Hardware on Janusworx

My Experience With the Kinesis Advantage 360 After a Day of Use

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 29 May 2024 20:02:51 +0530

Updates : I’ll update this post periodically as I get more familiar with the keyboard

I find the curvy, ungainly shape really beautiful. Click to enlarge

If you follow me on the fediverse, you’ve already read most of this.

Long story short, my wrists (and now, my elbows and arms) are killing me.
So, I saved up and got me a new, split, ergonomic keyboard: The Kinesis Advantage 360
It’s available in the US at around 500USD. I paid close to twice that to import it home, to India (via a seller on the Amazon India site)
Lots of bullet points after a day of use.

All of its ergonomic and software power is QWERTY first and Windows/Mac first. A Dvorak, Linux user like me, will need to adjust quite a bit¹
Everything’s slowed to a crawl as I get used to the new key placements.
The Dvorak layout seems to work better on this than on my old keyboard
The key layout and spacing is throwing everything off
Realised some of my keyboard shortcuts were that way, because of the old keyboard layout. They are terrible on the new keyboard. Need to find new shortcuts for ulauncher, minimising windows, and the gpaste clipboard manager
My caps lock is the compose key and i need to see if the new position will help or hinder me
totally gotten used to the new space, return and backspace keys
totally not used to the placement of esc. will try a week to see if i can get used to it.
new ways of chording keys in emacs. seem to be easier on the wrists. (because of the new place for the ctrl and alt keys)
my wrists feel much better. no idea how much of this is placebo. will know for sure only after a while
bottom row keys are tough right now
got used to the compose key
the question mark and slash has moved below and to the right (dvorak), so will need to see if i adjust
i miss my numpad so much!
learned how to mount the onboard flash storage and eject it properly
updated firmware to the latest version.
also note to self, switch to querty before you do this. status reports are typed out wonky other wise
I have brown switches

The one thing I confidently say, even after a single day of use, is that this is a lovely keyboard.
I will get used to all its quirks, because the scalloped, split design suits me really well.
Most of it, is just changing muscle memory, not learning new painful maneuvers.
And the design also ensures, every single key is in reach of my fingers. This is the magical part for me.
If it lasts me five years, I’ll consider it money well spent.

Updates
#

2024-07-02
#

Gotten used to the layout for the most part. The arrow keys are still very troublesome and trip me up all the time. Realise how deep muscle memory actually is.
The only reason I don’t want to change them, is that they (the new keys) are easy on my fingers and when I’m intentional about them, are easy to use.
The Compose key and the : keys will still take a while getting used to.
Have gotten the hang of /, ?, = and + though.
Have gotten back to my old speed. My error rate is still really high. Most of my friends have now gotten used to my typos 😂

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for e.g., the [ key finds itself at the top right, while the ] key finds itself top left 😂 ↩︎

The Kobo Elipsa 2e, Six Months Later

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 09:28:55 +0530

My beloved, battered, Elipsa 2e. Click the image for a larger image.

It’s been close to ~~six~~ seven months, since I moved over from the Oasis to the Elipsa.

Here’s my list of things / experiences with the Elipsa 2e, positive and negative, in no order whatsever. Also this is not representative of a typical ebook reader¹. I, umm … have a lot of books, and the Elipsa carries most of them. So every action that it does, it does with that number of books (either physically or with its database) …

I love it!
It’s very light for its size. I don’t feel the weight of this 10″ device as much as I felt the old 7″ Oasis.
It’s very fast.
I use it just like a book. It lends itself to such use as well. Part of it is the weight, part of it, is its responsiveness.
This is also how I broke it. I threw it on the bed and then it slipped right over the edge, and cracked the screen 😂 You can see the big chonky part that is permanantly dead, as well as the thin, dead, vertical and horizontal lines. Since I read with fat margins, the chonky part does not get in my way² and the lines are mostly invisible.
~~I cannot enlarge images in a book. I tap, I double tap, I pinch to zoom … nothing. This is the one thing I miss from the Oasis.~~ A few hours later: Of course, now it works! 😂 Double tapping an image, opens up the image where I can zoom and pan around! My fault for not noticing this earlier.
I love it!
It hangs loading complicated books or large pdfs, but it recovers quickly. This does not happen that often.
It randomly hangs and/or crashes. This happens quite often. But I’ve learnt to reboot it with the power button, and it comes right back up, quickly. It reminds me of the Am386 machines, I’d assemble for use as Netware thin clients in my youth. They would run hot and crash ofen, but we didn’t mind, because they rebooted right back so darned fast 😂
Not that the Elipsa runs hot. It just runs fast and crashes. And then comes back on and carries on as if nothing ever happened.
Did I tell you, I love it?
On paper, the screen specs look inferior to the Oasis. In practice, it made no difference to these old eyes.
The user experience is not as good is it could be, but it’s miles better than anything else I’ve used. I figured out most of it intuitively. I love just running my finger along the left edge to adjust the brightness. Helps a lot when I’m reading in bed, so that the better half does not get disturbed (or grumble at me much.)
Books on the Kobo store are a bit more expensive than the Amazon store. (New releases tend to cost the same.)
The database that it uses, gets corrupted quite often, which then leads to it no longer being able to talk to my PC or not showing the books in the device³. I doubt, I’d love the Elipsa as much as I do, if the Calibre ecosystem didn’t support it so well.⁴
- I can backup and restore the database at will, thanks to the awesome Kobo Utilities plugin.
- I’m getting old and impatient and want to read a lot more. So I’ve given up on taking notes by hand and moved over to highlighting and making notes in the Elipsa. I wouldn’t do this if not for the lovely Annotations plugin, which lets me get all my notes and highlights out of the Elipsa and into Calibre. (pic below, click to embiggen) The jury’s still out on this one.
I love it so much, that when I heard a friend was going to the USA, I bullied them into buying me another one to replace this one when it dies.

