taur10

So, makovette said...



on my last entry. I thought that deserved an entry of it's own, so here you go, a few weeks late.

Why the heck is a Subaru a Scooby? Sub makes more sense, but that might give some people the wrong idea, so... dunno.

More important is the price. Surprisingly they are cheap. No, really. The Crosstrek which is based on the Imprezza is a wonderful deal. I remember back when we got the Cobalt that I had read that $27K was the average price for a new car. Obviously we didn't spend that much, but we didn't get much with a base Cobalt plus auto and AC. Very bare bones car.

Now, for our base level CrossTrek we got a very logical equipment package. Power windows and power door locks, cruise, manual seats and manual transmission, an infotainment system and a back up camera. The manual trans we wanted, and thankfully Subaru doesn't consider it a sport accessory forcing you to pay for a bunch of crap you don't want. And despite the power locks and windows, manual seats make sense. Whereas it's easy to see why having power locks and windows is very helpful, power seats have never made much sense, at least to me. Oh, and the radio has controls on the steering wheel. The infotainment system is fairly basic in and of itself, but thanks to it's ability to use Android Auto or the iOS equivalent, things it's lacking like navigation are easy added via the cell phone that everyone carries.

So, for all that great stuff, what's the price?
$30K, right?
Nope, not even close. $1000 down, $500 trade, and out the door before interest (financing came from our bank) was $22550.50. Yeah, that's it. Not cheap, but not exactly bank breaking either. Honestly downright cheap for what that money gets you ifn you ask me.

Not much to say, just a quick update since we did two things today not counting the new entry.

Edited the poem entry, fixed the link problem, and filled in some tags, mood and music
Edited that last entry to include something I forgot
Re-styled the journal. Sadly there's no tiki theme here as near as I can tell, and maybe I'll make one in the future, but for now, this will do.

That is all.

Ok, so like I said on the last post, I forgot to post this here, so lets fix that.

I loves me some gadgets, what can I say. So, last year, last summer, in fact near to about a year ago, I got a Zeblaze Blitz, a 3G watch phone. Yep, put a SIM in it, and you have yourself a cell phone. Neat little gadget, but way too little memory, so you can't add much apps, and you can't remove the crappy built in apps (a calendar app that merely displays a month view of a calendar for example). Still, I used it until AT&T swore it was a 2G only device and they were turning off the 2G service, at which point I switched to the LG K10 they sent me for free.

Back in March, I picked up a Lemfo LES1. Software wise, a few differences here and there, but aside from a lot more watch faces, and a lot of better ones, not that different from the Blitz. It was however thinner and lighter, which is nice. Plus it had four times the memory which actually makes it a useful device, since with a sub 2 inch screen, you're not going to use it for as much as you would a regular cell phone. Unfortunately after a month or so it proved to have a defective battery with charge times that were all over the places, 100% could mean 9 hours of battery, or 1. So, back to Lemfo it went for repair or replacement. Early this morn I picked up its replacement from the Post Office, and its all good, in fact I finished putting all my software and settings on it a couple hours ago.

Oh but the story doesn't stop there, at the end of June I bought yet another watch phone. Unlike the first one which I bought hoping it would be a usable and neat phone (wasn't really) or the LES1 which I expected great things from (lots more memory which was the deal breaker on the Blitz), this was more a toy. A TenFifteen X9A Plus, a watch for which there's a fair number of reviews, but the company doesn't exist. No website, Facebook, nothing. Weird product too, but neat at the same time. And this one died too, it wouldn't charge.

So, where's the real blues here?
Well, that would be that at roughly the same time, none of them could be charged. Really. Lets see, the Blitz is prolly the strangest, apparently my sweat ate two of the contacts off the back of the watch. No, seriously, one's so chewed up that the pin that connects it to the mother board won't make a proper connection. After some headaches, I've managed to order a new back panel and just have to wait for it to come in.

And of course the LES1, we covered that, defective battery, new one sent to me and received. So what about the X9A? Well, that turned out to be a defective dock. The charge pins are spring loaded, and something wrong with the hole that the positive pin sits in resulted in the pin going down, but not coming back up. Noticed this while going back and forth with GearBest about the warranty. Good news is that they're supposed to be sending me a new dock, and in the meantime, I've jerry-rigged the current one so that it'll usually charge. With a little nail polish, I may be able to make that almost all the time. Still, it'll be nice to get a working dock for it.

Of course the blues couldn't stop there. We tried out Family Mobile from WalMart which rides on T-Mobile. Problem was that I was only getting 2G service, but that didn't worry me much as Chinese phones are known for having trouble with T-Mobile. So, today I dug up a spare AT&T SIM since my current live SIM is too small, went to the online chat and tried to set it up. Remember what I said about AT&T and 2G? Yeah, well, that's relavent here, because despite the advertising and all, apparently the 2G thing wasn't because of T-Mobile problems, its because this watch is only capable of 2G service. Hmmm, Ok, not sure what I'm going to do about that, maybe leave it as a WiFi device, maybe use it as a 2G device, dunno. Shame too, because its one of the most interesting watches I've had, its essentially a generic Chinese Android phone, just really small and with a watchband, unlike the others which run a heavily modified watch centric version of Android.

Yeah, no fancy title this time, but at least I finally made the post.

So, what's new...
Well, nothing earth shattering, been playing with other Arch spins and even a couple Manjaro spins. Seems a bit weird to have a Manjaro spin, since Manjaro is already a spin itself, that of Arch, but whatever. I did mention this last post I believe, but here's a few updates.

