Confusion over number of requests for SD csrd images

[PeterT]

Something I'm not at all sure I understand is the number of people who brick their devices.

What is so hard about downloading the correct file and placing it on their device?

My guess: not following instructions.

I haven't had issues with Kobo devices since it's straight forward, but I have managed to brick my TF300T (Android) with third party firmware before. It was, erm, a good lesson on why you read instructions and I learnt a lot about the Android boot process in the process.

[Stitchawl]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Something I'm not at all sure I understand is the number of people who brick their devices. What is so hard about downloading the correct file and placing it on their device?

Originally Posted by BWinmill

My guess: not following instructions.

Instructions? What instructions? We don need no stinkin' instructions.

I've found the Kobo so straight forward, using either my Sony or Kobo power cord to charge it once a week, and Calibre to fill it with books, that I have difficulty imagining that ANYONE could have a problem with this e-reader.


Stitchawl

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Something I'm not at all sure I understand is the number of people who brick their devices.

What is so hard about downloading the correct file and placing it on their device?

It's not the downloading the correct file and placing it on the device that seems to cause most of the problems. I been surprised by the number of people who have managed to brick their Kobos by damaging the two Linux partitions that are not exposed during a normal USB connection, making a factory reset impossible.

Some possibilities that come to mind would be removing the uSD card and accessing it outside the ereader, using a console connection (telnet, etc.) to access the Linux filesystem, installing a firmware version that does not support the device as one person who installed an old Touch only firmware version on an Aura HD.

Regards,
David

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. Rick Cook

[Stitchawl]

I don't dress up a can of 'Spam' with cloves and honey hoping it will taste like fresh ham. I won't put a Harley engine into a motor scooter frame and hope that it will run like a Harley. And I won't put a fancy operating system into a simple e-reader hoping it will perform like a Cray Supercomputer.

It's an e-reader. It's for reading books. It works flawlessly for that. Why ask it to be more? If I want more, I'll use a computer and get more.


Stitchawl

[mahal48]

Does not work flawlessly when Kobo servers mess up.

[taming]

Originally Posted by mahal48

Does not work flawlessly when Kobo servers mess up.

Having messed up shelves and a bricked device are very different things. Having to do a factory reset and having a bricked device are very different things.

People generally brick their devices when they try to do things that take attention to detail and involve doing things to their reader that are outside of normal usage. Even something as seemingly simple as adding an update to device from a downloaded file, rather than through Kobo's process, can screw things up if done improperly.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by mahal48

Does not work flawlessly when Kobo servers mess up.

Originally Posted by taming

Having messed up shelves and a bricked device are very different things. Having to do a factory reset and having a bricked device are very different things.

People generally brick their devices when they try to do things that take attention to detail and involve doing things to their reader that are outside of normal usage. Even something as seemingly simple as adding an update to device from a downloaded file, rather than through Kobo's process, can screw things up if done improperly.

There have been several occasions where the user has installed a firmware update from the Kobo servers either using the desktop app or WiFi and it has bricked their ereader. Not as common as user error but it does happen.

Regards,
David

[speakingtohe]

People make mistakes, power outages happen inconveniently, and some just want to go where no one has ever trod before

I have never managed to brick my Kobos no matter how hard I tried. They do behave in some strange and unexpected ways at times, for the Aura straight out of the box. It would freeze on opening after loading 549 books to the SD card and do this repeatedly, until I took out the card connected it to the computer, got it to boot, and put in the card again. This was in April, and it still does this occasionally.

Of course it is my fault for daring to use an SD card and put 1/60th of the advertised capacity for books on it, but I was a tad naïve at the time. There was a slot so I put a card in it. There was room for 30,000 of books so I put 549 on it. Mea Culpa.

And for those intrepid souls, who dismantle their devices or install 3rd party firmware on it, I gotta admire their guts. I've rooted an older tablet or two to bring them up to a useable level, and have a background in circuit board design and prototype building, but so far lack the courage and energy to take apart my Kobos

It has been my overall experience that people who do this as well as those that root their devices do it aware iof the pitfalls. The may ask for help, but not in a whining fashion, and often provide interesting and at least to me valuable information.

