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Why I Just Bought a Nexus 7 2013

I’ve had a Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus for about three and a half years. Its been a great performer for me, and we’ve put it through a lot of abuse. We used it for watching movies, checking email, keeping our (then) toddler entertained, writing documents, and all the other things that tablets are great for. As one of the first generation Android tablets, it was pretty good. Its most compelling feature for me was that it was 3G enabled, so I didn’t need WiFi.

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Oh, Comcast how I wish I could quit you

No, really, I wish I could quit you. Unfortunately, cable service is effectively a monopoly in most places. You’re the only company that can provide half way decent Internet speeds, and the only company that allows me to use a cable card for my MythTV setup.

Why, oh, why do you make it so painfully frustrating whenever you call in for any sort of issue? Your customer service people aren’t really trained to handle much more than telling people to reboot their cable boxes. And don’t even think about asking a question that isn’t answered by the script that they’re reading from.

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Fixing My Parents Network Part 1

A couple months ago, my parents finally replaced their old Sony console TV (a tube TV) with a bright shiny new Samsung 60" Smart TV. Its a thing of beauty. The picture is crisp and sharp and has excellent color. Being one of Samsung’s Smart TV’s, it also has networking capabilities and can stream things from the Internet. It also has Netflix and Amazon Instant Video buttons right on the remote. It also includes an IR blaster to control the Comcast supplied DVR/cable box. Now they have just one remote, don’t have to change inputs or fiddle with things to stream movies and it has greatly simplified their setup. This is good because if its not easy to do and easy to remember, they won’t do it.

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Yii2 vs Symfony2 - First Impressions

So a few weeks ago I started in on a ground-up rewrite of an existing project. Its currently using a framework that based around my CWFC libraries. It works very well, but its starting to show its age. As more and more features got added to the project, things have gotten more and more cumbersome to maintain in a clean way. I started off by ripping out all of the backend code and migrating it to C++ (see my posts on Protocol Buffers here and here), leaving only the front-facing code left to work with.

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New Gaming Headset

So last week for my birthday, Jessica told me that I had to buy myself a present to open up in front of our oldest son. She wants to stress the importance that all birthdays aren’t about him (he’s three). I’d been looking at a new headset with microphone to use at the office for a few months now. After moving offices six weeks ago, I find myself in an office that is very noisy at times, and other times absolutely silent. Since they’re “executive suites”, the types of businesses that are in the offices around me varies. There are a couple of realtors, and a couple of recruiters. When they’re in the office, its loud with voices, otherwise its very quiet. Headphones are almost mandatory to focus on writing code.

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Existing LUKS Partition and New Primary Boot Drive on Ubuntu 14.04

Yesterday I attempted to upgrade from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 on my office system. It failed. Everything appeared to go smoothly, but after rebooting, I got a black screen. No grub menu, no grub failure menu. I attempted to reinstall grub from a live image, but that failed too. I had an extra Intel 160GB SSD so I decided to a fresh install. Its been over a year since I did a clean install so I had a lot of cruft installed, so a clean install would take care of that, and would probably take less time than repairing the install.

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