The WinTen We're Taking Over Your Computer Whether You Like It Or Not campaign by Microsoft continues, unabated.

I thought I had posted these Important Messages Upon Bootup back on 14 and 18 October, but I guess I hadn't. This first one is based on the theory that 110,000,000 people who don't know how to say NO, NOT YET, can't be wrong:


But only Millions love Windows 10? That's what, a few percent of the 110,000,000 who upgraded?


Microsoft also increased the threats, by announcing that (a) Windows 10 will be rolled into the Recommended Windows Update lists and (b) Windows 10 will become a Required Windows Update at some point. Wait -- how the hell can you reconcile a Required update with still providing support for Windows 7 and 8 and 8.1 up to their Drop Dead Dates?

Then there's today missive:


Am I the only one who's thinking of the movie Scrooged and the network's tag line, "Yule Love It!" ?

And more to the point, given it's mighty decline in recent years, from James Earl Jones "This is CNN" and the "You Give Us Half an Hour, We'll Give You the World" of Headline News -- is anyone seriously thinking that CNN is a good recommendation for ANYTHING, including which operating system you're running?

This ad campaign by Microsoft is so lame, no wonder it's running in little blue boxes on my computer desktop. They couldn't even find a bad ad agency to run these in print/TV/cable/media anywhere. Microsoft, you are still not inspiring confidence in this upgrade. (Although to be fair, the TV spots are pretty lame, too. Microsoft just can't run ads which tell you what the fuck they do. Instead, they talk about children born today into the blessed light of Windows 10 and love and happiness. Does ANYONE think that a child born today will be using Windows 10 when they're five years old in 2020? Ten in 2025? Fifteen in 2030? Windows 10 MIGHT settle down into a great product, I don't know, but I don't think it's the Microsoft version of Men In Black's "The last suit you'll ever own.")

As I have said before, I am not totally opposed to the concept of Windows 10. But the messages have been very bullying and I know some people who've had some real software and driver issues after upgrading to Windows 10 -- and the promised version rollback to their last working Windows system FAILED. That does not inspire confidence either.

I have a lot of legacy software and legacy files I need to use to get my work done. The upgrades from PC DOS (2.10/3.1/3.21/3.30/5.00/2000) to Windows 95/98SE/NT4 to 98Me/2000 to Vista/XP/7/8.x already have cost me access to some of the programs I use and make it difficult sometimes to read older files. After a year of struggling, I am happy enough with Word 2010 under Windows 7 -- I currently hate Word 2013 and have no experience with Office 365, though as I pointed out the other day (DW) (LJ), that one I am going to probably have to eat in 2016 as the University decides to sell its soul to Outlook.

Someday I'll probably buy a clean native Windows 10 machine -- but I don't want to waste my valuable time to run an upgrade to WinTen just because Microsoft says so. Not until WinTen gets some Service Packs under its belt. That's been my rules going way back to Windows NT 4 Workstation. Me and a whole lot of IT professionals.

Dr. Phil

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So we were watching the rerun of the pilot of the new Minority Report series on FOX.

Apparently TV cops in the future are as bad about following proper police procedures as contemporary TV cops. Go figure. But, there were some very cool visuals, much like last year's short-lived series Almost Human, but better.

I've always liked the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report. I really can't remember if I've read the Philip K. Dick originating story. But the slick production had quite a vision of the future. Some of the big pieces, like the vertical highways, were a bit much. The intrusive advertising, though, was frightfully wonderful. And the end was sweet.

The series also has some impressive visuals. The disconnecting and reconnecting trains -- cool -- but there's some logistic problems with it. Probably not too surprising, since Steven Spielberg has his hands in both movie and series.

I like the concept, don't know if they can keep it up.

But... what was really intriguing was the commercials. We figure that advertisers liked the expected geek demographics of which might be expected to watch Minority Report. There was a long semi-animated Honda ad, vaguely reminiscent of Ah-Ha's Take On Me video.

And... we saw the first ever for us TV commercial for the Amazon Echo. When we bought into Echo earlier this year (DW) (LJ), it was still in Beta and by invitation request only. They've since opened it up a little. I guess that if they're advertising on TV, Echo is going bigtime.

There's an interesting rebranding going on with Echo as well. The Amazon Echo software on the Kindle Fires recently updated and it is now called Amazon Alexa. Personally, I think this is a mistake, because Alexa is one of the two available default command words. You talk about Alexa and Echo perks up and tries to parse the request. They are now advertising Alexa technology in the new Amazon Fire TV systems.

What was intriguing, because I turned my head to look at Echo, is that the blue light failed to come on every time the commercial used the word Alexa or gave Echo demonstration commands. I tried one of the questions they used in the ad and got an answer -- worded slightly different and longer than the one on TV.

I'd be curious to know whether there is anything active in the Echo ad. Whether in the coding of the word Alexa in the audio or if Amazon's servers knew exactly when the ad would be aired. If we had a working VCR or owned a DVR, I suppose we could test this.

