Benieuwd waarom de inwoners van Aarschot 'kasseistampers' of die van De Panne 'puzzieschieters' genoemd worden ? De site van Henk Deconinck levert een vermakelijk inzicht op de oorsprong van die spotnamen.

No, this isn't a post about Microsoft, judging by the title. I'm talking about the Xiaomi M365 electric step. I've been looking lately to use my car way less, partially due to the fact that parking space is very limited at the train station. Getting fines for not parking at designated places surely doesn't help either. It took me a while to obtain a M365 before summer, but eventually I got it. The e-step has an autonomy of 20km (in my case), and this just suffices for the round-trip from/to the station. The step has a maximum speed of 25km/h, which is 'acceptable' : I would have preferred a bit faster, as taking over bikes sometimes takes a while.


This e-step is quite high-tech : it features cruise-control, ABS and KERS, which makes me hardly use the brakes. Cruising at 25km/h really is a blast, and I have really become quite fond at my daily ride with it. Additionally, it allows me to explore different routes, is more versatile than a bike, and can be taken with me on the train (although the size, even when folded, is quite large).


There's a quite active group of 'developers' around this e-step, creating custom firmware which allows to change different parameters such as maximum speed or KERS control. I've tested out a few, but additional speed comes with too much impact on the battery, so that I decided to stick with the official firmware.

I'll take back anything I said about the Xiaomi Mi Mix. Well, at least about the slippery part : 5 months after my purchase, I placed the mobile phone onto a pile of papers on my desk. Five minutes later, it must have seen it wasn't 100% horizontal placed, and decided to go for a walk. Fell on the floor, cracked screen. This thing *is* slippery as soap.
I still find the design of the phone the most beautiful I've ever seen, and the large screen just is gorgeous ! But you cannot use this phone without a cover, and that just breaks the beauty of the phone. That, in combination with the fact that mobile reception is zero without band 20 support, and the fact that putting a light sensor at the bottom of the screen is just irritating, were enough reasons for me not to reorder another Mi Mix again.
I've switched to a Onplus 5T as a new phone. The design just pales in comparison with the Mi Mix, but the development support is fantastic, and my Oneplus One was brilliant. I hope I'll can say that again within 3 to 4 years about the OP5T.

I'm using my Oneplus One phone since 3 years, and my god, what a pleasant device this has been. And also a testimony to the rise and fall of Cyanmod Inc. It is currently the most used device with LineageOS, and will probably the first one to receive LOS15. People were laughing 3 years ago with OnePlus 'flagship killer' theme, but now, 3 years later, new mid- and highrange phones still carry 3 GB of RAM. So finding a worthy replacement was hard.
As I commute by train nowadays, I wanted to breach the 6 inch barrier to have a nice big screen, and battery life was extremely important. To make the jump from my Oneplus One reasonable, it should have at least 4GB of RAM. And only 2 devices seem to fit the above : the Xiaomi Mi Max 2 and the Mi Mix. I was lucky that the Mi Mix 2 was announced, as most webshops were dumping the Mi Mix at affordable prices. I quickly ordered one, and received it some weeks later.
This device has a surprisingly low footprint, as it's not much larger than a 5.7 inch phone, so it's quite portable. The ceramic glass is slippery, but not the bar of soap most of the web reviews make of it. The real problem is that the phone is slippery and heavy, so I'm a bit reluctant to use it without a case. Luckily, it comes with a nice leather premium case as well. The screen is fantastic, and it really is the star of this mobile phone. Viewing angles are great, vibrant colors, and nice outdoor readability.
So fantastic hardware, what about the software ? It came to my surprise with an unlocked bootloader, and with the MIUI Global ROM installed. TWRP installation was unsuccessful, as the touchscreen didn't worked, and I had to install a customized TWRP in order to get it working. Quite shocking, and being used to the openess of OPO, rather an unpleasant experience. I quickly installed the Xiaomi.EU ROM, as it sports full Dutch language support, and decided to try out MIUI during a week. MIUI is something people either love or hate, and after one week of usage, I must admit I fall into the latter group. I kept loosing myself into the settings screens, and could not live with the MIUI quirks. Especially notifications - you must enable notifications per application in 3 different settings screens - madness ! Notifications are broken in MIUI, but I'm convinced they are broken by design, to maximize battery life. And gosh, battery life is really impressive. I got 9 hours SOT with 3 days on a single charge with medium to heavy usage.
After a week, I wiped everything in favor of LineageOS. So, what do you loose when installing LOS onto the Xiaomi Mi Mix ? Battery life, camera functionalities and reduced fingerprint scanner accuracy. I guess I've lost 2 hours of SOT, while still having 3 to 4 days on a single battery charge with medium usage. Still impressive. Camera has lost 4K recording and slow-mo, though some camera mods re-enable them. LED seems brighter on LOS than in MIUI. Fingerprint scanner is slower and misses more scans - I regularly need 2 to 3 attempts to unlock the device.
So far, I'm really happy with the Mix. A tad too heavy, but really beautiful, and with lots of custom ROM support. After the Galaxy Nexus, the Oneplus One, the Xiaomi Mi Mix will be again a legendary phone I will enjoy using.

