Change A Word, Ruin A Movie Quote

Twitter first introduced me to hashtag games which for wordplay fans can be hilarious and delightful. SWIM recently played one, #ChangeAWordRuinAMovieQuote, and it really tied the room together, tapping quotes from some of my favorite films.

I have yet to see hashtag games blow up on Spoutible, but I intend to see if I can get the party started there for some wholesome pun...!

Elon Musk: POTUS 45, But With Money

Last night, Chief Twit Elon Musk apparently decided my latest main Twitter account needed a permanent suspension, with no reason given. Suspension was made days after his tweeting to the effect that Twitter's typically draconian ToS enforcement would be paused while some mysterious committee is on his to-do list to create.

Musk's hypocrisy in claiming to "free the bird" and declaring Twitter a safe haven for free speech is now crystal clear. Most of my tweets are gone (conspicuously those popular ones critical of him) but a few linger, which I'm sharing here. Each screenshot links to various cat ass trophy merch on Amazon, which I invite you to browse in thinking about the upstanding, bloated, would-be oligarch who's too much of a bitter little snowflake to withstand criticism.

First, some background, a screen of my late account profile, R.I.P. I do not abide the MAGA cult, their "leader", nor people like Elon who are similarly deplorable.

Next, from earlier this year, a jab at his stupid comparison of Canada's Justin Trudeau to Hitler, of all people.

Back in May I called him out for having quietly paid hush money to a SpaceX flight attendant whom he allegedly sexually harassed. Naughty, naughty!

Last, but not least, as far as little Elon is concerned, the left-leaning group Occupy Democrats called out Musk rolling the notion of restoring Donald Trump aka POTUS 45's Twitter account, long after previous CEO Jack Dorsey squeezed 45 for all he was worth ad revenue wise like the proverbial turnip. This, until it was unavoidably clear it'd be bad press to just continue letting him off with slaps on the tweet in the form of various warnings about misinformation accompanying his, well, misinformation.

To wrap up, a couple more tweets which thanks to Elon Musk will be seen anew, despite having been censored just days before the 2022 midterms. 

First, the Republican-in-name-only schemes to destroy Social Security and Medicare in the U.S.

Finally, me with wordplay for the University of Florida's recent, unanimous decision to pick Republican Senator Ben Sasse as president. There were vigorous protests on the UF campus and notably the administration restricted protests of any kind indoors, which is telling and speaks to how broken today's U.S. political system truly is. 

I've been faced with disagreeable people many times in my online travels. Musk is the latest and surely not the last. I see what he's doing, and I hope others see it too. He has money and power but fortunately lacks the brains and drive and passion to become the information technology overlord he fantasizes becoming while hitting his bong in his new Twitter onesie. 

🖕🙂🖕

Troubleshooting a Tablet with a Teeny, Tiny Tile

Tablet or smartphone repair is not fun, I hate it! That said, I managed a creative solution for my old Samsung Galaxy E 9.6 which I'd recently had to replace the battery on.

Removing the old battery and installing a new one was relatively easy. Carefully pry open the tablet, taking care to not damage its electronic internals, remove the old battery, install the new one, then close it up. Right?

Unfortunately, that turned out to be a best case scenario which was made worse thanks to the ribbon connector circled below. 

It wasn't the connector itself (fortunately the individual pins were intact), but the incredibly, aggravatingly delicate piece of plastic designed to snap atop the cable to connect solidly to the motherboard pins, also known formally as a ribbon cable snap.

I spent about an hour with a jeweler's loupe which clips on to a temple piece of your eyeglasses making like Popeye the sailor man and zooming in with one eye on the incredibly tiny pins trying to get a replacement ribbon connector clip (cannibalized from a nearly identical tablet purchased cheap off eBay due to a cracked and dead LCD screen) to assume the position.

Thanks to my frustration and a not quite true pair of forceps, I got nowhere. While the ribbon cable would slide in perfectly, without that infuriating clip in place I was unable to snap it down to make the connection hug between connector and motherboard. On top of that, the design of my tablet and the busted one was almost, but not quite, identical, and for all I knew the clip I salvaged might've been for a different type ribbon connector.

After that, I reflected on the fact that for a silly crafts-related idea I purchased a bag of miniature clay roof tiles meant for things like birdhouses, dollhouses, fake houses, train sets, and other realistic depictions of life in a smaller scale.

If you examine one of these tiles on its side, you'll notice it has a couple of curved sections, one around a quarter inch long, and another a bit less round and rather straight, with just a gentle curve. 