Echo isn't quite living in the Minority Report future, but we'll take it for now. (grin)

Speaking of TV cops... there are times I wonder why we bother watching the new Hawaii Five-O. It has jumped the shark so many times that they practically have to keep a precision synchronized shark jumping team on the payroll. Well, I do know why we watch. Because like a few of the other shows we watch, NCIS I'm looking at you, we like the ensemble cast.

Dr. Phil

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I have used a whole lot of various small computer devices over the years. Went through a long run of PDAs, starting with remarkable HP 200LX, which was a calculator sized machine which opened to a keyboard and was a full IBM PC compatible, with 2MB of memory (640K for MS-DOS 5.0 and 1.44MB for a virtual HD). Ran Microsoft Word 5.0B and had Lotus 1-2-3 2.4 built-in ROM. Hoo-boy! Remember, this is back in the day when laptops were enormous things. (grin)

While I was in the hospital, at first I did very little webbing. Even SUMMER, the small Fujitsu U810 UMPC seemed heavy and awkward -- and hard to read with its small screen. But a gift card from the UCF allowed me to get an Amazon Kindle Fire HD (DW). No mouse to farble with and lightweight, the Kindle Fire HD was a godsend. Probably kept me sane during the Year Without a Summer. Mrs. Dr. Phil's original first generation Kindle Fire had been a very good unit, and this next generation was even better. I even wrote a 17,000 word story with just a stylus (DW) on it while in the hospital.

Kindles come from Amazon preset for the user. What's amusing is that when I set up my Amazon account A Very Long Time Ago, my default address was the Physics Dept. at WMU, so my address was listed as Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon. Which is why the Kindle Fire HD says in the upper lefthand corner that it's Dr.'s Kindle. (grin)

Then on 27 August 2014, I received Dr.'s 2nd Kindle (DW) -- a Certified Refurbished Kindle Fire HD 7", 32 GB - Includes Special Offers [Previous Generation]. The first Kindle Fire HD had worked so well, that I got a second one to use at the office, so I wouldn't have to carry it back and forth and run down its battery in the winter. Since I've been home for all of 2015 so far, I've been able to swap those two units as the other recharges. Handy.

So last week I picked up a 7th generation Kindle 6". This is the straight Kindle eReader, not a Fire tablet. And it's the base model without a backlight. Very small, very light, very simple. Also an OMOTON cover with auto-sleep. It was a fraction of the cost of the Amazon branded covers -- a real departure from the two covers for the Kindle Fire HDs I bought last year after they were priced as obsolete. (cheap-grin)

The Kindle was $79 -- I missed the $59 sale price by one day as I thought about whether to buy or not. Technically it didn't cost me anything, since we used some Discover rebate money on it.

Why buy an eReader when I already have two Kindle Fire HDs? Well, the Fire HD is a tablet -- and I tend to use a tablet like a real computer as much as possible. Email, Silk browser, PDFs, etc. Getting set up to do eReader versions of my Beta 1 novel took some work, but also reminded me that someone using a Kindle or a Nook, etc. can't just run to a webpage and download.

Also, much like why I don't have a smart phone -- I need a cell phone's battery to be there for emergency phone calls. I don't need to many MORE functions to spend all my time on the tablet. And the Kindle 6" is small and light.

Amusingly the auto-sleep case on the Kindle has more powerful magnets than the Amazon case for the Fire HD. I know this because I set a Fire HD on top of the Kindle 6" while it was on -- and the Fire HD shut off. (magnetic-grin)

Anyway, when the new unit arrived, it was yet another easy piece of cake to get running. Nice packaging, pull it out of its clear plastic bag -- the battery still had at least three-quarters of a charge. Hooked up to our WiFi/DSL without any problems, and I had my handful of e-books downloaded. Including the MOBI version of my Beta 1 novel. It does not have a gravity sensor like the Fire, but you can go into Settings and change from Portrait to Landscape mode manually. I can live with that -- when I want to read a book, I want to read a book. I don't want the display flipping around if I set the thing down.

I haven't bought many Kindle books -- an out-of-print WWI novel I read as a kid, a Scandinavian phrase book. And I also had a copy of Steven Savile's novel Silver. Steven was one of the past winners who was a guest at the 2008 WOTF workshop. He'd mentioned on Facebook that the Kindle edition was reduced to $0.00 for an indeterminate time. So I snatched it. And hadn't gotten around to starting to read it until about two weeks ago. Now I'm reading in on Dr.'s 3rd Kindle. The book opened to the place I'd last been on the Fire. Go Whispernet.

While putting together this post, I was amused to see that I'd "bought" Silver on 17 July 2015. Lord, for some reason I thought it'd been languishing for a year -- and it's only been a month. Time gets distorted when you are working very hard AND not doing the daily job. I guess over 100,000 copies of Silver have been sold and so far it's a ripping good tale. But when I glanced at the webpage tonight, I noticed that the Kindle edition is again/still $0.00. So if you have a Kindle -- or the free Kindle for PC app -- you, too, can snatch a copy.

