The Ink-Pot and the Palette

As desperately as I believed I wanted an oh-so-shiny, thin, sleek, sexy ASUS Zenbook, as imminent the failure of my beat-up old Dell Studio, and notwithstanding my having saved up for a fancy new laptop, the universe said, "Whoa, Nelly."

( 'Listen to your heart and what it has to say.' )

And bingo, I'm back in business. Total cost: $100 and an afternoon. I feel like I've saved a failing marriage or something.

Moral of the story? You tell me.

Late last night I was up on my stepladder, sticking glowy-stars to my bedroom ceiling, when my brand-new Nest Protect smoke and CO detector first flashed yellow, then turned red and started shrieking at me.

"Emergency, emergency," it said (yes, it talks). "There is smoke in the room."



( Spoiler: there wasn't. )

Productive weekend.

( More power! )

( More light! )

( More books! )

Thanks to vampirefan, I've been testing the by-invitation beta version of Aviate, a new launcher app for Android (phones only--not yet optimized for tablets).

What, you ask, is a launcher app? Well, maybe you don't ask, but I did. There are dozens of them in the Play store, and most of them offer ways to customize your home screen--different icon sets, widgets and themes, that sort of thing.

Aviate is a different order of being. It aims to present what you'll probably need when you'll probably need it, and it learns, both from you and from the wider user base.

First, it replaces your busy icon-and-widget-filled home screen with something much simpler.

( Pretty! )

Aviate: intriguing, promising, and attractive. I have five invites available if anyone's interested. Just PM me with an email address.

Chrome to Phone is a one-click extension that sends the web page you're looking at on your computer to your Android device. (It requires a free app on the Android side.)

I have a single use-case for it: fanfic.

Here's how I use it:

1. Find a story on the AO3 using my nice big computer screen
2. Click the Chrome to Phone extension icon
3. Go to my phone and open the page I just sent
4. Use the Download/Mobi option to get a Kindle-compatible ebook version
5. Move the .mobi file to my Kindle app
6. Read!

(Chrome-to-Phone has a dozen other use cases--basically, any time you want to make something from your big web browser immediately available on your little mobile screen.)

OMG

I was just writing up a rant about the complete technofail of my Android tablet-for-which-I-paid-too-much. I was gonna rage against T-Mobile, and Google, and Android, and the stupid fucking DRM fail that makes it impossible for me to use streaming Netflix on this otherwise perfect-for-lying-in-bed-and-watching-shows device.

(That part's still true. And also? Netflix's streaming TV show selection sucks. Really a lot.)

But that was then. And now: TV show! On my tablet!

Here's what I had to do:

1. Install an FTP client app (SwiFTP) on my tablet
2. Install an FTP client on my Ubuntu laptop
3. Acquire the TV show from sources that stupid fucking DRM limitations will drive me to despite not only my willingness to pay Netflix money, but my actually paying Netflix money, speaking of wasting money
4. Transfer the acquisition, with a vast amount of fiddle-farting around, to my tablet, via FTP
5. Get an app on my tablet that can play said .avi file

This was after trying all kinds of tricks to get my laptop to recognize and give me access to my tablet via a regular old USB cable. Total fail. I overtaxed my geek limitations after about an hour of command-line mumbo-jumbo that didn't work.

Why didn't it work? As far as I can tell because either T-Mobile or LG sent out an un-refusable system update that broke that functionality.

But hey. TV show. On my tablet! Via a workaround that was time-consuming, extremely annoying, mentally taxing, and mostly not very legal.

PS: The show is "Community," which was highly recommended by ravurian. He said it was LOL funny, and let me tell you, after an evening of utterly frustrating geekery, I could use a laugh.

Busy in the shallow end.



