Last month I installed the official M.2 hat on a Pi 5. I’d heard this combination would fit in the official case with the fan and lid removed, but had trouble finding a picture of the result.

Here is a picture of the Pi 5 with the M.2 hat in the official case with the fan and lid removed:

I also installed a 1TB 2230 NVMe SSD (shown above) and set up NVMe boot.

This worked, but I was unhappy having the disk was exposed like a muscle car supercharger. I also noticed CPU throttling during CPU-intensive tasks because of the additional heat and reduced airflow from the M.2 hat.

I added an active cooler and switched from the official case to a KKSB Case for Raspberry Pi 5, a taller metallic case with more airflow.

Assembly was a hassle; the KKSB case has a lot of screws, does not come with instructions, and does not have enough room inside to access some of the screw holes.

Once I got everything assembled I was happy with the result:

We have several Raspberry Pi Pico Ws throughout the house which collect temperature and humidity measurements and a corresponding web interface which shows the current measurements, charts of recent measurements, and the weather forecast for the next few days.

I put together a Temperature Sensors article which explains the history, the hardware, and the software for the project.

I have owned my Sony WF-1000XM4 bluetooth headphones for 2 years. Over the past few weeks the battery life has dropped from ~7 hours to less than 1 hour.

Apparently this is a common problem:

• Rising Number of Unexpected Sony WF-1000XM4 Explosions Are Haunting Users (headphonesty.com)
• WF-1000XM4 - Severe Battery Issues (reddit.com)

I follwed the recommendation in the reddit thread and contacted Sony support. After a brief chat they offered to email a shipping label and repair the headphones at no cost.

If you own a pair of WF-1000XM4s and the battery life decreases suddenly or they get very warm while charging, then you should:

1. Stop using the headphones immediately because they could explode.
2. Contact Sony support and ask for a repair or a replacement.

Sony should cover the cost even if the headphones are no longer under warranty (mine weren’t); the battery life for a pair of 2-year-old bluetooth headphones should not deteriorate so abruptly.

Update (2024-08-26): I don’t know how long the WF-1000XM4 repair will take, so I bought a pair of WF-1000XM5s.

Overall the WF-1000XM5s are a moderate improvement over the WF-1000XM4s; the audio quality is better and the earbuds and case are smaller.

Unfortunately the Headphones Connect phone app has gotten worse.

Previously the phone app tried to railroad you into signing up for an unnecessary Sony online account during setup. Now you also have to opt-out of integrations with a handful of third-party services (which I don’t use). Sony also removed the option to control the volume by double- and triple-tapping the left earbud.

Instead, double- and triple-tapping the left earbud can only be used to activate the third-party integrations (which I don’t use). You can still adjust the volume by tapping the earbuds, but only by quadruple-tapping (!?!):

Update (2024-09-07): The repaired WF-1000XM4s arrived in the mail this afternoon. I’m going to continue using the WF-1000XM5s as my primary earbuds and keep the WF-1000XM4s as a backup.

We finally set up my home office. No more soldering on the dining room table or assembling computers on the living room coffee table.

Pictures and a description of my new home office of are available here.

Found while unpacking boxes last night:

Shown above, top to bottom, left to right:

• Sony PSP-2000: Handheld game console. Mostly used for playing emulated SNES games. Covered unlocking and installing custom firmware in this 2008 blog post. Battery failed ~5 years ago.
• Nintendo 2DS XL: Handheld game console. Also mostly used for emulated games.
• Anbernic RG350M: Handheld game console. Only used for emulated games. I liked the build quality but the metal put strain on my wrists.
• Nokia N810: “internet tablet” (smartphone precursor). Used quite a bit before I got my first Android phone. Battery failed at some point, but I only discovered the failed battery last night.
• Cowon iAUDIO X5 60GB: Portable media player with a 60GB spinning rust (!?!) hard drive. Note: Physical disks in media players made sense at the time because flash-based players had extremely limited capacity. Had Rockbox installed. Covered in this 2006 blog post. My patches for the Rockbox Game Boy emulator were covered in this 2005 blog post.
• RIM Blackberry (model unknown): Old work phone that I never liked and rarely used. Covered in this 2007 blog post.
• Apple iPod Classic 120GB: Portable media player. I didn’t like this thing, rarely used it, and can’t remember how I got it. Maybe a gift or reward?
• Samsung Galaxy S II (SGH-T989): Used CyanogenMod to add features, ditch the awful Samsung Android skin, and extend the support by several years.
• Google Nexus One: My first smartphone without a keyboard. I liked it, but the screen was too small, the capacitive buttons were hard to press, and the trackball mostly just got in the way.
• OnePlus One: Good price/performance at the time. Ran Cyanogen OS out of the box. Novel textured back. Awful camera.
• OnePlus 5T: Great phone at release. Still decent even now (for me, at least). I liked the rear fingerprint scanner and the slim bezels. Bad camera. I plan to install LineageOS and continue using it for non-phone stuff (drone remote control, dubious apps, etc).

Not shown (lost, recycled, or still buried in boxes):

• Samsung SGH-t809: My first cell phone. Bought in 2006. Battery failed ~10 years ago. Covered in this 2006 blog post.
• Motorola Cliq: My first Android smartphone. Not a very good device in retrospect.
• Barnes and Noble Nook Color: Immediately installed CyanogenMod and used as a cheap Android tablet.
• Google Nexus 7 (2012) and Nexus 7 (2013): I liked the form factor of these tablets. The original model was a bit slow so I upgraded to the 2013 model at release and used it daily until it stopped booting.

