In the last post I posted about learning woodworking and making some rattles.
Today I made another one, this time a whale shape. This is on my etsy page as well as FB marketplace. The first three are also on FB here.
Here’s the video itself:
If you are interested in purchasing you can find it at my etsy store.
I’ve been trying to teach myself woodworking over the last few months. So far have made a desk, a turntable “cabinet” for my record player and albums, a couple of dice towers and these baby rattles.
I’vee been using Life360 for close to ten years. I don’t remember how long exactly but started using it when my second child was a teenager, and she just turned 26. It’s been extremely helpful in past years not to snoop (although that’s what we were doing with our kids) but to keep tabs on my mom as well as the rest of the family.
It was useful in conjunction with the two home automation software packages I use, HomeSeer and HomeAssistant. I had quite a few automations set up based on location. Arrive home, at night? The front porch light turns on and the front door unlocks. Stuff like that.
Unfortunately, Life360 has chosen to block third parties from accessing its data and will not be providing its paid users with any sort of api to use either (I am gold level and pay $10 a month for the service).
Going forward I am going to be cancelling my subscription once I find an easy, viable alternative. May cancel it right away. With the free account you can have two “places” and it gives crash detection (something built into our phones now anyway).
I am limited in what I will be using but a few of the alternatives are listed below.
Home Assistant App– Does the same thing. I would miss being able to track in real time but it’s available for iPhone (my mom) and Android (the rest of us). The problem with HA is that it means I either must get it installed on everyone’s phones and get the setup right or expect them to do it. Probably not happening.
Bark. More of a parental control app which is not what I want. It is available for both ios and android. Don’t know if they have an accessible API.
Tasker. Android only. Difficult for new end users to set up, I would have to do the work and hope that nobody disabled it by accident. I already use it and, in the past, have used it for location based stuff for my personal phone, probably will continue.
Monitoring ip addresses on my network. I have done this in the past as well. It works well for automations when they are already here and connected so can’t have automations run quite as early as with Life360, but I will use this as well.
If anyone has any decent suggestions, please let me know. Open to alternatives.
Just a quick plug for some guys that have done a bit of work in our historic house. All Pro Renovation LLC, located in West Ga, has done several different pieces of electrical work for us including installing dedicated breakers for our pond pump, new light fixtures and new outlets. Quick, clean work and knowledgeable.
If you’re in the metro Atlanta area and need electrical work done, go let them know and they will give you a call.
FYI, this is not a paid review.
I’ve added BBS Tournament Wordle to the main Shadowscope Theme Door Games menu. Will try to get it added to the other themes when I get home from work this afternoon. Also, recently I have added a bunch of native Synchronet doors as well. These can be found in the doors in the “Ports” menu.
I still need to go through and retest all of the doors to make sure they are working correctly, but do it with a guest account or something. Another user found and I fixed a bug on the InterBBS version of BRE where everyone that played was thrown in under my name.
I am also thinking about expanding and adding more maps to the Operation Overkill game, potentially just have a section strictly for that and use all the maps. I’ve found that some are extremely popular, where I was getting multiple calls daily and when I reset the game last year it’s now been pretty dead.
Going to reset the default Mystic theme to be able to accept non-ansi callers. I know there are a couple that have issues displaying it and forcing ansi isn’t the way to build up any sort of regular callers.
One last thing, if you’ve found that it won’t connect, either from your telnet client or from the website here, please shoot me a message so I can fix it. Normally that’s because the IP address has gotten into my denylist for whatever reason.
I took a little time and fixed it so that the BBS telnet page is working again and can be logged into from the web page. Not sure why it wasn’t working but it is now…
Some of the fonts I am using don’t seem to display properly, I may consider going back to the old ones soon.
So I made a pretty simple dice roller for my android phone using Tasker. If you don’t know what Tasker is, it’s an all-around automation app. It’s been around for as long as I have been using Android phones I would guess. I’ve used it for years but have gotten really serious about it in the last year or so. This isn’t a post about Tasker though, although you will need it for this.
