I consider this an open letter to Kobo, and its parent company, Rakuten.

Holy, shit you guys.  Just holy shit.

After doing a lot of research on eink readers, I picked up the Kobo Aura as my birthday gift this year.  (The wife and I get our birthday gifts around tax return time, as we rarely have money to burn around our actual birthdays.)  My local independent bookstore was out of stock, and my OTHER independent bookstore was also out of stock, so I ordered it online and waited for customs to clear it from Canada.

It has a microSD expansion slot.  It’s compatible with nearly every major ebook format, as long as there’s no DRM.  The screen is incredibly crisp and clear.  The full-screen refresh only happens every chapter.  The back of the device is shaped to mimic a folded paperback.  When I got it, I immediately purchased the majority of the Clockwork Century (I already had Boneshaker in dead tree format) and Flex from the Kobo store.

I cannot gush enough about the difference between reading on a laptop/tablet screen and reading on this device.  I stare at screens for both work and pleasure, so when I felt most of the muscles around my eyes relax, without even realizing that they’d been tight, as I began to read, I fell in love.  And as I do with the things that I love, I ended up leaving it on the roof of my car.  (There will likely be an entirely separate post about my mutant power, regarding leaving things on the top of cars.)  I set it there when I lifted my daughter out of her car seat, and entered a friend’s house, and totally forgot about it.

I later drove home, halfway across town, and remembered that I’d forgotten it.  I called my friends and asked them to look around their house, to no avail.

The next morning, after a rainy night, I dropped the kids off at school, went back to my friends’ house to search for it.  Having had no luck, and with the rain starting again, I drove back home.

Nikki volunteered to help, certain that I’d left it on top of my car, and it was gone forever. I refused to acknowledge the possibility, so she went outside to drive my car back to the friend’s to see if she could find it (she also has mutant powers).  She looked my car over (which I’d done FOUR TIMES) and immediately saw it, still sitting precisely where I’d left it.  She rushed it inside, yelling for me to dry it off, which I promptly did.  I powered it down, and let it sit for the day to dry out.

That evening, it powered on and functioned perfectly.  Not a single glitch.  The next morning, it charged normally.  No excess heat, no funky spiking in charged percentage, just the usual smooth curve.  After several days of use, with and without the front-light, the battery discharge was also normal.

It survived riding round the top of my car, and spending the night and morning in the rain, and continues to act as if it was just taken out of the box.

HOLY SHIT, YOU GUYS.

And I haven’t even mentioned how sweet the Pocket integration is.

If you are in the market for an ereader of any variety, I urge you to check Kobo out.  They have my highest recommendation.

And now, another round of nerd links!

• TenFourFox is Mozilla Firefox for Power Macintosh and PowerPC. Keeping my G5 PowerMacs relevant!
• I don’t often use eBay, but when I do, I’m usually shopping for used nerd goodness.
• Don’t be fooled by X-Box Live Gold trial cards that come with consoles and games. They are full of the lame, instead of full of actual Gold membership.
• Reasonably-priced fiber-to-the-home service is coming to my neighborhood! I am full of the squees and the excitements! Yay for LightSpeed!
• I have finally received my Ello invite, and am intrigued. I have several invites to hand out, so if you’re interested, let me know.

Holy crap, what an amazing time.

I attended quite a few technical panels this year, so that I could learn things that might level me up as an Ops Engineer. That mission was a success, and I came away with pages upon pages of notes, as well as a couple of panel suggestions for next year. It may not be your typical technical conference, but there was a whole lot of generalist and introductory information available.

I did get to see a bit of the literature track this year, and was impressed (as usual) with what i found. There seemed to be less debate about whether or not self-publishing was viable, and more debate on how to go about it properly and professionally. Thumbs-up to that.

I missed out on the retro gaming room. Unfortunately, I had booked that entire day with panels, except for the first hour that the room was to be open. Unfortunately, the people running the room were late in setting it up, so I missed out. I heard it was fantastic, and hope that it will return next year.

Cosplay wasn’t limited to anime characters that I was unfamiliar with this year! There was a Kaylee from Firefly, and there was a G1 Soundwave, complete with heat-sensitive rubsign! Her chest piece was even playing the video of CGI Transformers dancing to Gungam Style!

I successfully handed out the last of the Remembrance ribbons. That is, until I find more in wacky storage locations throughout the house. I’m fine with pretending that they’re all gone in the mean time. On the other hand, I received more ribbons than I ever have before. More than once, I had to adjust the badge lanyard to prevent my ribbon chain from drooping too low. Now that I’ve moved it into my journal, it takes up four pages. The bottom ribbon, and now my favorite, says “RIBBON HOARDER.”

The best part of Penguicon, top to bottom, was seeing old friends and making new ones. While Alex, Peter, and I did the Three Musketeers thing through much of the con, I ran into a ton of old friends, was introduced to a slew of awesome people, and even got up the courage to introduce myself to a blogger I’m a fan of, and compliment his nails.

Photographic Evidence!

In which the grand saga comes to a conclusion. I hope.