Casting blame on them is tantamount to casting blame on Davidfor or PeterT for all of the great work that they have done in making the Kobo a lot more user friendly and some have even done that.

Helen

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

People make mistakes, power outages happen inconveniently, and some just want to go where no one has ever trod before

I have never managed to brick my Kobos no matter how hard I tried. They do behave in some strange and unexpected ways at times, for the Aura straight out of the box. It would freeze on opening after loading 549 books to the SD card and do this repeatedly, until I took out the card connected it to the computer, got it to boot, and put in the card again. This was in April, and it still does this occasionally.

Of course it is my fault for daring to use an SD card and put 1/60th of the advertised capacity for books on it, but I was a tad naïve at the time. There was a slot so I put a card in it. There was room for 30,000 of books so I put 549 on it. Mea Culpa.

I'm tempted to ask how many of those books were able to go through epubcheck and FlightCrew without error? A couple of months back, when I was playing with storing more ebooks on my Aura, I added 11,234 ebooks to bring the total on the SD card up to 13,000. Copying the books over took time, the processing took quite a while but they all added without problems. Opening, searching, etc. seemed as fast as when I have my normal ~1750 books on the SD card. The ebooks came from Gutenberg and were all checked prior to being sideloaded -- command lines are still great for some purposes.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

And for those intrepid souls, who dismantle their devices or install 3rd party firmware on it, I gotta admire their guts. I've rooted an older tablet or two to bring them up to a useable level, and have a background in circuit board design and prototype building, but so far lack the courage and energy to take apart my Kobos

It has been my overall experience that people who do this as well as those that root their devices do it aware of the pitfalls. The may ask for help, but not in a whining fashion, and often provide interesting and at least to me valuable information.

Casting blame on them is tantamount to casting blame on Davidfor or PeterT for all of the great work that they have done in making the Kobo a lot more user friendly and some have even done that.

Well, if they didn't tempt us, we wouldn't brick our Kobos.

On a more serious note, anyone who starts experimenting without having made a backup copy of the internal SD card to allow returning to a known good condition would let someone else pack her/his parachute.

Regards,
David

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I'm tempted to ask how many of those books were able to go through epubcheck and FlightCrew without error? A couple of months back, when I was playing with storing more ebooks on my Aura, I added 11,234 ebooks to bring the total on the SD card up to 13,000. Copying the books over took time, the processing took quite a while but they all added without problems. Opening, searching, etc. seemed as fast as when I have my normal ~1750 books on the SD card. The ebooks came from Gutenberg and were all checked prior to being sideloaded -- command lines are still great for some purposes.



Well, if they didn't tempt us, we wouldn't brick our Kobos.

On a more serious note, anyone who starts experimenting without having made a backup copy of the internal SD card to allow returning to a known good condition would let someone else pack her/his parachute.

Regards,
David

Ha ha on the parachute thing. Myself I always back up my SD cards whether I need to or not with two disk images made with two different imaging programs, and a straight file copy every time before I change firmware. I am a bit anal that way. Haven't had to use them yet but it costs nothing but 20 minutes of my time.

I don't do the epubcheck or flightcrew thing. No doubt they are invaluable but I am not anal in that way.

The 549 books were the exact same books I had on my Mini with no problems. The same books loaded flawlessly on my Aura a couple of times when I just deleted them and started over, and a few more times they didn't. And the Kobo didn't actually freeze it just took quite a while to come back. I believe you may have had a similar experience once or twice? Goes to the second set of squares and appears to be stuck? And you always use epubcheck don't you?

The thing with the Kobo being slow to boot does not seem to me to be connected to the actual books as it will boot in seconds at times and take over an hour at others. Same books. And for me the reboot doesn't always come after being connected to the PC. Sometimes it comes during a library search and I seldom search, or once when I accidentally hit a shelf tile on the home screen.

Yesterday it froze for about 5 minutes while reading a book. Then it came back, but displayed the cover of the book I was reading before that but that book did not come up on the current book tile. The book I was reading when it froze was in the top left tile and saying unread in the library view. I found my exact place again and it worked fine. I just don't see this as a fault in the book.