I had come across a Task (a set of actions) that would allow you to simulate the roll of a single six sided die. Really it’s just a random number from 1-6 so that part is pretty easy to emulate. I wanted to be able to roll multiple dice and I wanted the whole gamut, 2,3,4,6,8,10,12,20 and percentile dice. I took a little bit of work but I was able to get that part finished. I am currently using Google Assistant Intercept so I can say “roll 2d10” and it correctly recognizes that, gets the random number between 2 and 20 in that case, displays it on the screen and also speaks the answer. Tasker steps are below:
Task: RPG Dice Roll
<How many dice to roll>
A1: Variable Set [
Name: %Dice_number
To: %par1
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
<What type of dice (d6, d10, d20, etc)>
A2: Variable Set [
Name: %Dice_type
To: %par2
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
<Sets the minimum amount. This is easy, it just matches how many dice you are rolling. The minimum number you'll get>
A3: Variable Set [
Name: %HowManyDice_min
To: %Dice_number
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
<The rest of the Variable sets puts the max amount you can roll * whatever kind of dice it is, i.e. 3d12 would be 12 * 3.>
A4: Variable Set [
Name: %HowManyDice_max
To: %Dice_number * 2
Do Maths: On
Max Rounding Digits: 3
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
If [ %Dice_type ~ 2 ]
A5: Variable Set [
Name: %HowManyDice_max
To: %Dice_number * 3
Do Maths: On
Max Rounding Digits: 3
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
If [ %Dice_type ~ 3 ]
A6: Variable Set [
Name: %HowManyDice_max
To: %Dice_number * 4
Do Maths: On
Max Rounding Digits: 3
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
If [ %Dice_type ~ 4 ]
A7: Variable Set [
Name: %HowManyDice_max
To: %Dice_number * 6
Do Maths: On
Max Rounding Digits: 3
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
If [ %Dice_type ~ 6 ]
A8: Variable Set [
Name: %HowManyDice_max
To: %Dice_number * 8
Do Maths: On
Max Rounding Digits: 3
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
If [ %Dice_type ~ 8 ]
A9: Variable Set [
Name: %HowManyDice_max
To: %Dice_number * 10
Do Maths: On
Max Rounding Digits: 3
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
If [ %Dice_type ~ 10 ]
A10: Variable Set [
Name: %HowManyDice_max
To: %Dice_number * 12
Do Maths: On
Max Rounding Digits: 3
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
If [ %Dice_type ~ 12 ]
A11: Variable Set [
Name: %HowManyDice_max
To: %Dice_number * 20
Do Maths: On
Max Rounding Digits: 3
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
If [ %Dice_type ~ 20 ]
A12: Variable Set [
Name: %HowManyDice_max
To: %Dice_number * 100
Do Maths: On
Max Rounding Digits: 3
Structure Output (JSON, etc): On ]
If [ %Dice_type ~ 100 ]
<Found this one at Soundbible. You can download your own sound file or disable this part.>
A13: Music Play [
File: Tasker/soundfiles/Shake And Roll Dice.wav.crdownload
Start: 0
Stream: 3 ]
<Get the random number between the minimum # set earlier and the max # set earlier and outputs it to the Dice variable.>
A14: Variable Randomize [
Name: %Dice
Min: %HowManyDice_min
Max: %HowManyDice_max ]
A15: Say [
Text: You rolled a %Dice
Engine:Voice: default:default
Stream: 3
Pitch: 5
Speed: 5
Respect Audio Focus: On ]
A16: Flash [
Text: <h1><b><center>%Dice</center></b></h1>
Long: On
Tasker Layout: On
Title: You Rolled a:
Continue Task Immediately: On
Dismiss On Click: On
Show Over Everything: On
Position: Top
Use HTML: On ]
I do have this up on Taskernet as well, you can find it here if you don’t want to input all of that. I would also like to create a series of scenes for this as well at some point but I’m pretty shitty at drawing. I’m thinking animated gifs that show up with the correct number and type of dice and actually show the correct numbers on them. Seems like it would be pretty difficult to implement and would need to include hundreds of images to make it work right. IDK. Going to have to think about that one for a while. I tried using DALL-E and LeapAI to create the images on the fly but it didn’t work worth a crap. Vaguely resembled dice but the background wasn’t transparent and the numbers on them weren’t actually numbers.
An example of what NOT to do in tech support.
