Handset Snips Music at the Ankles

A few days ago my Pixel 4a phone, running Android 13, started exhibiting a problem where I can play music in VLC, pause it with my Bluetooth headset, wait a few minutes, and when I unpause with the same headset, I get no response. Crickets. No music plays.

So I wake up the screen, see that the Android Media Control in the windowshade is active and showing my session with VLC, and manually press the Play button. Nothing. The icon changes from the Play icon to Pause, as if it was actually playing. Progress bar doesn’t move. No music.

So I flip back through my Activities to find VLC, press the Play button there, and the music plays. Likewise, I could wake up the Assistant and tell it to ask VLC to play a song, which it cheerfully commands and VLC cheerfully plays.

“What the ever-living hell is going on?” I ask myself. I had no idea, so I started debugging by bouncing Bluetooth, unpairing and pairing the headset, rebooting the phone, uninstalling any new apps since last week, clearing the cached VLC data and rescanning my media, going into the Media Session settings, even going down to the system media services and clearing cache. No improvement. Scanned for and applied a monthly Android security and bugfix patch. Still, no luck. I grabbed at every low-hanging fruit I could find.

I just get so aggravated when something so basic is broken, and so many things under the hood in Android are too much of a black box for me to understand what’s not working. Especially aggravating because I f’n work with Android on the daily as part of my engineering job.

But something about the failure signature reminded me of a previous issue that I had with Plex Media Player, where playback would just cease after a few minutes of playing in the background. Oh, is the power management policy for backgrounded apps suddenly too aggressive? Did Android push a policy change that I triggered after running my battery low recently?

I looked at the battery usage policy for VLC; sure enough, it was set to “Optimized”.

Battery usage policy for VLC, when Optimized, will kill an idle session. Set to Unrestricted.

One would think that sending a Bluetooth or Media Session command to resume playback would send an intent to VLC to wake it back up, prompting the kernel to unfreeze the app, but you’d be wrong. Something changed recently, and I don’t know what.

The workaround is to change the battery policy from Optimized to Unrestricted. Now VLC never freezes when paused. I should test this with other media apps.

It could very well be something VLC did to break compliance with Android 13’s constantly changing APIs, to where it’s not correctly begging Android for the right behavior, and as a result Android plays the snippy bitch and cuts VLC off at the ankles. Dumb VLC. Stupid Android. God dammit.

At least I have a workaround and my music controls back.

Stupid, stupid fucking Android.

Federation

So this weekend has seen some shakeup. I joined Mastodon and started learning about how it works and how that it relies on an open standard called ActivityPub, which allows separate sites to share activity such as posts, comments, etc. This is the nervous system between Mastodon sites, enabling them to federate (just like how IRC networks are federations of servers sharing messages, channels, and user lists). And Mastodon isn’t the only kind of service that uses the ActivityPub protocol!

With that in mind, there’s an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, so I installed it here. I’m not sure what it buys me yet, but I’m assuming I can share a link on a Mastodon server and users there, as well as here, can interact.

If that’s the case, then it seems we’ve found whatever it was that we were searching for in the social web. We wanted to interact, but couldn’t because all of our user databases weren’t shared (OpenID and Oauth were tools toward that, but didn’t quite reach the goal). Maybe now that sites can not only link to each other, but also can share activity with each other in realtime, that’ll be the holy grail we’ve been searching for. Who knows?

I just hope I’m not opening this blog up for abuse. I’m watching you.

Anyway, it’s done, but also just now started. We’ll see what federation can do for us.

Fractional Distillation

“History is a vagina,” my drunk brain thinks. “Damn, what a random and juvenile thing to say, but I should tweet that.”

I didn’t tweet that because I knew it would not be good in the long run.

Two beats later, another cluster in my drunk brain responds, “yeah, because we all come from it.”

First cluster says, “I told you so.”

If anybody tells you the brain is singular and not made from multiple identities, consciences, voices, problem solvers, connection makers, you can tell them to go to hell for being wrong. You will always have an answer if you’re loose enough to hear. Without the intoxicants it would happen in an instant and you might miss its glimmer; but slow it down and you can see the component parts working in t/5 time. Bad for life choices, great for introspection.

Unsatisfactory

Out in the world reopening, falling in love every 15 minutes. Pretty girls and beautiful women all over. I love ’em.

But in the core of my soul, they fill me with sadness and pain. I will never be the man they want. I don’t deserve love.

When I go to Hell, you’ll find me on the second level, chasing lusty ghosts on the wind.

I’m 50. Fifty. The women my age are all sick of men and our bullshit. They’re over it. They only want two things out of men, and it’s not what you think. And it’s unconscionable pursuing anyone younger.

So my love life is over. It’s fucklessly over. Aside from a few brief dalliances while waiting for something greater, I wasted it all.

In the Valley In the Fold

How do we know god exists? We cannot see god, but we can see the evidence of god. Is cleavage boobs? No, cleavage is not boobs. We cannot see boobs. But we know boobs exist because cleavage exists.

“Ah!” you say, “what about butt? Butt has cleavage!” That is true and good. We cannot see butt, but we know that butt exists. Cleavage could be many things. Manifold evidence!

Perhaps polycleavism is the one true path.

“Ah!” you say, “but I can bend my finger and create cleavage. I’m I a god?”

As is said in the verses: “Where two or more folds of skin are gathered in my name, so I am there among you.”

So like a trained yogi, we can all bend into holiness.