I had the pleasure to finally meet Caleb, who I had known for their efforts in mainlining the Snapdragon 845 SoC, but also Alin Jerpelea, Senior Open Source Software Architect at Sony, who I had so far mostly interacted with via the Sony Open Devices github bugtracker, where I had been been reporting issues affecting Sony’s AOSP image on my XZ2 Compact.

I had been following the Open Devices project for a few years already , but I recently got in closer contact with their community in an effort to contribute some time to mainlining their devices and contributing to Sony’s effort.

As part of that, I will be spending some of the very little spare time available to lend a hand and iron out issues in running Sony’s AOSP Android 13 on Sony Xperia 5 IV (aka pdx224, Nagara platfom)

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One of the top criteria when choosing a new phone is how “hackable” it is, i.e. whether it allows things unlocking the bootloader, flashing other firmwares and ideally mainline Linux support, but also how OSS-friendly its manufacturer s.

That is why, a few years ago, I bought the Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact.
Compact, powerful, hackable.

I have been a long time Jolla fan (I was doing my internship there when we released the first Jolla phone! Oh, memories…) and it’s been a long time wish of mine to bring Sailfish OS to my phone.

Meanwhile, the awesome @rinigus has made it

I also always kept an eye on Sony’s efforts in the open-source world, especially the Sony Open Devices Program.

After attending @caleb‘s session on implementing Linux mainline support for the Snapdragon 845 SoC (the same XZ2 Compact is based on!) I started thinking I could join that project and contribute to mainlining my device.

Life with a toddler is incredibly busy , but I have finally decided to dedicate some of the very, very, very little spare time I have to this cause. Something like 1-2hrs per week, mostly in the evenings.

I know this will be fun!

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So many things happened since last post.

I quit Canonical, where I was working on Ubuntu Touch, right before the project was closed.

I joined Samsung R&D UK, where I spent 3 amazing years developing software for Samsung’s flagship phones, from a kernel driver for the Samsung S9 to an AI-based system service for game performance optimisation, like a smart CPU/GPU governor.

I was then approached by CrowdStrike, who gave me the opportunity to dive into cybersecurity and to start my first remote job.
What an amazing bunch of people was waiting for me, there!
Fast-forward 2 years, I am still at CrowdStrike.

Last but not least, we are now parents of a wonderful little princess <3

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Let’s Encrypt was released as Public Beta a couple of days ago.
You’ve got no excuses anymore, if you have a website, you have to use it!

It is easy (if you have one of the supported OSes), but above all…it’s free!! How cool is that?!? A Certificate Authority that provides you with certificates for FREE!! \o/

Okay, it all still comes with the risk of trusting a CA…a court could issue an order and get the master key, bla, bla, bla…
But hey, this is a step in the right direction!

One day we’ll have a secure net that doesn’t rely on CAs anymore.
One day…

In the meanwhile, https://letsencrypt.org/

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I know, I know, I promised I’d publish this post months ago…but I’ve been very busy with my thesis (Oh, by the way, I got my master’s degree last month! Anyone looking for a Qt/QML developer? :D) so I had to postpone this until now.

But better late than never, right?

If you haven’t read the previous post, let me sum up what I’m trying to accomplish here:
basically, Jolla’s loudspeaker SUCKS, it does, really
I thought it could be fun to buy a few genuine loudspeakers from phones which are known to have loud buzzers and try implanting them in my Jolla, just to see if it would actually make a big difference.

I used GsmArena’s loudness tests (they do it for all phone reviews) to select 9 loudspeakers and then bought them from online shops.

Test method

What I did was:
1) Open the phone
2) Replace the original loudspeaker with one from the test batch
3) Record a video of my Jolla playing Jolla’s ringtone via the new loudspeaker
4) Use Audacity to analyze the audio stream and collect the raw spectrum data
5) Import the spectrum data on plot.ly to generate an interactive plot!
6) Analyze/Enjoy the results

DISCLAIMER: I am no electronics engineer, I am a software developer who loves tinkering with whatever  happens to be under his hands. This test doesn’t take impedance or resonance into account, it’s just plug-and-play fun. For example, the amplifier on the Jolla is probably another bottleneck!

Results

The results are a video and two interactive plots.

