Category: technology

On buying the Boox palma 2

I bought the Palma 1st edition and then the 2nd edition.

As most of you know I have a sweet spot for eink/epaper, buying my first ereader in the form of a Sony ereader, moved to the kindle and then the Android based Likebook. During that time I also have a long history with the Pebble smartwatch.

I bought the Palma 1 because it fitted with a need to have a second Android device as a backup and to replace my old Likebook. Just as I bought it, they announced a Android 13 upgrade and I searched for the firmware which seemed to be only available in Asia? Then soon after the Palma 2 was announced with a few tweaks I would use including fingerprint support, better processor and higher microSD levels. Seeing I could pre-order it but also return the Palma 1 for no extra cost; I jumped.

It shipped a month later and I got it last week. Its great just like the last one with a few extras, which I understand most don’t care about.

A few things are strange, including access to authy and a few apps which don’t run as expected. The strange part, is that authy on the Palma 1 worked correctly? I assume it’s a API problem but annoying and reminds me of my plan to move away from authy. Another thing I noticed is keepassx won’t allow the fingerprint access to be saved. I got a feeling this might be the problem?

I’m sure these will be solved over time… fingers crossed.

If it wasn’t for me being able to send the old one back, I wouldn’t upgrade but I got lucky…

SOLD – Ian’s ereader: Its a steal, its a deal, its sale of the century

Likebook Mars 7.8inch E-Reader with Android
Likebook Mars 7.8inch E-Reader with Android

I am selling my Android Ereader on ebay.

To be honest it was a great device but a bit big for regular use. I would have preferred something I could carry around without thinking about it. So I recently bought the Boox Palma also running Android.

Its a pretty amazing and I’m surprised how fast eink has gotten with refreshes now. No matter what others say, I have installed most things on it including a full RSS reader, Wallabag, WordPress, Audiobook reader, music player, drive, google docs, password manager, 2FA app, etc. Decided to stop short on social apps but may add emails as they are useful to have for backups.

I did think it had a SIM but I am reading it is a microSD card, which is very useful but the slot doesn’t seems set for mini SIM?

Anyway, my old ereader is a steal at a low price of 55 pounds.

Downloading podcasts on a QNAP nas, the hard way

QNAP NasFor a long time I have had this quite unique way to download podcasts on my home network. It’s served me very well but since getting the NAS it’s been an endless fight to find a good way to do the same with minimal effort. Up till recently I have been running another machine on my network with Ubuntu, to download the podcasts using the tiny tiny rss source.

I would sync the podcasts over the network to my NAS mainly for connivance but I like the idea of the NAS being the place to access everything.

So after many years I finally come to a solution which might be useful to others too, as I couldn’t find a good solution in one place. To be fair I stopped running Tiny Tiny RSS (TTRSS) in favour of FreshRSS but regardless.

These are all for informational purposes and aimed at technical people who understand their way around a the terminal, have sudo and SSH access and can use alternative app repos.

  1. Install CrontabUI and Entware-std on your QNAP using the linked repo.
  2. I tried using CastGet which you can install via OPKG store but couldn’t get to grips with it, as it didn’t support what Podget did.
  3. I downloaded and unzipped Podget then ran it from the terminal. It worked once I found the user directory /share/homes/{username}
  4. Then I started moving the download directory and where the config files sat by modifying the permissions.
  5. Once it was working, I created a shell script which would pull the downloads and have all the parameters set. Remembering to make it executable checked it can work under a admin user
  6. Then started on the Qnap cron, which is a pain and needs attention. This is also where CrontabUI can save you a lot of time. I did do it manually but found it tiresome and there was little feedback.
  7. In CrontabUI, I tried a number of different options and would check they would run, looking at the timestamps of files. In the end what work ed for me was, /sbin/download-podcasts.sh. I tried many times to get it working but found it wouldn’t actually run outside of /sbin even with the right execute permissions.
  8. Now it works but may reconsider switching to Castget now I stopped using TTRSS and I have found I need to use Podget 0.6 as it throws a lot of errors from missing libraries and out of date fgrep commands.

Hopefully this might be useful to others? There might be an update if I switch back to Castget.

Adaptive podcasting is now open source for all


Video: Created by Vicky Barlow / Voice over: Bronnie McCarthy / Licensed CC-BY-SA  | Music: Sleepwalking by Airtone

It brings me absolute joy to finally open source all the code of Adaptive/Perceptive podcasting.

