Stephan Paukner :: syslog

I recently managed to reactivate my dear old Epson HX-20, a retro computer released in 1983 which I used at the end of the 1980’s and early 1990’s to learn programming. Since I even could read in some BASIC programs that were still stored on the micro cassette, I wondered if I could rescue the code directly, without using OCR on printouts or even typing it off by hand. I was aware that I was very lucky that this machine still worked after all those years—the soldering seemed to have been much more rigid back then, it might cause more issues to attempt to run old PCs which are a decade younger! To be on the safe side, I invested into a new NiCd battery pack and replaced the original one.

My research first led me to the machine’s RS-232 output, internally called “COM0”. Someone had used that some years ago to directly connect an HX-20 to a PC’s serial port, using a special cable and some adapters. Sadly, it seems that this is no longer an option, since these cables disappear, and serial-to-USB adapters only seem to work with a certain chip in this case.

Then I stumbled upon the GPL software HXTape, and I was totally baffled: What, the Epson HX-20 had an external cassette interface as well? I knew that concept from our even older machine, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. It connected to a special music cassette recorder and encoded data into simple “magnetic bits” onto the tape:

It was quite funny to listen to the noisy sounds when playing the MCs on an ordinary player.

This bidirectional data transfer works over ordinary mono audio cables, one for each direction. And now, it turns out the HX-20 had such an interface as well, and we never used it. But the point is, one could exploit it to decode the audio signals into the original bits and bytes by connecting the HX-20’s “MIC” port to the microphone input of a PC using a simple mono audio cable with standard 3.5 mm jacks! (How tremendous the analog world was! Keep a music cassette lying around in the basement for decades and then just play it. Try this with your ¡Phone!) And that audio decoding is exactly what HXTape is doing.

Eight years ago, I wrote in the history of my computer usage,

In 1988, when I entered grammar school, [...] I did a bit more serious BASIC programming on an Epson HX-20, which I still own today, but isn’t working anymore. [...] My cousin René taught me some BASIC things like how to use the random number generator.

Well, it turns out that this machine is still alive, as you can see in this video:

You can even watch me loading my cousin’s learning program from the micro cassette—that very lines he’d written for me on Dec 29th, 1988. Though, its output was designed for a separate and larger screen that I don’t own anymore.

I’m pretty sure that this machine had slept from ~1995 until I woke it up now. I hope I can also have a look at my other programs on that micro cassette.

I’m adding to my phone history:

A look back at the Galaxy Nexus

I only noticed recently that this phone never had a “Samsung” tag at all; while Samsung indeed was the hardware manufacturer, that device simply was a Google phone.

Surprisingly, I was less into rooting/modding with this phone than I was with my first Android phone, the Motorola Milestone, although the pureness and openness of the Nexus devices was dedicated to such purposes. Maybe because Android 4 finally featured a lot innately: Useful home screen, editing contact groups & birthdays, taking screenshots, mobile data usage control, unlocking by face recognition, panorama camera mode, rich notifications, better search, better messaging. I only rooted it once it was clear there won’t be any further updates; I did so to be able to use advanced anti-theft features. But now it’s beginning to bug me that the hardware (RAM) is getting old (small); the phone is lagging a lot if the uptime reaches one week. I had to turn off various useful but RAM-eating services, like, live wallpapers. Well, it’s 2½ years old.

Mentioning Android features, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Google Now experience becomes the actual core in the future, making devices smart and active companions that exactly know about their users’ habits.

... and the AppIe ¡Phone

Yes, I used an ¡Phone 4 for some months. I didn’t find it that intuitive like it was always praised; e.g., where do you find email settings? No, not at all in the email app, but in the system settings! Also, the ¡Phone has no idea of the concept of widgets or background services. There is no such thing as a third-party keyboard with swipe gestures and text prediction, or a service that changes settings according to detected current conditions. AppIe physically seals phones and notebooks, tries to trick users into buying entirely new devices by making component upgrades expensive or impossible. Yet, ¡People only seem to care about the smoothness of animations. Whoever buys AppIe, it’s their own fault.