The Kindle came with a free month of Kindle Unlimited, but I'm going to give up on that. The first search I tried was littered with these stupid little books which are really just repackagings of the Wikipedia article on the book. I do not have time to wade through stupidity.

Will I miss not having a backlight? Dunno. Right now, I can tilt the unit and get enough reflected light, even when the only room light on is across the living room. And it's nice and contrasty during the day. And if you're not being cheap, you can always spring for the Kindle Paperwhite. Or get a clip-on LED reading light.

Dr. Phil

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Ah, the law of unintended computers...

So before the university got me OUEST at work, my main machine last fall was LARA, an HP 1030NR netbook running Windows XP Home Edition Version 2002 Service Pack 3. I brought it home after the Fall semester, since I would be using OUEST at the office. The last day I used LARA was 14 December 2014.

One thing I knew I'd have to do when I brought LARA out was to install Norton Security. It had Symantec Endpoint Protection -- the free university's version of Norton Anti-Virus. But ZoneAlarm, whose basic firewall I have been using since about 1996 when I got my first Pentium class Windows 95/NT machine, was dropping updates to Windows XP. So rather than enable the Windows XP firewall, if I installed Norton Security, it came with a firewall. Of course NS requires XP Service Pack 3 minimum -- but that's covered, so I'm good. LARA is the only XP machine I bought which came with SP3 out of the box.

But... LARA has a 16GB SSD solid-state hard drive. Strange to say that 16GB isn't enough to run a machine, when I had all my work on a 4GB special HP USB drive that fits in a special deep socket port contoured into the case and backed up on an 8GB SanDisk Extreme III SD card. But there you go. I know that I had something like 240MB free. Since NS would need about 200MB to install, I knew this probably wouldn't work. Which is why I hadn't done this earlier.

Actually I tried to update KATNISS, the Asus Windows 7 Basic netbook the other week, and it complained it couldn't find the WiFi and I didn't have time to farble with it and used my Kindle Fire HD to do my PowerPoint at the MIAAPT meeting in April. LARA has a nicer keyboard for typing on than KATNISS anyway.

So... the order of things was important. First I copied GIMP 2.8, the Open Source graphics package, from C: to G:, the SD card. That freed up 500MB of space. Then I uninstalled Symantec Endpoint Protection -- that freed up a total of 2.4GB of space! I guess SEP was saving and not cleaning up all its update downloads. I mean, why should a program clean up after itself when "everyone" has terabyte hard drives now. Right? Grrr. After that, installing NS as the 3 of 5 download I bought in December was a piece of cake. Of course I've let Windows XP keep a fairly tight rein on things, so rather than just let it go I decided to start one of my summer reading projects and got out the first volume in the Maze Runner series, and kept allowing Norton to have permission to reach in and tweak things in the bowels of the computer. (Which reminds me -- runs off to disable Automatic LiveUpdates in NS. For a machine that I tend to use remotely, the last thing I need is it burning up limited bandwidth at whim, especially if I'm using the pay-as-you-go WiFi hotspot. Which I'm not.)

Then uninstall ZoneAlarm. ZA seemed shocked that I was uninstalling -- was it because there was a problem? Did I want to download a fresh new version? No, cause you don't have one for my computer, unless you changed your mind from December -- too late now. And then it begged to give them another chance. Nope. Gone. NS wants to know what to do about the Windows firewall. I told it to fuck it, use its own.

Ran LiveUpdate and everything's green. Well, there's a red NO REPORT notice under Last Scan, so to stall off a NS hissy fit, I told it to do a full system scan, which shouldn't take too long on a 16GB SSD drive, and then Shut Down. Went and had lunch. Watched the end of Gangs of New York on USA. A little music -- right, sound was turned on, since I was using Amazon Music Player at work. LARA was shutting down. Fine. All good.

That was Tuesday during the day. That night I did a filecopy backup of SUMMER onto a 128GB USB drive. Then dumped that backup onto ZEPPELIN. As a holdover of having small drive partitions in the old days -- and the fact it is much easier to have multiple drive letters for keeping work sorted -- I started a straight xcopy . c: /s/D filecopy... but it was going to take time to dump drive C: from SUMMER and I don't need the system and software backups. So I killed it and copied files one drive letter at a time. D: E: F: G: H: I: J: K: (no L:) M: ...

Insufficient Memory.

WTF? Huh? Now, realize that I am using an MS-DOS box on Windows 7 Home Premium on ZEPPELIN, and since they don't care about DOS anymore, I know most MS-DOS error messages are misleading. Was it suspicious that it broke after transferring exactly 8999 files? Maybe it was complaining about actual memory. ZEPPELIN has either 2GB or 4GB. But I was playing Solitaire and had Amazon Music Player running in the background. The latter has a bad habit of downloading updates at random. So I killed those and restarted.

Insufficient Memory.

Reboot. Insufficient Memory. So I cobble up a new batchfile, PIECEMEAL.BAT, so I could do these things directory by directory, starting with where I left off. Insufficient Memory. Next directories? No problem. N:? No problem.

