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, ...
Continue reading →
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 ...
Continue reading →
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!
Continue reading →
I was tinkering with my unused VPS and thinking about how to use it when I got the idea. I remembered the Minetest project. It's an open-source voxel engine with an open world. I played it many years ago when it was just a simple engine to prove the concept. It has recently been renamed Luanti, and there are "games" based on the engine which can be downloaded through the main Luanti client. Minetest is one of these games. However, the game that interests me is Mineclonia. It is an attempt to reimplement all Minecraft features in the Luanti engine. I gave it a try and found it really interesting. I remember really liking the Minetest project, but it wasn't very challenging as it lacked interactivity and the mobs were boring and not challenging enough.
However, Mineclonia is a game changer. It's really challenging and contains almost all the features of Minecraft, so there's a lot to explore.
I decided to use my VPS to host the Mineclonia server. Setting up the basic game was really easy. The tricky part was keeping it running and setting up an auto-start. After some unsuccessful attempts with systemd and cron, I created a .sh ...
Continue reading →
To be honest, I have never worked with application containers before. Not directly, at least.
However, as I wrote some time ago, I am running TrueNAS, mainly for backing up photos. I also have some apps running, such as a VPN, Git and Syncthing. I installed them through the official 'store' with apps. Yes, they are basically containers, but I deployed them by simply clicking 'Install'.
Now, I will explain why I had to set up a container myself. I sync all the photos and data in various ways, but I need a front end for easy listing and access. I liked Photoprism the most. I had some trouble getting it to work, but after adjusting some settings, I managed to get it working. The application kept crashing and would not deploy, but after making some changes to the configuration GUI, it ran and worked for a long time. That was until I decided to upgrade the TrueNAS system. Then problems appeared. Photoprism refused to run and kept crashing because it was compiled with support for SSE instructions, which my CPU does not support.
The confusing thing is that according to the documentation, this TrueNAS app has always required SSE, and then it ...
Continue reading →
My friend Tom gave me another interesting phone. It's a BlackBerry 7290. This 2004 model has a 240x160 pixel display and 32MB of ROM and 4MB of RAM.
It does not have WLAN connectivity. I was surprised at first because it has Bluetooth. However, after some research, I discovered that the first phone with Wi-Fi was probably the C1250i, which was released in 2003. So it wasn't really common back then.
The good news is that there is no proprietary battery charger or data cable, as there used to be with most phones. It comes with a mini USB cable, which is great.
So I started discovering the system. It was really tricky for me. Tom only gave me one piece of advice, which was about the password. He gave me the password for the phone and warned me that after ten unsuccessful attempts, the phone would be wiped.
The first thing I discovered was that the controls are really tricky. The phone does not have a touchscreen, and there are no control arrows or joystick to control the cursor.
There are, however, two controls on the side. A scroll wheel and a button.
My first idea was that the scrolling wheel ...
Continue reading →
I came back to the idea of wasting the hardware capabilities again. The more powerful the hardware, the more power-hungry the apps. So, we're still left with the same situation.
I wrote about my new Moto G05 some time ago and was quite satisfied. On paper, the hardware also looked more than enough for me.
However... I am facing the situation where everything loads three or four times slower than on my very old Redmi Note 9 Pro, which has almost every hardware parameter that is worse than the G05.
How is it possible that the Note 9 Pro has 2 GB of RAM, yet I can run as many apps as I need simultaneously and switch between them as required? On the G05, however, I have 4 GB of RAM, yet I am unable to switch a few times between the baking app and the browser to write my card number into a web form, because the system immediately kills one app as soon as I switch to the second one? So, when I switch to the browser and back, I have to log in to my banking app again and go to the page with my card number. OK... But then, ...
Continue reading →
My friend Tom sent me a very interesting phone. Alcatel 3040D. At first glance, it looks just like any other Android phone. Even the touch keys under the display look familiar.
However, it started acting strangely after I turned it on. It showed the time and basic settings screen, and it looked... strange.
To be honest, I thought it was some kind of high school project. But some manufacturers often create their own onboarding screens, and I thought that perhaps they didn't have enough time to create a more polished one, so they released this work-in-progress.
And after setting the basics, it started a homescreen, which also looks like some old Android with "cool" launchers, so, i was still thinking about "Just another Android"...
However then i started to discover the system, and found out, that all menus and inputs are the same looking as the onboarding procedure. So, i discovered, that this is definitely not and android.
There used to be an app marketplace, as well as an icon for 'Games'. However, after clicking on 'Games', it tries to download something that hasn't existed for ages. The same ...
Continue reading →
I have two Nokias that look exactly the same. However, when you look closely at them, you will see that they are completely different.
In the photos below, the dark one on the right is the 6230 and the silver one is the 6230i.
The first thing you can see on them, is the different LCD screen. The older model (6230) is from 2003 has just 121ppi, and the newer (6230i) from 2005 has 192ppi. And it makes really big difference, even thought the sice of the screens is exactly the same.
The older model comes with internal memory, and the "i" model comes with 32MB. However both of them can be extended by MMC up to 512MB. Also the camera on the phone is better, however none of them you would use to take anything other than blur.
The rest of the hardware is almost identical. Bluetooth has been upgraded from version 1.1 to 1.2, and the battery has increased by 50 mAh, but neither of these changes will make any difference.
It is the screen that makes the difference. The older screen is significantly more ...
Continue reading →
As I mentioned, I'm working on an Arkanoid clone called Brickanoid for Android. I have almost finished the physics engine and am currently fixing any bugs that I find during testing. The bricks are being destroyed as they should be and are also dropping power-ups such as a sticky paddle, a laser paddle and a ball multiplier. All of these have been implemented. The trickiest part of the power-ups was splitting the ball into three and ensuring the trajectories were natural and not overly random. Now, the balls split into three, which vary slightly but keep a similar vector.
I am now working on sound effects and the soundtrack. For now, I have four melodies which vary randomly in the background and a level-intro fanfare. I am still looking for some good sound effects for collisions and other things. I already have some placeholders which work and aren't too bad, but I'd still like to find something better. I composed the sound with some help from AIs, but the effects will probably be CC0 assets from the internet. However, I'll see if I can compose or record something on my own.
The score and level system have also been implemented. The most ...
Continue reading →
