Marcin Juszkiewicz - android

My E-book readers

2022-01-10T12:35:00+01:00

During last days I had discussions about devices to read electronic books. You know: e-book readers like Amazon Kindle, Pocketbook. I am unable to count how many of them I bought and which models. But I know which I used.

Very old times

Long, long time ago I had Palm M105 and then Sony Clie SJ30 palmtops. Used both to read some electronic books. But small screen made it not comfortable.

First try

In 2011 I wanted to check how it feels to read e-books on proper e-ink device. Borrowed Amazon Kindle Keyboard from one of my friends and it was good.

Month later I was in USA on Linaro Developer Summit and bought myself Kindle Keyboard. And got Kindle ‘no touch’ one too. First one went on shelf quickly as I used smaller one more often. Still have it — in storage now as battery finally gave up.

Amount of books I bought and read in electronic form quickly passed amount of paper ones.

Upgrading Kindle

Amazon released e-ink device with touchscreen: Kindle Touch. So I bought it on next US visit (another Linaro conference). This time I also got few devices for my friends (no customs == profit) and sold my ‘no touch’ one.

Then Kindle Paperwhite on next visit. Screen backlight was huge step. Reading books in buses, planes, trains became comfortable.

I had one or two newer Kindle Paperwhite devices but for short time.

E-Book subscription

In 2015 I gave Kindle Paperwhite to my mother with some books on it. She enjoyed using device but there was a problem with selection of content…

At around same time Legimi started their e-book subscription service. So I bought Inkbook Obsidian from them and gave my mother as Xmas gift. After some training she became a fan of both service and e-books.

Goodbye Kindle, welcome Pocketbook

At some moment Legimi started tests of ‘one account, two readers’ offer. I decided that it is good time to change device. Sold my Kindle Paperwhite and bought Pocketbook Touch Lux 3 instead.

New device allowed me to use subscription on two e-book readers == less money spent on buying books.

Few months later I had to buy another device as my daughter took Pocketbook from me and started using it. So I bought Pocketbook Touch HD for myself. And another Legimi subscription ;D

This was also first e-book reader where I started experimenting with software. Coolreader is nice alternative to original reading application. My favourite option was “ignore publisher formatting” so each e-book looked the same. Of course if it was properly done which was not granted.

Let go Android with Onyx

Time passed, I cancelled my Legimi subscription in meantime. And PB Touch Lux 3 one day decided to not refresh screen. Like at all. Dead.

So Mira got Pocketbook Touch HD and I started looking for something new for myself.

Asked friends, did some research, watched countless review videos. And decided on Onyx Boox Poke 3. Still 6” 300dpi screen but with all fancy backlight things and Android 10.

Did not even got used to it and replaced it with Onyx Boox Nova 2 from one of friends. 7.8” screen made a difference especially with pre-formatted PDF files.

FBreader works great on it and allows to use OPDS catalogs directly from device. And amount of configuration options beats everything I used before.

I miss one thing (compared to Kindle or Pocketbook) — there is no way to send e-books via e-mail straight to the device.

Summary

During those ten years of using e-book readers I have read countless amount of books. On trip to San Diego I have read above thousand pages on plane (one s-f book series was hard to put away).

Bought hundreds of books in electronic form. And just a few paper ones just because they lacked any other form. I also feel unable to concentrate while reading paper ones — have to hold them in a way to not close etc…

Android at Google I/O: what’s the point?

2018-05-09T09:49:00+02:00

Another year, another Google I/O. Another set of articles with “what’s new in xyz Google product”. Maps, Photos, AI, this, that. And then all those Android P features which nearly no one will see on their phones (tablets look like dead part of market already).

I have a feeling that this part is more or less useless with current state of Android. Latest release is Oreo. On 5.7% of devices. Which sounds like “feel free to ignore” value. Every 4th device runs 3 years old version (and usually lacks two years of security updates). Every 3rd one has 2 years old Nougat one.

Android versions usage chart

How many users will remember what’s new in their phones when Android P will land on their devices? Probably very small part of crazy geeks. Some features will get renamed by device vendors. Other will be removed. Or changed (not always in positive way). Reviewers will write “OMG that feature added by VENDORNAME is so awesome” as no one will remember that it is part of base system.

