conference lines, automated services like time, weather, wake-up calls, remote control of appliances, messages delivered via email, FAX to email gateway, call forwarding to your cell phone, the list goes on and on.   All that can get complicated, but right now we just want to do something pretty simple – screen and reject calls.   Asterisk lets us do it with style.

So I started working on a system to look at the caller ID on an incoming call and try to make a decision whether to pass it along to a human or not.   The first stage is call screening.   If the caller ID is blocked, or if the number is valid but the name says something like UNAVAILABLE or UNKNOWN, the system will answer the call, ask the caller to say their name, and put them on hold.   It then rings the phones in the house.   We get a voice telling us that there is a call, and plays back whatever the caller recorded as their name.   We then have several options:

  1. Accept the call, remember the number and always accept calls from that number.
  2. Send them to voicemail, now and any time they call.
  3. Send them to a very impolite message telling them not to call.
  4. Send them to a very polite message telling them not to call.
  5. Send them to voicemail now, but allow the call through in the future.

I actually have our set so that options 3 & 4 both simply send the three tones that say “the number is not in service”, and hang up.   #3 also adds their number to the blacklist, so we will never even know if they call again.

Part of the nice magic here is the blacklist.   We can blacklist any particular phone number, or the last number that called.   A blacklisted number’s calls will never be answered — the caller just gets a message from their phone company (or one that sounds like it, depending on how the call comes in) telling them that the number could not be reached.   We never even know the call came in.   I am also immediately rejecting certain NPA/NNN (the area code and first three digits of the phone number) that I know are invalid and signal a telemarketer call.   For instance, if you see a number like 305-000-1234 on your caller ID, you know it’s faked.   There are no 000 numbers in the country.   Those calls get dumped before they even reach us, as will 111, 555, 999 and a number of other area codes and prefixes.

So far I’ve been testing this out on my VOIP lines that I use for work and for HamGadgets.   I haven’t been getting any telemarketing calls on those yet, but when the new Gigaset base arrives I’ll be able to do the same for our home phone line.   Stay tuned, kids, and I’ll show you how to un-private blocked caller IDs.   🙂

 

Siemens Gigaset handset comparison

I’ve got a couple of different Gigaset handsets on hand as I have been ordering gear to replace our existing cordless phones.   So far I have two models, the S79H and the slightly more upscale SL78H.

Gigaset SL78H
Siemens Gigaset SL78H
Gigaset S79H
Siemens Gigaset S79H

The features of the two are quite similar.   The primary difference is that the higher end SL78H has Bluetooth in addition to a mini-USB port for managing pictures, ring tones and contacts as well as headset use.   The S79H has a mini-USB for file transfers, but has a standard 2.5mm headset jack for a wired headset.   Since we pretty much never use a headset with any of the house phones, this difference is pretty much moot.

The two differ quite a bit in other ways, though.   Both have good sized color LCD screens, but the SL78H is definitely sharper and better looking.   The SL78H also has a metal frame (polished chrome plated, even) and has a much heavier, more solid feel.   It’s a little shorter and a little slimmer.   There is no doubt whatsoever which is the higher end handset.   It’s not all one-sided, though.   The S79H has a louder speaker, louder earpiece volume, and can stand on a table for better speaker phone use.   Lisa and I also prefer the separate, easy to feel raised keypad buttons over the smooth and stylish but not so easy to use “Razr” style keypad on the SL78H.

Each uses the same kind of easy to navigate interface for placing and answering calls, muting a call, changing settings, etc.   I thought it really odd that the set of standard ring tones is not the same between the two…   but I can copy the ones I like to whichever handset doesn’t have them.   The same software (free from Siemens) will manage either handset.   Of the two, I really feel the S79H is a better value for the money…   but everyone likes the SL78H better, so that’s what we’ll have around the house.   🙂