The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Rants

And kvetching, too

  • Verizon FiOS: What’s the Real Price?

    So FiOS has finally arrived here in the hinterlands and the latest teaser deal is $70/month for 10/2 Internet and anywhere-in-the-US VOIP. The ad mailers always tout the blazing speed (although that’s not what they offer in the teaser) and voice clarity.

    But there’s an asterisk: the prices are always “plus taxes and fees”.

    So I called the FiOS order line (877-896-2263) with two simple questions:

    • What, exactly, are those taxes and fees?
    • What, exactly, will they add up to each month?

    After five minutes of telling the nice man everything they already know about me and giving him permission to read their own records of our account, I managed to push him off his script long enough to get a word in edgewise.

    He tells me that the taxes and fees depend on my exact location and the services I sign up for. I point out that we’ve just established my address and he should know what services he’s offering, soooo what’s the price?

    We go around and around:

    • He says the only way to find out is to sign up and get my first bill
    • I refuse to buy something without knowing the price

    Eventually he offers to transfer me to billing, where he says (and I have no reason to doubt) that they’ll certainly tell me the same thing. Sounds like a good idea to me, if only to get to the next screen. He’s obviously miffed that I’m not following my lines in his script and just buying FiOS like a good sheeple.

    I hear the usual beeps & boops, a snippet of their on-hold blather, and dead silence. Ten seconds later, the call disconnects and I get the usual “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again” message.

    They don’t care. They don’t have to. They’re the phone company.

    Right now we’re getting 13/2 Internet from Cablevision (aka Optimum Online) for $50 and a Verizon landline for $25.

    Let’s see: slower Internet and marginally cheaper phone service, plus the asterisk. Not a compelling value proposition in our situation. But, then, we’re cheapskates.

    Incidentally, the “taxes and fees” make up $10.61 of this month’s $25.09 phone bill. I have good reason to believe that if we buy two services from Verizon, the fees will add up to $20 or so. But there’s no way to find out without buying them first, of course.

    I’m seriously thinking of killing the damn landline and struggling along with VOIP and our $5/month cellphone.

    Update: Today’s mail brings an even better teaser with a different phone number: 877-896-5322. It’s still $70/month for a one-year “agreement”, but now with free activation and a $100 cash card and they guarantee the rate for two years. The kickbacks push it just under $60/month for the first year. Still has that asterisk, though. Not to mention that the offers just keep getting better and better … I’m sure the early adopters are astonished at Verizon’s sliding incentive scale.

    Update 2: If you ignore the flyer and sign up for FiOS via the Verizon website, you get an additional $5/month off and you don’t have to deal with Verizon customer service. That brings it down to $55 plus the dreaded asterisk… I wonder what next month’s mail will bring?

    Update 3: Another flyer and the offer is still $70/month, free activation, and $100 cash back. Somehow I think FiOS uptake around here isn’t living up to their expectations.

  • Spam Proposition

    This flotsam recently washed over the railing. I added the bold highlight:

    Ladies and Gentleman.

    In order to have your company inserted into the registry of World Businesses for 2009/2010, please print, complete and return the enclosed form (PDF file) to the following address:

    WORLD BUSINESS GUIDE
    P.O. Box 2021
    3500 GA Utrecht
    The Netherlands

    register@ — .biz
    FAX: ++31 — — 8107

    Updating is free of charge

    Treating the attached PDF with the same casual nonchalance I use with any lump of high-level radioactive waste, I opened it in The GIMP (to strip any interesting PDF malware) and found an ordinary printable PDF form.

    Surprisingly, it didn’t have any slots for charge card or bank account info, but, down at the bottom, there’s a dense block of fine print.

    I ran it through pdftotext to get the raw text and here’s the kick in the head, boldified for your reading convenience.

