RatCreature's Journal

What I Just Finished Reading

Nothing. Still in a reading slump as far as books are concerned. I have read some fanfic.

What I'm Reading Now

I started reading A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher.

Only yesterday my PocketBook e-reader decided to brick itself as something went wrong during a sync with Calibre (I wanted to transfer a Cat Sebastian romance that I had bought), and it now freezes during boot. I think its internal disk has become corrupted somehow. At least my books are all backed up.

I wrote to support, because when something similar happened with my previous PocketBook they walked me through some kind of clean firmware reinstall via microSD card to reformat the corrupted internal memory or something, but today support only responded with the useless idiot first steps in their script, i.e. the "have you tried the reset button while connecting the device to a power source" kind of turning on/off thing, that I had already tried in various permutations, only some of which I mentioned in my initial mail, but that were all useless. I haven't heard back anything yet to my reply, in which I hinted that with a different model this microSD boot and reinstall helped, and could they tell me the right steps for this model. I really hope it's not permanently broken.

What I'm Reading Next

No idea. Hopefully something on my then restored e-reader. Though I do have a smaller paper TBR pile too that I could tackle.

...is there some tool that let's you download all the Tumblr posts you liked? I've been good about downloading fanfic as I go along, but fanart much less so. I don't reblog with my Tumblr, but my likes are visible.

And now I don't have my tab groups anymore, and I have no idea from where I can at least retrieve the URLs as a list or something. :(

ETA: And I just discovered that the FlashGot extension also doesn't work anymore, and that was what allowed me to download the audio from dictionary sites such as dict.leo.org to put on my own flashcards for vocabulary revision. Is there any other way I can download these?

I have a new android tablet and I want Chrome to display my tabs like my old tablet does. That one displays tabs like on a desktop, with a tab-thing showing the title at the top and all are sort of in the same window like in a desktop browser. My new tablet does the annoying mobile browser display, where there is the little square next to the url that shows a number. Both tablets have Android 6 and the same Chrome so surely there has to be an option somewhere to tell Chrome how it should display its tabs, and yet I can't find it anywhere. And nothing that I tried putting into Google was any help either.

After the untimely destruction of my last one (lesson learned: don't read while walking, at least not unless you have seriously rugged your e-reader to take a lot of impact), I got a replacement today. I briefly considered just getting the same model again, because I liked my PocketBook Lux Touch 3, but actually it now cost 12€ more than eleven months ago when I bought it, and it would have been kind of depressing to get just the same again for more money now that the tech is almost a year older.

So instead I spent a little more still to get the new PocketBook Touch HD, which as the name indicates has a HD display, is faster with twice the memory and can play audio. My preference for PocketBook is that I want to be able to use my e-reader without having to register it anywhere or be associated with any store. PocketBook offers a cloud backup and synchronization service too, but you can just skip that. Also it supports the Adobe DRM my public library uses.

One thing that made me apprehensive is that while most reviews liked the hardware they cautioned about bugs in the firmware. Some reviews also claimed that it stopped working entirely when they tried to update said firmware, but I put these down to inexperience in coping with technical difficulties.

I was already familiar with how horrible and glitchy their firmware updates are from my previous PocketBook, but they also offer multiple ways of troubleshooting, restoring corrupted systems and their support is decent.

And true to form the thing hung during the initial firmware update, but actually it resolved more easily than last time. After a call to their support line, it took only one reset and connecting the e-reader to my laptop during the update for it to finish correctly. Apparently the thing likes to be connected to a power supply while updating, and may hang if it is not, even if it is nearly fully charged. Only the manual doesn't tell you that. (I was clever enough this time around to try this during their office hours, whereas last time I tried over the weekend and only got an answer to my, then slightly different, problem via mail on Monday, when I had already managed to resolve it with a lot of trial and error.)

Anyway, once I was past that (and disabled automatic updates), so far it seems to work okay when I tried stuff, though some problems might only show with longer use. I mean, my previous one has glitched a few times with books for no reason I could discern, like it would sometimes not display a page but exit to the menu, even though when I checked the ebook source code in that place on my computer I could never see anything unusual (like broken formatting or code or such) that might explain this. It wasn't happening often, maybe half a dozen times per several hundreds of files, but still annoying. And a few times it crashed for no reason, so even picking the old one again I would not have been bug-free.

The HD display of the new one is noticeably nicer and crisper than my previous one, and it is faster when loading things, when browsing the library and when reacting in general. So that is very nice. It connects fine to Calibre (though the translation of Calibre tags into "genres" is not ideal for my use of tags in particular with fanfic), and its own library organization got even better than previously.

Anyway so far I'm happy with it.

I bought myself a Nexus 7 tablet. Right now I'm still really confused by it. It doesn't help that the thing has no instruction manual whatsoever. Seriously, just a slip of paper with a URL for Google's online help that also points out on an image which button to press to turn the device on, which I guess is somewhat useful because there are no symbols near the two buttons, so nothing to tell you that the smaller is the on switch and the larger the volume control, but it is a *bit* minimalist as far as documentation goes. This is especially hilarious as the warranty information card tells me that I ought to read the instruction manual and only use it in accordance with that to not void the warranty...

