Tag: gaming

Android, Android marketplace and gaming addiction.

This would be a longish piece so please bear and play with tea, coffee, beer or anything stronger that you desire while reading below 🙂

I had bought an Android phone, a Samsung J5 just before going to debconf 2016. It was more for being in-trend rather than really using it. The one which I shared is the upgraded version (recentish) the one I have is 2 GB for which I had paid around double of what the list price was. The only reason I bought the model is that it had ‘removable battery’ at the price point I was willing to pay. I did see that Samsung has the same ham-handed issues with audio as previous Nokia devices use to, the speakers and microphone probably the cheapest you can get on the market. Nokia was same too, at least on the lower-end of the market, while Oppo has loud ringtones and loud music, perfect for those who are a bit hard of hearing (as yours truly is).

I had been pleasantly surprised by the quality of photos Samsung J5 was churning even though I’m less than average shooter, never been really into it so was a sort of wake-up call for where camera sensor technology is advancing. And of course with newer phones the kind of detail it can capture is mesmerizing to say the least, although wide-angle shots still would take some time to get right I guess.

If memory serves me right, sometime back Laura Arjona Reina (who handles part of debian-publicity and part of debian-women among other responsibilities) shared a blog post on p.d.o. where she had shared the troubles she had while exporting data from the phone. While she shared that and I lack the time or the energy to try and find it ( the entry is really bookmarkable, at least that specific blog post).

What was interesting though that I had gone few years ago to Bangalore, there is an organization which I like and admire CIS great for researchers. Anyways they had done a project getting between 10-20 phones from the market made of Chinese origin (almost all mobiles sold in India, the fabrication of CPU and APU etc. are done in China/Taiwan and then assembled here). Here what is done at the most is assembly which for all political purposes is called ‘manufacturing’ . All the mobiles kept quite a bit of info. on the device even after you wiped them clean/put some other ROM on them. The CIS site is more than a bit cluttered otherwise would have shared the direct link. I do hope to send an e-mail to CIS and hopefully they will respond with the report and will share that here as and when. It would be interesting to know if after people flash a custom rom if the status quo is the same as it was before. I do suspect it would be the former as flashing ROMs on phones is still a bit of specialized subject at least here in India with even an average phone costing a month or two’s salary or more and the idea of bricking the phone scares most people (including yours truly).

Anyways, for a long time I was on bed and had the phone. I used 2 games from the android marketplace which both mum and I enjoy and enjoyed. Those are Real jigsaw and Jigsaw puzzle HD . The permissions dialog which Real jigsaw among other games has is horrible and part of me freaks that all such apps. have unrestricted access to my storage area. Ideally, what Android should have done is either partition or give functionality to the user to have private space for their photos and whatever media they have and the rest of the area is like a public park. If anybody has any thoughts on partitioning on Android phone would like to hear that.

One game though which really hooked mumma and me is ‘The Island Experiment‘ . It reminded me of my younger days when gaming addiction was not treated as a disease but thankfully now is . I would call myself somewhat of a ‘functional addict’ as in do my every day things, work etc. but do dream about the game as to what it will show me next. A part of it is the game is web-based (which means it needs constant internet connection) and web access is somewhat pricey, although with Reliance Jio an upcoming data network operator having bundles of money and promising the moon, network issues at least on low-bandwidth game which I and mum are playing hopefully will not have any issues. I haven’t used tshark or any such tool to analyze the traffic but I guess it probably just sends short messages of number of clicks in a time period and things like that, all the rest (I guess) is happening on the mobile itself. I know at sometime I probably will try to put a custom rom on it but which one is the question as there are so many and also which is most compatible with my device. It seems I would have to do lot of homework before I can make any choices.

Couple of months back, a friend of mine Akshat who has been using Android for few years enabled Developer Options which I didn’t know about till he shared that info. with me. I do hope people do check Akshat’s repo. as he has made/has quite a few useful scripts, especially if you are into digital photography. I have shared with him gimp scripting few days back so along with imagemagick you might see him doing some rough scripts in it. Of course, if people use it and give feedback he might clean the scripts a bit so it gives useful error messages and gives statement like ‘gimp is not installed on your system, please install it or ask for specific version’ but as it works in free software it is somewhat directly proportional to the number of users, bugs and users behind it.

A good example of what I mean is youtube-dl . I filed 873853 where I shared the upstream ticket. Apparently YouTube again changed few days back and while upstream has fixed it, the youtube-dl maintainer probably needs to find time and get the new version up. Apparently the issues lies in –

[$] dpkg -L youtube-dl | grep youtube.py
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py

Hopefully somebody does the needful.

