Amezri's other journal space

Verizon finally put out the Jelly Bean 4.1.1 update for the Samsung S3. I downloaded it with a bit of worry because you never know with these things.

 

After spending an hour downloading and then 5 minutes installing it, everything seemed okay. Mostly.

 

I still can't get alarms to vibrate. There's now no easy way to disable the shutter sound for the camera app. (You can set your phone to silent. Well, I can; doesn't seem to work for everyone.) I can't disable some of the stupid Verizon apps like Backup Assistant and Visual Voice Mail, neither of which I use.

 

On the plus side...it seems like Swype has stopped crashing in the Tumblr app when I add tags, which is awesome. So, one plus among some annoyances.

 

The battery was running a bit hot (91F versus usual 85F) but I figured that was just because I installed the update. I think that's right, since after about 2 hours, the temperature seems more normal.

 

Performance seems the same - not noticing slow downs so far. The next thing I'm going to have to keep an eye on is the battery.

 

There are a couple other weird things, but they just mostly mean I should back up my photos on to my hard drive and clear them out.

About a year ago I bought a Canon PowerShot SX20IS. It was supposed to be an upgrade to my S3IS.

I fraking hate this camera. Photos are noisy. It's practically unusable at 400ISO. Autofocus is crap. Shutter speed is slow as all hell for continuous shots. Terrible. I've been using it, though, and the pictures I took last year at DragonCon are all sort of.. meh. Soft, not in focus, noisy. I might as well have brought my Sony Cyber-Shot and not worried about the zoom.

While looking to see about a frimware update (there isn't one, BTW), I stumbled on CHDK - Canon Hack Development Kit. I was initially hesitant to install it - it could brick my camera! But then I though, well, I'm not liking this thing anyway, so whatever. Besides, my model has to boot from an SD card, so I'm not actually dumping firmware onto the camera itself - why not?

It took about an hour this morning to get it all on the card. I couldn't figure out how to format to FAT16 with Windows 7, but that was okay because CardTricks will do that and make the SD card bootable for you. You need a card that's under 4GB, though. I have two, so it's not a problem.

There are a TON of features you can enable with CHDK, including shooting in RAW mode - apparently the SX20IS is capable of it, but Canon disabled the feature in software for whatever reason. You can get it back with this. I don't really care that much about RAW, however, so the only thing I've enabled immediately is Super Fine compression. I'd heard that the camera's native compression is what was causing all the noise, so I took some test shots. Here are two of them (click for larger):



( more photos and thoughts under the cut )

I've been using XP for... well, an embarrassing number of years, actually. My current system is about 2 years old and has had XP SP2 on it since it was built. I never installed XP3 because there were issues with it killing systems, especially if you didn't have a valid serial. I could never remember where my serial came from - if it was a crack from who knows how long ago or a genuine key I got somewhere along the way, so I never installed it.

About two weeks ago, I started getting pop-ups from Avast, saying it was blocking a Malicious URL. I ran all sorts of malware and rootkit scans - none of them ever found a thing. Then I wasn't sure if the attack was coming from outside, or if it was something on my machine trying to get out and download something (in which case there wouldn't be anything detectable on my machine yet).

Looking for help on Avast's boards, I basically just got told to update to SP3. I can't. So my final solution was to back up all my files (needed to be done anyway) and format the drive before I finally updated myself to Windows 7. Genuine key, even. Seemed to work fine. Machine was up and running. Got all my files back. No malicious URL blocking. Shiny.

Only not because ClearType is driving me nuts. EVERYTHING looks blurry and fonts are not the same size as they were in XP under the same settings. Firefox was practically unreadable. That I fixed by turning off Nvidia's own anti-aliasing features and disabling Firefox's hardware acceleration (while also using a Anti-Aliasing Tuner extension). It's bearable now.

Except that was not the end of it. Photoshop file type icons are not displaying properly. Oh, file association is perfectly file - .psd files open with Photoshop when double-clicked. The icons, however, are just a blank page "unknown type" icon. Registry key looks perfectly fine. I uninstalled/reinstalled. Same. So, fine, it doesn't work. EXCEPT THEY SHOW UP IN AN OPEN FILE BOX. WUT. I have no idea why that is. I've given up on fixing that. Thankfully, I have show extensions on as default.

You cannot change a file type icon in Windows 7. You can associate it with a different program and change it that way, but that is not what I want to do. You now need a third party program to change an icon for a specific type (ex: Default Programs Manager) or go and fiddle in the registry.

Did you now that the status bar in Explorer no longer tells you the total size of the folder? That's super annoying. Sure, you can find out if you highlight the files and then click "see more details" but only if you don't also have a folder selected. I could install Classic Shell, but WHY DO I HAVE TO DO THAT?! This also affects the Recycle Bin as you can't see the total size of that either.