Back to M: and let's see what the problem was. The problem directory had transferred 780 of 788 files. Everything else in the backup transferred. But... When I surf the web I do a lot of right-click saves, so I can look at things later. And some of these outfits have outlandish file names like 734547_10154001481240405_8476921583871495048_n.jpg. Sometimes really long. And because of nesting subdirectories being stored deeper on the USB drive than on the original hard drive under Windows XP, I think those 8 really long filenames crapped out Windows 7. I know that there is a different filename length limit in DOS root directories than subdirectories -- go figure. Fine, I'll go in and shorten them someday. They're not critical. The important stuff got all copied.

In the middle of this, I kept on getting DIRE RED WARNINGS from Norton Security about something evil it had found. Turns out it was a piece of the old ZoneAlarm firewall installer and was present because my SUMMER backup is a file-by-file, so it had stuff that had been replaced on SUMMER but not deleted on the backup. The danger was listed as LOW, but it really, really, REALLY wanted to do something to those files. Basically, Norton and ZoneAlarm have never gotten along. Whenever I got a new version of Norton Anti-Virus I always waited for it to be out for a few weeks and then got a new version of ZoneAlarm, so the machine wouldn't crash. I am sure this was a modern example of the old Microsoft "DOS ain't done until Lotus don't run" version upgrade mentality. Alas, poor ZoneAlarm. Norton has ended up winning this round... I cannot WAIT until next fall when I get to find out if Norton Security will continue to support Windows XP SP3... Sigh.

Delete both Checkpoint/ZoneAlarm directory trees and move on...

Next up. I've been editing my photos mainly on SUMMER, so that backup had the JPGs from my digital Nikons. I put the newest files from the NIKON3 directory onto F:, the 16GB microSD card I use for backups on ZEPPELIN. Then I copied the whole card to C:. Pull out the shiny new 32GB SanDisk microSD card (they cost like $14 on Amazon Prime), stick it into ZEPPELIN and...

xcopy . F: /s/D/h fails. Cannot create directory. Now what? I know that Windows 7 is real pissy about letting you create files in the root directory C:\, but F:? Eventually I realized that xcopy *.* F: /s/D/h worked. Sigh. I think the Windows 7 MS-DOS box coding couldn't find a . directory in the root F:\ to copy to. I've done this for years, folks. The kids today keep trying to "fix" stuff that ain't broken, because they don't know how real computers work.

Great, I have more backup room on ZEPPELIN, just like I have a bigger working microSD card drive on OUEST at work. Pack up the old 16GB microSD card with LARA, so Wednesday night I'll have all the latest files and twice the storage space on G:.

And when I get LARA out again in the field... Windows XP can't find G:. Oh, it shows up under My Computer, but the Properties says that G: has 0 length. Great. I can never keep track of the ranges of card sizes that work in various generation units. LARA is just old enough that an 8GB SD card works, but not a 16GB. (Just like my ancient obsolete Nikon DSLRs will only use up to a 2GB CF card.) Fortunately the important work files are all backed up on the Swiss Army Memory, so they got put on that way.

Which once again proves Pournelle's Law -- nothing is truly backed up unless it is on two different media (in two different places). Never assume one backup is going to work or can be read by any one specific device.

Oh, and my spare white extension cord with three outlets I pack in my travel kit? The one I need because most hotel rooms generously give you one whole outlet on a lamp in 2015? Yeah, the charger for LARA has been a pain from the start. Completely overbuilt, needs a three-prong outlet. Had to get a special APC Mobile Surge Protector, PNOTEPROC6, because all my other laptops from Sony, Fujitsu and Toshiba can use the two-prong PNOTEPROC4. Anyway, you guessed it. My cheap little white extension cord is two-prong. No room for cheating with the third prong and I don't have an adapter with me. So the extension cord got plugged in where the coffee maker was plugged in and LARA hogs the lamp outlet all by itself.

I keep sayin' it, and will freely admit that I do some things in an unorthodox manner by today's standards, but I think one of the reasons why people buy new computers is that the error messages aren't helpful and no one knows what they do mean. So people either continue on using crippled equipment or buy something new to get around problems that are completely solvable. It's like you have to scrap your 2008 Toyota, because it can't use 2015 gasoline.

Not trying to be elitist here, but once again the question is... what do normal people do? How can they even use this crap?

Please note that all comments about how a Mac or Linux would smugly solve my problems do not show that I am an idiot, but rather your own ignorance -- so don't even bother.

Dr. Phil

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Oh my, what a glorious day it was today. And I don't even mean that in some ironical or April Fools way. Wednesday was just one fine damn day.

Sunday we had some snow. Actually, as predicted, it snowed quite hard, with the temp dropping from the mid-40s down to around freezing. We'd had a good spring warm up, with temps into the 50s and all the snow on our yard had gone, except for some bits in the shadows of the trees. But by Sunday afternoon the driveway and then the weeds and the back deck and finally the concrete pad in front of the garage were all white. And then it rained and it all washed away. Without even creating more than just some water in the drainage ditch by the road.

