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.

I don't know how this operating system is for. I have been using free unix desktops for a decade, I can't see anything in ubuntu touch that I want. The default system shows a collections of scopes, scopes are an advertisers dream.

There are default scopes like, weather, music, video, news and the scopes are populated by scope apps that create a feed for each theme. There are loads of different input services for them as well, so if you use facebook, instagram, flicker, 500px you will have a nice full feed. If you use one, or none of them you won't have anything. I saw the scopes and thought of windows crap wear.

I turned off all of the scopes as soon as I could.

Here is a short list of issues I encounter:

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.

I was hit pretty hard the last few weeks with the standard issue winter cold. I was quite surprised to see how little energy I had for working on anything after work. I certainly see the value in taking time of work even if it just means more energy for side projects.

Yakamo and I have continued to push out our podcast , with another episode appearing today. Our audio is getting better though you won't hear it in the most recent show as I did all of the editing with my backup audio.

Editing the backup audio showed some of the issues with mumbles recorder. It was a lot of trouble to keep my levels balanced, there seems to be gain correction on the mumble feed so my starting audio is super loud and it just tampers off.

So yakamo and I have been managed to do it again, the most recent episode of the unreasonable podcast , episode 0x03 appeared yesterday.

This episode should now be missing large chunks of silence and features a much deeper sexier voice for me. Turns out there were some config issues with my microphone. There were also some observation issues, I didn't actually listen to the whole show or check the waveform before doing the renders.

Should all be fixed now and it will sound silky smooth.

Or something.

It has been mentioned by a friend that my voice in the recent unreasonable podcast episodes is much higher than it is in reality. Of course for the first few episodes he just said 'your audio is fucked' which didn't help me resolve the issue at all.

With the detail that pitch was off I knew where to start looking, the pitch issue was present on both the audacity recording and the mumble back up. The audio rate for the microphone and audacity where both the same, 44.1kHz.

The last thing to check was the audio sub system on FreeBSD. I read the snd man page and it pointed me to a few sysctl knobs that I might be able to tweak. I also checked the man page for usb audio and found this little notice in the bugs section:

BUGS The PCM framework in FreeBSD only supports synchronous device detach. That means all mixer and DSP character devices belonging to a given USB audio device must be closed when receiving an error on a DSP read, a DSP write or a DSP IOCTL request. Else the USB audio driver will wait for this to happen, preventing enumeration of new devices on the parenting USB controller.

 Some USB audio devices might refuse to work properly unless the sample
 rate is configured the same for both recording and playback, even if only
 simplex is used.  See the dev.pcm.%d.[play|rec].vchanrate sysctls.

 The PCM framework in FreeBSD currently doesn't support the full set of
 USB audio mixer controls.  Some mixer controls are only available as
 dev.pcm.%d.mixer sysctls.

vchanrate is a per device sample rate that can be controlled by a sysctl, toggling the value showed me the problem. With the rate at the correct 44100 my deep voice poured out of my microphone and into a file.

$ sudo sysctl dev.pcm.4.rec.vchanrate=44100
dev.pcm.4.rec.vchanrate: 48000 -> 44100