CarlSeibert

Peter, those look like petty darn nice cases. I have a nice leather case for each phone and a scruffy every day one. Those look like candidates for 'nice leather', which is on the agenda after I get the everyday thing under control. You've got to keep an open mind, too. I stumbled on my 'nice leather' case for my Motorola for twelve bucks in an auto parts store. I don't remember if I checked to see if the Bluetooth button would wake up Google voice control. Dragon has been pretty satisfactory, apart from staying active with the phone in the holster and heating up the phone doing god knows what without my participation. I wonder if there's a voice command to make it exit??

In the activism biz, they would say you "exercised" the bank. It'll do 'em good. They're all flabby anyway.

Incremental update. Best I can tell, when making a simple hands free phone call, S-Voice's interface dead ends into requiring input on the screen of the device. W. T. F. How stupid is that if you're writing hands free functionality. There's a "driving mode" , which dead ends at a point where it simply refuses input at all. Gets worse. I tried two third party voice control apps and found they do the same thing. And I rejected a couple more because I learned before downloading them that they have that same fault. Really. Whaaat the eee fuuuuck? This is a sad comment on the people who are developing mobile apps these days. And a business model that doesn't support professionalism. So ultimately, I settled on Dragon Assistant. It's not feature complete. It's Beta-but-they-claim-otherwise-but-you-dont-pay-for-it-so-it's-ok-right-ware. It will make a proper phone call. It's voice recognition works and it works with my existing headset. It works properly with the button on the Bluetooth headset. It did apparently butt activate itself in the holster and gobble up enough CPU to make my phone hot as a two dollar pistol once. So I'll make sure to end it within ten minutes or so of using it. That said, it looks like it will eventually be a dandy voice control option. Or they could fix S-voice. Apple eventually got Siri to be reliable. I wouldn't be surprised to see a system update that includes some sort of overheating protection, either. I've only had that one incident, but the has been internet traffic to suggest that others have had overheating while playing games and the like Sadly, it turns out that the Nightize "tall" holster isn't wide enough for this phone. Bummer. I'll carry on with my beloved, worn out, old Nightize until I find something just right.

Jacob, that sounds a lot like the way my mother was. So, what John says. It'll be tough. My poor sister nearly unraveled herself before the situation resolved. But it did work out eventually. Hang in there.

This is either brilliant or the most tortured metaphor ever: http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2013/05/03/do_high_quality_headphones_really_make_music_sound_that_much_better.html

While we're talking phones...... I'm now a week in with the Gallaxy S4. I'm real impressed. It's like having your tablet in your pocket all the time. All the 'tablet' functionality is superb. The display is razor sharp. We're talking like pretty decent printing on coated paper sharp. Rant (There are Hydrogen Audio-esque chuckleheads out there who claim the human eye can't detect quality above 300 PPI. Not. Forget assault rifles, there should be sanity checks before people are allowed to carry trigonometry.) /rant. All the places where it looks like Samsung customized Android feel successful. Dialogs and settings pages and the like are intuitive and straightforward. As opposed to my iPhone, if I want to set something up a certain way, it just does it - without me spending hours on Google and getting all frustrated. I wanted all my email accounts and texting to have unique ringtones, for example. No problem. It just does that. The camera seems to be pretty good. It's big enough (12MP) to actually use. It's pretty sharp. Colors are good. Low light performance is good. It's no D-4, but it's a phone for crying out loud. I showed it to my boss. He was over the moon about the camera. So it's like having a real camera all the time, too. It actually focuses, by the way. In low light, it focuses in not too much of a hurry. Just like itty bitty real cameras. For telephony, its RF performance is good but not as good as my old Motorola. Better than my iPhone on ATT by a long shot, but not like the Motorola. Audio on phone calls is very good to excellent. In the Motorola / Blackberry range. The voice command system is like Siri. It's server based. Which means that if the server is hosed, so are you. It's not as clever as Siri. You have to know, for instance, "Make a note" will get you a note, but "Make a recording" gets you an offer to Google that. You have to say "Record voice". It doesn't like my Bluetooth headset. If I use the mic in the phone, it does what I ask. If I use the Bluetooth, it gets all bratty. I'm going to the off-price big box to look for a hopefully better matched Bluetooth tomorrow. Audio for playing music is OK. With an amplifier, it sounds about like my iPod. Without, dynamics aren't so great , music doesn't have a great sense of time. A number of USB DACs are supposed to work out of the box with it. I haven't tried any yet. If that works, this thing would rock for music. Battery life seems good. I accidentally left Neutron playing for about six hours and it didn't murder the battery. It plays 24/96 FLACs just fine. (And they sound pretty darn nice) I wasn't expecting that. That's pretty cool. The earphones that come with the phone could be used for enhanced interrogation, not that that is exactly shocking. Ergonomics are fine if you put a case or bumper on. Without one, I could barely pick the thing up. It's very, very thin. I guess that's fashionable, and if I need to carry it in a suit coat pocket, I suppose I'll appreciate it. But, come on - a big, shiny, thinner than all crap thing with rounded edges just isn't gonna be easy to handle. If the internet is to be believed, it doesn't offer much protection to itself if you drop it, either. I'll probably end up with a heavy duty case like an Otter box. The upside to it being so thin is that, even in an Otter box, it'll still go in my Nightize holster. Be forewarned that the thinness of the phone may mean that the hole in your case for your mini plug might not be very big and there might not be enough stock to safely enlarge it. I had to go to Rat Shack and be overcharged for a really fashionable mini to mini to adapt. It's not perfect, but overall I think as I get used to it, this phone will grow to indispensable status. It's pretty effin fantastic, actually.

