software

Review of the Samsung A52 5G phone

Leave a Comment / hardware, software /

Several weeks ago I and Stephanie both received our new phone, the Samsung A52 5G. I got the phone for free from my new employer, for Stephanie I purchased a subscription from T-Mobile which included the phone. We chose T-Mobile because they would give us an extra discount and more mobile data because they are also our internet provider (for our glass fiber connection).

I chose a Samsung A52 5G because it’s a relatively new model with good hardware and an affordable price around € 380. While not as good as Apple’s upgrade policy, Samsung promised that this phone will receive three major Android version upgrades. This means it will be updated for three years, with one additional year for security updates. Also, as I’ve mentioned before Samsung doesn’t produce phones in China, that major human rights abuser.

The one thing which is seriously bothering me is all the bloatware which is shipped with the A52 5G and other Samsung phones. Presumably it’s not as bad as it was before, but to me it’s still very irritating. A small part of the bloatware is actually useful, such as the Microsoft apps which I need for work, but most are just Samsung’s own apps which are inferior imitations of their Google counterparts.

So why didn’t I buy a Google Pixel phone then? The Pixel 4a is sold for roughly the same price, the Pixel 5 is sold for € 630. Not only do I think the Pixel 5 is too expensive, when I compare hardware specifications the A52 5G seems to be better than both Google phones. Same goes for the Fairphone, which I also considered and is sold for € 440: hardware is inferior, it’s still on Android 10 and it doesn’t even have an OLED display. And I haven’t checked, but I suspect both the Google phones and the Fairphone are probably manufactured in China.

Fortunately, there are solutions for the bloatware. Because some of the bloatware can’t be removed normally, I had to resolve to ADB to disable them. Just follow some guides such as this one or this one. I used this list here to remove the specific packages from my phone and can confirm my phone is still working fine without all the annoying bloatware.

Next was adjusting some settings to limit Android’s spying. There’s a good guide on which options you can disable. The more severe measures will limit some functionality, like that of Google Assistant, but I chose to follow all the advice and can confirm it works well for me. Another measure mentioned in the guide and which I certainly recommend is using apps which respect your privacy instead of Google’s defaults. Instead of Google Chrome, I use Firefox as my web browser with the Privacy Badger add-on to block trackers and DuckDuckGo as the default search engine. I use Signal for instant messaging, ProtonMail for e-mail, ProtonCalendar for calendars and BitWarden for password storage.

I still use some Google services occasionally though. There isn’t any replacement for public transport route planning in the way it is provided by Google Maps. Sometimes, I need Google, Google Scholar or Google Books to find things I can’t find with DuckDuckGo. Because ProtonCalendar doesn’t provide calendar sharing yet, I have to use Google Agenda to share our collective calendar with my wife. Ideally, an app like maps.me should implement public transport planning, DuckDuckGo should give better search results and have a replacement for Google Books and Google Scholar. Once ProtonCalendar allows sharing calendars I might be able to convince my wife to switch to that.

As for the A52 5G itself, I’m still not sure whether I like the fact that, like almost all modern phones, it’s so much bigger than my iPhone 6. I use the phone together with the silicone back cover accessory sold by Samsung to protect it from falls. This back cover has a rough surface so that it doesn’t slip from your fingers, but another consequence of this is that it pulls my pocket inside out when I grab my phone from my pocket. My final complaint is that the in-screen fingerprint scanner of A52 5G isn’t as accurate as the ordinary fingerprint scanner on my iPhone 6. It happens too often that the A52 5G fails to recognize my finger. As for performance, I don’t have any complaints. I don’t run demanding apps like games and don’t notice any slowness when using my phone. The screen is good. Bottom line is that this phone is a good choice for its combination of price and quality, provided that you get rid of the bloatware.

Review of the Samsung A52 5G phone Read More »

Switched to the Astra theme for WordPress

1 Comment / internet, software /

During the years I have maintained this weblog I’ve used quite a few different themes for the appearance of WordPress, the software which powers this weblog. I didn’t like the default WordPress theme, so I used K2 instead. Eventually K2 was no longer maintained, meaning that it became incompatible with newer WordPress versions. Then I found Tarski, which also became unmaintained after several years.

