Kaimusailing

New Year’s Eve Day, Friday, the post office is open till 5 PM. Mariola needs to pick up a sausage and any packages for Henrik. I have tracking information that says my new (old) phone had left Jacksonville at 4 AM, it must be at the post office by now. We arrive there and the parking lot is empty. I push the front door open, they leave that open so box holders can get their mail. The rest of the interior is locked up. There is a notice that the post office will close at 2 PM today, but packages can still be picked up at the “Blue Dutch Door” up till 5 PM. What the heck is a blue Dutch door. We find it, it is the only blue door and then I see it is a Dutch door, that is, the top half of the door can be opened while the bottom remains shut. A note says push the button for service, so we do so. After a long while someone opens the top door. Mariola and I are wearing our masks, I guess to protect ourselves from each other. We give the postal employee three Polish names and they have to write them down, too complicated.
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After another long while she returns with two packages for Henrik but nothing for us. I give her my tracking number and she leaves again. Later she says it isn’t here yet. Bummer. Will have to wait until Monday.
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On Monday I was frantic to get transportation to the post office again. I not only have to buy ingredients for the pizzas, I have to buy replacements for my bowls and measuring cups. I keep these in a sealed box in the communal kitchen with a bunch of loaner books on top to deter anyone who would want to take these things. Hard to believe, but someone did take my plastic bowls from Walmart, my fat separating cup, and earlier, my Hamilton Beech mixer. I bought replacements at the dollar store, total: seven and a half bucks.
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It was a chilly day and I was afraid the yeast wouldn’t cooperate. I had borrowed a bowl from Mariola to start the yeast along with honey and some flour.
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I did get the new phone from the post office and it was gorgeous. It was not a Galaxy S20 FE, or Fan Edition, it was a Galaxy S20 Plus, a much different and much more expensive phone. I found the phone was PIN locked, but otherwise it looked very much like a $1,200 cellphone. Samsung has tried to keep ahead of the hackers and have made phone security an issue and it’s much more difficult to unlock your phone if you forgot your PIN. In fact, it is almost impossible to unlock a locked Samsung phone of recent vintage, and the S20 Plus is very recent.
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The dough had risen in Mariola’s bowl. Well, I had been away a while and given it a lot more time. I threw more flour in, hadn’t bought a new bag of flour, grateful that there was just enough. I put olive oil on my hands, the new bowls from the dollar store, the knife to cut the dough when it was ready, and on the pizza pans that cover the bowls of dough, to keep the dough from sticking to all those things.
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I got about an hour of time to research Samsung phone recovery, then had to start working, prepping toppings, checking the dough in the bowls, and the bowls and the dough had toppled over in the communal kitchen. Discouraging. I put them back in their pagoda pile, making sure they had landed right side up.
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Cold winds were chilling us down. I was paranoid. They would steal my knives and anything else that was not nailed down. Still, I had grabbed a knife from the communal pile and it was much sharper than my elegant looking stainless knife from the dollar store. The toppings were chopped up quickly without letting blood out. I had new containers to pack away these things and bike them up to the Breezeway. Get it all up there. I always forget something.
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I lit the oven early to hopefully warm the place up. The external doors were closed so there was a chance for thermal heat. Eloise came by and I was glad to see her. Her puppy was itching and scratching. Maybe the warm weather was getting the flea bugs active and maybe now the cool off would shut them down. I offered some merlot, she had pinot noir. I guess we had a total of 8 liters of wine. Gotta be prepared.
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I was hungry and made a pepperoni pizza. The oven was pinned at 1000 degrees, maybe more. Mariola came up, irate, and I found out I had done something wrong. Shucks. She left. I felt deflated. Henrik arrived. He joked. We three talked. It was chilly and the oven made it so we couldn’t leave, but eventually we did.
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Up the coast, up in Crisfield, they had what they described a blizzard, but up in the I-95 corridor from Fredricksburg, VA, up to Alexandria and Washington, DC, it was a real blizzard. Over a foot of snow in areas that never see that much. Glad I’m not up there.
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Not the best pizza night, but sometimes we have to take one on the chin. The fighters say they need that, then they can go on and fight to the end.
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As a NY Jets fan I can’t regret being a fan of a team that has all the resources, like major market TV revenue, the opportunity to attract the best talent, the pick of coaches, and yet they are an embarrassment. Losers. On Sunday the hosted the reigning Super Bowl champions, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, complete with Tom Brady, the ageless quarterback that has defeated them over the decades. And so he did again, at age 44. The Jets quarterback is aged 22, same birthday as Tom Brady. The younger quarterback was impressive and effective, but in the end, give Tom Brady a minute and a half and he will kill you.
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The next day is always the clean up of the debris. Not much to clean up. The kitchen is a mess. It has always been a mess. Just clean up your own things and get out. I have to courier items from here and there to be cleaned up, and how to store them so the thieves won’t take my new measuring cups. I don’t care what they are after, I’m getting my stuff out and try to wean them from stealing.
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How could someone steal a $.50 cent gray, unattractive plastic bowl. Five of them. Go ahead and take them, but don’t confront me with them. It might be a difficult encounter. It’s almost that it can’t be an ordinary kind of taking, it’s like, we are doing this to irk you. Their problem is they are amassing ersatz crap. They have to sneak around to do this, we have been here for a while and we can figure these things out. I’ve been buying up dollar store items for them to accumulate. Do the math.
