Mark's personal blog

After using a Google Nexus 6 for almost 3 years I decided to upgrade my phone. I considered quite a few options including Samsung Galaxy S8+, Samsung Note 8, Pixel 2 XL, OnePlus 5, and of course the LG V30. So I tried to score them mentally against one another and all but the V30 lost points because of lacking support for LTE band 71, since I am on T-Mobile that would have to count for something.

Samsung S8+:

Lost points because of the dedicated but in my opinion useless Bixby button. It did feature both a microSD slot and a headphone jack both of which I found important.

Samsung Note 8:

Is to me just a marginally bigger version of the S8+ but with a smaller battery to make room for the S-pen. Since I have no really use for the S-pen then that became a negative not a positive. I was really hoping this would be the first phone to support LTE band 71, when I saw it didn't it actually I felt the S8+ was a better choice.

Pixel 2 XL:

To me the Pixel 2 XL is a LG V30 without headphone jack, microSD card slot, and no wireless charging. The quad DAC of the V30 has been replaced by a proprietary imaging chip. The phone does if I am not mistake take some of the best pictures for a cell phone but that is not really enough to make up for what it lacks. I couldn't help but ask myself why I would pay more for the Pixel for what I consider less. Stock Android and fast updates are a positive for this phone.

OnePlus 5:

This phone was initially a strong contender because of the price. It had the headphone jack but lacked the microSD slot. I did however realize that once I had bought new Dash chargers for my car, my wife's car, office, home office, etc. the price savings would be significantly smaller, not only that but since my wife has a Samsung Galaxy S8 we would have to double up on chargers to since we could no longer share chargers and benefit from fast charging.

LG V30:

Ultimately the biggest downside to the V30 was that I had no real experience with LG for a cell phone. I could of course read reviews back and forth on the Internet regarding the V-series but that wasn't really helpful as people either seem to love a phone/brand or hate them. I also have stopped really caring about the reviews because many of them seem biased from the start. I finally just decided to go for it.

I have used the phone since the day it was released and I have very few complaints. I love the location off the power button/fingerprint  reader on the back. The phone is fast and I have had no software issues whatsoever. I actually like the screen a lot and I don't see any issues with the display being grainy as some people have complained about. My only complaint regarding the screen is the very aggressive power saving when running display brightness in auto mode. When it is very dark the the brightness goes too far down and the display looses contrast. I wish there was a way to tweak this in the settings without disabling automatic brightness adjustments altogether.

LG has made a strong product in my opinion. I was very apprehensive about this phone at first but now I am happy I took a chance on LG.

So I have had issues with getting email through to customers of Fusemail. All I get is this relatively useless message from comendosystems.com when I try to send them an email.

<xxxx@xxx.xx>: host xxx-dk.mx1.comendosystems.com[89.104.206.4] said: 550 rejected is temporarily blocked. Contact support [2] (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Now after some searches on various search engines you find that the domain is owned by comendo.com. So I tried to email hostmaster@comendo.com and support@comendo.com. Those emails were returned with the same error as above. So I resorted to my very little used Gmail account and decided to send support@comendo.com asking them to investigate the issue. I received a confirmation email from Fusemail support (so now comendosystems.com has become comendo.com which is really fusemail.com) that they had received my email. The following day I get a reply from Casper at Fusemail that they will not look into the issue because I am not a customer with them. If I want the issue resolved I need to contact one of their customers to have them raise a ticket with Fusemail. Anyone else see how useless that response is?

1. If I could send emails to your customers then I wouldn't be trying to contact you?
2. If your customers were technical enough to understand the mail issue then they probably would run their own mail server.
3. Do you really want me to inform your customers about how you are preventing their potential customers from sending them emails.
4. How many people do you really think go through the hassle of trying to resolve an issue like this. Most will just find somewhere else to do their business.

I did end up trying to email one of Fusemail's customers from my Gmail account. Not surprisingly the technical abilities of this customer was below average and only really resulted in added frustration.

2017-10-23 - edit

Removed comment about not using them.

I was successful in getting my server removed from their blacklist. I contacted them through their website using their contact support form https://www.fusemail.com/contact-support/ and they ended up removing my server's IP address as they could see it was an old entry. This leads to a new rant. We have at this point run out of avaliable IPv4 address space, that means that many new servers are using IP addresses that have previously been in use. So in my opinion you probably should auto expire entries in your blacklist. 6-12 months seems reasonable to me considering how many companies create and tear down VPS instances for customers.

On a different note I think it is rather bad that a company that specializes in email can't put in a proper decline message. That message should have clear instruction on how to contact them for further information and it should not require extensive detective work to find out who actually owns the server. These are things that I think people considering Fusemail should know. Several Fusemail customers lost our business because we couldn't get through to them via email.