At that point a switched back to the default themes of WordPress, which had gotten better by then. Even with the default themes I had to switch to newer versions over time, because more recent default themes make better use of new features in WordPress. I made minor modifications to those with the child theme functionality to suit my taste. However, I eventually became dissatisfied with them as well.

The current default theme, Twenty Nineteen, was the limit for me. First of all, the WordPress developers decided against giving users the option to add a sidebar, unlike past default themes. It may be true that the sidebar widgets are moved to the footer of the page if you visit this weblog on a mobile device with a small screen, but it’s still useful to have if you’re using a larger screen. Currently the sidebar shows the search bar and categories on my weblog.

But what is far worse is the layout of Twenty Nineteen. On smaller screens there is no issue, but you will notice it when you view the theme on a large 23 inch monitor with a Full HD resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. My knowledge of CSS is still limited, but what I understand from the CSS code of the theme is that the maximum width of the content is always relative to the screen size. I believe the following code is responsible for this in the style.css file of the theme:

@media only screen and (min-width: 1168px) {
  .entry .entry-content .wp-block-image .aligncenter {
    max-width: calc(6 * (100vw / 12) - 28px);
  }
}

As you can see the entry classes have a relative width calculated from the width of the viewport for screens which are at least 1168 pixels wide. This is a bad thing because this leads to long line length on large screens, which makes text uncomfortable to read. Unless I’m missing something in the code, it would also mean the line length would be even more extreme if you would view Twenty Nineteen on a larger monitor with a 4K resolution. Another gripe I have with the theme is that it uses system fonts for the content:

.entry .entry-content .wp-block-verse {
  font-family: "NonBreakingSpaceOverride", "Hoefler Text", "Baskerville Old Face", Garamond, "Times New Roman", serif;
  font-size: 22px;
  line-height: 1.8;
}

This means that Twenty Nineteen first looks for common fonts which are shipped on Mac OS, iOS and Windows operating systems. If those are not present, it will fall back to the default serif font used on the system. On my Fedora Linux computer, that’s Liberation Serif. So in other words: the theme looks different based on what operating system is used to visit the weblog. To me, that’s undesirable. Also, note the rather large font size of 22 pixels in the CSS code, which is way to large for my taste. Do note that the px length in CSS doesn’t denote absolute pixel count, but is a relative length which depends on the pixel density of the screen. Because next to the 23 inch monitor with 1920 by 1080 pixels, you also have phones like the Samsung Galaxy S10 with a 6,4 inch screen and 3040 by 1440 pixels.

So in summary, with the Twenty Nineteen theme and a Full HD resolution on a 23 inch monitor, paragraphs of weblog entries are 932 pixels wide and use a 22 pixel font (this time in the absolute sense). Let’s compare this with the website of a popular Dutch newspaper, de Volkskrant. If I view that website with the same monitor, paragraphs have a maximum width of 590 pixels and the font CapitoliumNews at 20 pixels is used instead of system fonts. This causes the line length to be much shorter, what I consider normal and convenient. That website looks good and reads comfortably.

I could have spent a lot of time on making a child theme for Twenty Nineteen to tailor it to my needs, but I decided to switch to the Astra theme instead. This theme is quite popular, so I don’t expect it to become unmaintained any time soon. While it has some paid options, the basic functionality which you get for free is adequate for my purposes. I really like it for its sensible defaults, its sidebar option and the ease of customization. It offers many options which don’t require delving into CSS and making a child theme. Paragraphs of weblog entries appear to have a maximum width of 600 pixels by default, which I like.

I changed the following options in Astra’s customizer to change the theme to my liking:

  • Layout → Header → Site Identity = Enable “ Display Site Tagline”.
  • Layout → Blog → Blog / Archive = Set “Blog Post Content” to “Full Content” and set “Blog Meta” to “Publish Date, Category and Comments”.
  • Layout → Blog → Single Post = Set “Single Post Meta” to “Publish Date, Category and Comments”.
  • Typography → Base typography = Set “Font Family” to “Source Serif Pro” and “Font Size” to “18”.

Especially the option to select a different font is convenient. By default Astra also uses system fonts because they load faster. It also allows you to use all fonts available from Google Fonts, which gives you a massive amount of choice. Of these, I like the Source Serif Pro font. Unlike the system fonts option, this font will be used for the theme regardless of the operating system of the visitor. This guarantees a uniform appearance for my weblog.

