Author: jon

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Android Geekery Mobile Devices Privacy Qin F21 Technology

Qin F21: backup, unlocking, rooting and replacing stock firmware

As I described in the backstory, hardware-wise the Xiaomi Qin F21 Pro was the perfect form factor for me. The power of a smartphone, but actually designed to be a focused communication device, rather than a hamstrung computer.

There are thoughtful debates about the security pros and cons, but the prerequisite for this level of control is rooting the phone.

However, on the software side it needed a bit of work. The phone arrived with little bloat and mercifully no Google components – but there was still a fair bit of Xioami stock software, including the notorious browser which reportedly was spying on Chinese users for every page browse [I have no idea if this is the case in the internal Qin].

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Android De-Google Digital Minimalism Privacy Qin F21 Technology

Outsmarting your Phone

Secure, private & trustworthy Android

That you (not Google) controls – and which works well as a phone

I’m a later adopter to smart phones. My early experiences confirmed just about every bad thing I’d heard about them. I was astonished, for devices of such putative hardware power, just how ridiculously and deliberately limited they were in software:

A very simple and ugly design principal underlies standard Android phones: effectiveness of advertising penetration means everything, the wellbeing of the users means nothing. The users are only a commodity input to the only reason Google exists: advertising revenue.

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Android Digital Minimalism KaiOS Mobile Devices Privacy Qin F21

Some Backstory

For a long time now I’ve been fairly comfortable simply stating

I plain don’t like smartphones

I’ve gone into this in more detail elsewhere – but the short version is:

  • They’re very poor mobile computing devices
  • They’re very poor telephones
  • They’re designed to actively work against (and spy upon) the user

However, I need a telephone of some sort. And while I try my utmost to eliminate it, there is some software which (grudgingly) I’m compelled to run outside of a PC.

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Android De-Google Digital Minimalism Mobile Devices Privacy Qin F21

Post Series: Taking control of Android on the Qin F21

A series of blog posts going into great detail on how I left behind large-touchscreen smartphones and Google – and set up a lightweight, reliable but powerful Android phone that works for me rather than vice versa.

The finished article – high quality hardware, a week’s battery life and simple, beautiful, effective and trustworthy software that works for me

Some useful resources that inspired this work:

Categories
Arcana Ethics/Metaethics Knausgaard Nabokov Philosophy Politics War in Ukraine

Homo homini lupus

Recent events have stirred in me some thoughts about evil.

For an atheist I spend a, probably unhealthy, amount of time thinking about theodicy. The below may also make it clear why I am comfortable using terms like evil and virtue from a non-religious perspective.

I think all of these have some truth to them (and all are problematic) – and I suspect we could point to examples of all of them, even just in the context of Ukraine. But some, I think, are easier for modernist, rationalist (decent?) people to get their heads around. Some are much less comfortable. This is endlessly fascinating to me.

We may think ourselves secure โ€“ but there it is, the dark shape at the door, it seeps through the floor like radon. There is no limit to the limits of our rational power. Evil is a Thing that can ignite, all by itself.

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Hiking Maps Trains Travel

Trip Maps

European Trips

European trips. Blue = Backpacking, Red = Cycle Tours, Green = Road Trips, Yellow = Walking Trips
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Arcana Geekery Linux MacBook Air

Plymouth boot splash

Boot splash in Linux

Most operating systems have some sort of branded animation or placeholder while they are loading. In Linux, this niche is filled by plymouth. Unfortunately – and this is far from an exclusive scoop – plymouth is a pain in the arse and doesn’t work very well. I’ll never get back the day of my life I spent getting this working – but maybe I can save someone else the time (or at least the bother).

What follows are my attempts to get some sort of loading screen working for Gentoo on my MacBook Air before X/LXDE loads. This was a ludicrous amount of effort to get something so trivial working.

Unless you have a lot of time to kill, I wouldn’t bother with plymouth at all. But for the curious, here’s what I did.

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Geekery Kernel Linux MacBook Air

FaceTime Webcam

The last piece

The webcam built into the MacBook Air is quite odd in a number of ways. It appears to use an unusual hardware configuration involving a wifi-disabled Broadcom BCM15700A2 chip – and it was the one piece of hardware that didn’t work out-the-box on the Linux Mint installation. I also identified it as the culprit that was preventing deep CPU package sleep states (and hence full battery life) under Gentoo.

It isn’t too difficult to get it working properly – but it does require a custom firemware driver and activation of the right kernel modules.

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Geekery Kernel Linux Mac OS MacBook Air Operating Systems Technology

Macbook Keyboard HID and Touchpad

A better configuration for the Apple keyboard

As a piece of hardware, the Apple keyboard is great – crisp and satisying to use. In terms of key layout – not so much. Many users coming from non-Mac systems find the following frustrating:

  • The media keys defaults to on all the time. Most people, particularly developers, use the function keys (F2, F5 etc) more often.
  • The Ctrl and Fn keys are swapped, meaning Ctrl (surely the most important special key) is no longer at the corner of the keyboard. I’m flumoxed by this design choice, also present on the Thinkpad – it’s pretty infuriating.
  • Alt is no longer by the space bar. This is confusing for alt-tabbing between windows.
  • The “super” (start or command) key is moved compared to PC keyboards
MacBook function and control keys

Fortunately, there is a simple way to configure the mappings directly in the kernel under Linux.

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Arcana Geekery Kernel Linux MacBook Air Power Consumption

Battery life under Linux

Linux energy efficiency, laptops and battery life

While linux distributions proliferate on servers and desktops (and even on mobile devices in the form of Android) linux desktop OSs running on laptops have often been the poor relation. Most prominently, it’s become somewhat accepted that popular fully-featured distributions like Ubuntu and Mint will have significantly higher power consumption, and worse battery life, than Mac OS – or even Windows. Keeping up with Windows running on the same machine is typically considered a good result.

This was much the situation I found for myself when running Linux Mint on my 2015 Macbook Air. The features of Linux Mint are excellent, and I much prefer the interface and flexibility to Mac OS. Indeed, modern distos like Mint are now by necessity generalised for many different systens, which inevitably introduces some degree of unwanted components (or “bloat”).

What I was interested in was whether it was possible to piece together a Linux system more minimally tailored to my needs, and optimised for the MacBook hardware – and so maintain the freedom and flexibility while regaining the battery life performance.

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