It's sad to know that one never really truly realises how much one is loved, even when they are dead.
``MT, getting all sentimental?''
Joke's on you---I'm always sentimental. This is literally the biggest oxymoron that makes up much of my character. I know that I can push through anything if I choose to do so, but time has just made me a little more selective on things that I choose to expend effort for. But this is a major digression and not the objective of today's rant.
The reason why one never truly realises how much one is loved, is due to how hardly anyone knows how to show that they love someone without being all weird and/or awkward. Or sometimes, as is the regular excuse from SIN city, it is a ``cultural thing'' to not show emotion, as any form of emotion is a demonstration of weakness.
Unfortunately for me, I never really grew up in an environment where I could emote properly. My folks never emoted, though there is no doubt that all my immediate family members would go through hell and back for each other.
We just never emoted with each other.
And that was one thing that I could never quite grasp when I was dating and meeting my date's folks, whether it was the first time, or the last. And that is also why I feel oddly uncomfortable when people start coming close to me the way normal people come close to others, you know, by talking.
And that is probably why I stay within my rebuilt walls, avoiding my inner peace from being ``disturbed'' by women whom I may have a chance to be a partner with for this life.
I would rather quietly hug someone tight to show them I love them, than to say the words ``I love you''. I would rather sit next to them in quiet content, physically close, than to gossip about what other people are doing. I would rather talk about the future with them, than to mull about my past and present.
I think many people know that about me, and thus they have all kept their distance as a form of respecting my preferences, all without saying anything out loud in acknowledgement. It only took me nearly forty years to realise and acknowledge this in public.
Of course, the alternate way of thinking about things is that no one really gives a shit about me, but somehow I do not think this to be true of those whom I have interacted with on a consistent basis. Inasmuch as they have affected my life through interacting with me, I'm sure that I have affected their lives (hopefully for the better) through my interacting with them.
But you'll hardly ever catch me going up to them and telling them ``I love you''. I just simply cannot do that.
I think the number of people whom I had ever done that in my life can be counted on a single hand.
That one time when I was really, exceptionally down, people from the woodwork started to pour out and remind me that in some small way, I'm still loved by them, even if we don't do many of the usual things that people who love another do.
Some people might think that MT has a commitment problem. I think they are both right and wrong. They are right in thinking that I have a commitment problem; they are wrong in thinking that it means I cannot commit.
If anything, I'm damn good at meeting my commitments. If I give my word, it will be an extreme circumstance in which I would have to break it.
Perhaps that is why I'm uncomfortable telling people I love them---the honesty's too much for me, and perhaps for the them who are receiving it from me.
And mayhaps the manner in which I deliver such heartfelt words is just sub-par from the absolute lack of practice on the whole.
If there's ever a resolution that I ought to be making, it will be to be more open about my feelings to others. I've started through affirming my appreciation (it's still awkward as fuck), but to those whom I love, maybe I should have the courage to tell them so, before it is too late.
------
In other news, I have decided to pull the trigger on the Kindle Colorsoft Signature, or as I would like to call it, Eirian-VI.
``But MT, you just got Eirian-V barely 2 years ago! Why are you wasting money?!''
Well, it's not like there was no precedent. I mean, Eirian-VI is going to come with colour, much like how Eirian-III had colour (as a tablet) compared to Eirian-II.
The purchase is through a forwarder (vPOST), so we'll see how it all turns out. I'm not expecting any trouble, but for these things, one never really knows.
The upcoming week is what I call ``i'm-forty-bitches'' week. It's a week where I choose to do things to mark the end of my fourth decade walking this earth, and the start of my fifth decade.
It's okay because I'm on leave.
I think that's about it for now. Till the next update then.
Showing posts with label eirian-iii. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eirian-iii. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Saturday, July 25, 2020
Eileen-II and Other Stories
To say that the past week-and-a-half is a roller coaster is a bit of a cliché, but it is an unfortunate consequence of my lack of imagination in the use of the English language. Let's see what I can say here today.
I've bought a new 22-inch 16:9 monitor from Dell (P2219H) that can swivel, and is primarily set up to be vertical in nature. No name for this device, though it can technically be called ``Eirian-V'' since its role is similar to the Eirian series of devices---but I'm not going to. The problem I was facing was the reading of certain PDF forms of e-books that had the two-column layout. On a normal screen, no matter what resolution and dimension, if we keep it in the usual landscape format, each column ends up taking up at most one quarter of the screen by width. It is basically unreadable. What I needed was something that had more physical dimension in the height department. I could get a tablet like Eirian-III, but I didn't want to have to lug it around with my hands just to read the document---I have grown used to the smaller form factor. Eirian-IV has superior pitch density, but even then, it can be a challenge to read really tiny text that was supposed to be ``normal sized'' in a more traditional A4/letter sized setting. And so, the monitor was obtained.
