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Rant out of passion | About

Coming Soon: Unify Openscape Is Broken

Oct 30, 2024

Stay tuned.

Tolino Is Broken

Sep 9, 2024

I got two Kindles (2nd generation) a long time ago, which prompted me to finally start reading more again. Basically, it worked quite well; I installed Calibre, imported books and moved them to the Kindle from there.

However, I quickly wanted a more up-to-date device that wasn’t from Amazon. I decided on the Tolino Vision 6 and after playing around a bit, I discovered a few things that really annoyed me:

  1. when the device is tilted, an icon appears on the right edge with which the orientation can be changed. This wouldn’t be so bad if the icon didn’t obscure the text underneath. Actually, I don’t want this function at all, but I can’t switch it off.

  2. the power button reacts very spongily. After the ‘click’, it has to be pressed a little harder to make it react.

  3. the book view in the software is worse than on the old Kindle. I can’t see which page I’m on when turning pages and the alphabet at the bottom is absolutely useless because it’s too small.

My conclusion: I’m not giving up hope that one day there will be a manufacturer who produces a good and open device so that you can install another reader without jailbreak if you don’t like the one that came with it. As far as I’m concerned, the guarantee can be cancelled, I’m not particularly interested in that.

Rant over.

Element is broken

Aug 1, 2024

I have been a Signal user for many years and am reasonably happy with it. But soon my son will be of an age where he will also get a smartphone and I will have different requirements than I do for myself. For example, I want a messenger whose server I can host myself and which is not linked to a telephone number. Also I want to keep him away from Telegram and WhatsApp groups for as long as possible.

For this reason, I installed a Matrix (Synapse) server again after a long time and created three accounts. And of course I want to use Element. But after a few days I just can’t understand the following things:

  1. No aliases are possible for contacts. Either my name is “Stefan Ritter” or my name is “Papa”. In our case, “Papa” is of course fine, but as soon as I want to reach contacts outside the family, that would of course be rubbish. Is it really that difficult to implement? Are Spaces and emojis really much more important?

  2. There is no possibility to adjust colours. In contrast to Signal (where this is possible to a limited extent), it is much more difficult to distinguish who has written what in Element. And again: is that so difficult to implement?

  3. This stupid piece of software has 2 sidebars! Who came up with the stupid idea of making them unhideable?

  4. I can sort my contacts and rooms by activity or alphabetically. The funny thing is: Element doesn’t remember this for 3 minutes!

  5. On iOS, I’m used to taking a photo, pressing “Share” and selecting an app. Why the hell is Element not showing up? Well, because of

  6. You can search for rooms and specify a server for them. If you now think that you will be shown rooms on this server: nope. Rooms on completely different servers appear in rows.

  7. Multiaccount! Come on, it can’t be that I have to install Fluffychat at the same time.

  8. It doesn’t even remember its position and size O.o

In conclusion, I can only say that although Element is usable, development is focussed on completely absurd things. Why don’t you first make a good messenger with useful functions before you start building in some bullshit?

Rant over.