Firmware3.17.0 Discussion

[Ogion]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Sure do. As a caveat I have seen several occurrences of my Glo HD not sleeping after the sleep inactivity period has passed using this build. It does sleep properly with the cover closed though.

After installing v 3.17.0 my Aura HD would not sleep after the timed inactivity delay had expired or via the sleep cover or (worryingly) via the power button.

However, I was able to get it to power-off with the power button.

I've had a lot of serious problems with my Aura HD since it updated to v 3.15 by itself (and by mistake) recently but I didn't put two and two together until now.

Now I've reverted it to v 3.12.1. Hopefully that's the end of the problems.

Sick of Kobo!!!

But....extremely thankful for this forum!

[Desdinova]

Originally Posted by johnnyb

Great that we are discussing this here: incidentally, I just turned my H2O on and all my collections are empty... And I havent connected the reader to PC for weeks... Great stuff! I think this may be the straw that lets me switch back to Kindle. Will finish that book I am reading and then move on quickly...
Good luck to the rest of you!

Well you may need a lot of time to create those collections, considering you won't be able to do it in Calibre and will have to do it manually on the device ;-)

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

Without any patches I got a reboot 100% of the time when accessing Awards (which is not something I do very often), and soon after a restart it would reboot about 50% of the time when tapping the reading stats tile, and about 25% of the time when opening a KePub book by tapping its cover tile which are things I do very often.

The fact that my last KePub read that I was using to test with was a huge Peter F. Hamilton doorstop might be a factor, but it was a book bought and synced from Kobo. I had no problems opening sideloaded ePubs.

That does suggest it was that book causing the all problems. It's a pity you couldn't have tried open the Awards or stats after reading a different book.

I'll try creating a nice big kepub to see if I can break it. But, as this was a kepub from Kobo, can you send me a link. I haven't been in the mood for Peter F Hamilton lately, but I'll look at the preview and pass it on to Kobo.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by arspr

I'm re-reading your posts for my 100th time and I just cannot understand how the hell you defend Kobo. And I am specially astonished because you are a coder yourself...

I didn't think I was defending Kobo, more attacking the attitude here that JSWolf typified. The reason for replying to his post was that he was complaining about a new feature that I knew he had not actually tested. That is very typical of him and everyone else here.

As to being a coder myself, that just makes me understand the issues. As an example, yesterday another team member reported a problem in the code I am developing. When I looked, I had missed an edge case. I fixed that but when I tried testing it using the front-end, it didn't work. Back to the other team member to demonstrate and everything was OK. He then watched what I did. I was being lazy and chose the minimum number of options. He had been concentrating so much on the complicated cases that he had forgotten to test the simplest. So, yes, I understand the type of issues that Kobo are having.

The pdf file that 3.17. cannot manage because its thumbnail generation causes a reboot is just a 29 Mb one...

And the one that kill it for me is only 7MB. So it obviously isn't size, it's something else about the PDFs. Until Kobo has a copy of every PDF in the world to test with, they can't be sure it works.

And this failure happens 100% of the time. So if you just have one file like this one, BANG!!!!, you are dead. You won't be able to browse your Library because each time you reach the page containing that file the device will restart...

So Davidfor, you are wrong. Your son will probably trigger it if he has scanned comics or fanzines in his device...

Of course, that would require that my son had those type of books or an interest in them. Go back and read what I said. I was VERY careful in my wording. Do I think my son is a typical user of these type of device? Probably not. But, I think he is a lot closer to typical than I am.

AFAIK, Kobo says that they support pdfs. So they MUST support EVERY kind of pdfs. I don't care if they are a collection of photos, OCR text, AutoCAD digitalized graphics or whatever. Specially when we are not talking about torture-test pdfs...

Of course they should support every type of PDF. Can they? Maybe if they have enough time and examples. Will they concentrate on the unusual? Probably not.

As to not supporting a "collection of photos", it isn't as simple as that. I created a PDF using calibre that was just JPEGs. It didn't cause a problem. But a much bigger one did. Or maybe it was some difference about the jpegs.

This is not a 1GB pdf file or something like that, (and this is not any of the two issues described in the pdf performace thread). It's a damn less than 30 MB file which only has one particularity: it's just a collection of images with no text...

Davidfor, NTFS is supposed to support files up to 16TB (approximately). Would you defend Microsoft if one system choked with a 100GB file because that kind of files are not "common"? Or would you defend them if they choked with file names containing "ñ" when they are supposed to support Unicode?

Yes, I would complain. But, I would also give them a chance to either explain it and fix it. Not that I'm sure this is a good example. As far as I can tell, all file systems have some exceptions that they don't support. That's one of the reason there are so many different file systems around.

