u/Canatee

I feel silly having both bought a Beam Pro and eagerly awaited OneUI 8.5 to put back auto-hide taskbar in DeX to be able to have a completely black background and get more control over side view.

I realized that since the app I'm always using, Findroid, is open source, I can just make a personal fork and add this myself. Also fixed some download manager issues the app's had pull requests for for years and made it talk to my Xteink X3 via BT LE as a media remote.

I even specifically made this affect the video canvas rather than the app window so playback controls, settings, and even subtitles stay full screen.

Sharing as an idea for others to replicate, not as an app for others to use. I'm not interested in maintaining a fork or even figuring out what my obligations are upstream if I did.

This is all vibe coded to hell (albeit with some very specific instructions that still took a lot of time to learn to give), and basically ignores the actual point of Epub Media Overlay files (from Storyteller, shoutout u/scrollin_thru) and instead treats them as "audiobooks with lyrics". The UI is a lot more inspired by synced lyrics in music players than a typical book-first ereader implementation. The Xteink X3 is running my custom fork of the Crosspoint BT Remote fork, using the BT BLE stack to talk to the app directly. The player then sends the active text snippet to the reader over BT and also a few pieces of metadata like a trigger for the custom UI (the same remote works for music and other media using another UI) and skip button labels.

I know how the community hate vibe code so don't worry, this is not a plug for anything. I just think this is a neat use case for both the X3 and media overlay files that can inspire others to make something "proper".

Needs a companion app to handle the bridge between media session events and BT LE connection, and some logic to transfer cover art in stages, but works well. Now I'm not eyeing those earbuds with charging cases anymore.

Next step is making it able to dynamically scale the title field to fit the Epub Media Overlay highlighted text snippets the Noctium dev is working on broadcasting as a media session event. Then it hopefully becomes a wireless eink read-along companion to audiobooks.

For a week or so now I've tried to use HA as the master location for my step count. My watch's companion app, Zepp, writes to Health Connect, and the HA companion app grabs it from there. On the HA side I mirror it into a total increasing sensor template for the purpose of being able to swap the source if I swap phones etc, then dashboard cards show current dynamic step counter and bar graphs for last 30 days, per week, and per month.

The problem with it has been that the pipeline Watch -> Zepp -> HC -> HA is very prone to one pipe falling asleep. It usually is accurate-ish by the end of the day but missing a few dozen steps around midnight. Even if I set HA to update sensor data every minute or use an automation to request an update right before midnight, that doesn't help if Zepp is busy taking a nap and writing the last step count after midnight. HC will eventually be correct with backfilled data, HA will not since it moves on at midnight.

I've also had problems with backfilling data. Using "import statistics" from HACS I can import CSVs but it's quite finicky to write the right values since it recalculates totals and expect hourly readings. I did manage to manually backfill the start of july from a manual source eventually but it took more back and forth than I liked.

My solution was to set up a webhook sending JSON data to an AppDaemon script that manually enters values into an external statistic value on a per-day basis, targeting 23:00. The incoming data is merged into a daily step count instead of hourly values and it only writes values prior to today. Coupled with an Android app I made that requests Health Connect access and grabs daily totals, it functionally means that it will get X days of accurate, finished statistics + the current count for today, disregard the latter, and write the former if missing. That way it doesn't matter if Zepp wrote some backdated data. Not being connected to a live sensor means less mess with hourly deltas as well.

This works, is very controllable by me, and includes a JSON ledger that is the script's master source just in case. It's also easy to swap to any other source, and I even have an alternative input source by making the watchface itself keep track and a watch app setup sending that off to the same webhook. On paper it seems like the actually-me-in-control option I don't feel like the official pipeline offers.

But since I'm not finding any discussions about this exact issue in community discussions, want some smarter eyes on this to check to see if I missed something, possibly over-complicating the fix because I missed a setting or something.

So far the HA part is just the server used to store the image fetched on sleep, but going that route means I can write to the same image using other means as well, so we'll see where this goes.

The magnetic charger (or rather, the USB-C adapter version, but goes for either) for the X3 gives me a bit of PTSD to the Pebble and other shitty magnetic pogo pin chargers. As if the connection type isn't already unstable enough, Xteink decided to balance it on a thin protrusion (probably for cases) which makes it even wobblier.

