Tag: Lenovo

Comixology for Android: bad engineering, and an exemplary tale against DRM

I grew up as a huge fan of comic books. Not only Italian Disney comics, which are something in by themselves, but also of US comics from Marvel. You could say that I grew up on Spider-Man and Duck Avenger. Unfortunately actually holding physical comic books nowadays is getting harder, simply because I’m travelling all the time, and I also try to keep as little physical media as I manage to, given the constraint of space of my apartment.

Digital comics are, thus, a big incentive for me to keep reading. And in particular, a few years ago I started buying my comics from Comixology, which was later bought by Amazon. The reason why I chose this particular service over others is that it allowed me to buy, and read, through a single service, the comics from Marvel, Dark Horse, Viz and a number of independent publishers. All of this sounded good to me.

I have not been reading a lot over the past few years, but as I moved to London, I found that the tube rides have the perfect span of time to catch up on the latest Spider-Man or finish up those Dresden Files graphic novels. So at some point last year I decided to get myself a second tablet, one that is easier to bring on the Tube than my neat but massive Samsung Tab A.

While Comixology is available for the Fire Tablet (being an Amazon property), I settled for the Lenovo Tab 4 8 Plus (what a mouthful!), which is a pretty neat “stock” Android tablet. Indeed, Lenovo customization of the tablet is fairly limited, and beside some clearly broken settings in the base firmware (which insisted on setting up Hangouts as SMS app, despite the tablet not having a baseband), it works quite neatly, and it has a positively long lasting battery.

The only real problem with that device is that it has very limited storage. It’s advertised as a 16GB device, but the truth is that only about half of it is available to the user. And that’s only after effectively uninstalling most of the pre-installed apps, most of which are thankfully not marked as system apps (which means you can fully uninstall them, instead of just keeping them disabled). Indeed, the more firmware updates, the fewer apps that are marked as system apps it seems — in my tablet the only three apps currently disabled are the File Manager, Gmail and Hangouts (this is a reading device, not a communication device). I can (and should) probably disable Maps, Calendar, and Photos as well, but that’s going to be for later.

Thankfully, this is not a big problem nowadays, as Android 6 introduced adoptable storage which allows you to use an additional SD cards for storage, transparently for both the system and the apps. It can be a bit slow depending on the card and the usage you make of the device, but as a reading device it works just great.

You were able to move apps to the SD card in older Android versions too, but in those cases you would end up with non-encrypted apps that would still store their data on the device’s main storage. For those cases, a number of applications, including for instance Audible (also an Amazon offering) allow you to select an external storage device to store their data files.

When I bought the tablet, SD card and installed Comixology on it, I didn’t know much about this part of Android to be honest. Indeed, I only checked if Comixology allowed storing the comics on the SD card, and since I found that was the case, I was all happy. I had adopted the SD card though, without realizing what that actually meant, though, and that was the first problem. Because then the documentation from Comixology didn’t actually match my experience: the setting to choose the SD card for storage didn’t appear, and I contacted tech support, who kept asking me questions about the device and what I was trying to do, but provided me no solution.

Instead, I noticed that everything was alright: as I adopted the SD card before installing the app, it got automatically installed on it, and it started using the card itself for storage, which allowed me to download as many comicbooks as I wanted, and not bother me at all.

Until some time earlier this year, I couldn’t update the app anymore. It kept failing with a strange Play Store error. So I decided to uninstall and reinstall it… at which point I had no way to move it back to the SD card! They disabled the option to allow the application to be moved in their manifest, and that’s why Play Store was unable to update it.

Over a month ago I contacted Comixology tech support, telling them what was going on, assuming that this was an oversight. Instead I kept getting stubborn responses that moving the app to the SD card didn’t move the comics (wrong), or insinuating I was using a rooted device (also wrong). I still haven’t managed to get them to reintroduce the movable app, even though the Kindle app, also from Amazon, moves to the SD card just fine. Ironically, you can read comics bought on Kindle Store with the Comixology app but, for some reason, not vice-versa. If I could just use the Kindle app I wouldn’t even bother with installing the Comixology app.

Now I cancelled my Comixology Unlimited subscription, cancelled my subscription to new issues of Spider-Man, Bleach, and a few other series, and am pondering what’s the best solution to my problems. I could use non-adopted storage for the tablet if I effectively dedicate it to Comixology — unfortunately in that case I won’t be able to download Google Play Books or Kindle content to the SD card as they don’t support the external storage mode. I could just read a few issues at a time, using the ~7GB storage space that I have available on the internal storage, but that’s also fairly annoying. More likely I’ll start buying the comics from another service that has a better understanding of the Android ecosystem.