Coming up: Samsung Galaxy S5

I somehow drifted away from praising Google’s “pure Android” experience, although they drive core innovations. Having used my first “real” Samsung device, the NotePRO tablet, for some time, I came to appreciate the AppIe-like benefit (what!!1) of an interlinked environment: Samsung devices are “magically” in touch with each other—I can remote control both my TV and my sat receiver/HDD recorder/Blu-ray player (but, strangely enough, not my microwave), I can stream pictures, videos and even my whole UI screen to my TV over the freakin’ air. I mean, totally on their purpose and without me “hacking” anything. It’s no longer Android or Google integration that’s exciting to me, it’s the Samsung experience. I don’t mind TouchWiz as long as they have a mission behind it. (OTOH, the Samsung store praises cheap and foolish third-party apps exclusively, it’s totally pointless to search for apps there, IMO.)

I notice, Samsung is the new Nokia: Every jerk has got one—people who don’t know how to mute their phones or change the standard sounds. I’m the next in line!

... and the Gear Fit

In addition, I’m leering at Samsung’s health-centric smartwatch Gear Fit, as it perfectly integrates into their (or my) device environment.

Do they also build toothbrushes?

Shortly after I had published my first post in this series, rumors about a large (12.2”) high-resolution (2K) Note-branded Samsung Android tablet turned up. I followed those rumors closely until the sudden reveal of the Galaxy NotePRO at CES a few days ago!

This device finally seems to fit my original requirements, tailored around “active” reading:

• High-resolution screen for perfect font rendering (247 ppi); LCD in favor of e-ink due to versatility,
• Large screen for displaying A4-/Letter-sized or magazine pages in (almost) their original size,
• Dedicated stylus input for on-screen and in-document annotations in form of free-hand text, graphs, arrows, and formulas.

I still get opinions that even 10” tablets are too large & heavy and 8” are about right; anything larger ought to be a MS Windows 8 notebook. But MS does not play a role in my personal computing setup. I really do care about the points listed above.

A different point is software updates. I'm an update geek regarding Android, but in this case my focus is on the stylus software features (consider search by hand-drawn shape—yes, it works!), so I don't mind Samsung's TouchWiz UI or the possible lack of OS updates, especially since Samsung has finally fixed some long criticized issues. And it's based on the still fresh Android 4.4 after all, while my Galaxy Nexus is now stuck to 4.3.

Originally, I wanted such a device for a better workflow of reading scientific publications for work. Too bad my job has meanwhile changed... twice. But I will still make use of its features for “active” reading (annotating) of math/CS literature and for conceptual work, as well as for image editing.

I started the following section as a draft in 2008, with the generic title “Mobile device wanted”:

• I need an electronic device with about the shape and weight of a usual magazine or book.
• It should have an electronic touch-screen with a reasonably high resolution, in a size that covers most of the front area.
• The device should be capable of storing files of all type.
• The device’s software should be capable of:
• Showing documents of various formats (especially PDF) that can be scrolled by touching the screen.
• The screen should capture and visualize touch-pen movements correspondingly, e.g. to underline phrases or add hand-written notes. (Most important!)
• Bookmark functionality and cross-document references. (OK, just nice to have.)
• These notes should be stored in some way, either directly in the document (if the format allows it), or in a separate database or file that maybe even allows exporting the additional information.
• Editing editable document formats such as DOC or ODT by translating touch-pen movements to text is optional.
• Optional features:
• Keyboard underneath or attachable.
• Network connection (LAN/Wi-Fi) and internet/e-mail/WWW software.

I want such a device as I read many scientific papers/PDFs for work. It’s not convenient to print them all out, gather them as a bunch of single sheets and take notes with a real pen while e.g. on a train. It would be nice to have a PC-like device, as software and operating systems already exist, and it would immediately be possible to search the web for further information.

It seems that such a device is finally coming in two different incarnations: As netbook or as e-reader.

Yes. The ¡Pad didn’t exist yet. That mentioned netbook back then was a convertible, with a touch-screen LCD that could be rotated to be operated like a tablet. Similar solutions still exist, e.g. the Lenovo ThinkPad X230, but I dislike the low screen resolution, its weight and the MS Windows 7 OS that’s not tailored for touch use. But the main reason why I disliked both the netbook and the e-readers was that these were no dedicated solutions for stylus input—I wanted to write formulas and draw graphs and arrows. I followed the evolution of e-readers with e-ink displays, but they were just too laggy.