This research project has run for a long time and at some time thought about pulling the plug. I always thought it had so much potential and needed to reach different people who will explore and use it for many more use cases than a research agenda.

If you are wondering what Adaptive podcasting is, check out the post from R&D and my own thoughts last year.

Podcast listener with headphones

Now the code base is public under a Apache 2 license, it means anyone can make changes to the code base including I hope,

There is so many people who had a hand in Adaptive podcasting, which are all named in the credits. This project couldn’t have happened without them and it speaks volumes about a future where collaboration is the default.

Adaptive podcasting editor

I am personally humbled by everything and if I wasn’t in Amsterdam during the Society 5.0 conference would be sending out lots of emails letting everyone and anyone know. There is a long long list of people to contact to let them know its all public now. Its also one of the research projects which has always been in the forefront of my mind and consumed many of my cycles. Its a great project and in the history makes clear the trajectory of progression. However wouldn’t existed without the community of practice, which kept me on my toes. Even now, I’m keen to see the community grow and built the amazing experiences which we dreamed about.

This is a clear sign of the power of public service. Many will ask why would the BBC open source this? Its in the BBC’s royal charter, helping build the UK economy. This is also a natural end to the Perceptive Media workstream for me, looking at implicit interaction to drive experiences and narratives.

Ultimately I’m hoping to further the ambition on podcasts and adaptive audio full stop. I have always said and stood behind the notion media has so much more potential. I do expect some enterprising individual to take the source code and port it to the Apple app store. Although I’m already looking at fdroid for the latest player too.

If you have any questions about Adaptive/Perceptive podcasting please do get in touch via email or github. This project is leaking so much potential be it public, commercial, etc.

I really look forward to seeing what people do with it all…

Smartwatches: after the Pebble on to wear OS

Pebble time and Ticwatch pro

Since the pebble I have been a bit fed up with the selection of smartwatches.

Originally I kickstarted the Bangle JS 2 smartwatch then bought the TicWatch 3 pro, but the battery life just frankly annoyed me so much and sent it back to get the Amazefit GTR 4.

I liked the Amazafit GTR 4 because the battery life was 3-5 days but the setup was something else. It doesn’t run Wear OS but I was fine with this because battery life made a big difference.

There is a review I read after getting the watch which sums up the problems with the watch. I like to hack and customise things but the options were insane. Then to add to this was the apps which included the default Zepp app and another one to pick up on the shortcoming of Zepp. Ultimately there were so many options but some of the basic things I expect were not covered.

Amazafit-GTR4 smartwatch

Replying to messages by voice wasn’t possible, although the watch does support voice commands and even Amazon Alexia integrations. The other thing which got me was the calendaring. With the pebble, the calendar was always up to date and I could trust it to know what’s next. With the Amazefit the calendar only updated when I opened the Zepp app, stop the calendar sync and then re-enabled it again. My calendar changes sometimes hourly so an updated calendar is super important.

In the end I got so fed up with a watch I couldn’t really trust, and finally I made the decision to sell the watch on ebay after reading  reviews about the new TicWatch 5. I decided the reasonable battery life, quick charge, wear OS 3 support was enough to convince me to switch (although I am wondering if wear OS 4 will make it to the watch). Its great to have proper sleep as android support again too.

Ticwatch pro 5

Its still early days but  I do miss some things like the automatic workout stuff, I have no idea what to put diaboloing under in my workouts. But generally if I’m charging the watch every day while in the bathroom, everything should be great.

The fast charge really has made a big difference and makes up for the smaller battery life. I can see this working when away from home due to cheap USB chargers (unlike the Oura). But that element of trust when looking at my notifications, calendar and tasks is something which can’t be underestimated.

Exposing a huge wearable problem

Oura wearable ring new charger checkout subtotal $59
Oura ring charger checkout

This is a bad story but I almost chuckled thinking about my wearables. The main point is about proprietary chargers for wearables and I completely agree. I always avoid proprietary chargers or ones which are not easily available elsewhere for a fair price. For example before buying the replacement to my Pebble, I bought cheap chargers for when I travel.

However back to the story, the Oura ring charger makes it all seem like a storm in a teacup, The Oura uses a USB C but has  a completely proprietary charger which is also size dependent and there are 13 sizes!

Can’t even start to explain how expensive 2nd hand chargers are on eBay. but I have a filter looking for dead Oura rings which are size 13 on eBay just incase. Even the thought of a 3rd party one is someone dashed to the wind.