Edythe-III is still hale and hearty, but her 3-year warranty is almost up. And if the behaviour of Edythe-II was of any indication, it was clear that I needed to get a replacement soonish. At the same time, Elysie-II was starting to become a little... unstable, partly because of age, partly because of hardware (old school spindle HDD), partly because of software (Windows 7), and partly because of circumstance (it was hard/impossible to head out to the venerable Sim Lim Square to source for parts, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging and stores closing left and right). So I decided to spend a little more than what I had originally saved for and get a new iteration of Eileen, now known as Eileen-II.
So, what's Eileen-II?
She's an Alienware m15 R3, with an Intel i7-10750H processor (6-core, 12MB cache, up to 5.1GHz with Turbo Boost), 32GB DDR4 RAM at 2666MHz, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super 8GB DDR6 discrete graphics card. Her screen is 15.6" (1920×1080) with a refresh rate of 144Hz, and her storage is a 1TB SSD.
Her specs are on par with Elysie-II in many ways, except for a slightly better parallelisation capability with 50% more cores and a faster secondary storage, and a much more portable form factor (laptop vs desktop). She's pretty portable for a stronk person like me, but I think I may actually need to use the provided carrier bag instead of whatever I had---she is a little larger than the 13" laptops that I have.
For a portable machine running the specs like the beast that is Elysie-II, Eileen-II runs surprisingly cool. Let's hope this continues.
------
On more different matters, it had been quite trying for the past week-and-a-half. Work had some extra certification thing that needed to be done to address a tender, and I was tasked to get it with a colleague. The whole process was a little harrowing, partly because the item that we were getting certification on wasn't exactly directly aligned with my interests/area of work/domain of expertise per se, and partly because of the super shortened duration we had to actually prepare for it, even though we managed the expectations of that to have two attempts instead of the one that was originally envisioned. Then there was the need to book a time slot to actually take the certification exam---it had to be online proctored, and the only time slot that fit the original planned schedule was at six in the morning (or any time between three and six in the morning in roughly fifteen-minute intervals). Thankfully it is now over; well it had been over since the Wednesday just passed. I passed by the grace of God---the score I had was exactly the one needed to pass, no more and no less. Just to be clear, this was one of those exams that the passing grade was a ``high'' percentage that was not fifty percent.
The Friday before, I had a near breakdown. I don't know why---suddenly I felt completely useless for some reason. I felt as though I would just fade away if I didn't pay attention to myself. I think I was just overwhelmed with the stress of not willfully failing that certification exam, and the combined stresses of a general lack of coping mechanisms (no Chinese Orchestra rehearsals, no meet ups with friends, no more confidante in general) with additional social stresses (what is the new norm for me now that I am a believer, am without a wife-to-be-candidate, basically having my life rewritten to the past) meant that I just sort of lost sense of where I was. I mean, yes, I'm a believer now, I know God is with me because I've chosen to walk with Him in my life, but I'm still a neophyte in the ways of Christ, and more importantly, I'm still a mortal.
Given all that I felt, I did something pretty uncharacteristic; I posted a plea for reassurance on my ``wall'' in Facebook.
I am really heartened by the responses that came in. Friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances started coming out of the wood work to send me private messages, asking my well-being, and giving me really positive encouragement that I had indeed impacted their lives in a positive way during the times when we were walking closer together than now.
I teared up. I tear up still. I wasn't expecting all that love and concern to come in like that. Don't ask me why---I don't know. I've never really had these kinds of feelings before.
It definitely helped ground me back into reality. That I was, and am here.
------
On yet another note, I've also bought some Oval-8 finger splits by 3-point products. They are for my two pinky fingers---they have a mild form of swan neck deformity. They only show up when I need to be playing the dizi or when I'm going for the pinky-notes of the right hand (instrument C♯, C, B), in which case it is bad. Most of the time I don't have to actually ``stretch'' my fingers, but under those circumstances highlighted, I have to, and it is a problem. The Oval-8 finger splits block the middle joint from bending backwards, which allows me to safely stretch out the pinky without jamming the joint up. It is super useful. I first learnt of them at the Flute Forum on Facebook, and bought mine from Fu Kang, a Singapore company.
And that's about it for now. Till the next update I suppose.
I've bought a new 22-inch 16:9 monitor from Dell (P2219H) that can swivel, and is primarily set up to be vertical in nature. No name for this device, though it can technically be called ``Eirian-V'' since its role is similar to the Eirian series of devices---but I'm not going to. The problem I was facing was the reading of certain PDF forms of e-books that had the two-column layout. On a normal screen, no matter what resolution and dimension, if we keep it in the usual landscape format, each column ends up taking up at most one quarter of the screen by width. It is basically unreadable. What I needed was something that had more physical dimension in the height department. I could get a tablet like Eirian-III, but I didn't want to have to lug it around with my hands just to read the document---I have grown used to the smaller form factor. Eirian-IV has superior pitch density, but even then, it can be a challenge to read really tiny text that was supposed to be ``normal sized'' in a more traditional A4/letter sized setting. And so, the monitor was obtained.