Speaking of... custom icons for the Recycle Bin break the ability for the icon to refresh when you fill/empty it. You have to go into the Registry and fix the key. Not a big deal... but WTF? It's an option right there in the personalization for me to be able to change the icon. This should work properly!

Instant auto-arrange. YOU CANNOT TURN THIS OFF. I don't mind auto-arrange - everything sorted by name automatically is ace. I don't want it to resort instantly when I've dragged & dropped a bunch of files into my photos folder for sorting or instantly arrange while I'm changing file names. WTF, WINDOWS?! (Yes, I am aware you can turn off auto-arrange on the Desktop. This is not what I mean.) Work around now is to remember to set it to arrange by date when I'm working with a large number of files. Thanks for destroying my workflow, Windows.

Resizing desktop icons with the mouse scroll wheel is kind of cool, though.

And it now reads EXIF info properly when I view the properties for a photograph.

The fact that System Restore now pretty much works is really good because...

I installed Classic Shell to get some features back in explorer (well, just the folder size, actually). Seemed to work fine. I switched back to the Aero theme just because and my machine decided that's when it would lock up. Restarted. Locked up again. Uninstalled Classic Shell. Locked up again in Basic theme. Used System Restore to roll back to a point before I installed Classic Shell. So far, so good. To be fair, my system is currently using 1.35GB of ram with Firefox, Digsby, and Winamp open, as well as whatever background junk is going on. Aero eats up a bunch of memory from what I understand, so it's possible that caused the lock up. More RAM is on the way so I'll soon have 6GB total instead of 2GB, which should help. My graphic performance rating is still crap (3.4), though, so I might stay with Basic.

That's another thing - you can't change the color of the windows or the title bars while using Basic or Classic Windows themes. Sure, it'll let you change them in the Personalization screen, but it doesn't actually do anything. Thanks for that, Windows. In order to change the color of Windows Basic Theme, I need to go in and replace a .msstyles file and thenuse Universal Theme Patcher. SERIOUSLY, YOU GUYS?! (I might try this one, though.)

Otherwise, Windows 7 IS GREAT!

Okay, so I'm returning to livejournal with some chatter about my new toy: Kindle 3G+Wifi.

I know a lot of people are asking why I didn't get a Nook Color or an iPad - something that will also go online and do lots of other things. Well, I thought about that. The thing is, I already have an n810 internet tablet which I don't even use that often anymore because I can now check my e-mail on my phone. So, after a lot of research into different ereaders (and some conferring with athenaktt) I decided to get the Kindle 3, which will read all the .prc files I'd already created to read on my n810. Why 3G and not just wifi? Well, in a bind, I can get online with the 3G and check some things quickly if I have no cell service for some reason. For $50, why not?

My Kindle arrived mostly charged - I just plugged it in to top it off, which only took about an hour. The page turn rate is faster on this eink display than the others I have seen and it's legible, even in lower light. It's light-weight and a nice size for reading, I think, just a little smaller than a trade paperback. Since I purchased my Kindle from Amazon, they'd already registered the device to me and some free books I'd downloaded while waiting for my new gadget to arrive synced up as soon as it powered on. Fabulous!

The screen is pretty glare free - maybe about as much glare as a magazine page? I do notice some ghosting on the screen when I'm running through menus, but a page refresh (Alt+G) will clear it up. I don't notice it when reading a book.

Things I noticed right away: I kept trying to touch the screen during the first hour of use, but I've stopped. It's a bit slow to respond to button pushing. Rather, I'm probably just pushing buttons too quickly. The Kindle likes you to take things a bit slower! I hate that there's not really a way to organize series of books or an indication of what book is what number in the series. My files are all named properly, but if it's not in the file info, it won't show up. Annoying OCD thing, I guess?

I ordered a third party case from iPearl (in Tardis blue!) rather than the $35 Amazon Kindle case. I'll talk about that when it shows up, but I got it mostly because it was $10 and also because it uses the corner system, rather than the hinge, which freaks me out a little.

There are a few games you can get for the Kindle and my first one to try out is Shuffled Row, a Scrabble-like game. Could be fun? It was free in any case.

I won't be playing with this much more today as I've spent all of it cleaning the house and doing laundry in order to get ready for some friends that will be coming tomorrow (YAY!). Might be the same case tomorrow as I still have a lot of things to do and also a pie to bake. ACK! Oh well. My still unnamed Kindle will just hang out in sleep mode until I can get back to it.

I'm selling my Nokia 770, reflashed with clean version of OS2007HE.

Since this is a reflashed device and you will go through all the first-time setup procedures, there are no apps installed aside from the standard ones. The LCARS theme is also gone, but you can install that on your own. You can also upgrade to OS2008HE if you wish, but I warn you that will make the tablet extremely sluggish as most internal memory will be used.

