Messages

31

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

« on: March 07, 2023, 04:32:47 pm »

While trying to sleep, I begun wondering, if - indeed - the Astro screen, in landscape mode, has a 2340 sets of RGB triplets horizontally, but "only" 720 of them vertically, wouldn't it then be possible to nicely depict a simple pattern consisting of every second pixel horizontally and every third pixel vertically? In theory, depending on the mapping algorithm, every second physical RGB triplet vertically should line up with every third logical pixel.

So, I drew this and took pictures.

 

That looks like a clean match to me. We're looking at the screen lighting up every second RGB triplet, both horizontally and vertically. If in any doubt, we could try to take exactly the same image with an off-black background, to see the in-between triplets. As that's beyond what I can reproduce, here I have digitally superimposed an approximation of how it would look like.

It should be evident that the black gaps are one triplet, both ways.

There should only be a 1/3 chance for things to line up this neatly vertically. In the other two cases, the logical pixels would be 2/3 of a physical RGB triplet off vertically, in which case this, too, should be blurry, depending on how, in particular, the mapping algorithm works.

One slightly weird thing I noticed, was that I could only get a "clean" match, while dragging the image around (which made getting a good photo of it even harder, with one hand of the camera and one on the phone) inside the image editor (Photo Editor by dev.macgyver) I was using to show the image at 100% (since it turned out that the regular Android photo album didn't show my test picture at exactly 100% on my Astro).

As soon as I let go of the image, it would settle in a slightly blurred state every time. I can't know for sure whether this is a behaviour in that app or not, but the app shouldn't (need to) know what type of display the device has, so my best guess is that the display driver tries to even things out by always making the image a tad blurry "at rest". Perhaps this is a tad too CPU intense to do while  something is being dragged around, but well, now I'm just guessing, so I think it's time to declare this little foray into the physical screen layout done.

We seem to have 2340 x 720 x 3 = 5054400 individual OLED segments on our Astro displays. I wish they were 2340 x 1080 x 3 = 7581600, but perhaps it isn't yet feasible to do at 400+ DPI at a reasonable cost? My laptop, that has a triplet per pixel "only" needs to do that at around 320 DPI, and even it has some funky offset business going on with its blue segments, so maybe "clean" OLED screens, at these densities, just aren't quite here yet?

Oh, before I leave, here's the "raw" test image I've been using, in case anyone would want to peep at their own pixels.

Edit: Added the "raw" test image.

32

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

« on: March 06, 2023, 07:54:35 pm »

Getting anything useful out of my primitive gear wasn't easy for me. Here's my best attempt though, which seems to suggest there are shenanigans here. Let's, for starters have a look at a 12x12 pixel gray square. I'm not sure which of these pictures is the "best", so here's two:

 

This is the most magnification I've been able to eke out. Both pictures are rotated as if the phone is held in portrait mode. The first picture comes from pointing at the blu-tacked loupe with my $4 flea-market USB microscope. It is only 0.3MP and the usable part is even smaller in this case, so I have digitally scaled it to 200% to make it easier to see anything. The other image is from photographing the loupe with my handheld camera. That gave prettier colours and a few more pixels, but also more distorsion. In either case, I think these images starts looking a bit like "Alternating BGBR" described in the Catalog of Subpixel Geometry mentioned by Zimbix.

Had there been a full RGB triplet dedicated to each physical pixel, this layout would likely be fine, if hard to write subpixel anti-aliasing for, but there seems to be a bit of foul play. Along the vertical axis, one can indeed find twelve groups of a red subpixel atop a green subpixel, with a blue subpixel on the side, but as each such triplet is two subpixels wide, we'd need twenty-four columns of subpixels in total horizontally, to represent twelve pixels, but in the image, there are only fifteen fully lit subpixel columns and two weakly lit. I suppose this corresponds to about 16 subpixel columns instead of 24.

That would suggest that this screen, rather than having a true resolution of 1080x2340 square pixles, has a resolution of 720x2340 rectangular pixels, onto which a 1080 by 2340 pixel image gets mapped. Since the sample area I can capture like this is so small, there is room for error in my method, but let's look at some more tests. In the following, all pictures are taken with the Astro screen in its normal landscape mode. Here are some striped patterns of single pixel wide lines and some 8x8 pixel single colour blocks.

 

Well, that's a bit rubbish, isn't it. Now let's try a single pixel dot pattern (and some more single pixel lines)

 

It's just a mess. Here are just some single pixel lines.

 

The lines are a single pixel wide and eight pixels long, but gets weirdly spread over multiple rows or columns.

Here's some small text

 

Horizontally, we have the "correct" number of subpixels, but, say, five pixels would need to become ten subpixles vertically, with (a properly proportioned version of) this layout. Here, the case is rather seven.

In conclusion, it would be possible to make "true" RGB with this kind of layout, but the subpixels would need to be square and not rectangular for that to work. As an example, here's a closeup of my laptop (also OLED) screen. In the second image the horizontal lines are eight pixels wide, while the vertical are nine pixels tall.

Edit 2023-Mar-07: Added a second photo of my laptop screen.

33

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.

34

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.

35

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.

36

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.

37

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
 

38

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.

39

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.

40

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...

41

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.

42

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.

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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.

44

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.

45

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.