The latter got me thinking. What if I could carefully snap that piece off, and use it as a surrogate ribbon cable holder along with some duct tape (what else??) to secure it into place?

Turns out, it worked!

Using one of the tools out of a kit I got specifically for performing surgery on a tablet, I used a very thin and flexible metal pry tool as a firm edge against which to hold the small piece down, then gently but firmly applied force to snap it away.

Next, I carefully inserted the ribbon cable in its socket on the tablet board and ensured it was in under the pins as level and far as possible. At bottom in the photo above is a similar sliver of tile which I placed so that the curve was facing up as shown below, and so the rather cylindrical little edge (referenced by red arrow) was applying pressure to the ribbon cable just like the flimsy plastic connector would by design.

Success! Upon first verifying my touchscreen was working properly by carefully applying pressure with my fingers to the top of this improvised "clip", I then stuck the tablet motherboard and its connected components and snapped things back into place. The curve of the tile fragment seems adequate, at least, to ensure a nice, firm connection far more resilient than electrical or duct tape alone.

Aside from being nonconductive like its flimsy counterpart, the clay tile more importantly provides a sort of firm, structural pressure along the length of the pins to ensure they're firmly connected. For the touchscreen to work fully, all pins must be engaged, and without either the manufacturer's flimsy clip or this improvised solution, that wouldn't happen.

When Your Smart TV Complains, "Unsupported Codec"

Sometimes in life we realize something after the fact that would be a superior solution to a compromise made early on out of haste or impatience.

Case in point, my Samsung "smart" TV's inability to support various video codecs for digital media like movies, TV shows, and other files. Up until now given this happens relatively rarely (but still happens), I've simply found another format or used the excellent and free tool Handbrake to re-encode the video into a more conventional one like MP4. However, upon trying to play and stream to my TV a set of old movies I'd obtained over a decade ago, all but a couple of these returned "unsupported codec" and were unplayable.

Enter the excellent gift my brother-in-law gave my wife and I, an Amazon Fire Stick. At under $30 this remarkably versatile device plugs into an available HDMI port on your TV and comes with its own remote with voice recognition to boot, as well as interoperability with Alexa if that's your thing (it's not mine).

Basically, you plug the Stick itself into the TV's HDMI, then run a USB cable from the provided AC adapter to a micro USB plug on the side of the Fire Stick. Then, turn on your smart TV and select the HDMI port your Fire Stick is plugged into as the video source. 

While it has lots of features including integration with numerous free and pay streaming services, the one that turned out to help in my situation tremendously is the fact that while depending on what smart TV you have, it may or may not allow you easy access in order to install Android apps, for example. Unfortunately, my model of Samsung TV is locked down pretty tight with its proprietary operating system and interface, and has a relatively slim collection of apps to choose from.

For example, I tried first to find a way to access files that are not video, audio, or photos from say a USB stick plugged into the TV. No joy there, only those specific files types are visible, precluding simply downloading a (hopefully) compatible .APK for VLC and installing it. Sure, while Samsung exposes an API for their TVs and other devices, I'm not inclined to break out my favorite IDE and trudge through the weeds of an unfamiliar platform just for a one-off workaround. 

However, thankfully the Fire Stick enables you to download any available apps on the Amazon app store, including VLC, and that's excellent, because VLC is a great app! The player is completely free thanks to the generosity of its developer team VideoLAN, a nonprofit organization.

Once the Fire Stick is set up with your wifi connection details, you can access streaming services and other network resources, including your networked NAS device, PCs, etc. on your home network. In my case I have most of my media on a Synology NAS, so in VLC I'm able to browse its shared folders and pick what to play from its directory.

Since setting up the Fire Stick, all the video files I mentioned that the Samsung TV's own media player balked at were completely playable by VLC. That's one of my favorite things about VLC, it plays virtually every codec you might throw at it. It's got that comprehensive a collection of codecs that among the hundreds or thousands of videos I've played with it, I could count on one hand those I've had it fail to play (don't worry, not a mutant with more than five per hand).

Bonus, VLC enables you to seek out subtitles for your hearing impaired or hungover audience members, and will let you download multiple ones from the internet and pick and choose until you find one that syncs properly with your media's audio. 

One tip with that, when trying a particular set of subtitles, once you select it in VLC it will take just a few seconds before the subtitle text appears during playback. Don't hurry, just wait a bit so you can verify whether the subs are proper, and if not, download or pick another set, try again, and once you find one, off you go.