Current gadgets:

• Google Pixel 8 Pro: Current smartphone and the first one I’ve owned that is waterproof. I’m very happy with it. Great camera. Screen is large enough to read eBooks. Used to take the picture above.
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e (Wi-Fi): Current tablet. Immediately installed LineageOS because I prefer it to One UI. I use it to read eBooks and with the detachable keyboard as a second laptop.
• PowKiddy RGB10 Max: Current handheld game console. Only used for playing emulated games. Lighter and has a larger screen than the Anbernic RG350m shown in the picture above. Rarely used.
• Sony WF-1000XM4: Current Bluetooth headphones. I use these daily for meetings and to listen to music and to watch TV shows past my bedtime. Great audio quality, battery life, and charging speed. My only complaint is the phone app tries to railroad you into an unnecessary Sony account during installation. Update (2024-08-25): I had to send these in for repair because the battery life deteriorated rapidly.

Update (2024-07-26): I found the Nook, Cliq, both Nexus 7 tablets, an iPaq, and two digital cameras. Everything except the Cliq is shown below:

Those are some massive bezels!

On Friday I posted a long Site Backend article which explains how the content on this site is managed, speed and security tweaks, Hugo customizations, Apache configuration, and more.

Last week I released a browser extension for Firefox which sorts entries in Daily Kos live update articles in chronological order and adds a sort toolbar.

Install Firefox Add-On, Git Repository

Background: Several months ago I created a bookmarklet (available here) which sorts entries in Daily Kos live update articles from oldest to newest. Unfortunately the bookmarklet was difficult for people to use because:

• Installation required copying minified JavaScript into a text field, and
• You had to click the bookmarklet after loading a live update article in order to activate it

To address these problems, I converted the bookmarklet into a browser extension. I also added a couple of features during the convdrsion.

Note: The extension isn’t Firefox-specific, but it’s unlikely I will port it to Chrome because I recommend people ditch Chrome.

This week Google announced they are moving forward with the plan deprecate Manifest V2. Despite claims by Google, this change has nothing to do with security and everything to do with hobbling ad-blockers.

Last year I switched to Firefox in anticipation of this change and in response to several other user-hostile changes,

At this point I recommend everyone do the following:

1. Switch to a non-Chrome browser. I recommend Firefox.
2. Install an ad-blocker. I recommend uBlock Origin.

This recommendation applies even if you don’t care about ads or privacy; the current "don’t be evil" incarnation of Google has been a poor steward of Chrome and it’s only a matter of time before they do something that you do care about.

Update (2024-06-27): Don’t forget that ad networks regularly serve up malware as well.

While perusing Vim scripts, I noticed that there are several Vim books. A couple of them piqued my interest:

• Practical Vim, Second Edition (2015)
• Modern Vim (2018)

I bought both books and I’m about 300 pages into Practical Vim. So far it’s great. I have been using Vim for over 20 years but I still learned a few things; for example, I did not know about the \v “very magic” prefix for patterns.

If you buy the books from the publisher instead of Amazon you can download the eBooks as DRM-free PDF, EPUB, and MOBI files. I read the PDFs on my desktop and the EPUBs in the Kindle app on my phone (imported via Send to Kindle).

Unlike many technical books, the EPUBs render very nicely in the Kindle app. Example:

Page from “Practical Vim” rendered by the Kindle app on a Pixel 8 Pro

Update (2024-06-15): I finished both books. Practical Vim is great and I recommend it. Modern Vim is a bit of a tossup:

• Pros: The introduction to neovim is helpful and so is the section on fzf integration.
• Cons: Several chapters are a subset of material from Practical Vim (examples: chapters 2 and 4). Also Modern Vim does not cover modern Vim features like the terminal command, which I use regularly.

To be fair, :terminal is mentioned briefly in the “What’s Next for Vim 8” section of Appendix 1, and it was not included in a stable release until after Modern Vim was published.

A couple of site updates:

• Added dark mode support and a dark theme.
• Added pictures on the About page.

Dark Mode

Dark mode uses a prefers-color-scheme media query to determine the default theme, so it should do the right thing™ for people who have their system configured to prefer a dark color scheme. The theme can also be set explicitly using the “Switch Theme” icon on the right side of the menu bar.

There is a minor refresh bug and probably a few rough edges with older content, but I will get them sorted as time permits.

Screenshot:

I strongly prefer dark mode and have wanted to add it here for years, so this change is a big victory for me.

About Page Pictures

There’s not much to say here; the About page now has a couple of pictures.

Adding the images in a way that I was satisfied with turned out to be a lot more effort than you might expect… This site is statically generated with Hugo, the theme is a heavily-customized version of Bulma, and blog posts and articles are written in Markdown.

The features that I wanted were:

• A responsive layout containing a horizontal row of images on desktop which gracefully falls back to a vertical list of scaled thumbnmails on mobile.
• Multiple image format support (in other words, the <picture> element).
• Accessibility (title, alt, aria-label, <figcaption>, etc).
• Ability to specifily all of the above in the article front matter.

In order to support everything above, I ended up copying my existing pe-figure shortcode and modifying it to support image “carousels” in articles.

In any case, it’s done now. Here is the result: