My other website: GPSOwl.com

Had some free time so I build a new website with the help of a friend: gpsowl.com

In short it is used to keep track of the location of anything with an Android phone. There are basically two types of users: regular people and small companies with fleets of vehicles.

Regular People
Say you would like to know when you son borrows your car that he only drives it to work in back. Or what if your parents are going on a driving vacation. With GPSOwl.com you can follow their progress from the convenience of your computer.

Companies
Most fleet management systems are expense and complicated. Not GPSOwl.com - it is simple and inexpensive. Keep track of personnel and or vehicles without having to call or text them to ask where they are. A quick look at our website and you can see if they are on their way, on site or on their way back.

How to turn off Gawd Damn vibrate-on-touch in Android 5.0

Got a new Android phone a while back. It blew my mind that by default it vibrated on every keyboard input, every back button, every time I looked at it. How absurd, why would anyone want that at all, let alone make it the default.

Sometime later my phone started generating a message about gapps crashing or something. Great. Only fix was to reset the phone. Then it started vibrating all the time again! Ahhhhhh, turn it off! But now I could not find where the hell the setting was, it is based on user input, so checked anything to do with input and plenty of other places, but it was no where to be found. Finally gave up and had my wife look for it. She found it under:

Settings -> Sound & notification -> Other sounds -> Vibrate on touch

Other sounds, really? Anyway, thank gawd, turn that stupid shit off.

Idiots at Google Android

If Microsoft would get some decent hardware for Windows Mobile I'd drop Android in a second, what an annoying OS.

Time and Date Pickers
Talk about design fail. Most. Annoying. Pickers. Ever.


Need to scan forward a couple months and find the second Monday of the month? Well you better hope somebody has a wall calendar up nearby cause this useless crap isn't going to help.

Vibrate on Back Button
Just to be annoying? If I press the back button, I can see the screen change, why are earth would I need additional feedback? What a stupid feature.

com.google.process.gapps has stopped
"Google" that and you will find tons of web pages devoted to the topic. Got that on my phone one day, with a bonus, it popped up every 3-10 seconds continuously. It gets better. The error pops up with the OK please fuck off button disabled for about 1 second. What an amazing feature someone took the time to add, disabling the okay button for a brief moment, well done, idiot.

No Blocking of Numbers
I actually trying to log the lack of a caller-block feature as a bug with the Android developers. The response was they had debated the topic and decided not to add the feature. The idiots win again.

Anything good about Android?
I got a Motorola with a quad-core processor, high definition screen and gorilla glass for eighty-something dollars and change. Eat that Apple.

Nationalism IS Propaganda

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Oh, Canada, blah blah blah blah blah blah...

I was born in Canada, not a bad place, I definitely picked the right country to be born in, damn I'm smart. I'm a proud Canadian.

What a bunch of bullshit. One person is not more important than another person because of where they were born.

When your political leader, excuse me, your "elected representative", gets up on some podium  and feeds you some line about how "great" your country is, know that you are being feed a bunch of propaganda. These people don't give a shit about you or your country. They are parasites working hard to keep the masses ignorant and placated.

The hidden messages to you behind their "isn't our country great" talk:

• I'm (referring to themselves) doing a great job
• No need for you to pay attention to what is going on
• Things are fine, no need to look for areas of improvement
• Don't do anything
• Don't say anything

What would happen if people in power would just stop lying and tell the truth? First people probably wouldn't believe them, there isn't much people hate more than the truth. But eventually, after some time of hearing the truth, maybe people would say "Hey, let's take the steps needed to make things better. We can solve these problems."

My Homemade Bailey's Recipe

After reading the ingredients on the back of a Bailey's Irish Creme, and noting the lack of Irish whiskey, decided to make my own. I haven't been able to reproduce the flavor of Artificial Flavor, but it's pretty good! In fact, I think it is better than Bailey's.

• 10 oz. Jamison's Irish whiskey
• 8 oz sweetened condensed milk
• 3 tsp instant coffee (Starbucks is best)
• 2 tsp almond extract 
• 2 tsp vanilla extract 
• 1 cup cream

Otherwise mix all the ingredients in a blender and store in the fridge.

Hopefully you got my Artificial Flavor joke. I can't reproduce artificial flavor: I'm not a chemist!

Update: got some Bailey's for Christmas and decided the missing 'flavor' from my Irish Creme is 'butter' flavor, but since mine is better I am not going to try to reproduce the butter flavor.

Using Vi (XVim) in XCode 5 & 6

XVim is great for us Vi users that also use XCode, but the installation instructions on GitHub are (as of the time of writing) useless.

Here is the best way to install XVim, as email to me from the author himself:

• Install git if you haven't already
• Clone XVim: git clone https://github.com/JugglerShu/XVim
• Go to the dir: cd XVim
• Change to develop branch: git checkout develop
• Open the project file XVim.xcodeproj
• Build
• Restart XCode (make sure the XCode process is completely restarted)

Finally, there seems to be some misconceptions out there about Vi: it's just a text editor. It is not an IDE.