Btw, I find f-droid extremely useful and especially osmand but sadly both of them are not shared or talked about by people 😦

The reason I shared about Developer Options in Android is that few days back I noticed that the phone wonks off and has unpredictable behaviour such as not letting me browse the web, do additions or deletions using the google play store and alike . Things came to a head when few days back I saw a fibre-optic splicing operation being carried by some workers near my home by the state operator which elated me and wanted to shoot the video for it but the battery died/there was no power even though I hadn’t used it much. I have deliberately shared the hindi version which tells how that knowledge is now coming to the masses. I had seen fibre-optic splicing more than a decade and a half back at some net conference where it was going to be in your neighbourhood soonish, hopefully it will happen soon 🙂

I had my suspicions for quite sometime all the issues with the phone were not due to proper charging. During course of my investigation, found out that in Developer Options there is an option called USB Configuration and changing that from the default MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) (which is basically used to put or take movies, music or any file from the phone to the computer or vice-versa improved much better behaviour on my android phone. But this caused an unexpected side-effect, I got pretty aggressive polling of the phone by the computer even after saying I do not want to share the phone details with the computer. This I filed as 874216 . The phone and I am guessing most Samsung phones today come with an adaptor with a USB male socket which goes in to the phone’s usb port. There is the classical port for electricity but like most people heavily rely on usb charging even for deep fully powered down phone for full charging.

One interesting project which I saw which came in Debian some days back is dummydroid. I did file a bug about it . I do hope that either the maintainer gives some more documentation. I am sure many people might use and add to the resource if the documentation was/is there. I did take a look at the package and the profile seems to be like an xml pair kind of database. Having more profiles shouldn’t be hard if we knew what info. needs to be added and how do we find that info.

Lastly, I am slowly transferring all the above knowledge to my mum as well, although in small doses. She, just like me has and had problems coming from resistive touchscreen to capacitive touchscreen. You can call me wrong but resistive touchscreen seemed to be superior and not as error-prone or liable to commit mistakes as is possible in capacitive touchscreens. There may be a setting to higher/lower the threshold for touching which I have not been able to find as of yet.

Hope somebody finds something useful in there. I do hope that Debian does become a replacement to be used on such mobiles but then they would have to duplicate/also have some sort of mainstream content with editors to help people find stuff, something that Debian is not so good at currently. Also I’m not sure Synaptic is good fit as a mobile store.

Density and accessibility

Around 2 decades back and a bit more I was introduced to computers. The top-line was 386DX which was mainly used as fat servers and some lucky institutions had the 386SX where IF we were lucky we could be able to play some games on it. I was pretty bad at Prince of Persia or most of the games of the era as most of the games depended on lightning reflexes which I didn’t possess. Then 1997 happened and I was introduced to GNU/Linux but my love of/for games still continued even though I was bad at most of them. The only saving grace was turn-based RPG’s (role-playing games) which didn’t have permadeath, so you could plan your next move. Sometimes a wrong decision would lead to getting a place from where it was impossible to move further. As the decision was taken far far break which lead to the tangent, the only recourse was to replay the game which eventually lead to giving most of those kind of games.

Then in/around 2000 Maxis came out with Sims. This was the time where I bought my first Pentium. I had never played a game which had you building stuff, designing stuff, no violence and the whole idea used to be about balancing priorities of trying to get new stuff, go to work, maintain relationships and still make sure you are eating, sleeping, have a good time. While I might have spent probably something close to 500 odd hours in the game or even more so, I spent the least amount of time in building the house. It used to be 4×4 when starting (you don’t have much of in-game money and other stuff you wanted to buy as well) to 8×8 or at the very grand 12×12. It was only the first time I spent time trying to figure out where the bathroom should be, where the kitchen should, where the bedroom should be and after that I could do that blind-folded. The idea behind my house-design used to be simplicity, efficient (for my character). I used to see other people’s grand creations of their houses and couldn’t understand why they made such big houses.

Now few days back, I saw few episodes of a game called ‘Stranded Deep’ . The story, plot is simple. You, the player are going in a chartered plane and suddenly lightning strikes ( game trope as today’s aircrafts are much better able to deal with lightning strikes) and our hero or heroine washes up on a beach with raft with the barest of possessions. Now the whole game is based upon him/her trying to survive, once you get the hang of the basic mechanics and you know what is to be done, you can do it. The only thing the game doesn’t have is farming but as the game has unlimited procedural world, you just paddle or with boat motor go island hopping and take all that what you need.

What was interesting to me was seeing a gamer putting so much time and passion in making a house.

When I was looking at that video, I realized that maybe because I live in a dense environment, even the designs we make either of houses or anything else is more to try to get more and more people rather than making sure that people are happy which leads to my next sharing.

Couple of days back, I read Virali Modi’s account of how she was molested three times when trying to use Indian Railways. She made a petition on change.org

While I do condemn the molestation as it’s an affront against individual rights, freedom, liberty, free movement, dignity.

Few of the root causes as pointed out by her, for instance the inability or non-preference to give differently-abled people the right to board first as well as awaiting to see that everybody’s boarded properly before starting the train are the most minimum steps that Indian Railways could take without spending even a paise. The same could be told/shared about sensitizing people, although I have an idea of why does Indian Railway not employ women porters or women attendants for precisely this job.