I tend to update my phone at least once a year, sometimes more. I’ve gone through all the Pixels except the 4, the Oneplus 7 and 8, Note 3 and 10, all the Google Nexus family, a couple of different HTC ones, the Droid Incredible and Incredible 2, couple of different blackberries, couple of Windows phones. One thing has been consistent across most of the Androids. I’m an avid Rom flasher (it’s like getting a new phone 10+ times a year).
The problem with that is that I must back everything up and restore it. I have gotten fairly good at it but it still takes several hours each time.
One app has been a major headache every time I load a new Rom or get a new phone. Life360. I have one of their premium memberships and I use it with my home automation stuff as well, so it’s important. Any time I have to set it back up, it’s always been a bear to log back in. Usually, I can finally get it to log back in after 20-30 attempts though.
This time, I have tried to log back in 200+ times since March 31st and have been unsuccessful. I contacted Life360 through a DM on Twitter on April 2nd:
So, I went ahead and opened the ticket. I described my issue of not being able to log in, told them I had followed their FAQ. I tried over Wi-Fi and mobile. I tried in multiple locations. I uninstalled and reinstalled. I cleared the cache and storage. I disabled the ad blockers on my home network as well as on my Pixel 7 Pro. I reset my password twice. At two different points in the process I even got a text message from Life360 telling me welcome back, etc. You get that when you’ve made a successful connection, which obviously I had not.
Anyway, I get this initial email
Hey there,
It looks like you forgot your password. Let’s get you a new one.
If you didn’t receive the email to reset your password, please check your spam folder to see if the message is there.
If you didn’t receive the SMS text, make sure your carrier plan is set to allow SMS text messages.To reset your password, please follow this link- https://www.life360.com/forgot-password
*Watch this short video on How to Reset Your Password: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tckK_sWbFLg
If you still need help, please respond with the email and phone number on your account and we will be happy to help.
Let us know if you tried, but did not receive the password code through SMS text or email.
Thank you,
Life360 Customer Care
So, I immediately emailed back “This has nothing to do with having forgotten my password.
Email is [REDACTED], phone is [REDACTED]”
No response after that until I sent them a DM on Twitter again.
Next email from Life360:
Hi Richard,
Thank you for reaching to Life360 about new device log in. I appreciate your patience and understanding on this matter. I’d be glad to help you with this.
To effectively assist, may I know what device are you using now?
Your swift reply is highly appreciated.
Have a safe day,
So of course, I email them back immediately
“I am using the Pixel 7 Pro
Thanks
Richard Miles “
I got a response quickly the same afternoon
Hi Richard,
Thank you for reaching Life360 Support about your account. I can assist you with this.
I would suggest to perform an app refresh.
Kindly follow this steps:
Note: Do not uninstall the app
Open your phone Settings app
Scroll down to and select Apps
Select Life360
Select Storage
Tap Clear Cache
Tap Clear Data
Power your phone off for 5 minutes
Open and Log back into the Life360 appAfter refreshing the app, you can reset your password. Kindly click this link
If the issue persists, please provide me a screenshot of the page that you are stuck.
Looking forward to your response.
Have a safe day,
Even though I had reset my password twice already at that point I went ahead and did as he instructed because sometimes it’s not the steps, it’s the ORDER of the steps that matters. I was in tech support at one point, and I know it’s important to go through with this stuff. Of course, that didn’t work. I emailed them back:
“Did as you instructed. Got the results in the screenshot. I did attach the logcat to my initial ticket.
Thanks
Richard Miles “
They emailed me back:
Hi Richard,
Thank you for your response.
I can see to your screenshot that unknown error has occurred. May I know if you have a stable internet connection in your area?
For the meantime, I suggest that you restart your Wi-Fi connection then, try resetting your password again with this unique link that I’ll be provided.
Please let me know if this works.
WTF. Okay, so I reset my password yet again for the 4th time. And yes, my internet connection is great here. Not only that but I had tried it on multiple connections and networks. I shot them back two emails:
“I have reset my password again using the link you provided. This is the 4th password reset I’ve done.
Restarted wifi connection. Internet connection in my area is fine. I have done this on two different wifi networks as well as connected only to mobile data in three different locations.
Same results, unknown error.”
