Archive for the ‘Gripes’ Category

Da Vinci Reversed Text For PC

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Well, I am not satisfied until I discover something acceptable for my goal.  This goal would be to reverse all of the English text on my Windows PC in a manner consistent with Da Vinci’s unique backwards-right-to-left writing style.  It’s done for other languages on Windows, so I don’t see why it couldn’t be done on English with some kind of a hack.

Somehow, I think reversing the video output horizontally (mirrored) would achieve a decent result without any side-effects other than EVERYTHING being horizontally reverse (including images and buttons, and all UI elements).  However, then I would have to get used to moving the mouse cursor to the left when I want to go right, and right when I wanted to go left.  Unless of course, there is a way to invert the mouse’s horizontal directions as well.

The closest thing I’ve found is a Da Vinci backwards font.  However, this doesn’t achieve the result of making all text read right-to-left.  Besides, the system actually uses many different fonts, and making it hacked to use a single font like that would take a lot of work, and make it darn near boring.

If you have any ideas I could try, please let me know!

Like 

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Gripes | No Comments »

iPhone Totally iPhailed And Wouldn’t Boot!

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Well, guess what.  Another iPhailure.  I had seen some recent updates in RockApp and I was definitely skeptical about if they’d not cause problems.  Apparently after today I did some research and it turns out that the updates were causing widespread problems.  Serious problems.

Now I’m not talking about just making stuff crash or not work.  I’m talking about full blown serious issues…not being able to boot!  I would see the iPhone show the Apple logo and then about 5 seconds later it would just shut off again.  Even more serious was that when I put the phone into DFU (Device Firmware Update) Mode, it would fail when trying to restore the firmware to factory settings.

It’s funny thinking about the way this all happened.  It seemed so innocuous…so innocent.  I was working with it just fine.  Then I was prompted by somebody to enter their phone number quickly into my phone for safe-keeping.  I entered it into my SBSettings Fast Notes as I do a lot of things when I want to jot something down super quick.  When I thought I’d just leave the fast notes open and hit the sleep button, I didn’t realize that the darn thing would leave the on-screen keyboard up!  This was a big problem….I couldn’t use the phone any longer since the stupid keyboard blocked my view of the unlock slider!

What I ended up doing made my heart sink with what happened next.  I went to go shut it off….slid my finger across the screen to confirm shut-off…and waited.  Then when I turned it on again, it wouldn’t boot.  I got the results described above.  At first it seemed I had messed it up by shutting it down with that keyboard still up…but that really doesn’t make any sense.  After looking online for a solution to my problem, I found it was a huge issue due to a recent Rock update.  Great…the one I had installed.  The one that seemed to be working just fine.  But I hadn’t actually powered the phone down and up again until this moment.

So what did I do to fix it?  I tried a LOT of things.  Took me a couple of hours to finally get it sorted out to where I could restore the thing.  Of course restoring it was a last resort to me because I didn’t want to lose my files, and restoring all my apps and settings is a pain.  I had to try everything I could find before deciding that I should just restore it.

First I remember trying to use the iH8Sn0w iREB v3.1-2 for Windows.  First I thought I’d try the Recovery Boot Loop fix…which all it did after I got the libUSB installed and clicked the button for my iPhone 3G was reboot and still shut off.  Then I tried the actual iREB app and clicked my 3G iPhone button, and it didn’t appear to do anything.  Then I downloaded and tried iRecovery for Windows.  At first I thought it failed, but then I read the README.TXT file which said it was supposed to be run from a command prompt window.

iRecovery had two options.  To upload a file, or to start up a shell.  So I started up a shell.  The shell might have been able to do something to fix the darn thing, but I don’t know enough about doing that stuff.  I had tried to use some commands that I found online:

setenv auto-boot true
saveenv
fsboot

Doing this didn’t seem to do anything, but I’m thinking it may have contributed to making the restore work.  After those commands I typed in the “reboot” command and watched it reboot and then shut off.  So at that point I decided to try a restore again, which also failed.  Then…this might be the only thing which was necessary: I rebooted the phone into Recovery mode & was able to restore a custom firmware file to the phone. For those who don’t know… Recovery mode is entered when you boot the phone like so: press and hold both the Home button AND the sleep button for about 12-13 seconds…then while still holding the Home button, release the sleep button once the image on the screen pops up, – still hold the Home button about 10 seconds until iTunes says that there’s been an iPhone detected in recovery mode.

Also for those who don’t know, you can download a custom firmware file to your iPhone by SHIFT-CLICKING the Restore button in iTunes (that’s holding down the shift key while left-clicking).

A fair warning which many would already know if they jailbroke their iPhone, but worth mentioning: DO NOT update to the latest official Apple iPhone firmware (3.1.3).  It contains no new features, and nothing was done to it that is worth updating.  If you like your iPhone jailbroken as I do, then do yourself a favor and pay attention and special care to NEVER update the iPhone to that version.  A friend of mine did it by accident and he cannot jailbreak his phone anymore.