To conclude, the Elipsa 2e is wonderful.
It has flaws that I can live with.
It serves me well.
I love it!

the person, not the device ↩︎
much ↩︎
This point I think, is more a me problem, than a device problem ↩︎
Note to the Kobo folk, please care about your device software a smidgen. Please! At least at as much, if not more than these lovely open source folk do! ↩︎

My Raspberry Pi 5 Ran Hot

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 13:52:09 +0530

I got my greedy paws on a Raspberry Pi 5 last month.
Probably the Pi after this, will be the one at which I will say these are good enough and stop my “get ’em as soon as they are available” manic buying spree over the past few years.

I use it as a music jukebox (with Jellyfin), as a place to host my audiobooks/files, as well as a syncthing node. Occasionally I will download and transcode videos I find interesting, with yt-dlp.

The Pi is blazingly fast at these tasks. Stuff gets done in a third to half the time, they would take on the old Pi.
It also gets blazingly hot apparently.
Which reminds me of my time assembling 486 desktops in the late 90s. The DX2s needed only heatsinks (like the Pi 4) whilst the DX4 needed fans as well (like the Pi 5)
Like they say, everything old is new again.
It also reminds me of the time the fans would just up and die, after which the machine would then heat up and just go off.
The exact same thing is happening with my Pi 5. The fan in the official case is close to useless. It started whining loudly after only a week of use. But even when it did come on, the Pi would heat up and die.
I thought this was because of the power adapter I was using. Official chargers are not available here in India, for love or money. Which is why I was using the highest rated mobile charger I could lay my hands on. To eliminate this as a cause, I switched to a 65W Anker adapter. No dice.
I installed the sensors package, to get an idea of what was happening. The cores were spiking to 80°C plus. No wonder!
Went looking for heatsinks or fans that could assuage this issue and found an all metal Verilux Aluminium Alloy Case. Though calling it a case would be a slight misnomer. What it is, is sheets of aluminium, separated by spacers, topped with a fan.

It seemed overkill, but at the time, I had no other option available.
I got it, screwed everthing in, praying all the time, that I wouldn’t lose a spacer or screw. (They give one extra screw, nut and spacer)
That did the trick. Temperatures are in the high 40s to low 50s. And everything is zipping along and hunky dory again.

A New Hole Hawg, the Kobo Elipsa 2e

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 08:11:04 +0530

Update, 2024-02-16: Six months later …

A couple of years ago, around this time, I upgraded to the best reading experience I could afford at the time. I got me a Kindle Oasis.

I called it my Hole Hawg. And boy, has it served me like one.
And while it has done, everything it promised it would do, I found myself outgrowing it and needing something more powerful.

What I need
#

A device that could handle nearly every format that I could throw at it.
Something that was not beholden to the Bezos beast.¹
While I love the Oasis’ speed, I want something faster.
Something that would let me read PDF files, without making want to scratch my eyeballs out.
A large screen, because PDFs and because I am getting old and blind as a bat.
While also doing everything else that the Oasis did with the same aplomb
Bonus: Being able to read comics.

A little bit of research led me to the Kobo Elipsa 2e.
It isn’t sold here in India, so a kind cousin got it for me. It has a pen and it marks up books and all that jazz, but I don’t know how much I will use that feature. What I need is what I wrote above and the Elipsa does it all. Very, very, well.

The big screen is gorgeous

The screen is a lower ppi than the Oasis (227 vs 300), but the screen is large and I hold it farther away from my face, to notice any difference. I can also turn off that crazy Kindle full justification, to have my beloved ragged right. It’s extremely responsive, flipping orientation without that heartbeat of a pause, I would have with the Oasis.

The Elipsa 2e vs the Oasis in size.
Did I mention the screen was bigger? Much bigger?
And that it was gorgeous?!

My only regret? I miss my page turn buttons.
But that is a small price to pay for the myriad formats that I can now read on the Elipsa.
Comics, Technical Books, old scanned PDfs, all my fiction, everything!
I love it!

