Encryption unsuccessful (AKA, your phone is bricked. Buy a new one!)

So I woke up last night at 3 AM with my phone (a ZTE AWE N800) screaming Virgin Mobile's horrible launch tones, happily announcing "Encryption Unsuccessful" and I have to do a factory reset and wipe all my data. Well that's just fine. I get to reset my damn phone and re-install everything, right? All my contacts, apps, everything, right? No problem. I have backups.

Except it doesn't work. I click the button for a factory reset. I hear the horrible screaming tones again, and I get the same error. This is what's referred to as a "boot loop," apparently. I go online hoping for a solution. (Because Google is SO good at finding solutions to this stuff, right?) Apparently, you can reset into Android's fix-it mode by holding the power and volume down keys (holding power and volume up boot with the letters FTM in a white box and do absolutely nothing else). So, from this screen I can do such useful things as "wipe data/factory reset," which should be what I want to do.

But it doesn't work. Reboot, and I get "Encryption Unsuccessful" once again.

So what's the solution now? Go to Google again and look for more answers that aren't there. Maybe I should "root" my device, "re-flash" the ROM, or apply any number of useless initials to my problem. (CWM or TWRP, anybody?) There are plenty of websites with people experiencing the exact same problem with the exact same phone, but absolutely no answers for anybody other than crap like "Get the unbrick kit and try that or get in recovery if u have twrp" and "tried loading update.zip and it failed." This problem is so pervasive one page actually tried luring people in to throw scammy spyware alerts at them. Most pages, however, just have people stating the problem with no solution. Heck, even Virgin Mobile has a Q&A page with this problem, with hilariously ineffective solutions such as rebooting the phone or dialing *86 (which you could only do if you were able to boot past this screen).

After just a few minutes (hours, actually), I start feeling like I have to be a third-level hacker just to use a damn phone, and I'm starting to realize that I have no choice but to just go and buy another one. These things are pretty much disposable, right? Everyone has four or five old cell phone in a drawer somewhere. Maybe this will be a good time to switch over to FreedomPop instead and pay $32/month instead of $42. The new phone pays for itself in less than a year, and this time I'm getting one with enough room so that it doesn't yell at me to delete some apps every time I use Facebook.

Win, right?

Removing High-Pitched Noise from Canon Powershot Videos

I used to use a Canon Powershot A630 for all of my photography. Since it has a built-in video feature (as most digital camera these days do), it also became my default video camera. In the mid-2000s, once I had a memory card large enough, I found it completey unneccessary to use my little video camera at all, so I started recording all my video with this little pocket camera from about 2005 onward.

If you're ever used this camera for video, however, you may notice it had a high-pitched hissing all throughout every video it shoots. This was an irritation for me before I stumbled upon a website that explained how to remove it flawlessly using a free program called Audacity. It involves removing the audio, entering a strange, cryptic code into a NyQuist prompt to remove the sound, and then putting the audio back in with the video (I usually separate tracks using Final Cut).

Unfortunately, the web page that explains how to do this (located here) decided to lock itself behind a password for some reason. Fortunately, I was able to save the instructions, which I'll share here for anyone who wants them.

Using this tip on audio removal from the wiki for the software Audacity, I managed to figure out that the high-pitched noise has a frequency of 4290 Hz. I extracted the audio from the video using VirtualDub, and opened it with Audacity 1.3.4 beta. Like the Wiki page instructed, I used the Nyquist prompt and the command (notch2 s 4290 50) (yes the brackets are necessary), and this removed the noise flawlessly! All that needs to be done is now to reinsert the audio into the video file. I can combine this with re-encoding the video with a more size- (and web-) friendly codec.

Happy videoing!

Technology sucks

I think we can all agree that personal computers are quickly growing worse with every generation rather than better. Case in point: copying sections of a DVD. I have a bunch of home movies compiled on several DVDs, and I want to create a compilation by copying bits and pieces from them. This used to be simple with a free program called MPEG Streamclip and a $20 MPEG2 plug-in from Apple. Of course, Apple has since dumped all over their software and made their plug-in completely unusable.

Fortunately, I still have an older laptop that runs 10.5 instead of 10.7, so I can still get my work done. Maybe I should consider "upgrading" my newer iMac down to an older version as well.