Finally, I also added some custom CSS to modify the table layout. The default layout for tables in Twenty Nineteen is very unappealing to me, unfortunately Astra doesn’t do better in that regard. I borrowed this CSS code from the Lovecraft theme:

/* Tables */

table {
	border: 0;
	border-left: 0;
	border-right: 0;
	border-collapse: collapse;
	border-spacing: 0;
	empty-cells: show;
	font-size: 1em;
	margin: 2.5em 0;
	width: 100%;
}

th, td {
	border-left: 0;
	border-right: 0;
	padding: 2%;
	margin: 0;
	overflow: visible;
	line-height: 100%;
	border-bottom: 1px solid #DDD;
}

caption {
	color: #111;
	text-align: center;
	padding: 2%;
}

thead {
	vertical-align: bottom;
	white-space: nowrap;
}

th {
	font-weight: bold;
}

table tbody > tr:nth-child(odd) > td { background: #f9f9f9; }

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Calculating stock return with LibreOffice Calc

Leave a Comment / finances, software /

Earlier this year BinckBank, the bank I used to invest in stocks for years, introduced new subscriptions. These now require payment of a service fee which is dependent on the size of the portfolio. For my portfolio of slightly more than € 5,000 I pay a bit more than € 10 per quarter. This comes on top of the transaction costs which were already relatively high with BinckBank.

BinckBank has good customer service, accessible information on investing, a good website and app, but that doesn’t justify the price difference with DeGiro, another bank. There I don’t pay a service fee and the transaction costs are much lower as well. As a consequence I’ve decided to cancel my BinckBank subscription and pursue all my stock investments through DeGiro. Apparently BinckBank wants to lose its smaller and less active customers, that’s the only explanation I can think of.

Initially I wanted to transfer my entire portfolio from BinckBank to DeGiro. I had a vague memory about a phone call with a DeGiro employee earlier this year. I reckon being told then that costs would be high for this. For that reason I decided to simply sell my stocks with BinckBank and then rebuy them with DeGiro.

I’ve come to regret this because the stock price of the sole stock I possessed, the Dutch construction company BAM, had risen notably since I sold my stock. When I investigated what transferring a portfolio would cost me, I saw that BinckBank charges € 25 per fund for a portfolio transfer and that DeGiro charges nothing because the portfolio is bigger than € 3,000. Had I known this I would have chosen for the portfolio transfer, certainly because it just contained one fund. Obviously this is another lesson in how assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. And yes, I know a portofolio consisting of € 5,000 in just one fund is not good risk-spreading.

But now the core of this post. I have the issue that I purchased and sold stock of BAM through both banks. Because DeGiro won’t pick up the historical purchase price of the stock I bought through BinckBank, I wanted to use LibreOffice Calc to calculate the costs and potential return of my transactions. You could do this by simply entering the numbers, but if you are like me you want to do this in a pretty way with a formula. Because it took my half an hour to figure out the solution I thought others would be grateful to me if I’d share it here.

My document can be downloaded here. The kind of transaction (purchase or sale), amount of stock, stock price and commission are entered manually. It’s all about the following formula which calculates the total result of a transaction:

=IF(B3="Purchase";((D3*E3)+F3)*-1;IF(B3="Sale";(D3*E3)-F3))

The IF function is nested in another IF function here. First IF evaluates if cell B3 contains the text ‘Purchase’. If yes, it multiplies amount and price and adds the commission. The result is then multiplied by -1 to make it negative (because a purchases order gives negative return). If cell B3 doesn’t contain the text ‘Purchase’, it will execute the next IF function. There IF evaluated if cell B3 contains the text ‘Sale’. If yes, then amount and price are multiplied here as well, but the commission is substracted instead.

More explanation is given on this page of Microsoft Office Support. The syntax of Excel is slightly different because it uses comma’s instead of semicolons, but the IFS function mentioned at the bottom of the document is also useable in Calc. The more simple notation of the IFS function doesn’t require a nested formula and is equivalent to the formula with the IF function above if written as follows:

=IFS(B3="Purchase";((D3*E3)+F3)*-1;B3="Sale";(D3*E3)-F3)

These formulas aren’t a necessity for such simple things as calculating return on stocks, but I thought it was useful to learn more about Calc and Excel this way.