The video contains all the audio tests, so you can listen to it to form your own idea about the performance of those speakers on the Jolla

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp8lww8S7U4

The interactive plots provide an easy way to compare the loudness of Jolla’s original loudspeaker to the ones in the testbed. You can pan/zoom and show/hide some of the loudspeakers in order to make a clean comparison between only 2 datasets, for instance.

PLEASE HIDE SOME OF THE CURVES TO BE ABLE TO ANALYZE THE DATA, OR YOU’LL JUST SEE A MESS IT’S ENOUGH TO CLICK ON THE LEGEND ITEMS TO HIDE THE CORRESPONDING CURVE

IFRAME WARNING (sorry)

Due to the fact that this plot uses a logarithmic scale (because of the dB values), it may not be easy to understand how one speaker compares to another one (i.e. -50dB vs -25dB doesn’t mean that the latter is 2x louder!).

For this reason, in the next step I converted the data to a more easily readable format.
Taking into account that the results are measured in dB using dBFS, we can give a rough estimate of how Jolla’s loudspeaker compares to the other ones by using the formula:

[math]comparison = \frac{(10^{(\frac{20}{competitor\_dB})})}{(10^{(\frac{20}{jolla\_dB})})}[/math]

this will give us the amplitude ratio, i.e. how much higher/lower the amplitude of the signal created by the competitor buzzer is, using Jolla’s loudspeaker as a reference (0%). A value of 100% means that the signal amplitude was 2x than Jolla’s one on that particular frequency. Using the toggles to hide some of the curves is particularly useful to be able to get a better visual over the results

Try deselecting all the results but the ones from Jolla and Xperia E1 by tapping on the corresponding legend entries, for example

The amplitude is related to acoustic energy, so a higher amplitude corresponds to a louder sound. (more info here)

As we can see, Jolla’s loudspeaker is pretty weak…there are some buzzers which manage to get below its level at some frequencies, but some loudspeakers are a lot louder at other ones. Xperia E1’s produces a signal whose amplitude is a massive 600% higher than Jolla’s, at 8441 Hertz frequency!

Now, the next steps…

1. Choose the best one
2. Fit it inside Jolla’s housing
3. Find a way to connect the (different) loudspeaker pins to the motherboard audio out pins

Anyone who feels like helping out?

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As I think Jolla’s loudspeaker is a bit too weak, I’ve been thinking about ways to fix that. Ended up disassembling my Jolla, Nokia N8 and Sony Ericsson K750i and rip their loudspeakers off their metal hearts

Then I set up Jolla’s mediaplayer to play Jolla’s ringtone in an infinite loop, and then started the game

First I connected Jolla’s loudspeaker to the pins, then N8’s, then K750i’s.

K750i’s loudspeaker is too big to fit in Jolla’s loudspeaker housing, but the one from N8 could fit after some manual work on the cover

Check out the video to see how the 3 loudspeakers performed when implanted on Jolla!

DISCLAIMER: I’m total noob at electronics, I just found a way to do what I wanted to do, no guarantee that this is the right way to do it

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4e5zqG86c4

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I took inspiration from the current qtquickcontrols-tizen repo and built the repo for the new Nemo components for Glacier UI! So, first of all, a big thank you to Tomasz Olszak (nickname: tolszak) and Jarosław_Staniek (nickname: staniek) for their awesome work on Qt for Tizen!

I changed quite a lot of stuff from qtquickcontrols-tizen repo in the attempt to improve the overall quality and make things easier for the people who will contribute to building Glacier components. I hope I succeeded at that task

For those who don’t know what Glacier is: It is the new UI for Nemomobile, you can find some mockups here:http://play.qwazix.com/grog/?p=344

Yes, it will be as awesome as it looks from the mockups!

Nemomobile UI Components are built on top on QtQuickControls, the UI QML controls of Qt5, the ones which will be used for both Desktop and Android/iOS app development in QML!

This way it will be easy to port software developed for iOS/Android/Sailfish using QtQuickControls to Nemomobile

Together with the repository I published the Button component, which is the first component of the new Glacier UI! Hurray for the button!