Edythe-III is still hale and hearty, but her 3-year warranty is almost up. And if the behaviour of Edythe-II was of any indication, it was clear that I needed to get a replacement soonish. At the same time, Elysie-II was starting to become a little... unstable, partly because of age, partly because of hardware (old school spindle HDD), partly because of software (Windows 7), and partly because of circumstance (it was hard/impossible to head out to the venerable Sim Lim Square to source for parts, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging and stores closing left and right). So I decided to spend a little more than what I had originally saved for and get a new iteration of Eileen, now known as Eileen-II.
So, what's Eileen-II?
She's an Alienware m15 R3, with an Intel i7-10750H processor (6-core, 12MB cache, up to 5.1GHz with Turbo Boost), 32GB DDR4 RAM at 2666MHz, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super 8GB DDR6 discrete graphics card. Her screen is 15.6" (1920×1080) with a refresh rate of 144Hz, and her storage is a 1TB SSD.
Her specs are on par with Elysie-II in many ways, except for a slightly better parallelisation capability with 50% more cores and a faster secondary storage, and a much more portable form factor (laptop vs desktop). She's pretty portable for a stronk person like me, but I think I may actually need to use the provided carrier bag instead of whatever I had---she is a little larger than the 13" laptops that I have.
For a portable machine running the specs like the beast that is Elysie-II, Eileen-II runs surprisingly cool. Let's hope this continues.
------
On more different matters, it had been quite trying for the past week-and-a-half. Work had some extra certification thing that needed to be done to address a tender, and I was tasked to get it with a colleague. The whole process was a little harrowing, partly because the item that we were getting certification on wasn't exactly directly aligned with my interests/area of work/domain of expertise per se, and partly because of the super shortened duration we had to actually prepare for it, even though we managed the expectations of that to have two attempts instead of the one that was originally envisioned. Then there was the need to book a time slot to actually take the certification exam---it had to be online proctored, and the only time slot that fit the original planned schedule was at six in the morning (or any time between three and six in the morning in roughly fifteen-minute intervals). Thankfully it is now over; well it had been over since the Wednesday just passed. I passed by the grace of God---the score I had was exactly the one needed to pass, no more and no less. Just to be clear, this was one of those exams that the passing grade was a ``high'' percentage that was not fifty percent.
The Friday before, I had a near breakdown. I don't know why---suddenly I felt completely useless for some reason. I felt as though I would just fade away if I didn't pay attention to myself. I think I was just overwhelmed with the stress of not willfully failing that certification exam, and the combined stresses of a general lack of coping mechanisms (no Chinese Orchestra rehearsals, no meet ups with friends, no more confidante in general) with additional social stresses (what is the new norm for me now that I am a believer, am without a wife-to-be-candidate, basically having my life rewritten to the past) meant that I just sort of lost sense of where I was. I mean, yes, I'm a believer now, I know God is with me because I've chosen to walk with Him in my life, but I'm still a neophyte in the ways of Christ, and more importantly, I'm still a mortal.
Given all that I felt, I did something pretty uncharacteristic; I posted a plea for reassurance on my ``wall'' in Facebook.
I am really heartened by the responses that came in. Friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances started coming out of the wood work to send me private messages, asking my well-being, and giving me really positive encouragement that I had indeed impacted their lives in a positive way during the times when we were walking closer together than now.
I teared up. I tear up still. I wasn't expecting all that love and concern to come in like that. Don't ask me why---I don't know. I've never really had these kinds of feelings before.
It definitely helped ground me back into reality. That I was, and am here.
------
On yet another note, I've also bought some Oval-8 finger splits by 3-point products. They are for my two pinky fingers---they have a mild form of swan neck deformity. They only show up when I need to be playing the dizi or when I'm going for the pinky-notes of the right hand (instrument C♯, C, B), in which case it is bad. Most of the time I don't have to actually ``stretch'' my fingers, but under those circumstances highlighted, I have to, and it is a problem. The Oval-8 finger splits block the middle joint from bending backwards, which allows me to safely stretch out the pinky without jamming the joint up. It is super useful. I first learnt of them at the Flute Forum on Facebook, and bought mine from Fu Kang, a Singapore company.
And that's about it for now. Till the next update I suppose.
Thursday, February 02, 2017
Goodbye Eirian-III
I've had Eirian-III for quite a while now, and it is with great sadness that I'll have to retire this tablet.
I've had Eirian-III since January 2013, and she had always been my go-to for any of the coloured stuff and comics. Each time I travelled, it was Eirian-III that I lugged along instead of Edythe, Elyse or Eileen. Much good times were had.
But today, it was deemed the day where Eirian-III has to be retired. Her battery wouldn't charge, and upon closer examination, was already swelling up, a sign that things weren't going well.
And so, retired she shall be.
I'll always remember the times that Eirian-III had provided me with much needed entertainment that cannot be gleaned from the ``pure'' e-ink readers that her sisters were (Eirian, Eirian-II and Eirian-IV). Much fun was had watching Twitch streams on her as well. And geocaching with tools running on her, including oversized maps that make it easy to look ahead.
It will all be consigned to the past now.