As an old fashion C/C++ programmer I have never relied on an IDE with code completion. I have since the early days of doing software development relied on Emacs as my default IDE. It provide the perfect set of elisp packages and code highlighting. Indentation of code is also done correctly and beautifully when you use smart-tabs-mode. Now finally I have decided to enable code completion in Emacs and it took a little bit of trial and error since many of the guides I found were either outdated or I couldn't find the right packages in MELPA. First step is to enable MELPA: Add the following to you .emacs (require 'package) (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "http://melpa.org/packages/")) (package-initialize) For code completion I finally managed to get Irony and company to play well together.

Today is the 6 week mark of my wife and I coming home from out anniversary weekend to find my big black bum, Smokey had died. It still hurts but the pain is more of a sweet pain where I remember the wonderful 9 years I had him. I cannot write this without tears trickling down my face but I guess that is not so bad. We don't know what happened on that Sunday, March 17th but I know I will never forget. The fear that struck when he did not come to greet us and the pain when I found him dead in our bedroom. I miss you buddy! You were the best dog I could ever have wished for. I feel robbed of many years with you! I feel cheated that I will never see you get old, grey and lazy but I am also very grateful for the years I had with you. Thank you!

So I finally participated in my first real trail run on April 20th 2013 Leatherwood Mountains Ultra Run. Friday was a very rainy day and I was really hoping for good weather on Saturday and I couldn't have asked for better weather. It wasn't too windy, it did not rain and it was neither too hot nor too cold, it was just perfect. We lined up shortly before 9am and since this was my first trail run I started in the back of the pack not really knowing what to expect. However I quickly found that I was faster than that, but when we hit the real one track trail there was little I could do and I had to stay behind people until it was convenient to pass. After about 4 miles or so I had advanced past most of the people that were slower than me and I was joined by Michelle. We ran/trudged up and down the mountain while talking/chatting/cussing. It was my first social experience during a run. During most road races I am focused on my running and so is everyone else around my pace so if we exchange words they are few and far between. I finished my first 10 miler and with a total elevation gain of somewhere between 2000 and 3000 feet (Garmin Connect is not 100% precise when it comes to elevation) it was definitely the toughest run I have ever done. This is also reinforced by the fact that it took me 2h 9m 23s which is the longest run (time-wise) I have ever done. That being said I am hooked on the trails. I am hoping to do the 50k out at US National Whitewater Center in October.

So for a couple of years I have had to put up with a 10" Asus netbook. It has served me well but it is far from perfect. The screen is too small, the resolution too low and the keyboard too cramped, not to mention that it is slow. I can't play the movies I would like to watch and overall it is just not good enough but still it has served me well. I have spent countless hours looking at laptops. I even bought a Asus UX31E when I was visiting the US only to have it be defective. I have looked at ultrabooks and real laptops. All have had something wrong with them. Primarily I think the resolution is too low on them. 1366x768 would have been acceptable in the early to mid 90'ies. 1920x1080 would be acceptable but I still would prefer more. When Apple released the retina display Macbook Pros I was finally impressed. What I was not impressed with was the general issues people reported when it came to running Linux on them. I want something that can run Linux. Then recently Google released the Chromebook Pixel. Finally a laptop with a proper display and it runs Linux but there is a catch. The standard version has 32GB storage and the LTE version has 64GB since they are designed for use with Google's cloud storage. I do not believe in the use of cloud storage (another ranting blog post should be dedicated to this subject) but I could probably live with 128GB even if I would prefer 256GB or 512GB. At least it has arrived in a non-Apple packaging hopefully we will soon see more high end laptops with resolutions of 2560x1600 or 2560x1700 (or even higher?).

So after I moved to the US I could not get my old analog phone adapter (Linksys SPA3000) to work and I just assumed that it had not survived the trip to the US. I never saw any registration attempts on my Asterisk server from the SPA3000 but both my Nokia N9 could register using SIP and so could my wife's Samsung Galaxy S3 using Sipdroid. I finally decided to buy a new phone adapter and since I have been very content with the SPA3000 I decided to go with a Cisco SPA112. Later I have found out that a lot of people really don't like either the SPA112 or SPA122. Well I fought and fought with it for days but the problem was the exact same as with the SPA3000, no registration attempts ever reached the Asterisk server. I thought it was possibly firewall issues or something similar although that made no sense since the mobile phones could register while being on the wireless network. I finally came to the conclusion that it had to be the new Netgear WNDR4500 that we also bought when we moved here. So I found the setting. Enable WMM (Wi-Fi multimedia) settings This setting seems to come enabled by default. It can be found under Advanced Tab -> Setup -> QoS Setup. I disabled that and the SPA112 registered right away and I have had no issues since. I guess either Netgear's implementation of WMM is faulty or Cisco's SIP implementation is buggy. No matter which I don't need that setting enabled and I am very happy that everything works now.

