I recently came into possession of a nice new Vizio Smart TV. It’s pretty nice - 1080p, Netflix, etc. As part of the process for connecting the television to the internet, they made you agree to a number of different license agreements and privacy policies. In a fit of UX mastery, they did not show the privacy and license agreements on the television, instead instructing you to type a long URL into your web browser and reading the policies there. Nevertheless, they insisted upon your agreement before connecting to the Internet.

In my previous post on this topic, I tried to detail the way that I fetch and send email using my laptop using a combination of mbsync and systemd. This has been working extremely well – it runs in the background and does the right thing when I am connected to the Internet. The only issue with this setup is that I’ll occasionally need to clear a lockfile out of the .msmtp-queue directory. This is quite rare, however.

I’m disabling comments on this blog as of today. I’ve only received a small handful of comments in the year or so that this has been up – certainly not enough to justify the user needing to download over 1 megabyte of javascript from Disqus when they load the page.

Feel free to email me - john at johnbyrnes.info if you have any comment.

I recently purchased a cheap T-mobile broadband USB stick for use with my Debian Linux laptop. The device is the T-Mobile Jet 2.0 – a rebranded Huawei UMG366.

After putting the SIM card in, I noticed that NetworkManager was unable to see the card. Some DuckDuckGo-ing led me to this Linux Mint forum post.

Apparently these sticks show up as a USB hard drive when you plug them in. This lets them include the drivers with the stick. Ejecting the drive activates the internet connection. You can use a piece of software called usb\\_modeswitch to change the device mode.