Even though I ended up with two broken Switch 3s, I still really wanted one. After all that frustration, I bought an Acer Switch 5. It's absolutely amazing!
It comes with the lighted keyboard, but is still compatible even with the keyboard from switch 3. So that is the only part i can recycle, and keep as spare one. Only thing i was missing, was the strap for the pen on the side of keyboard, so i used the one from the broken switch, and glued it there. It seems, that the keyboard used to have it too, but it wore of. Now it is complete.
So back to the device. It has i3 processor and 8GB RAM which should be enough for anything i would do.
So, when it arrived, I tried the pre-installed Windows just to see if everything worked. When it did, I started booting Ubuntu. At first, I tried the live version just to make sure that everything worked as it should. Then I started the installation. To my surprise, it crashed three times, which confused me a bit. I therefore recreated the USB installation media using the latest ...
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To be precise, I have a very good Acer Obsidian for working from home, which is great for any work I need to do. It has enough RAM and a very fast AMD processor, as well as a really good Nvidia GeForce 4070. So I have everything I need for working from home. However, this notebook is more like a desktop computer as it is not something you would want to carry around.
For daily use on the go, I have an IdeaPad with a touchscreen display and a palm-rejection stylus. It is the predecessor of the Lenovo Yoga.
It is fine, but for the use of the touchscreen it is quite big, and in tablet mode, it is quite thick. However i still really like it and it is fine notebook. However it is a bit old, and 4GB of RAM is not much today. However it still works, and can be used.
However, I did receive a gift from a friend. It's an Acer Switch 3, a x64 notebook with a detachable keyboard and a touchscreen with palm rejection. It's a really nice, powerful and compact piece of hardware. It is very similar to the VisionBook I have already mentioned. The ...
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Another lovely gift from Tom! The IdeaPad Flex 14! It looks brand new, with no scratches or signs of use.
It comes with an i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a GeForce graphics card. It's exactly the kind of PC I would have used as my main PC a year ago, before I got a sponsored notebook to develop apps for HryProDva.cz.
Unfortunately, there is one annoying issue, which is possibly caused by Czech Post shipping it, as it worked before they sent it to me. The "ESC, ;, q, a, z" keys on one column of the keyboard are behaving very strangely. Sometimes they work fine, but other times they generate presses of 3–8 random keys. Absolutely random keys!
I completely disassembled the notebook and found a slightly broken flex cable, which was possibly scratched by the chassis plate. I fixed the flex cable and added some protection against scratching, thinking that it was fixed. And it was... for a while.
But then it started misbehaving again. This usually happens for a couple of minutes after booting up, and then it works normally. I'm thinking about the problem and am not sure if it's a ...
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The first of the electronic gifts from Tom. The LG G5, the 2016 flagship model. It has 4 GB of RAM and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor. It's a really beautiful piece of hardware and, even though the reviews complained about the design, I actually like it.
The phone is designed to be modular. Unfortunately, no modules are available nowadays and I guess there weren't many of them. However, this does not matter, as the phone is really good as it is.
I was surprised by the USB-C port, as this was not common in 2016. It comes with a fingerprint sensor on the back that also works as an unlock button, which is quite unusual for sensors on the back. Nowadays, it is common for the side unlock button to also be a fingerprint reader. However, in the past, when the readers were on the back, phones had a separate unlock button on the side. It's uncommon, but not bad. :)
The volume buttons on the left side are a bit more problematic for me, as they are not intuitive for someone who controls the phone with their right hand. But it's not bad, ...
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I have received a box full of really nice hardware from my friend Tom. There was one very interesting phone, some notebooks, some other electronics and... one toy.
Today i would be writing about the toy. It is a logic game, called IQ link and it is really nice, but really hard to play.
It comes with hand of colorful pieces, which should be placed inside the grid in way, to fit all of them.
At first, I simply removed all the pieces and tried to fit them back into the box. Even after half an hour, I still couldn't fit them all back in. At least two pieces always remained in my hand.
Then I read the additional booklet and tried one of the prepared patterns. The patterns are sorted by difficulty. Based on my previous experience, I started with the easiest one. The booklet shows about two-thirds of the pieces on the board, and the aim is to fit the remaining pieces in the gaps. Even at the easiest level, it took me about ten minutes to fit five pieces in place.
