Messages

31

Astro Slide - Hardware / Re: Pixel peeping (main screen closeups)

« on: February 25, 2023, 05:09:20 pm »

I'm glad you liked them. I'm glad I could capture them. My rudimentary equipment shouldn't be able to produce results like this.

Once upon a time I picked up a "30x triplet loupe", for a few tens of dollars. That is the round thing you can see a hint of in the first picture above. Here's a better picture of it.

For scale, the lens is about two centimeters or 4/5 of an inch.

I can attach it to the screen with small dabs of blu-tack (or similar from another brand). Then it turned out that a digital camera I have,

a (now) old Sony DSC-HX60V, which I got once to get real optical zoom, could lock focus onto that loupe, even when zoomed in almost 5x, from a much closer distance (the front lens is almost touching the loupe) that its technical specifications says, so it seems this camera and loupe, somehow, gets along better than one could expect.

To be fair, only a tiny portion on the image comes out actually sharp, while the rest is heavily distorted, but for things that either gives off its own light (like the screen) or things I can backlight (say, by putting them atop my phone, showing a white picture, at max brightness), I can get a few millimeters square reasonably magnified.

I agree that PenTile layouts tends to be ugly, since such screens (by design) has too few subpixels of one or more colours. As you can see in the last close-up above, the Astro screen appears NOT to be a PenTile variant. While its subpixels are arranged in a triangular pattern that reminds me of the phosphors in certain old CRT screens, there is an equal amount of red, green and blue subpixels. I guess they are arranged like that for practical reasons. I don't think it is feasible to make OLEDs into the narrow elongated strips one would typically find on an LCD.

As long as there's one full RGB triplet for each supposed pixel, the specific arrangement of them shouldn't matter much, provided the display driver knows what it's doing. I may have to draw some test images and (try to) take close-ups of, to verify that a full triplet per pixel is actually used.

32

Astro Slide - Android / Re: Airmail

« on: February 25, 2023, 03:35:56 pm »

There, I fixed it.

Last time, I had set up POP3 for my personal account (which has too little space for IMAP anyway). Later, I tried to set up IMAP for my work account (which, for my needs, has plenty of space). That didn't work, because "authenticated SMTP" was disabled. How Microsofts own web mail client could send, presumably authenticated, mail anyway, is beyond me. Perhaps it has some special protocol, or maybe Microsoft treats its own client differently... In any case, it turned out that I, on my work account, had enough administrative privileges to enable authenticated SMTP, so now both accounts are working. Yay.

Then Google wouldn't take my money... which turned out to be my own fault. Last year, the contactless payment antenna broke in my card, despite me being careful with it. The replacement - of course - had a new expiry date. Apparently, I hadn't shared that with Google. Rather than giving me a meaningful error message, Google just said OR-PMSA-03 instead. I suppose one complicating factor was that the old card would still have been valid, if it hadn't been replaced.

FairEmail worked very well for me even in its free form. Some advanced features were unavailable and there were a discreet nag text in the UI, but it was still a very functional e-mail client, and that nag text could even be hidden for a while. Once I had verified it met my needs, I wanted to pay for it. Not sure I need reply templates or colour codes for my two accounts, but a less than $10 tool that, for my needs, is arguably better than the free options, is a bargain in my book.

So far, it has just worked for me, with almost the default settings. I turned on a "compact view" to make better use of my landscape screen, and I turned off "conversation threading", since I, and everyone I know, are too lazy to set up address books. To send messages to someone we've been in touch with before, we'll just reply to any random message from that person, making the "conversation" grouping a mess, but I do see the point of the feature among more disciplined correspondents (or people with some centrally managed address book).

I guess I'm done with this thread now. I have finally found a cheap email client that works like a charm for my needs. Would K-9, once it becomes Thunderbird for Android, gain the ability to compose rich text messages, that might become an option for me then, but unless something breaks, I feel no need to replace FailEmail.

33

Astro Slide - Android / Re: Fingerprint issue

« on: February 18, 2023, 06:15:31 pm »

I'm assuming that if you want a finger to be recognised in both orientations, it's not smart enough to realise it's the same finger...

