Timmerov's Blog
killer sudokus
standard sudokus are too pedestrian for us. we do killer sudokus. you can find books of them on krazydad.com. thanks krazydad! they're fun cause you don't start with any starter numbers. you get odd shaped regions of boxes and the sum of the numbers in that box. i don't care much for standard sudokus because you get to a point where you have to guess. and see where if it leads to a contradiction. which is cool. but much of the time it leads to the solution. which is satisfaction fail. killer sudokus aren't immune to this. as evidenced by the puzzle that inspired this post. but it seems to happen a whole lot less. ie more of the puzzles can be solved by deduction and reasoning. instead of guessing. any moron can do that.
wisdom
b had his wisdom teeth removed on the 23rd. he's still kinda unhappy. he still can't eat hard sharp shrapnel like foods. like potato chips and pretzels. but he can eat chicago style pizza. the doc said get at least 1600 calories a day into him. sheehs. he's a teenage boy. he would have eaten the entire pizza by himself. heh. he's not all that fond of the medication. but recognizes its necessity. he was kinda hungry the first days. cause he could only eat liquid foods. and liquefied foods. fortunately he likes smoothies. and sweet potatoes. blech! more power to him. the beautiful and talented alisa threatened to feed him a kale and cranberry smoothie when he couldn't taste it. she didn't. but it was a funny thought experiment. i don't think he would have cared.
nexus day 4
god what a pain in the ass. i finally got cyanogenmod installed. my original idea was to boil these posts down to a simple set of instructions. but i ended up pulling so much information from all over the web that i don't know which steps ended up making things work and which were just tossing a pinch of salt over my shoulder. cyanogen doesn't come with any of the google apps. so if you want those you'll have to flash them. in theory you can do that at the same time you flash your rom. but i don't know for sure. it seems that yes you must wipe to factory resets before flashing a rom. which involves going through the setup process again. so flashing all of the zips at the same time seems like a good idea. unless you want to go through the setup process again and again and again like i did. failing to reset to factory may mean you end up stuck and the cyanogen boot animation. or in an infinite reboot loop. fortunately it seems you can reset to factory after the flash. which is good. off to fry's today to get a cable. i'm hoping the end is in sight.
nexus 7 day 2
okay i want to root my nexus 7. this will let me make all kinds of changes to it. generally this is a serious pain the ass. fortunately wugfresh has made it easy. download his nexus root toolkit. it's not a very friendly looking interface. however, each step has detailed instructions that seem to pretty much just work. which is nice. the bad part is, there's no uber guide telling you which order to do things in. the first and most annoying step is the big button at the top - full driver installation guide automatic and manual. you will need to reboot your pc several times. the annoying part. my nexus 7 was factory reset. but i used nrt to make a backup anyways. and i successfully backed up 0 files. heh. next step is to unlock. and the final step is to root. some steps take a while. some steps require input on either the pc or the n7 or both. check each frequently. you may have to re-enable usb debugging. make a mental note. the next time the toolkit wants to control the device, the device will need you to tell it to remember that this pc may debug it. whew, another day's work. it went more easily today. yay! check again tomorrow to see if we can get a custom image installed.
nexus 7
so i got a nexus 7. it's the 2012 model. i bought it on the cheap. it didn't come with a charger. just the charging cable. fortunately it seems to work just fine with the iphone charger. so far. the device is pretty. especially for a used device purchased sight unseen over the intertubes. but that's where pretty ends and ugly begins immediately as soon as you turn it on. you *must* join a wi-fi network. which is seriously inconvenient if you use mac address filtering. i had to temporarily disable mac address filtering on the router. which was super inconvenient. the beautiful and talented alisa's mac doesn't like that. its wireless must be reset too. stupid dumbass thing. anywho, after it boots i could get the mac address from the following intuitive procedure: tap the funny white circle with six white dots. tap the white gear icon, settings. tap wi-fi. tap the three vertically stacked little boxes in the upper right. tap advanced. mac address is listed. awesome. now since this is a working device and not a play device it needs to rooted. step the zeroth, download the android sdk. step the first, enable developer: go back to settings. swipe to the bottom of the list. tap about tablet. tap build number seven times. no, i'm not making this up. congratulations, you're a developer! go back to settings. tap developer options right above about tablet. tap usb debugging to enable it. now you need to reboot in fastboot mode. so you have to power off. and this is another stupid feature. you must remove the usb cable. there are three buttons on the right hand side. the two together are volume up and down. the third is the power button. hold the power button for a second. tap power off. tap ok. wait for the screen to go dark. plug in the usb cable. push and hold all three buttons until the dead green android appears on the screen. and that's as far i'm going to get in one day. try again tomorrow.
