Category Archives: General

HTC Evo: Weird Camera Posterize-like stuckness

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I just went and got my HTC Evo (phone) and turned on the Camera app, and something was really messed up, like “posterize” was chosen, in PINK but all the settings were normal in reality (I have used different settings before, but not with my most recent use of the phone camera.) Choosing any other settings did nothing except change the color of the “posterize” look … I had used the camera a few days or more ago. I’m not sure how long ago. Anyhow, I powered down then back on my phone last night for some other reason, that’s the only thing … but that doesn’t make sense. So anyhow I just now since discovering that powered my phone down then back on again, and voila! It’s fine now.

Coffee by K-Cup

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We got a Cuisinart Single Brew coffee machine in the middle of December from Bed, Bath and Beyond. It was for sale as well on Costco.com, but not in the actual Costco brick store we go to. There was a great package of coffee with the Costco.com machine for a good price. The same machine at BBB was $20 more and had less coffee & water filters in the package. We had a coupon for 20% off, using that it pretty much met the Costco.com price and so we did it, bought it and brought it home from BBB, just so we would have it right then, not have to wait for shipping, as we were so sick and tired of our 10-cup SS Carafe Cuisinart coffee maker.

We like bold coffee, hot coffee. The machine we had for over a year just wasn’t up to snuff anymore, not that it ever was, or wasn’t but I was over tired of the big routine every morning to get the carafe hot enough to hold the 10-cups of coffee for me and hubby. That wasn’t the pot I liked. I liked the second pot we brewed. It’s not that I didn’t try … 1. I ran a pot of water through the machine without any coffee grounds first. 2. Then in an electric water heating pot I boiled water for the carafe,  I let the machine 1. sit for 10-min then dumped it and added the 2. hot water, let that sit while heating up 3. water, dumped 2. added 3. then heated 4. water, then when it was heated dumped 3. and added 4. and either let it sit 10 or more minutes or pretty soon or later dumped and made real coffee with the machine, water in it, and coffee grounds.

I developed that over a long trial period of time, it was best I came up with, and wasn’t good enough. It was better, but still ick, and the second machine pot of coffee after the first was way better. Letting hot water sit in it for blah, blah, blah from here or there made no difference. It was just the way of it, we wanted it better, it wasn’t HOT enough, was mucky at the end, half-mucky in the middle. Ick. Not grounds, just ick feeling, ick feeling, ick, feeling. You get it.

A second brew of coffee in that pot made for a nicer pot, not ick in the middle, just OK, hot enough. Problem was we didn’t always drink it all, plus when hubby out of town I was very unhappy with the coffee situation having to do it all alone, and only have 1 pot of ick.

Enter Keurig, for years I’d heard of it and never gave it one whit of thought really. Until late 2010. I did.

1. Keurig machines in Costco all the time, noticing them but not caring ever.

2. Demo at Costco using Keurig Platinum machine. Hubby got a sample. I only tasted it. Impressed for the HOT of it.

3. Same day as 2. being at Bed, Bath & Beyond for something else, saw K-cup machines and looked deeper at them and the K-cups. Saw Cuisinart for $199 and loved it. DH not as impressed. Would buy one at Costco made by “Keurig” the one was $139 and that’s as much as he wanted to pay, sometime, but not even then or soon.

4. At home went to Costco.com and saw they had the Cuisinart K-Cup machine I wanted. Started reading more about it and fell in love with K-cup idea and Cuisinart model.

5. Within a few days hubby OK with it and we bought the one at BBB.

We have bought several varieties of K-Cups since. The machine came with a small sampling that we found some we liked OK, others we’ll pass on. We’ve bought a box of 80 at Costco, some 18′s at BBB, and a few 18′s at Target. My favorite is only at Target, Caribou Obsidian. Yum!

Hubby was using the My K-Cup, but the last few days he’s doing that less and less. I don’t NOT want to use my own coffee, just hate the My K-cup, looking to use the Perfect Pod E-Z Cup with E-Z Cup paper filters maybe … something with paper filters, I DO NOT want a “have to wash the basket out” method. I DO NOT want a “have to replace the holder to use my own coffee in my machine” method. E-Z Cup solves those problems, and I also want paper filter for good coffee and healthier coffee reasons.

All in all very happy with my K-Cup machine, K-cup coffees as long as they are bold, bold, bold. Caribou Blend is as weak as I can stand it. FWIW

Sleep

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I’ve been really tired lately. I haven’t gotten enough rest/sleep and this morning I slept way over … finally, so don’t feel quite as bad as I usually do by this time of day.

