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AT&T customer since 1960 buys WSJ print ad to complain of slow speeds

I remember that spectacular quality and awesome sauce speed from nearly twenty years ago. Where my family lived there was two choices: Bellsouth and Charter. For all intents and purposes today, Bellsouth and AT&T can be considered abotu the same.

I also remember when my mother finally switched to Charter. After that the Internet access sucked a lot less by broadband standards of the word. But I’ll give Bellsouth this mouch, their aDSL service had been a major improvement over a 56 K modem that averaged more like 34 :P.

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Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “Fake it till you make it” meets OS development

Forking and building off Android is what I would call the natural response for Huawei’s situation. And pretty much as long as you respect the open source license agreements and such, nothing is wrong with that. The ability to do so is one of the best aspects of Android; the going it without the Google add ons one of the reasons fewer people do that with actual phones.
Ron kind of says it neat here:
Forking Android and launching your own rebranded operating system is totally fine. But be upfront about that. Say “HarmonyOS is a fork of Android” instead of “HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android.” Don’t call HarmonyOS “all-new” when pretty much the opposite is true.
Where the real ire of the story lay, and perhaps justly so. But the conclusion towards the end of the article also makes sense. Inside China the Google’less Android idea works, as an international product not so much.
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Every crazy thing that happened in Apple and Facebook’s privacy feud today

Interesting to see how this plays out in the long term. The real telling, or should I say damning question is just now many apps make a lot of revenue off tracking users across other apps and websites. Obliviously companies like Facebook and Google have a vested interest in this because of ads and analytics but for most regular applications the difference is down to how the above pay out from their services.
Personally, I don’t think it is an unreasonable expectation that users should be made aware of where their data is being sent. Online most people should already beware of tracking cookies and such. But the same expectation is not there with moving between apps; perhaps it should be given the prevalence of large ad networks.
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In the course of my life, often the solutions to problems have been “Put your back into it!”. Either because power tools are expensive, or it’s something I’ll probably use once every several years at best.

Repeat after me: “I will buy a drill.”

Then go buy a drill.

Honestly at this point, the only negative I can see is the dogs might swap from offering emotional support to running for cover. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing depending on what you’re working on.

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 A gander at the old hard drive.

3 TB of reliable

So the drive is about 7 years old.

SMART via SATA native
And has about 5 ½ years of up time.

SATA native

Connected to my desktop’s SATA controller: Crystal Disk Mark shows about the performance I would expect for such a drive.

USB Enclosure

Connected to the enclosure on the other hand, I’m just getting pure crap. Suggesting that either the enclosure is falling back to USB 2.0 when connected to my USB 3.0 controller, or just doesn’t like my desktop.

The symptoms observed with the file server was the drive dismounting whenever I tried to start Plex, or try to see if I could get any SMART via passthrough.

Damningly, if I connect an old Samsung SSD through the enclosure: I get about the same level of performance. While nearly old as the drive the enclosure is a 3.0 with UASP that has generally delivered hard drive performance just fine until recently.

Which reminds me that one of the nifty changes of the new 8 TB drive is loading sections of my Plex is now a hella lot faster on my Fire TV than it used to be.

I think that my spare enclosure made its way to work for various need fillings. So the other of the three is hanging off my Xbox with a 1 TB drive that is probably manufactured circa 2012. Perhaps I will swap that 1 TB drive with this 3 TB drive and use that for a comparison; can break that down into power supply, USB cable, and enclosure without having to pull the PCB. More detailed testing will require hooking it up to my Linux machines.

Possible re-homings include my Xbox for storing games, or adding it to my desktop to store video files being processed for my file server. Both tasks fall under transient data storage, and I’m disinclined to use a drive with over 2,000 power on hours for anything mission critical. Hmm, I think modern Xboxes have a limit of 128 GB – 16 TB for USB 3.0 drives.

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 There are days when I can sympathize with Mr. Spock’s plight in The City On The Edge Of Forever.

“I am endeavoring, ma’am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins.”

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As a young programmer, I think it was probably around 2.4 or 2.2 that I started to use Python. Today it remains one of my favorite languages.

I remember thinking quite highly of the Zen of Python at the time. Much time as gone on since then, and to be frank, I think it even more beautiful and dead on balls accurate today than I did then. The older I get as a programmer the more accurately it reflects the reality.

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
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Mobile Suit Gundam Anime That Started It All Launches on Crunchyroll.

Now there’s a surprise. Crunchyroll has long had plenty of Gundam series available, but I don’t recall anyone carrying the original series. Thus why /dev/shelf contains the Blu-ray 😉.
Don’t think that I’ve watched the entire series from end to end in a decade plus. But it’s definitely one worth watching. I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of the animation style from back then, so much as Gundam’s One Year War era.

Tech things that mildly worry me

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I find it just a bit worrisome how often I remember shortcuts for running the MMC‘s various faces.

PS C:UsersTerry> gci C:WindowsSystem32*.msc


    Directory: C:WindowsSystem32


Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09          41587 azman.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09          63081 certlm.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09          63070 certmgr.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08         124118 comexp.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         113256 compmgmt.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         145622 devmgmt.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09          13091 DevModeRunAsUserConfig.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08          47682 diskmgmt.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         145127 eventvwr.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         144909 fsmgmt.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:53         147439 gpedit.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08         144998 lusrmgr.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         145519 perfmon.msc
-a----        2019-10-15     09:53         146389 printmanagement.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:53          43566 rsop.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:53         120458 secpol.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09          92746 services.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:09         145059 taskschd.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08         144862 tpm.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     06:19         144967 virtmgmt.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08         115109 WF.msc
-a----        2019-12-07     04:08         144673 WmiMgmt.msc

In most cases I’m more likely to do foo.msc from a command prompt than go hunt down what I want through the start menu or other methods. Despite my background having focused heavily on unix systems, I’ve actually have learned a fair bit of NT over the past 15~20 years. Don’t think I’ll ever enjoy the care and feeding of Windows systems but it does come with the computer nerd territory, I suppose.

When you consider that for much of the past fifteen or so, the main reason I’ve kept Windows around has been for video games it may be kind of sad and worrisome, lol.