I cleaned my keyboard because the spacebar stuck down. It still doesn't feel right (it returns a little slow, but not slow enough to repeat), but just like all other modern electronics, new keyboards have enshittified into the extremes of cheap shit (like what I have now) or "gaming" rainbow unicorn vomit that requires a massive Windows-only bloatware package to turn the lights off.

I briefly thought about getting some speakers for my computer, but I haven't seen any good choices that will physically fit with my dual-monitor setup. Anything that has a chance of having reasonable sound quality is too big, so I would have to build them myself (which I have done before, but there aren't any good deals on drivers anymore). I wouldn't have much opportunity to use them anyway, but people keep telling me that headphones will make me lose my hearing faster. I didn't want to make a simple box in my head again, so I briefly opened up FreeCAD again for the first time since I tried 3D printing in college (almost 10 years ago). It's still confusing, but it might just be because I haven't used real 3D CAD software like Solidworks.

lti wrote on 2024-09-22, 21:29:

I cleaned my keyboard because the spacebar stuck down. It still doesn't feel right (it returns a little slow, but not slow enough to repeat), but just like all other modern electronics, new keyboards have enshittified into the extremes of cheap shit (like what I have now) or "gaming" rainbow unicorn vomit that requires a massive Windows-only bloatware package to turn the lights off.

There are some good quality office keyboards out there still. Lenovo makes some reasonably priced yet pleasant-to-type on membrane keyboards. Das Keyboards as well (these are mechanical and more expensive, but can be gotten without RGB).

dr_st wrote on 2024-09-23, 06:24:

Lenovo makes some reasonably priced yet pleasant-to-type on membrane keyboards.

That's what I have. I thought it would be a good new option (instead of spending lots of money on a Das Keyboard or one of the off-brand MX switch keyboards with no backlight), and my other choice without spending tons of money would be deep-cleaning an old keyboard.

I've never used a modern "mechanical" keyboard, so I don't know which types of switches have a tactile feel or noise level I would like. Every "mechanical" (even though domes are mechanical parts) keyboard I've used was old enough to use Alps switches.

Last night I spent the evening reviving my spouse's HP Probook 850 G8 from the dead. It would power on, the keyboard backlight would engage, and the fan would spin up about 15 seconds later, then just sit there doing nothing with no response to keyboard input and no output on the internal or external display. After a bit of reading I found out about doing a hard power reset (hold the power button down for about 15 seconds) and that seemed to clear it from whatever broken/corrupted state it was in.

Opening it up to see if anything was obviously damaged, I noticed that not only does it have an easy to replace battery it's also got a standard NVMe hard drive in case I need to replace it/take a drive image when the laptop is otherwise dead. The RAM is also easy to change, and the fan can be cleaned/removed without a lot of additional fuss. I am very happy I convinced her to buy a business-model laptop instead of a cheaper consumer one that's much more challenging to service!

I exercised my right to repair today and replaced the heating element in my dryer. It's a bit concerning that a ~12 year old dryer is already in need of repair, but that may partly be on me. I cleaned out the exhaust duct whilst I had the dryer disconnected and vacuumed out an astonishing amount of lint. I'm thinking that that may have impeded air flow -- perhaps enough to cause the element box to overheat. I'm just glad that none of that lint ever ignited. People, please keep your dryer vents clean!

I also pulled the last of this year's carrots and potatoes out of the garden. Just check out the sheer girth of these carrots man - my gosh! They were actually hit with a bit of frost a few nights ago, so they're super sweet. I just can't stop munching on them!

Today I left work earlier and went back home testing my best netbook the Asus eeepc 1005PE I found again for a good expensive price. I installed Lubuntu o.s. into it with an impressive 6.8.x kernel which still support its iGPU. The netbook runs an Atom N450 1.66Ghz single CPU with HT, 2GB DDR2 RAMs along a SATA2 SSD. While slow it's impressive still running last Chromium based web browser supporting OpenGL 2.1 (not totally). YouTube is working with sw decoding @ 240p with AV1 video/audio streams almost smooth at full screen. I bought the same netbook when it was released in 2009 more or less and it was an awesome good looking portable device. Those were indeed great times for netbooks.

