Wow. IKEA is selling avocado green shag carpet. In 2015.
Now *that’s* a flashback!
Battery Life: 1½ Days Doesn’t Matter
Interesting point on phone battery life in Wired’s article on the Google Nexus line:
One and a half days doesn’t matter….In the morning you want your battery to look 100 percent when you leave for the day. So either somebody solves it for a week battery, or you have to give reliably one solid day of battery.
Long Beach Comic Con Hits its Stride in 2015
I’ve liked Long Beach Comic Con since it started, but this year was something else. They doubled the amount of floor space from previous years…and filled it. I think they doubled the number of programming tracks as well. And the fans came: I’d swear the place was busier on Sunday afternoon than it was last year on Saturday, and I had trouble finding parking for the first time ever.
TL;DR? Skip to the photo gallery if you must!
Last year I went with very specific goals in mind, because I’d been so aimless the year before. This year I wasn’t sure until Friday whether I’d be able to make it or which day, so I held off on planning, but it worked out.
Keeping Artist’s Alley as the centerpiece of the show has broadened it a bit into a show about comics and art. Continue reading
Storm water pond: Now with added storm water!
It rained pretty hard last night near home, and clearly it rained hard enough here that mud was flowing over the sidewalks, and the stormwater detention pond still had water at noon.
It’s funny how, four years into the worst drought in ages, we’ve had one of the wettest summers on record. Considering that LA usually gets no rain to speak of during the summer, that’s not saying much, but we’ve had several storms strong enough to cause floods and mudslides in the middle of a drought. We’re all hoping for a wet winter.
On a related note, yes, they’re still watering the lawn too much here. At least there’s a lot less of it than there used to be before the renovation, between the hollow and all the planters full of native and otherwise less-thirsty plants and wood chips behind where I was standing.
Also, ZPizza opened earlier this month, completing the trio of restaurants on the ground floor of the new hotel. More lunch options!
Back to the Marsh (what’s left of it)
At the end of August I returned to the Madrona Marsh Preserve. It’s a fragment of the seasonal wetlands that used to dot the western edge of the Los Angeles basin, just inland from the coastal hills. These low-lying areas collect water during winter and spring rains, then slowly dry out over the summer, only to fill up and become wetlands again the next year.
On a hike in May I found extensive pools and lots of wading birds. Trees kept some parts shady. Scrub prevailed on the higher ground.
Returning at the end of summer, I found the area near the entrance looked about the same as it had before. As I got closer to the low-lying areas, the scrub seemed to have grown thicker. The pools were gone, but the ground where they’d been was clearly still wetter than the area around it. Plants were greener, and in some places it was still muddy.
There were also fields and fields of wild sunflowers. Most of the places that had been mud flats in spring were now covered with sunflowers. Some areas I’d walked to get closer to the pools were completely blocked. I saw dragonflies, and in a few places I found bushes that were absolutely covered with clumps of foam from some sort of bug.
Once I reached the tree-covered area, I walked a trail that had been underwater the last time. It seemed to end abruptly until I realized that a tree limb had snapped and fallen to block the trail. It was still attached about ten feet up.
In the lowest, shadiest part of the preserve, I did find pools that were still wet, and still host to a few wading birds. I wonder if I return in, say, November, will they have dried out as well, or is there a last bastion that stays flooded all year (at least in years with normal rainfall)?
I didn’t recognize the spot at first, or I would have tried to frame it the same way, but I did manage to get shots of the same clump of trees flooded in spring and surrounded by dry land and low plants in summer. It was interesting to see the spreading roots without the water.
You can view the full Spring hike (23 photos) and the full Summer hike (8 photos) on Flickr.
Android Phone: Died and Reborn
Friday afternoon my phone finally got the OTA update for Android 5.1. After several hours stuck on the swirling boot animation, I decided it was time to admit that the phone wasn’t going to finish booting on its own.
I tried everything: Pulling the battery. Clearing the cache from recovery mode. Removing the SD card. Even a factory reset. I’d tried to avoid that, but eventually decided all the important stuff was backed up, and dammit, I needed a phone for the weekend!
If it had been a carrier phone or an actual Nexus device, I could have flashed a fresh system image, but it’s a Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Play Edition. Nobody wants the responsibility of supporting it.
In the end I bit the bullet and installed CyanogenMod. Even if I messed it up, the phone was already unusable and long past any warranty it might have had two and a half years ago. I didn’t really have anything to lose.
I had to read through the instructions a couple of times, but the process was actually pretty simple since I already had the ADB tools and could install Heimdall on my Linux desktop through Fedora.
- Flash a more capable recovery partition.
- Upload the right CyanogenMod .zip and the corresponding Google Apps .zip.
- Install the images from the recovery partition.
- Sign in to Cyanogen and Google.
- Reinstall apps.
It’s a bit weird because the UI feels like I’ve gone back in time a couple of years.
But the phone works again, and I was able to do it overnight. I didn’t have to spend three days emailing tech support back and forth. I didn’t have to go into a store on Saturday and be told I can either buy a new phone or wait a week while they send it in for repairs.
I may still end up replacing it in the near future — it is 2 1/2 years old, after all — but I don’t have to, which makes a big difference!
Update!
The phone worked great for camera, navigation, texting, and everything else I wanted to use it for at an event Saturday and at Long Beach Comic Con on Sunday.
Unfortunately, the dial pad doesn’t always respond during calls, which makes phone menus unusable. It’s not just the problem with the proximity sensor thinking my face is next to the phone and blanking the screen — I’ve had that on the official firmware for ages. I can get the keypad to display, but it won’t react to touch.
My carrier has an app for voicemail, but I’ll have to do something to be able to deal with other phone menus.
Eek! GERMS!
This children’s hospital recruited patients (and probably siblings) to remind you, through the time-tested media of crayons and markers, to wash your hands. (As the nurse put it at check-in, don’t take anything home that you didn’t bring with you.) They posted the drawings in all the elevators and lobbies.
Between all the dots on the hand to represent the germs, and the extra captions, this one was my favorite.