Today everything serendipitously fell into place: yesterday was warm enough, no frost over night, nice weather on a lazy Saturday afternoon and a buddy of mine was also planning on a short ride.

Started the ride at 80% battery, and rode 55 kilometers in total, down to about 50%. We took it slowly on backroads and gradually increased the riding difficulty. We had all kinds of terrain, flat portions and up and down the hills, easy curves, turnpikes. By the end the sun was about to set and the temperatures started to drop from the 17 degrees we had set out at, down to 13 degrees.

Compared to my (also electric) winter car, it is noticeable how much better the motor and the BMC performs. Not only in output power but in estimating, recouping and saving power.

It was fun every minute of the ride and I’m looking forward to the warmer months, when the conditions are even better and the sun is up for longer.

Since then I had fallen back to reading on Android phones (Aldiko Reader) and iBooks on the iPad mini, then the iPad Pro and then my iPhone after that.

iBooks had automatic syncing, so I could double click a book on the Mac and it would automatically show up on all the other devices. And Screen Fatigue aside, the iPhone’s high-res, self illuminated display is quite nice at night.

Ever since my Nook broke, I had missed the feeling of eInk. But a Kindle device was never an option with their closed-up ecosystem. In the meantime Kobo had released some nice e-Readers (even with color displays) and there even were other portable options.

A full size e-Reader takes up space in your jacket pocket¹. I opted to go for a small, cheap and unilluminated one by Xteink with a black & white E-Ink display.

Xteink X4

Hardware

There’s no Android and thus no support for arbitrary Apps to be installed. For me that is a plus, as it removes unnecessary complexity and saves battery.

Speaking of which, the battery holds up well for me, I have to charge it every couple of weeks. And the ubiquitous USB-C makes charging easy, when needed.

The device is computationally underwhelming, but given the battery size that is also a good thing. Once a book has been “indexed”², page turns themselves are quick and snappy. But navigating the menu and settings will still take a long second.

My device came with a FAT32 formatted 32 GB Micro SD card in the box, once I took that out and formatted it as ExFAT the entire interface was loading noticeably quicker.

I’m still a bit confused, their marketing material shows the device attached to an iPhone via MagSafe. Realistically it only fits Pro Max iPhones and according to the Subreddit only certain Models.

Therefore if you are, like me, in the non-Max club, this is going to be a standalone device for you.

Software

Stock Firmware

The default fonts are perfectly legible. But if the defaults aren’t your cup of tea, there’s tons of great resources out there to customize everything to your liking.

It only supports ePub, TXT and BMP files, no Markdown, no PDF and no Comic Book formats. Which is fine, but should be known before buying.

But even the formats it does support are often broken, For instance there’s stray HTML divs rendered throughout the text. I have yet to try cleaning up the ePub files with a Calibre Plugin to see whether it improves the experience. But coming from the Nook and iBooks I’m used to just copy the Publisher’s ePub files over as-is.

Some book covers and images are missing because modern ones come with SVG files that cannot be rendered, which is a bummer but understandable.

Webinterface

On the plus side, no Internet connection is needed, as there is a Hotspot built-in, that once you connect your phone to it, you can navigate to a barebones web interface and upload ePub files directly there.

But in reality the web interface is janky and you have to acknowledge several error messages, upload the file, close some other error message saying that the upload failed (even though it worked) and then disconnect. File management, as in creating folders, moving or deleting files is present but outright doesn’t work.

Custom Firmware

There is an active community developing tools and mods for it. Including an open source alternative firmware that can be flashed. CrossPoint Reader’s interface is more barebones, and has less settings. But the text rendering and the reading experience is way better.

Plus at the moment there is so much work being done, that a new version with new features is dropped literally every few days.

There’s no Hotspot functionality, but once connected to a network³ you can even directly browse Calibre OPDS catalogs without taking out the Storage Card.

Another thing of note: The manufacturer doesn’t seem to like the custom Firmware at all, which is why the devs have been forced to move to a Subreddit of their own.

Should you get one?

I’ve paid 65,48€ including postage and shipping and now have read several books with the Stock Firmware as well as the alternative one and am happy with it.

This is still not a purchase recommendation though, but if you think it has a place in your life, even after I described its flaws here, go ahead and buy it.

The hardware is cheap and lightweight. Do not get it for the Software. If the MagSafe issue doesn’t bother you, get the Chinese X4 from Ali Express and flash the alternative Firmware:

The upcoming X3 will supposedly fix the MagSafe issue, but does have proprietary Pogo Pins instead of USB‑C and it is currently unclear whether it will allow flashing CFW.

Don’t bother with the warranty of the international version — It isn’t worth it for such a cheap device.