Will attempt to build LineageOS 14.1 for my smartphone from source and hopefully get it signed with a private key along the way, see if it gets me any better results passing SafetyNet / Play Integrity checks.

Even syncing the source code from the repo takes forever...

Modern-ish, built my 4th silent mini PC with a J5040-ITX mainboard, works with 32 GB of RAM despite officially supporting 8 GB.

The previous three are a J3455-ITX and two Q1900-ITX.

Yeah, I need to give my J-hooziewhatsit celeron board a job.

UCyborg wrote on 2024-10-07, 15:52:

Will attempt to build LineageOS 14.1 for my smartphone from source

1#### make completed successfully (02:30:05 (hh:mm:ss)) ####

I upgraded a Samsun SM-T560NU to LineageOS. Not much of an upgrade, it's still Android 7, but at least it's de-googled. I already had an SM-T280 with Lineage, but it was never officially supported and thus not very stable. It was okay for an ebook reader, but very prone to random rebooting. This other one is/was officially supported so I hope to get a bit more out of it. As for the T280, I think I'll re-flash the factory rom.

In recent times I get more and more disgusted both with Samsung and Google, but especially Google since it essentially killed invidious. I heard they also implemented pause screen ads for Youtube? Too bad they are too big to fail.

Google and Samsung, not a big fan of either. I have minimal set of Google apps, besides the background stuff for satisfying dependencies of some other apps, really just an alarm and a phone app. I might try and see how microG works for me as replacement for Google Play Services.

I went compiling from source as I want to see if I can pass SafetyNet's CTS profile match check if I sign the OS with private key as no one provided downloadable signed build for my Xperia E3. I'll also try to put some of my favorite apps into flashable OS ZIP. Should be fun, the source tree is huge and I've no idea what is what. Over 60 GB of data was downloaded, another 40 GB was produced during building. And there's no guide out there that covers all oddities you might encounter.

This was the first time I compiled whole operating system.

Installed eXoDOS v6 on my Intel NUC...

Simmerhead wrote on 2024-10-11, 19:51:

Installed eXoDOS v6 on my Intel NUC...

You'll never have the time to go through all of them. 😜

I'm going through Android apps on my phone, it's crazy what you can do by editing a single XML. I have this TV (Samsung) Remote Control, it's the only lightweight app I found for remote controlling Samsung TVs. I trimmed its AndroidManifest.xml, it reduced its memory usage by half, doesn't show a single ad anymore, data it stores was trimmed by about 3x. It even had android:largeHeap="true" defined. Why would a TV remote control explicitly request larger amount of memory??

I wonder if Microsoft's Remote Desktop really needs it. Or MX Player.

Bought and connected one of the last still existing HD 768p 32" cheap simple TV that I'm using as PC HDMI monitor with the Raspberry Pi 5. While resolution may seems bad, it'll be faster than a 108op or 4K panel for the GUI. I even like the large pixels look of the panel when set at native resolution (1366x768) on an usual desktop table. I suppose I will connect a Mega Drive or Master System game console through RCA composite input to this. Unfortunately it doesn't have a SCART RGB connection to get the best out of these consoles.

Yup, I don't like to "push" resolution on limited hardware either. There has been a dearth of smaller/simpler/cheaper TVs on the market for a while now. Reminds me of a period I can't date exactly, mid to late 90s probably, but it was when 14" color portables dropped below about $200, and $70 mono 12" TVs suddenly unexisted, as did 9" Color that had been around $150, both of which were half the bulk and weight of the 14" portables. Anyway for a while if you wanted the smallest, generally available cheapest TV it was a 14" color or nothing... then... they started putting VCRs in them, so they could bump the price $50, kinda like all the TVs apart from that one you got are smart TVs. There was at least a year when that was basically all you could find, plus 19" were the same price as 14"... which is kinda where we are now.. but, suddenly some companies realised there was a demand unsatisfied for smaller TVs and we got that flood of $50 5" Black and White, 5" color, some cheaper 9" Color again, but they weren't all that common. Anyway, I think we might get that happen again, a boom in smaller less sophisticated TVs because the smallest ones now are not convenient enough for some purposes. (I know you can probably order some off amazon or aliexpress, I'm talking about what you can walk into Walmart and pick up this afternoon)