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Switched from Samsung Galaxy S7 to the iPhone 6

Leave a Comment / hardware, software /

My previous employer FRISS provided me with a mobile phone I could use privately as well. This was needed for their work from home policy and the occassional standby shift. My new employer ID Ware doesn’t do those things, so it was not unreasonable that they didn’t provide me with a phone. Because it was expensive to take over the Samsung Galaxy S7 which I used while working for FRISS, I decided to look for a new phone.

The subscription FRISS had with T-Mobile allowed some choice in different phones. Among the phones with Google Android, the Samsung Galaxy S7 phones stood out as the best choice. The iPhones required an hefty extra payment, so I chose the Galaxy S7.

While the Galaxy S7 was a great phone from a hardware point of view, I didn’t like the software. Apart from the obvious spying on your personal data by Google, the phone came crammed full of bloatware by Samsung. Some of which you couldn’t uninstall. Samsung has a annoying habit of supplying their phones with their own alternative apps for the standard Android software (such as the web browser and calendar) which add nothing. They also have a bad reputation for ending regular security updates for their phones quite soon. There are of course other manufacturers which sell phones which do run stock Android and do receive security updates for a reasonable amount of years after the phone was released. But you haven’t solved the spying problem then.

Installing a custom ROM on your Android phone, like LineageOS, doesn’t solve the problem either. I’m not aware of all the details, but the fact that you will have to deal with lower photo quality of the Galaxy S7 is a deal breaker for me. And you will still need to install Google software which spies on you if you want to use the Android app store. It’s too much uncertainty and work. I wanted something which is (relatively) privacy friendly, bloatware free and easy to use.

My choice was a refurbished iPhone 6 from Forza, included in a Tele2 contract with unlimited calling/SMS’ing and 2 GB of data per month for € 22. Paying € 1.000 for the new iPhone X, even though it has that nice OLED screem (and that silly notch!) is madness. But € 22 a month is barely more than I paid for a SIM-only subscription in the past, which excluded a phone.

A brief remark about Tele2: avoid them. I found my number was published in the phone directory, online and on paper, without my permission. Their helpdesk doesn’t have a clue how this could happen and they didn’t compensate me in any way. I submitted a complaint for this with the Dutch Data Protection Agency.

Not too long ago there was a critical investigation by the Dutch Consumer’s Association which slammed refurbished phones. They found that these phones can be badly repaired with second-rate components and aren necessarily much cheaper than new phones. Forza got a bad review too. In my case I have nothing to complain, my refurbished iPhone 6 works fine.

I expected that I would miss the great OLED screen of the Galaxy S7 on the iPhone 6, but this didn’t happen. In the majority of my use cases the screen doesn’t have to display a lot of black color and it isn’t used in dark environments, so I don’t notice the lack of an OLED screen much. On the software side iOS is much more pleasant than Android, no spying and bloatware. The sporadic app you can’t remove such as Apple Health doesn’t really get in the way or take up a lot of storage. No problem if you want to set DuckDuckGo as the default search provider in the Safari web browser (it’s not possible in Google Chrome on Android).

However, Apple wouldn’t be Apple if it wouldn’t combine it’s superior product design with its fair share of dick moves. For example their negligence in keeping their web browser engine WebKit up to date with the latest web standards. Usually this is no issue because you could install a different web browser with a different engine, but Apple is actively blocking anything else from WebKit being used on iOS. This reached the news after the French software company Nexedi sued Apple for this. This was in 2016 and while WebKit is still the only option on iOS, I’m not up to date on the current web standards compliance of WebKit.

Another one is that Apple refuses to implement support for the open and cross-plaform Vulkan graphics API on iOS, in favor of their own closed Metal graphics API. Metal was released in 2014 while Vulkan was not finished yet (it was in 2016), Apple might have legitimately thought that Vulkan was taking too long. But for some time now Vulkan has been accepted as the open standard for graphics and is frequently used on Linux and Android. While it’s not visible to the consumer, Apple is effectively screwing all those developers who have to convert their software from Vulkan to Metal if they want to release it for iOS. If the life of developers is unnecessarily made more difficult the consumer is disadvantaged indirectly.

Then there is the inability to use another app store than the Apple App Store (not the case on Android). Apple says it wants to protect its users, but that doesn’t justify restriction of freedom. They could easily give a warning that there are no safety guarantees once users add other app stores. The real reason is of course that they want a monopoly on paid iOS apps so they can reap more profits. Just like Google they take a share of app store transactions. My solution for this is simply refusing to buy anything from the Apple App Store. I don’t need any paid apps anyway.