That plus the fact that recent updates have improved things quite a bit, maybe a reboot a month instead of several weekly or on occasion even daily indicates that it is a firmware issue. My books are pretty much the same. I will delete the ones I have read about once a month and put on some random new ones. I am glad that things are getting marginally better firmware wise, but admit that I think it is taken far too long.

As for the opening/searching, that has never been a problem speed-wise for me, just a pain in the butt as I have become accustomed to using shelves/collections on my other readers and find it not only faster but more convenient. Some readers don't have shelves or collections and that is fine, but if they are provided they should not require you to open the shelf menu and go have a coffee while you wait.

Sorry for being so curmudgeonly, but seeing a couple of the same voices that dumped on people who dared to criticise Kobo, mostly in a kind of Oliver Twist way, dumping once again on people who are only guilty of trying to work around the problems. Perhaps some people never get a problem. Good for them. I suspect for the most part don't read 5 or 6 books a week but I could be wrong on that one.

Helen

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Ha ha on the parachute thing. Myself I always back up my SD cards whether I need to or not with two disk images made with two different imaging programs, and a straight file copy every time before I change firmware. I am a bit anal that way. Haven't had to use them yet but it costs nothing but 20 minutes of my time.

The easiest way to make sure you won't need a backup is to have one.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I don't do the epubcheck or flightcrew thing. No doubt they are invaluable but I am not anal in that way.

I had issues with epubs years back when reading ebooks on my computer. That was when I discovered epubcheck/FlightCrew and Sigil. They made my reading life a lot easier. I had a fair number of Microsoft Reader .lit format ebooks and the utility I found to convert them to .epubs was, putting it gently, something I wouldn't have used if there was any other way to continue reading those ebooks.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

The 549 books were the exact same books I had on my Mini with no problems. The same books loaded flawlessly on my Aura a couple of times when I just deleted them and started over, and a few more times they didn't. And the Kobo didn't actually freeze it just took quite a while to come back. I believe you may have had a similar experience once or twice? Goes to the second set of squares and appears to be stuck? And you always use epubcheck don't you?

I still have the issue when an uSD card is installed and the boot process stops for a while. The more books on the uSD card, the longer the pause. At least now with 2.8.1, the delay is in minutes. When I first got the Aura, the delay could reach hours. I thought my Aura was freezing until I left it over night and in the morning the boot process had completed.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

The thing with the Kobo being slow to boot does not seem to me to be connected to the actual books as it will boot in seconds at times and take over an hour at others. Same books. And for me the reboot doesn't always come after being connected to the PC. Sometimes it comes during a library search and I seldom search, or once when I accidentally hit a shelf tile on the home screen.

Yesterday it froze for about 5 minutes while reading a book. Then it came back, but displayed the cover of the book I was reading before that but that book did not come up on the current book tile. The book I was reading when it froze was in the top left tile and saying unread in the library view. I found my exact place again and it worked fine. I just don't see this as a fault in the book.

That plus the fact that recent updates have improved things quite a bit, maybe a reboot a month instead of several weekly or on occasion even daily indicates that it is a firmware issue. My books are pretty much the same. I will delete the ones I have read about once a month and put on some random new ones. I am glad that things are getting marginally better firmware wise, but admit that I think it is taken far too long.

They have made improvements but there are still quite a few issues and ways that Kobo could improve their firmware. Even in the handling of non-standard epubs, it would be nice if an error message with the name of the book was popped up instead of sitting on the processing screen for hours. Out of curiosity, are you getting error logs after the freezes? They would show as stack_xx.log files. The disappearing books for instance sounds like the Kobo reset before updating the database and that generally generates an error log.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

As for the opening/searching, that has never been a problem speed-wise for me, just a pain in the butt as I have become accustomed to using shelves/collections on my other readers and find it not only faster but more convenient. Some readers don't have shelves or collections and that is fine, but if they are provided they should not require you to open the shelf menu and go have a coffee while you wait.

Sorry for being so curmudgeonly, but seeing a couple of the same voices that dumped on people who dared to criticise Kobo, mostly in a kind of Oliver Twist way, dumping once again on people who are only guilty of trying to work around the problems. Perhaps some people never get a problem. Good for them. I suspect for the most part don't read 5 or 6 books a week but I could be wrong on that one.