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-10-12, 12:26:

Yup, I don't like to "push" resolution on limited hardware either. There has been a dearth of smaller/simpler/cheaper TVs on the market for a while now. Reminds me of a period I can't date exactly, mid to late 90s probably, but it was when 14" color portables dropped below about $200, and $70 mono 12" TVs suddenly unexisted, as did 9" Color that had been around $150, both of which were half the bulk and weight of the 14" portables. Anyway for a while if you wanted the smallest, generally available cheapest TV it was a 14" color or nothing... then... they started putting VCRs in them, so they could bump the price $50, kinda like all the TVs apart from that one you got are smart TVs. There was at least a year when that was basically all you could find, plus 19" were the same price as 14"... which is kinda where we are now.. but, suddenly some companies realised there was a demand unsatisfied for smaller TVs and we got that flood of $50 5" Black and White, 5" color, some cheaper 9" Color again, but they weren't all that common. Anyway, I think we might get that happen again, a boom in smaller less sophisticated TVs because the smallest ones now are not convenient enough for some purposes. (I know you can probably order some off amazon or aliexpress, I'm talking about what you can walk into Walmart and pick up this afternoon)

Yeah the idea was to find a lower size TV/monitor but nowdays in the stores 24" or similar devices are mostly only smart TVs as you said. This is the classic DVB-T2 old style simple menu/hardware TV. I connected the Blue Ray player to this TV and seems working good with two HDMI inputs it has one for it and the other for the Raspberry Pi or the main PC. Good thing it will not need complex upscaling to look like native resolutions.

UCyborg wrote on 2024-10-12, 08:40:

You'll never have the time to go through all of them. :P […]
Show full quote

Simmerhead wrote on 2024-10-11, 19:51:

Installed eXoDOS v6 on my Intel NUC...

You'll never have the time to go through all of them. 😜

I'm going through Android apps on my phone, it's crazy what you can do by editing a single XML. I have this TV (Samsung) Remote Control, it's the only lightweight app I found for remote controlling Samsung TVs. I trimmed its AndroidManifest.xml, it reduced its memory usage by half, doesn't show a single ad anymore, data it stores was trimmed by about 3x. It even had android:largeHeap="true" defined. Why would a TV remote control explicitly request larger amount of memory??

I wonder if Microsoft's Remote Desktop really needs it. Or MX Player.

Ha ha. You sound like my wife talking about my record collection... 😁

I still swear by SONY phones, but I don't think I have more than 50 apps total. 14" screen is the lowest I'll go! 😉

I have exactly 50 apps listed in the launcher! Misc stuff can accumulate. I occasionally look at newer phones, I'd probably go with Sony again if I was buying a new one. Currently still getting as much as possible out of the old one. Not that I expect a lot from a smartphone.

I tried to do too many things at once on weekend and wasted it. The idea of adding some of my apps to the build process to be included in the flashable ZIP with the operating system didn't work out, apparently it does ODEXing (some sort of optimization) by default that doesn't work on at least 1 APK. Figured might just skip this and push them manually to the device later. ODEXing will consume more space with extra apps which I probably can't afford anyway.

But I finally got everything (hopefully) ready to flash newer self-signed build of LineageOS, including the script that will replace the old certificates and keys in the packages.xml file (it lists installed apps and related data) so hopefully don't lose too much apps' data, we'll see what still works.

The apps' data survived, bank app still works, some bugs in the OS are gone compared to old build, at least AudioFX app now shows up something meaningful instead of blankness. Google still doesn't like it though:

And naturally the other financial app still refuses to launch. Still puzzled why it worked the first time.

But hey, I can say I compiled whole working operating system from source code ! 😁