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I Popped The Question...

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday April 05 2018, @09:39PM (#3127)
22 Comments
Career & Education

... via instant message.

She said "Yes", also via instant message.

<3 :-) <3

I at first planned to take her to some romantic place such as a beach at sunset, but last night our Facebook Messenger chat seemed to be the right time and place.

She's from some - I won't tell you where because she's very shy - other country. I'm going to get her a fiancé visa. I don't know the procedure yet but I handled Bonita's green card completely on my own. I expect I can figure out how to smuggle her into the US despite the National Guard.

I'm going to start shopping for a ring soon. When I complete my contract I will have the ducats required to buy it. I won't take out a loan.

WD Black/SanDisk Extreme Pro NVMe SSDs

Posted by takyon on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:10PM (#3124)
11 Comments
Hardware

The Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review: EVO Meets Its Match

Very fast sequential speeds and high IOPS. Endurance could be problematic (600 TB for the 1 TB model, calculated as 0.3 DWPD). I wonder what that ratio will be for QLC 3D NAND SSDs.

Western Digital bought SanDisk in 2016.

I Might Set My New Lady Up With Linux

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday April 04 2018, @09:00PM (#3123)
19 Comments
Career & Education

She doesn't have a computer, and if she did she wouldn't know how to use it.

So I'm going to buy her a laptop and a HOWTO book with lots of color pictures.

I was at first going to get her a Windows box because where she lives there wouldn't be any shops that service Macs.

But now I expect to go there and live with her.

That led me to look into a MacBook for her. But a MacBook costs what would be three month's rent where she lives. But I really don't want to get her a Windows box. My Acer is good as laptops go but for me using Windows is like pounding nails with my fists.

But I figure that if I set her up with Linux Mint - or maybe even Puppy - she would be completely unaware that Linux Will Never Be Ready For The Desktop and so be perfectly happy with The Penguin.

What's your take? Linux from scratch?

News Travels Fast.

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday April 03 2018, @07:39AM (#3122)
2 Comments
Career & Education

$GAY_AS_OLD_PAREE: "Hi!"

$MICHAEL_DAVID_CRAWFORD: "Hi. I can't chat right now I'm talking with my girlfriend."

$GAY_AS_OLD_PAREE: "Do you sex?"

$MICHAEL_DAVID_CRAWFORD: "No."

$GIRLFRIEND wants me to move in with her. Where she lives housing is much less expensive than even Vantucky.

Either we will rent a house, or we will buy a vacant lot and I will build a house.

I actually know how to, because my father taught me how to use every kind of tool. I already have all the tools I would need; I even have a full-sized table saw.

I would need a helper, and I'd get someone else to do the foundation.

Maybe I'll build a geodesic dome. Bonita said she would refuse to live in such a Fullerian home, but quite likely $GIRLFRIEND would be into it.

The Hell is a homeless guy doing with a table saw? You quite reasonably ask. When my father died my mother asked what I wanted to inherit. "His tools," I replied. She paid for the storage.

I'm probably going to sell the auto body tools. Those were given to my grandfather by his best friend, because his best friend had no heirs.

Nighty-Night! Don't Let The Code Bugs Byte.

News Travels Fast.

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday April 03 2018, @07:38AM (#3121)
0 Comments
Career & Education

$GAY_AS_OLD_PAREE: "Hi!"

$MICHAEL_DAVID_CRAWFORD: "Hi. I can't chat right now I'm talking with my girlfriend."

$GAY_AS_OLD_PAREE: "Do you sex?"

$MICHAEL_DAVID_CRAWFORD: "No."

$GIRLFRIEND wants me to move in with her. Where she lives housing is much less expensive than even Vantucky.

Either we will rent a house, or we will buy a vacant lot and I will build a house.

I actually know how to, because my father taught me how to use every kind of tool. I already have all the tools I would need; I even have a full-sized table saw.

I would need a helper, and I'd get someone else to do the foundation.

Maybe I'll build a geodesic dome. Bonita said she would refuse to live in such a Fullerian home, but quite likely $GIRLFRIEND would be into it.

The Hell is a homeless guy doing with a table saw? You quite reasonably ask. When my father died my mother asked what I wanted to inherit. "His tools," I replied. She paid for the storage.

I'm probably going to sell the auto body tools. Those were given to my grandfather by his best friend, because his best friend had no heirs.

Nighty-Night! Don't Let The Code Bugs Byte.

Mommy Shaming

Posted by takyon on Sunday April 01 2018, @10:45AM (#3117)
41 Comments

I Can't Sleep

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday April 01 2018, @09:53AM (#3116)
11 Comments
Career & Education

Not manic. Not yet anyway.

There is a woman in my life now. She is very religious, so I have the idea that I'm going to get up in six hours.

Doubtlessly AC will find some fault with her. Perhaps he will suggest she's inflatable

She lives far away. I'm going to visit when I get paid

I had a long distance relationship once before. That works a lot better now because even video calls don't cost anything

She is very shy so I won't be tell you much about her

I would prefer to stay up all night but I promised her I wouldn't do that anymore

Moto C Plus is the Queen of Budget LineageOS Phones

Posted by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 31 2018, @09:20PM (#3115)
6 Comments
Mobile

After nearly 6 years with a Motorola Photon Q (XT897/"Asanti") I finally decided it's time for a new phone, and spent the outrageous sum of just-under-$130-including-shipping for a Moto C Plus, screenglass, and rubber body armor.