It's a really nice game, but incredibly hard and addictive!
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I received this notebook from a colleague about a month ago, and it was slightly damaged. Some screws were missing, which wasn't really a problem, but a bigger problem appeared a little later.
First, the parameters. The notebook is relatively slim and comes with an Intel Pentium ULV997 processor and 4 GB of RAM. Not the best, but not the worst either. It would still be more than enough for someone who just wants to browse YouTube and social networks and read emails.
However, after the usual ritual of installing some games and getting caught up in playing Portal for the first time — even though I had wanted to try it for 15 years — a bigger problem appeared. I knew the fan was slightly damaged, but it seemed to be working fine. However, after playing for a while, I heard some scratching and noise, and after a while the notebook shut down. I immediately knew that it had overheated. After disassembling it, I discovered that the fan was missing some blades.
So I did some research on AliExpress to see if it would be possible to order a spare one and whether it would be worth ...
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I have already bookmarked a very interesting 3D model of a pinball machine. It's a small tribute to pinball, but I really like it. I have been planning to print it for a couple of years, but it is too complex for me — especially for my printer — so I still haven't forced myself to start printing it.
However, I recently found another pinball model that is much simpler, but still looks very funny, and that might be the thing I needed to finally print one.
The assembly looks much simpler, but from the videos, it's clear that it's a really nice machine.
There is just one problem: three of the parts would not fit my printer, so I am unable to print them. However, as I know a lot of people who own 3D printers, I am hoping I will be able to find someone who can print these three parts for me, and then I will do the rest.
Keep watching for updates — I'm really looking forward to having the device, so I hope I'll be able to complete it!
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Here's another piece from my drawer. Another phone that I bought new. And it did not last very long. The funny thing is the name. It's called the DOGEE X5 MAX Pro. Every time I read that name, the Thundercougarfalconbird from the Futurama series immediately comes to mind.
The phone wasn't so bad and worked really well at first. However, later very weird things started to happen. Pop-up adverts and weird notifications started appearing, as well as automatically installed apps.
I was young, i was enjoying my "modern" phone and i was installing loads of shitty apps. As the phone memory is really low, i was installing and uninstalling them again and again and changing them for others. So i though, that i just installed some crap during these installations. So i made the factory reset, and everything worker well again. However after a month, or two, everything repeated. So another factory reset, and then i decided not to install any single app, and wait what would happen.. And in couple of weeks, again these notifications, unknown apps, popups, etc.
So then i started searching the internet and discovered, that this phone comes with preinstalled trojan. Whe ROM of the phone was compromited, ...
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It's always nice to go back to some of my old phones. The Arty A3 was my first Android phone from the 'big screen era'. I thought it wasn't that old, but it actually is. I bought the phone in 2014. However, having researched it, I realised that it was the best phone for the money at the time, so I made a really good choice.
I really liked the phone because it was smooth enough and capable of doing everything I needed. It had enough RAM for its time. And it was really cheap.
It also comes with the highly commercial name 'Android KitKat'. Gigabite used to make phones under the brand name Gsmart, but I'm not sure if they still do. I'd say there was a really short period of one or two years when GSmart was a popular low-budget brand, but then it disappeared.
I also really like discovering the games I've forgotten about on my old phones. This time, I found Europoly (a Monopoly clone), which I remember really liking and playing a lot. I can also remember some strategies for winning, and my ...
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Here we go again! It's been a year since the last annoying notification about API support, and I've had to redo all the work.
Google is forcing me to update all my apps again. They only support two-year-old APIs, and if I don't upgrade my apps, I won't be able to send updates, and they will remove my apps from the store after some time.
It's really annoying. I have to go through all my apps, increase the target and build the API version. I also have to upgrade all the libraries to meet these conditions, fix all the conflicts, change all the removed functions and update all the deprecated functions to the new versions. Then I have to compile, test and deploy to Google Play, test again and send to the public.
This wouldn't be such a big problem if you only had one or two apps, but with a higher number, it becomes a week-long task.
And this process repeats year after year. I am asking... WHY, GOOGLE? I really hate having to spend my time on nothing, and this is an exact example of that issue. So please, don't do that to me!
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