I could mention the fact that iOS is not open source, meaning there is no opportunity to create custom ROM’s for iOS. The more complex reality is that while Android is open source, many Android apps are not. They are now close source as part of a deliberate strategy by Google to make the open source Android unattractive. Presented with this choice, I value privacy more than software freedom, hence my choice for Apple. I think I’ve made it clear now that I merely consider Apple the best choice out of two bad choices.

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Switched to ProtonMail

Leave a Comment / software /

Since September 2017 I’ve been a rather satisfied user of the ProtonMail email service. I’d like to explain why I switched and why I think you should do so too.

Before ProtonMail I had been using Roundcube. This the open source webmail solution offered by my website’s hosting provider Antagonist. Just like many other webhosts their email service is included in my hosting package. The problem is that Roundcube sees very little development and is archaic now. Its web interface isn’t responsive, so it’s a pain to use on a smartphone. There are no smartphone apps either. Even on a laptop or desktop, it’s interface is old and clunky. It’s not even a contest between Roundcube and modern free webmail solutions like Outlook.com and Gmail.

But you don’t want to switch to Outlook.com or Gmail either. Those are delivered by unscrupulous companies who lust for your data and privacy. You don’t just use their product, you are the product because they will use your personal data for advertising purposes. In practice the advertising they employ is unobtrusive, but in principle this is unacceptable. No one gets to stick their nose in my emails, whether they are strangers or automated advertisement software!

After some time of considering the alternatives such as getting a VPS and installing SOGo on that, or other smaller paid email services, I arrived at ProtonMail. I chose the paid account because it was possible to associate it with my own custom domain. This way all the emails which are adressed to my existing email address simply get routed to my ProtonMail account. So I didn’t need to change my email adress everywhere. Using my own domain required reading some documentation and changing a few things in the email configuration of my host Antagonist and ProtonMail itself, but was relatively easy.

The greatest advantage of ProtonMail is that it focuses on privacy and good encryption. The encryption employed is both zero-access and end-to-end, as explained here. They can’t search through your data and sell it for advertising purposes. They have a good web interface as well as Android and iOS apps. I’d highly recommend everyone to get a free account with them, or a paid one if you want the custom domains feature. These people rather than Microsoft or Google deserve your financial support.

However, it also has some problems. The most important one is that it’s not completely open source. They do give the impression that all their software is open source on their website’s front page, but they are misleading their customers. Actually only the frontend (graphical user interface) is open source and the backend (the inner workings) is not. Neither are the iOS and Android apps.

The developers claim that they don’t publish everything because it would expose their spam filter to circumvention by the spammers. As others have already pointed out, they should not use this excuse because if their software is properly modularized they can maintain a closed source spam filter while the rest is completely open source. As for the iOS and Android apps, they have already been claiming for years now that those would be open sourced once sufficient code quality had been reached. After several years of waiting this is no longer a credible excuse. I’m not going to assume malice where I can assume negligence, but the communication on their open source strategy is very disappointing.

It is important for their software to be published under a free and open source license so that far more people than just their own developers can analyze it and check for security vulnerabilities. Also, it would allow other parties to host ProtonMail. I think this is an important reason why ProtonMail is holding back with open sourcing their software; if everyone can host it they will lose paying subscribers.

Currently I’m paying Antagonist for the web hosting (including their email service which I don’t use anymore) and ProtonMail for the email. It would be more efficient if Antagonist could install the ProtonMail software so I would have everything hosted with one party. I would probably still donate to ProtonMail so they can keep developing their software.

Apart from the open source issue, I would like to see several important features in ProtonMail. First, a calendar feature would be useful so that I don’t need to use separate software for that. Currently I just use an old-fashioned paper agenda. Second, the ability of the phone apps to synchronize with the phone’s contact list. If you get a new Apple iPhone there is no way to tell the ProtonMail iOS app to place all its contacts in the iOS contacts list (it’s the same on Android). Migrating your phone’s contacts is thus more complicated if you don’t want to use Google or Apple cloud services for that. Finally, the fixed American mm/dd/yyyy date format should be adjustable and preferably default to the date format of the user’s location.