Not-all-that-bloggable things which have been occupying my mind and time lately include

• Doing my nails¹
• Trying on clothes²
• Playing with my tablet³
• Working out at the gym⁴
• Trying new skincare products⁵
• Fiddling around with Google+⁶
• 750 Words⁷
• Trip planning⁸

So while I turn into a member of some Band of Really Girly Sisters (an unanticipated morph that I lay entirely at the door of my oldest friend G, who has always been a beauty queen and my good grooming guru), I'm afraid that all substance has vacated my mind, my life, and my journal.

I might be back later. With a really nice manicure.

¹With the CND Shellac system. "Zero dry time, lasts two weeks, easy off", so they say. When your nails get as old as the rest of you, a little help is in order.
²I just need a few things for my trip...
³The G-Slate from T-Mobile.
⁴Rebecca, my trainer, is a hardass. I think I'm doing great and she makes me do more.
⁵Including a sort of torture device that pokes microscopic holes in the epidermis so that the magic elixirs can penetrate to a deeper layer. It's What Technology Wants. Really.
⁶I agree with this assessment.
⁷Highly recommended writing goad tool
⁸ Only six weeks away! Eee!

I discovered this function on my new Android phone last night. Well, okay, my 14 year old nephew showed it to me:

You push a button and say, "Navigate to 1234 Southwest 5th Avenue."

And it tells you how to get there.

I know, I know: people who've had iPhones for years, or who have GPS in their car, are no longer impressed by this. And people who actually have a sense of direction could never, ever be as thrilled about it as I am.

But I have no sense of direction. It's a borderline handicap, a slight but very real disability, that carries all kinds of baggage: it's funny to people, it's goofy, it's "feminine," it's an allowable form of "stupidity" for an otherwise very bright, creative person. It's also annoying and incomprehensible to people who don't suffer from it. They think I'm just not trying. "Come on!" they'll say. "Just picture the route in your head!"

There's no picture there. On a good day, if I know that that's west over there (because the sun is setting or I can see the West Hills, or the Pacific Ocean or something obvious), then I can painstakingly work out that to the right of west is north, and to the right of that is east, and to the right of that is south, using the "Never Eat Shredded Wheat" trick. But I can't feel it, and even if I can see it, I'm unsure.

As a prosthetic aid, I have whole catalogs of street names and their sequence memorized from long residence in my hometown. Jefferson Street is south of Madison Street, so if I set out from Madison and come to Jefferson, I can deduce that I'm heading south. If I come to Salmon, on the other hand, I know I've gone north. I cannot sense directions. When I'm moving, I'm just heading forward. When I turn left, I'm still heading forward. That's all I've got.

I've burned a lot of calories and a lot of gasoline over the years correcting for this handicap.

So when I got in my car this morning and said to my phone, "Navigate to [XYZ Address in unfamiliar neighborhood]" and my phone talked to me, right in my ear, and said, "Head west on NE Beech Street and turn right on NE 11th Avenue," and kept telling me exactly when and where to turn--well, I'm not exaggerating when I say I felt like I'd been let out of a prison.

And when I got to where I was going and there was a Google Street View of the destination house right there on my phone screen looking exactly like reality, I wish I could describe the sense of safety and security it gave me.

When I think that I ever, ever ventured out without this tool, I am amazed at myself.

Ah ha ha! I totally could have posted that last post from my new phone except I forgot. This is from my new phone. it's a bit tricky to navigate. But so what? It's cool. :D

Seriously, I've spent so many hours in the past few days resetting and re-flashing my Windows Mobile phone and generally trying to get it to behave, that if I were actually PAID for those hours, I could buy a new phone.

At one point, I was so stressed out that I was imagining smashing the damn phone and grinding it under my heel. maybe riding my bike over it a few times for good measure. then going to some creepy phone store in a mall and putting a new one on my credit card.

Why, you may wonder, do I do shit like this? Well, it wasn't working right. It started misbehaving in ways that a simple reset wouldn't fix. Apps that were working fine before started seizing up, etc., etc. And I really can't justify a new phone till the end of the year.

Five more minutes or so, and all my content should be transfered back onto the memory card, and I can see whether this fourth full system re-flash has worked, or whether I have to get out my bike.