Also I have barely looked at two or three things and Google already prodded me four times to sign up for Google+. I mean, I expected to decline once during sign-up, but it wants me to turn on various Google services with bizarre frequency, as seemingly every icon I look at wants me to agree to allow Google to sign me up for something, or track me and share my data even while I'm not using that particular thing to "enhance" something or other, like it wants to share location info with search services and then turn on the Google web search history (which I have disabled), and allow it to share that data with whomever.

I still have to find out how I can get stuff I already have on my computer, like ebooks, onto it easily. And decide which ebook reader app I ought to use. There seem to be quite many of them. In case that you use an android device as an ereader, do you have a favorite? Also what other apps do you like? This is the first time I'm using something like this, so I'm a bit lost.

ETA: And now it just signed me up for Youtube without me doing anything besides clicking on a demo video for an ereader app, wtf?

My laptop won't boot anymore. It just makes some noises and then shuts down again. :(

I did have the foresight to buy a four year extended warranty when I got it, which is useful, since it is just after the two year usual one (quite suspicious that), so I ought to get it repaired on that. But of course I was less than scrupulous about backing up all my stuff (my last full backup is some weeks old), and my creaky, old desktop is not as nice to use, and of course you can't take a desktop to use it from the comfort of your bed covered by a warm blanket either. And who knows how long the repair will take.

So I'm likely to be around less online with this inconvenience. :(

ETA: Maybe it's not quite dead? Just before bringing it to the store I tried one last time to boot it, just to be sure not to embarrass myself (I've had that happen in the past that in the store a computer suddenly changed its mind about being broken), and this time, unlike the last four or five times I tried to turn it on, the laptop booted normally, pretending it hadn't played dead brick for the last few hours. Obviously right now I'm scrambling to do the backing up I'd neglected, to get all my data.

The logs I looked at, do not show anything for the time around 2am last night when I turned it off and the boot now. Obviously right now I'm highly suspicious of the laptop. Once all my data is copied, I'll risk turning it off and see whether it'll start again. I hope it'll remain non-dead *crosses fingers*, to spare myself the repair hassle, though even if it does, my trust in it is severely shaken.

ETA2: I finished the backup, and the laptop turns on again after I turn it off. So for now I'll hold off from bringing it for repair, as obviously I can't reproduce its total failure, which is both good (because I have a functioning laptop) and bad (because it feels more unreliable than the usual computer having failed me for no reason I can discern). I guess I just have to be very diligent about backups and hope for the best.

I've accessed Google Docs for the first time in a while, and apparently they are discontinuing it? Instead there will be a "Google Drive" for which you need to download some program that doesn't even have a Linux version? *siiigh*

It is a rather cheap one, having cost €400 (plus a bit over €20 for an extended repair warranty lasting four years which I thought was worth it to reassure me that I'll get use out of my investment for a while), but this was still quite a big expense for me. It's a HP 625, and it came with a SuSE Enterprise Linux trial thing, but I've just installed Ubuntu on it, because from what I understood you have to pay Novell for using the updates or something like that. I suppose I might already have paid with the computer and would have just needed to register, but I couldn't find any sensible instructions, and while I used older SuSE Linux in the past, this one's interface wasn't all that great when I checked it out.

Also the guy in the store where I bought it recommended installing an new Linux anyway, saying that the Linux on it wasn't a regular version, but he had assured me that he had installed Ubuntu without problems on this model. And because I didn't have to pay for a Windows license, I got more memory and a larger hard disk than the version of the laptop that was sold with Windows at this price. So I have 4GB RAM and a 320GB disk.

So far everything works really nicely. The Ubuntu install went okay overall, though my first try, when I choose to download updates right away stalled with a bizarre I/O error at the end right before the restart, and left me with a non-starting system, but my second try to install what was on the CD then download updates later worked out. Unlike with my old laptop (may it RIP) with this one the power management and battery monitor works under linux, and the wireless worked right away, also it can do the better encryption, so now my wlan is safer since I could enable that in my router. Sound, touchpad, graphic acceleration work too. The fan is not too loud, and it doesn't seem to heat up too much either. The keyboard is quite nice too, though I keep thinking the keys ought to be further to the left, because unlike my last one this laptop has the special keys on the left side, but I ought to get used to that soon enough. I haven't yet checked everything, and still have to customize a lot, but it seems really promising.

In the last installment my beloved laptop died, not recognizing its hard disk any longer, without the option to rescue anything from a Live CD, as its DVD drive had died a while ago.

Anyway, in an attempt to maybe salvage some of the lost data (my first HD failure since 1998, I've been complacent about frequent backups) I got myself an SATA/IDE to USB converter thingy, hoping to plug that into the disk, and then follow a data recovery guide, which explains how to image a damaged disk (I also got a shiny new external hard disk with plenty of space so I can store it) to then do repair work on that image and hopefully salvage stuff.

However, before I even got to that stage I've been defeated by screws. I got the disk out of the laptop okay, but it is in a metal frame you slide in, and the cable of the converter does not fit onto the disk while it is in the metal thing. But I can't get the screws loose. They don't budge at all, the only effect I'm having is denting my screw driver head. Admittedly said tool is a cheap and dingy little thing (I got it with some computer part or other), but I suspect if the screw driver was harder I'd only end up damaging the screws instead. :(