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Fairphone 2 now available

Leave a Comment / hardware, software /

The Fairphone 2 was released on 21 December 2015. I love how this phone is designed to be durable, easily repairable and open source. In my personal correspondence with their support I was also assured they don’t pay Microsoft for a licensing deal, which is good. Of course there is much more which makes this phone laudable, such as the conflict-free minerals used for its construction and the transparent supply chain, but those three advantages are my highlights.

Since Mozilla pronounced Firefox OS for smartphones dead, I’ve been looking for an alternative smartphone. Right now I’m using a Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo with Android from my employer, which I’m also allowed to use privately. I’m very uncomfortable with it, because Google loves to spy on me. So ordinary phones with Android are out of the question. The Fairphone 2 ships with stock Android by default, but fortunately Fairphone provides the Fairphone Open Source OS as an alternative. This ships without Google Mobile Services (GMS). GMS is Google’s proprietary software running on top of the open source part of Android. However, this raises questions about what life is like without GMS.

I’d have to find open source replacements for several Google apps such as Chrome, Gmail, and Maps. I guess Firefox, some alternative e-mail app and Maps.ME would be good replacements. But you will also need to find another app store, because Google Play is also a proprietary Google app. Where am I going to find the Spotify and Netflix apps then? Amazon’s Android app store maybe? But how privacy friendly are they? Are those shady websites which offer APK downloads (Android app downloads independent from an app store) safe? How will my apps update automatically?

Using Android without Google’s proprietary software will be challenging. So challenging, that I might consider an iPhone as an alternative. Like stock Android, iOS contains both open source and proprietary software, but at least Apple has more respect for their user’s privacy as far as I know.

There are also other factors I consider before deciding whether to buy the Fairphone 2 or not. A price of € 530 is a lot of money for a phone, especially if the the hardware isn’t at the top of its class. An iPhone or a Galaxy, if new from an older generation or second hand, cost less. I’ve grown quite fond of the AMOLED display in the Galaxy S5 Neo, but the Fairphone 2 is equipped with an LCD display which is inferior to both Samsung’s AMOLED displays and Apple’s LCD displays. In principle I might be able to live with the price and inferior display, because I value the ethical and social goals of the Fairphone 2. But I don’t want to spend so much money on a smartphone right now.

Before I make a choice, I need to investigate which data Google (through both the proprietary and open source Android versions) and Apple exactly collect from me, the degree to which I’m being spied upon. I need to know how user friendly it is to use Android without Google’s proprietary software. When I’ve figured that out, documented it here on this blog and have determined how to deal with the Galaxy S5 Neo provided by my employer, I will make a decision.

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Firefox OS is dead

Leave a Comment / software /

On 8 December 2015 Mozilla announced that Firefox OS was dead. A day later they posted an official statement on their blog, in an attempt to mask their failure with positive spin. My last hope for a truly free smartphone OS was extinguished. Over € 200 spent on two Firefox OS phones was wasted.

I had held off buying a smartphone until I purchased a Geeksphone Peak with Firefox OS in December 2013. I didn’t like and still don’t like phones with Android and iOS. I believed in Mozilla’s mission to use the web as the universal platform for smartphones, to make interoperability between different operating systems possible. The idea was good, but the execution was bad.

The Geeksphone Peak never gave me working GPS because the phone suffered from a bug, which Geeksphone could apparently not fix with a software update. They suggested their users to modify something in a config file, but even then I had no luck. I ended up buying the ZTE Open C, which did have working GPS. However, ZTE never bothered to ship updated stable versions of Firefox OS. Maybe Geeksphone did supply one stable version shortly after the release of the phone, but that was it. This way, bugs I noticed in Firefox OS weren’t fixed.

Mozilla itself is also to blame for this. On their website and wiki it was never clear what they were working on and what their release schedule for Firefox OS was. Bugs reports I (and others?) filed on Mozilla’s bug tracker weren’t processed. If they were, no or not enough work was done to fix them.

I was very disappointed in Mozilla. It seems like they got in over their heads. They misjudged how difficult and time-consuming it would be to dislodge Android. When they did figure it out they threw in the towel within two years time. They made some big mistakes which could have been avoided.

Mozilla should have taken ownership of the update process themselves, so that users were not dependent on the whims of indifferent smartphone manufacturers to provide updates. Good communications and building a strong community around Firefox OS would have helped much to gain momentum. Mozilla should have done more to get app developers on board to make their apps available for Firefox OS, before they started releasing phones with Firefox OS. Apps like WhatsApp, Netflix and Spotify for example should have been available from the start.