Will I get a replacement for Eirian-III? I don't know, and I don't really think so. While great, Eirian-III has never been my standard workhorse---she ran stock Google Android with all its... flaws. Her coloured LCD was great for comics, but I'm no rabid comic devourer. She did follow me through great works like Neil Gaiman's Sandman, One Thousand Nights and A Night, Watchmen and V for Vendetta, not to mention my own compendium of web comics for easy reading. But are those enough reasons to consider getting a replacement? I don't think so.
So to my faithful device, thank you for your service, and thank you for your patience with a fool like me. Your absence will be felt in time to come.
I've had Eirian-III since January 2013, and she had always been my go-to for any of the coloured stuff and comics. Each time I travelled, it was Eirian-III that I lugged along instead of Edythe, Elyse or Eileen. Much good times were had.
But today, it was deemed the day where Eirian-III has to be retired. Her battery wouldn't charge, and upon closer examination, was already swelling up, a sign that things weren't going well.
And so, retired she shall be.
I'll always remember the times that Eirian-III had provided me with much needed entertainment that cannot be gleaned from the ``pure'' e-ink readers that her sisters were (Eirian, Eirian-II and Eirian-IV). Much fun was had watching Twitch streams on her as well. And geocaching with tools running on her, including oversized maps that make it easy to look ahead.
It will all be consigned to the past now.
Will I get a replacement for Eirian-III? I don't know, and I don't really think so. While great, Eirian-III has never been my standard workhorse---she ran stock Google Android with all its... flaws. Her coloured LCD was great for comics, but I'm no rabid comic devourer. She did follow me through great works like Neil Gaiman's Sandman, One Thousand Nights and A Night, Watchmen and V for Vendetta, not to mention my own compendium of web comics for easy reading. But are those enough reasons to consider getting a replacement? I don't think so.
So to my faithful device, thank you for your service, and thank you for your patience with a fool like me. Your absence will be felt in time to come.
Sunday, May 01, 2016
May-Jan
It is now May.
I wanted to write something before, but could never convince myself that there was something substantial enough to warrant the effort needed to write a post like this one.
Long time readers might have realised that I hadn't written the customary rant that occurs whenever the annual ``celebration'' of my birth rolls around. It isn't so much as me deliberately forgetting to write anything, but that I was actually waiting for something to happen before I wrote anything. The said thing happened a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't bring myself to write anything until now.
So, as per normal, I used the birthday celebration as an excuse to buy myself some cool stuff. One of them is a brand-new Kindle Voyage reader with the origami cover, nicknamed ``Eirian-IV''. She's a compact replacement of Eirian-II, whom was actually replaced with Eirian-III, my Nexus 10 tablet. The thing is, I've always liked to do my heaviest text-reading over e-ink, but as noted before, Eirian-II was fast fading away. I had used Eirian-III for a while, but the brightness that comes from staring at an LCD display was starting to annoy me. What convinced me to get the Kindle Voyage was the stupendous resolution. At 300ppi, it rivals that of the Nexus 10 (also around 300ppi), is more than 4× better than the Kindle DX (~150ppi---we're looking at area here), and has an amazing battery life. That high resolution made the 6-inch form factor tolerable, and so I got one. Eirian-IV is thus procured and is now part of my daily carry.
I got Eirian-IV a couple of months or so before my actual birthday, but didn't really write anything about her till now.
The main thing why it took me so long to write this was my Grenaditte bass flute, or Mio. An order for Mio was placed a while back, but due to a variety of reasons (some staff changes, Chinese New Year, probable company restructuring etc) it took GUO nearly 3 months before they delivered it to the shop. And when Mio finally arrived, I was right in the middle of my annual trip to the US to meet up and hang out with friends, as well as to go walk around to find geocaches.
It is of no secret that I am starting to explore the lower extremes of sound generation. I have been quite decent with messing around with the really high-pitched stuff (see also my picc, the new Garklein recorder that I got during my US trip, which superceded the sopranino recorder that I had since my days at UIUC), failing only with the highest of the high notes, i.e. everything from A7 and higher. But there is only that much one can go with the high pitched notes---they tend to get a little too annoying on the ears (anything at around 1kHz does that, and when it gets to 4kHz it gets stupid worse---try listening to the screams of a toddler for an idea on how annoying it gets). It may be super impressive and fun, but as I mentioned, it gets annoying. Now the lower extreme, that's not as well explored as that of the middle and high range. Partly because of the skill and resources required. Small instruments need some level of skill to construct, and a relatively iron will to actually play it. but larger instruments require quite a bit of actual material to build, and a fair bit of physiological conditioning to even make a sound out of it, let alone play it well. They also tend to sound way more pleasing to the ear, and in the grand scale (hur hur) of things, more octaves of them for playing with than the high stuff (around 5 octaves of low notes versus the commonly used 3 for the high ones).
So yes, a bass flute. The cheapest metal bass flute costs nearly USD10k, and weigh practically a ton (more like 2kg or so). Mio is made of Grenaditte, the same material as my picc, and weighs less, nearer 1.5kg. She also costs around half the price of the cheapest metal bass flute, while still sounding pretty solid for the price point. In short, a real steal. Of course she can't beat the well-crafted professional silver bass flute, but she is definitely a cost effective way to explore the beginning of the lower reaches of the flute family. In comparison, the standard ``bass'' dizi is only at the range of an alto flute, not counting the scary weird 巨笛 (or ``giant dizi'') that spans nearly 3m in length.
