Jimmycrackcrack

It's strange but listening again to music from about 20 years ago, during a time when I was mostly sad and depressed, and where the musical choices reflected that, gives me a weird sense of nostalgia and longing for that time.

I know it's not unusual for music to do that, that's just run of the mill, it's just odd that, it has me longing for a time and associated mood that, on the whole, I kind of didn't really enjoy very much. The angsty tracks were what I listened to because I was so bummed out and dissatisfied.

I guess it shouldn't bother me, after all I try my best to avoid watching anything on youtube that I didn't go there to watch in the first place but nevertheless, it's hard not to see the clickbaity thumbnails for suggested videos to the right of the one I'm watching, and also, when I'm researching something it's undeniable that sometimes it genuinely was actually useful to have another video on the topic suggested that was relevant.

But this has really started to freak me out, Youtube has gone bananas recently. I'm constantly getting suggestions decrying woke this or woke that, in particular a lot of videos of compilations of police bodycam footage with titles about various people being 'idiots' or 'entitled' or various other terms suggesting a strong pro-authority angle. Those suggestions were annoying but it's starting to get disturbing now because they're veering strongly towards incel themes. Today I've seen suggestions for: a video about catching a woman faking a rape accusation 'caught on camera', another about a 'high value' man winning in court against a woman wanting him to pay reparations because she refused a DNA test, another about why men don't approach women anymore, and on and on. They stick in my mind because I can see exactly the the world view this constellation of fucking garbage is catering to.

On the one hand, I guess I could take some comfort in the fact that if the algorithms have gotten it this far wrong then maybe Google really didn't manage to snag so much data about me as I assumed but on the other, it's definitely used something it reckons it knows about me to make these assumptions. I can't for the life of me figure out where the fuck it got the idea I would like this or why it's so persistent despite the lack of positive reinforcement. I am not signed in, so I can't even attempt to manually give negative feedback and as far as I can tell people who do that say it doesn't work anyway.

This all seems to have coincided with a dramatic change in recent viewing habits, so I'm guessing that's what has triggered this, but it's still weird as fuck that there's apparently some overlap here. I've been in the market for a new phone and so have been watching a lot of videos about various phones and I was also considering a pixel as one of the options because if I went with that, I could use GrapheneOS. This has meant watching a lot of content content on GrapheneOS as well. This does seem to have had the expected effect of a lot of suggestions along those lines but it's definitely coincided with the fucking alt-right starter kit. This is certainly a counterintuitive link. Shit makes me want to puke. Normally when I see these kinds of surveillance economy mechanisms at work I just look at them with a detached kind of wry amusement at the shitty state of things but this actually really did offend me, I mean yuck, makes my fucking skin crawl.

Back in 2007-ish I told my Mum all about how you could jailbreak iphones and unlock them to make the phone with other carriers. I helped alleviate any concerns by convincing her and myself that if there are any problems after the procedure, nothing physically has been changed on the phone and as long as I made a backup first, we could always switch back.

I jailbroke the iphone 3g she had and it didn't take long before she began to notice a lot of problems, it got hot all the time, the battery drained way fast and animations were juddery and slow and sometimes apps crashed. I restored the backedup image of the phone from before thinking I'd fix everything, but although it improved the situation somewhat, the heat and battery dissipation remained permanent and the phone became useless. Ever since then I've been pretty scared of doing anything of that nature to any phone.

I really want to install Graphene OS on a pixel phone but... well, I also want to be sure I can go back if I change my mind, especially as the phone is expensive. Any risks associated with doing this? Is there any way to screw it up so bad that you permanently brick the phone? If the USB cable breaks or gets yanked in the middle of it or something like that can I always get back to square 1? Is there any known way for things done in the installation of Graphene OS to somehow survive having stock android flashed on to it?

You'd think this would be easier than it seems to be in reality. I am interested in getting a Sony Xperia 5V or Xperia 1V. Where I live, phones can't make calls unless they support VoLTE. The phones in question support basically all the bands I need them to support and I've found several encouraging Reddit posts from people saying they got the Xperia 1V to work here (haven't found any for the 5V). Some confirm VoLTE, others simply say they were able to make calls. The VoLTE requirement for phones is very recent with different carriers killing off their 3G networks at slightly different times the latest being about a month away so it's hard to judge how much I can trust those posts. I've also seen a video from what seems to be an Indian person showing you how to enable VoLTE on a 1V.

