Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   urges to pound my fist through that fucking tablet
Thursday, January 12 2017

This morning Gretchen and I met our realtor in a gorgeous little Norman Rockwell neighborhood just south of broadway and a couple blocks east of Kingston High School. We'd come to see a perfect little "cream puff" of a house, a little Edwardian structure built (like much of the neighborhood) in 1915. Nearly all of the houses on the street are white, but the cream puff we'd come to see was a handsome orange-red, and still retained gingerbread details that had somehow survived the de-Victorianification of the 1950s. Inside, the only major problem with the house was wall-to-wall carpeting that concealed linoleum which had almost certainly been glued to what might otherwise be a perfectly-good floor. There was also the problem of the house's size, which was only about 1000 square feet, and there was no way (for example) to have any more than the one bathroom. But it was cute, had nice details in the moldings, and there was even a large fenced-in backyard. As a bonus, none of the neighbors looked to be the sort who would throw chicken bones and bagels into the yard. The price was $154,000, which was a bit more than we wanted to pay, even for a house that might require no work. According to the realtor, the present owners had bought it at the top of the market for $176,000 and put a lot of work into it, so even at the asking price, they'd be taking a big loss.

As a side note, I should mention that weather had taken a welcome turn for the milder today, and it was actually pleasant to be out and about in Kingston.


Even when it worked, I kept having an urge to fling my RCA Cambio W101 V2 tablet-cum-keyboard across the room or to pound my fist completely through it. The trackpad clickers are so stiff that I can feel my tendons wearing out (or whipsawing through the surrounding tissue) with every click. And then today, even after reinstalling all of Windows 10, a lot of it didn't work at all. After some exhaustive research, I found a piece of software I needed (related to I2C drivers) not on the RCA site but on the Intel site. But even with that, the screen was no longer touch-sensitive. I tried a number of things in hopes of getting that working, and then finally began fiddling with the obscure bits in the UEFI setup (the thing that looks like BIOS settings on newer computers). But then, when I went to restart the tablet, it didn't come back up. It seemed one of my UEFI settings had killed it. Normally this wouldn't be a problem; on every computer I've ever worked with there is a way to reset the BIOS (and also, presumably, the UEFI). Indeed, the Cambio has a reset button, and I pressed it in concert with every combination of other buttons, sometimes holding them for finger-achingly-long periods). Some web research also suggested holding either the volume-up or volume-down button when doing various kinds of resets, though none mentioned a UEFI-clearing procedure. When none of that worked, I took the tablet apart (it disassembled easily and its internal parts were pleasantly modular despite the cramped space they occupied) and disconnected the battery. But nothing worked; it seems that it is indeed possible to brick a UEFI-based computer, particularly if there is no physical UEFI-clearing provided. I don't brick devices often (this may only be my third bricking of something I hadn't also extensively modified), but whenever I do, it throws me into a terrible funk. It's not just the loss of the device that eats at me (in this case, the tablet only cost like $60), it's my concern that I will now be too nervous to boldly experiment with new hardware in the future. That said, it seems my many urges to pound my fist through that fucking tablet had been correct all along.

The fruitless effort to make that tablet useful had been a serious time-suck starting with the many challenges of getting it to boot from any form of external media and extending into today's many anxious attempts to revive it from the dead. A lot of that had happened this afternoon when I should've been doing my day job, but not to worry. From about 8:00pm until 2:00am, I interactively tested code on the email server. I'd removed everyone else from the loop and did it all by dragging and dropping files between Explorer and FileZilla windows while monitoring things via SSH, phpMyAdmin, and a custom tool I'd built. I didn't manage to fix the problem, though I greatly narrowed what it could be. From now on, my diagnostics will take the form of a binary search, with me uploading progressively smaller bits of code until I've isolated what the problem is. And what is the problem? My code works great for about a minute and a half, but after that queries pile up as they wait to get access to locked tables. The problem is probably a subtle one of timing, but it will take more diagnostics to know.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170112

feedback
previous | next