I just ran a test install of OS2007HE and added a few apps and went on the internet with the browser set to the Opera engine. Internet works well and though some pages load slowly, overall it's much improved performance over the constant freezing and crashing of OS2008HE. I also installed FBReader, which still works fine, and Vagalume, a last.fm client. Streaming audio worked perfectly fine.

You can find additional info and tips & tricks at the maemo forums.

Comes in original box with all booklets and attachments. I'm including two 2GB cards in addition to the 64MB one that comes with the unit as well as an extra battery. There is an InvisibleShield screen protector already installed.

Looking for US$70 + shipping, but willing to negotiate.

Will do an update with photos soon. Right now, just reporting that the device it working pretty great and I'm happy with the performance so far. I've got a bunch of apps installed now:

+ Canola2 - media player. Connects to last.fm and youtube (but playback is twitchy)
+ Maemo WordPy - blogging to lj
+ mauku - twitter app. I feel like I'm missing tweets.
+ Maemo Mapper - free mapping program; alternative to preinstalled Map program
+ FBReader - for reading ebooks. New version for n810 is a bit different from the n770 version re: sorting

I had mauku on for a couple hours last night and it was nice reading the twitter feed from there. The LED indicator doesn't seem to really work though, so I have to remember to check.

Battery life seems pretty good. Used it all day yesterday and a little bit today and it's still showing 2 hours of use and 3 days standby.

I ordered a NDSi slipcase and still need to get screen protectors - probably Screenguardz HD. I'm using the case that came with the device, but don't really like it. Also still using the screen protector that ships with the device. It's not bad, but will definitly need to be replaced with something more permanent.

So while I loved my n770 for book reading, as an internet device, the n810 is superior.

Day 5. Everything still working well on Agathon.

Invisible Shield arrived today. When I went to apply it, I saw a giant fingerprint on it. Ugh. So I've contacted ZAGG.com to see about getting a replacement. Almost put it on anyway, but didn't want to deal with getting it off if a replacement came. Should have stuck with Screenguardz? Dunno yet.

2GB memory card also came in. Card reader didn't read the new card, but I was able to get data off the old one, put the new card in Agathon, connect that to the computer via USB. Then put everything from old card on it. No problems. Went in to memory settings and expanded virtual memory to 32MB. Really makes a difference. Might try turning images back on the browser and see if it's stopped being crashy.

I'd wanted to try out cbrPager when I first got the NIT770, but it kept crashing, so I'd taken it off. Well, decided to try again with the expanded VM. After also installing unrar, I got it working and opened .cbr file. It... works, but honestly, I didn't find it that great. Load time was super slow and controls aren't great. For portable comic reading, I think I'm sticking with my DS.

On the reading front, I still haven't gotten to any books I've wanted to read because I'm still trying to make it through some fanfic I wanted to read... one of them is 400+ pages. I feel like I could read it way faster on a full computer screen... so far it's taken me two nights to get past the halfway point. Talk about novel-length fanfic. Anyway. Loving at a reading device.

So I've suddenly decided that I would like to read more eBooks. I order to do that, I wanted to buy some sort of portable eBook reader. There is of course the Kindle (and Kindle 2) from Amazon and then there's Sony's Reader. Both of them had things I really liked (Kindle's free EVDO connection; Reader's additional formats) and things I didn't like (Kindle 2 has no card slot; Reader has no WIFI or EVDO) but the biggest negative for both was the price. I definitely don't have the $300 they'd want for either device.

Googling for eBook readers, I found quite a few alternatives, but they were all still generally in the same price range (or more in some cases). The only exception was the Nokia Internet Tablet 770 -- you can download FBReader for it and the reviews were all pretty positive. Poked through eBay and won myself an NIT 770 for $50. The seller had already upgraded to OS2008 Hacker Edition, so I wouldn't have to do that.

It arrived this afternoon and I immediately got it out of the box and turned it on. Ran all the standard first time user things. Named it Agathon (yes... it's BSG related). Battery died after about 20 minutes, so I charged it for about an hour before playing again.

( setup, photo, babble )
To sum up, awesome device. OS is good, but slow (though honestly, NIT770 was not built to handle OS2008). FBReader is great. Screen is a sufficient size for reading (probably). Off the 1 hour quick charge, I think I got 5 hours of power. It's hard to judge properly since I wasn't actively using it for all 3 hours; it went idle a lot. Glad I bought it and am looking forward to using it as an ebook reader.

I've been depending on Twitter to post my random daily thoughts without having to come here, but LoudTwitter is kind of stuffed up right now, so I'm going to do a manual archive.

( I know no one except for me cares. )