Zoom Cannot Start Video With Older Webcams in Windows 10

I've had a Logitech QuickCam Fusion webcam since around the time Windows 7 was still mainstream. Other than from my work laptop I don't do online meetings so the camera largely went unused on my home desktop, even after upgrading to Windows 10. 

Then, one day my wife and I installed Zoom and wanted to test it out prior to her joining some Zoom calls with some of her old high school classmates. While her setup with Windows 10 and a relatively new (ca. 2021) webcam worked flawlessly, mine did not. Repeatedly Zoom would complain whether in the video settings or upon joining a meeting, "Cannot start video":

My solution took some trial and error but ultimately worked. First, unplug your webcam from its USB port, and then open Device Manager, and under Imaging devices, right-click on Logitech QuickCam Fusion (or whatever your older webcam is):

Ensure "Delete the driver software for this device" is checked so that whatever driver Windows may have initially used is removed, then click Uninstall and follow any prompts to remove the drivers:

Next, download and install the latest available drivers you can find for your old webcam, ideally for Windows 10, but at least for Windows 7. With some older webcams it's entirely possible you won't find any drivers let alone ones for Windows 7 or newer. If that's the case, skip the following.

Otherwise, on Logitech's site, upon searching for QuickCam Fusion, you'll notice the default operating system is set to Windows 11. Click and choose the only other option, Windows 7, and you'll be prompted to download the newest Windows drivers. 

Plug the webcam into a free USB port, and Windows will proceed to install either the driver you found and installed, or a compatible driver included with Windows. Assuming all goes well, from the Start menu type "Camera privacy settings" and ensure "Allow apps to access your camera" is set to On:

Further down the screen, ensure all apps (except Zoom, if listed) are set to Off:

Now, ensure "Allow desktop apps to access your camera" is set to On:

If you haven't already, install the latest Zoom desktop client. Before you proceed, go ahead and restart your PC to let Windows complete any post-configuration or housekeeping stuff that may linger. Then, once back at the desktop, create a system restore point to preserve things in case something blows up (unlikely, but always a possibility; my system decided to BSOD at least once during the process, better safe than sorry).

That's it. Upon opening Zoom and going into Settings => Video, you should see your face or whatever your webcam is currently seeing, and in meetings with video enabled things should proceed just fine.

Fennec Chard

 

R.I.P., Reddit User /u/DarthContinent

I can't say Christmas and the 2021 holiday season have been reason for me to be remotely festive.

In May of 2020 I lost my mom (granted, MAGA "Democrat hoax" believing mom). This past year, I lost two beloved dogs in quick succession to nightmarishly aggressive cancer. Allow me to introduce them!

Miles, my longtime "fren" and drinking buddy, left. Ava, my dear, sweet, gentle girl, right.

Both of them now live only as memories in the tapestry of our lives, and as ash in a couple of rosewood boxes on my dining table. No telling when my wife and I will be able to summon the courage to properly bury them with some of our other late furry friends in our backyard.

Oh, and as an aside, my 16 year old Reddit account was permanently suspended recently. In the AskReddit subreddit, I made a joke about, and I quote, "Sex with a miner." Miner, as in adult who spends their days working in the coal or other mine. Not by any means an underaged child.

Given Reddit quietly announced their upcoming IPO, in a perverse way it makes sense they'd want to essentially sanitize their user base. People speaking out against things like censorship, the Tiannenmen Square massacre, China variously exploiting and exterminating the Uyghurs?

Going forward, this is the new face of Reddit in my mind. The wildly popular meme of Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh, given China has invested considerable assets into Reddit and its ilk.

Today, fascism and censorship and casting human beings away like offal is the new normal, apparently. I'm far too lazy and unmotivated to battle the nowadays deplorable Snoo and its pals. I'm not about to invest thousands upon thousands of dollars to set up a smartly cloud-based platform to rival Reddit, a longtime platform that filled in the vacuum in the wake of the tragic Digg exodus.

A wise mentor once said, "Keep small things small and simple things simple, for as long as you can." Sage advice! 

If I despaired over some faceless, deplorable miscreants essentially upending the sand mandala that was my 16 years on Reddit, contributing my life experiences personal and professional, even my money in buying their "awards" for dropping dollar bills into their coffers, I'd consider myself in a bad space.

Serendipitously, however, this whole moist sac of nonsense lately has for literally days taken my mind off the devastating grief that I presently shoulder in the wake of the loss of our dogs. It's become a watershed realization for me, that hey, maybe the whole sand mandala thing being upended and destroyed once the work is done isn't such a bad thing!