spoiler
i like to be surprised at christmas. but it's gotten difficult. the beautiful and talented alisa has been shopping for me online. using my computer. when i'm not there of course. but the problem is google. or more specifically google's ad selection. which shows exactly what everyone was searching for. model planes. corselettes, phones, laptop batteries, cables, sausage (? really?, huh). anywho, bad google. spoil christmas. then there's also an ad for a support group for tech abandonment. uh oh. should i be worried? am i working too much? am i spending too much time gaming? should i spend more time with my soul mate? hrm. probably. okay. soon as i clear this special to drop.
0.5%
everyone talks about the 1%. i'm sick and tired of hearing about the 1%. so let's talk about the 0.5%. these are the women who at the age of 28 have had a baby. but have never had vaginal sexual intercourse. wtf? really? how does this work? by my estimate that's 2000 divine births per year. apparently jesus has a LOT of half brothers and sisters. or maybe they are the children of other gods. if you follow the persy jackson plots, the greek and roman gods are rather prolific. okay so much for the supernatural explanations. are these women simply in denial? there's some suggestion that religiously conservative (thou shalt not have sex before mahwij) women are more likely to be virgin moms. like mary was with jesus. so that's okay, right? or do these women just not remember having sex? cause they were drugged or drunk? are they using a non-standard definition of vaginal sex? like you can restore your virginity simply by declaring it so. you can have a marriage annulled. so why can you have a sex act annulled? seams reasonable. i'm thinking the latter natural explanations are much more likely than the alternatives. it still disturbs me that people can so stubbornly insist that something so obviously false, is true. actually, i suppose i should be happy that the number is so low. maybe it's only so low for women. the posts in the deny-o-sphere, which seem dominated by male, suggests the incidence of such insanity is much much higher.
te$la
tesla recently announced plans for a model that'd cost somewhere around $40k. unfortunately, it'll be shown in 2015. which makes it a 2016 or 2017 model. sigh. guess i'm gonna have to wait. or drive more. the economics for an electric car don't make much sense when you drive less than 10k kilometers (10Mm heh) per year and pay $.32/kwh. cause even if electricity was free, we use $750 worth of gas per year. an electric car is $15k more than a gas car. so it'd take 20 years to break even. which is too long. sigh.
pe3ves
i've recently encoinsciencenated one of my pet peeves. it's the one where send someone an email with three questions. and you get a response that answers one of them but completely ignores the other two. now what do i do? did they not notice the others? did they choose to not answer? do i re-transmit? that seems kinda rude. sigh. quandary. the word of the day.
draggie!
i got a draggie knight in puzzle and dragons. heh. so what's the big deal? well, i decided to go with the ancient dragon knight team. cause it can be farmed pretty easily. and draggie gives my dragons 2x attack for one turn. which makes a scary boss fight short. there are better teams. but you have to be either really lucky. or willing to pay for the stones to feed the rare egg machine. which i'm kinda not. i spend way too much time on this game. it would officially be an addiction if i paid real money for it too. the web site showed the draggie dungeon was coming. but there's a 10 point limit. and on thursday i didn't have a team of smalls that could run it. i had a marginal leader, a level 37 vampire lord. but no subs. i needed four dub-mythlits. which is the boss critter on the friday dungeon. which i've had very little luck with the past month of fridays. think i got 5 in 4 weeks. whine. but yesterday was different. five dropped. holy cow. so not only do i have a possible draggie team. but i've got a dub-mythlit left over to ultimate evolve one of my fully awoken dragons. woot! i danced around and celebrated. literally. the rest of the family looked at me like i had lost my marbles. well, the awake members did anyways. the teenager slept through it. something something finals something something studying. right.
