I recently bought a Bluetooth 4.0 USB adapter from BlueRigger, because I wanted to use a wireless headset on my desktop computer at home, and it doesn’t have Bluetooth built in. It didn’t quite work… I was able to listen to music just fine on my headset, but when I tried to switch it into telephony mode (i.e., activate the microphone), it stopped working.
I emailed BlueRigger about the problem. They worked with me aggressively to find a solution to the problem. Eventually, they concluded that the Bluetooth 4.0 adapter, which has a relatively new chipset in it, is incompatible with Linux, but an older version of the same productis fully Linux-compatible. So they sent me one for free, and indeed it fixed the problem.
I heartily recommend Colonial Shoe Repair in downtown Boston, MA. They took my wife’s pair of leather boots which were scuffed and salt-encrusted and had a broken zipper, and in a week replaced the zipper perfectly and cleaned, reconditioned, and waterproofed the boots to make them look almost like new.
In my meeting today with the MBTA about the air quality inside T buses, I suggested that the fact that we sometimes see exhaust smoke coming from underneath the buses, despite the fact that the buses’ exhaust pipes are on top of the buses, might indicate a broken exhaust system which might explain how exhaust fumes are getting into bus passenger compartments. As evidence of this, I pointed to an article by Doug Tillberg on TransitBoston.com.
In response, the T employees at the meeting explained to me that it’s actually normal for exhaust smoke to come from underneath the buses, because there are actually two engines in the back of the bus that burn diesel fuel, one of which exhausts out the pipe at the top of the bus, and the other out from underneath.
Today, I met with the MBTA to discuss my concerns about poor indoor air quality (IAQ) inside some T buses. I am extremely grateful to Michael Buckley, Sen. William Brownsberger’s Legislative Counsel and Policy Advisor, for arranging the meeting and attending with me.
The following T employees were present: Jeffrey Gonneville, Chief Mechanical Officer; Dave Carney, Director of Bus Operations; Erik Scheier, Project Director; and two other people whose names I’m sorry to say I didn’t write down and can’t recall. (If they read this, I hope they will forgive me. If I am going to keep doing this kind of thing, I really need to get better at remembering people’s names, which I’m really awful at.)
I learned several things at the meeting, and I obtained commitments from Jeffrey Gonneville to take concrete steps to look into my concerns. I wish I’d learned more, and I wish the T had committed to do more, but progress has been made.
Last month, I sent the MBTA a public records request, trying to obtain more information about how aware they are of the problem of air quality problems in the passenger compartments of their buses, and what they are doing about the problem.
The Massachusetts Public Records Law requires “custodians of records” like the MBTA to respond within ten days to such requests. It took the MBTA 26 days to respond, which they did only after I appealed to the supervisor of records in the Secretary of State’s office Correction: I mailed my appeal to the Secretary of State’s office on February 11, and I received the response below from the MBTA on February 12, so it appears that they although they were quite late in responding to my request, they did respond before my appeal was brought to their attention. The job of the supervisor of records is essentially to force custodians to obey the law. This is necessary because custodians regularly violate the public records law until the supervisor is involved, and sometimes even then. This sorry state of affairs persists because there are no penalties for violating the law (stupid!).
Anyway, here is the response I received from the MBTA yesterday (click here to see it in a separate window), followed by the letter I sent back to them this morning. Read the rest of this entry »
The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company, LLC
Attention: Consumer Affairs
1385 Hancock Street
Quincy, MA 02169
To whom it may concern:
My wife and I spend over ___ on groceries every year. Until today, a large fraction of that was spent at Stop & Shop. However, after what happened to me today, I will go out of my way to give Stop & Shop as little of my business as possible.
The school our children attend in Watertown held a community service day today. Students and their families came to the school in large numbers, despite the recent blizzard, to create various items needed by non-profit organizations within our community. Unfortunately, we discovered at the start of the event that a few things we needed for the projects were missing, so I drove over to the nearby Stop & Shop on Pleasant Street to get them. Since I was already there, I also threw a few items in my cart for my family.
When I got to the checkout aisle and had rung up my $31.20 worth of groceries, I discovered that I had forgotten my wallet at home, a half hour drive away. Cursing my own stupidity, I told an associate what had happened, explained that though my wallet was at home my checkbook was about five minutes away at the school, and asked if I could pay by check. She assured me that I could, and I ran off to the parking lot to drive to the school, grab my checkbook, and drive back to the store.
Less than 15 minutes later, I returned to the store and presented my check. When the associate attempted to ring up my order, she informed me that since it was the first time I was paying by check, she would need to see ID. “But I don’t have any ID. It’s in my wallet. That’s why it’s the first time I’m paying by check – I usually pay by credit card – and that’s why I’m paying by check in the first place.” She called over another associate to whom I explained the situation. She said she would take the check without ID and just had to call over the manager.