“Also, it’s obvious it’s making a connection because if I enter the WRONG password it immediately tells me I have the wrong password.”
I didn’t get a response after that, DM’ed them again on Twitter:
Ok cool. Higher level of support. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. It usually only takes a time or two or public tweeting once and they get someone with intelligence on the job. I was pretty wrong on that. Next email I got from them:
Hi Richard,
I appreciate your patience on this matter. Let me further help you with this.
For the password reset link that was previously provided to you, have you already tried the link on different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, or Safari) on your computer? If not yet, can you please try to access the link and try it on different browsers to see if the issue still persists?
Please let me know if this works.
Have a safe day,
What in the cracker jack box do they think this is about? Obviously not reading any of the prior tickets or emails. I let them know (on April 6th:
“The link worked and reset my password. What does that have to do with getting a network error in the life360 app?”
On April 7th, I sent them another email:
“Any sort of updates on this ticket? Been a week since I was able to log in.”
They finally responded 14 hours later (this was Friday I believe):
Hello Richard,
Thank you for your patience in regards to this matter.
I am glad that you’ve able to login by resetting your password through a web browser.
There are some time that resetting the password will not work in the app but it is a rare case scenario. That is why we provided an alternative through the website.
Please let me know if everything is fine now.
Have a safe day,
I was starting to get pretty pissed off now. This idiot has no friggin’ clue. Sent a couple of DMs to them again.
Received an email response a short time later:
Hello Richard,
Thank you for your patience in regards to this matter.
Upon checking with your phone settings, I can see that there is a VPN. Can you confirm if you are using a Virtual Private Network?
Looking forward for your response.
Have a safe day,
What? Number one, you can’t see my phone settings, and if you think I believe that you really are a fucking fool. Number 2, I am not behind a VPN. While I do occasionally use one to access my home network when I am away, I haven’t used it in months and certainly not on this ROM.
So again, I emailed them back lol:
“I’m not currently using a VPN. I do occasionally use one to access my home servers but not in general.
I do use Adaway (not VPN mode) to block ads but it is currently disabled while I troubleshoot this.”
and a second email a few minutes later with a snippet of my logcat in hopes that someone that knows something there will be able to help. I don’t know what most of it means unfortunately, just that it’s errors:
“Just tried logging in, all ad blocking disabled, connecting over 5g rather than wifi. This is the log recording:
—- Apr 8, 2023 5:10:32 PM —-
04-08 17:10:36.180 4187 4187 I GoogleInputMethodService: GoogleInputMethodService.onStartInput():1898 onStartInput(EditorInfo{inputType=0x0(NULL) imeOptions=0x0 privateImeOptions=null actionName=UNSPECIFIED actionLabel=null actionId=0 initialSelStart=-1 initialSelEnd=-1 initialCapsMode=0x0 hintText=null label=null packageName=com.life360.android.safetymapd fieldId=-1 fieldName=null extras=null hintLocales=[]}, false)
04-08 17:10:46.535 14180 29161 E NetworkManager: https://api-cloudfront.life360.com/v3/oauth2/token error
04-08 17:10:46.535 14180 29161 E NetworkManager: at com.life360.android.l360networkkit.internal.etag.ResponseETagInterceptor.intercept(SourceFile:2)
04-08 17:10:46.535 14180 29161 E NetworkManager: at com.life360.android.l360networkkit.OkHttpClientSingleton$special$$inlined$-addNetworkInterceptor$1.intercept(SourceFile:3)
04-08 17:10:46.535 14180 29161 E NetworkManager: at com.life360.android.l360networkkit.internal.NetworkManager$RetryStrategy.doStrategy(SourceFile:3)
04-08 17:10:46.535 14180 29161 E NetworkManager: at com.life360.android.l360networkkit.internal.NetworkManager$RetryInterceptor.intercept(SourceFile:5)
04-08 17:10:46.535 14180 29161 E NetworkManager: at com.life360.android.l360networkkit.internal.HeadersForV5ApiAndAboveInterceptor.intercept(SourceFile:19)
04-08 17:10:46.535 14180 29161 E NetworkManager: at com.life360.android.l360networkkit.internal.cache.CacheInterceptor.intercept(SourceFile:20)
04-08 17:10:46.535 14180 29161 E NetworkManager: at com.life360.android.l360networkkit.internal.Life360PlatformImpl$AuthInterceptorBase.intercept(Unknown Source:13)
04-08 17:10:46.535 14180 29161 E NetworkManager: at com.life360.android.l360networkkit.internal.DynamicBaseUrlInterceptor.intercept(SourceFile:11)
04-08 17:10:46.535 14180 29161 E NetworkManager: at com.life360.android.l360networkkit.NetworkCallInterceptor.intercept(SourceFile:12)
That was on April 8th. Three days ago. Still no response. So I DMed them again first thing this monring
They didn’t even bother to respond there. Probably getting tired of me. They did, however, respond via email a few hours ago:
Hi Richard,
I appreciate your patience on this. I’d like to make a follow up on this. Are you still not able to log in to your new phone?