Motorola, now a subsidiary of Lenovo, is known for most of its phones being fairly amenable to rooting and unlocking. This particular one also happens to be GSM-enabled and support dual SIMs, on the off chance I ever leave the US and want a data plan. Its specs are, by today's standards, unimpressive: quad-core MT6737M CPU (4x ARMv8 A53 @ 28nm, somewhat slower than a Snapdragon 425 for reference), 2 GB of memory, 16GB of eMMC flash, and 5" 1280x720 screen. The body is all plastic, though it's not bad plastic, and the battery is a surprising 4,000 mAh that weighs more than the phone itself does.

Now, it turns out the C Plus is *not* as easily unlockable as, say, the G4 is. In particular, the usual fastboot commands such as get_unlock_data simply fail with "unknown remote command" errors. The stock ROM is also kind of pants, though it's at least a fairly vanilla Android 7.0 rather than Madokami-forgive-us-all MIUI or TouchWiz.

However, there is a program called SP Flash Tool that is able to write directly to MediaTek devices' internal flash over a USB port. This is not for the faint of heart, as it requires carefully-crafted scatter files with the exact starting addresses and lengths corresponding to each and every piece of the stock firmware, and if you mess up by even one byte, you will very likely hard-brick your phone. For even more heart-pounding excitement, the way to get a custom ROM on here is not to use this tool, but to pop into an advanced mode and specify where to start writing (if you're curious, it's 0x2d80000 and no, that's not a typo) and with what file.

The purpose here is to flash a custom build of TeamWin recovery, known by its uncomplimentary acronym TWRP. And *this* involves dissecting the machine, removing its battery, holding VolDown, and hooking it up to a PC via USB cable, *in that order.* Somehow, Flash Tool is able to write to the device even though it's powered off and battery-less.

From here, disconnect from the PC, hold VolUp and Power, and select Recovery boot. After about 30s, TWRP will load, and you can pull up ADB in your shell, place the device in sideload mode, and "adb sideload /path/to/lineageos-14.1.zip," which goes a hell of a lot faster than you'd expect it to. But there's a catch: if you reboot now, you'll go into an endless bootloop, where the phone won't go past the Motorola logo. If you don't have a stock ROM or, preferably, a Nandroid backup, this is game over.

Turns out you *also* need to install SuperSU, and you need to do it in a special way: while in TWRP, pop a terminal, and do "echo SYSTEMLESS=true>/data/.supersu" before adb-sideloading a known-good SuperSU .zip onto the phone. The output will be quite verbose, and it will warn you that 1) on reboot, the device will likely restart at least once and 2) first boot will take "several minutes."

They're not kidding. I lost count of the exact amount of time, but I believe LineageOS sat there blowing bubbles to itself for a good 15 or 20 minutes, and I was literally seconds away from forcing a power-down and starting the entire process again with a stock ROM. It also takes well over a minute to boot; I counted 33 sets of right-to-left bubbles at the LineageOS loading screen per bootup, and that's after a good 30 seconds of the phone sitting at the Motorola logo with a nice fat warning about how the device can't be verified and might not work properly.

Yeah, that's the point: from Google's PoV, it's *not* working properly, because LineageOS seems not to have all that spying junk on it. I didn't even flash a GApps zip; instead, first thing I did was to sideload an FDroid archive, which is something like an open source version of the Play Store. Everything I need is on there and more.

So far, I am loving this thing. I've been zipping all over downtown Milwaukee looking for a new place to lease the last couple of days, and there is nothing like having a portable MP3 player for those long rides. And get this: after using it to play music for a good 3 hours, *the battery was still at 95% from a full charge this morning.* That is *nuts.* The Moto C Plus punches way, way above its weight with the proper love and attention paid to it.

So if anyone wants a good budget phone to run LineageOS, Resurrection Remix, etc on and doesn't mind doing some nailbitingly-scary stuff with direct flashing, I can heartily recommend the C Plus (NOT the C, that thing is junk). Happy flashing, everyone :)

My Cyberstalker Is Back

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 31 2018, @01:36AM (#3112)
5 Comments
Career & Education

So far she seems mentally stable: she hasn't said anything about wanting to have my baby

I really am trying to help her. Last time she was clearly trouble or by her mind

But at the same time I advised her that I am not the man she is so urgently seeking

Murder for Popularity

Posted by takyon on Thursday March 29 2018, @02:50PM (#3111)
6 Comments
/dev/random

Crazed girls flood Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz with fan mail

Mass murderer Nikolas Cruz is getting stacks of fan mail and love letters sent to the Broward County jail, along with hundreds of dollars in contributions to his commissary account.

Teenage girls, women and even older men are writing to the Parkland school shooter and sending photographs — some suggestive — tucked inside cute greeting cards and attached to notebook paper with offers of friendship and encouragement. Groupies also are joining Facebook communities to talk about how to help the killer.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained copies of some of the letters showing that Cruz, who had few friends in the outside world, is now being showered with attention.