I got into the habit of using search on my PC since it was faster that browsing through the directory structure looking for a specific author. I've since simplified my structure dropping most of the directory structure so now it's at tossup as to which way is faster. On the Kobo, I use search since it is much faster and more flexible than shelves.

For some of the comments pro and con about some posters, I'm on the fence there. There have been some criticisms of Kobo that I, personally, feel were not justified. Others I have agreed with. I tend to be suspicious of anyone who claims never to have any problems. As you said, they are probably not making much use of their ereader.

Going back quite a few years, there was a columnist (mostly noted for having a Windows logo tattoo) who kept stating that people who got regular blue screens with Windows 3.1/3.11 were simply not using their computers properly and he personally never saw any. Oddly, after Windows 95 was released and he switched, in one column, he commented that he happy to no longer see multiple blue screens every day.

Regards,
David

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Going back quite a few years, there was a columnist (mostly noted for having a Windows logo tattoo) who kept stating that people who got regular blue screens with Windows 3.1/3.11 were simply not using their computers properly and he personally never saw any. Oddly, after Windows 95 was released and he switched, in one column, he commented that he happy to no longer see multiple blue screens every day.

Regards,
David

Maybe the guy didn't have a color monitor There is a certain sawmill in Prince George who were still using Windows 3.1 on an antique pre Pentium desktop 5 years ago to download sorts to the sorters and other things. Apparently nothing else was as reliable

I had issues a few years back when reading ebooks on my computer. That was when I discovered epubcheck/FlightCrew and Sigil. They made my reading life a lot easier.

I have had an occasional issue with books on my Kobo, but nothing I couldn't fix pretty quickly. Nothing that would brick it, just display problems such as triple line spacing and large paragraph gaps, opening at the end of the book and immediately closing it, ends of lines being chopped off etc. Some could be fixed temporarily by changing the font, but changing the font every other page or so is a bit of a distraction.

These same books appear to work well on the Sonys and my mother's Kindle, the Sony Reader software, the Kindle App, Aldiko and even the dreaded Moon+ reader.

Perhaps epubcheck would point out numerous errors but many have been recently published library books and I don't remove the DRM from library books. Did a couple just to see if it could be done, but doesn't seem right somehow, so I just don't. Only issue I have had on my PC or tablets other readers is just a butt ugly book to begin with. Early Project Gutenberg for example. Kobo may be the only reader displaying books exactly as the publisher intended, but if this is the case why aren't the publishers protesting about all the other readers and apps and peek inside the book and even their own website previews displaying them in a pleasant and readable manner. I just can't get my head around the concept.

Out of curiosity, are you getting error logs after the freezes? They would show as stack_xx.log files. The disappearing books for instance sounds like the Kobo reset before updating the database and that generally generates an error log.

The book didn't exactly disappear, it just was removed from the main page and marked as unread. I did not check for error logs and probably won't tonight, but I will. Maybe not till my day off but will get back to you.
As to resetting before updating the database, hasn't reset for a while, but could have been on an earlier reset. I'm pretty care ful about ejecting the Kobos, and generally eject in calibre and from the computer menu, and then power off the computer before actually unplugging. A bit bizarre, but I only plug my Kobo into the USB port when I want to do something that requires it. The farther away from the computer I keep it the better it behaves

Thank you for your courteous replies and input. Hopefully I will stop ranting now. Just thrown into the flight or fight mode, or the pillage and burn mode at the implication that those who brick their devices are all sub moronic nincompoops.

Helen

[jackastor]

Is it really apropriate to have a thread here dedicated to bashing people who have had an unfortunate experience in upgrading their devices? And thinly veiling it under the heading "CONFUSION"? I don't think so. Certainly there is more important things this forum could be discussing don't you think?

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by jackastor

Is it really apropriate to have a thread here dedicated to bashing people who have had an unfortunate experience in upgrading their devices? And thinly veiling it under the heading "CONFUSION"? I don't think so. Certainly there is more important things this forum could be discussing don't you think?

Of course important things; I forgot this should be a poll on f/w 2.8.1; pass or fail; or a poll on whether or not we need a file browser.

I am so sorry to have wasted your precious time.