You do not have to be able to read a single word of Chinese:

• Power it up
• Connect the USB Cable
• Navigate to the flashing website
• Press the flash button
• Push the reset button on the side
• Done

The questions cover a broad enough base, serving as a good starting point to drill into the year past.

Haven’t tried the decade one yet, but will also do at some point.

• Kotlin Brain Teasers

  Found it via Lukas Mathis’ recommendation and thoroughly enjoyed it, did even learn something new.¹

  Big fan of PragProg as a publisher in general.

• Ra

  qntm’s work is always an interesting read. Started this book two years ago and only now found the time to finish it.

  At the beginning it is weird to read through the setup, as it tries to connect “magic” and “science”, especially with various jumps in times and storylines. But once you are past the “suspension of disbelief” threshold, it gets easier and all these loose threads are masterfully connected to a coherent whole.

• Ball Lightning

  After having read Cixin Liu’s famous masterpiece Three Body Problem trilogy way back, I had set out to read some of his other works and had read Ball Lightning. But since the Three Body Problem still occupied my mind at the time, I did read this book but didn’t fully grasp it back then.

  When I scrolled past it in my library and it said “read” but I couldn’t remember a single thing, I re-read it and it was worth it.

• Head On

  Being a huge fan of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, naturally I had to read his other works.

  I devoured this entire book within a day and a half, attesting to its ability to capture the reader. The story involves a lot of characters and their interactions, but each are distinct enough that they are not confusing.² And in the end it all resolves neatly.

• Fine Structure

  Classic QNTM, you have to keep at it to be able to keep up with the plot, memetics naturally present. Overall I did enjoy the book, but the end feels a bit rushed for an otherwise good book. It all happens on a few pages, and does not resolve some of the plot strings.

• Hands-on Rust

  Another one I picked up at the PragProg Black Friday sale. Didn’t yet finish, but learning a new language isn’t as easy as finishing a book front to back, so 🤷

39C3 Talks

Apart from reading I watched a lot of interesting talks from the congress. Interesting to me as a potential buyer of a Steam Frame, was the Fex-Talk. But my pick for the best one so far goes to the Deutschland Ticket one.

Read before my vacation

These I had read before my vacation, during summer or fall but still want to list them somewhere for completeness’ sake:

• Die with Zero

  Bill Perkins makes the case from various angles that one should re-evaluate how wealth and posessions are used in ones lifetime. He makes the case using various parables and sheds light from various angles. Worthwhile cause, even if the target group seems to be US citizens. Interesting read nonetheless, though it repeats very often recounting the same concepts.

• Read Team Blues

  Cory Doctorow writes less outlandish SciFi more grounded in the real world, thinking ahead of technalogy that already exists and takes it to new places, diving into the consequences they have for us by telling a compelling story around it.

  This book is no exception where it delves into Cryptocurrencies and the Silicon Valley. Nice and cozy read.

Good to know it works.

$ docker image prune

Especially, if you are using watchtower.

Total reclaimed space: 34.47GB

One of the functions the Shortcuts.app that ships with macOS Tahoe gained is native support for Folder Actions:

Hazel did the job perfectly fine, but onboard tools are obviously preferred.

This sample rule here that moves Android Emulator screen recordings to Photos.app

can be replaced using a simple Shortcut:

HiddenBar –> Ice

After the BarTender issues back then I had switched to HiddenBar, which is way simpler than Bartender and works nicely on external monitors (to hide and show rarely used Menubar icons). But unhiding on the MacBook display often moves the leftmost icons under the notch.

Queue Ice, which provides the IceBar (which is an overlay that pops up under the Menubar).

Caused by: java.io.IOException: Unexpected response code for https://maven.alphadev.net/releases/de/sipgate/dachlatten-io/0.0.101/dachlatten-io-0.0.101.pom.sha512. Expected: 200, actual: 502

Quick check in the Browser, and I was greeted with the Reverse Proxy landing page of the host, so the service itself was actually down.

After logging into the Host, it transpired that the host was automatically restarted for an unattended update, but the Docker daemon was somehow corrupted and never came back up again.

The offered “reparation” seemingly entailed reinstalling Docker and restarting with the old data dir, which thankfully wasn’t actually corrupted.

Not exactly sure what had happened here. Will keep an eye out for recurring occurrences. Thankfully the data dir is regularly backed up.

Technically Arabic scripts are valid in domain names using Punycode. In reality though, having a LTR user part and At-sign, followed by the RTL domain, followed by the LTR dot, followed by the RTL TLD was too much to handle for many mail validators.

Kudos to Apple’s Mail.app, which had no issues. Neither when setting up the account, nor when using it.

But if it was such fun, why is the domain free right now?

I have never felt as if that domain ever really belonged to me, and have since let it expire. It is now free to grab and for you to have your fun with it.