I published the Button in a separate commit so that those of you who would like to contribute have an example of what to modify/add to create a new UI control

I have recorded a short video showing the Button component, here it is

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcS_D1pO0lE

If you want to be part of the development please do not hesitate to come talk to me (faenil) at #nemomobile IRC channel (FreeNode server) and…let’s make it happen!

REPOSITORY URL: https://github.com/faenil/qtquickcontrols-nemo

Cheers,

faenil (Andrea Bernabei)

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We have to change that and make it easier for people to join and have fun with us…

But who wants to modify a wiki? We want to hack!

But someone has to do that….

So I thought it was worth helping a bit in that sense as well, I wrote a guide to getting started with Wayland VM virtualbox image, a guide to getting started with N9/N950 Nemo apps development, and the current status matrix of Nemo Wayland

Check them out!

If you want to develop apps for Nemomobile or contribute to Nemomobile development using N9/N950, read:
Nemo Wayland armv7hl (N9/N950) development tutorial

For the VirtualBox VM image check:
Nemo Wayland VM development tutorial

Current status matrix of Nemo Wayland:
Nemo Wayland status

Come join us on #nemomobile IRC channel!

Enjoy!

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FIRST OF ALL: sorry for the many ads on this website! This blog is looking absolutely awful. I absolutely have to clean it and change style completely. But no time at the moment…Restyling will come as soon as possible

WOW!

It’s been 2 years already since I last updated this blog…time has gone by so fast, and so many things happened in the meanwhile

I left the Symbian community after the i8910 and Nokia N8 efforts, and moved to Harmattan when I had the honour to receive a Nokia N950 developer device in August 2011…awesome moment

I met lots of nice people on #nemomobile IRC channel on FreeNode (some of their nicknames, in random order: sledgeSim, Sage, Venemo, fk_lx, qwazix, w00t, special, Stskeeps, Sfiet_Konstantin dm8tbr, cybette, iekku, jukkaeklund, veskuh, Jonni, and many others…) , and I’ve always enjoyed the atmosphere

Few months later Jolla people announced their plans, and in September 2012 the Jolla hack day was organized by Devaamo, in Tampere! I had already been in contact with Jolla people because basically most of them were already Nemomobile contributors before Jolla was born, and I knew I would have loved a company with those people and values/ideals behind. I absolutely wanted to join them at the hack day! I had to sell a few gadgets (a tablet and something else) to be able to join them (eh, students life ), but it was definitely worth it! I also owe this to the nice girl that hosted me in Tampere for 3 days! (and thanks to CouchSurfing for making this possible).

You can hear Iekku thanking me for the contributions to Nemomobile’s image/video gallery application (which was used by Marko Saukko aka Sage to show the presentation slides) during one of the Nemomobile related talks at the hackday, link here That was so kind of her, thanks honey-badger, I was about to panic! But maybe that was because of the many Mountain Dews I drank that day!

The launch was just AWESOME! It was very exciting, and I felt as happy as them

She took 7 PICTURES…and….well, you can see the result below.

After November I had to dive again into university studies…and I kept contributing to the nemomobile project whenever I had some spare time (either by fixing bugs or by helping people on chat) or I was not as stressed as I am during exams periods. So we’ll fast-forward to May

After that, the launch of The Jolla, the first SailfishOS phone by Jolla which is supposed to be shipping during XMas period. Very exciting stuff, just like you would expect from a Jolla event

Though I have to say I was a bit disappointed this time because we were told so many times to “wait for May to get more info”, and we got almost nothing

But, well, not their fault, they worked so hard, and they showed us all they could show at that time

Again Couchsurfing and Ryanair made this possible A very kind Finnish couple of young people hosted me, Venemo, and fk_lx!

The talks at the event were very interesting, and the free soft drinks and food made everything better

The second day there was a hacking challenge going on as well…at the end of the day, after the talks were finished, we formed up 3 teams of 2 people (me, qwazix, aknight, Venemo, fk_lx, and another guy) and went through all the puzzles in about half an hour

It was very entertaining I have to say, I’m looking forward to participating in another hacking challenge

The exams period eventually finished, and at the end of July I finally had some spare time again to hack Nemomobile!

Exciting stuff!

But I’m tired of writing and this post is already huge

So I’ll leave the nemomobile hacking to the next one

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