Breaking up with Angie's List

So here's why email marketing doesn't work and why I'm putting Angie's list on my "blacklist" of emails and am not going to resubscribe to their crappy premium locked-garden review site anymore. I get this delightful little piece of spam this morning.

See that? "Great news!" What's the great news? "Gift memberships." Yeah, I get about ten of these a day from Angie's list, crap like $199 for $300 worth of floor planning supervision or something stupid that has nothing to do with finding out if the guy who's installing my furnace is ripping me off, which is what I signed up for in the first place. (And no, Gmail, it's not "important." Thanks for the useless label.)

So naturally I want to unsubscribe from this thing because I want my "special offers" to consist of nothing but buy-one-get-one Smash Burger or something like that. So I click through to unsubscribe, where I'm asked my email address to "confirm" the unsubscription. Yeah, ever notice how they don't bother ask your permission to send you spam, but they definitely want to triple-check that you're absolutely sure you want to tell them to go away?

Anyway, here's the result.

There. See that? The email address I entered did not match the information in their database. Oh yeah? Go back and look at the first screen cap. See where they sent the spam from the beginning? That's right. They have my information in their database, but they don't want to remove me from their database. They want to keep sending me crappy email "offers" I don't want.

So guess what happens next? I add their email to the filter that automatically deletes stuff from my email before it ever even gets to my Gmail funnel. Then I cancel their service, and when they refuse to do that, I start dispute their charges when they automatically bill my credit card. You guys at Angie's List ought to learn how to take a hint. Being this annoying isn't going to get you any more loyalty from this side of the screen.

An unexpected error occurred (error code -43)

So I'm in the middle of a happy workday when a shared server decides it's no longer going to cooperate.


Whenever I try to mount (or dismount) this server, it spits out the ever-so-helpful alert, "An unexpected error occurred (error code -43)." What could this mean? A Google search reveals absolutely nothing helpful anywhere on the Internet. Force-quitting the Finder won't help. Neither will logging out. The server itself is working just fine. So what's the solution?

Rebooting, of course. Close every single damn program you've got open, close all your open documents, and reboot your whole stupid Mac. It's the only way to get access to the shared drive again.

I'm putting this blog online only so the next time this error occurs, I'll find something relevant amidst the sea of completely unhelpful pages out there.

Find file

It's hard to explain how much I hate the Mac's inability to find simple files. The "find file" feature has been integrated in the Mac OS for a couple decades now, so I have no idea why they decided to screw it up so perfectly a few versions ago (in 10.4).

You used to be able to search for files by name (and other criteria) in a simple window and receive a simple list of results. You can still do this with third-party freeware like "Find Any File," but not the Mac OS. When I search for a file named "All in Kansas," which I know is on my hard drive somewhere, Mac OS X reports "0 items." Why? I have no idea. Find Any File picks it up with no problem, as you can see in the above screenshot.

I have a feeling the reason this happens has something to do with a hidden setting for Spotlight that involves digging through preference panes or mucking about in the terminal, which is why I'm not bothering with it. (Apple's hilariously outdated support page certainly won't help. Check out those pinstripes!)

Firefox profile manager

So I finally upgraded from Firefox 3 to Firefox 8. I would have upgraded a while ago, I think, but I must be the only person in the world using the Profile Manager to run multiple versions of Firefox (i.e. one with my bookmarks, passwords, links, and plug-ins, and another for my "test" identity for trying out new stuff). I had been able to access the profile manager in version 3 with this completely non-intuitive Terminal command I had to discover by digging around on the Mozilla website:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager

Yeah, really easy to remember, right? So anyway, when Mozilla brought out Firefox 4, this command no longer worked, and they never (not even to this day) bothered to update the website to explain how to use Profile Manager. Go see for yourself.

I stuck with Version 3 all this time (not using Chrome because I like having bookmarks and pages in a sidebar, thank you very much). Then I discovered on some random Mozilla forum that there's a whole new command to launch the Profile Manager. Here it is:

arch -i386 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -ProfileManager

Happy as I am now to use Firefox 8 with both my old profiles, I have to wonder why Mozilla hasn't bothered updating their own help section after five versions of their software?