You can also buy a second one, brand new from Oura at roughly 50 pounds!

Wearable watch woes

Amazafit-GTR4 smartwatch

A little while ago posted how I have finally stopped using the Pebble smartwatch (I still own one and hold on to it). Funny enough a few people sent me posts about how about a quarter of a million people still use the pebble smartwatch. Of course I was one them for a long time.

I moved to a TicWatch3 which is a Android wear OS smartwatch. It was good and the Android wear system was quite good but the Android overhead is a massive resource hog. It was on a recent trip to London while using using the sleep tracking, I woke up to find the watch dead after 36hrs. I decided enough and swapped it for the Amazfit GTR4.

Its a good smartwatch with lots of options and great battery life (generally about 6-8 days on a charge). I was aware of the complexity of options but the interface and ecosystem makes things more tricky.

For example, I currently have two apps installed on my phone. Zepp and Notify. Main reason for Notify is because of sleep as android. There has been a few times when the watch has disconnected from the phone during night leaving zero feedback about my sleep stages, heart-rate, etc. The disconnection happens more than I’d like and the only way to get it back is to restart the watch or mess with my phones bluetooth.

Other annoying things include not being able to voice reply to messages, this was built into Pebble’s since the Pebble Time & Pebble 2. Its strange because it has everything needed to do it like the voice assistant (which is annoyingly the Alexa voice assistant, wish I could change that)

Right now I’m looking through the FAQ, forums like XDA and even Reddit.

Generally its a great smartwatch and I’m generally happy but really need to  spend time understanding how to do simple things like control my remote music. Ideally it needs a well thought out UI with a paradigm like the Pebble has.

Sorry Pebble Rebble

Pebble time and Ticwatch pro

Over the last few months, I kept using my Pebble watches for many things but over time every single Pebble 2 (I have 2 which still kinda work) died, even with no buttons.The last survivor is the Pebble time but it got to a point where I need to charge it everyday and partly in the day. I looked into moving the battery from some of the dead Pebble 2’s to the pebble time but its so simple.

The pebble is a great smartwatch but I had to look at my options, so decided to look at the hybrid smartwatches again and wasn’t impressed. After looking at smartwatches which have longer battery lives, I found a number changes and low power modes increasing the battery lives from 1 day to a 3-5 days.

In the end I bought the Ticwatch Pro 3 Ultra with Wear OS (automatically updated to wear 0s 3), although I did originally buy the Samsung Galaxy watch 4 and considered one of the Huawei smartwatches, but I decided I should stick with Wear OS (even with the battery drain). I had hoped the Google Pixel watch would be the answer to my needs but was let down.

Idle mode on the pebble time and ticwatch pro 3

The idle mode seems to be the key to battery usage, and the viewable screen on the ticwatch 3, although not as clear as the epaper screen of the pebble time. Is still good even at extreme angles.

Its a shame having to say goodbye to the rebble (post pebble community, they were amazing and the rebble software engineering is incredible. But it had to happen, as little things like not knowing who is calling and not being able to reply to non-sms messages (signal for example) was grinding on me. The health side is useful but mainly covered by the Oura ring.

Roughly 4 days of app tracking with Duck duck go’s app tracking

4 days of app tracking with Duck duck go's app tracking system

Following the post a couple of days ago about Duck Duck Go’s app tracking system.

I had planned to make an update to the original post but after reading a few other pieces about it, thought it deserves another post.

So here is 4 days of data, and there are some really questionable tracking in there. For example I didn’t open my ereader prestigio app over the last 4 days but there was a tracking call to Google. Oura and Beeper are sending a lot of tracking calls. Wasn’t pleased with the calls to Facebook from Orfi and surprised OKCupid and POF apps were not tracking more.

I am thinking about maybe installing another app which does similar but unsure if I trust them as much duck duck go right now. Oh and I got my invite for Duck Duck Go’s mail tracking today too.

Fixing the pebble smartwatch with the new 3D buttons (Kinda)

Fixed pebble2 smartwatch

Over the last few weeks I have switched from the Pebble Time watch which a friend gave me. To the slightly fixed button Pebble 2 watch. I finally tried decided to just go with superglue in strategic positions.

The buttons are 3D printed to fit without glue but they didn’t quite pop like described in the video which came with the buttons. I obviously didn’t watch enough as I assumed I would need to open the pebble watch to fit the buttons (no idea why I did this). The upside of this being not breaking the watch and understanding how to maybe replace the battery too.