Have a safe day,
Really? No shit I’m not able to log in. What the fuck do these guys do, send out generic emails and close the fucking trouble ticket so they can tell their supervisor they’ve fixed everything for the day?
And my response to them
“No, I am not. Have not been able to log in since prior to April.”
To their credit they responded pretty quickly, although it was not helpful in the fucking least:
Hi Richard,
Thank you for your response. Can you confirm what type of device are you using and also can you check it for me if you can log-in using other device?
Have a safe day,
So, we are back to the same initial questions again. I did respond again though,
Pixel 7 Pro.
I’m setting up an old phone now to see if I can log in there anymore, will take a few minutes before I can get it set up.”
and then again, a few minutes later after having tried to log in from an older phone (non-rooted, completely stock, no extra apps installed, no custom rom.
“I got the same result trying to log in on another device. OnePlus 8 pro.”
And they responded again. Third time in one day. Wow. This guy must be tired from all the typing he’s had to do:
Hi Richard,
Thank you for your response. Since you are still unable to log back in to any device you might need delete your account and recreate it?
Have a safe day,
That’s all you have? What the everloving fuck.
So, I sent out a tweetstorm rant over on Twitter for my two followers to see. Only thing I’m getting there is answers from bots and spammers.
I have had Owntracks set up on my phone for the last few days. While it doesn’t (currently) offer me all the bells and whistles that Life360 does, I am able to integrate it into both Home Assistant and Homeseer using MQTT and trigger my automations off that. The way it’s headed now I will be deleting my Life360 account and cancelling my subscription. Biggest issue with that is that my daughters and my mom are all on my account as well and don’t live with us so getting it on their phones and getting everything working properly is a pain in the ass.
One of the downsides of posting crime stories on top of the tech stuff is that some people (including Google apparently) count it as hate speech. I don’t know but it seems to make the site a target for getting hacked. It’s happened several times over the last few years, but I’ve gotten rather good at cleaning it up and restoring everything.
This last time (Sunday afternoon) I did a better job at securing everything. Only thing that concerns me now is that I am not so sure that my host, LivingDot, does such a wonderful job with securing their servers and that other sites hosted on the server where mine is might be prone to letting bad actors have access to their file systems.
Seriously considering moving this back to my own server at home. The only issue I ever had with that was bandwidth. The first few years I had my site online after I took my BBS down, I hosted it at my home, first under Apache on a Debian box then under IIS on a Windows 2000 server. I finally moved it to LivingDot sometime around 2005 because of DNS issues as well as the occasional bandwidth suck (remember the Slashdot effect?)
Those same issues are the ones that are holding me back from moving it inhouse right now. I am still on cable internet with Charter Spectrum and while my DL speeds are decent the UL sucks balls. We also do a lot of streaming and gaming (when my daughter is home from college) and that’s not conducive to running a web site on cable. I’m still hoping that someone will eventually offer fiber. It’s available a block from here and at least one company has fiber running 3 feet from my front yard.
As I am going through the older posts on here (and the ones that are still listed as private) I am slowly but surely trying to fix problems with formatting, grammar, missing information, and photographs. Each time I update a post, WordPress sends an email out like it was a new post. I’m not sure if there is any way to stop that but I apologize for the spam. Overall, it will make this place a little better.
I may even take out some of the foul language in a few of them. Don’t count on it though.