Like 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Gripes | No Comments »

CenturySmell vs CenturyStink!

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

********************************************
EDIT 3-29-2010: The following is a former
expression of how I felt about CenturyLink.
Since the time of writing, CenturyLink got on
the ball and fixed the problem and made it right.
*********************************************

Well, I told somebody about my gripes and rantings on my blog here, and I just realized they would have to dig through to find them because all of my more recent blogs were actually trying to be rather up beat.

So I present to you, … another rant about CenturyLink (yes, they changed their name). I had my pet(or pet-peeved) name for CenturyTel, it was CenturySmell. Then they recently changed it to CenturyLink, which I of course call CenturyStink.

Am I serious about my disdain for this company? Oh you bet I am. The company royally screwed over my parents. They took something like 6 months before they FINALLY ported his business phone numbers out to our new phone service. In the process they cost him hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars.

I have my own complaints about the company too. They have their own stupid mini-contracts that they never tell you about. I got DSL internet a few years ago on my own phone line, then when I moved, I couldn’t just switch the service to my new location, they had to charge me a cancellation fee…which I couldn’t pay, and I didn’t need the internet at the new place anyway, so I was really wanting to just drop them, but nooooo, they had to tell me I was under a contract and had to pay an early termination fee to cancel it early. Eventually I got the family there to take over the service, so I got out of it. Still, they have no right to act like a freaking cell phone company.

On the list of other dings on CenturyStink’s record, are CRAPPY internet, TERRIBLE customer service, and non-existant repair. They sell us an internet speed of 10megabits/second, and they don’t even bother to pro-rate it when their stupid techs bump it all the way down to 3.5mbit/sec so they can supposedly “fix the disconnects”. They didn’t FIX it… they made it WORSE. It disconnects nearly 30 times a day, or else at least acts completely retarded 30 times or more a day. They always say we’re the only ones having this problem, and that it is probably because we’re so far out from their office, which is …what,…a MILE exactly maybe? Golly… if they can’t make 3.5 megabit/sec work without problems just 1 mile away, I wonder what it’s like right in their office…probably 40% uptime!

I know we’re not the only ones with crappy DSL service from them. They also refuse to come out and look at the situation anymore. They figure they replace the modem (which doesn’t fix anything). They come in and make sure that the “Auto-Reconnect” feature is turned on, and that’s it…. now they don’t even come out.

Tell me CenturyStink… if we’re the only ones with this problem, then you obviously have the time to come and look at our issue and fix it right? Except they don’t know HOW to fix it, because they’re not as bright as they claim to be. I hate living out here where there’s no quality options for things like internet. I’m going to move elsewhere as soon as I can!



Like 

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Gripes, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

New Gripes From The Grump

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Grumpy gripes are back!  If you were missing the whole umpitygrumpity gripey gruffness, well…you’re about to see some more.

I’m driving down the road eating a simple little Powerbar Protein Plus.  I look down and what do I see?  A flippin little piece of the candy bar on my pants.  Can I scrape it off before it melts itself permanently into my nice khakis?  Nope!  It’s already too late.  There goes another perfectly good pair of pants and it’s all because candy bars all fricken hate me.

I mean, I suppose I could try and be more careful.  Naw..I mean, shoot, I am pretty careful already.  I guess pants should just be more indestructible.  They can make pants wrinkle-free (which I want some by the way), but they can’t make them stain-proof?  Come on.  If there are good looking affordable pants that resist wrinkles and stains both, please let me know.  I just freakin hate stains.

Now let me begin on another gripe.  This involves internet that costs like $50 a month for residential service.  You would imagine, at that price a person would have pretty dang good internet service.  Wow, I mean, what a price to pay. We get 10 mbit/sec download speed and hmm maybe 3 1/4ths of an mbit/sec up speed.  Sure the down speed is nice.  The games don’t play so nice though.  The connection is just as crappy for me as for Shane’s 1.5 mbit/sec service from the same company.  It offers laggy multiplayer gaming, and what – …disconnects to boot!

I sit here using my web browser and email and what-not for a while, and I kid you not.  I’ve had to reset this dumb connection about 10 times tonight.  What on earth causes the stupid thing to go off that much in the first place?  It’s not wireless!  I just don’t understand.  CenturyTel’s networks really SUCK.  If they don’t do something to fix the internet around here so that uptime is more than 75%, …I’m gonna crack….CRACK!  I’ll go bonkers!

I wish internet could be something with more options to choose from around here.  CenturyTel is the best we’ve got.  Doesn’t that SUCK like…royally?  CenturyTel….you are one lousy service provider, and money grubbing greedy to boot.  TO BOOT!  I wish we could totally give you the BOOT!  SUCKY company.  YOU SUCK.

Like 

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Gripes | No Comments »