So far its good although the pressure of pressing the buttons did crack the plastic and I had to re-glue it again in even tighter positions. But its generally staying put now. I’ll likely do similar for the other pebble which  has broken buttons.

Its a good fix as the watch battery is much longer lasting than the Pebble time, even with the HR sensor and other features turned on. Maybe a charge every 4-5 days currently.

I would certainly recommend the 3D printed buttons for those looking to extend the life of the pebble.

 

Trying out duck duck go’s app tracking protection

Duck duck go's app tracking protection on Android

I was in the queue to get access to the Duck Duck Go’s app tracking protection and yesterday caught a invite on my old Pixel 4 phone.

Its only been one day but you can see above there has been 1650 tracking attempts. Many from Beeper app, which is my instant messaging app of choice. I can forgive them as beeper is under heavy development and segment & functional seems to be a customer/feedback data platforms.
This is similar to Oura and I can see why Google would be tracking as I do connect it to Google Fit anyway.

On the annoying side, Orfi is a app which my volleyball teams have switched to from using facebook events. The Facebook and Google trackers is worry some but its only when the app is open, which isn’t most of the time. Likewise the Philips Hue app tracking is annoying, as I do have that open a lot for controlling my lights. Plume is a tricky one but I will look through the settings to see if there is something which could be turned off.

Frankly its all really interesting to see and funny enough, the battery life of my Pixel 6 has completely changed. Usually its at about 75% after a day but today its at 85%. Not much different but the apps using the most battery power has completely changed.

Of course this is all after one day, so I expect I’ll see what happens over time and likely write a follow up.

Duck Duck Go are on fire and we need to see more of this…

 

Pixel6 magic eraser, pushed to the limit

I posted a quick picture on Mastdon of my Google Pixel 4 using my new Google Pixel 6 magic eraser feature.

Pixel 6 image

Here is the original shot, no edit no filters in my living room as I setup my Pixel 6.

This is the same picture just quickly wiping my finger over the Chromebook at the top right of the picture.

I guess I could have tried the other objects but I thought the reflection in my Pixel 4 would have looked very strange. The nice thing is I can go back and make that change at any time. So here is the that picture

Pixel 6 magic

If you hadn’t seen the other pictures, you might think the reflection is from objects much further away but knowing the fact it looks a bit strange.

magic erase looking strange

Finally magic erase can only go so far and you won’t get away with this picture at all.

Regardless of everything, its super fast and took longer for me to resize the photos (I reduced them down by 5x) on my laptop than use the tool. Computational photography has certainly stepped up a gear since my Pixel 2 days. I look forward to removing all those people who photo bomb my photos.

Growing up in the age of the search

Gnome shell search

This has been massively shared on the internet but I did find it interesting as something to look at how I organise myself.

Generally I use folders of hierarchy on most of my systems including my Android devices. I find the linux operating system encourages you put files in certain locations, especially when you are using different applications and different app systems. For example using snap, flatpak, apt and appimage. Its quite a diverse (sometimes complex) ecosystem compared to OSx and Windows I found.

I do use symbolic links (shortcuts) a lot on my systems and find it useful to link things within remote locations like my NAS or online storage.

Gnome shell has search built in from the super key (windows key on most laptops). I don’t tend to use the search for files or folders, which in hindsight is a bit silly because its much quicker. I guess it just wasn’t as good & quick as it is now, and so never got use to using it. Even now I still would put the files in a certain folder to be clear where it is for my mind.

I use dropbox, which kind of forces you to use a folder hierarchy. There is most of my files on there and that includes personal, work, app, etc. I have my Google drive mounted as a folder inside of Linux, so I also manage that in a similar way.

Now I’m looking at the list of Gnome shell search extensions and thinking about using it much more. Heck I can search my email, files, music, etc from Gnome shell (no Joplin however) time to start using it more.

Paypal goes crypto

Use Paypal to buy Crypto We all knew it was coming but it feels so strange seeing Paypal supporting Crypto. Especially certain ones over others.

Confirming crypto in Paypal

At least there is more terms and conditions before you can actually buy.

Buying etherum in PaypalActually buying some Ethereum is pretty straight forward. You can pick anything linked to Paypal including your credit and debit cards (which is slightly troubling).

Having bought a little bit, it seems to be stuck in Paypal. I couldn’t find any wallet address or a way to send the bought funds to other own crypto wallets. Maybe that might come but I doubt it.