The Diary of A Simple Man

Google Plus and Dreamwidth

2018-10-18T15:33:23Z

Since Google announced their plans to shutter Google Plus, I've been part of a group there that's trying to find the best alternative. Here's something I'm posting there today:

I'd like to suggest considering a social media site that hasn't been talked about here, as far as I know: Dreamwidth.

Dreamwidth has been operating for eleven years now. It has circles, communities, tags, the ability to follow or be followed *without* "friending", and it has an active and generally friendly body of users. It's not swarmed with memes, or at least the parts that I see aren't. You can create different views that will allow you to see posts from specified groups of friends or communities. Privacy controls are outstanding, and the service as a whole is *very* easy to use.

It's ad-free. There are free accounts, and there is no posting limit. There are also paid accounts; they get the additional option of searching their posts internally.

They keep out spammers quite effectively. Their policies on free speech are enlightened; when the Russian government started enforcing restrictive and homophobic policies on LiveJournal, many users migrated to Dreamwidth.

The code is a fork of LiveJournal code. It was set up by ex-LiveJournal staffers, and they have continued to update and improve it. Journals can be imported to other LJ-code-based sites, and posts can be automatically copied elsewhere at your option. You the option of logging in via OpenID.

It's not perfect. There's a mobile app for LJ-type sites, but it doesn't work very well. I use the browser on my Android to post there instead, but that's not ideal.

As far as I know, there's no way to download your data - although you can mirror your posts on LJ-based sites.

Here's my Dreamwidth journal, although most of the posts are private and won't show; I've had a couple of stalkers over the years, although as far as I know neither was actually a Dreamwidth user.

https://bobquasit.dreamwidth.org/

And here's the Wikipedia entry about the site. I do think it's worth considering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamwidth

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This Modern Age

2018-09-17T15:18:28Z

Our internet service is from Comcast Xfinity. And the WiFi has been absolutely terrible. Constant freeze-ups, slow-downs, and sudden shifting to low resolution images. It happens on Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, and it's almost all the time. Every time I called Comcast about it, they'd reset the signal. That helped for a day at most, and then we were back to the same shitty service.

So I went to the store. The clerk recommended I buy a router to replace the Xfinity one. It was pricey, but I figured it would be worth it. We stream a lot. In fact, we hardly ever watch broadcast TV. The only reason we get TV from Comcast at all is because they'd charge us more for just internet.

But our WiFi remained terrible.

This didn't make sense to me. My place isn't that big. Comcast had refused to give us a second wired connection to the TV, but the router was still less than 20 feet away from the TV - albeit one floor up. No matter how I aimed the router's antennae, the WiFi signal never stayed good for long.

So I went back to the store. The clerk recommended a range extender. It was pricey, but I had bought a large-screen TV a few months ago and I'm already paying for Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube Red; I figured it would be worth it.

Still our WiFi remained terrible. I tried moving the range-extender around, But no matter where I put it, our signal was totally unreliable. Drops, long pauses, low resolution...all the time.

Maybe you know how utterly frustrating it is when you're really into a show, and suddenly it freezes and that damned "loading" circle appears - only to be replaced after a few minutes with "Signal lost, check your internet connection". I grew up in the age of broadcast TV and rabbit ears, and I swear that our signal was much more reliable back then. And it was free!

So I went back to the store. The clerk suggested I set up a mesh network; he said that would fix the problem for sure. But it was pricey. Too pricey. It was $500, and I just didn't have that kind of money to blow on TV any more. So I bought a fifty-foot ethernet cable for $14.99. We went home, plugged one end into the router, ran the cable down the stairs and plugged the other end into the TV.

I've never seen such a crystal-clear picture. And not a single pause in the last two days!

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Phone decided

2018-08-06T04:46:02Z

I ended up going for a Pixel XL. It's brand new, and only $309; what's more, the version I'm getting has 128GB (!) of storage. That's four times more storage than any other phone I've owned!

I was worried for a moment that it would be a locked phone, but a quick query of the seller confirmed that it is unlocked, fully AT&T compatible, and the US edition of the phone. I'm feeling positive about this.

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Phone

2018-08-04T20:01:35Z

Recently I heard about what sounded like a great deal: a refurbished Pixel 1 for $199. So I ordered one. The company selling them was called Woot.

My current phone is a discontinued South Korean model. It's usable, but limited and VERY slippery. There's no cover that will fit it.

When the phone arrived, I tried to peel the plastic film off the screen. To my surprise, the screen itself wasn't fully attached; it was entirely detached from the lower left corner, and I could literally see inside the phone. It had clearly been dropped, hard, on that corner. There was visible damage inside. The phone worked, apparently, but had clearly been "refurbished" in the shoddiest way imaginable.

On further investigation, the screen turned out to be detached from the entire lower half of the phone. I did some research, and found that Woot had been acquired some time ago by Amazon. It seems that Amazon uses Woot to sell garbage that they can't or won't sell on Amazon itself.

And this phone was literally garbage. So I contacted Woot and told them I'd be returning it for a full refund. They sent me a prepaid return label, and I shipped it back.

The thing is, I still want a new phone. I won't buy a used or refurbished phone, and I'll certainly never buy anything from Woot again. I don't want to spend what it will cost to buy a new new phone - not directly from a manufacturer, anyway. But there are new-in-box older model phones available on eBay.

Here's what I'm considering:

A Pixel (1) XL - an excellent camera, but will only get Android updates for another year at most. And the manufacturer, Google, is a company I no longer like or trust.

An Essential phone. Titanium and ceramic, and not manufactured by Google. It has virtually no bezel, but that's a negative; my current phone has a tiny bezel, and it's actually a drawback. My palm isn't that fat, but it still tends to bulge around the edge enough to cause the screen to get confused or fail to respond. I never had that problem with a normal cellphone, by the way.

Last is an older OnePlus phone. I don't know much about that.

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Twitter hacked

2014-02-21T18:35:53Z

My Twitter account was apparently hacked by a Russian - at least, they posted a bunch of things in Russian to my Twitter account. Those tweets were mirrored to LiveJournal (but not Dreamwidth) automatically. I've deleted the original tweets and the LJ mirror-post. I've also taken a number of enhanced security steps to resecure my Twitter account.

It's almost not worth it. I don't really USE Twitter. It just grabs some of the stuff I post elsewhere. If something like this happens again, I'll just delete my Twitter account.

As far as I can tell, nothing else has been compromised. What I don't understand is how my Twitter account got compromised in the first place!

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G+ Link

2013-10-30T00:14:44Z

Google just sent me a custom URL for my G+ account. It's google.com/+PeterMaranci. Handy!

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