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Chromebook Offline Google Movie Stops at 9 Seconds - Solved

 I had a few movies downloaded on my Chromebook, for trips or other situations. Last night was another situation: m router was down as there was no power in the neighborhood. However, every time I tired to play one of my offline movies, the player would run for 9 seconds and stop. I'd see a little spinny circle, but no progress. Try to jump ahead: spinny circle. I tired rebooting. I tried removing all extensions. I tried stopping things with task manager. I tried using my phone as a hot spot, to get past the 9 seconds. None of those fixed the offline movies. I could play one of the titles by using a browser instead of the google play movies app, using my hot spot. It was interesting that the movie would stall for almost a second at the 9 second mark. This suggests to me that 9 seconds must be the point were some extra authorization check is happening. The last step: reload the google play movie extension. Would I lose the offline movies? Maybe, but they weren't doing anything f
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My Personal History With Computers

Late 1970s - fascinated by the teletype and accounting computer at my father's office.   The computer was a big special formed metal desk, with an electric typewriter and a printing calculator built in. Below the calculator was a magnetic card reader/writer. Where the drawers on the side would have been was a big metal box.  It ran simple accounting programs and simple mail-merge processing, and had a coil of wire for the main memory storage. My favorite thing was to do powers of 2 on the calculator - having no idea that those were natural binary values. My Uncle worked for IBM, and one time when he was visiting NYC, we visited him at one of the offices. This was my first time seeing green-screen terminals connected to bigger systems. 1975 - my father buys an SR-52 programmable calculator - which had a tiny magnetic card reader for storing programs. I learned an early version of machine code programming using the calculator. My favorite game was the lunar lander simulator. 1

The Secret of Hotel Room Key-Cards

How many of you have gone to a hotel, and then suddenly, your card-key no longer works? I am about to share a secret about these card-keys. You know the keys - the size and shape of a credit-card, along with that magnetic strip. After years of having these keys go bad on me, I wondered why I seemed to have bad luck with them. Yet, I didn't have bad luck every time - just occasionally - and I wasn't sure why. Is there anything worse than finally getting back to your hotel room, late in evening - figure you have enough time to get to the room to go to the bathroom. Your hands are full of the stuff you don't want to leave in the car. You manage to re-balance your stuff to get out your card key. Slide - red light. Slide again a little faster - red light. Or maybe your card-key doesn't show any lights at all. You have to trudge back downstairs to the front desk. Wait in line for a clerk to help. Or maybe you had to ring the bell to get the lone clerk to come out

Colorado Springs - What Happened to the Intel Plant

When I moved to Colorado Springs, things were booming. The city was a significant technology hub. Compaq, HP, MCI, and a number of technology manufacturers including Intel. MCI was the largest employer in the region by a giant margin. It was one of the factors that lead me out to Colorado Springs. Even after MCI took the major financial hit and shrank to the point where it was not even in the top 10 of employees in town, Intel was still doing well. So well in fact, that they were in the process of securing land near the airport to build a second very large manufacturing facility. Yet, those plans fizzled, and a couple of years later, Intel decided to close the doors to their large plant, right along a major avenue named for, and giving access from the highway to the famous park: Garden of the Gods. This large space stood off the road, majestically idle, waiting for some use. Eventually, there were some takers for the space: Everest College added a call center; the County combine

Steal My Sunshine - Len

Random song come up from my playlist: "Steal My Sunshine". Not the first time it has come up, but it does seem to come up rarely.  When it was playing on the radio in 2001-2002 time frame,  during my drive to-and-from Denver Tech Center, it was one of the newer songs that stuck with me. It stuck with me enough that I decided to order the whole album CD from which the song was featured. It turns out there are a number of songs of a style I do not prefer on the CD, but it is interesting to gamble on other songs on an album by a group. This song also fits into a category for me: songs that spell a word. I was thinking a while back, I should make a list of them - for some reason some of them stick out. (Ex: B-A-N-A-N-A-S) However, it turns out that the song isn't all new. Perhaps there was some subliminal influencing going on with this song. In a very ADD ("SQUIRREL") moment while listening to the song today, I decided I needed to view the lyrics. It ha

Song from 2 Broke Girls

Love the new TV series: "2 Broke Girls"! We've been wondering what the song behind the intro was for a few weeks now. I tried googling it the other day, without success. Tonight, we were watching How I met Your Mother from a couple of weeks ago on DirecTV DVR. And the end of the recording was the beginning of a 2 broke girls we had already seen - but it was still fun to watch again. The recording went through the intro and into the first commercial, just about to end and say delete, when I had an inspiration. I decided to try seeing if the song-identification app (V-Cast) would be able to identify it. Tried it once, no luck. Second time, BINGO!! It is a song called 'Second Chance' by 'Peter Bjorn And John'. I was able to confirm it by doing a search and found it on Youtube