Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Victory!  After five long years of trying almost nothing, I have finally returned to the top of the search results on Google when searching for "Brent" and "Ironic."

I attribute my success to very little effort, ignoring the problem, and essentially not even thinking of my social media presence for the last 5 years other than saying "Happy Birthday" to friends from high school on Facebook.  Also, I'd like to thank Google's incomprehensible search algorithms as a result of which I can't explain how I lost the top spot in the first place.



It's worth mentioning that Google now thinks I mean "Brent zionic" which, I guess, maybe?  But as far as I can tell, that is just some guy on LinkedIn that Google thinks you are now more likely to be interested in than how ironic I am.  Is that, in and of itself, a form of irony?  Probably not.

Thursday, June 7, 2018

date | cowsay | lolcat Watch Face on a Verizon Wear24



In 2017, Verizon released the Wear24 smartwatch to an overwhelming lack of interest, and discontinued it soon thereafter.  However, as an Android platform it's actually not horrible once you get through the tedious and time-consuming process of rooting it.

Wear24 root instructions: https://forum.xda-developers.com/android-wear/development/how-to-install-twrp-recovery-achieve-t3781502

Once I had it rooted and installed Termux, the next obvious step was to use "date | cowsay | lolcat" as a watch face. 

  1) Termux: https://termux.com/
  2) cowsay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j12kFnXBlbs
  3) lolcat: https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat

And it works perfectly, albeit a bit slow.  (For example, lolcat requires more than a second to colorize each frame so there is a 3 second delay between screen updates.)

TL;DR, Buy a Verizon Wear24 for cheap, root it, install termux et. al., run date | cowsay | lolcat

Note: If you need to watch a video to install cowsay then you probably shouldn't try doing any of this at all. :)