Wednesday, though. Well, Wednesday was blue sky and sun all day long. Supposed to get up into the 60s.

I had planned on doing my weekly run to the office on Wednesday, because the forecast was so nice. When I started planning I really had just one agenda item. When I last was there two weeks ago, I noticed that the 8GB microSD card I was using to have removable storage on OUEST, the university laptop, was down to about 400 MB free. Well, guess I had order some more tunnel.

Oh wait. I already had coming a 32GB SanDisk Ultra microSD card (with SD adapter) because the silly thing was only $12.99 with free Prime shipping and I figured I need it someday. Guess someday was now. Note that I had bought a 16GB SanDisk Extreme microSD card with adapter for $14.99 to use on ZEPPELIN at home. And I'd bought a couple of 8GB Sandisk MicroSD cards with SD adapters for $6.95 each -- one which went into OUEST last fall and was now full, and one each for our new LG phones back in January. At some point SanDisk and Amazon are going to be paying me to take their larger and larger GB storage units in smaller and smaller form factors. (Compared to the hundreds of dollars I paid for a 512MB IBM MicroDrive Type II CF card -- with a two-platter ¾" hard drive with read/write heads and everything!)

All I had to do was get a card reader for the office, so I could easily transfer from the 8GB card to the 32GB, without dumping files onto the laptop's hard drive ***. And it would be nice to have a Compact Flash reader as well. Alas, the current versions of the bulletproof Sony multi-card readers are very expensive, and the cheap ones had reviews which said they worked great with SD cards but the pins bent and broke on the CF slots. Finally I found a Kingston USB 3.0 Memory Card Reader for $17.43 with reviews saying the CF card slot guides were long enough for the card to go in straight every time.

Whew. So that was my plan.

But... I had a student who needed a new letter of recommendation for medical school applications. We made an appointment for noon. And since I was going to be in, I contacted another student who I'd been helping and we set up an appointment for 10:30. While I was at work I wrote another email to check on a third student -- and also got an email from a fourth student suffering from writer's block and wanted some help getting unstuck with their multiple papers due in mere weeks. That's more students in one day of office hours than I usually get other than just before an exam -- and I'm not even teaching anything this semester! Also did a few story notes. And started in on my PowerPoint for the MIAAPT Spring Meeting at MSU in two weeks.

I didn't get around to opening the 32GB card and card reader packaging and starting the file transfers until 4:05pm. (grin)

It was a good day. Very productive.

And when I got home just after 7pm, the temperature in Allendale was still 63°F. Hey, I could open windows and turn a little fan on in the bedroom. Put my leg up and napped for an hour. And when I got up, the neighbor's power tool bonanza was over.

Peepers.

Ah, the peepers were peeping out in the swampy drainage ditches. A True Sign of Spring and the first time for 2015.

Tomorrow is a writing day -- rain, rain, rain. (grin)

Dr. Phil

*** -- BTW, in case you wondering why I was going to all this trouble with microSD card storage, instead of just using the hard disks, it's pretty simple. On ZEPPELIN at home, I use the 16GB card as easily removed backup. On OUEST at work, I can pull the microSD card and lock it up. The university keeps worrying about security of grades and other materials, so I'd taken to locking up removable cards last year. Not that I want the laptop stolen. After all, before OUEST, the laptops in my office were my own machines.

Remember, nothing is truly backed up unless it's on two different media and in two locations. (better-safe-than-sorry-grin) And a Master padlock trumps a silly little desk key.

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And now we go through that silly ritual of changing clocks and trade an hour of sleep in the so-called Spring for an an hour of sleep in the so-called Fall.

I did decide to quiz Echo...

-- Alexa, set alarm for 2:01am. I don't know how to do that.

-- Alexa, set alarm for 3:01am. Alarm set for 3:01 am.

-- Alexa, cancel alarm. Alarm canceled.

So, Amazon Echo apparently knew enough to know there is not a 2:01 am tonight.



Dr. Phil

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A month ago (DW) we got our "free" Amazon Echo. Like any good tech paradigm shift, you wonder if it wasn't always like this, even as you can plainly see how long it has actually been.

Echo, if you recall, is the 9" high black cylindrical 2001 Monolith slash HAL9000 device that doesn't come close to running your house, but always on, lurking in the background, waits for its keyword "Alexa" to do a few things which are helpful.

-- Alexa, what time is it? It's 3:38.

-- Alexa, what's the temperature? Currently in Allendale it's 24°F with lots of clouds...

-- Alexa, what's the temperature in Helsinki? In Helsinki Finland it's 34°F with showers. Tonight you can look for snowy, rainy weather with a low of 31°F.

-- Alexa, what's tomorrow's forecast for Helsinki? Right now in Allendale...
Oh well -- its algorithms and voice recognition systems are not perfect. If you are using the Echo app on a Kindle or computer, you can click and get more information. And tell the mothership at Amazon if Echo heard you correctly. If you put in a short pause after the trigger word, you can give Echo a chance to lower the sound level so it can pick your commands out of the air easier, and you don't have to shout.

