Computer Log

Cutting the cord seems to have become a thing today. I’m a long time cord cutter before the term existed, I did it to save money. At one time I had all the premium channels. Ending cable caused some withdraws to be sure. Now I get over the air (OTA) TV reception, using a converter box that can also record. Sometime I think companies and people miss the true concept of cord cutting. Some People “cut the cord” apparently only to tell others “I cut the cord”, because then they get Netflix, Hulu, Disney and others and end up spending as much or more than when they had cable!

I’m ranting about this because I am constantly offered YouTube TV. When I checked on it I found it cost $65! Sixty five dollars…really! I read that when it launched a few years ago, it cost $35, that;s almost a 100% increase. I got a Fire Stick on sale and on occasion get Netflix for a month or two. I got the Stick because my daughter was coming down for a visit and didn’t want to miss Game of Thrones, which I also got free using new subscriber offers.

Speaking of OTA digital TV. The term digital TV causes people to think they need a special digital antenna. Not true! When I first got my OTA converter box I just attached my old outside antenna and it worked fine. As a matter of fact when I later got a powered digital antenna…I actually lost a few channels that my old unpowered beat up (missing arms) antenna got.

Unless I learn different, I’d have to think hard about getting another Amazon Kindle Fire. I’d switch to an android tablet. Why? Let me count the ways. It uses a customized version of android but is NOT android. You can sideload android apps and they may or may not work. I have a older Kindle which has a browser no longer supported and I’m unable to update it. No current version of their silk browser will run on this Kindle.

If not connected to the internet MANY apps just stop working [get a message saying to the effect that the license has expired requiring me to connect to the internet to refresh them] and this message can appear often. I just recently did a factory reset and reinstalled a few mostly media apps and within a week it wanted to “refresh” licenses. Really? I’d rather not [at least seldom] connect to the internet with a old unsupported OS. Amazon feels like Big Brother is watching me. Just let me get in and freshen up those licenses and…perhaps poke around a little! What are you reading, listening to and watching?

Many apps, if even available are lesser versions of the current versions. Some popular apps are not even available.

My old android phone (at least 2 new phones since…and I don’t get a new phone every year) on the other hand…never had [Not saying it don’t happen] an app give me a “license has expired” message.

Here is my hypothetical scenario. I’m going to a remote location in the mountains for a few weeks or even months with no internet access. I load up my devices with books [PDFs], music [MP3s], videos [MP4s]. The Kindle if I’m lucky might work a few days. Then “license has expired” messages appear requiring Wi-Fi which I don’t have, causing the app to become useless. The old android phone on-the-other-hand is still functional. It can still work with the above media formats. Why does that make sense? Because a jpeg or png, pdf or mp4 format basically rarely changes. How about letting me “refresh” the app only when/if the app fails to render the media type because of some format change? Or I may choose to update if a newer version has features I want.

Since the hardware in all likelihood is still fine lets make the device obsolete, by just failing to run the software!

You can’t judge a book by it’s cover. Bought a new Type-C cable for spare at “Five Below”, which use to mean $5 and less, but as soon as the opened one near me it became $5 and up, despite the name. These cables appear to be nice. Nice packaging. quality appearing braided cable. However I bought one from them before an noticed much longer charging times. Perhaps it was a fluke? How hard can it be to make a good cable? Apparently harder than it looks. Actually it’s probably more to do with the materials used than the actual construction. I plugged the new cable into my phone and no click, which is a nice audible assurance that it is inserted correctly. Since I didn’t hear that I decided to check settings.

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Wow! Quite a difference. There’s 5+ dollars wasted. I’ve learned my lesson.

256MB not GB. No longer works.

I often start my day early, and there is nothing worse, at least it feels that way at the moment, than opening a web page, where most of the page is white. So I do a little research and learn about dark themes. But wait that only affects a small aspect of Firefox, such as tabs. The web pages themselves haven’t changed. Opening Google, for example is visual torture. It’s like being snow blind. I need my sunglasses (which I have actually done). Long story short Dark Reader https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/

This is my experience…so far. YMMV. Well it started out good. I had to virtually sign some documents Saturday…which I did. I Received the following text on Saturday.