We had a crazy 4th of July, setting off fireworks, running around like crazy, it was fun and exhausting. I guess I feel like I hadn’t “caught up” with rest since then. So it was nice sleeping, but something woke me sometime after 4am, it was my hubby’s alarm clock, but he wasn’t there.

He left on a bus. trip yesterday, & what went off was not his usual, not an alarm, but a loud hissing of a radio not tuned to a station but volume turned way up. Ugh. I struggled to get it off, then laid down again, only to have a beep, beep, beep sometime later (probably snoozed the alarm) and I couldn’t think of what to do except to pull the plug. So I did. Ahhh, relief.

So I went back to bed and slept until my newly 3 year old started telling me to get up, so I was able to respond but go right back to sleep. I told him to get his brother or sister, and his sister said right away she was awake and got up and I zonked out right away again, woke up only when my Palm Pre started to ring. It was 9-something-am. I didn’t answer the phone. But did call him back a few minutes later. It wasn’t very nice. I didn’t feel like talking about anything he said, so he hung up. Oh well.

I’m going to make Pizza for dinner, that needs a lot of energy on my part. I make the whole thing, my own dough, shred the cheese, make the sauce, cook the sausage, put it all together. It usually totals me. So I need to start now, I guess, and get it done with so I can go to bed and hopefully be even more rested tomorrow than I was today. I don’t have anything big to attend too until mid-Aug. So that is good. Hopefully I will be in good shaped for that. (I’m an introvert who stays home with children, no “work” outside, no responsibilities outside of home, so I’m not has “hardened” as I once was. Nor as young as I once was. :) )

One thing about all this, I was a night owl all my life, until I had my 4th baby right before I turned 41. Since then I sleep at night usually. I get so run down thoughout the day and can’t wait to get to bed and go to sleep. I didn’t ever have the ability to just “go to sleep” until then. I sleep all night, unless someone or something bothers me. Sometimes I get woken up in the middle of the night and I read for a bit or watch something on TV, but I usually then fall asleep fairly easily again. My old life was one of sleep deprivation that I lived with just fine. I couldn’t sleep much without waking up. If I went to bed before Midnight that was too early. Bed before 2am wasn’t often. Even going to bed I’d awake a couple of hours later and be wide awake for 2 or 3 or 4 hours. Often I couldn’t fall asleep until that sun started to come up. I slept hard and fast then, sleeping for a few or two hours like that is what I went on until Midnight again.

So it’s weird still, after 3 years now of sleeping better, I’m still far more tired and still not a “morning person” so I have less time for me than ever.

Directv

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One of our DirecTivo R10 units quit booting up this past week. It is actually most likely the hard drive, just new in December 2008. Why is it that which I think it is? The Q, 2, nearly 3, was shaking and banging the DVR apparently, enough that it damaged the hard drive.

I can’t get the hard drive to be recognized in anything. It’s there, but won’t “show up” … so getting it to be scanned … ah forget it. I’ve had it. My desktop computer on which I have to get it connected to use InstantCake on it is just too difficult to utilize for this anymore. I have one Eide cable input for my DVD and CD drives. There is another Eide input, but pins are bent, it’s in a really weird place and to use it I’d need to take the computer out of it’s case, it’s that badly placed.

(I use SATA drives not just for them being better, but absolutely since the Eide situation is so bad on my motherboard.)

So because of all that, not wanting to buy a new hard drive and have to take my computer apart to get the InstantCake baked, we got a new box from Best Buy, the DirecTv Plus HD DVR HR22 … not that we have an updated dish from DirecTv, no, we still have what they installed in late 1997.

It’s a weird system, but I’m becoming accustomed to it. There are some things I like better than the DirecTivo, but there are things I miss, or just things I can’t easily find, or just … whatever. The transition from DirecTivo to Directv DVR is frustrating, but doable. We were waiting for TIVO & Directv to come out with a new HD box, but just couldn’t wait any longer. As for the HD part I’m hoping we can get the lines run how we want them, then get the system upgraded. I want to to use Single-Wire to 4 dual tuners. We only have 1 box for that right now, but will get 1 for free with the upgrade, at least. We only have 2 tv’s right now, but will have 3 or 4 eventually. 1 in bedroom, 1 in livingroom, 1 in kitchen, 1 in basement.