In other words: I stopped caring what is happening in Android space. With most popular version being few years old I do not see a point in tracking new features. Who would use them in their apps when you have to care about running on four years old Android?

Android pisses me off

2018-03-12T16:53:00+01:00

If you want smart phone then you are limited to Android or iOS. Other options just do not count. iOS philosophy and devices which run it are not something I want to own/use so I am left with Android.

My first Android device was Nokia N900 with Froyo (Android 2.2) based NITdroid. When I saw “K9 mail” on it I knew that Maemo goes to trash (it’s mail client “Modest” worked only in landscape and used font size for visually impaired people). So few weeks later I bought Nexus S. Then Nexus 4. Next was Samsung Galaxy S4 which I won in some contest. Then moved to Nexus 5, LG G3, and now use ZTE Axon 7. Had/have few tablets as well: first some Tegra2 based one with Honeycomb (sold quickly), Archos G9, Nexus 7 (2012) and finally Lenovo S8.

For most of time I tried to run latest possible Android on my devices. Of course non-vendor one cause Android world cares about device for a year (or year and half in best case) and then ignores it. I stopped caring are there any updates to my devices. Sure, they are full of security holes etc but sorry I am not planning to spend few hundred euros every year to replace three phones and tablet.

With Android Oreo (not present for any of my devices) Google announced ‘Project Treble’ which should fix some of that. I suppose that in 2020 year 40-50% of new devices may support it. With old versions of Android anyway because binary blobs will be too old to keep up with newer releases.

Switching device is the other thing. Doing backups, restoring backups, (re)configuring applications etc. Last time I did factory reset on one of phones it took 2 hours before Google Play Store finished installing applications. Including those I removed half year earlier. Of course forget about text messages or call history. WTF Google?

Backups are fun anyway. Official way is “hope that Google keeps backups of your app settings in a cloud”. Most of apps to do sensible backup require root. Which usually require factory reset to be done first. Or all they do is provide other UI for ‘adb backup’ command (which does some backup and then decides to do nothing for any random amount of time).

ADB itself is a joke. Sure, it can be used to send files over USB connection but it looks like it’s authors live in 90s and all they have is USB 1.1 host controller in their PCs. I can not find other excuse for its speed of 3 MB/s (yes, THREE megabytes per second). Again: WTF?

My current plan is to use my Axon 7 with Nougat for about a year (or two) until it finally die or meet with ground one time too many. And still be pissed off any time related with backups (changing devices in family or sending them for repair).

Project “media player for my wife” finished

2015-06-05T12:28:00+02:00

For long time I had one project on my todo list: media player for my wife use. Has to be easy to use and control, does not need connecting anything when you want to watch a movie etc. Typical black box design.

Idea was to take one of boards I have at home, plug 750GB 2.5” hdd to it and put it on a box with only power and hdmi ports exposed. All running Ubuntu (with distro kernel) or Android. And controlled by simple remote control.

I tested several platforms as a base for it. First was Pandaboard — but as I have EA1 board it was far too slow for my use. And with current kernels there is no support for any hardware decoding or video acceleration (yay for PowerVR and yay for Texas Instruments). Then I purchased Wandboard Quad. Nice device, fast but I lacked patience to get it to properly recognize monitors so it always booted into XGA resolution. HW acceleration was a bit of fun as well.

Then I got Minnowboard Max from Dave Anders. After first days of playing with board it was visible that it can be a good platform for this project. But then something happened and board required RMA which took quite a long time (remember to pay for air transport of package while sending Europe->USA).

During last 2-3 weeks I was working on it in free time and finally got it done:

Minnowboard Max in a box

Box contents:

Minnowboard Max (dualcore Atom with Intel GPU and 2GB ram)
750GB Serial ATA 2.5” hdd (bootloader, system, movies storage)
cheap Realtek WiFi dongle
cheap usb hub
remote control dongle
microhdmi/m -> hdmi/f cable
hdmi/m -> hdmi/m adapter
hdmi/f -> hdmi/f wall mountable adapter

Amount of HDMI adapters was required as finding microhdmi/m->hdmi/m cable is (probably) impossible.

