Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
I am at home enjoying a private day off. My wife has work, my kids are at non-summer summer school, and my sofa is beckoning me. Links already:
My Life As a Young Thug
Mike Tyson on how he became an animal.
New line of underwear filters out farts
Is muffling a bug, or a feature?
This post will be compiled almost entirely of material taken from other sources, because I am lazy. If you follow the instructions and install the script successfully, you will have the best YouTube functions integrated directly into Google Chrome. This includes turning off DASH (where YouTube segments videos into parts that prevents you from preloading whole videos – handy for slower or overseas connections), downloading videos in all available formats, and many, many other options.
A Chrome extension for this script is downloadable from the Google Play store, but it seems to be causing a lot of problems. The workaround is to install an Opera extension, which is counter-intuitive, and this is why I’m compiling this short guide.
What is YouTube Center? (via Github)
YouTube Center is a userscript designed to expand the functionality of YouTube. It includes the ability to download the video you’re watching, auto selecting your preferred video quality and much more. Here’s a list of all the features.
How to Install the Opera Add-on into Google Chrome
on the browser toolbar.For me, even just the downloading function is worth the hassle of installation, but really, this is how YouTube should look and work by default.
How I got this is very difficult to explain…
This is the coolest medical video I’ve seen in a long time. Sometimes technology really works, I guess.
Since Twitter got hacked a while back, the apps using its API have been refused permission intermittently. Until now, I used a site called twitterfeed to daisy chain my blog posts from my dedicated blog to Twitter to Facebook, but that all fell apart when Twitter security got oversensitive.
So now, I’m going to see how the WP Publicize function works out. Guess I’ll try to post a photo and embed a YouTube video:
Random video from my YouTube “music” playlist:
“Last Friday, Sony Music sent Gummy Soul a cease and desist order for Amerigo Gazaway’s “Bizarre Tribe: A Quest To The Pharcyde”.”
Sony just doesn’t get it:
They don’t know how to make good products anymore.
They don’t understand “fair use.”
They don’t know how to get back all the loyal customers they chased away over the years…
It seems they only want to make a last few bucks before Samsung and Apple and all the other companies who do get it (a little better, at least) collectively piss on their grave.
Die, Sony, die.
By the way, the album mentioned above is simply sublime.
Like it says in the title, Line.
My wife is in Myanmar/Burma for a week. I looked up the best options for calling to/from that country before she went, but the telecom market is in a state of constant flux and it seems they the government controls the sales of SIM cards. What sad state of affairs: Third world telecom service with first world bureaucracy!
As it turns out, most of the airports and hotels she’s been to have had barely decent wifi, which has left us experimenting with voice/video chat services. Here are the results for using chat apps on Android to/from Yangon, Mandalay, and maybe other places in Burma:
1st place: (Naver) Line
Excellent voice quality even on weak connections. If there was a major disaster, this is the app I would rely on (oh yeah, that’s why it was made in the first place).
2nd Place: Google Hangouts
Fairly stable, but laggy with both voice and video calls. Consistently laggy, though (about 1/2 second), so usable if you want to speak slowly and wait for responses.
3rd place: Skype
Skype changed my world, then abandoned it. I still have most of the money I put into Skype credit 7 or 8 years ago. TOTALLY UNUSABLE FOR ANYTHING UNLESS YOU LIVE IN KANSAS CITY AND GET FORCE-FED INTARWEBS FROM GOOGLE. Seriously, I’m going to uninstall Skype from all my devices. So fucking sad.
It took a few hours to research and get a custom ROM installed (SmoothROM v5.1), so I was dismayed to see that it lacked 3G support. Oops. So I started over again using Nexus Root Toolkit and pushed the latest cyanogenmod nightly for Tilapia (Nexus 7 3g) and gapps via my laptop. Success!
cyanogenmod is kind of boring because it’s so stable – and that’s a good thing.
Regarding the title above,
grouper = Nexus 7 wifi
tilapia = Nexus 7 3g
In Jelly Bean 4.2 and higher, if there is no “Developer Options” shown in the “Settings” menu, go to Settings –> About Tablet –> Build Number and tap on it 7 times to unlock/unhide it.
So basically create a new APN with the following settings:
Name: TRUE-H INTERNET
APN: internet
User name: true
Password: true
MMC: 520
MNC: 00
APN type: internet
Personally, I think anyone using MMS in this day and age should just give up and go back to using a typewriter, so I won’t cover that.
You can find device-specific info on the True page from which I borrowed the above graphic: http://www.truemove-h.com/helpsupport_apnsettings.aspx
True seems dedicated to the curious corporate tactic of changing the location of any helpful information on their website every few months, to the point where I can no longer find it. Anyway, the settings described above are still valid as of February 27, 2014.