Some Lego, super glue, a magsafe adapter ring, air-dry clay and spray paint later and I have this blob. It magnetically attaches to the primary magsafe part as well as the charging part, and justr adds stability. It's of course a trade off in size, but this is not a charger I need to carry around, and it can even be given a foot to turn it into a charging stand in the future if I so desire.

I'm leaving this here more as a search target than something that is probably immediately useful to anyone.

I recently started using Noctium on Android for books, and it has Koreader sync. No matter what I tried, I could not calculate a hash using the raw Calibre file to match anything Noctium was writing, and the hash isn't visible to users in there. Today I got an Xteink X3 and Crosspoint's Koreader Sync found the Noctium data just fine.

After some digging, this is the problem: Calibre rewrites files it serves over OPDS to include metadata, meaning that any device using the OPDS version of the file will calculate a different hash than the raw file on the server. This is apparently kinda documented somewhere if you know exactly where to look but apparently I didn't until I knew what the issue was. The filename based alternative match Koreader sync offers isn't always an option for apps and filenames can also be changed in the process ((swapping author and title order).

The best tool to quickly find the hash seems to be Readest. The URL to read a book in the web reader uses the exact hash as the unique part of the URL. Feed your OPDS files back in there to extract the hash if you're ever in need of putting the OPDS hash back into Calibre.

The problem is then that if you start syncing progress to calibre, the extra metadata in those columns will propagate out to new OPDS downloads and generate a new hash. So it's an evil circle doomed to never work properly.

Edit: I found a way to "fix" it. Disable all of Calibre's "metadata writer" plugins. God knows what else that will break but it does solve it. Note that there's also an option in the internal ebook viewer to store progress internal in the file, so disable that too. I had to restore an epub from the cloud to get back the actual raw epub just from accidentally double clicking a book.

Edit 2: Noctium's dev has now added the md5 hash visible in the UI when using koreader sync, which should add another way to make the actual hash more visible for people setting up sync.

Bought a stack of these things on Ali a while back as they're advertised as everything from DAC holders to normal card wallets. Figured they'd be great DIY magsafe bases to have. Turns out it's a perfect fit for my brand new X3 whose magnets leave a lot to be desired.

If anyone know any good made-to-fit cases with strong magsafe though I'd listening.

I was searching for random shit a little while back and my brain farted long enough for me to look up magsafe headphones. Turns out that's a thing and it's made by the people who bought Nokia; HMD Amped Buds. I could find very little reputable information about them beyond them being available here and there, and some very small outlets/YouTube channels having done content on them. What's more, they were available as purchasable with a week's extra delivery time from a central warehouse from an online store shipping here to Norway. The price listed was about 1/4 of what appears to be the €180 ish MSRP so I said what the hell and ordered it. It sat around as processing for a week but eventually shipped and I got them today.

All I can say is how the hell did this fly under everyone's radar? They fold flat and click into a thin magsafe charging case 14mm thick, and fold out into something that's kinda airpods shaped with tiny rubber tips. As an IEM user I'm not entirely sure how the fit is supposed to be since I want to push them further in like IEMs, but they seem to sit more like how I'd imagine airpods sit. They sound good too, and I'm fairly picky on sound.

The feature set is insane, in more ways than one. They can charge wirelessly through magsafe, but also charge other devices via magsafe, which is kinda stupid given they have a 1600mAh battery and can't do that while USB is plugged in (missed opportunity to be a travel magsafe charger). They can connect to multiple devices, and support AptX, AptX Adaptive low latency, high quality, and even lossless (tested with FiiO Airlink). They apperared as a quick add thing on Android and even prompted to add to Find Hub.

I'm not sure there's €180 of value here but for someone liking this bud style, the AptX support and sound quality alone isn't off the mark for that. At 1/4 that price I'm not sure if I just picked up the leftovers of a failed product venture or what was going on. There's even a dedicated app for them, with a nonfunctional FW update that says "coming soon" and no update since April 1 last year.

There seems to be room for bigger tips if I can find something that fits, so I'll play around with that next. Either way, stupidly nice find for the price even if it wasn't just to satisfy my curiosity.