i got a call this morning from yulia. i haven't seen her since july, when i tried to fix her macbook that started behaving strangely. i haven't heard back since but figured no news was good news. a call from her couldn't be good. she confirmed that everything was working after my last visit, but now her computer was acting up again, and she believed it had something to do with the fact that she hasn't backed up in a while. when she tried to activate time machine however, it didn't work. i figured i'd need to stop by the store, but seemed like the problem had something to do with the usb backup drive not mounting on the desktop. when she tried the other usb port the drive did show up properly. hopefully that was the solution.

it was a good thing yulia called because otherwise i'm not sure when i'd wake up. it was already close to 11am. normally i try to get up between 9-10am. in the summer i get up even earlier on the account of the early sunrise. but in the winter i have a tendency to get up later because it's darker and colder. in my defense, i did go to bed last night at 3am.

i tried a few more wifi settings today but i still couldn't fix the wifi problem on the pi zero. i started to pin all my hopes on the possibility that the OTG cable was at fault. my other option was to reinstall raspbian and start over.

i was going to buy an HDMI-to-DVI adapter online, but found one while i was taking off a DVI cable from my bedroom monitor. i can use the adapter on the spare LCD minitor my father has, which i discovered has both VGA and DVI ports. that meant i didn't need the HDMI-to-VGA adapter i ordered from ebay earlier in the week.

i went to belmont to try out the raspberry pi zero with the spare LCD monitor. but my primary reason for going was to get my hands on the spare OTG cable my father has in his collection. using that cable, the wifi started working on the edimax. it was still a little slow and dropped packets, but i managed to load a few websites without problems and remotely access the pi via ssh, something i wasn't able to do yesterday (yesterday the pi wouldn't even registered when i tried nmap on the ip number). maybe a higher quality OTG cable would improve the wifi, but at least it was working now.