When the ¡Pad was introduced in 2010, I saw the desired technology approaching, but I was leering at a more open Android solution. Sadly, in the first time those tablets were only targeted at game and movie enthusiasts, and were more considered gadgets than productive devices. I was drooling over Plastic Logic’s QUE e-reader that also had a stylus, but of course it never appeared on the market.

The finally tablet-optimized Android 3 of 2011 wasn’t mature. Also, I still think that 10” screen diagonals are somewhat small compared to textbooks or magazines, so I was drooling over Kno’s 14” tablet. (I shake my head over opinions that 10” are already too large.) Of course, Kno went out of the hardware business before reaching production. From a different manufacturer, and while too underweight for my needs, the NoteSlate was a nice concept, but it still doesn’t exist.

2011 also brought Samsung’s S Pen technology with their Android-based Note brand, and I thought that a tablet variant would be just around the corner. Indeed, the Note 10.1 came in 2012, but it still had that pixelated 720p resolution (regarding font rendering) instead of more reasonable 1080p. Finally, there seem to be two 11” Samsung tablets lurking for 2013, but none of them is Note branded; there’s also a rumor that there won’t be a Note 10.1 successor soon due to weak sales of the current model.

It appears I’ll have to wait for yet another year.

A look back at the Motorola Milestone

I’m continuing the history of my [cell] phones by replacing my two-year-old Milestone. It literally has been a milestone: It was my first smartphone, and I could do everything with it (which, of course, wasn’t specific for that device, but for Android in general): Contacts and calendar were magically in sync with Google’s web apps. I could browse the web fully, even start embedded Flash videos—a zombie technology, considered dead since years. I used the GPS to do local exploration, e.g. with Google Maps/Places, used location-based games like Brightkite (meanwhile dead), Foursquare or Gowalla (which I lost interest in soon), or recorded my bike rides. It’s so “living in the future” to pan through Google Street View on a mobile device. I was root on a Linux system. GTD task managers and note apps are in sync with their respective web apps. I access important files in my DropBox. I receive audio streams from Google Music. I hold the phone up to a speaker and it freaking tells me what song it’s playing. Apps with AI (e.g. text predicting keyboard apps) are popping up, just as those implementing computer vision and augmented reality.

However, since several months my most used app is Running Services (which I called ruining services), followed by Android’s internal Task Manager: I had to cope with the phone’s limited RAM of only 256 MB every day. I could hardly install additional apps, although I had already applied a mem hack. It was a regular task to copy a Google Maps upgrade from /data/app to /system/app using Root Explorer (and do a hot reboot followed by deleting the old cache file). The phone also had a memory leak (since that infamous Android 2.2 upgrade that every European Milestone user was whining for for months), occasionally killing the alarm clock app during the night, making a precautionary reboot necessary every other day. However, I didn’t have the nerve to flash one of those very experimental alternative unofficial ROMs—Argh, the locked bootloader!—as they often introduced heavily disturbing and way too serious bugs, which I consider out of the question for a productive device that simply ought to work. The actual problem of course is that developers are constantly bloating their apps, keeping track with the hardware specs of the most recent phones.

My Milestone even got two hardware upgrades: A new and stronger battery, and a new LCD, which I had smashed accidentally.

Phone vs. tablet

So, I’m getting a new phone, but I didn’t really want to: Actually, I’m leering at an Android tablet since more than a year, and my intention was to use that device primarily and reduce the smartphone to a simple phone. I want to use a tablet as a kind of e-reader that supports handwritten input—I want to write formulas and draw freaking arrows!—, replacing my non-electronic (cardboard) tablet that holds printed sheets of paper and a pencil. So far, my workflow is to print research papers and read and annotate them with pencil on paper. There are also computer science e-books with hundreds of pages involved, printed incrementally, where I can only carry the currently read sections with me. Sadly, it seems that such a device is still months away. One of the main issues for me is that all of those 10.1" tablets currently only have a pixel count of at most 1280 along the wide edge, resulting in ~140 ppi, what I consider way too low compared to the densities of ~250–300 ppi of current phones. Another thing is precise stylus input using an actively powered stylus, allowing effective palm rejection. Slowly, that technology evolves, e.g. with Samsung’s Galaxy Note. Also, although Android 3.x had been optimized for the tablet form factor, it appeared having been rushed to market. I expect an incarnation of a tablet that meets my expectations within the next months, with an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core CPU, Android 4.x, and e.g. Samsung’s S Pen. But I’m not going to wait any longer.

