WTF is this Shit?

 

This fat broad has been fucking with my phone ever since November 7, which was the cutoff date for Verizon's old SMS app.  I have played with getting rid of it but there is no Visual Voice Mail app installed on my phone.  I never installed it.  I never accepted any EULA or Terms of Service.  

Besides showing this nag screen it also cuts the phone interface over to /dev/null.  You have to click the power button to get it back but if you subsequently hit any dialpad key, it goes black again.  The old VM interface still works.

Functionality is there but the phone is impaired.

The illustration looks Google-ish, but again there is no such app installed.

In my adventures with this turd, I found that if you use the carrier's data connection (which is not FREE), it goes away... sometimes.  I only use the carrier's data connection to connect to DinkNET's VPN since it blocks a huge amount of ads.  

Having an "always on" unfree data connection violates my Terms of Use.

 

FAT CHICK UPDATE 12/18/2024 

 

It did turn out to be Google crap, but it's not a standalone app.  It's bundled with their telephone app.  No way to split it off.  You have to trash the phone app to get rid of it.

 

I am now using the "generic green" phone and SMS apps from the Play Store.  It still blacks out the screen when you answer the phone.  There doesn't appear to be a way to originate a call in screen mode, but there may be an option for an in-progess call.  They're both pretty cruddy apps but preferable over unannounced feature "upgrades".

No doubt about it, I need a new phone.

Snap VLC

 Happy fucking New Year, nerds!

I've been using VideoLAN (VLC) for longer than I can remember.  It has always been quirky to the extreme but I use it on my phone (Droid) and all my computers.  Back in the day my work phone was an iPhone and the Apple version of VLC was seen as a threat by iOS.  You could use it for a few cuts, but the OS always shut it down as soon as the screen blanked.  I guess this was a way to force you into iTunes but I just used my personal Droid to listen to music.

For a few years, Do Not Disturb (DND) on Android did nothing but shut the sound off system-wide so if you wanted to listen to music you had to be disturbed.  Mildly infuriating.  They "fixed" that by breaking DND in a different way,  For a few months whenever you got a phone call it would say "The phone is ringing but Do Not Disturb is activated!"

What part of Do Not Disturb do you not understand?

They fixed that relatively quickly.

Desktop VLC was less vexing but it had its own problems, like imposing a sort order you didn't ask for or want.  The Icecast Radio Directory was an awesome feature that offered absolutely everything at dir.xiph.org.  EVERYTHING.  But then one day the folks at xiph.org decided to upgrade their site and broke that feature for good.  Until now.

My old desktop (Ubuntu) version of VLC is 3.0.16 Vetinan and it has the annoying habit of flashing multiple video windows when starting a video.  I could not get rid of that, even with a rip/reinstall.  I was aware of Snapd Apps but had ignored them for years (unless forced to use them like with Chromium and Firefox).  I thought I'd give the Snap version a try since it was listed as 3.0.20 Vetinan.

I was pleasantly surprised.  For the most part.

The flashing multiple video windows problem was flat out gone.  The Icecast Radio Directory was finally fixed.  Two thumbs up.  We're on a roll.

Unfortunately I have two USB ATSC devices I have been using to watch television using playlists output by w_scan ("version 20170107 (compiled for DVB API 5.11)").  These playlists do not work on the 3.0.20 version of VLC.

w_scan is marked all-caps EXPERIMENTAL so I suspect that is the issue.  But you never know, VLC 3.0.21 might fix it.  Until something is fixed I'll be running both versions.