Category Archives: Daily Blog

Generally a bunch of various small items that come up on a given day. Less focused than other topics, a catch-all…

Daily Blog, General Technical, Thoughts

Pixel-C and Pixel-XL Filesystem Support

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I’m finally getting the filesystem support on my Android pixel devices sorted out. I’ve had Samsung tablets and phones previously (until the Note 7 debacle) and they fully support exFAT. Given this is the default for almost everything larger than about 4GB that has been very useful.

When I got my two current Pixel branded devices I thought that my SD card readers were failing. It is not clear that the issue is a lack of exFAT support. Particularly curious as I appear to be able to read NTFS formatted SD cards in read-only mode.

I’m now at s point where things are workable but still rather annoying. Cards that I’ll use with my pixels are either small, crippled and FAT32 formatted (read/write) or NTFS and read-only. Cards I’ll use with my old Samsung tablet are exFAT formatted and won’t work with any of the pixel devices.

I suspect that if I rooted the tablets I could probably find a way to add exFAT filesystem support but I’d rather not make changes at that level. Really wishing that google had paid the extra bit to license exFAT for its flagship devices.

 

Daily Blog, Sandbox

Dead Computer, Live Computer

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Looks like the spare core-2 machine is likely down for the count. Even with the motherboard completely out of the chassis with nothing but the power supply and the power switch plugged in it seems to immediately shut down the power supply. I may give it one more shot on the possibility that it just doesn’t start properly without at least memory and video but I’m not hopeful.

I’ve started an install of Ubuntu 16.10 on ‘madhatter’ my back basement lab bench machine. This should do nicely for now. I’ll probably wind up buying some low-ish end hardware to replace the dead machine when the back lab bench area gets set up with a 3D printer. Until then this provides a decent Intel based linux machine that should meet my needs.

Once the base install is complete I need to get

  • xrdp installed for easy remote UI access
  • SSH installed (if not there out of the box) and configured for secure command line stuff.
  • tightvnc installed mostly to see if it works better than the free version of realvnc that came pre-installed on the RPi
  • samba to make files available to my windows boxes and hopefully set up for cleaner network visibility.

Hoping that this one goes smoothly. Disappointing the number of machines that have gone flaky recently.

Ubuntu install appeared to succeed. The machine was waiting at a ‘press enter to restart’ prompt when I checked on it this morning.

It is running on a WD ‘green’ drive so may be a bit slow booting. When I left it was still showing just a black screen (after dropping through a ‘how should I boot’ screen) so I’ll see tonight whether this system loaded up successfully. The machine seems ok overall as the windows 10 boot disk works fine.

I did start downloads of the Ubuntu 16 and 14 LTS releases to try tonight if the 16.10 image fails. Hoping there isn’t some incompatibility with core-2 era computers in newer Linux builds.

Daily Blog, General Technical, Projects, Thoughts

Digressions and returns…Lisp, NUC and SQL.

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I’ve mostly got the pieces of SQL DDL together that I need to define the tables for my sandbox project to manage file archiving. Hit this weekend after a tiring week and let myself get distracted.

I had bought an Intel NUC 6i5 to replace my ‘test target’ machine img_20161211_112015that has been randomly hanging and rebooting lately. The NUC setup and OS install went well except for the NIC driver. Wireless worked perfectly but the driver for the gigabit NIC either wouldn’t see the controller (Intel driver install packages) or saw the controller but then timed out before completing. As this was on a clean Windows install with nothing present except for the Intel driver img_20161211_112034packages I’m getting a replacement from Amazon. Should arrive today…hoping all goes smoothly as the NUCs are very nice little machines.

I let myself get distracted by some articles on Clojure and then wandered down into Scheme and Common Lisp. The various lisp dialects have always had a bit of allure to them as hugely expressive languages with very simple syntax. Nothing that I’m likely to every use professionally (though you never know) but cool toys to play with.

Clojure seems to be the closest to mainstream relevance with its JVM hosting and functional programming focus. Not sure I’ll do much more than poke at these but who knows.

Trying to get aimed back at DDL for the tables I need and then start piecing together C# code and native PInvoke stuff to get me where I need to go. Would be nice to be able to thumbnail canon raw files and PDFs (even better to get at metadata) but that will come later. Expecting that to involve serious native code execution as most of the SDKs for such things are in C or C++.

 

Daily Blog, Thoughts

Disney Imagineering laying off significant staff

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According to the LA Times the Disney corporation is significantly trimming down their imagineering staff in Glendale, CA. Suggestions are that the teams were bulked up for work on Shanghai Disney and now that the park is complete the imagineering team is being pared down to its usual size.

Given the challenges and opportunities ahead for the Disney parks with expansions ongoing in Orlando and digital media and new technologies coming into play, I’m hoping that they’re right.

The Disney parks have been a place of wonder and magic for my family for the last two decades and I’m very much hoping that they can remain at the top of their form for my daughter’s children (should she have any).

Daily Blog, Thoughts

Replacement Pixel-C is almost ready for action…

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The replacement for my original Pixel-C is now just about ready to use. Application are reloaded and updates applied.

Kindle books are on it. There was some sort of hiccup when loading the books initially. A handful came up with a ‘!’ on them and would not load or reload. I found that the only thing that helped was going to the ‘carousel’ and tapping to load the affected books from there. Once I did that they seemed to work properly. As this is a WiFi only tablet, I need to have everything I’m likely to want pre-loaded before I leave home.

Continue reading Replacement Pixel-C is almost ready for action… →

Books, Daily Blog, Thoughts

PC Kindle viewer has been throwing errors with some books…

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I have become more and more dependent on kindle books for both technical material and relaxation reading. I mostly read them using the app on my android phone and tablets. Lately I have been trying to use the windows application to read technical documents while working on my computer at home.

I’ve found that some books that display perfectly on my android devices give persist ‘delete and download again’ messages on the PC. No matter how often I try the process suggested by the app, I continue to get the error.

Continue reading PC Kindle viewer has been throwing errors with some books… →

Daily Blog, Thoughts

Disappointed – My Pixel-C tablet is not working right

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I’ve had a Pixel-C tablet since they were released and until the last week or so have been very happy with it. Over the last week it has taken to having one half of the screen freeze and refusing to come out of sleep mode without a hard reset. The frozen screen even occurs at boot (when half the screen is pixel snow). As of this morning, the failure is there at boot and never goes away and even when I just press the button to put it to sleep it refuses to start up again. Continue reading Disappointed – My Pixel-C tablet is not working right →