USB hub was fun. I have several of those but this one got removed from case, got all cables desoldered (two going to second board with additional two ports and one going to host) and then fun started…

Only one connector had 2.54mm spacing while both host and second port one were some random size. After soldering single pins for host cable I decided to not add 4th port. Pictures show why ;D

Simple USB hub

One half of hub

Non-standard pin header

Ready to be used

That’s hardware. For software part I used Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with Kodi 14.2 ‘Helix’ as media center. After few small tweaks (automatic login to ‘kodi’ user and into ‘kodi’ session) system boots directly to movie selection.

But how to choose what to play? My Iogear wireless keyboard will not go with media player box… I bought Natec A30 airmouse but then it shown that it’s dpad buttons work only as IR control for TV ;( But then I realised that years ago I bought Sony bluetooth remote for Playstation 3 console (for some other random project). And it still works ;D

Still have to sort out key mapping as lot of remote buttons have no sense for media center (I have no idea what for those triangle/circle/box/cross are for example) but this is small part which I already have partially solved. And need to add BT dongle into the box to get it working ;D

96 boards again?

2015-03-12T17:20:00+01:00

During Linaro Connect 2015 Asia there was announcement about new Linaro project called “96boards”. It is about making cheap ARM/AArch64 boards in same form factor and same placement of ports. And first board named HiKey was presented. Today third one — from Qualcomm. So we have two boards now (2/96 was not yet announced).

I prefer not to comment on form factor, lack of Ethernet, mobile phone cpus and other things people do not like but about software requirements.

96boards specification v1.0 says:

Minimum Software requirements for 96Boards certification will include:

Boot architecture (open source implementations are strongly recommended)

Support for bootloader such as U-Boot/FDT, UEFI/ACPI, UEFI/FDT

Support for a secure execution environment (optional)

Support for ARM Trusted Firmware (ARMv8), including PSCI APIs (optional)

Accelerated graphics support

Accelerated graphics drivers need to be fully supported either with open source code, or through royalty free binary drivers. If binary drivers are utilized, the vendor will provide support to provide updated drivers/libraries to support new mainline Linux kernel features.

Kernel

A kernel based on one of the following that is buildable from source code and any required binary blobs:

kernel.org latest “mainline” or “stable” kernel

The latest Google-supported Android kernel version

One of the last two kernel.org LTS kernels (for example Linaro LSK)

Operating system

The latest released (stable) version of one or more of the following open source distributions shall be made available for a 96Boards CE compliant design:

Android

Debian or Ubuntu

Fedora or Red Hat

An OpenEmbedded/Yocto build of a Linux distribution

I hoped that Linaro will be a place where free/open source software would matter. But it looks like “let release whatever you want as long as size and ports match” deal. Any blob as bootloader, binary graphics drivers (does someone remember TI OMAP line and PowerVR? Those boards run with raw framebuffer nowadays).

And that kernel requirement… HiKey uses cpu which is not in mainline kernel, so does Qualcomm one. Are they in AOSP kernel? Maybe. But does someone else than Android uses those trees for serious work? Latest I see in kernel-msm (which may not be proper place to check) is 3.10 which was released (in mainline) nearly 2 years ago…

I really wonder how “latest released (stable) version” of Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu can be made available for those boards when all those distributions use mainline kernel only (I do not count user generated remixes which are not supported by anyone).

So I wonder will 96/96 board came with mainline support, open bootloader and open drivers for everything. Time will show. Until that I am not so interested.

New project: Pandaboard based media player

2014-02-16T22:36:00+01:00

I need an offline media player to play movies from hard drive. And I did not managed to find something interesting on a market. So decided to take a look into my electronics trashcan and dig some parts from it.

What did I found?

PandaBoard EA1
USB 3.0 to SATA adapter
750GB 2.5” SATA hard drive
2xUSB PC bracket
3.5A 5V power supply
u.FL to RP-SMA cable

Looks just fine for my needs. OMAP4430 ES2.0 cpu should be enough and with some libraries should decode everything I have. Just 1GB ram but hope to be enough, there is WiFi and Bluetooth on board with u.FL connector so I can get external RP-SMA antenna. HDMI with audio but no idea about CEC for remote control. And there are 4 USB ports (two at rear and two on pins) so internal hard drive is possible without any extra cables sticking outside.

OK, hard disk will be over USB 2.0 which is quite slow compared to SATA. But that’s all what is available on board. Otherwise I would have to buy new one.

Will have to find big enough plastic case to fit both boards and hard disk, cut some holes for power, HDMI and maybe also USB and RP-SMA antenna connector. Then solder J3 and J6 pins to get extra 2 USB ports, power and reset buttons and maybe even will do power LED.