Coming up: Samsung Galaxy Nexus

This device is at the bleeding edge. But one of the important advantages is, just like with Google’s previous two Nexus phones, that its Android software is a “pure Google experience”, without any adaptation by a specific hardware manufacturer, what is one of the issues people have to deal with on other phones. This ensures that updates or upgrades come early and for a longer time. Of course, the hardware specs are a total win, giving me a dual-core CPU with 1 GB RAM. New to me will be the NFC chip, what will probably be of no use for me initially (as a European, but we’re getting there), and a front-facing camera for video chats. Let’s see if I’ll miss the Milestone’s hardware keyboard. Given that the Galaxy Nexus is also the first official Android 4.x device, it introduces new software features, but those won’t be specific to that device.

As I use to say: With that phone, I won’t need something else for years again.

“It’s a Sony!”

This camcorder relies on a docking station to provide connectors for power, FireWire and USB. However, the dock didn’t get a tripod mount. So, you have to commit something like that to get a live DV stream. In addition, the camera is only loosely attached to the dock, making an additional rubber band necessary.

Or: A review of the Nokia N73

The history of my cell phones had its preliminary end in January 2007, almost three years ago, when I got my Nokia N73, a Symbian S60 based device. I was quite satisfied with it, and it was quite robust as well. I could sync contacts, calendar and tasks with Evolution via Bluetooth and SyncML by the help of OpenSync. I regularly used the e-mail client with IMAP/TLS and SMTP/TLS. The built-in browser did its job, despite its bugs. I bought a license for the LCG Jukebox app to be able to play Ogg Vorbis files. The cell’s camera was OK, though not very fast to launch; a quick sneaky snap was almost impossible. Features that I never tried were video calls or Push-To-Talk.

After a while I used it more and more extensively for internet access. It was my morning newspaper on the train during the week and at the breakfast table on the weekends. I had to cope with websites that didn’t provide a “microbrowser” friendly http://m.whatever.com/ version. I used a dedicated app to access timetables of the local public transport system. I used the non-GPS(!) based geolocation capabilities of Google Maps. I used the IM client Fring and bought a license for the Identi.ca/Twitter/Facebook/Google Reader client Gravity. Because of the browser’s bugs I installed Opera Mini. But I had severe memory problems, I couldn’t run no two of them at once—so quite the behavior of the Crapple diePhone. Also, there was always a different and minimalistic browser launching from a text or from Gravity. A cumbersome copy & paste of a URL into the “real” browser killed Gravity. I had to fav tweets or dents to look at URLs on the PC at a later time; I could thus hardly dare to retweet them from the cell.

As it was a branded device, there were apparently never any software updates available, although it definitely had its flaws. It took me 2½ years to finally notice that I should have faked its device ID so that I could’ve updated it as if it were unbranded. But after those three years I decided that it was just too late to mess around with it, as I thought it’s time for something that comes up to my needs.

Coming up: Android

I’d never buy something from Crapple, so it’s an Android what I’ll get. In contrary to the diePhone, this software base and app market by Google is open—it runs on Linux! As hardware incarnation I want to have the Motorola Milestone, a.k.a. Droid in the US. Originally I targeted at the HTC Hero, but the Milestone has some more appealing features like a hardware keyboard, larger LCD resolution and a more masculine style. In contrary to the Droid, its LCD has multi-touch. I’ll rather use it as PDA than as a phone. I’ll welcome “apps for everything”, especially those which work online, e.g. for social nets, newsfeeds, etc. It has Wi-Fi and GPS with Google Maps Navigation (Yes, also in Europe!). Contacts and calendar are automatically available via Google’s web apps and can be used from within Gnome Evolution without syncing. It has a plain 3.5 mm audio jack and a USB connector. This gadget will cost me more than €400, but at least it won’t be branded or tied to a long-lasting contract. Let’s see where its price is at in January.

Yeah, Google is a data leech. I know. But what should I do? Buy the you-know-what instead?

Btw, this will be my second Motorola device after my StarTAC 75 from 1998.