Shelly - that's an unusual failure. I always thought that mobile phones just passed on the carrier's system time, which has to be really precise, thus making them perfect watches. that said, my music server got screwed up once where the onboard hardware clock strayed from the network time by more than a few minutes, which caused NTP to think the change was intentional, so then on every boot-up, the time would change from the correct network time to whatever way-off-base value the hardware clock had. If the symptom is that it's OK and goes astray after a reboot, you might have the same disease. On a full size system, it was super easy to fix. I just synced the hardware clock to the (correct) system clock. (hwclock -W, if I remember right). As long as the difference between the two times was less than some cutoff value, NTP could take care of keeping things in sync. On Android, the whole lack of root business could make my whole thought moot. So, what Nate said, maybe.

What everybody else has said, Steve. Good on you for being so strong through such an awful time. Hang in there.

I'd forgotten how good this is.

Oh, I think hitting a policeman in south Florida will do far more than fuck up your weekend ) Darwin award candidates is right.

Got the Gallaxy S4. I'm not the sort who waits overnight in line for such things. It's not like they're going to run out of them. I called the Sprint store yesterday on a lark to find out if there was any word on when they would ship. Turned out it was today. I ambled into the store around lunch time, apparently just a few paces behind yhe UPS man and got the first one in my neighborhood.

I thought porcelain crowns were the dearest ones. Or is it that nowadays all kinds just cost more than all other kinds just on general principles?

Record Store Day. Monster crowds at Radio Active again this year. We nabbed some cool LPs. Had dinner at the Lotus. Adam Sandler was at the next table, greatly amusing a regiment of little kids - in-laws, we gather. Old ladies were making a fuss. Young women were texting the news to their friends. It was a strange scene. I guess the Lotus is just where the elite meet to eat. .

Wow, Vicki. That's messed up. I know so well that feeling of weighing the option of doing what somebody really needs to do. Every ethical consideration in the world says you can't jump into somebody else's story but it would feel so darned good. .... Frustration sucks. Seeing what people do to each other sucks. It never seems to get better.

A-line? A-train? THAT Pulitzer is no longer with us, so no matter how cute the boss would look in bright colors..... Maines doesn't write, actually. He works with databases. This was the story where we measured the distance between Turnpike toll booths, worked our way back through Sunpass records, and documented that a whole bunch of cops were in the habit of driving 100 to 120 MPH in their police cars when they were off-duty. Maines crunched the data. Don't actually know who came up with the idea, which was truly inspired.

I read in this morning's paper (a physical one that was left behind at the Peter Pan Diner) that we have won a Pulitzer prize. Thus, we relinquish our crown as the Susan Lucci of newspapers! It was for a story that I had exactly nothing to do with, but it was one of the coolest stories ever. So it's all good. Congratulations are in order for Sally Kestin and John Maines!

Tell me you made that in Photoshop...........

MIAMI BEACH, FL - APRIL 10: Emilio Estefan and Target celebrate the launch of Sound Machine by Monster headphones at Hispanicize 2013 on April 10, 2013 in Miami Beach, Florida. Arrrgh!

I've been having the same. TapaTalk HD on Android.

I actually got to end a letter with "govern yourself accordingly" once. It felt great. Got the desired result, too.

The clock begins to tick down........

Happy Birthday indeed!

CJ - I have really wide feet too, about one size shorter than yours. I have liked the Rockport dress models for stand-around-all-day-on-a-hard floor use. I have a couple pair that are over twenty years old and have had a few new soles. And I just scored an almost-new perfect pair in perfect condition in the pet rescue thrift store in Wilton Manors for eleven bucks! I thought the odds against ever finding shoes in a thrift store were a meeelion-to-one. Who knew? (I guess gay guys give better stuff to thrift stores.)

My father in law did well with one of these Excellent for soldering, too )

I like the Moon Audio Silver Dragon on my 650s. Horribly too expensive, but nowadays you can buy the wire by the foot from Drew and make them up yourself. That makes them pretty reasonable, especially if you like short cables.