It actually is. I've only registered my finger perpendicular to the screen, but it still unlocks in other angles too.

Also, when I wake up in the morning and remove the charging cable, my Astro never responds to a fingerprint...

For "added security" the Astro (and the Cosmo) will require the actual password once in a while. I'm not sure about how often the Cosmo did this, but my Astro does this at least once a day. For me, it doesn't necessarily happen in the morning, but at any time of day. Then again, I use my Astro for (manual) sleep tracking, so I tend to wake it up a few times, when I wake up during the night, and I rarely charge during the night either, so maybe that affects the "circadian rhythm" (or whatever) of my particular device.

While I get the idea of this, having my phone randomly require my (long) password, while Skype is ringing or while trying to use the camera shortcut, to not miss a brief photo opportunity, is just a bad user experience.

Edit: 2023-Feb-25

To wake, simply rest one of those fingers on the sensor...

I forgot to mention this last time, thank you Andy for pointing out this seemingly obvious detail. I have always, for no reason at all, really, been tapping fingerprint sensors, with mixed results. I guess I, at some point, just thought that was how it was supposed to be done, and then a (bad) habit formed. Leaving my finger on the sensor, until it either succeeds or fails, of course works better than me just stabbing the sensor with a finger. Who would have thought?

Sure, it still fails more often than I'd like to, but so does the much bigger sensor on my laptop. I also get the feeling that failed attempts aren't always only the sensors fault. Sometimes, when I'm cleanly in the center of the sensor, and just nothing happens, I get the sense that it might rather be the OS that fails to pick up the result. Not that it helps us much, but perhaps the sensors themselves are a bit better than their reputation.

34

Astro Slide - Android / Re: Airmail

« on: February 05, 2023, 07:40:42 pm »

Well, I finally got around to have another go. As I already had the FairEmail client installed, I made a slightly more thorough effort to find out why the setup wizard failed me the first time.

This time, I used my personal e-mail account, rather than my job e-mail (presuming, incorrectly, that they would work the same, since they are hosted by the same provider). At first, I just got another weird error from the wizard. It turned out that the weird text about "authenticated but not connected" didn't come from the email client, but rather from the server, and it turned out to be a permissions issue, where IMAP was (and remains - as I didn't have permission to change it, either) disabled on the server, probably because my cheap-ish mailbox doesn't have much storage anyway. At that point I tried the "not recommended" option of using POP3 instead. It worked and it's enough for my mobile needs, so I'm fine with it.

Here's what the GUI looks like, with a few settings tweaked a tad. The redacted stuff is just my account name

Here I'm trying out the rich text features. It's basic compared to a desktop client, but the important stuff is there

This is how the message looked when it arrived

Apparently the "highlight" didn't work. Oh, well, manually colouring the background works. That's enough for me. I'll try this one out for a while, maybe try again to add my work account and if it all pans out well, I might have found what I was looking for. If so, I'll probably get the pro version, mostly to support the developer. I'll probably make a follow-up post here in a few weeks or so.

In other related news, it seems K-9 Mail will become Thunderbird for Android. If that transition also means the mobile app will gain some features of the desktop app (such as composing basic rich text messages) I might have a look at that. In an ideal world, Planet would too, as continuing to base their own mail app on what would then be a deprecated version of K-9 would seem silly, to me anyway. We'll see, I suppose.

35

Astro Slide - Hardware / Pixel peeping (main screen closeups)

« on: February 02, 2023, 02:50:20 pm »

As OLED screens tends not do follow the RGB-stripe layout common to liquid crystal screens, I wanted to have a close enough look at the screen of my Astro, to see which subpixel pattern it uses. I blue-tacked a 30x magnifier to the screen, and took pictures through it with an old Sony digital compact. To my surprise, I could use a bit of optical zoom and still get a sharp image, even with the front lens of the camera almost touching the magnifier. To the extent permitted by law, I declare all pictures I upload to this thread as CC0 public domain, no rights reserved, no attribution required.

This is mostly an overview for context
 

Here, I've zoomed down on four characters in the center...
 