From a strategic perspective, Mozilla’s assumption that they could serve the bottom end of the market in developing countries without (much?) competition from Android fell through. They should have known this wouldn’t have been a viable strategy. I would have loved to see a different strategy: build a completely open source smartphone OS for all market segments, which respects user privacy and is not dominated by a single company. I hope I might see such a smartphone OS in the future.

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Thesis finally published in a scientific peer-reviewed journal

Leave a Comment / public administration, software /

I thought the day would never come, but on 26 March 2015 my modified master thesis was finally published in Government Information Quarterly, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Two and half years after I submitted it for my graduation as MSc in Public Administration in August 2012.

After graduating I used several months to rewrite the thesis as a publishable article together with my thesis supervisor dr. Dimiter Toshkov, who is also the co-author. We then submitted to the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. This is a very prestigious journal so we were not surprised it was rejected for publication, but we benefited from the feedback of the reviewers. We then resubmitted to Government Information Quarterly.

The wheels of academic publishing are known to turn very slowly, but the period of the time we had to wait for a verdict was exceptional: more than half a year if I remember correctly. After asking for information it turned out that our paper had gotten lost in the process. Fortunately, it was eventually accepted for publication after some minor modifications. I wish the process had been faster so I could have taken advantage from mentioning a scientific publication on my CV more soon.

Reflecting on it all, I’m very proud we managed to get this published. There aren’t many graduate students who get to do so. I learned R and the required statistical knowledge relatively easily, even though I used to have an aversion of statistics in the past.

The perfectionist inside my head is still slightly dissatisfied, telling me that I could have given even more thought to the subject and method of my research. That it would have been even better with more survey responses. The layout could have better. But the bottom line is that a temperate sense of satisfaction triumphs over my hot-headed perfectionism. Ten years ago, when I was an academic failure with serious procrastination issues, this achievement would have been but a dream.

It’s a pity the article is not Open Access, but behind the publisher’s paywall. Fortunately, you can find my own pre-print on my website. The source files for LaTeX and R are attached to the document for those who a curious about how the statistical analysis was performed with R and how the paper’s layout was done with LaTeX.

Regarding LaTeX, I’d like to point out two issues. Documents with two or more columns are too difficult. You need some specific commands to make sure that lines on both columns match vertically. Placement of figures becomes more complicated too, even though I’ve mostly managed with workarounds. If I would write my article again, I would take a serious look at Scribus, a free software desktop publishing application. Unlike LaTeX it follows the “what you see is what you get” principle. It seems to make several things much easier to do than LaTeX.

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Testing the Fedora 20 Alpha release

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Today I installed the Fedora 20 Alpha release with GNOME on my laptop to test it. Regarding the changes in GNOME 3.10, I love the move to merge title bars and toolbars into header bars. It’s good to save vertical space. The new applications like GNOME Photos, Music and especially Software are also nice, but I’m not sure about the integrated system status menu. It simply takes a lot more clicks to connect to a WiFi network now. As always, I’ve filed some bug reports and commented on some old ones:

Fedora:

  • Bug #904052 – Eye of GNOME should be the default application for viewing images
  • Bug #981963 – no touchpad edge scrolling in Fedora 20 with GNOME
  • Bug #1028734 – LibreOffice banner shown during installation of F20 alpha is outdated
  • Bug #1028758 – no easy way to change computer name before or during installation

GNOME:

  • Bug #329652 – add OpenSearch support to GNOME Web
  • Bug #664915 – GNOME Web uses wrong fonts on nos.nl
  • Bug #711774 – GNOME Software doesn’t display progress for downloads

I think the first and fourth Fedora bugs are evidence that the Fedora developers don’t spend as much time on usability as they should. The second one is a very nasty bug, but knowing Fedora’s development I doubt it will be fixed in time for the final Fedora 20 release. Fedora releases should be more polished.

The first two GNOME bugs are still preventing me to switch to GNOME Web from Firefox. They’re very old and there is no indication that they’re going to be fixed any time soon, I wish I could do it myself.

