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Timeless...

We have to take our stupid war

I wonder if the rest of the galaxy should be grateful that they're still out of reach, or if they're just like us, and we should be grateful to be out of their reach

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers

[Update: 22 September 2019 2056 GMT]

Writing this journal made me think more about what the issues with building LineageOS for my phone entailed. As I mentioned, it's primarily an integration issue. As such, I reviewed the hardware specific Github repos I was using and noted that some of the hardware specific repos (android_device_htc_t6-common, android_device_htc_msm8960-common and android_device_htc_t6vzw) were being pulled from the LineageOS 14.1 branch (the last supported branch for my phone). So I changed the repos to pull from the only project I'm aware of that supports my phone under 15.1 (ResurrectionRemix, with repos from developer TARKZiM.

Et voila! LineageOS 15.1 now compiles (well, except for an initial error that the recovery image -- which I'm not using, I use TWRP instead) complained that it was too large for my recovery partition. Since I'm not using that recovery image anyway, increasing the allowed size of the recovery image got rid of that error.

I now have an installable rom for LineageOS 15.1. Sadly, it hangs on boot, without even the boot image animation being displayed. :( Logcat debugging is called for now, to determine what may be preventing the image from booting.

In the meantime, I'm convinced that further integration is required. It appears that TARKZiM, as well as the TWRP folks have moved to a universal codebase for the HTC One Max (t6-Univ) and I'm guessing I'm going to need to integrate that into my device tree.

I'll continue updating as things move (or don't) along.
[End Update 22 September 2019 2056 GMT]

So I have an HTC One Max (VZW version) that's served me pretty well for more than five years.

When I bought it back in 2014, I chose it over the HTC One and other phones for several reasons:
1. Big screen (5.9"/1080p support -- not that I watch video on it)
2. Extra battery life compared to other phones
3. External SDCard slot (I keep ~60GB of music on that)

It shipped with HTC's stock Android 4.4.2 (KitKat), along with HTC's bloatware and a few nice utilities.

In September, 2015 HTC released the *last* update (still 4.4) for the One Max and declared that it would not support future versions of Android on it.

For quite some time, I'd been annoyed that I didn't have access to the more granular permissions in Marshmallow and investigated custom roms for my phone.

I installed Cyanogenmod (now LineageOS) and really liked it. However, it did not have support for either the IR blaster or the fingerprint scanner on the One Max.

This led me to go back to the stock rom, as I was using both of them on a regular basis.

On a fairly regular basis, I'd check in on LineageOS development and see if the IR/fingerprint functionality was available.

Then it happened. LineageOS stopped supporting my phone after v14.1. Still with no IR/fingerprint sensor support.

Finally, a few months ago, I got so sick of the lack of features in my stock rom, I went looking around for new custom roms that support my phone. There wasn't much out there.

I poked around the forums on https://www.xda-developers.com/ and found very little in the way of stuff I could use.

Then I decided to see if I could port my phone to LineageOS myself. I started with LineageOS 15.1 (Android 8 Oreo) and failed miserably. Mostly because I had no experience with Android development.

So I went back and attempted to build the most recent version that was supported (LineageOS 14.1) and successfully built that.

I then went back to LineageOS 15.1 and tried again. It still failed. I did a ton of research and realized that the issues I was seeing were related to the hardware (t6vzw/msm8960) code (from 14.1) I was using wasn't compatible with the newer android version.

More research and I determined that this stuff isn't just poorly documented, discussions about porting and references to specific resources to assist were mostly non-existent.

It was around this time I discovered ResurrectionRemix (based on LineageOS) which *does* support my phone, With Android 7, 8 and 9.

I installed various versions, and they do, in fact, work on my phone. Currently, I have RR 7.0.2 (Android 9 pie) running on my phone.

But RR eats the battery much faster than the stock rom or the older versions of LineageOS. What's more, Wifi and cellular signals are not as strong as in supported versions. Even worse, there's an RRStats app that sends usage information back to the RR folks, and that cannot be removed or uninstalled. Assholes.

As such, I am continuing to try to build LineageOS for my phone. As many of you are aware, this requires an iterative approach:

1. Assemble the various code repos required;
2. Attempt the build;
3. Address any errors that cause the build to fail;
4. Go to (2) until the build completes successfully;
5. Profit!

I'm continuing with (2) and (3) and have addressed a bunch of problems. The issues I'm seeing now appear to be related to android API changes causing missing/malformed definitions.