My old netbook is currently seven years old, and shows its age : boot times up to two minutes, working in Chrome was a drag and took ages. And I'm not even talking about performing updates. All to blame on the slow CPU (never again an Atom !) and the slow hard drive. The last two occasions I used the laptop was on Config Management Days and Red Hat summit, and I can tell you the experience was unpleasant. So a new laptop was needed.
Luckily, the laptop market has reinvented itself after it collapsed during the tablet rise. Ultrabooks are now super slim, super light and extremely powerful. My new laptop needed to be :

• fast : no Celeron or Atom chip was allowed. An i5 as minimum CPU
• beautifull : I need a companion to my vanity. No plasticky stuff, well build and good quality.
• well supportive for Linux : Linux would be installed, so the hardware needed to be supported
• reasonable cheap : speaks for itself; a lot of nice ultrabooks are available, but I didn't want to pay an arm and a leg.
• light and small : I carry this everywhere around the world, so the laptop shouldn't weigh more than 1.4kg

Soon, I saw 2 main candidates : first, the Dell XPS13 still is regarded as ultrabook king. It supports Linux nicely, and has that beautiful Infinity display. Disadvantages were that it was on the heavy side, and I wasn't fan of its design either. And a tad on the expensive side as well.
On the other side, there was the Asus Zenbook 3 (UX390) which was stunningly beautiful, had a nice screen as well and was extremely light with its 0.9 kg. However, I saw the silver variant in the shop, but found it a bit on the small side. So when I saw its 14 inch brother, UX430UQ, I was immediately sold. This is a 14 inch laptop - it is advertised as a 13inch laptop with a 14 inch screen, but don't believe that - which is as light as 1.25 kg, has a nice dark grey metal spun outerior and excellent keyboard and screen. Equipped with an i7 CPU and 16GB of RAM, it doesn't fail to deliver on the performance field. Shame that Asus doesn't provide a sleeve with this laptop, as it does with the UX390. Also, important, it doesn't has a safe lock hole, so don't leave this baby unattended.

I wiped the Windows 10 and booted the Fedora netinstall CD, but it seemed that both WiFi and trackpad were unsupported. I lost quite some time with this, but eventually decided to boot it with the Fedora LiveCD, to find out all was working out of the box. Probably the netinstall CD uses an older kernel. I baptised the laptop Millenium Falcon, as I switched to spaceship names on my hardware lately.