Waiting for Mio was the reason why I didn't write this post any earlier.
The more astute among you will know why my Grenaditte bass flute is called Mio. I shall end on this note for now. Till the next update.
I wanted to write something before, but could never convince myself that there was something substantial enough to warrant the effort needed to write a post like this one.
Long time readers might have realised that I hadn't written the customary rant that occurs whenever the annual ``celebration'' of my birth rolls around. It isn't so much as me deliberately forgetting to write anything, but that I was actually waiting for something to happen before I wrote anything. The said thing happened a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't bring myself to write anything until now.
So, as per normal, I used the birthday celebration as an excuse to buy myself some cool stuff. One of them is a brand-new Kindle Voyage reader with the origami cover, nicknamed ``Eirian-IV''. She's a compact replacement of Eirian-II, whom was actually replaced with Eirian-III, my Nexus 10 tablet. The thing is, I've always liked to do my heaviest text-reading over e-ink, but as noted before, Eirian-II was fast fading away. I had used Eirian-III for a while, but the brightness that comes from staring at an LCD display was starting to annoy me. What convinced me to get the Kindle Voyage was the stupendous resolution. At 300ppi, it rivals that of the Nexus 10 (also around 300ppi), is more than 4× better than the Kindle DX (~150ppi---we're looking at area here), and has an amazing battery life. That high resolution made the 6-inch form factor tolerable, and so I got one. Eirian-IV is thus procured and is now part of my daily carry.
I got Eirian-IV a couple of months or so before my actual birthday, but didn't really write anything about her till now.
The main thing why it took me so long to write this was my Grenaditte bass flute, or Mio. An order for Mio was placed a while back, but due to a variety of reasons (some staff changes, Chinese New Year, probable company restructuring etc) it took GUO nearly 3 months before they delivered it to the shop. And when Mio finally arrived, I was right in the middle of my annual trip to the US to meet up and hang out with friends, as well as to go walk around to find geocaches.
It is of no secret that I am starting to explore the lower extremes of sound generation. I have been quite decent with messing around with the really high-pitched stuff (see also my picc, the new Garklein recorder that I got during my US trip, which superceded the sopranino recorder that I had since my days at UIUC), failing only with the highest of the high notes, i.e. everything from A7 and higher. But there is only that much one can go with the high pitched notes---they tend to get a little too annoying on the ears (anything at around 1kHz does that, and when it gets to 4kHz it gets stupid worse---try listening to the screams of a toddler for an idea on how annoying it gets). It may be super impressive and fun, but as I mentioned, it gets annoying. Now the lower extreme, that's not as well explored as that of the middle and high range. Partly because of the skill and resources required. Small instruments need some level of skill to construct, and a relatively iron will to actually play it. but larger instruments require quite a bit of actual material to build, and a fair bit of physiological conditioning to even make a sound out of it, let alone play it well. They also tend to sound way more pleasing to the ear, and in the grand scale (hur hur) of things, more octaves of them for playing with than the high stuff (around 5 octaves of low notes versus the commonly used 3 for the high ones).
So yes, a bass flute. The cheapest metal bass flute costs nearly USD10k, and weigh practically a ton (more like 2kg or so). Mio is made of Grenaditte, the same material as my picc, and weighs less, nearer 1.5kg. She also costs around half the price of the cheapest metal bass flute, while still sounding pretty solid for the price point. In short, a real steal. Of course she can't beat the well-crafted professional silver bass flute, but she is definitely a cost effective way to explore the beginning of the lower reaches of the flute family. In comparison, the standard ``bass'' dizi is only at the range of an alto flute, not counting the scary weird 巨笛 (or ``giant dizi'') that spans nearly 3m in length.
Waiting for Mio was the reason why I didn't write this post any earlier.
The more astute among you will know why my Grenaditte bass flute is called Mio. I shall end on this note for now. Till the next update.
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Lollipop
Man, that was a doozy.
I've had my Nexus 10 for a while now. I still haven't named my Nexus 10 yet, though I am veering towards calling it Eirian III. Eirian II is still going strong, and I have a tendency to take her out for a spin every month or two -- there are just some things were the E-Ink screen works better than your typical LCD display. In fact, for heavy reading (think more than 100 pages in a day), it is more comfortable to read on an E-Ink screen than a non-E-Ink one.
A pity that the Kindle DX is basically extinct, and that Amazon isn't really going to resurrect the larger form factor, deferring instead towards a high resolution (200+ ppi) displays in a 6-inch form factor, a format that I feel is quite useless for A4/letter-sized PDFs.
Anyway, my Nexus 10 shipped with Android 4.2 ``Jelly Bean'', and at the time of purchase the CyanogenMod version wasn't ready for it. And so I had been running the stock Android image for as long as I can remember.
My biggest beef with the stock Android image is that there is just so little... control that is available, without rooting the device. I don't trust Big Corp to have my interests as a priority, and thus prefer that anything that I paid money for should have the option of allowing me full control over it -- I am willing to take on the responsibility of undoing any damage done by my own stupidity, as long as I had the power to enact all the control that I care to give. In particular, I am very annoyed at the advertising.
