Its_All.Lost
Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

May the odds be ever in your favor

Sweet. Yes. Fate actually worked for me this time, if you can fathom that. I had a Samsung Note 8 tablet, which I loved. The S-Pen is great, it’s what made me decide to get a Note 5 phone. Well this last Father’s Day at like 3am during one of my awesome morning stints the fucking thing fell over. I have been trying to better myself and got back to lifting weights (which I’ve also already dropped HA) and I decided since I was up that I should be productive and lift. So as I stood there with a barbell a cockroach crawled across the floor. I decided in my infinite wisdom to try and step on it. During so (which I failed to do) I hit the ottoman the tablet was standind on, yes standing – I am an idiot. It rocked. Tablet fell. It tipped right over and smack. Crack. Shattered the screen right above the power button. Fucking sweet.

So I looked around and found on eBay, a replacement screen for $30 and a battery for $25 plus the chance that I would fuck it up, or that it would never be the same again because let’s face it eBay is chinese shit. I decided to see what it would be like to put in a claim with my carrier. Well the tablet isn’t made anymore, and it’s old. Duh, it’s not made anymore. So they wont refurb it. They’ll swapp it for a Galaxy Tab S2. What? Yes. They’ll swap a currently rated $180 tablet with a currently rated $400 tablet. Fucking sweet sauce. I’ll take it. No swapping a battery, no swapping a screen and removing adhesive. And now no longer stuck on Android 4.1! I get Marshmallow now! For once something bad turned out to be good. That’s fucking rare…

Bringing back the old laptop

Spray Lubricant
Spray Lubricant
So I have a laptop, it’s an older one. A Toshiba Tecra, decent machine Intel i5 2.somethingGhz, 3GB RAM and a laptop that was free. BOOM. Sad part is that the palm rests were a little worn. I had cleaned them with some rubbing alcohol but all that accomplished was making the pads turn white from no more oils in the plastic. They were already white which is why I was cleaning them, just cleaned too good I guess haha.

So how to solve this? Well I know liquid silicone will do the trick, but I don’t have any. I have used it on car parts before with good results. So I had the next best thing, a Headlight Restoration kit. I used the spray lubricant from the kit to bring back the plastic on the laptop. I wish I had a better before picture but I didn’t think about it till after I applied the first coat. But trust me it does work, and it does not leave an oily finish either. Lets see how long it will last.

Before
Before
After
After

Note 5 and Bluetooth

So I have an AT&T Note 5, love(d) it. I have had it now for a few months. Love the stylus and I originally thought it would be too big, but its actually a great size. Note a good size if you are a one handed phone user. It does have a single hand mode, but you still can’t reach the hard buttons. Anyways, Bluetooth. The range on this thing was great with my headset. I would get 30 feet easy with no distortion. Was fucking tits. What happened? Everyone else is saying its related to the Gear S2 watch which cannot be true. I got my phone and watch the same day, never had an issue till 5.1.1. I’m positive thats what killed my BT. Fucking sucks. The watch is now practically useless. If it can’t connect to the phone to send and receive data what fucking good is it? I’m holding out for the 6.0 MM update to see if it fixes it, otherwise I’m bitchibg at AT&T. So tired of these sleeper “you must install” updates, they ALWAYS break shit. Funny enough it’s usually around the time of the launch of another phone. Cause you know, people need a new cellphone every 3-6 months. Fucking stupid.

Update: Got the 6.0 update and all is right in the world. Bluetooth range issue is resolved for me. Fucking sweet. 

Upgrading PHP on ClearOS (Part 1)

I need php higjer than 5.4 for a project. ClesrOS isn’t using 5.4+. Bastards. So here is my atyempt at upgesfing php on clearos 7. Some shit went vad during the upgrade,  i lost my original post which was more detailed. Typing this on my cell, I’ll clean up later. But for now here it is. Its a mess. 

http://www.clearos.com/resources/documentation/clearos/content:en_us:kb_howtos_upgrading_to_php_5.5.x

yum –enablerepo=clearos-updates-testing update

About 40 or so update it seems…hung up on kernel.x86_64 0:3.10.0-327.10.1.v7…then had dependency issues with libnatpmp. Hey at least it’s only one. And it has to do with Transmission. Which cannot be found in the repo’s, naturally. Which is for NAT routing.

