The first step to getting my devices working for me is to set up a consistent network for them to use. To do this I am going to use a small pocket sized router that can be run from a usb battery to act as a hot spot for my devices, but also as a bridge to an internet connected wifi network.

The network I want to setup looks something like this:

                                                   +
  +---------+                                      |
  |  phone  <<-------+                             |
  +---------+        |                             |
                     |                             |
  +---------+        |  DHCP     PANWIFI           | DHCP    PUBLIC WIFI
  |  laptop <<-------+      +-----------------+    |    +-----------------+
  +---------+        |      |                 |    |    |                 |
                     +---->>>   OpenWRT       <<<----->>>                 +---->  INTERNET
  +---------+        |      |                 |    |    |                 |
  |  camera <<-------+      +-----------------+    |    +-----------------+
  +---------+        |             192.168.x.x/xx  |
                     |10.10.10.0/24                |
  +---------+        |                             |
  |  pda    <<-------+                             |
  +---------+                                      |
                                                   |
        Personal area wifi network                 |  Upstream wifi network
+--------------------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+

I struggled to find a network configuration like this in the OpenWRT wiki. I wondered for a while if it was because the network was an impossible (seemed unlikely) or if it was so obvious to not be worth documenting.

Eventually google turned up a bitbucket page with a config that worked perfectly.

I need to find a method which makes it straight forward to configure a new outgoing network. I think at the moment I am going to have to edit the wifi config files to make any changes. On the road that will be less than ideal.

From Stevens TCP/IP Illustrated Vol 2 :

We will see the comment /* XXX */ throughout Net/3. It is a warning to the
reader that the code is obscure, contains nonobvious side effects, or is
quick solution to a more difficult problem.

The second volume of that series might be one of the best networking books ever written. Not because it is a good tome to learn networking from, it is instead a guide into the heart of a real system. It is close enough today to use as a starting point for finding out where things are and a step to finding out why they are.

It is where I go when I want to find out how my current machines get bytes from an application to packets on the wire.

For about as along as I have been using terminals I have had them set to a dark theme, for a while at the beginning I had my terminal set up to be green text on a black background. I might have been the l33test mutherfucker around.

! Zenburn theme
! black + red
urxvt*color0:      #101010
urxvt*color1:      #705050

! green + yellow
urxvt*color2:      #60b48a
urxvt*color3:      #f0dfaf

! blue + purple
urxvt*color4:      #506070
urxvt*color5:      #dc8cc3

! cyan + white
urxvt*color6:      #8cd0d3
urxvt*color7:      #dcdccc

! bright-black + bright-red
urxvt*color8:      #000000
urxvt*color9:      #dca3a3

! bright-green + bright-yellow
urxvt*color10:     #c3bf9f
urxvt*color11:     #f0dfaf

! bright-blue + bright-purple
urxvt*color12:     #94bff3
urxvt*color13:     #ec93d3

! bright-cyan + bright-white
urxvt*color14:     #93e0e3
urxvt*color15:     #ffffff

I moved to Zenburn from the unreasonably popular solarized at some point last year. When I moved I went through a few themes trying things out. I found that .Xresources supports cpp macros making it easy to swap themes.

!.Xresources 
urxvt*scrollBar:      false
urxvt*matcher.button: 1
urxvt.transparent:    false
urxvt*allow_bold:     true

Xft*dpi:              96
Xft*antialias:        true
Xft*hinting:          full

URxvt*geometry:       85x16
URxvt*fading:         0
URxvt*tintColor:      #ffffff
URxvt*shading:        0
URxvt*inheritPixmap:  False

#include ".papercolour"

URxvt.urlLauncher:    firefox
URxvt.matcher.button: 1

URxvt*font: xft:Source Code Pro:size=8

I tried to work outside quite a few times last year. Dark themes for terminals are really hard to see in bright sunlight. For some reason yeahconsole doesn't like the way I include themes and stayed with a default light theme. The light theme is really easy to see in sunlight. The contrast in readability made me really question using a dark theme at all.

At camp last year most of the daylight hours I spent on my laptop were inside our super tent, direct sunlight made my screen hard to read and the sun seems to melt my skin. My dark theme was okay to read in the tent, but it was no good outside, with the sun melting I just hid away until it was night time.

The sun being bad, I am grateful I live in Scotland, we don't have to put up with the sun very often(this is a joke, it is always fucking sunny, I want a refund).

When the sun isn't around I do quite like to sit in darkened rooms when I am hacking. If you too are a vampire you might have noticing the eyeball explosion that happens when you switch from your friendly terminal to the light explosion that is a web browser. Pretty much every web page has a light theme, I actually dislike dark themed web pages, I always think the designer is being up front with how much of a douchebag they are.

Anyway, this is a lot of words for "I have moved to a light theme"

! PaperColour Theme

URxvt.foreground: #4D4D4C
URxvt.background: #EEEEEE

! black
URxvt.color0: #EDEDED
URxvt.color8: #969694

! red
URxvt.color1: #D7005F
URxvt.color9: #D7005F

! green
URxvt.color2: #718C00
URxvt.color10: #718C00

! yellow / orange
URxvt.color3: #D75F00
URxvt.color11: #D75F00

! blue

URxvt.color4: #4271AE
URxvt.color12: #4271AE

! magenta
URxvt.color5: #8959A8
URxvt.color13: #8959A8

! cyan
URxvt.color6: #3E999F
URxvt.color14: #3E999F

! white
URxvt.color7: #4D4D4C
URxvt.color15: #F5F5F5

I dropped my android phone at congress, I was trying to figure out which direction to walk in the compass was spinning wildly being absolutely no help. I slide the phone into my pocket missed and the screen cracked on contact with the ground. The phone had a terminal diagnosis then, but I soldered on for as long as I could.