Advertising is the bane of all things relating to the web. On the one hand, it sounds like a fair trade to provide ``free'' content at the expense of a few advertisements, but on the other hand, advertisers tend to cross the gray area of what is acceptable by either being more intrusive, or even downright misleading. I blame this on a couple of factors, namely the laziness of web site owners in managing their own advertising, and the negative side of the ``network effect''.
Most advertisements on web sites do not come from the web site owners themselves, they are instead delivered from one of many ad-networks, farms of servers whose operators act as a type of aggregation point for anyone who wants to run an advertisement. This... market arises naturally due to the cumulative heft of such ad-networks in fulfilling the two requirements of a successful advertising platform -- largest reach for those who want to advertise and a single point of contact and out-sourced management for those who want to have advertising dollars to support their sites.
Initially, I was neutral with respect to advertising on the web. Then it started to get obnoxious. Bandwidth was wasted in running large payloads of advertisements instead of the content that one was looking for, then the increasingly shady practices of the ad-networks allowing malware and downright unethical methods of gaining those click-throughs proliferated. Basically, ad-networks have turned from a somewhat tolerable nuisance to an unwanted harassment.
On the desktop, it is easy to mitigate these. Web browsers have various plugins that aid in blocking access to these ad-networks, which have the dual benefit of making pages load faster and saving of precious bandwidth particularly on those with quotas on them (think mobile internet or dial-up).
But the phone, or technically, the smart phone -- it is hard to use such tools. For one, actual control is hard to get at for such locked down devices. Android may be open source, but once the environment is ``live'', it is hard to impossible to enact controls on the fly. For two, much of the ads are found within the applications themselves, and by decree there cannot exist tools that publicly block ad-networks system-wide. Couple that with the misleading display graphics of the ads in question, it is a no brainer that the phone environment is particularly susceptible to bad ad-networks, especially since their user interface is error prone to begin with -- it is easy to ``slip'' and click the wrong damn button.
So what has this got to do with the ability to root? The answer is this file: /system/etc/hosts. That's a file that the underlying DNS look up libraries respect to obtain the equivalent IP addresses for a given domain name provided. With the proper set up, it is possible to hijack the domain name of the ad-network and redirect it to nothing, thus stopping the access of the ad-network at the lowest level of the OSI layers. This means that we have a system-wide (though crude) way of eliminating those pesky ad-networks.
CyanogenMod provides such powers on the get-go, and that's the reason why my Galaxy Nexus phone runs that instead of stock. But the Nexus 10, well, as you can tell from the link, development for it is sort of... slow to non-existent. So, I just load in the latest and greatest factory images (Lollipop 5.1.1 at writing) instead and root that instead and use the new root powers to load up a custom hosts file that will prevent access to the ad-networks' machines.
There is, however, a catch.
Unlike CyanogenMod, the stock factory images are very stingy in setting up the system partition -- there is literally no space for the 500kiB needed to load the custom hosts file. The way in which I discovered how to workaround that is something that I probably won't write about here. The principle though, is rather simple -- make space by deleting files already in system.
And so now, my Nexus 10 is running Android 5.1.1, somewhat secured from the dastardly ad-networks, complete with the obligatory screenshot:
I don't think I have anything else to write about now. Till the next update, I suppose?
I've had my Nexus 10 for a while now. I still haven't named my Nexus 10 yet, though I am veering towards calling it Eirian III. Eirian II is still going strong, and I have a tendency to take her out for a spin every month or two -- there are just some things were the E-Ink screen works better than your typical LCD display. In fact, for heavy reading (think more than 100 pages in a day), it is more comfortable to read on an E-Ink screen than a non-E-Ink one.
A pity that the Kindle DX is basically extinct, and that Amazon isn't really going to resurrect the larger form factor, deferring instead towards a high resolution (200+ ppi) displays in a 6-inch form factor, a format that I feel is quite useless for A4/letter-sized PDFs.
Anyway, my Nexus 10 shipped with Android 4.2 ``Jelly Bean'', and at the time of purchase the CyanogenMod version wasn't ready for it. And so I had been running the stock Android image for as long as I can remember.
My biggest beef with the stock Android image is that there is just so little... control that is available, without rooting the device. I don't trust Big Corp to have my interests as a priority, and thus prefer that anything that I paid money for should have the option of allowing me full control over it -- I am willing to take on the responsibility of undoing any damage done by my own stupidity, as long as I had the power to enact all the control that I care to give. In particular, I am very annoyed at the advertising.
Advertising is the bane of all things relating to the web. On the one hand, it sounds like a fair trade to provide ``free'' content at the expense of a few advertisements, but on the other hand, advertisers tend to cross the gray area of what is acceptable by either being more intrusive, or even downright misleading. I blame this on a couple of factors, namely the laziness of web site owners in managing their own advertising, and the negative side of the ``network effect''.
