restart audio

On my Win 8.1 computer, sometimes when I unplug my speakers, or plug them into the audio jack, the audio will stop working. When I test the playback device, Windows shows an error like "Failed to play test tone" (I don't remember the exact wording). Disabling and re-enabling the device doesn't make a difference. I usually have to reboot. Maybe sometimes it fixes itself after a while; not sure.

But today, I tried this, and it worked:
open a command window using "Run as Administrator"
then enter commands:
net stop audiosrv
net start audiosrv

hours of sleep

I've been tracking my hours of sleep each night since 2016.

For 2018 so far:
On the weekend (Fri & Sat), I sleep an average of 7.93 hours per night. (That's less than I expected)
On week nights (Sun - Thu), I sleep an average of 6.77 hours per night.
Sunday is the night with the least sleep, 6.56 hours.

I didn't separate out vacation days vs non-vacation, but that would probably only make a very slight difference.
Overall, my average is 7.11 hours per night. (That's better than I expected)

In 2016, my average was 6.84.
In 2017, my average was 6.85.

I've a feeling my average is going to go down a bit now, as my morning Skype calls for work have shifted from 10am to 8am. Which means that I have to get up at least half an hour earlier than I had been doing before.

But then again, I have quite a few vacation days now at the end of the year.

I've also been keeping track of what time I go to bed & get up. It would be interesting to get an average of those times for weekdays versus weekends. But I'd have to figure out how to do that first. StackOverflow has a suggestion of how to calculate it, by converting the times to degrees and doing a vector average. But I think it might be easier if I shifted the times to avoid the midnight crossover (23 to 0), as then I could just do a simple average of the values. I don't feel like spending time on that right now though. Some other day. Or night.

Mastodon

I have signed up for a Mastodon account on the https://im-in.space/ instance. The "I'm in space" name seemed nicely amusing to me, and the site has a cute spinning spaceship gif too. More importantly, the instance still had open sign-ups available, which many of the other smaller instances I looked at didn't, due to spam or capacity issues.

I looked up the name before signing up, so I did realize that it (and the spaceship gif) are actually references to Portal 2, even though I've never played the game.

Trying to use Mastodon, I'm feeling sort of like I did when I started using Facebook. I've never had a Twitter account, so I'm a newbie in terms of micro-blogging sites too. Some things aren't very intuitive to me. Some things which I feel one surely ought to be able to customize, apparently can't be. Im-in.space is a GlitchSoc instance, so I'm not sure if that makes a difference to these things or not.

There's a page which shows the stuff I've posted: https://im-in.space/@darkoshi

There's a "dashboard"-style page: https://im-in.space/web/getting-started
with 4 columns:
1st column has a text box where I can post a message.
2nd column shows notifications
3rd column shows a feed of posts from the people I've followed.
4th column shows navigation options.

But what if I want the text box for writing posts to be larger, rather than in that narrow column?
What if I want to view the posts of the people I've followed on it's own page (like DW's reading page), rather than having it squeezed into less than 25% the width of my browser?
The only way I've seen to do that is to switch the layout to mobile view... which actually doesn't look that bad now. So, guess this is no longer an issue for me.

When I tried the mobile view on my laptop before, it looked different (dunno why), awful. Now it's ok, but I still wish the text would be centered, and take up say, 50 to 75% of the browser width (more like my DW page) rather than being left-adjusted on the page. And I don't see a way to customize the page colors.

The other thing that has been confusing me is how protected posts are handled between instances.

When I view my feed (on my instance), it includes the protected entries posted by the people I've followed on another instance. When I view their page (on their instance), it doesn't show the protected posts. That makes sense in retrospect, as the other site doesn't know who I am, as I'm logged into my instance, not their instance.

But there are some posts that I see when viewing the posts on the other instance, which I don't see in my feed. The reply button only shows up on posts in my feed, not when viewing the page on the other instance. So I can't reply to those mystery posts.
I think it has something to do with whether the entry was posted public vs unlisted vs followers-only, but I'm not sure. (I was thinking there was a way to post only to one's own instance? Maybe then it doesn't go out to followers on other instances?) Maybe it's a bug, but I'm not sure.

squirrels, Janelle Monae

I watched a show about squirrels on PBS' Nature. Fascinating. Per the show, a fox squirrel can remember up to 9000 locations of where they've buried their nuts each year. Their brain grows larger while doing this, and then shrinks again by the next year.

..

(Content warning on the lyrics of the following song; they contain the term 'schizo'.)

I also watched a concert by Janelle Monae on Austin City Limits. The riff on the last song (starting 42 minutes in), "Come Alive", sounds so familiar to me, I'm sure I've heard it or one very similar before.
(Dah'-duh DAH'-duh, Dah'-duh-duh) (also La'-luh La'-luh LA-luh, La'-luh-luh)
But I haven't figured out which other song that might be*. I tried humming it on midomi.com but had technical difficulties.

And then she melds in that "Ya-dee dah-dee dah-dee da" lyric from some other familiar old song (Cab Calloway - Minnie the Moocher, aka the Hidey-Ho song) as well. The concert version of the song is quite better, muchly expanded and with audience participation, compared to the album version of the song on YouTube.

*I think I found the song, thanks to the "Come Alive (The War of the Roses)" Wikipedia page: The B-52's - "Rock Lobster". It was one of the songs the B-52s played in their set during the Culture Club concert I went to this summer.

Now I'm wondering why the song is subtitled "The War of the Roses". I haven't been able to figure that out yet. Anyone know?

Here's another video of the song in concert, in case anyone has trouble with the PBS link: Janelle Monae Come Alive (The War of The Roses) Glastonbury 2011
I still like the Austin City Limits version better; this one doesn't have the Hidey-ho part in it.