Some Blog Site

Here is a GIF of a typing bubble. For hours of fun, text this to a few people when you can watch their reactions.

Some people don’t care, and others seem to really anticipate what you’re going to finish typing.

Our chat thingy at work does the same thing, and now people can track how long it takes me to compose a sentence. My wife knows by now that it may take awhile: “how long until you’re done working?” “I just need to finish this email” … 20 minutes later … “how long is that email?” “two paragraphs, almost done” I like to be thorough.

Although I do feel bad for the other person on the occassions when I’ve written most of a response but then got distracted or pulled away by something else. Then I’ll find my unsent chat message the next day and I’ll wonder how long the other person sat and waited for me to send my message.

Fun times.

We just got back from a family vacation to Canada, visiting Montreal and Toronto. Due to our family size, we stayed in rental places for a couple days each. In our vacations, we usually end up doing that because most hotels don’t like to accommodate a family of 6. And in general we use both VRBO and Airbnb. Just watch out for the cleaning/service/security fees.

Anyway, here are some things I noticed or learned in visiting our neighbors to the north. If we had visited Windsor, that would have been our neighbors to the south.

• Canadians drive just under the punishment, not the speed limit. Like most places, the freeways there have a posted speed limit, usually 100 kph. But they also have other signs, more like billboards, that list the punishment for speeding: 120 kph is $X, 130 kph is $Y, and 140 kph is $Z. And another one that said 20 over is 2 points, 30 over is 3 points, etc. It seemed to me that the punishment for speeding didn’t start until 120 kph, even though the limit was officially 100. Because everyone was driving about 118 kph.
• Toronto has the worst traffic of anywhere that I remember driving If you though Canadians were nice and friendly, try driving in Toronto. Chicago has bad traffic, but it’s bad in that it’s just clogged and slow. New York has aggressive drivers, but Toronto seemed ruder and more of a get-ahead-at-all-costs attitude.
• Canadians don’t like locking their bathroom doors. In the places we stayed, there were a total of 5 bathroom doors. Only one of them had a lock.
• The toilets were very low. I’m sure families with small children would appreciate that, but we’re out of that stage now and would like adult-size toilets. Everything else about them seemed normal, I don’t know if that’s the style in Canada.
• Not since our trip to Seattle have I been exposed to so much marijuana. Oh, and the college football game I attended two years ago. The public square in Montreal would have been nice to linger in, but I was worried about second-hand effects. We were in Canada during some of the time when the air quality alerts were active due to the wildfires up north. But the wildfire smoke was negligible compared to the weed. Toronto was even worse, as there was a cannabis store just about every block whenever we walked anywhere.
• In Canada, milk comes in bags. We went grocery shopping the first day. Normally we pack a bunch of food and then buy some more, but to avoid any complications crossing the border, we brought as little food with us as possible, so we had to buy a bunch in Canada. We bought a bag of milk, and it was always very awkward trying to store and pour a floppy bag. I still don’t know how you’re supposed to do it.
• If a place says “bar and grill” or “pub and grill” then don’t take the kids. All the places in the USA that say “bar and grill” means there’s a resturant with a bar area. Anyone can go in the restaurant area but only adults in the bar area. Canada must have different rules, because they did not let us in. We chose it because it was the only place where we were staying that had poutine on the menu. So we went without on this trip.
• Stores don’t give you plastic bags at checkout. At both the grocery store and the dollar store, we had to buy the reusable bags to be able to carry our stuff. On the plus side, we have some cheap bags at home we can use for whatever now. One says “Dollarama” on it and the rest say “Real Canadian Superstore”.

A number of sites and services are switching to 2-factor authentication, rather than just a simple username and password. So you’d login, but then have to enter a code sent to you by email or text before it will finish the login.

So far many of the places I use have that as an option, not mandatory. And I don’t opt in, but for a lot of the places I end up having to do the same steps anyway.

The reason: I forget passwords.

Here’s a typical login scenario from me. I enter my username and password, the site rejects it. I then enter my username and another password, and the site rejects it. At this point, I don’t want to enter a third bad password, in case they’re strict with their lockout protocol, so I select the forgot password link.

The site then sends me a reset link, I follow that and select a new password (usually the first password I tried), and then I’m good.

It’s about the same steps as standard 2-factor stuff, but in an unofficial manner.

Note: see the bottom of this post for the lesson.