Most advertisements on web sites do not come from the web site owners themselves, they are instead delivered from one of many ad-networks, farms of servers whose operators act as a type of aggregation point for anyone who wants to run an advertisement. This... market arises naturally due to the cumulative heft of such ad-networks in fulfilling the two requirements of a successful advertising platform -- largest reach for those who want to advertise and a single point of contact and out-sourced management for those who want to have advertising dollars to support their sites.
Initially, I was neutral with respect to advertising on the web. Then it started to get obnoxious. Bandwidth was wasted in running large payloads of advertisements instead of the content that one was looking for, then the increasingly shady practices of the ad-networks allowing malware and downright unethical methods of gaining those click-throughs proliferated. Basically, ad-networks have turned from a somewhat tolerable nuisance to an unwanted harassment.
On the desktop, it is easy to mitigate these. Web browsers have various plugins that aid in blocking access to these ad-networks, which have the dual benefit of making pages load faster and saving of precious bandwidth particularly on those with quotas on them (think mobile internet or dial-up).
But the phone, or technically, the smart phone -- it is hard to use such tools. For one, actual control is hard to get at for such locked down devices. Android may be open source, but once the environment is ``live'', it is hard to impossible to enact controls on the fly. For two, much of the ads are found within the applications themselves, and by decree there cannot exist tools that publicly block ad-networks system-wide. Couple that with the misleading display graphics of the ads in question, it is a no brainer that the phone environment is particularly susceptible to bad ad-networks, especially since their user interface is error prone to begin with -- it is easy to ``slip'' and click the wrong damn button.
So what has this got to do with the ability to root? The answer is this file: /system/etc/hosts. That's a file that the underlying DNS look up libraries respect to obtain the equivalent IP addresses for a given domain name provided. With the proper set up, it is possible to hijack the domain name of the ad-network and redirect it to nothing, thus stopping the access of the ad-network at the lowest level of the OSI layers. This means that we have a system-wide (though crude) way of eliminating those pesky ad-networks.
CyanogenMod provides such powers on the get-go, and that's the reason why my Galaxy Nexus phone runs that instead of stock. But the Nexus 10, well, as you can tell from the link, development for it is sort of... slow to non-existent. So, I just load in the latest and greatest factory images (Lollipop 5.1.1 at writing) instead and root that instead and use the new root powers to load up a custom hosts file that will prevent access to the ad-networks' machines.
There is, however, a catch.
Unlike CyanogenMod, the stock factory images are very stingy in setting up the system partition -- there is literally no space for the 500kiB needed to load the custom hosts file. The way in which I discovered how to workaround that is something that I probably won't write about here. The principle though, is rather simple -- make space by deleting files already in system.
And so now, my Nexus 10 is running Android 5.1.1, somewhat secured from the dastardly ad-networks, complete with the obligatory screenshot:
I don't think I have anything else to write about now. Till the next update, I suppose?
Monday, January 28, 2013
Birth Anniversary Aftermath Report
It has been roughly a week since the anniversary of my birth and there is of course much rejoicing at a most private level. I suppose I should write a little about what happened and what-not because I promised it earlier in my thank-you note to all the people who had an impact on my life.
Prior to everything happening, I had decided to get myself a gift as per tradition. People who have known me for at least the last couple of years would realise that I'm a big fan of the e-ink readers, preferably something that is bigger than the puny 6-inch form factor. Eirian II was a recent replacement for Eirian who had aged over the course of the years. In general, I'm not a big fan of tablet form-factors that are not e-ink for several reasons: discomfort in reading under either bright or dark conditions, low battery life and most importantly, lousy resolution. So when I realised that the Nexus 10 existed with a whopping 2560×1600 resolution, I knew it was time to plonk some hard-earned money down to get a tablet for myself, not to replace Eirian II but to support her with a coloured high resolution sibling for things that are not as readable on e-ink displays. An example of such files are comics or graphic novels---the colour that is used doesn't look that good when we strip out the hue and saturation information. Here's a quick picture of the Nexus 10:
Lovely isn't she? The character that is gracing the wallpaper of my Nexus 10 is Death of the Endless, one the loveliest and pragmatic personifications of Death I've ever seen, prompting the joke of ``Yeah, I stare at Death every day on my screens''.
While I have named almost every device I own, somehow I can't bring myself to naming the Nexus 10 (or even my Google Nexus phone either). I'm not sure why---maybe I see these devices as tools more than friends per se, which is weird. Maybe I need to devise a new naming scheme for such tools, I mean, even my Neo has a name (Eiko). I can't call the Nexus 10 ``Eirian III'' simply because it's not a replacement but a sibling. This will prove tricky...
I can't remember how many years it has been since I've kept my birth date hidden on the Facebook. One thing is for certain though: only those who truly care truly remember. Folks like RX, Cui, Victor, JW and YT (and my mother of course) who gave me their best wishes on this day of rememberance. This gives me a fuzzier feeling than having half of the people on my Facebook ``friend list'' spamming my wall with two-word and three-word posts. YT even sent me a nice box of Singapore-styled curry spices, which gives me a strong incentive to actually get potatoes and chicken from the supermarket the next time I go grocery shopping---curry in the US tends to be watery and lacking in the right kind of ``kick''.