I have a better time of getting Echo to recognize me, over Mrs. Dr. Phil. It may be the years of lecturing and putting micro pauses between words so people can write notes down, I dunno. Or maybe Alexa is a misogynist jealous bitch.

Many of the local radio stations are available through Tune-In

-- Alexa, play 88.5. WGVU-FM, from Tune-In.

Mrs. Dr. Phil has been experimenting with doing podcasts over Echo, as she does from her Kindle. Here, it is not very successful to do it directly. But if you are running the Echo app, you can call up a podcast and command Echo to play that from the app. Same with music.

Right now the problem with both the radio and the podcast functions is that if the stream is interrupted, you can lose some of the program, and it's hard to cue up if you aren't starting at the beginning.

For me working at home right now, it is the music function which is excellent. Echo doesn't likely have much onboard storage -- sufficient for firmware and buffering -- instead drawing stuff from certain sources on the Internet or on its own Amazon Cloud storage. I've started acquiring stuff through Amazon's music store, and naturally it'll play that. I could upload my non-Amazon music library and it would play that, too.

-- Alexa, play Pirates. Pirates, by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. From Philip's music library.

Amazon Prime has added some of my previous Amazon CD purchases to the library, some 300 songs. All told, I have taken 87 songs as of today and put them in what I call the HAPPY Songs playlist. 84 of those are in the YPPAH Songs playlist, which is the same list in reverse order. I usually play one during the day and the other during the late night sessions -- otherwise one tends to hear the same music in the same order all the time. Which isn't a problem in writing, but you'd never hear all the music unless you played for nearly 7 hours.

-- Alexa, play HAPPY Songs playlist. HAPPY Songs. From Philip's music library.
Perfect. But for the other playlist, since it doesn't start with a normal word, Echo stumbles 95% of the time:

-- Alexa, play YPPAH Songs playlist. What playlist would you like?

-- YPPAH Songs. YPPAH Songs. From Philip's music library.
Still, in the beginning it wouldn't even do that well. (grin) So it is learning.

But here's the best thing about the Amazon Echo -- the sound. The speaker system is deep and rich, covering ten volume levels. (-- Alexa, volume 3. -- Alexa, louder. -- Alexa, stop. -- Alexa, resume.) We typically use 2-3 in the kitchen and living room. So nice we have an ultra quiet dishwasher now. I use 4-5 in the bathroom and 6-10 if I am way back in the bedroom. The Bluetooth remote is in the bedroom, which means I don't have to bellow over volume 10 to try to get myself heard. Also I can reset Echo down to normal levels for the next morning, so the radio doesn't blare on phasor level Kill.

I am sure that a proper audio study would find fault, but from where I am, playing what I'm playing, there is good range of tone and detail at all settings, and I'm not hearing any distortion or clipping even at volume 10. Pretty darn good for the home user.

Upcoming adventure. The last Echo update email said that they were coming out with a SDK -- Software Developer's Kit -- and was I interested in doing a late Beta on that? Sure. What programming languages would you like? Oh, geesh. I don't write apps and crap. And the list doesn't include "real" languages like FORTRAN. (geeky-grin) But of the list there, let's skip Java. And Ruby for now. So let's put down Python. It looks as if I had a couple of sample programs I can follow the syntax of Python.

We still both want to tell Alexa "thank you" from time to time. And the commands don't work with the car stereo. And at the moment, there's no connection to either the TV or phone -- or other functions such as lights. Yet. I am sure that Amazon Echo will morph into a full-featured device to run your home at some point. Maybe they'll have different models and features. Couple it with a home security system. Handle dictation. Read your files or your emails to you.

Whatever, I think that Amazon was pretty smart by starting on these core activities. They've shown that with the Kindles and Kindle Fires, they can make consumer products that can be handled. Provided it endures, both physically and financially, having an Amazon Echo around the house is already pretty useful, despite its limitations.

We've got Echo on a single-outlet surge protector. Bought it from Amazon Prime. (prime-grin)

One month in, we're pretty happy with the unit. It sits up high on top of a bookshelf between living room, dining room/kitchen. It's out of the way. I can see the blue/white ring light when it responds to commands -- and can tell when it's confused and whether it's changed the volume level even if nothing is playing at the moment.

Cool.

-- Alexa, roll the dice. I rolled a die and got 3.
Yeah, I could see D&D players having a great time with Alexa...

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Ms. Alexa Echo is feeling a bit under the weather.

We got our Amazon Echo on Tuesday and set it up quite easily at 10pm. Wednesday and Thursday I was home most of the day and had it playing my Amazon Music playlists, answering questions, doing math problems.

Friday, however, it's not handling my playlists correctly.

My guess is that someone did a code push to fix something else and there was a coding error or a corrupt server file or something.