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Hat tip to MWL, for that lovely term ↩︎

Raspberry Pi 4 Not Accessible After a Reboot

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 14:00:00 +0530

Update: 28/12/2021
The solution? Move off the 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS and install Ubuntu. Everything below is now just for history and context :)

Every time I update my Pi, whether it be an kernel update or due to something goofy I do, it refuses to be accessible via ssh after it boots back up.
And everytime I bring it back to my desk, it just works.
And when I put it back into its niche, by the door, it continues to work.
But inevitably, sooner or later, comes a reboot, and we’re back to being inaccessible.
No ssh, no plex, no network.

The other Pi, my old 3 series, keeps chugging along like a champ in the meanwhile.
This was driving me up the wall.
So I got to thinking, and I realised, I was running the 64 bit edition of the Raspberry Pi OS.
And then I got to thinking some more, hmm, this is not a mature os. What if, it might be buggy? Or what if, something I do, is tripping it up the wrong way?
Logically then, that meant the network stack, or the network interface, or the port itself.
Because everytime I brought the Pi in, to where my desktop is, I connect it to a switch (that connects to my upstream router).
And then when I take it back, it changes back to connecting to the router directly.

So the next time it borked, I put the Pi off, then turned the router off and on and then finally, put the Pi back on.
And that did the trick.
I tried it again this morning, when the Pi went offline, after another update. The heuristic still holds!
I’m sure, I could go digging further to find the root cause, (dhcp release renew not happening correctly?), this just lets me get on with my life and I’m happy :)

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A Few Thoughts on the Kindle Oasis

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 09:21:19 +0530

The old Paperwhite, is on the left. The Oasis is on the right.

I ran out of space on the 8gb Paperwhite and so grudgingly went and paid extra for a 32gb Kindle Oasis. This was before a friend pointed out that even the Paperwhite now has a 32gb variant.

Now what?

I decided to use the Oasis, so that I could lay my hands on the best e-ink reader Amazon makes for a week and then exchange it for a new Paperwhite.

I got it.
I used it.
And decided within a day, that I was not going back to a Paperwhite, ever.
I realised that the Oasis, to me, is not a “premium” device.

What it is, is a Hole Hawg …

Neal Stephenson writes …

The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners.
The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner’s drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be in a homeowner’s drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber handle on the other.

The Oasis is my Hole Hawg for reading.
It is lopsided, but it helps me hold it better and for longer.
It is extremely responsive.
It is much, much, much faster than any e-reader I have owned.
The glass screen is much better than plastic, both to see and to use.
Touching, swiping, highlighting, shuffling books, file transfers … it handled everything I threw at it without breaking a sweat.

If you read as much as I do, the ~~Hole Hawg~~ Kindle Oasis, is a worthy investment.

Thoughts on Running Plex on a Raspberry Pi 4

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 09:15:20 +0530

This is just a play post to do a few things.
One, I am now testing categories for the blog.
So that the tech folk can subscribe only to the tech rss feed if need be.
Second, I need to get into the swing of writing things again.
It’s only been close to a month of not writing, but I already feel rusty 😂

I have been watching a lot of Netflix and other online streaming media last year. Well lot is relative. Definitely not as many as the books.
But what I realise, is that I just spend my time endlessly browsing through what I want to watch rather than, you know, actually watching something.
I also realise that most of my watching is mostly stuff I already watched. I want my old Holmes, or Yes Minister, or Suchet’s Poirot.
Stuff I already have, offline.
But not easily accessible, since it lies on an external hard disk, which I need to plugin to my desktop and then watch.

Then I realised that my trusty little Raspberry Pi was always there, in the corner, running away silently, currently serving as a repository for podcast episodes.
I also had an external thunderbolt ssd, that I could no longer plug into my Mac, because my Mac is dead (sob)
The LaCie did however also have a USB interface too.

Lightbulb moment!

I formatted my external disk on the desktop with the ext4 filesystem, copied all the stuff that I always watch or have running in the background and connected it to my Pi.

Then went to the Plex site and got the armf distribution.
Copied it over to the Pi and installed it with a dpkg -i.
There are better ways to do it. Check the webz if you need better directions and handholding.

Decided that I did not need a Plex account to do what I needed.
Which basically was just reading a folder full of videos, presenting them and playing them.

The web interface is beautiful and functional.
It keeps pushing you to get a Plex account, which you might want … or not.
Added my folders as video sources and then after a few minutes, they showed right up.

I downloaded the Plex apps (on the iPhone and the iPad) and paid for the option to stream files and play them.

And that was that.

It works beautifully, if it is just a couple of devices.
More than that, and it struggles.
But most importantly, Plex handled darn near every video format, I had.

And so, every evening for the past week has been bliss, with an hour, solving crimes Poirot and his “littel gray sells” as I go off to bed.