...and finally, this was as close as I could get
 

36

Astro Slide - Hardware / Re: ear phone noise

« on: February 02, 2023, 09:51:51 am »

One more thing... which I am not sure where to post, as I don't know the scope. As it may have to do with the particular adapter above, I am posting it here.

With some use, I have noticed another audio issue than those mentioned above. It affects, at least, my particular USB-C headset adapter and probably carries over to, at least, that particular model of adapter and, possibly, to using USB-C headset adapters with the Astro in general.

Seemingly at random, during phone calls, the audio in my headphones briefly degrades severely, usually below intelligibility. It doesn't appear to affect what the other person hears (they haven't complained anyway), which makes sense, as the microphone(s) in the Astro picks up my outgoing audio. It usually rectifies itself within seconds, and tends to be at its worst so briefly, that I can usually guess any lost syllables from the context. Yet, it is quite annoying and if something like a sequence of digits had to get through correctly, I'd much rather deal with the noise of the Astros analogue headphone output.

In some calls it doesn't happen at all, in others, it's there like 10% of the time, often in clusters. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the USB connection, so I'd rather guess it has to do with what else the Astro might be doing at the moment, other than my phone call. To me it sounds like an audio buffer going out of sync, which I, in turn, thinks sound a bit like a very heavy bit-crusher effect.

37

Astro Slide - Hardware / Re: Does SD card share slot with second SIM card?

« on: February 01, 2023, 08:10:11 pm »

Yeah, should anyone want to see what the tray looks like, go here
https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?topic=36863#msg298960
and scroll down a bit.

38

Astro Slide - Hardware / Re: ear phone noise

« on: January 21, 2023, 12:55:30 pm »

I just edited the previous post to fix a fact error. This thing does have an input after all, but, thus far, I haven't got it to work...

39

Astro Slide - Android / Re: Airmail

« on: January 17, 2023, 07:09:51 pm »

Thank you for your assistance. I am assigned my e-mail login and the use of 2FA from my workplace. While I do have some administrative privileges (small firm, where everybody does a bit of everything) I'm not sure I am at the liberty of creating a new password, nor I am not sure Outlook.com supports app passwords such as you describe them.
The only authentication method I know I can use is OAuth2 within an SSL/TLS connection. I think I know why I couldn't set up Fair Email. Will do new attempts, time permitting.

40

Astro Slide - Hardware / Re: Keyboard Backlight

« on: January 13, 2023, 09:02:27 pm »

The Cosmo's backlight behaved the same.

While this is an Astro thread, for completeness, my Cosmo used to turn its keyboard backlight once the screen went to sleep. The delay varied, seemingly at random, from a few seconds to a few minutes, but in 99% of the cases it would eventually turn off, without me having to use the keyboard shortcut.

Not so with my Astro though. It seems to just leave the backlight just on forever. I'm trying to work around it by closing the keyboard when not in use. As silly as that might be on a device, whose claim to fame is its physical keyboard, I'm even keeping it closed on my night stand and using the on-screen keyboard for my few nightly needs, mostly manual sleep tracking.

41

Astro Slide - Android / Re: Airmail

« on: January 13, 2023, 08:44:19 pm »

Thank you. The version I find on Google Play seems to be from 2016, which, in itself, doesn't have to matter. I have other apps of that age.

As Outlook.com / Outlook on the web (or whatever they call it this week) uses OAuth2 for its 2FA (on my job, anyway), support for which was only recently added to the "canonical" K-9, I might, however, run into the same authentication issues as Airmail presented me with (though, hopefully, handling it nicer than just terminating with no clue, as Airmail currently does).
K-9 "proper" seems to lack all support for composing rich text. I am having a look at FairEmail at the moment. Its Wizard failed to set up my Outlook account, complaining something about the admin maybe disabling SMTP or something, which didn't seem accurate, so I'll have another look at it tomorrow or so.

42

Astro Slide - Android / Re: Fingerprint issue

« on: January 12, 2023, 08:59:40 am »

I get the "Too many attempts - Try Again Later" almost every day, while the "Too many attempts - Fingerprint Sensor Disabled" has, thus far, only happened to me once twice, and was solved by a reboot.

