When three days ago I asked why things have to grow, I also meant that in regards to a swelling battery in one of our phones – again. This time it’s my Pixel 4a which is kind of hard for me because I consider that the perfect phone regarding size, features, and all…
So my first reaction was to change that battery, and I looked up videos about it and thought: “Oh my…”, because with *this* device it’s really hard. So I looked up an estimation for repair costs at Google, and oh my again…
estimated repair costs for a Pixel 4a phone
Don’t know if you can see that, but it says 326,06€ – which is more than a new Pixel 6a would cost either on mail order or in local electronics shops.
So for now I switched over to my brother Willi’s last one, the Pixel 3a. I had installed LineageOS 20 (Android 13) on it already, and after moving over the SIM card as well as some data, it almost looks the same like on my 4a:
Pixel 3a with LineageOS 20
So let’s see. Haven’t tried everything yet (like my banking app for instance), but so far this looks good…
The next version of Debian Linux will default to Pipewire, so it’s always good to see developers doing some work on/with it. Enrico is actually one I’ve met, he’s a very nice and extremely capable guy. Found via Planet Debian. And like always, thanks for reading.
In case you can’t read it: from the left, we have the Google Pixel 3a (from my late brother), my Google Pixel 4a, then our kid’s Pixel 4a 5G, and at the right Mitchie’s Pixel 6.
And with their latest line, even Apple now left away the “mini” version of their iPhone, so in case you want small, you’re left with the 13 mini, or on Android, with the Asus Zenfone 9 (which even still has a headphone jack).
The Pixel 7 is a bit smaller than the Pixel 6, and the (to be announced) 7a and 8 are – like the 6a – also a bit smaller than the Pixel 6 (at least, we hope so). But that 6a still has a 6.1″ screen just like a now “normal” iPhone 14 or 13, so the question is: why do they have to grow all the time? Are our pockets getting bigger as well, like our garages and even roads for the ever growing cars? Are we humans getting bigger and taller all of the time?
Some things are hard to understand for my (small, pun intended) brain… but I don’t think that bigger equals better. My 4a has about the perfect size, and the guys over at XDA Developers wrote in their “best phones” article:
“Many of us at XDA actually think the Zenfone 9’s 5.9-inch screen is the perfect “small” size, as the iPhone 13 mini’s 5.4-inch panel is just a bit too cramped for most modern content.”
And that’s what I think about the 5.81″ screen of my Pixel 4a as well. Just right for my hand and eyes… and if “modern content” means more whitespace, well I could do as well without…
Like always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: just checking on the battery of my Pixel 4a – last full charge was exactly 48 hours ago, and my gsconnect (kconnect but for the Gnome desktop) shows it with still having 31% of its charge:
When I got up today, my chair at the computer desk was occupied already. So I let the guy sleep and took some photos of him with my phone, first a black & white “portrait” which I changed to the built-in “Eiffel” preset, and which looks like this:
Cookie with “Eiffel” preset from Google Pixel 4a phone camera, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023
But I had set the phone’s camera to also save raw .dng files, so I took one of that format and converted it with RawTherapee 5.8 on Linux – looks like this:
Cookie from raw phone dng, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023
Such photos have of course a much larger dynamic range in case you need that – but that takes some space as well… anyway, here you’ll have all the possibilities of your favourite raw converter(s) (I used nothing here, just a conversion without changing anything).
Just to compare, here’s a straight out of camera photo from my Olympus camera, with a Panasonic Leica 25mm/1.4 lens:
Cookie with my Olympus straight out of camera, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023
Wer Deutsch kann und mit Linux und freier (und meist kostenloser) Software Musik machen möchte sollte sich den Artikel Arbeiten mit Linux von Michael im Musiker-Board durchlesen:
In English: if you can read and understand German, and if you’re interested in making music with Linux and free (mostly also cost-free) software, then you should read Michael’s article “Arbeiten mit Linux” in the German-speaking Musiker-Board.
Today, for the first time since quite a while, I stood and sat down with both my upright and also my fretless basses, playing to some template/song from Wikiloops again. And it’s fun. And although I’m not after perfection anymore – the journey is the reward – I’ll have to put in some time again. Can’t wait…
Fretless bass at the computer desk, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023
A photographer friend from Florida, William Beebe, recently wrote in a series of articles titled “Use what you have” (part 1 and 2) about some cameras and phones, and that he’s tired of RAW processing and mostly uses what comes out of the devices. And since we both have a Google Pixel 4a phone, I took a photo with that one today. I set the phone cam to “portrait mode”, but later also edited the picture in-camera (or rather, in-phone) with the “Eiffel” black & white preset which I really like. That almost gets you a film-like look:
Google Pixel 4a photo in portrait mode, with its “Eiffel” preset
Reminds me a bit of photos I took with using Kodak’s Tri-X (TX400) film stock, and really – a counter-shot from my camera with simulating that film in RawTherapee gives you this:
Self portrait, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023
I sent myself the phone image with Signal, and that cropped it to 2048×1536 or around 3 Megapixels – very nice for using it on web pages. So I did the same using Gimp with the photo out of my camera.
But really, that “Eiffel” look in Google’s software isn’t half bad…
Like always, thanks for viewing, and for reading.
Edit: after searching and reading a bit about it I decided to just try and uploaded my photo taken with the Olympus camera into the Pixel 4a phone, then treated it like the first one in this article: opened it with the camera app, selected “portrait” mode (which blurred the background quite a bit more), and then applied the “Eiffel” black & white preset to it. Then I sent it to myself with Signal again, so here’s the result:
Olympus photo, edited with the Google Pixel 4a phone
Quite a bit more “dramatic”, isn’t it? But even this can be set with a slider – here I had “Eiffel” at the max (100%).
Interesting. Who needs Photoshop or Lightroom with that (and lots more options and presets) in our cameras?
Again, thanks for reading/viewing and so on…
Edit2: I wanted to examine this a bit further, so I took an image of myself holding a Color Checker, and converted it using the Olympus built-in black & white setting (simulated in OM System’s Workspace RAW processor), and then I used Nik’s Silver Efex (on Windows) and RawTherapee (on Linux) with simulating Kodak’s Tri-X film. Plus I put the image into the Google phone to apply their “Eiffel” preset to it. With the resulting images I made a collage in The Gimp, which I then cropped to 2048×1536 pixels for web use, and uploaded that to Flickr. So here it is:
Black & white options, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2023
You can click the image or this link to view it bigger in Flickr if you like.
Yesterday I encoded a snippet of video out of a much longer (almost 3 hour long) one – and saw that when transcoding it with Handbrake, all 8 cores and 16 threads of my CPU were used as they should – looks like this if you have conky on your desktop:
Handbrake transcoding parts of “Stunksitzung”
Average framerate was over 140fps, so more than 4.5 times faster than the realtime video. Cool; for jobs like these we’ve bought the right machines, or rather CPUs (I build all our desktops myself).
When making music, these machines are quite overkill for what I’m doing with them. Here’s a screenshot from the new Ardour 7.3 with codename “Nerve Net” (funny, “nerv ned” could be Cologne dialect or so):
Ardour 7.3 “Nerve Net” on Debian 11 “Bullseye” (with a 6.x kernel from backports)
1% CPU usage, and even with a few tracks more it’s still pretty bored. I don’t use many MIDI tracks and instrument plugins, mostly – or rather, almost always – audio tracks only.
So that’s nice to know. And like always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: I quite like the Ardour install script on Linux – it asks if you want to keep 7.2 (I said “no”) and 6.9 (I said “yes”) installed, and it runs the uninstall scripts for those you don’t want to keep, and cleans up. Very nice.