    THE SIGNING OF THIS DOCUMENT REPRESENTS THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS AND THE CONDITIONS STATED IN “THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR INSERTION” ON WEBPAGE: WWW.WORLD-BUSINESSGUIDE.COM. THE SIGNING IS LEGALLY BINDING AND GIVES YOU THE RIGHT OF AN INSERTION IN THE ONLINE DATA BASE OF THE WORLD BUSINESS GUIDE, WHICH CAN BE ACCESSED VIA THE INTERNET. A CD ROM WITH WORLDWIDE BUSINESSES IS GRANTED, ALL IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONTRACT CONDITIONS STATED IN “THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR INSERTION” ON WEBPAGE: WWW.WORLDBUSINESSGUIDE.COM. THE VALIDATION TIME OF THE CONTRACT IS THREE YEARS AND STARTS ON THE EIGHTH DAY AFTER SIGNING THE CONTRACT. THE INSERTION IS GRANTED AFTER SIGNING AND RECEIVING THIS DOCUMENT BY THE SERVICE PROVIDER. I HEREBY ORDER A SUBSCRIPTION WITH SERVICE PROVIDER INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORIES LTD “WORLD BUSINESS GUIDE”. I WILL HAVE AN INSERTION INTO ITS DATA BASE FOR THREE YEARS. THE PRICE PER YEAR IS EURO 995. THE SUBSCRIPTION WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY EXTENDED EVERY YEAR FOR ANOTHER YEAR, UNLESS SPECIFIC WRITTEN NOTICE IS RECEIVED BY THE SERVICE PROVIDER OR THE SUBSCRIBER TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE EXPIRATION OF THE SUBSCRIPTION. YOUR DATA WILL BE RECORDED. THE PLACE OF JURISDICTION IN ANY DISPUTE ARISING IS THE SERVICE PROVIDER’S ADDRESS. THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE SERVICE PROVIDER AND THE SUBSCRIBER IS GOVERNED BY THE CONDITIONS STATED IN “THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR INSERTION” ON WEBPAGE: WWW.WORLD-BUSINESSGUIDE.COM

    I haven’t checked out the full T&C, as I doubt I’ll benefit from such a listing.

    This probably works best in large organizations, where one sucker responds to the spam and then the billing department responds automatically to incoming invoices. The two-month advance notice is a really nice touch, isn’t it?

    Why do people continue to fall for this crap? If it didn’t pay off, the spammers would dry up and blow away, so there must be a fresh crop of suckers every day.

    People, stop doing that!

    Update: More on spam and what (not) to do: http://www.spamprimer.com/

  • Mobile Phone Contact List Portability, Lack Thereof

    I just finished re-typing my (admittedly limited) list of contacts, merging the lists from my ancient Virgin Mobile Nokia Shorty and my new-but-defunct Kyocera Marbl into the replacement Marbl.

    These things should be able to bag up their internal representation of my Contacts into some standard interchange format, place that file somewhere, download such a file, and poof be up and running.

    If Virgin wants me to keep buying phones, why do they make it such a pain to start up a new one? Come to think of it, I know why: they don’t make any money on the phones, so they must maximize the phone’s lifetime, while simultaneously touting new features to entice new customers.

    I’m still grumpy from driving too much, even after a mid-morning nap.

  • Technology Oopses

    Driving back from Cabin Fever, we passed the second-most-famous nuclear reactor site in the world.

    After the fly ash spill last month in Tennessee, I’m waiting for calls to immediately shut down all coal-fired plants.

    Maybe that’s like waiting for PETA to start picketing halal butcher shops. In Tehran.

    Driving makes me way grumpy.

  • Cell Phone Web Browsing

    Oh, that Kyocera Marbl from Virgin Mobile I mentioned here? One of its bullet item features is “web browsing“.

    The screen is roughly the size of a large postage stamp and displays text amounting to, in round numbers, five lines of three words each. Graphics are not an appropriate use of screen real estate.

    I have not signed up for a “data pack” to enable cheaper browsing.

    There’s nothing I can say about this that doesn’t sound snarky.

  • Dell GX270 Auto-On Power Setting

    I bought an off-lease Dell Optiplex GX270 from Dell Financial Services (via the highly useful techbargains.com) to update my mother’s PC.

    For the last month I’ve been twiddling it every now & again in preparation for my next visit, plus just letting it run to get some power-on hours under my supervision. You’ll find some of the info on that process earlier in the PC Tweakage category.

    So it’s been booting up automagically at 6:15 am every morning, which is easier for Mom, but every now & again it wakes up dead. This is why I’m doing a month or two of burn-in here!

    The diagnostic LEDs (the ABCD lights on the back panel) are GYGG, which isn’t listed in their hard-to-find LED reference. [Update: maybe now at Optiplex Diagnostic Indicators]

    Dell Optiplex GX270 Auto-On Boot Failure LEDs
    Dell Optiplex GX270 Auto-On Boot Failure LEDs

    I did the usual diagnostic stuff. All the Dell diagnostic tests work fine, replugging the memory doesn’t help, and so forth & so on. Running many passes of memtest86+ (from the invaluable System Rescue CD) shows no problems at all.