The manager, upon his arrival, informed me that it was simply impossible to accept my check without ID. I explained to him that I was buying items for a community service activity in progress at that very moment at a nearby school. I explained to him that I was a regular customer at that Stop & Shop, where I shop several times per month. I explained to him that he could look up my Stop & Shop number and see that my name and address there matched the name and address on the check. None of this mattered; he insisted that he simply could not accept my check without ID.
Given that most banks, including mine, allow merchants to verify checks by telephone, there was absolutely no excuse for refusing to take my check.
I next offered to leave my $200 smart-phone with him as collateral if he would just let me rush back to the school with the few items that were needed there (less than $20 worth of merchandise) and then come back with payment for the entire $31.20. Even this, he refused to do.
At this point, one of the other employees, who could see that I was clearly sincere and could be trusted, offered to pay for my order out of her own pocket, but she didn’t have enough cash on her. Another customer who had overheard the exchange walked over and handed me $20 in cash, which I did my best, unsuccessfully, to refuse because I had no way of paying her back; she said that I should just make a $20 donation to charity and we would be even.
I ended up calling another parent at the school and asking him to come to the store to pay for the groceries, which delayed even more the start of the activities that needed them. Not to mention that it was inconvenient to him and both inconvenient and rather embarrassing to me.
Obviously, if we had remembered to buy the needed items in advance, or if I had remembered my wallet this morning, all of this trouble could have been avoided. Nevertheless, it is entirely unacceptable that your store manager was either so stubborn or so restricted by your corporate policies that he treated a verifiably good customer poorly over a potential loss of at most $31.20, when each of your stores probably loses many times more than that to shoplifting every single day.
I will not willingly give my money to a business which treats its customers this way. While I can’t say I’ll never patronize a Stop & Shop supermarket again – I’m sure there will be times when I have no choice – I promise you will be seeing a lot less of me.
The folks at the King Features Syndicate have always made their comics harder to aggregate than those of any of the other syndicates. I had implemented a convoluted workaround involving redirecting requests for images of their comics through the comics aggregator itself, where various special headers were inserted into the request to convince the King Features web servers to provide the requested content. That worked for quite a while, but as of today, they’ve apparently turned off their old web servers and replaced them with new ones which use a completely different protocol for requesting content.
In short, King Features comics are no longer working in the aggregator. This means that the following comics are currently broken:’
6Chix
Lockhorns
Baby Blues
Mallard Fillmore
Beetle Bailey
Mutts
Bizarro
Phantom
Blondie
Prince Valiant
Curtis
Rhymes with Orange
Family Circus
Sally Forth
Flash
Shermans Lagoon
Funky Winkerbean
Zippy the Pinhead
Hagar The Horrible
Zits
I’m working on restoring them as best as I can, so you will see them creep back into service one by one as I find new ways to retrieve them (it seems unlikely at this point that I will be able to use a single retrieval method for all of them as I was before), but in the end, some of them may prove to be no longer aggregatable.
I will post another update when I’ve done all that I can to get them back.
I have an HP LaserJet 500 color M551 printer, with which I am overall extremely happy. One of the neat features this printer supports is HP ePrint, which allows me to print files just by emailing them to an email address @hpeprint.com. Not only that, but I can link the printer directly through ePrint to Google Drive, such that I can print a Google Doc directly rather than generating a PDF and printing that. Furthermore, there’s an HP ePrint driver for Mac OS and Windows, so you can print from your laptop to an ePrint printer from anywhere in the world. And there’s an Android (and I imagine iPhone as well) app, so you can print documents from your phone. In general, it’s pretty sweet.
Well, it was pretty sweet, until it stopped working. I’m not sure exactly when it stopped working, but my guess is that when I had to replace the printer’s formatter board, which was malfunctioning, or maybe it was when I upgraded the printer’s firmware. I noticed it wasn’t working when I tried to print a file from my phone and it never showed up on the printer.
I figured that I just had to re-enable the ePrint service, so I went online and looked up the directions for doing that. They say to log into the printer’s Embedded Web Server (EWS) and click on the “‘HP Web Services’ tab” to enable ePrint. Alas, there was just one problem… There was no “HP Web Services” tab displayed in EWS!
I searched all over the internet for suggestions about how to resolve this, and found nothing useful. There were several pages suggesting upgrading the firmware, but that seemed to be for printers for which ePrint support had been added in a new firmware version and wasn’t available in the old version. Also, I’d already upgraded the firmware recently and had the current version, so I didn’t see how that would fix the problem.
Fortunately, the printer was still under warranty, so I filed a support case with HP and asked them to figure out the problem. Lo and behold, they sent me instructions which fixed it! I’m posting these instructions here because I couldn’t find them anywhere else online and because they may be applicable to printers other than the M551dn specifically. Here’s what I had to do:
Perhaps I just don’t grok the zen of Hacker News, but I just don’t get why the site doesn’t provide RSS feeds of comments on postings.
I also don’t get why nobody has written something to provide this. Or, at least, if it has been written, I couldn’t find it (perhaps my Google mojo just isn’t high enough).
http://api.ihackernews.com/ gets part of the way there, but it’s an API, not an RSS feed, and it’s broken and has been for quite a while.
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