After my last phone post, I called HTC support.  The hold time was very short, and the tech on the other end of the line was polite, reasonable, and friendly. Kudos to their call center, wherever it’s located. I explained my situation to him, and also explained that I had a friend with the same phone and the same update, but was not experiencing the problem. The tech said that he had the same phone that I did, but it didn’t sound like he used it as much as I did. I let him know that my friend likely doesn’t use hers as much as I do, either. So, he admitted that it might be something that he had not yet stumbled upon, but that he couldn’t verify because it hadn’t happened to him.  I expected this sort of response. I asked if there was a way to remove HTC Sense, and drop back to the default Android launcher.  He said that there was not.  I asked if there was a way to upgrade to HTC Sense 4.0, and he said that there was not, unless I wanted to upgrade to one of their new HTC One phones.  I said that I did not. I liked my phone quite a bit, except for this crashy-crashy stuff that kept happening. (That’s a technical term.) He suggested that rooting the phone was an option.

I was not expecting that response.

I wasn’t ready to void my warranty just yet, and I let him know. He apologized for not having another option (like I said, polite), and I thanked him for his time. T-Mobile was my next stop. The carrier modifies the phone as well, even if it is just to add a few non-removable apps.  So, the next time that I was at the mall‘s T-Mobile kiosk to pay the phone bill, I happened to be dealing with my favorite techy sales rep. Nikki reminded me that I wanted to ask about my phone, and so I popped the question. Er. Asked the question. And then I followed it up with a guess that it might be hardware related, since others weren’t experiencing the same issue that I was. He countered, saying that a hardware problem should be causing more issues than just making Sense crash. I agreed, and was worried that we’d once again come to an impass. I let him know that HTC had suggested the possibility of rooting the phone.

He was not expecting that response.

He asked me if I’d tried a custom launcher. I hadn’t, because I was under the impression that you had to root to replace the launcher. Not so in Ice Cream Sandwich. He asked if he could install an app called Apex Launcher, and spent a minute or so showing me how to customize it.

See, Sense still handles the lock screen, the incoming calls, things like that. Apex replaces Sense as the app that gets called when you press the home key, or when you back out of your apps. So Sense is still handling everything that it was doing right, and is no longer being asked to do the things that were crashing it. It’s still sucking down the memory as it runs in the background, but Apex doesn’t add to that load very much. On top of that, Apex has a snappy response, mimics Ice Cream Sandwich‘s look and feel well, and is far more stable than Sense was.

In the end, I’m just as happy with my selection in phone as I was when it was running Android 2.3, and am glad that I can leave it in its Otterbox instead of having to deal with hardware replacements. With that said, I’ve decided that my future purchases are likely to be the bare-bones Android models. They tend to get their updates first, and don’t have unnecessary add-ons that just get in the way of using the phone.

Do you ever run into problems like this with your phone? Is my experience typical or rare? Do you ever get a solution that lets you be satisfied with the way your pocket tech works, instead of eternally frustrated?

HTC and Android are now fighting over my phone, and I’m a pissed off consumer who’s stuck in the middle.

Originally, my phone shipped with Android 2.3, with (the very slick) HTC Sense running on top of it. Recently, HTC released an upgrade to Android 4.0, the much-touted Ice Cream Sandwich. (Never mind that 4.1 AKA Jellybean is about to be released.) It also released a built in update to its HTC Sense.

What’s the purpose of the new version of Sense? Is it to take advantage of the new user interface that Ice Cream Sandwich provides? Is it to add a shiny finish on top of the OS that’s brilliantly designed to take advantage of the hardware present in both smartphones and tablets? Ha!

No, you silly dreamer. It’s to make 4.0’s interface look JUST LIKE 2.3’s interface. It’s purpose is to undo nearly all of the awesome that comes along with 4.0 so that HTC’s end users don’t get confused by the changes to their phones.

HTC upgraded the operating system my phone, and then added extra software to un-upgrade it. On top of that, it doesn’t work. At least three times a day, when exiting an app, Sense reloads itself. I’m not sure if it’s crashing, if it’s becoming unresponsive and timing out, but the result is the same. Irritated end user.

Wouldn’t it make more Sense (see what I did there?) to actually design that shiny polish for Ice Cream Sandwich? Of course it would! It makes so much sense that they’ve already done it. Can I install this piece of awesome software on my phone, since I’d rather have the changes that come with the new OS?

No, you silly dreamer. That’s only available for new phones that ship with Android 4.0 pre-installed.

*sputter*

This is yet another reason why people root their phones. Listen to me, phone companies and service providers. Your shininess is appreciated, but if it doesn’t work, it’s not welcome. That phrase you use? “Value-added feature?” It’s not adding any value for me. It’s right up there with the provider’s mandatory pre-installed junk apps that do nothing but slow my phone down as they inevitably crash and burn, or pop up helpful notices that cannot be dismissed or acknowledged or what-the-hell ever. I shake my cane at them and tell them to keep that crap to themselves.

So now I’m faced with the rooter’s conundrum. Do I root my phone, void its warrantee, and have the device function like it should? Or do I leave it alone, preserve the warrantee, and deal with the dumb? I suppose there is the third option of contacting HTC and finding out what they can do for me. Maybe I’ll give that one a go.