I accompanied a blind gentleman friend few times on Indian Railways and let me tell you, it was one of the most unpleasant experiences. The bogies which is given to them is similar or even less than what you see in unreserved compartments. The toilets were/are smelly, the gap between the station and the train was/is considerable for everybody from blind people, differently-abled people, elderly people as well. This is one of the causes of accidents which happen almost every day on Indian Railways. I also learnt that especially for blind people they are ‘looking’ for a sort of low-frequency whistle/noise which tells them the disabled coupe/bogie/coach will come at a specific spot in the Station. In a platform which could have anything between 1500-2000 people navigating it wouldn’t be easy. I don’t know about other places but Indian Railway Stations need to learn a lot to make it a space for differently abled to navigate by themselves.

Pune Station operates (originating or passing through) around 200 odd trains, with exceptions of all the specials and weekly trains that ply through, adding those would probably another 5-10 trains to the mix. Each train carries anywhere between 750-1000 odd people so roughly anywhere between 15-20 million pass through Pune Railway Station daily. Even if we take conservative estimates of around 5% of the public commuting from Pune, it would mean around 750,000 people travelling daily. Pune Railway Station has 6 stations and if I spread them equally it would come to around 100,000 people on one platform in 24 hours. Divide that equally by 24 hours and it comes to 4,160 people per hour.

Now you take those figures and you see the Pune platforms are under severe pressure. I have normalized many figures. For instance, just like airports, even in railways, there are specific timings where more trains come and go. From morning 0500 hrs to late night 2300 hrs. there would be lot many trains, whereas the graveyard shifts would have windows where maintenance of tracks and personnel takes place.

I dunno if people can comprehend 4000 odd people on the platform. Add to that you usually arrive at least an hour or two before a train departs even if you are a healthy person as Indian Railways has a habit of changing platforms of trains at the last minute.

So if you a differently abled person with some luggage for a long-distance train, the problems just multiply.

See drag accidents because of gap between railway bogies and platforms.

The width of the entrance to the bogie is probably between 30-40 inches but the design is such that 5-10 inches are taken on each side. I remembered the last year, our current Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi had launched Accessible Campaign with great fanfare and we didn’t hear anything much after that.

Unfortunately, the site itself has latency and accessibility issues, besides not giving any real advice even if a person wants to know what building norms should one follow if one wants to make an area accessible. This was easily seen by last year’s audit in Delhi as well as other places. A couple of web-searches later, I landed up at a Canadian site to have some idea about the width of the wheelchair itself as well as additional room to manoeuvre.

Unfortunately, the best or the most modern coaches/bogies that Indian Railways has to offer are the LHB Bogies/Coaches.

Now while the Coaches/Bogies by themselves are a big improvement from the ICF Coaches which we still have and use, if you read the advice and directions shared on the Canadian site, the coaches are far from satisfactory for people who are wheel-chair bound. According to Government’s own census records, 0.6% of the population have movement issues. Getting all the differently-abled people together, it comes between 2, 2.5% of the population which is quite a bit. If 2-3 people out of every 100 people are differently-abled then we need to figure out something for them.While I don’t have any ideas as to how we could improve the surroundings, it is clear that we need the change.

While I was thinking,dreaming,understanding some of the nuances inadvertently, my attention/memories shifted to my ‘toilet’ experiences at both Mumbai and the Doha Airport. As had shared then, had been pleasantly surprised to see that both in Mumbai Airport as well as the Doha Airport, the toilets were pretty wide, a part of me was happy and a part of me was seeing the added space as wastefulness. With the understanding of needs of differently-abled people it started to make whole lot of sense. I don’t remember if I had shared then or not. Although am left wondering where they go for loo in the aircraft. The regular toilets are a tight fit for obese people, I am guessing aircrafts have toilets for differently-abled people as well.

Looking back at last year’s conference, we had 2-3 differently-abled people. I am just guessing that it wouldn’t have been a pleasant experience for them. For instance, where we were staying, at UCT it had stairs, no lifts so by default they probably were on ground-floor. Then where we were staying and where most of the talks were about a few hundred metres away and the shortest distance were by stairs, the round-about way was by road but had vehicles around so probably not safe that way as well. I am guessing they had to be dependant on other people to figure out things. There were so many places where there were stairs and no ramps and even if there were ramps they were probably a bit more than the 1:12 which is the advice given.

I have heard that this year’s venue is also a bit challenging in terms of accessibility for differently-abled people. I am clueless as to did differently-able find debconf16 in terms of accessibility or not ? A related query to that one, if a Debconf’s final report mentions issues with accessibility, do the venues make any changes so that at some future date, differently-abled people would have a better time. I know of Indian institutions reluctance to change, to do expenditure, dunno how western countries do it. Any ideas, comments are welcome.