The sensor on the Astro recognizes my fingerprint on the first attempt, only most of the time, making it count "failed attempts" fairly often.

If the sensor has a harder time with the skin of a particular user, that will likely cause a double-whammy effect, where it not only fails more often to let that user in, but also counts "failed attempts" more often, making that user getting locked out more often.

The issue seems to be that the sensor only differs between "valid fingerprint" and "anything else" that activates it, making it count failed "attempts" from partial prints read when the user tries to locate the flat, flush, untextured, unlit and camouflage coloured sensor by touch, or from random skin contact when handling the phone, or maybe even skin-like enough objects in pockets, bags and such.

The sensor on my Cosmo tended to rack up a lot of failed attempts, if I had it in my shirt pocket, with the sensor facing my body. Apparently, that sensor couldn't even tell a finger from a textile covered chest.

Because it tends to complain during enrolment, we know the sensor in the Astro can tell when it didn't get enough of a fingerprint, yet, in use, it keeps counting incomplete reads as unauthorized login attempts.

All in all, I get the sense that the fingerprint sensor wasn't very carefully designed, which makes me wonder about how secure it actually is. The sensor area is just a few mm wide, so even a "complete" read is really just comparing a fraction of a fingerprint.

Edit: OESF ate some line feeds.
Edit: Had the "sensor disabled" happen to me again a few days ago.

43

Astro Slide - Android / Re: Airmail

« on: January 10, 2023, 07:34:26 pm »

Welp... starting to answer myself...

While the "proper" K-9 can, apparently, technically send html mail, it doesn't appear to support any form of actually composing "rich text" email, and, at times, I need a bit of, say, larger orange bold text to make my colleagues notice questions they're actually supposed to answer an such. They're nice and clever people, though often a bit stressed.

I'd settle for some simple tags, like
[size=medium][color=#FF9900][b]Question:[/b][/color][/size] here on OESF, but it seems it doesn't even has that.

Just reading about the Microsoft Outlook app made me itch the wrong kind of way. I can't put my finger on it, but both the regular and the lite version seems strung together form a handful of popular features, rather than being a comprehensive tool for a well defined purpose. It might be nice to have a calendar integrated in the mail app, but I already have two calendar apps forced upon me and if the spam filter isn't working, I can't really use any of the features, so well... unconvinced and slightly deterred for now. Also, it doesn't seem to offer any "rich" composing either, in which case it is a bit pointless for me.

Hm... Last time I tried to fix up my mobile e-mail (ending up with using Remote Desktop to a Windows computer with a proper e-mail solution on it) I recall FairEmail whizzing past on the information superhighway... ehm... internet. I might give that a look again...

Even if it does work for me, it would still mean having to install an extra email client, which, well, feels a bit clunky.

44

Astro Slide - Android / Airmail

« on: January 09, 2023, 03:38:27 pm »

 
So... Airmail, on the Astro, claiming to be 2.0b[eta?] - though no such version is found on Google Play - is uninstallium forceware, based on K-9 mail. Upon start, it claims support for Gmail, Vivaldi and Outlook, but promptly crashes with no error message, if told to use an Outlook on the web, aka. Office 365 aka. Microsoft 365 account...

Manual account setup exists, and lacks support for Oauth2, which Microsoft seems to have been phasing in since 2020 and finally made no-more-excuses mandatory on 1/1 2023, and K-9 claims to have added support for in release 6.2, about six months ago (see https://github.com/thundernest/k-9). I suppose that even the "latest" Airmail [beta?] is based on something much older.

Ideally, if Planet insists on it being there, it should be nominally up to date, aka. usable. Then again, maybe this isn't a problem Planet should try to solve? There is web mail, there's an outlook app from Microsoft and the original K-9 says it supports Office 365 now. Perhaps they should just partake in that project to make sure it's smooth on the Astro.

Either way, that's not where we are today, so I'd like to pick the brains of the forum. Has anyone here tried the Outlook app, or K-9 6.202+ on an Astro. If so, is there anything I might want to know? Yeah, I could try them myself, but if anyone already has, I'd like to hear your opinion.

