The Xteink on the left shows the stock Crosspoint font
(in regular and bold); the one on the right shows one of my
semi-bold fonts.
I already wrote about my
neat new tiny Xteink X4 E-book reader,
which I flashed to the open source firmware Crosspoint.
I found Crosspoint's only preinstalled font, Noto, too thin and spidery
for easy reading.
But getting new fonts turned out to be a little complicated.
You can find some pre-built .cpfont files (the format Crosspoint
understands) in
crosspointreader.com/fonts,
and some more in
Crosspoint
font releases. No previews, and I couldn't find any way to
download everything (short of cloning the whole repository and then checking
out the appropriate release SHA) so you have to just guess at
which font face names might fit your needs,
and then download files one at a time for each face and size you want to try.
I got my husband an Xteink X4 Classic e-reader for his birthday
after reading Hollie's
comments on the X4. After seeing it, I immediately ordered one
for myself.
First impression: it's startlingly small, thin and light.
Even after seeing photos, I wasn't prepared for this butterfly-weight
device. You could carry it everywhere and never notice. And yet the
e-ink screen is crisp and clear: despite its tiny size,
it's completely fine for reading books. And it's so easy to hold in
one hand.
I've been wanting a heart rate monitor I can check while exercising.
I've tried carrying a pulse oximeter,
but while they work fine for resting pulse sitting at home,
they seem utterly incapable of measuring a raised pulse outdoors on
the trail. (Too bad, since it would be nice to have the oxygen reading
when hiking up a mountain at 10,000 feet.)
I wonder if they have that problem for everybody; it may have to do with my
very small fingers.
There's the chest band option, from brands like Polar.
But I tried a Polar HRM
years ago and found it exceedingly uncomfortable.
I don't deal well with
a tight band under my breasts, especially while exercising.
I've wondered about smart watches. Some people say they work fine
for monitoring pulse rate, others say they're not so good.
But Dave tried a couple of smart watches a year or two back,
and I saw what he went through trying to get it working.
It's probably all painless if you don't mind being
part of the Apple or Samsung ecosystem, using devices and software
exclusively from one company and having all your data uploaded
to that company's cloud (there to be shared or leaked or whatever).
But that's not really my thing.
I installed LineageOS on the old Pixel 3a that's been sitting in a drawer!
I've been meaning to try that forever, but never got around to it.
The installation experience was pretty good, and Lineage works great,
giving a new lease on life to a device that otherwise could be
leaching out toxic chemicals in a landfill. (Though I confess it was
actually sitting in a drawer, in case I ever found a use for it,
like all my other old phones and laptops.)
First, I want to stress how very old the Pixel 3a is.
It was first released in 2019 and discontinued in 2020.
It's wonderful that LineageOS still offers an OS that works on a
phone this old. It means that rather than throwing old phones away,
contributing to e-waste, an old phone can be repurposed to do
something useful.
Installation was remarkably easy on the 3a, though not totally without hiccups.
I just updated to Firefox 144 and discovered that when I narrow my
Mastodon window to its minimum size, it no longer fits in the space
between my mail and IRC windows. I suppose I could reduce the IRC window
even further, but I don't want to; the sizes I was using yesterday
were fine.
I ask you, what was the compelling reason that Firefox users had to be
prevented from using a 450-pixel wide window? What is up with Mozilla
developers? (And why do I still put up with random time-wasters like this?
Sure enough, they weren't. The error console said
Loading failed for the script
with the name of a calendar widget I use, along with the CSS it uses,
both loaded from a directory inside /javascript on my website,
the same website where the moon simulations are running.
I checked the logs: sure enough, references to those files were returning
404 in the access log, with nothing at all in the error log. The files
were clearly there, and world readable, so it wasn't a permissions problem.
I haven't really gotten into using AI chatbots as coding assistants,
so I'm not one to say. But it did make me wonder how many searches I do.
Michael saw a stat that people average fewer than 300 searches per month;
he thought that was absurdly low until he checked his own stats and
found he'd only made 211 searches so far in March.
(Of course, March isn't over yet.
He didn't give a search number for a complete month.)
But it turned out that Google expires OAuth2 tokens on a weekly basis.
So if you use that method, once a week you'll have to bring up a browser,
log in to your Google account and go through the five or so pages of
re-authorizing. Which will invariably happen when you're in a hurry
and just wanted to send a quick email so you can move on to other things.
However, it turns out there's an easier way, which apparently doesn't
expire: App passwords. I switched to using app passwords back then
(I've been using that app password since then),
and I even wrote it up, and then forgot to post it. What a dingbat!
But I changed my GMail password recently, and it turns out when you change
your Gmail account password, Google revokes all app passwords you've
set up (and, of course, doesn't bother to tell you that, and the
error message you get when you try to sign in with the old app password
has nothing whatever to do with the actual problem, which is that your
app password has been revoked and you need to create a new one).
So I dug out this old never-got-posted article and used it to
make a new app password, and have updated the parts that were a little
out of date.
![[Two Xteink X4 classics, tiny e-book readers, held in differently sized hands. One is white and held in a large hand, one black in a small hand]](https://shallowsky.com/blog/images/screenshots/xteink/PXL_20261011_214654158sm.jpg)
![[A PineTime watch being worn on an upper arm]](https://shallowsky.com/blog/images/bike/PXL_20260928_191437281.jpg)
I've been wanting a heart rate monitor I can check while exercising.
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