Can’t install with yum, wont find it. Seem to vaguely remember this issue before, and maybe with Plex. Anyways found an RPM for Fedora EPEL7, gonna try that.

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=712607

run testting update again

hanging on kernel again, dependency issues? …. NO! Woo hoo fixed the issue. Now to download 47mb of updates and hope the system doesn’t break!

Here’s where shit goes bad. I staryed the updates and they went ok. I saw the errors the other page mentioned, ok. All done it was. Complete it said. But the instructions say to reboot, which I had to cause the phpinfo page was still showing php 5.4. I rebooted. Which I fucking hate doing, because ClearOS can never seem to get an IP address from my modem when I do. Then I am stuck doing the IP dance. Fuck that noise. But I had to. 

Reboot went ok, fucker even tried to say I had an IP still, which I now believe was true. But the net wasn’t working. Nothing. So I spent an hour trying to get an IP from my modem. Nothing. At this point I am pissed off, and fuck ClearOS.

I connected my “emergency rotuer” and hopped on the web looking for a ClearOS alternative. Fucking shit. There isn’t one, and I just couldn’t come to terms with rolling my own. I need an easy way to manage IP addresses. I looked into some others but nothing debian or even centos based was any good for me. Everything is BSD. Don’t want that. Don’t know it. Don’t wanna learn it. So I reluctantly reinstalled ClearOS 7.2. No, its still having fucking problems. And now I am down to php 5.4 again. Fuck. 

I’ll edit this post later and clesn it up but for now…i was able to updste to php 5.5.33 but i lost all connections to the outside. Not 100% sure this was thr case but i am hanging it on a solid hunch. Back to square one. 

MAME on a PCDUINO Nano Lite (AllWinner A20)

So I am going to attempt to “catalog” this project as I do it. Yeah I know, the first fucking time, ever. If it happens we’ll see, jury’s out.

So I have a AllWinner a20 PCDUINO Nano Lite that I snagged for $15 bucks a while back, and its been collecting dust ever since then. Haven’t done shit with this super ardunio-half-pi. Yay me. I wanted an arcade cabinet and this was here so bam diggity! I decided to try and purpose it for this task and since it happens to have a SATA port on it and I happen to have a 250GB SATA drive sitting here… Who’da fucking though eh? Perfect for MAME, its got all the space too (thats what she said).

So.. Ubuntu 12.07 Linaro, precise.

In case you wanted to know, df -h gets me:

I am following this guide https://www.anavi.org/article/177/. He gets all the credit.

I used Filezilla to copy all of my CHDs and ROMS over to the hard drive on the pcduino. Getting that setup was hella easy. Won’t cover it here.

Always sudo apt-get update (it always seems to give errors for some packages on the pcduino, i just have never bothered to removed them from the list).

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev libgnome2-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxv-dev libxv1

I installed 28.5mg of new crap and took up 83.9 overall, not bad so far.

That last edit was quote a ways down..

Build the source code

…and that too for fucking ever. Jesus.

xmame.x11 roms/starfir2.zip

It works! But requires lightdm to be running. Need to figure out how to ditch the desktop if I can.
Dude on the tut page recommends using the gflags -ah 720 -ws 5 to adjust the resolution.

-ah height, -arbheight depth
Scale video to exactly this height (0 = disable).

-ws xaspect, -widthscale xaspect
Set X-Scale aspect ratio.

-b depth, -bpp depth
Specify the colordepth the core should render, one of: 0 (auto), 8, 16.

-ah 720 -ws 5 -b 16
all the commands here

Basically, the dude has it all right, easy peasy. For once. Follow his guide and you should get a working xmame emulator. No fancy GUI or anything but it does work. Not sure it will work for what I want. I do not think so. I want a nice easy to navigate GUI to be able to use from the cabinet hardware. Not a keyboard and mouse. There seems to be a few of those exact things available for the Pi so I will probably go the unwanted route of using the Pi2 with a USB hub and a USB hard drive. Which fucking sucks. I wanted to use the built-in SATA port. That was the whole fucking point. But I am not about to reinvent the wheel. I will adjust lanes.