A year ago I made the upgrade to a Pebble Time Steel. I really have fallen in love with the Pebble smartwatch, and Android Wear of the Apple iWatch were no valid candidates due to their shortcomings in battery life & user interfaces. The PTS upgrades the Pebble experience finally with a color screen (though the readability indoors is disappointing), and the smartwatch really looks like a watch now (Pebble OG looked like plastic toy). This thing survives nine days on a single charge which is one of the main advantages of Pebble hardware. I could never support a daily charge cycle on a smartwatch, which makes the Pebble Round (2 days on a charge) a no-go.


However, Pebble Time still has its drawbacks : it carries a large bezel (which is now addressed in Pebble Time 2), and the screen resolution remains far below Android/Apple competing devices.


The largest surprise was the Pebble Timeline in firmware 3.x : it carries your whole daily agenda on a glance within a single button press, and this has become one of the most pleasant features of the smartwatch.

My old PC has survived for 10,5 years : mostly thanks to Linux and its low resource requirements. That is very impressive, but the box started to show its age : boot times up to two minutes, and a hard drive which performed sub-par. Time for a new machine : Intel i7 Skylake, SSD + 3TB HDD and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Fast and furious.


I made the switch as well from Debian to Fedora : I must admit that I'm quite charmed by Fedora. Stable and on the bleeding edge side (my previous box was Debian Stable based, so your definition of "bleeding edge" may vary). Anyway, Fedora installed without a glitch, and the subsequent upgrade to Fedora24 was one of the fastest PC upgrades I experienced.


The machine is called Nostromo, to the spaceship in Alien. I guess I ran out of pronounceable Tolkien names, and didn't found any suitable Game of Thrones based names. Science-fiction to the rescue.

Even more Pebble adventures ! Now that Skylines was thriving in the Pebble appstore, I decided to generate a watchface for the new Pebble Time, so I had something to show off when my Pebble Time will arrive in August. And what better app could I implement than some colorfull spirographs ?
It took quite a while to finish this : as I didn't had my Pebble Time yet, I had no real hardware to test the app, so I had to rely solely on the Pebble emulator on my computer. Eventually, I came up with a first version which I published on the appstore. However, soon, different people remarked that the app was slow and crash prone. Turned out the app used quite some sine/cosine functions which were the cause of all those slowdowns. Hard to believe that my 20 year old HP pocket calculator was more powerfull than a wearable with a modern ARM chipset !
So it was clear I couldn't use sine/cosine functions. Pebble had a workaround in the SDK with sin_lookup functions which use a precalculated table to come up with this. However, this was mostly oriented to create the movement of analogue watches, and the generated values didn't make any sense to me. So I quickly programmed my own co/sine lookup table, and used the default hypotrochoids equations. This worked a lot better & quicker, but this needed also a lot of iterations to come up with a decent spirograph. And in some cases, the spirograph turned into gibberish. More debugging revealed that this was to events coming in when the Pebble was generating the spirograph, like the flick_wrist_to_update option I added to the watchface.
So eventually, I turned to the default Pebble SDK co/sine_lookup functions, and implemented my own hypotrochoids equations with it. This time, all worked well without any glitches. The result is Spiro, a colorfull watchface for the Pebble Time, and the original Pebble (only in B&W off course)..

Now that my Pebble NMBS app is wrapped up, I decided to have a look at the SDK2 for Pebble, and build a watchface for it. I didn't need to search long for some inspiration for a new watchface : on the Moto360, someone made clever use of the black horizontal bezel at the bottom of the screen, adding some scenery to it, as if it was some shadow (default was a man sitting on a bench in the park). So I took the skyline of Prague, converted it to B&W, and I got my first watchface, which I called Skylines.


The app has been extended currently with skylines up to 30 cities from all over the world. I also included a random mode, where the skyline changes every two hours. Just like you're on a world trip ! I also added a Night mode, where the screen inverts and a beautifull night sky appears between 8pm and 6am.


All in all, programming in C went quite well, considering I didn't touched C during the last 20 years. Only problem was the implementation of the configuration window, which was a bit of a hassle. Turned out I defined my app as SDK3 compatible, which seemed the cause of the errors.