One of the mechanisms I've used to address this is to use the Android version hardware specific code from builds (in this case, Resurrection Remix) that do support my hardware. This has helped considerably and the build goes much farther.

I'm currently stuck on some C++ definition errors ('member reference base type...is not a structure or union') which certainly shouldn't be too hard to address. I suspect that this is an integration issue, as the errors I'm seeing are in the hardware-specific code that I ripped from RR and am trying to build LineageOS.

I am emphatically *not* asking for coding assistance, as I want to work these issues out myself, but feel free to make suggestions and/or point me at resources that might give me some ideas as to how to address such integration issues.

Note that I'm not a developer by trade (rather I'm Unix/Linux guy from way back in the 90s, so I'm no stranger to building software and doing some debugging), so this has been and will continue to be a nice learning (C++, possibly some Java) experience for me.

Have other Soylentils engaged in this sort of project? I'd be interested to hear about your experiences and would appreciate suggestions and pointers to reference material that might help.

Feel free to chime in on the wasteland that is software support for phones older than two years and/or other Android ecosystem issues too.

Can Congress defund them for it? If they can, but they haven't, it can only mean they truly are complicit. Which nobody should doubt anyway.

But I also understand the fear of discovery. It would reveal that Sr. Presidente isn't doing anything out of the ordinary. And none of this is going to affect the vote anyway. The Party will still get its 95% no matter what.

And Poor old Joe. He has to spend the rest of his campaign denying that he *fucks pigs* (a "Fear and Loathing" thing). Damn near feel sorry for the SOB.

My wife is getting surgery Wednesday, that means that the scan were cancer free but it also means that she will stay under general anesthesia for 2hr if there are no complications, a minimum of 2 days at the hospital and something between 6 to 8 weeks at home before full recovery.

That surgery is purely prophylactic. A drug she takes to prevent BC reccurence can cause a hard to detect cancer in her uterus. A month ago, she asked if it was rational to have that organ removed and the oncologist told her that it is infrequently done but that her clinical reasoning was flawless and that if she is willing to undergo a painful surgery a second time , he would recommend it.

So here we are a month after.... the surgery is Wednesday and I don't know how not to think about it. Work will be a tough thing Monday and more so Tuesday. I wish I could speed up time so we were Thursday.

I feel the need to quench my anxiety with a bottle of fine Scotch but I am unwilling do to so cause I have to be strong and there for her. I don't know what to do to calm myself and this post is a desperate attempt to do so. My wife is a Vulcan, she thinks rationally and manage to consider the odds without stressing out, I need to be more like her....

So please accept my apologies in advance if I am even more grammatically challenged than usual.

Just show his press conferences raw and uncut. The takeaway is:

...watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.

Expose a little of this, and you just might make the sale.

Oh, and misprision is a word. Something you see every day in your elected government. Which means, the problem is not intractable. In fact, the solution is most trivial.

A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout in Afghanistan killed at least 30 civilians resting after a day’s labor in the fields, officials said on Thursday.

The attack on Wednesday night also injured 40 people after accidentally targeting farmers and laborers who had just finished collecting pine nuts at mountainous Wazir Tangi in eastern Nangarhar province, three Afghan officials told Reuters.

U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

In less than three years, President Donald Trump has named more former lobbyists to Cabinet-level posts than his most recent predecessors did in eight, putting a substantial amount of oversight in the hands of people with ties to the industries they're regulating.

The Cabinet choices are another sign that Trump's populist pledge to "drain the swamp" is a catchy campaign slogan but not a serious attempt to change the way Washington works. Instead of staring down "the unholy alliance of lobbyists and donors and special interests" as Trump recently declared, the influence industry has flourished during his administration.

"An administration staffed by former industry lobbyists will almost certainly favor industry over the general public, because that's the outlook they're bringing to the job," said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform program at the think tank New America and author of the book "The Business of America is Lobbying."

Former lobbyists run the Defense and Interior departments, Environmental Protection Agency and office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The acting Labor secretary, Pat Pizzella, is a former lobbyist and Trump's pick to run the department, Eugene Scalia, also is an ex-lobbyist. Scalia's confirmation hearing before a GOP-controlled Senate committee is scheduled for Thursday and Democrats are expected to grill him on his long record of opposing federal regulations.

A seventh ex-lobbyist, Dan Coats, resigned as Trump's intelligence chief in August.

Trump, so far, has named more lobbyists to his Cabinet than Bush, Obama did in 8 years