ArchLabs, really loving it now that I understand the problem which was a combination of me not reading, and them making a weird decision. It used to only use OpenBox for the user interface, but now it also has I3. The problem I had was that for some reason it was defaulting to I3, and since R2-D2 is the first with that, and new enough that few tutorials are out there for it, all videos showed it with the OB interface. Once I learned that from one of the 'official' tutorial videos, it was smooth sailing. Its a nice build, and very light.

So, ifn we're talking ArchLabs, then we need to talk MaBox, a Manaro re-spin that also uses OpenBox, right? There's not a lot of difference between them though, the biggest being that MaBox uses PCMan for the file manager rather than Thunar. Unless its significantly lighter, I don't get why, from a function stand point they don't seem all that different, but visually PCMan looks quite ugly, not quite 8 bit, but close. Oh, and for some reason once it was installed, all of the customizing tools stopped working. Those are minor problems, but when ArchLabs comes off feeling more polished and lighter, whether it really is or not, that sorta kills MaBox.

Antegros I still haven't tried, despite my desire to do so. It uses Calamares for the installer, and for some reason it gets to 100% on preparing the drive... And that's all she wrote, nothing happens after that. I've tried with two different Antegros DE's, and the same thing happens. Didn't really expect anything else, but its still annoying. Oh well, that's another off the list.

Bluestar Linux... not bad, quite nice, but... Eh, never really liked KDE, things never seem to work right. I tried bringing up KDE's native mail client, and it crashes the first time. Got it up the second time, added an account... and it hangs on log in. Yeah, nicely done package, really clever installer, Calamares with an added details pop up, but KDE and me have never gotten along. A shame really as I love the Dolphin file manager, which doesn't work real great outside of KDE.

SwagArch which I saw a review of, and I agree with the reviewer, damn that's a pretty build. Well done, very well thought out, and very pretty... and that's about all I can say. I already run Manjaro Xfce on my main computer, and beyond looks, there's nothing really different about Swag, so no reason to change. That said, maybe it has a better community, though Manjaro's would be hard to beat. If you were new to Linux, I'd say go for it ifn you haven't hit Manjaro yet, I don't think you'd go wrong with either of them, and it is prettier.

KiboJoe is another Manjaro spin, this time running Joe's Window Manager. Haven't played with this much, don't even remember much from what little I did with it. That said, in a way it's good that it doesn't stand out in my mind, that means there's nothing wrong with it. Sure, that might also mean that its unremarkable, but it could just as easy be that I haven't done much with it, after all I've been eyeballs deep in proofreading and editing, so not enough time to play as much as I like.

So, I think that's every Arch spin that's out there, or at least the ones it makes sense for me to try. I really do need to try ArchLabs on the main computer. I'm a bit worried about the resolution, it has Skylake graphics, and there's been an issue with the 4.8 and above kernals not offering my maximum resolution, which is why I stay with Xfce, Mate for example which would serve my needs (so long as it doesn't glitch) just fine, but it runs the 4.9 kernal.

Any other tech?
Well, umm, yeah, namely a bit of silliness. I should really not be left on my own, otherwise you get things like this:



What prey tell is this, aside from an abomination?
Well, its what happens when I look at some more or less discarded electronics and go "why let it go to waste?" Sitting on that end table is an old Roku, as in first generation, low memory POS Roku, paired with a 21" ViewSonic VGA monitor. Yes, I'll let that sink in. The Roku only has HDMI and composite outputs, so its connected via an HDMI to VGA adapter that splits off the audio. The adapter is powered via a cell phone charger since it uses a micro-USB connector. It does come with a cord, but its really short as they assume you're using the adapter with your computer, so I supplied a cord of my own and dug out a spare wall wart. The audio in turn goes to a set of computer speakers that don't work reliably that's to a bad plug, or more specifically, the wire at the strain relief. So yes, that's the most ridiculously cobbled together TV set up ever... But it works. Now if only it were possible to get YouTube on a first gen Roku...

Only thing left is the watch phone fiasco. I have three of them now. Yes, three, and none work. Let's see...

ZeBlaze Blitz, my oldest one. My sweat ate the connector on the back of it. Trying to get a replacement back, been a week or so of back and forth with the company and a lack of help from Everbuying where I bought it. Combine that with a package that went missing recently, and I'm starting to rethink them as being my source for Chinese electronics in the future.
Lemfo LES1, one I was really stoked about... Until the battery crapped out. Fully charged could randomly be anything from an hour's worth of life to nine hours. Sent it back for warranty repair or replacement, and on 27 July it cleared Chinese Customs, and... vanished? Just shouted at them to find out what happened.
TenFifteen X9A Plus, another charging problem, this time because of a defective dock. The charging pins are spring loaded, or supposed to be. The positive contact has either a missing or broken spring because the pin went down, and didn't come back up. Trying to get a replacement dock for this one, and really hoping I do, because its a really kick ass watch phone. Of the three, I think its my favorite even though its heavy. Its literally a mini phone with Android 5.1 and an SD card slot. The negative is that A5 was when Google got the brilliant idea that you shouldn't be allowed to store apps on an SD card, so this means you can't use it to help with the very limited memory. Then again, its much more efficient about memory usage, so its not as big a deal as I expected after my previous experience with the Blitz which I believe has at least as much memory if not more.

So, that's all the tech news so far, but if we get the various warranty and repair issues sorted out, there'll be more, namely detailed reviews of those two newest watches.

Until next time, malamo pono...

PS
Anyone know of a tiki or Hawaiian theme for DreamWidth?