Russell Coker: PineTime Status
Since my last blog post about the PineTime [1] I haven t done anything exciting with it. I ve been wearing it every day and it s working reasonably well for me. It s been working better since I changed to a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 as my main phone [2], so it seems that the Huawei Mate 10 Pro has some issues with Bluetooth that were making it unreliable.
A relative also has one which is working well for them but which had some problems, I only discovered that holding the button down for a long time (longer than usual for device reset) makes a PineTime reboot because of their issues. I also once had their device get into a bad state where the only thing I could do was flash a newer firmware which fortunately fixed the problem.
My latest issue is the battery life. Recently it has been taking ages to get above about 90% charge when charging and the time taken to go down to ~70% when I charge it seems to be decreasing. Yesterday it suddenly went to 13% after being 73% the previous night. Then it stayed at 13% all day. It seems quite inaccurate. But also it doesn t seem to be lasting as long as before.
Generally it seems to me that Pine64 products are almost great. I won t rule out the possibility of a newer firmware for the PineTime alleviating the battery issues (or at least reporting the status accurately) and making Bluetooth connectivity more reliable (even on older phones). For the PinePhonePro an update to Mobian could reduce power wasting from user space (there s an issue that I have reported in Plasma Mobile but no-one is interested on working on this before KDE 6), and a kernel update could improve things. But I don t think there s a possibility of it ever having the battery last a day while polling Matrix and Jabber servers which is something that every Android phone can do without problems.
To ease my nerves, I struck up a conversation with a man seated nearby who was
also traveling to Abu Dhabi for work. He provided helpful information about
safety and transportation in Abu Dhabi, which reassured me. With the boarding
process complete and my anxiety somewhat eased. I found my window seat on the
flight and settled in, excited for the journey ahead. Next to me was a young
man from Ranchi(Zarkhand, India), heading to Abu Dhabi for work at a mining
factory. We had an engaging conversation about work culture in Abu Dhabi and
recruitment from India.
Upon arriving in Abu Dhabi, I completed my transit, collected my luggage, and
began finding my way to the hotel
I reached Tirana, Albania after a six hours flight, feeling exhausted and I was
suffering from a headache. The air pressure had blocked my ears, and jet lag
added to my fatigue. After collecting my checked luggage, I headed to the first
ATM machine at the airport. Struggling to insert my card, I asked a nearby
gentleman for help. He tried his best, but my card got stuck inside the
machine. Panic set in as I worried about how I would survive without money.
Taking a deep breath, I found an airport employee and explained the situation.
The gentleman stayed with me, offering support and repeatedly apologizing for
his mistake. However, it wasn t his fault, the ATM was out of order, which I
hadn t noticed. My focus was solely on retrieving my ATM card. The airport
employee worked diligently, using a hairpin to carefully extract my card.
Finally, the card was freed, and I felt an immense sense of relief, grateful
for the help of these kind strangers. I used another ATM, successfully withdrew
money, and then went to an airport mobile SIM shop to buy a new SIM card for
local internet and connectivity.
I found my top bunk bed, only to realize I had booked a mixed-gender
dormitory. This detail had completely escaped my notice during the booking
process. I felt unsure about how to handle the situation. Coincidentally,
my experience mirrored what Kangana faced in the movie Queen .
Feeling acidic due to an empty stomach and the exhaustion of heavy
traveling, I wasn t up to cooking in the hostel s kitchen.
I asked the front desk about the nearest restaurant. It was nearly 9:30 PM,
and the streets were deserted. To avoid any mishaps like in the movie
Queen, I kept my passport securely locked in my bag, ensuring it wouldn t
be a victim of theft.
Venturing out for dinner, I felt uneasy on the quiet streets. I eventually
found a restaurant recommended by the hostel, but the menu was almost
entirely non-vegetarian. I struggled to ask about vegetarian options and was
uncertain if any dishes contained eggs, as some people consider eggs to be
vegetarian. Feeling frustrated and unsure, I left the restaurant without
eating.
I noticed a nearby grocery store that was about to close and managed to get
a few extra minutes to shop. I bought some snacks, wafers, milk, and tea
bags (though I couldn t find tea powder to make Indian-style tea). Returning
to the hostel, I made do with wafers, cookies, and milk for dinner. That day
was incredibly tough for me, I filled with exhaustion and struggle in a new
country, I was on the verge of tears .
I made a video call home before sleeping on the top bunk bed. It was a new
experience for me, sharing a room with both unknown men and women. I kept my
passport safe inside my purse and under my pillow while sleeping, staying
very conscious about its security.
I took a bus from Shkod r to the southern part of Albania, heading to
Sarand . The journey lasted about five to six hours, and I had booked a stay
at 









I m finishing typing up this blog entry hours before my last 13 hour leg back home, after I spent 2 weeks in 



Conference Dinner Photo from Santiago





Dear Debian community,
this are my bits from DPL written at my last day at another great
DebConf.
DebConf attendance
At the beginning of July, there was some discussion with the bursary and
content team about sponsoring attendees. The discussion continued at
My Debian contributions this month were all
You can also see it in:
A short status update on what happened on my side last month. Looking
at unified push support for Chatty prompted some libcmatrix fixes and
Chatty improvements (benefiting other protocols like SMS/MMS as well).
The Bluetooth status page in Phosh was a slightly larger change code
wise as we also enhanced our common widgets for building status pages,
simplifying the Wi-Fi status page and making future status pages
simpler. But as usual investigating bugs, reviewing patches (thanks!)
and keeping up with the changing world around us is what ate most of
the time.
Phosh
A Wayland Shell for mobile devices
A new minor release 0.4.24 of
I've tried Android Element app for matrix first time during Debconf. It feels good. For me it's a better IRC.
I've been using it on my Chromebook and one annoyance is that I haven't found a keyboard shortcut for sending messages.
I would have expected shift or ctrl with Enter would send the current message, but so far I have been touching the display to send messages.
Can I fix this? Where is the code?
This is one of those posts that s more for my own reference than likely to be helpful for others. If you re unlucky it ll have some useful tips for you. If I m lucky then I ll get a bunch of folk pointing out some optimisations.
First, what I m trying to achieve. I want a virtual machine environment where I can manually do tests on random kernels, and also various TPM related experiments. So I don t want something as fixed as a