It's not that the curry here sucks, it's just that it is dominated by the Thai-styled and American-styled curries. It's hard to find something more of a cross between South East Asian and Chinese cooking that is so predominant in Singapore.
But those are of course the physical gifts that I received. There are other more interesting things that happened. John treated me to a dinner at Tang Dynasty restaurant in Urbana without knowing which day my birthday was (he only knew the month, which was of course my intention overall). The food there was decent but not fantastic, and we both agreed that it was definitely one of those places that we should just try once to have said that we have been there and then find cheaper places for food. =P
On the actual day itself, I had actually arranged with Janet to have dinner at Alexander's Steakhouse, a family-style restaurant-grill-bar north east of campus in Champaign. Ever since Cedar brought me there to eat about a year or so back, I've fallen in love with the thick slabs of steak that they had to offer, and wanted to go there to eat once again. Janet had a car and so it was an easy enough appointment to set up. Well, of course I neglected to inform her that it was my birthday; I don't reveal things like that because it generally makes people feel all uncomfortable and compelled to do strange things like agonising about gifts and what-not---I'm more interested in the company than what gift they are getting. Anyway, we had an enjoyable dinner at Alexander's, and Janet was amazed/confused/shocked that it was my birthday, and that I could finish up the 20 oz steak and that she could finish her 16 oz steak and still walk after the fact. Easily the best dinner I've had in a while. =)
For some reason, I just enjoy food. For the rest of the week, I ended up eating sashimi and sushi at different places (oh my poor poor wallet) and had an enjoyable extended celebration of my birthday, without drawing too much attention from people. Life is good that way.
And now, a new week begins, and we are back to the regular schedule of life. Till the next update.
Prior to everything happening, I had decided to get myself a gift as per tradition. People who have known me for at least the last couple of years would realise that I'm a big fan of the e-ink readers, preferably something that is bigger than the puny 6-inch form factor. Eirian II was a recent replacement for Eirian who had aged over the course of the years. In general, I'm not a big fan of tablet form-factors that are not e-ink for several reasons: discomfort in reading under either bright or dark conditions, low battery life and most importantly, lousy resolution. So when I realised that the Nexus 10 existed with a whopping 2560×1600 resolution, I knew it was time to plonk some hard-earned money down to get a tablet for myself, not to replace Eirian II but to support her with a coloured high resolution sibling for things that are not as readable on e-ink displays. An example of such files are comics or graphic novels---the colour that is used doesn't look that good when we strip out the hue and saturation information. Here's a quick picture of the Nexus 10:
While I have named almost every device I own, somehow I can't bring myself to naming the Nexus 10 (or even my Google Nexus phone either). I'm not sure why---maybe I see these devices as tools more than friends per se, which is weird. Maybe I need to devise a new naming scheme for such tools, I mean, even my Neo has a name (Eiko). I can't call the Nexus 10 ``Eirian III'' simply because it's not a replacement but a sibling. This will prove tricky...
I can't remember how many years it has been since I've kept my birth date hidden on the Facebook. One thing is for certain though: only those who truly care truly remember. Folks like RX, Cui, Victor, JW and YT (and my mother of course) who gave me their best wishes on this day of rememberance. This gives me a fuzzier feeling than having half of the people on my Facebook ``friend list'' spamming my wall with two-word and three-word posts. YT even sent me a nice box of Singapore-styled curry spices, which gives me a strong incentive to actually get potatoes and chicken from the supermarket the next time I go grocery shopping---curry in the US tends to be watery and lacking in the right kind of ``kick''.
But those are of course the physical gifts that I received. There are other more interesting things that happened. John treated me to a dinner at Tang Dynasty restaurant in Urbana without knowing which day my birthday was (he only knew the month, which was of course my intention overall). The food there was decent but not fantastic, and we both agreed that it was definitely one of those places that we should just try once to have said that we have been there and then find cheaper places for food. =P
On the actual day itself, I had actually arranged with Janet to have dinner at Alexander's Steakhouse, a family-style restaurant-grill-bar north east of campus in Champaign. Ever since Cedar brought me there to eat about a year or so back, I've fallen in love with the thick slabs of steak that they had to offer, and wanted to go there to eat once again. Janet had a car and so it was an easy enough appointment to set up. Well, of course I neglected to inform her that it was my birthday; I don't reveal things like that because it generally makes people feel all uncomfortable and compelled to do strange things like agonising about gifts and what-not---I'm more interested in the company than what gift they are getting. Anyway, we had an enjoyable dinner at Alexander's, and Janet was amazed/confused/shocked that it was my birthday, and that I could finish up the 20 oz steak and that she could finish her 16 oz steak and still walk after the fact. Easily the best dinner I've had in a while. =)
For some reason, I just enjoy food. For the rest of the week, I ended up eating sashimi and sushi at different places (oh my poor poor wallet) and had an enjoyable extended celebration of my birthday, without drawing too much attention from people. Life is good that way.
And now, a new week begins, and we are back to the regular schedule of life. Till the next update.
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