Oh, it plays music just fine. Individual songs. But when I started one of my playlists, it didn't start with the first song. And then when I stopped and restarted it, it might play the same song over and over, or play with just the first couple of songs. Shuffle play was off. Telling Alexa to skip or play next track -- usually ended up replaying the current track.

Put in two error tickets. The second regarded the Echo App, both on the Kindle Fire HD and on the webpage for use on my laptop, isn't displaying the current track properly -- not getting the control keys. If you click on a song, it does give the control keys. But of course the app has just told Echo to play the one song.

Anyway, they've got on the Help tab of the Echo app a call feature, where you put in a phone number and they call you back, so you know it's them. Got almost an immediate callback and nearly zero wait for the next customer service person. We spent about 29 minutes trying different things.

It's actually an amusing process, since there's Echo, which you can give voice commands, the Echo remote, the Echo app and the guy on the phone. I tried very hard to refer to the program as Echo and not Alexa, because if you say Alexa followed by anything, Echo tries to parse it for a command. (grin) At one point I reread what was on the Home page, displaying what Echo thought I said, and read it verbatim, so Echo heard Alexa + command and executed it again. (grin)

To get link data back to the DSL provider, they needed me to do something. "Alexa temperature" works, because it also gives a little forecast, so it was on long enough to record.

Anyway, the problem has been turned over to the techies. As it should be.

Any other Echo users out there having trouble with playlists after Noon EST on Friday 6 February 2015?

I note that Amazon is telling Echo users that they have these nifty new Playlists just for the Grammies. Hmm... maybe I was right about the coding error.

Oh, and the Cool New Thing I learned yesterday is this: From the Echo remote only, hold the microphone key and say "Simon Says _______" and Alexa will say whatever you tell her to say. The guy who told me about this said it was really useful when he was writing and needed to tell one of his kids to go get him a fresh soda from the fridge. (evil-grin) No, I haven't tested having Alexa say naughty things. Yet. (double-evil-grin)

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Nearly 7 Years Ago -- 2520 Days

We bought a pair of Motorola RAZR V3a cellphones back on 16 February 2008 (DW). We didn't need to buy new phones, in terms of the phones, but the pair of Motorola V60i phones we were using covered both analog and digital bands -- and the FCC wanted to rid the country of analog band phones. So, Alltel had us come in and get new phones.

Realize that since 1994, we've only each had three cell phones: Motorola MicroTAC/TeleTAC, 2 x V60i, 2 x RAZR V3a.

In the course of time the RAZRs have done swell. We've replaced batteries twice. But Mrs. Dr. Phil, who in the last two years has left hers on most of the time, has had some flaky problems. Which came to a head Saturday around 1pm. Tried to turn it on and it hung while booting -- not a good sign. Got the Hello Moto splash screen and it stayed there. Except for flickering every now and then, momentarily showing a couple of vertical color strips against a black background. Oh that's never a good sign.

Ironically, we'd just been having a discussion the other day about which way we might go with phones the next time we needed to do phones. On the one hand, we really want our phones to be phones. On the other, it would be nice to be able to check a few things online from time to time. We have a Verizon WiFi hotspot which we use on a pay-as-you-go basis for travel and conferences. Mrs. Dr. Phil was even able to take a quick picture of some fall leaves in the U.P. on US-41 in the middle of nowhere with her Kindle Fire HDX, then post to Facebook using HAIKU, the hotspot.

But smartphones? Apple iPhone? Stick with Motorola and get a Droid MAXX or Turbo? The latter has really quick charge and with the Kindle Fires running a form of Android, it would make some sense. But they charge so much for the damned data plans. Our Alltel plan, grandfathered into Verizon, was so old -- and also pretty cheap for two phones.

So basically I figured we had three options: Plan A would be to just get Mrs. Dr. Phil a new phone. Plan B would be both get new phones. Plan C would be to jump to smart phones and get a data plan.

The little Verizon store in Standale was very pleasant -- it's actually a 3rd party franchise, but that's okay -- and they were very helpful. They even had just gotten in the Motorola Droid Turbo, so I could look at it.

But jumping to a usable data plan for smart phones would basically double the monthly cost for us.

Do they even make usable flip phones anymore? (grin) They had one, an LG model.

What about slider phones? I had always admired the original Motorola Droid when it came out. Actually they had two LG slider phones, one with a numeric keypad as well, and one with a touch screen.

Mrs. Dr. Phil finally decided on the last one:

The LG Extravert 2

And this turned out to be a problem. We could change our plan to one with unlimited voice and text and 500MB/month -- we have never really texted in our life -- for only about five bucks more a month. And at nearly seven years, we certainly qualified to get new phones. Our Alltel plan allowed my phone to have 20 texts a month, I think, but I never used it, except to receive free monthly notices from Alltel and Verizon about what the next bill would be. Mrs. Dr. Phil's number didn't have any free texts on it.

This is why we were looking at sliders, because if one was going to text, no way was I going to do the ABC DEF routine -- it was bad enough to input telephone numbers. And the Extravert 2 (which is not a typo by the way) with its touch screen AND slider could presumably text both ways. Plus, both phones would fit in the travel cases we already had.