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The nights are chilly. I had to get a new high priced air mattress, about $18, to take over for my ALPS Mountaineering mattress, about 5 times more, but I’d hate to be in the alps with it now, it goes flat really fast. Why do I use an air mattress on a boat? Ordinary mattresses get waterlogged when the errant waves, some caused by dastardly powerboats, fly into the open hatch, open to dry out the bed, and now the bed is soaked with sea water. Bummer. An air mattress can be wiped with a towel and good to go. The cheap air mattresses from Walmart last a few months. Let’s get a non-vinyl mattress, hence the ALPS, still go leaky, takes longer, don’t waste your money.
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I found out that the pump to inflate the ALPS mattress takes a long time to charge up, but can run many times, as if we were on a camping trip away from electricity, so I thought it would be great on a boat. Others have gone the cheap Walmart route and that works out too. The $18 dollar one has an pump too, but it’s not rechargeable, it needs 4 D cell batteries, but you could go camping, or sailing, for a long time with a bag of those batteries.
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OK, back to unlocking the Galaxy S20 Plus, so far unsuccessful, but don’t count me out, yet. The simplest and least effective method is up on YouTube in a million posts, just forget them. Samsung won’t let any simpleton get through their security regimen. The procedure is hold power on and volume down keys until the phone goes blank completely dark. Then power on and volume up until the phone goes into recover mode. There’s tiny script on the screen. Volume up and down scrolls through the script and you are advised to select the wipe data entry, and it asks, just scroll down once and hit confirm. Data is wiped, come back and select delete cache, same thing, select, activate and confirm. It might work sometimes, but not now.
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It is ironic that I pay money to Dr. Fone, a website that purports to be able to help. No luck for me and the Galaxy S20 Plus, they might help on older phones, but not on this one. Let me add, they are not entirely honest, as well as the seller of the phone I have got, no mention of PIN lock, plus advertised as an S20 FE, but it is an S20 Plus, very different. Maybe the seller is trying to disguise, so that an owner of a stolen phone can’t find their phone on eBay, but the IMEI number of this phone hasn’t been reported as stolen, nor is it a monthly payment phone that has reneged.
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There are more aggressive ways to deal with a phone like this. Most require access through the phones USB port, but the port can be locked out. A cable, called OTG, enables a remote USB storage to become attached to the phone, and the phone is the host. There are codes and firmware, the phone can be operated from the most basic android functions, the phone can download new firmware, but I can’t believe how many versions of software there are for this phone, plus it has two chipsets, one is used in USA, the other in Europe, of course other countries have to have one or the other.
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Welcome to the world of phone hackers. The hackers are versus Samsung, so there is a give and take, an evolution of attack and defense. Samsung wants their phones to be secure, an obvious positive selling point, so they are analyzing the hackers and thwarting them as much as they can. Unfortunately they also thwart the phone owner who forgot the pin, maybe never even looked at it, and now the phone is locked. The hackers seemingly have no problem with this, they are engaged in mortal combat with Samsung software developers.
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Maybe someone had already tried to hack this phone. The seller has no eBay feedback at all, nothing, this is the only thing they have sold. I have asked for a return and rebate. However, I am on the side, somewhat, with the hackers.
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I had an urge to make another borscht recipe, one that was swimming around in my brain. I had made the pork chili soup recipe, ole mole pork soup, but if I include beets and sour cream, just can’t have all those other Mexican mole ingredients. I decided on pork, kale, onion, dill, and beets. This time I used canned beets like I had used long ago. The oven roasted beets are great, but I think reserving the liquid from the canned beets and adding it later works out pretty well.
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After I decided on what I was going to do I googled Pork Borscht, and lo and behold there were several recipes including a Ukraine Borscht, traditional, included potatoes, which I deplore. I opened 4 cans of beets and drained the bright red liquid into containers to be reserved for later. I threw the beets into a sieve in the big stock pot, added diced onion, and as much kale that had been trimmed from the stalk and chopped. I calculated I had about 3 cups of beet juice from the cans and wanted 6 cups of stock, so I added 3 cups of water to the pot. I sat out for a while and it came up to boil and steam. Probably it would be better to sear the pork with the onions, more flavor. People came by and said something smells good.
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I texted about the soup but nobody came around. It was not too much for me to put away in the fridge.
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I had subscribed to several paid phone recovery websites, but they didn’t help. A couple of them merely showed how to do a hard reset, which is common knowledge. I wanted a backdoor code or something like that. One suggestion was to use Android Developer Kit. I ended up spending over 4 hours trying to download it. I think their server is either slow or overwhelmed with requests. There are options within the phone in recovery mode to load firmware from an SD card. Perhaps this phone will never be unlocked, but not for a lack of trying.
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Behold, there is a service that can do this, progeeks.blog, you have to pay them about 30 dollars, but they are like bulldogs on this difficult task, money well worth it. Consider all my efforts, not that I’m not able or eager to solve the blocked function. It took them over a half hour of work to get it done, but I have to hand it to them, they are the soldiers. If you get locked out of your phone, then go there. Let them help you.
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The phone was now viable and I leaped on it. We loaded old apps and attributes.
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It was pizza night again. I had gone to Walmart to buy a SIM chip for the phone and pizza ingredients. It was too late to make pizza dough, so bought Walmart’s fresh pizzas, not the frozen kind. I could still fire up the oven and bake something, but I was focused on the phone. Eloise showed up while I was immersed in the new phone. She had her dog, Blue, who was doing better, from scratching for fleas, and she said it was bathing and keeping him from what’s out there. Others showed up. I have no control of the stream of conversation.
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The oven keeps the Breezeway warm on a chilly night. A box of Black Box pinot noir helps also. The conversation consists of aircraft talk, airports, Vietnam War, helicopters, and air crashes. The pizza is all gone and the wine is somewhat depleted.
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The image is of the Galaxy S20+.