I'm starting from scratch, and I plan to lurk incessantly on Reddit because I'm motivated to help people and leverage my intellect, expertise, and experience to do so. No petty bunch of cash grabbing, visionless plebes will keep me from doing so.

Please, today's Reddit, accept a hearty FUCK YOU. You more than deserve it. 🙂

Mouse Back/Forward Buttons Stop Working in Windows 10

Recently, inexplicably, my wireless bluetooth iClever mouse decided that its thumb buttons used for stuff like forward and back in browsers and Windows Explorer and other applications should no longer work.

No idea if a recent Windows 10 update was the culprit or what, but I found a very simple solution via a post on Reddit. Simply unplug the mouse's little USB transceiver and plug it into a different USB port on your PC. 

That's it. That's the post.

I'd already tried removing all bluetooth devices from Device Manager including hidden ones and rebooting, no joy. No clue if should this happen enough times if I might eventually run out of USB ports my mouse deigns to allow control of it. 

Prevent Docker for Windows Auto Update

I recently installed Docker Desktop in order to then install PiHole on my Windows 10 desktop PC. PiHole is a cool and free little utility that you can install as a Docker container to provide ad blocking capability that goes a step further than a browser ad blocker add-on like say UBlock Origin. Once installed you can have your PC serve as a sort of DNS proxy for your entire network which bypasses a wide array of blacklisted IP addresses and domains.

One annoying and frankly impolite "feature" of Docker Desktop in general is that some time ago (possibly after version 2.5 or thereabouts) they removed an option through the GUI to disable automatic updates. This is irritating because what you might expect happened to me; a newer, buggy version once installed caused Docker to behave erratically and crash frequently. 

I took a quick look at the Docker documentation (Dockermentation??) and while there are command line options to disable auto updates in the Docker daemon I haven't got the patience to figure out what syntax to use; I mean come on, I'm so lazy I'm using Windows 10, right?

Instead I tried to find out where Docker downloads its updated versions, and I believe I found that folder as shown below. From the Start menu you can type in C:\Users\<Windows username>\AppData\Local\Docker Desktop Installer:

Docker's systray icon will conspicuously show a little "i" to inform you of a looming upgrade, and at the next restart of Docker Desktop the upgrade ordinarily will be installed. However, in lazily taking a stab at preventing this behavior I decided to alter the file system attributes of the folder containing the updates to make it and its contents read-only.

The idea is to both prevent updates from being downloaded in the first place, and in case Docker normally attempts to write any temp files to that folder as part of the upgrade process to kneecap its ability to do so and maybe indicate to that logic something's up that makes upgrading a bad idea.

I altered the folder attributes and applied them, then exited Docker via the systray icon and after a minute or so opened the shortcut. I checked the version first of all:

I was rewarded not with Docker dictating the 3.2.x version I'd use going forward, but rather the previous 3.1.x version I downgraded to in order to not get stuck with the buggy behavior of the newer but less stable version. Success!

I also noticed the conspicuous "i" was gone, as if the logic quietly decided the attempt to upgrade never even happened, which is fine by me.

Of course this isn't the optimal way to prevent software from doing its thing despite user preference, but in these "challenging" times laziness reigns supreme in my headspace. Possible caveats may be that the next time you manually upgrade to a newer version you might need to reapply this change to your file system (too lazy to post a batch file to do it, sorry!) but that's minor compared to browsing on my tablet across the house from my PC and having Docker crash and take out my PiHole.

Trump In Jeopardy

 

Gaming vs Government

There are parallels between government and gaming that help disinformation and profits, respectively, thrive.

Today’s games, in particular triple-A titles like Call Of Duty and Star Wars: Battlefront 2, are top-tier games that in addition to offering a fun gaming experience also offer things like swag and other perks in exchange for real-world money.

You might pay upwards of $60 for a game to start, but then indulge in anything from special swag for your in-game character to ammo that does more damage, the former cosmetic but the latter an example of game studios’ so-called pay to win revenue model. Some players might splurge once in a while and buy emblems or weapon skins or clothing, but others go too far, like this teen in India who squandered his father’s life savings to buy in-game merch in the free-to-play game PUBG Mobile.

Game studios are private, for-profit entities for the most part, and the games they produce are a black box to their customers. They might use proprietary code and algorithms that give them an edge over the competition that could be considered trade secrets. That’s the first parallel gaming has with government; certain things simply have no public visibility or are actively withheld from the public.

Among the things a game studio might keep under wraps about its product is how much it seems to care about things like physics. Bullet drop, for example, is pretty faithfully tracked by say PUBG or ARMA 3 or the Battlefield series of games; you need to account for this when sniping especially to ensure you compensate for gravity’s effect on the bullet you just fired at a distant target’s skull hundreds of meters downrange.