Pure webmail in Vivalidi appears to work, but seems to fall back to composing in plain text. While perhaps the purest form of email, it seems I need some colour and a more prominent font, to make my colleagues notice questions they are supposed to answer. They're nice people, just stressed.

Edit: Sometimes OESF seems to eat the supposed blank lines between paragraphs...

45

Astro Slide - Hardware / Re: ear phone noise

« on: January 04, 2023, 03:55:50 pm »

I have also done some testing.

The only USB-C to 3.5mm DAC headphone adapter my local town former-schoolmate-and-his-wife IT shop had in store, was from the domestic brand "Champion", so I don't know who really makes it.

The (Swedish only) product page https://www.champion.se/usb-c-till-35mm-dac-adapter/ says fairly little about it; size, weight, article numbers, picture, boxshot, "made from aluminium" (just the 3.5mm part, it seems, as the USB connector casing feels like plastic), that it should work with smartphones, tablets, macbooks, laptops or "computers" and finally there's link to a "EU-declaration of Conformity", with no further product information.

The box only adds "made in China" and recycling instructions (for the box). It disagrees with the web page about the length of the adapter, and both are wrong. My ruler says 11cm in total. As the product page could move or disappear, here's some pictures of my own:
(I hereby declare all pictures I upload to this thread as public domain - cc0 - but I'm not a lawyer, so please be careful.)

 

 

When plugged into a Windows computer, it presents itself as "GHW USB AUDIO". According to Windows it supports two channels (stereo) of 16 bits at 48 or 96 kHz sampling rate (output only, this is unfortunately only a headphone, not a headset, adapter). The hardware Id starts with VID_31B2 which a search engine said is KTMicro Inc. I suppose they make the chip inside. Anyway, enough about the adapter. Any similar product should work, I think.

Edit 2023-jan-21: Though the English text on the box says "headphones or earphones", it mentions "headset" in the Swedish text. I checked in the Windows device manager again and, yes, there's an "GHW USB AUDIO" input device too, which supports once channel (mono) of 16 bits at 48 kHz sampling rate. As you can see on the photos, my Astro showed the "headphones" icon when I plugged the adapter into it, making me believe it was output only, but that was because I had headphones plugged into the adapter. When I used a headset (or nothing), I got the "headset" icon. My Cosmo, for reference, shows the "headphones" icons regardless. So far, I haven't got the input to work on either Planet device or on my Windows laptop. I can select in it (in Windows, Android does that for me) but it just records silence.

On its own, the adapter works in either port of the Astro:

 

When using it with the FM radio, plug in whatever you use as antenna (an aux cable in my case) first and then the headphone adapter. Whatever is plugged in last, gets the audio, so would you happen to do it in the wrong order, just unplug the headphone adapter and plug it back in to grab the audio output.

If you have the headphone adapter in the left hand port and the charger in the right hand port, the adapter works and the Astro charges (slowly), but if you have the headphone adapter in the right hand port and the charger in the left hand (somewhat faster charging) port, the Astro does not charge. If you plug in the charger first and then the adapter, charging stops.

 

If I listen to the FM radio using the headphone adapter, it seems the radio can't immediately tell if I unplug the aux cable, but I promptly lose all reception. Weirdly enough, if I do this while the charger cable is plugged in (regardless of whether it has a power source in the other end), I still have decent radio reception, though with a bit of digital noise in it. Is the radio using the ground plane as an antenna or what?

For the heck of it, I first plugged in my headphones into the 3.5mm jack on the Astro, so I could start the radio. Then I plugged in headphone adapter (without the headphones) into the left hand port, and finally the charger cable. Then I moved the headphones to the adapter. The idea was that if I don't have an extra 3.5mm cable on hand, maybe I could "jumpstart" the radio with the headphones and then move them over to the adapter, to get a bit better sound.

Most of the times, hotplugging the headphones into the adapter would trigger Google assistant to tell me the time, and then, somehow, the radio found out it had lost its antenna cable. After a visit to Settings > Apps & notifications > Default apps > Digital assistant app > Default digital assistant app > none I could actually pull it off. I was still prompted to active Google assistant, but the radio kept going. After a while it figured out it had no cable and disabled its UI, but kept playing.

Edit: Typos.