Then connect USB3 -> SATA adapter into internal USB port, wire power cables to charge it directly from Pandaboard power plug (for when USB would not be enough) and get it running.

Have to check is there any good Android build for a board as this may give me more options than GNU/Linux distros with XBMC like apps. And have to solve remote control as well.

UPDATE: I booted Android 4.3.1 Jellybean (Linaro 13.10) on the board. It is so slow (with HW acceleration) that I am unable to use it. So project gets postponed to unknown date.

TouchWiz? Thanks, but no

2013-09-23T14:03:00+02:00

Week ago I was at SmartDevCon conference where Samsung was main sponsor. They had some contest which I won and got Samsung Galaxy S4 (GT-I9505) phone.

Phone arrived on Friday just before my trip to WeCan demoparty so I had to spend some time with original software instead of starting from flashing CyanogenMod. It was painful experience…

Hardware is nice — Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 with 4 cores, 2GB ram, 5” fullhd screen made it nice device but software… I had a dejavu and felt like travel back in time to moment when I bought Nexus S. Why? TouchWiz looks and feels like Gingerbread ;(

I have read many times posts where people complained about it, saw it on Galaxy S2 but never thought that it is so bad until played with it for few days.

As a person used to clean AOSP interface I had problems finding my place with it. For example dialer:

Dialer - keyboard

Dialer - connection list

As phone is running Android 4.2.2 I would rather expect Holo compatible UI with tabs which can be switched by simple swipe. But no, Samsung decided to give users Gingerbread style with tab captions to tap if you want to switch. I did called few people by mistake as swipe right is call (left == send text message). Sure, dialer can be replaced by other application from Google Play Store but why?

Compare it with standard Android dialer on my Nexus 4:

Dialer on Nexus - keyboard

Dialer on Nexus - connection list

Note also indicator icons on status bar. On Nexus WiFi icon is near to GSM signal one to not take precious space — not possible for Samsung. And while on AOSP network speed icon (GSM/EDGE/HSPA(+)) is above signal one, TouchWiz has separate one — just like it was in Gingerbread.

Or notification panel… This one is insane:

Notifications

Quick Settings?

I already disabled brightness slider which was there as well. Note how pressing button in right top corner changed switches from ribbon to be full screen. I would like to remind Samsung that Android 4.2.2 has Quick Settings panel for such stuff (screenshot from my Nexus 4):

Quick Settings on Nexus 4

I could add more and more screenshots and complain about many things. But will not because I feel sick when have to use this UI. But just two more, Settings and recent apps:

Settings

Recent apps

Note tab captions again, huge fonts (with text size already set to “small”). Recent apps list is another crazy thing. Device has “hardware” buttons so “Google Now” is harder to run now.

Speaking of buttons… Let me quote Android documentation for developers:

Beginning with Android 3.0, the Menu button is deprecated (some devices don’t have one), so you should migrate toward using the action bar to provide access to actions and other options.

And Honeycomb was released over two and half year ago. Recent apps button would be much more useful.

So what next? CyanogenMod 10.2 (Android 4.3 based) will land on device as usual.

I have a new time waster: Ingress

2013-07-15T20:13:00+02:00

Months ago a new game started: Ingress. There is a story behind it but not that I care about it.

In short: there are two teams: green (Enlightenment) and blue (Resistance) trying to take over the world by “hacking portals”. Sure, someone could say that there are many MMORPG games on a market already and they would be right. But there are few things which made me play Ingress.

To play you have to get your ass moved as game takes place in so-called “real world”. You know — streets with people, cars etc.
Gives possibility to learn many more or less interesting places around.
Another opportunity to meet other people and have something common to talk about.

For me it started 4 weeks ago when I had three spare hours during Sunday evening. Joined the Enlightenment and hacked some portals in Warsaw, made few links and ended with a bit above 10k AP which gave me 2nd level. Next evening (in Szczecin) I met some local players and they helped me to get to 3rd one.

Then time went… I convinced a friend to play and helped him to do L3 in one evening :D And during last weekend I was in Warsaw again and made 7th level (with help from local people who told me where to go to get some AP in quick and easy way).

But what I like most is a need to grab a bike (or take a walk) and go to city centre to spend some time in active way ;)