I played game with my laptop, and I prefer performance rather than graphic quality. Hence, I use MangoHud (previously I used libstrangle), by changing the FPS to 24 or 25, the gameplay is still good, and there is no heating issue on GPU (or CPU). But some of the action games like “Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon” and “Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth” will require higher FPS, else the action is not smooth.

Due to previously reviving old Samsung Galaxy Tab, I bought a bluetooth gamepad/joystick (MOCUTE 053 Gamepad). Then I found that bluetooth technology is so wonderful, as I am not bound by wires.

Configurations

In Linux, to make Bluetooth to start on boot, need to edit /etc/bluetooth/main.conf and set AutoEnable to true. Furthermore, I have issue on the paired device. I also set AlwaysPairable to true.

Another issue I faced was the devices are not able to auto reconnect after resume from sleep. As a result, I created a custom “systemd unit file”,

Recently, I failed to boot into my laptop. I was shocked.

home contains a file system with errors, check forced.
home: Inode 12976129 seems to contain garbage.
home: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
        (i.e., without -a or -p options)
fsck failed with exit status 4.

Then not able to mount the home partition, I was prompted to login as root. However, I was too nervous, I forgot what is my root password.

I was using Dell Vostro 5459 previously. However, it has some hardware deficiencies. The battery capacity keeps dropping drastically within a year. That’s a very bad experience. Now, the fully charged battery is only 1% of the designed capacity. Then I purchased an external power bank from Dell. But that’s not an ideal design for a laptop that you need to bring extra gadget to everywhere, and charging external battery is too troublesome.

I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 many many years ago. But recently, I am trying to revive it so that, it will be a possible solution to allow my son to watch cartoon on an old tablet, in future.

Reviving this Galaxy Tab (P7500) takes me so much time to try out those custom ROMs and the apps. But it is an interesting experience.

I tried several ROMs, flashed with TWRP.

I wrote a post about Brave recently, and found that Brave browser is interesting. So, I am switching to Brave from Chromium for a trial.

A brief introduction about Brave: Brave is developed by Brave Software, which is founded by Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and former CEO of Mozilla Corporation. Firefox is the product of Mozilla Corporation. However, Brave is built on Chromium, the open source project for Google Chrome. So, I personally perceive Brave as the Chromium with the soul of Firefox. That is why, it makes Brave different from Chromium and Firefox.

In my previous blog, I mentioned I changed a new laptop. My older faulty laptop is Dell Vostro 5459, which was four years old. My current laptop is Lenovo Legion Y7000 2019 PG0 model 81T0, which as higher spec than the old one. Besides that, I added another 1T HDD, just in case I may doing machine learning study, or my work requires large disk space.

Note: All the instructions should follow official Arch Linux Wiki. The followings are only based on my experience of this installation.

This was a disastrous week. Firstly, internet network cable broken. Secondly, my laptop went wild. Internet network cable broken, I still can online through mobile hotspot. But my laptop, it was catastrophic problem. Because I have a lot of valuable data, and I have to work.

Chinese proverb, 旧的不去，新的不来, but it was damn pressure. Because the old laptop had unpredictable behaviour. The problem was that, the keyboard will trigger some keys unintentionally, especially Alt key. I thought it was software problem, but until I reboot, and saw the GRUB menu cursor moving by itself. Damn! This means, (i) I am not able to work, (ii) I have to spend money to buy new laptop, and (iii) I need to get my data out.

Recently, I revived my old laptop HP Pavilion dv3, due to the need of second computer to do my research study.

Since it is revived, and works smoothly, I then revived a tablet which was not used, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (P7500). I flashed the AOSP 7.1.2 Nougat. And it is revived also. However, the hardware specification is too antique, it can neither install Google Chrome nor Firefox. Most of the apps failed to run. 😩

I just found that, if I have an AAC audio file (technically M4A), and if I added the ID3 tag 2 (aka ID3v2), then the audio file will failed to be converted by ffmpeg.

It can be either converted to mp3

• using DeadBeef audio player, or
• remove the ID3v2 tag then convert

So, how to add the metadata like ID3 tag? Use the Kid3 and add the Tag 3 (aka APE tag). This will not affect how ffmpeg to read the file.