Today I go to Carvana website where I am shown the following. I’m excluding some purchase details, only showing the left side of screen. As you can see all green check marks except apparently a final, 2 minute “Review order” step.

Well the Review Order step wants me to select a delivery date with a selection beginning with Nov 3. WTH #1? I already picked Oct 31. Which was confirmed by the above text.

So I attempt to call and was given the option to hold or have someone else call me back. I don’t like to answer calls not in my contacts so I choose to hold. After 20 minutes I am sent to a voice mailbox! WTH #2! So I decided to try their online chat and their AI, determining the proper response…sucked. So I asked for a human. They wanted incident details, and said someone would get back to me. But first they sent a code for me to enter then wanted my email & zip. I never received a response. I made a second call and again had to hold again, after 20+ minutes I was disconnected! WTH #3! So I finally decided I try a call back, not long after I received a call and was once again put in a wait queue. WTH #4! I thought the purpose of the call back was someone would call when available! Anyway someone finally answered.

Bare in mind the only reason I called was to clear up the delivery problem. But this person, who was nice, seemed to imply that I hadn’t completed everything and tells me my delivery is delayed because of payment verification! WTH #5! I was already given green check marks for both Cash or Finance and Payment! If all the Carvana indicators are green and I’m sent a delivery appointment what can I say. Also I used this confirmation to let someone who was tired of driving me around know that they needn’t fret after Saturday! Now I have to say never mind. Part of the very first steps I was told a Carvana rep my call or text me about any issues. I received no such contact. If you can send a delivery confirmation text. Then why can’t you send a potential problem text?

Oh I almost forgot I was also shown a countdown timer. And if I didn’t look at app today would have expired. They previously contacted me by both text and email (not about any of this!) so they had that option.

So what started out as a positive experience has somewhat soured. If I ever get the car I maybe happy. But I don’t want to forget what initially happened, which you sometimes do if the end result turns out good. I was hoping for a better pre-sale experience and not having to deal with people.

Entirely online…so computer related!

Slow downloads, high CPU usage, YouTube pages (comments) not completing. Suspected my ISP at 1st. But that doesn’t explain high CPU usage. So tried Google and the afore mentioned problems weren’t there.

Playing with Beautiful Soup and…when did this happen? Brought up some websites to scrape locally. Save HTML in Firefox and Google Chrome. The view was right but when I “save page” the source has been heavily modified, to barely resemble the original. I use to do this all the time…that’s how I originally learned HTML. The saved source from Opera was the only one that matched the original.

I was listening to a podcast on screen scrapping with Python. Specifically they were talking about Scrapy. Which resurrected thoughts of how I created my Birthday database. I never went into detail about how I started this project. Anywho this was in 2002, a few years before requests (version 1 started late 2012) Beautiful soup (Initial release:2004) or Scrapy (Initial release:June 26, 2008) came into existance. I wrote my own Python 2 web scraper using Python’s urllib. I think requests began life using urllib2. This returned HTML from a url which I had to parse myself. I scrapped a few different sites the merged the data. Someone on the podcast mentioned that it’s not illegal to scrape publicly available data.

At the time I figured no one could own basic celebrity information such as date of birth (DOB) or date of death (DOD). But my biggest remembrance is of how famous at least one of these websites is today. There was also a description of the celebrity which I did not use. All the descriptions were written by me, and are not complete. Through the years I’ve added some on occasion. I always add a description when someone dies. I would imagine it would be much more difficult to crawl through some of these sites today. Not to mention how much more data there probably is now. If I remember correctly these scrapers ran over dial-up modem. I used Name, DOB and DOD.

Another interest I had was older magazine covers (which will remain nameless) I wrote quite a few scrapers to get those for my private enjoyment. I think these images would be much harder to grab today than they were back then.