The thing is though, these are encouraging signs but Sony themselves have kept decidedly shtoom on the matter not mentioning the capability in their marketing or their web manuals for either phone, it is also not mentioned on GSM arena, however I noticed that this is not mentioned in the information about my current phone on GSM arena either, even though it definitely does support it because I've been using since even before it was a hard requirement. Is there any way to figure this out definitively? I've tried contacting Sony and maybe at some point they'll reply but frankly I'm not holding my breath and I suspect if they do reply they'll say something about the phones not being for sale in this country (which is true), or mentioning some of the other things the phone can do without answering whether it will do this one particular thing, which is what some websites selling the phone did as well. That type of evasive behaviour would normally lead me to conclude the answer was the feature isn't supported but those Reddit posts and that video, while not definitive enough in their own right seem to strongly indicate that it is supported.

I'm trying to make sure that if I import a phone to my country, it will likely work pretty much wherever I may go here. Most phones I'm looking at support every 4G band operated here, but I've noticed that on the GSM arena website, they will often give a list of supported bands for a given phone followed by a dash and a region name like 'Asia' or 'international' or 'USA'. One of the supported bands I'm looking at is operated in my country, but seems to be pretty rare, if I use that as a criterion the list of devices shrinks considerably as does the number of brands to choose from. One particular phone I looked at only lists support for the specific band I'm looking at in it's "-USA" list of supported bands. I'm confused by what this means for me, if that band is used in my country and I import a phone that only lists the band as supported in the US does that mean the phone wouldn't work here if I'm in an area where the only available tower operated on such a frequency? Why not? It sounds like it's physically capable.

The other question is, how do you assess the likelihood of this being a problem? The relative rarity of support for this band and the fact that it's only officially supported here, but seems only to have recently been licensed for people to build infrastructure operating on that band makes me think that there are likely very few towers actually using it here, but presumably more will eventually start to do so. My current phone has lasted me 6 years, almost 7 so I'll want to future-proof in this regard. In the time since I bought my last phone, carriers have abandoned any non VoLTE support so if the phone I bough then, hadn't had this compatibility it would have become a brick well ahead of its time so I'm weary of something like that happening.

EDIT: Something has occurred to me that didn't before and might answer my question, but then I guess it'd be good if anyone knew because this is only a guess on my part. Maybe the dash followed by region name is referring to model variants, as in, if you buy the US variant of the phone, then it supports these bands, and if you buy the international variant, it supports these bands etc etc. In that case, it would presumably mean that if I bought a variant model of a phone that lists support for a particular frequency band it should work anywhere in the world where those frequency bands are used not just the region mentioned after the list. I guess the trouble is that usually the sites I can find selling these phones to consumers in my market don't go in to anywhere near that level of detail so I'd have no way of knowing which model variant it was other than simply the manufacturer's marketing terms for their product lineup.

I have already been offered and officially accepted a gig which represents a continuation of a move towards work in a new sub-field for me that I really want to move in to, but it's just a short term contract like the many I've been doing over the years and afterwards I'll have to return to scrounging for the next gig after that with no guarantee of further success in that area (except hopefully doing well and getting more offers but nothing concrete). This gig won't start for a long time so I need to start filling the intervening time.

I recently interviewed for another gig, which would be full time indefinitely, no more scrounging. It's a pretty great opportunity too, lots to like, but would likely represent an entrenching of my existing career path thus far rather than the move to the new one I've been embracing. Had this opportunity come up maybe a year ago I'd have grabbed it with both hands as I hadn't considered this other path but now I've begun on that new path I want to see where it can go. I think I did well in the interview and have a feeling I may be offered this full time job (not counting my chickens yet but it looks promising). That would be tricky though, the short duration, later-in-the-year gig will stretch just over 2 calendar months and I can't imagine getting that much time off from a brand new full time job in order to do the other one.

It's a small town with a small industry, and it's a damn shame the timing couldn't have been reversed. If I were to accept the full time gig until shortly before the 2nd gig later this year and then leave to go do this short term but arguably more interesting contract job, is it likely to go over so badly that I'd get a bad rep locally for this? I could cancel the short term job but deep down I'm pretty sure it's the work I'd like to start doing going forward. I could decline an offer for the full time gig if presented with it, but I have nothing else going and should really take on some work. It's unfortunate that I likely wouldn't be able to just walk back in to the first gig any time soon if I left and I'd probably appear pretty unreliable to them anyway having done so.