Sniper's bullet drop in Battlefield 1.

Call Of Duty notably seems lax as far as “real world” game mechanics go (that is, mechanics that faithfully resemble real-life gunplay and weapon dynamics). You might wonder why that is, but it becomes clearer when you consider the hype surrounding the game.

The term “gaming industry” comes to the fore when you realize what a big business gaming is. Not merely creating and boxing and selling the game itself (more digitally than boxed nowadays, but I digress) but getting that game in front of as many eyeballs as possible to get the owners of those eyeballs excited about the game and want to get involved in it. Ideally this involvement for the play-to-win model, especially, will be in the form of a healthy in-game economy which its players actively participate in.

In generating hype, as is the case with government, truth becomes not only less important but less of a priority. Lawmakers may not push to get new laws on the books for objectively good reasons. Rather, they might’ve been treated in the U.S. for example to perks by lobbyists big and small to earn (or effectively buy) politicians’ attention. Fancy dinners, trips to the Bahamas, and of course “donations” fuel the sway lobbyists have over the politicians holding the keys to the taxpayers’ coffers.

Eventually the origin of and circumstances surrounding the hype become less important than the hype itself. This is key, because it creates an artificial, yet sustainable, relationship between lawmakers and their constituents, and game studios and their customers.

Government and game studios have in common control over what is revealed to outsiders, whether citizens or customers. In government, we the public don’t know who bombed an adversary nation’s ship in the Persian Gulf or fired missiles at their nuclear power plant. In games, we the customers don’t know how the RPG we fired at a helicopter over a kilometer distant managed somehow to knock it out of the sky.

Some things just happen, and when they do, the outcome is spectacular, and for some, profitable.

Call Of Duty is one of the most popular games out there. I focus on it here because I play the free-to-play Warzone flavor of the game, which is to its credit free, but offers players numerous and occasionally irritating reminders that you can pay real money for in-game swag.

It also pigeonholes users (including myself with less than great broadband internet, thanks to a local monopoly and lack of real competition among ISPs) into downloading sometimes ridiculously large updates, often hundreds of MB but for major updates tens of GB. When your ISP charges monthly overage fees (paused initially due to COVID-19 but after some months resumed) free becomes less so. Easier I suppose than selling USB sticks to purchase via snail mail, but more expensive to customers strapped for cash.

Games including Call Of Duty have tournaments that variously claim to test the skills of players in competition either online or on-site (the latter less so given current events). While I have no doubt there are players out there who have gaming skills that remind one of trade craft used by secret agents, that skill is likely not absolutely a reflection purely of their prowess. It instead is modified to suit the game studio’s primary objective to make money.

If a gaming studio wants to generate hype, it might actively seek to distance itself from reality. A particular game’s version of the truth might not reflect the real world. A sniper’s literally long shot from kilometers away might not be a “natural” head shot, but if you ask the game, it is, however inexplicable. 

To the game studio it’s ultimately profitable, which achieves one of their goals. To sustain that goal, enter streamers, gamers who make it their business to play competitively or just for fun online and themselves make bank off their audiences.

Streamers are analogous to government’s taxpaying citizens. Streamers, facilitated by an agency like YouTube or Twitch or other video hosting or streaming services, play to their audience for a share of profits. They generate hype for the games they play which in turn generates new customers, a fraction of whom will pay hand over fist for swag, their or their parents’ wallets permitting.

A streamer in his natural habitat.

Taxpayers working for a living or otherwise obediently and diligently paying their taxes do what they do, and those taxes variously fund initiatives according to the whim of lawmakers and maybe themselves if they manage to make enough noise (something increasingly unlikely especially in a consumerist late-stage capitalist society like the U.S.).

Leaving the USA? Take a lobbyist!

Which would create more hype? A game that mimics a sniper’s reality faithfully? A reality that demands carefully, patiently, tediously stalking their target, lining up a shot, and firing that shot precisely for the golf equivalent of a hole in one of the first person shooter, a headshot? One shot, one kill? Or a game that puts the brakes on reality, and perhaps widens the hit box a bit, so that instead of a target’s brain case being like the head of a pin at a thousand meters is instead like a beach ball at that distance?

Clearly the latter.

Just as government would have citizens believe in different flavors of truth, games would have players, their customers, believe the hype is the truth. For game studios, hype translates into profits. For government, hype translates into power. Both once achieved are far too tempting to surrender, and far too lucrative not to maintain for as long as possible.