    Called up 800-891-8595, the DFS warranty service number (which is different from the usual Dell route), told my story, and got a call back (!) from the tech. I related the situation, mentioned that I’d set it for auto-on, and he said “Oh, they never got that BIOS code working, it’s never been released, and I’m surprised it works at all.”

    Riiiight…

    This is a biz machine, the sort acquired in semitrailer loads by big companies with actual IT departments, the ones that automagically wake up their flock of machines for overnight updates. Maybe they trigger auto-on through the LAN port (that’s another BIOS option) these days, but the BIOS wake-up alarm clock function has been available in pretty nearly every Dell I’ve ever owned… and works fine.

    This is not rocket science.

    Indeed, if anyone’s ever had the slightest problem with Dell’s auto-on, Google shows no sign of it. There’s nothing on the normally loquacious Dell forums. Nay, verily, the GX270 manual itself touts the “advanced feature” of having it turn on at a preset time and day.

    Anyhow, he says the LED code shows the problem has something to do with the memory or video chip not starting up in time. That information is in his “internal” debugging info, which is not available to mere customers. He’s unwilling to swap memory (I tried another stick to no avail), let alone the system board.

    Conclusion: his assignment is to make me Go Away without spending any money on warranty repairs.

    Seeing as how the GX270 was a whopping 100 bucks delivered, I can sympathize with his marching orders, even if I disagree with their outcome.

    So maybe Mom’s going to have to get used to turning the box on in the morning; it seems to work perfectly that way. A straightforward crontab entry turns it off in the evening… at least that part still works.

    I’ve bought other off-lease & Dell Outlet boxes; they’ve worked fine. This one is a bit more battered than usual, but it’s otherwise in fine shape. It’s even been re-capped; the larger electrolytic caps aren’t the dreaded Nichicon popcorn caps.

    Update: It seems to be booting OK with this burn-in regimen.

  • Syncing Zire 71 in Kubuntu Hardy

    I have a somewhat antique Palm Zire 71 that has, periodically, synced perfectly with various flavors of GNU/Linux. On the other hand, sometimes a new release / kernel / version prevents it from syncing at all.

    My life is simple enough that I really don’t need to actively sync it with an online calendar, which is a damn good thing. Back when I needed to do hotsyncing, it always came heartbreakingly close to working; apparently that’s still the case. Having to comb out a complete set of duplicate addressbook entries pretty much soured me on futher experimentation.

    Currently, the Zire on the outs with Ubuntu / Kubuntu Hardy. The hack that makes it work goes a little something like this:

    The file /etc/modprobe.d/libpisock9 blacklists the visor module, which allegedly lets all the pilot-* programs connect using libusb, but that flat-out doesn’t work for me.

    Replace this stanza inside /etc/udev/rules.d/60-symlinks.rules:

    #KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", ATTRS{product}=="Palm Handheld*|Handspring *|palmOne Handheld", \
#                                       SYMLINK+="pilot"

With this one:
    BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="Palm Handheld*|Handspring *|palmOne Handheld", \
KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", NAME="ttyUSB%n", SYMLINK+="pilot", GROUP="dialout", MODE="0666"

    Make sure you’re in the dialout group. If you’re not, add yourself, log out, then log back in again.

    I back the Zire up once a month, which is rarely enough that I just load the visor module by hand:

    sudo modprobe visor

    Create a directory for backing up into:

    cd ~/Zire71
mkdir 2009-01-03

    And then backing up the Zire is easy enough. Pop the thing in the cradle, poke the hotsync button, and quick like a bunny whack Enter on this:

    pilot-xfer -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -b 2009-21-03/

    The ttyUSB1 device will, of course, vary depending on whether you have any other USB-serial gizmos plugged in at the time.

    Frankly, the utter unreliability and instability of this whole USB PDA mess is one of the reasons why, IMHO, GNU/Linux really isn’t “ready for the desktop” despite the fact that all our boxen here run it. I don’t particularly want a phone / camera / PDA / ebook reader / pocketwarmer, but I can see I’ll wind up with one some day just to get a USB interface that actually works.

    Memo to self: remember to modprobe visor

    Update: Xubuntu 8.10 fixed all that, so USB hotplugging seems to work right out of the box. Install pilot-link, then just:

    pilot-xfer -p usb: -b /path/to/backups

    Now, whether syncing to contacts & calendars works correctly, I cannot say.