Eventually the nexus 5 dropped the cellular network and I travelled 40 minutes to a vet when I didn't need to. The next day I jumped on to the bq site and ordered my ubuntu edition E5.

The BQ sales process was just terrible, it didn't help that my email provider decided I didn't need to receive email that weekend. The BQ site is really badly laid out, confusing and proactively difficult to login to and view your orders. They don't offer tracking number, so I don't know where the extra €10 'international' shipping went.

The ubuntu touch os out of the box is annoying as any other smart phone, you are run through the standard dialog that asks mostly pointless questions. The version of ubuntu touch that ships on the E5 is "really old" (with really old being may 2015, 9 months prior). I was unable to install anything from the ubuntu app store (well I installed a hex colour picker, but that doesn't count).

I tried to check for updates, but the phone was happy believing it was all up to date. I searched for a while, but any search term with 'ubuntu touch' results in ubuntu users having issues with their touch screen laptops. Eventually I fell into the #ubuntu-touch irc channel and asked.

And I waited...three hours later on my third time asking someone suggested I try updating. There isn't wifi at work, I wondered if the ubuntu touch os is so broken it won't acknowledge user settings and will only look for updates on wifi. I tried at the hackerspace later that night and I managed to update to OTA9.1. This is the latest release version.

Out of the box

• No updates were shown as available on 3G
• Updates became available to download on wifi
• Unable to download apps from the ubuntu app store
• Unable to run any software other than browser
• No way to find out the phone was an entire naming scheme behind without wifi
• The UK (and English) support site doesn't mention the Ubuntu Editions at all. The Austrian one does.

General System issues

• All advice assumes you are running ubuntu on the desktop
• Phones always seems to be low on memory
• You are stuck looking at the apps scope
• No way to have a phone wallpaper, just apps
• If you turn off all of the scopes there is no way to add them back in
• No way to import contacts into the phonebook, yes on a phone
• There isn't a calendar
• There is no count down alarm timer (make noise in 20 minutes)
• Bluetooth volume is massively reduced (unable to hear anything out side)
• Removing wired headphones doesn't pause playback
• Volume transfers when plugging/unplugging head phones. Play music full volume on speakers, plug in headphones, go deaf.
• Headphone buttons don't work
• It can take still running paged out apps 10 seconds to become active. This was seen on the alarm clock app
• No security
• No encrypted storage
• No way to hide notification bodies on lock screen

• Default lock screen leaks data (how many calls, how many messages)

• UI Bugs everywhere

• There is gravity scrolling sometimes, I can't tell you when though
• The alarm time picker has gravity scroll when you don't want it and doesn't when you want it.
• When you switch to paged out apps, sometimes they will be out of focus. This is your only idicator they app isn't actually running. Don't worry it will restart entirely within 10 seconds
• There edge swipe gestures, but they only seem to work at the most annoying times
• The left swipe menu is useless when the default screen is a page of apps
• In the browser you access multiple tabs with a bottom up gesture, scroll in landscape mode is nearly impossible.

General App usage

• The apps are either written by Canonical or some random person, these apps wants my login credentials

• There are loads of apps available, as long as you want a news app from a minor regional newspaper

• Nobody wants scopes

• Built in apps (twitter, youtube, etc,) are just web views and they are terrible.
• Can't tweet photos from twitter app
• Can't send photos on telegram app
• The Canonical provided apps have led to no good alternatives for apps (youtube, twitter, etc)

Specific Apps

• Podbird looses progress in podcasts
• podbird redownloads podcasts on new wifi networks
• podbird doesn't have any play back indicator for podcasts other than the currently playing
• podbird can't handle many rss feed urls

• podbird can't bulk import podcast urls

• Ureadit can't show the first item in the list in portrait

• ureadit has no touch area for gifs
• No way to refresh feed without a long scroll up
• On out of memory feed/message thread is reset or cleared away

Other people agree , I have installed android and life is better.

I am making my email setup better. I have moved hosts to Fastmail (referrer link) and I am setting up mutt to work with folders correctly. There is a patch for mutt called mutt-sidebar which gives a list of folders in a side pane in mutt, much like the interface would be on the web.

Looking at Freshports it looks like the sidebar patch is part of the FreeBSD port, but it isn't setup by default. I wanted to check this and looked for the option in pkg to list the build options. There is the pkg query command that will show information about installed packages, but it is a little mental to use.

I found how to use pkg query to list the build options for a pkg in the wiki .

$ pkg query "%n is compiled with option %Ok set to %Ov" mutt
mutt is compiled with option ASPELL set to off
mutt is compiled with option COMPRESSED_FOLDERS set to on
mutt is compiled with option DEBUG set to off
...
mutt is compiled with option SIDEBAR_PATCH set to off
...

That tells me that I new to build mutt from the port and turn sidebar patch on.