Of course the issue remains that I have a lot of content on Comixology, and just a very limited subset of comics are DRM-free. This is not strictly speaking Comixology’s fault: the publishers are the one deciding whether to DRM their content or not. But it definitely shows an issue that many publishers don’t seem to grasp: in front of technical problems like this, the consumer will have better “protection” if they would have just pirated the comics!

For the moment, I can only hope that someone reading this post happens to work for, or know someone working for, Comixology or Amazon (in the product teams — I know a number of people in the Amazon production environment, but I know they are far away from the people who would be able to fix this), and they can update the Comixology app to be able to work with modern Android, so that I can resume reading all my comics easily.

Or if Amazon feels like that, I’d be okay with them giving me a Fire tablet to use in place of the Lenovo. Though I somewhat doubt that’s something they would be happy on doing.

Playing old games

I already have a proper, beefy gamestation which I use to play games the few days a year I spend at home. It’s there for games like Fallout 4, Skyrim and the lot where actual processing power is needed. I also use it for my photo editing, since I ended up accepting that Adobe tools are actually superior (particularly in long-term compatibility support) to anything I could find open-source.

On the other hand, I spend a significant amount of time “on the road”, as they say, travelling for conferences, or meeting my supported development teams, or just trying to get some time for myself, playing Ingress, or whatever else. The guy who was so scared of flying is now clearly a frequent flyer and one that likes seeing confs and cons.

This means that I spend a significant amount of time in a hotel room, without my gamestation and with some will to play games. Particularly when I’m somewhere for work, and so not spending the evenings out with friends — I do that sometimes when I’m out for work too, but not always. I have for a very long while spent the hotel time writing blog posts, but since the blog went down I didn’t (and even now, because of what I chose to use, it’s going to be awkward since it ends up requiring SSH access to post.) After that I spent some of the time by effectively working overtime, writing design docs and figuring out work-related problems; this is not great, not only because it leaves me with a horrible work/life balance, but also because I wouldn’t want to give the impression to my colleagues that this is something we need to do, particularly those who joined after me.

So on my last US trip, back in April, I was thinking of what I could actually play during my stay. Games on mobile and tablet are… not quite satisfying pretty quickly. I used to have a PSP (I didn’t bring it with me), but except for Monster Hunter Freedom, most of the games I’ve played have been JRPGs — I was considering getting myself a PlayStation Vita so that I could play Tales of Heart R but then I thought against it, because seriously, the Vita platform clearly failed a long time ago. I briefly considered the latest iteration of Nintendo’s portable (remember this is before they announced the Switch) but I also thought against it because I simply don’t like their form factor.

I settled on getting myself an Ideapad 100S, a very cheap, Windows laptop, and a random HP bluetooth mouse, total damage, less than €200. This is a very underpowered device if you want to use it for anything at all, including browsing the net, but the reason why I bought it was actually much simpler: it is powerful enough to play games such as Caesar 3, Pharaoh, The Settlers IV and so on. And while I may have taken a not very ethical approach to these back in the days, these games are easily, and legally, available on gog.com.

While they are not ported to Linux, some of them do play on Wine, on the other hand I did not want to spend time trying to get them to work on my Linux laptop because I want to play to relax, not to get even more aggravated when things stopped working. So instead I play them on that otherwise terrible laptop.

I actually did not play on it on my last trip, that included two 12-hours flight between, respectively, Paris and Shanghai, and Tokyo and Paris, but that was because I was visiting China, and I’m trained to be paranoid, but otherwise I have been having quite a bit of luck to play this even in the economy section to play Pharaoh and company. The only game I have not managed to play on it yet is NoX, for whatever reason the screen flickers when I try to start it up. I should just try that one on Wine, I’m fairly sure it works.

I’m actually wondering how many people have been considering reimplementing these games based on the original assets; I know people have over time done that for Dune 2⁄2000 and for Total Annihilation, but I have not dared trying to figure out if anyone else tried for other games. It would definitely be interested. I have not played any RTS in a while even though I do have a copy of Age of Empires 2 HD on my gamestation; I only played a couple of deathmatch games online with friends and even that was difficult to organize, what with all of us working, and me almost always being in different timezones.

On a more technical point, the Lenovo laptop is quite interesting. It’s very low specs, but it has some hardware that is rare to find on PCs at all, particularly it comes with an SDIO-based WiFi card. I have not tried even getting Linux to run on it, but if I were bored, I’m sure it would be an interesting set of hardware devices that might or might not work correctly, on that one.

Oh well, that’s a story for another time.