This used to just be how it worked, I don't know what changed. I have for a long time used VLC to navigate to files on my computer in the other room so I can stream video to my phone that are stored on the computer.

Occasionally I'll also use VLC to browse local media on my phone. I can still do this through the browse tab but I have to navigate my phone's internal memory folder structure that way, which is cumbersome and irritating. Previously I would just go to the video tab because any video that showed up there would be local to the phone. Now, all the video on my computer's storage is displayed there and seemingly NONE of the phone's own local video material.

I tried going to settings and Media Library Folders and noticed that interestingly the network location for my computer was ticked and the internal storage was unticked. I have no idea how that happened but I thought I had the problem solved then. I unticked all potential Media Library Folders except internal storage which I ticked and then navigated to the video tab in hopes of seeing only local video and no network video. The situation was completely unchanged. There was a notification at the top of the screen from VLC indicating it was scanning so I thought perhaps it was going to have to complete this scan first before anything could change so I left the phone to it to it with the VLC app open. Some time later I returned and the notification was gone, but the video tab was the same. I navigated away from and then back to the video tab and still it was the same. While writing this post I checked the Media Library Folders setting again and the changes I had made were reversed, only the network location for my PC was checked and all other items including the internal storage were unchecked. WTF!?

I'm trying not to just resist everything new in mac OS right away, but this whole focus concept and do not disturb mode turning on without me asking it to and not having any option to disable it is just too much. I can imagine maybe using this in some exceptional circumstances where it actually occurred to me to do so, but I definitely want it to be a conscious decision.

In the preferences I could find no off switch. I tried setting it to only turn on when I'm in Antarctica and off when I'm not but it didn't seem to actually work as the little moon icon remained there even after this. I also tried to scheduling it to operate in a one minute window but even after that window elapsed it continued to be in 'do not disturb mode'. I don't tend to get a whole lot of notifications nor rely on them much but frankly the idea that they're being suppressed not under direction from me is infuriating and I don't want that to happen.

So I've seen passing ironic references to DARE in American media representing it as a bit of a joke. That media was intended for American audiences so didn't really elaborate on what the program entailed but I somehow already knew without any need of such context that it was an anti-drugs public outreach campaign and was able to laugh along having had various similar laughable campaigns aimed at youth in my Australian childhood.

But then on reflection I realised that the whole DARE thing specifically, was familiar to me, like I'd personally experienced it too, but what I remembered was a TV commercial and also seeing it as late as the 2000s. From what I've now read about the campaign it seems to have been US-centric and maybe a bit in the UK and based entirely around talks at schools. I went through my fair share of shitty talks at school, but not DARE specifically, but I can't shake a memory of an ad I swear I remember seeing, in Australia, specifically about use of marijuana, implying that the effects of smoking it aren't fun or enjoyable and then at the end of the ad having a logo or graphic referring to DARE. But I can't seem to find any evidence that this, or even any DARE commercials ever existed. It doesn't help research that we have a brand of bottled Ice Coffee in Australia called Dare who have had lots of high profile ad campaigns so that's almost entirely what comes up from search results. I found Flinders university (An Australian university) paper about the role of schools in Alcohol education which talks about DARE and its utter inefficacy but seems to be referring to the American context and specifically about alcohol. So doesn't really prove anything.

From what little I remember about the ad it was focussing on the fact that marijuana can give you an increased heartbeat and feelings of paranoia and trying to imply that this was somehow something that always happens and is the only effect of smoking it. Had some sort of tagline like 'there's nothing fun about marijuana' or some similar idiocy.

I can't seem to find any rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes the casting button just doesn't appear as an option. I first noticed when I tried to watch something that was a youtube video that's in 4:3 so my best guess was maybe that somehow had something to do with it but I tried various videos at different aspect ratios, frame rates, resolutions even different videos on the same youtube channel as where I has actually succesfully found the option presented.

This is probably happening for all sorts of video but I noticed it with youtube and did my testing there because that's where this extension works the most reliably and where I can be confident some other weird factors about how the website is setup aren't responsible for a video not being able to cast.

The game is here. . Tremendous fun and despite it's lack of depth, I've had fun trying to beat my records but ultimately, it gets tired fast given there's only one "level" so to speak albeit a randomly generated one.

I really like the mechanics of this one and managing them against fuel load. It's similar to a game called Space Rescue by Ostrich Studio which I also liked but both these games seem to be kind of little prototypes so there's very little to them.