The problem was... our Alltel plan couldn't be changed. To add a Verizon phone, we had to have a Verizon account. So Plan A, getting Mrs. Dr. Phil a new phone, was out. We were now on Plan D -- both get new phones and a new plan.

Our last two phones, covering a span of some twelve years, were identical models, which meant it was easy to trade batteries and use each other's phones. But I decided I liked the other, slightly smaller slider better:

The LG Cosmos 3

Now let's face it -- we had to do something today. LG is not a brand I would have just sought out if I was making a long-term purchase. I would've bought Motorola, Apple or Samsung. But I suspect that our text slider days are a stopgap before we go to smart phones, about the time that everyone has moved on phone glasses or Uberphones or something, and the ancient dinosaur smart phones will have become cheap. (grin) So I think these will be "good enough" for us for a couple of years. I am not expecting seven years plus from these phones.

Both phones have microSD card slots. A while back I had bought an 8GB SanDisk microSD card with SD card adapter for dirt cheap on Amazon, to provide some removable storage on OUEST, the College of Arts and Sciences laptop I got this year. Still available on Prime. Two cards for $13.90.

Most of the $99 we paid today covered taxes, a protector for the touch screen and other bits, not the phones themselves. The $10/month/phone credit on our bill pretty much covered the "cost" of my phone and just about all of Mrs. Dr. Phil's. It was actually cheaper than what we paid the day we got the RAZRs, partly because my Motorola 720 Bluetooth Borg implant works with the new phone. Must use handsfree while driving in Michigan.

The one problem we had was the age-old problem. Couldn't get the contact list off my RAZR onto the Cosmos, by either wire or Bluetooth. One of techs offered to take it home with him, but no... that would leave me (a) without a phone and (b) without the phone numbers I need. I was always too cheap to spend $50 and get Motorola's USB cable and CD-ROM software, and too not trusting to buy the same kit for $4.95 from any of a hundred vendors on eBay. Now, at least, the new phones have a backup through Verizon, which wasn't available in the Dark Ages seven years ago.

So, not the way I intended to spend the afternoon -- I had just booted ZEPPELIN to do writing when this all came down -- and not the way I intended to spend the weekend -- I have done A-G in the contact list manually. But we stopped what we were doing, had lunch, then hopped in the Blazer and drove on passable roads to Standale, then back to Allendale for the grocery run that had started all this. (grin) On the other hand, I'm getting good real world training of the slider keyboard, and a chance to see some of the crap I have in my contact list, so in a way, it's all good.

But I am glad I got my ConFusion reading story massaged into place last week. (evil-grin)

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Busy

Back to classes. Back to work. Survived the week one parking free-for-all where they don't ticket students in the faculty lot. And before you think it's just whining, remember my current difficulty in walking -- I just can't go to a distant lot and then walk up hill to my office like I used to.

Using i>Clickers in my two classes -- the first time for me -- now that the university has settled on the third clicker brand in five years and most of my students have used them in other classes. Not using them for grading this semester, but the stats are interesting so far. As long as the answers are A B C D or E. (grin) Physics Dept. wanted the clickers that had numeric keypads, dammit. (double-entry grin)

Huh -- for $10 you can buy an app to run i>Clicker without using a clicker. And was amused to see a student raid the batteries from his calculator to run his clicker. I think he needs to buy some new batteries.

Decided I needed a clean new Windows 7 machine for the i>Clicker base station to plug into. Went by Best Buy a couple weeks ago and picked up an Asus Eee PC 1025C notebook for $199. $199! Dual core Intel Atom processor, 1.6GHz clock, 1GB memory, 320GB HDD. Weighs like two pounds. Named the machine KATNISS since I bought a Blu-Ray copy of The Hunger Games at the same time. (grin) This is the machine I did Iron Chef Flash Fiction (DW) at WorldCon with, as well as gave my PowerPoint which I'll report on Real Soon Now.

Of course if parking eased in week 2, commuting has gotten worse in week 2. One of the construction sites is creating a four mile twenty minute backup on the way home. Grrrr. Mostly avoided the worst of the construction summer woes, even on my trips to Atlanta and Greensboro.

Huh?

Gas is running around $4.09.9/gal for regular, though my local gas station has upped its grade differential from 11¢/gal to 15¢/gal -- and as I usually get mid-grade for the 1996 Blazer, this is relevant. The last two tanks I've filled on the way home in Wayland and though regular is the same price, the Shell's differential is only 10¢/gal. Whoo-hoo.

Except the last couple of days I've seen two people reporting that gas is running around $1.85.9/gal in Cincinnati. WTF? That's 45% of the price here! I mean, you might be able to get a tanker truck of gas at retail Cincy prices, truck it up here and make money AND lower gas prices. It's like 380 miles!

I. Do. Not. Get. It.

Dr. Phil

PS -- Lots more WorldCon coverage coming!