Where is the class action lawsuit against Comcast?

Imagine you go to the grocery store, choose one apple (which is priced at 50 cents) and go to the checkout with this one item. The clerk then charges you 75 cents. "Why are you charging me 75 cents?" you ask. "50 cents for the apple, plus 25 cents to eat it" responds the clerk.

Customers paid Comcast for Internet service. When those same customers tried to access NetFlix Comcast throttled the service, rendering the service quality unacceptable. Comcast didn't block NetFlix: Comcast blocked their own customers, failing to provide the very service they had already been paid for.

Later Comcast blackmailed Netflix into paying for the same bandwidth, the bandwidth that Comcast's customers had already paid for.

It is complete bullshit and should be illegal. At a minimum Comcast should be sued in a class action lawsuit.

ps/2 Keyboard on a Mac Mini

Yes, my (awesome) Chicony natural keyboard (with ps/2 cable) does work with my Mac Mini.

The trick when first plugging in the keyboard with the ps/2 to USB adapter: when OS.x asks
   "what key is immediately to the right of the left shift key"?
the answer is to lie and say it is the Cmd (Windows) key.

In reality the Z key is to the right of the shift key, but that answer will result in the keyboard not being recognized. Pretend it is the Cmd key.

Also, when the shit hits the fan (such as the mouse and/or keyboard start acting wacky) unplug  the keyboard and plug it in again.

Robot Watch

The world is becoming more and more automated - with fewer and fewer good-paying jobs. The trend is likely to continue.

Articles:

• The rich and their robots are about to make half the world's jobs disappear
• 2018: US companies put record number of robots to work
• US banks to automate 200,000 jobs in next 10 years
• Walmart Nation continues to lose jobs to automation
• PepsiCo to layoff workers in automation push
• Robots to stock shelves in 50 Walmart stores
• Self-driving cars for pizza delivery
• Chinese factory replaces 90% of humans with robots, production soars
• Drones to take over some human work
• Deutsche Bank: a lot of people will see their jobs affected by automation
• Nike lays off 100,000 low-wage workers and replaces them with automation
• Adidas to switch from Asia manufactoring to robots in Germany
• Foxconn lays off 60,000, replaces workers with robots
• Autonomous vehicles to replace divers for underwater inspections
• How Google might put taxi drivers out of business
• Schools need to change or robots will destroy the middle class
• Burger robot to disrupt the fast food industry, also here
• $35K robot cheaper than hiring at $15 an hour
• Apple to replace 500,000 workers with robots
• The robot that might replace you at your job
• Outsourcing jobs is no longer cheap enough, so they are being automated
• Robots really are coming for your job and there's nothing you can do about it
• Autonomous truck cleared to drive on US roads for the first time
• Self-driving trucks are going to hit us like a human-driven truck
• McDonald's testing kiosks to replace cashiers
• There will never be enough good jobs again
• Driver-less trucks coming to Alberta's mining regions
• First driver-less trucks at a mine up and running 24/7
• Autonomous vehicles will replace taxi drivers, but that's just the beginning
• Self-driving car travels 3400 miles across America
• Japan to launch robot taxi trials in 2016
• AI to "create a useless class of human"
• World's first driver-less bus service comes to the Netherlands
• Automation expected to take more traditional jobs from men than from women
• Dear striking fast food workers: meet the machine that just put you out of a job
• Japan making robots to help with elderly care
• Bosch develops robot to do weeding work on farms
• AI could leave half the world unemployed
• Google's SkyNet robots
• Uber's autonomous cars will destroy 10 million jobs
• A lot of people who make over $350,000 are about to get replaced by software
• Manufacturing jobs are not coming back
• Learning to code won't save your job
• Veggie factory: world’s first vertical farm run entirely by robots
• A fleet of trucks just drove themselves across Europe 
• Volvo is sending 100 self-driving cars to China for testing
• BMW to launch self-driving cars within 5 years 
• Commerical driverless taxis
• Naive millennials belief robots creating jobs
• First drone delivery, cleaner and cheaper than trucks, and no driver required
• South Korea to invest heavily in robotics to automate factories

Related:

• McDonald's to hire extra workers but also deploying self-service kiosks
• Self driving cars are coming by about 2020
• AI as good as human experts in medical diagnosis
• Ireland joins international call for a four-day work week

Economists tell us that while technology displaces jobs, it also creates jobs, right? Economists also tell us people are rational, LOL. If you want to understand the real world, the first thing to do is ignore economists, or use them as a negative-indicator.

The pace of displacement has been (and is) accelerating to the point where job creation is not keeping up with job destruction.

And the compensation of the created jobs has been much less than the compensation of the displaced jobs. Goodbye manufacturing job that used to pay a decent living, hello minimum wage job at Wal-Mart.