About 10 years ago or so I bought a Happy Hacking keyboard. I liked the minimalistic keyboard and it worked well for me but it was expensive and I was constantly force to use regular keyboards so it never got to be the perfect keyboard for me. I then switched to using gaming keyboards and for a long time I was happy with a Razer Lycosa. When I got a new Lycosa Mirror it had many issues and it turns out that Razer unfortunately is notorious for the quality control on the Lycosas. I then looked at the Blackwidow Ultimate and Razer Deathstalker but I didn't really like them enough. My wife likes the Deathstalker and knock on wood has had no issues with it so far. So after many years of using a gaming keyboard or at least a backlit keyboard I have now replaced it with a much more basic keyboard. Das Keyboard Ultimate S tactile soft. Now I can really feel like a proper nerd again. The only problem is that I will want one at work as well. I guess that will have to wait a little while I get completely used to not being able to look at the keyboard for help while typing.

So a lot has happened since my last post on this blog. - I quit my job at Danske Bank - I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina - I got a new job as a contractor with Wells Fargo Securities - I have sold my old Ford Focus station wagon (well my uncle Finn sold it for me) - I have bought a brand new VW Golf R - I had to give up on AT&T and my Nokia N9 (damn I miss that phone) - I replaced it with a Samsung Galaxy S3 (nice phone but not half as cool as my N9) Life is good in the US but of course I miss Denmark too. - I miss being able to wear jeans and a tshirt to work - I miss the weather (it is not supposed to be 23 degrees celcius in January) - I miss seeing snow - I miss being able to say whatever I want (my son got in trouble at school for saying "that sucks") - I miss Danish politics but at least I don't have to worry about what I am going to vote - I miss Danish driving rules (damn I hate all those friggin stop signs over here) - I miss my family. I miss being able to call them whenever I think of it, now I have to factor in time difference and crap - I miss my friends - I miss speaking Danish I do like it here but I am Danish and I believe I will always be Danish no matter how long I live in the US.

Tell this little fella that size doesn't matter.

Been a while since my last blog post but this is important I believe. Why do I believe it is important? Because not only does DRM take away from our potential choices when we buy something DRM infected but it also promotes piracy. This may be a controversial statement but why is it that I cannot just put a blu ray disc in my Linux computer and view the damn movie when if I download the exact same movie from Pirate Bay (no I do not use Pirate Bay, I never have and I never will) it will play out of the box. It is time for the media industry to understand that DRM has not done anything to stop piracy of movies and music but only made it harder (in some cases nearly impossible) to be a law abiding citizen.

Today I received my Asus UX31 featuring a Intel Core i5-2557, 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Overall I love the looks and the feel of the machine. Of course the computer comes preloaded with Windows 7 Home Premium or something like that. I only managed to boot it into Windows once because I didn't realize that F2 was the right key to enter the BIOS setup utility. Then my fun started with getting Debian installed. I had a USB stick with a Squeeze (stable) 6.03 Netinstall copy on it. Only problem was that the kernel would not recognize the wireless card. Then I tried the USB-to-ethernet adapter that comes with the computer but that didn't work either since the kernel had no driver for the USB 3.0 port on the right side of the machine. After some fighting back and forth on my wife's Windows laptop I created a new Wheezy (testing) netinstall USB stick using unetbootin. The machine is currently installing but since I am on my mother-in-law's fairly slow DSL I will have to wait a couple of hours before writing more about how Debian Testing runs on it, hopefully I will be wrinting form that machine and not my wife's laptop. I have not decided if I should just go to Unstable or stick with Testing. We will see. I am sure there will be plenty of hours playing with my new toy to get everything working to my full satisfaction.

I supported this project with $25. I may be kinda cheap but I am also kinda broke.

So I went fishing for the first time here in Denmark on my own. I have been fishing in DK before but it has probably been 20 years. This was my first time fishing for sea trout and even though I didn't catch anything but seaweed I had a good good time. I went with the following setup. Pole: Abu Garcia Vendetta Reel: Abu Garcia Ambassadeur Orra SX Waders: Kinetec waders and wading boots Lure: Random Hansen lure (for sea trout) I really liked the Orra reel. It casts very smooth and I hope it will serve me well. I have read about some quality issues with the reel but I hope that wont be me. It has been a good experience fishing like this and I believe I will be doing this quite a bit more over the summer. Now I will just have to learn how to break apart and reassemble the reel for good and thorough cleaning and lubrication. Next time (hopefully tomorrow) I hope I will at least hook something that resembles a fish. :-)

So I have finally started getting some runs in in my Vibram FiveFingers KSO Trek. I try running like 3 times a week and I have finally been up to around 4k. Far from what I used to run but for some reason running in them is just more fun. I still get somewhat sore in my calves but I can't wait until my body is ready for a real trail run in the woods near by. Now in my roaming the Internet today I stumbled on Luna Sandals and I think they look so cool. I really want a pair but now my wife basically told me to put down the crack pipe and get back to reality. This one is going to take some convincing.