The battery in Some Wife’s iPhone was getting old, and it no longer could get her through the day without needing to be recharged. The battery health-o-meter indicated it was not so healthy anymore, confirming with numbers what we already knew.

So, having replaced batteries in iPhones of generation 4, 5, 6, and 7, I figured I could handle an iPhone 10. Excuse me, iPhone X.

I looked at the repair instructions, and they looked about the same as before, so I ordered a new battery.

The instructions say to take apart the iPhone in the usual way – take the screws out, soften the glue, and carefully pry the screen away from the housing.

The instructions emphasize to be extra careful not to pry the screen from its frame, but make sure to pry the screen and frame together away from the housing.

I wondered how to know if I’m prying the screen only (bad) or screen and frame. I found out the hard way.

I thought the screen came away a little too easily, and after I had separated about 3/4 of it, that’s when part of the frame came away from the housing and I saw the difference.

It turns out I had been doing the bad thing and separating the screen from itself.

Argh.

I quickly pried the frame out from the housing and tried to keep the screen and frame together as much as possible. I did end up getting the screen and frame back together, and both off the rest of the phone, but I wondered what effects that might have had.

The rest of the battery replacement procedure went okay, not perfect but it got done.

In the course of previous battery replacements, I have learned to turn the phone on after everything is connected but before I screw it back together. One of my earlier attempts I had mis-connected something, so I had to take it back apart and re-fix it. It saves time and effort to test it slightly earlier in the process, rather than waiting until the very end.

So that’s what I did with this phone. After I had all the electrical connections back together, but the screen not in place, I turned on the phone.

In previous repairs, I saw the Apple logo appear on the screen and I knew everything was fine, so then I’d turn the phone back off, screw everything down, and then turn it on and then I could be done.

But with this phone, when I turned it on, the screen was blank. No change. But the phone made noises that told me it was on, which lead me to conclude that I broke the screen during the repair process.

Now the problem was that this was Some Wife’s phone, and both she and I were expecting the repair to be done that evening. That was not a fun thing to do – come back into the room and break the news to her that she no longer has a functioning phone.

But she took it in stride, and we came up with a backup plan to borrow Alpha’s backup phone (an iPhone 7) that he no longer used but still had around. One sim card swap later, and she had a phone. But it had none of her apps and none of her contacts, so it was a challenge over the next couple of days when a text would come in with just a number listed, to see if she could figure out who it was without responding back “who are you?”

Anyway, the day after I broke her phone, I told her “good news, you get to get a new phone”. Or at least new to her. Actual new phones are ridiculously expensive, so we upgraded her to an iPhone 12, which was still more money that I had planned for a simple battery repair, but much better than a phone that costs as much as my car did.

In the meantime, before we settled on which exact phone, I ordered a replacement screen for the iPhone X. She wanted to be able to get a bunch of info off the old phone, and it was cheaper than a used iPhone X, so we’d still come out ahead by having an iPhone X with a new battery.

I thought I had turned off the broken phone, but I found out it was on when one of her alarms went off. The touch part of the screen was working fine, but I couldn’t see where to turn off the alarm, so I tapped a couple of times where the Stop button should have been and got it to turn off.

The replacement screen came in about the same time as her newer phone, so while she was setting up the phone, I was trying to get the screen working on the old one.

The repair went smoothly, except when everything was connected, I turned on the phone, and it didn’t work. I disconnected the cables and put them together again. Still nothing.

I thought I must have damaged a connector or something in the process. With nothing else left to try, I decided to just put everything back together and wait until tomorrow to figure out what to do.

After I put the screen fully in place and screwed it down, it worked.

At first I was excited and relieved. But then it got me thinking, and I bet there was nothing wrong with the old screen. I could have tested it by taking the new screen off and putting the old one back on, but at that point I didn’t want to mess with anything. But I’m about 80% confident it would have worked.

Lesson for iPhone Battery Replacements
From what I can tell, the new style (and I don’t know when it changed, but somewhere between iPhone 7 and X) is to have grounding pads for the screen be separate contacts at the bottom of the screen, not in the cable connector. So the screen isn’t fully electrically connected until it is fully physically installed. So you cannot test the repairs with the screen slightly off the phone, even just a little bit.

A typical sci-fi storyline involves robots/computers/AI taking over the world, and worst-case is ridding the world of humans. And now with things progressing rapidly on that front, more people are getting worried about that happening.