Kittens growing up

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The kittens we have are 5 1/2 weeks old just about. They are ready to be separated from their mother. Three of them will be going to someone for adoption eventually. Maybe they will take them this weekend, or the weekend after this one. (An organization that told us they would take them.)

The other two kittens are going to stay with us, pictured under “My Two Sweeties” in the photo category, the most recent picture posted here. I set them up in my bathroom this afternoon, and they are content with their own basket w/towel & kitty litter, food & water. Last I saw they were curled up nicely in the basket sleeping.

I’m keeping all the kittens well socialized. They’ve been with humans since their birth. They should do fine in growing up into being nice cats.

The next thing then is the feral mama cat, she needs to be spayed. Sometime after the kittens are away from her we can get that done, then release her again. She’s tamed down for this litter so very much, but she is getting antsy to get out of the laundry room now. She’ll be fit for bear sooner than later, I’m pretty sure.

That will be the end of this feral cat production line. Wonder how soon it will be until another one takes it’s place. Where we live, it may or may not be too long.

My Main Problem

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I have this problem occasionally. My hubby goes on business trips and doesn’t always keep me up to date. He has a calendar online and doesn’t update it when he’s out. He doesn’t txt me or tweet or answer vmail. He’s been gone since Monday this week and did call me or call me back each day until Wednesday it slowed down, and Thursday he didn’t respond until later, and then he was in transit to a new location and never let me know he arrived or anything since the early afternoon phone call.

I’ve dealt with him doing this kind of thing before and he just doesn’t realize how really important it is to keep me in the loop, I get very upset, rightly so when he doesn’t answer the phone hour after hour, after hour, after hour, and email isn’t replied to, txt msg’s go unreplied to …. I go nuts, and that’s the nicest way to put it. My body is starting to freak out and that is the point to all of this, I care, and because I care I can’t help thinking about all the bad things that could be happening.

In the past he poo-poos that all right after he has been out-of-contact for a very long time and finally contacts me. He doesn’t care like I do, that is very obvious.

Fedora 12 on my Desktop

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I’m typing this post in Firefox on a new install of Fedora 12. It’s my first time installing a linux distro. I’ve used a Knoppix CD before, and have wanted to install Linux, but just hadn’t until I finally got the bug to upload my last.fm .scrobblerlog and didn’t want to not load it to Libre.fm, which I had done a dump from last.fm and upload to libre.fm in mid-2009 — once after that I hand fixed a .scrobbler log to load it to Libre.fm, but that was a mess. A big mess. Took several times to re-do the list and reconnect (Python is how one loads data to Libre.fm) I liked using Python, and want to learn more of how to use it, write in the language for usefulness, etc.

I looked online to find someone who’d made a Python script to change .scrobblerlog to be accepted by uploading to Libre.fm, but the only thing I have found, over and over, is one thing, a bash script on a linux forum. So that was what eventually got me to install Linux. I chose Fedora since it’s a good thing.

I have a Dual Boot install. So I have new Fedora 12 and old WIn XP SP3.

The one thing I haven’t gotten done that I want to is to get my wireless networking card to work in Fedora. I haven’t tried too hard. I have to find the key anyhow, it’s in my router at least, which I can access since I’m plugged in with an ethernet cable for now. If I can’t make that work, then I’ll have to leave the desk by the router for the time being.

One thing that was troublesome in this is that my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse worked through install up to a point, but not after reboot, and I’d whizzed through a screen that I needed to get logged in to the system, and couldn’t do anything but get a wired keyboard and reinstall. Which was fine, it’s not like Windows that would have taken an hour to install. :rolleyes:

The house

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We got back from Costco a bit ago. There are things there that would make my house a bit better. A TV in the kitchen. A handmade Italian glass platter. Brother TAPE cartridges for my label machine. Just to name a few.

Of course the TV issue is a DirecTV problem, having an old dish and using all 4 feeds we have from it (split into 4 from 2) and not having a third box to use and not wanting a non-pause-able DirecTV box at all. We’ve had DirecTivo boxes for so long now. There is no other way to watch TV (except on DVD, or downloaded digital files, of course.)

The thing about my house is that it is just so small and the kitchen is so in need of being more completed, lighting, counters, island configuration, and so on. Part of my family wants to do this and part that and I fit in nowhere. Then baby comes along, tired of being there or with them and then I have nothing to do, it’s dark and it’s just me, him, and this icky kitchen and table area.