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My review of the Geeksphone Peak with Firefox OS

7 Comments / hardware, software /

I wrote in September that I had pre-ordered the Geeksphone Peak+ with Firefox OS and why I did so. Unfortunately the Peak+ was delayed and in October it turned out the delay would be longer than expected. At that point Geeksphone offered those who had pre-ordered the Peak+ to send them the original Peak instead, which had become available again.

Because I didn’t want to wait much longer, I accepted this offer. I received my Peak the next day on 22 October, after it was shipped from Spain to my address in the Netherlands in less than 24 hours. I also got a refund because the Peak had a lower price. Initially I was disappointed in Geeksphone’s communication of the delay. I learned about the delay through the order status on their website rather than an e-mail which they could have sent, but the way the handled this restored my trust in them.

The Peak smartphone

I think the hardware is very adequate for a phone which is sold for € 150. I haven’t compared it with the Android phones at the same price point, but if I look at the Samsung Galaxy S4 of my brother or my dad’s iPhone 4 I don’t get the feeling my phone is deficient. Sure, the Galaxy and the iPhone cost over three times as much and have better hardware, but I’m satisfied with it.

But there are a few things which I would have liked to see differently. The iPhone 4 for example measures 115,2 by 58,6 by 9,3 mm and has a 3,5 inch screen with a resolution of 640 by 960 pixels. The Peak measures 133,6 by 66 by 8,9 mm and has 4,3 inch screen with a resolution of 540 by 960 pixels. I like how the iPhone 4 fits in my pant’s pocket, but the slightly larger Peak is a bit more noticeable. I would have preferred the iPhone 4’s slightly more compact dimensions and higher amount of pixels per inch.

When I took off the Peak’s back cover to place the battery and SIM card I feared I would break it, but it’s sturdy enough. The quality of the enclosure won’t win awards either, but it’s good enough for me. What worries me more is that the Peak only gets half of the full reception quality in my home, while my former dumb phone would always get full reception quality. However, in practice I’ve never experienced problems with the reception during phone calls.

The Firefox OS software

Version 1.1 of Firefox OS does the basics right and I haven’t seen it crash. However, being an operating system in its infancy, it doesn’t have much good apps. For example, Here Maps which is included by default doesn’t have turn-by-turn navigation. EverNav does, but if you want to use it you to have log in, which is something I don’t want. I’m surprised no one has built a good map app based on OpenStreetMap yet. It would have been useful if a flashlight app and an app for taking notes were included by default, but they aren’t available yet either.

I often use the 9292 website, which is popular for planning trips with the Dutch public transport. Because Firefox OS hasn’t been introduced in the Netherlands yet it’s unsurprising they don’t have an app for Firefox OS. This isn’t an issue as a Firefox app doesn’t need to be much more than a simple manifest file which redirects to a mobile website. Unfortunately 9292 doesn’t detect the Firefox OS user agent and redirect you to their mobile website like it does for Android smartphones. You can visit the mobile website manually and than add it as a favorite to your home screen, but it doesn’t display 100% correctly in Firefox. And the favicon used for the home screen uses a very low resolution, so it’s not a pretty sight. I’ve already sent them a message to inform them of these problems.

I intend to build my use of the phone around ownCloud, which would allow me store my calendar and contact data with my own web host. This way, I don’t need to use services like Google Calendar and the big companies can’t poke their noses into my personal data. GNOME also supports synchronization with ownCloud, which allow me to work easily with the same data on my PC, laptop and smartphone.

It’s already possible to synchronize the calendar with ownCloud if you follow these instructions (in French). However, synchronizing the contacts with ownCloud using CardDAV is not yet possible though, all Firefox OS offers at time is synchronization with Facebook.

This and other issues I’ve noticed have been filed at Mozilla’s bug tracker, of which the first two were filed by others and the last four by me:

  • Bug 859306 – Sync contacts with carddav
  • Bug 901218 – [Peak] Back camera does not take photos in full resolution : 1.2M instead of 8M pixels
  • Bug 934092 – can’t set locale separately from language
  • Bug 934094 – “order by last name” setting doesn’t take surname prefix into account
  • Bug 934097 – alarm doesn’t trigger when the Peak smartphone is turned off
  • Bug 934099 – Firefox OS doesn’t use delta updates
  • Bug 934115 – m.9292.nl website displays two arrows in a drop down menu

The first bug is most important to me. If it’s also important to you, you might want to vote for the bug report.

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