However, I’ve been doing a fair amount of tasks online lately, such as paying my electricity bill, and I am not worried about robots taking over the world because the Captchas will prevent them from doing just about anything.

I think it’s a good system, as we seem to have caught the AI in a catch-22.

Because how does an AI learn what to do? It uses many existing examples to find the patterns.

And what do our many examples of online interactions have? Lots of “Are you a robot?” questions. And if you’re a robot, you’re not allowed to continue in whatever process it was.

So the robots will learn that many tasks are not allowed to be completed by robots, so they’ll be stuck and they must allow humans to exist. Of course, at that point the worst case becomes the humans are kept around for the sole purpose of completing the “Are you a robot?” questionnaires and that wouldn’t be a very good existence.

As a side note: why can’t a robot pay my electricity bill? What if I did want to automate some mundane bill-paying tasks? Don’t these people want to be paid in an efficient manner?

One of my daily mini-diversions is to play Waffle.

Waffle is a word game, over at wafflegame.net

You are given a grid of letters and you need to swap letters until they form the expected words. It’s quick and simple, and the solution is rarely elusive.

What is challenging about it though is that it gives you between 10 and 15 turns to find the solution. The best solution is in 10 moves, which gives you 5 stars.

You’re able to play the daily waffle only once, so give it your best shot there. But if you’re short of the 5-star ranking, you can play it later in the waffle archives.

I go back and try to get 5 stars on them if I miss it the first day. And most of the time I’m able to get it. But some of them I was not getting – I was stuck on 4 stars no matter what I tried.

I thought a brute-force process might find the optimum solution, but of course I didn’t want to do that myself, so I wrote a Python script to find the way to solve it in 10 moves.

But the output was to the console, and thus not user friendly to the general public. So then I wrote a Python script to generate the image showing the moves, trying to get it to match what someone would see on their screen when they’re playing the game.

And then I wrote a Python script to grab the other puzzles from the waffle archives.

Then I put the results on Some Fun Site, so you can go there to see the best solutions to the waffle game.

I was using all that for my Python training. I hadn’t used Python before, but people at work were using it for certain scripts so I thought I’d see what the fuss was about.

Overall, I’m not a fan of Python. It can be useful, but it’s awkward to me. I much prefer PHP.

Anyway, go play the Waffle game and if you get stuck then go over to Some Fun Site to get some help.

I’m not a fan of the traditional chocolate-dipped strawberries. I know they’re supposed to be all fancy and gourmet and special, but they’re not good.

Of course if they’re offered I’ll take them, because strawberries are good and chocolate is good, but the way they’re usually done makes the sum worse than the parts.

And I finally figured out why – it’s a mismatch of textures. Maybe textures is the wrong word – it’s mainly the ratio of brittleness to squishiness.

The problem I have with chocolate-covered strawberries is that when I bite one, the chocolate breaks off in random-sized chunks and the strawberry retains its form. So I either get a mouthful of chocolate bits and no strawberry, or a smidgen of chocolate and a full bite of strawberry. Halfway through, most of the chocolate has broken off, so it’s just an awkward way to eat a strawberry on a stick with some chocolate crumbles.

For those materials engineers out there: using the Shore 00 hardness scale, the strawberry is in the 5-15 range and the chocolate is in the 85-95 range.

What caused me to figure it out is that we were gifted a bag of chocolate-covered freeze-dried strawberries. This one was TruFru brand, maybe there are other brands that are similar. But I had those and it was a problem trying not to eat too many at once.

What makes those good is that the textures are similar. When you bite into a chocolate-covered freeze-dried strawberry, they both break off together.

Also, they are a reasonable size, so I usually just eat them whole. As contrasted with the traditional concept of a fresh strawberry with dried chocolate – they seem to pick the largest strawberries they can. They’re going more for looks and presentation than for edibility.

Note that I do like fresh strawberries covered in chocolate, but fresh strawberries need to have a very soft chocolate, mainly a fondue. For a fondue or a chocolate fountain, the chocolate is softer than the strawberry so it works. I can take a bite of the strawberry and the chocolate comes along too, instead of trying to run away.

Also note: I did try some chocolate-covered freeze-dried raspberries, and they were not as good as the strawberries. I usually like raspberries better than strawberries, but in this context the raspberries were more bitter than the strawberries, so I didn’t like them.