And I don't give a damn if less than 1% people read scanned comics, Kobo say they support pdfs, so therefore DO IT!!!

WTH! I myself build some computation Excel spreadsheets (with VBA macros in some cases) in my work... And I had NEVER EVER suffered an issue remotely similar to this one and you can imagine which is my Q&A team...

Congratulations on being able to set the specs on what is needed, testing them and then deciding if the results are suitable.

More over I cannot defend Kobo in any way when the solution is as easy as increasing the threshold time...

Great, lets increase the threshold time. To what? 20 seconds? A minute? An hour? There is almost no way they can get a time that handles 100% of the "taking a long time" cases without it being to long for the "really has hung" cases. So, they make a compromise. And any compromise is guaranteed to be wrong in someones opinion. And in case you didn't read the last part of my post, I did express the opinion that Kobo has gotten this wrong.

And please, Davidfor, test the Upgrade Dictionary process I've also posted because I am 95% sure that you get a reboot after it. (I cannot test it anymore because I've patched my 3.17 installation).

I have vague memory that someone reported a restart when downloading the dictionaries. As I have downloaded all the dictionaries on all my devices and didn't see a restart, I can't back that up. Or did I misremember?

[fxp33]

Hi guys,

had a lot of problems with this firmware... after 3 "error failures would you like to factory reset YES NO?", now a blank screen...

Has anyone got a link to an original backup of the inside sdcard for Kobo Aura HD Model N204B (I hope there is one just like in the Glo)

Hopefully I won't have to go surgeon with it, but for now... nothing seems to wake it up (two blinks and back to blank screen)



Thanks a lot for your help

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Someone mentioned a problem with creating a bookmark. But, I'm not sure if this was with 3.17.0, or 3.16.10. I have made at least 50 annotations since I had 3.17.0 on my devices and haven't had a problem.

If that was my comment about a reboot when doing text highlight/annotation, it was with 3.16.10 on a Glo. I've done ~100 on my H20 without issue but have still applied GeoffR's patch to increase the sickel timeout. It may just be the books I was marking up but 3.17.0 seems to be more responsive than 3.16.10 when marking up text.

And on a nitpicking point.

Please folks, it is sickEL not sickLE. Makes me want to emulate Tulip and "then I'm gonna get medieval on his arse." Possibly with a sickle.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by fxp33

Hi guys,

had a lot of problems with this firmware... after 3 "error failures would you like to factory reset YES NO?", now a blank screen...

Has anyone got a link to an original backup of the inside sdcard for Kobo Aura HD Model N204B (I hope there is one just like in the Glo)

Hopefully I won't have to go surgeon with it, but for now... nothing seems to wake it up (two blinks and back to blank screen)

Have you tried a full charge from a wall charger, followed by a factory reset?

[fxp33]

Hi Meera,

It's charging now, but not from a wall... I am going to give it a try (everything before opening it)

Thanks for the tip.

François

[johnnyb]

Originally Posted by Desdinova

Well you may need a lot of time to create those collections, considering you won't be able to do it in Calibre and will have to do it manually on the device ;-)

Regardless, that's not the point. This is just the kind of erratic behavior that makes Kobos be part of the class of devices that makes people think there's something weird about electronic devices that makes them hesitant to use them.

[fxp33]

Still no luck,

Just have to wait for an aura HD sdcard image...

From what I have seen in the "aura bricked" thread, I have to hope for a DavidFor "PM sent" saving message

He usually is our much thanks "baywatch guy" ressuscitating any desperate sdcard lying breathless after wrongful manipulations

Cheers

François

[GERGE]

PDF is the single most terrible document format ever. There is no way around this. There are many terribly generated PDFs around. I had to reprocess and OCR many PDF files we get in our law office with PDFPen, they simply don't work. Many even breaks iMacs.

PDF is terrible, there is no way a mere ereader can open and support every one. Honestly, PDF should just fall in a pit and die. OpenXML is the best format of this kind, I hope it gains acceptance.

PS. We use PDFs for work. We need documents as they are. You can't send a contract with epub. But PDF files aren't for reading novels, this is the main cause of all these problems.

[BeeTee-Ess]

FW 3.17.0 is running in my Mini, along with the patches. Thanks to all concerned.

Reading is clear and sharp.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by arspr

IMO the real sad issue is that there's just no other options... It's either Amazon Kindle or Kobo, each one with its own set of peculiarities. No other Carta HD eink devices anywhere... So therefore they can basically do whatever they want. It's called oligopoly...

Other Carta eInk devices I can think of...

Boyue T62+
Pocketbook Ultra
Pocketbook Touch Lux 3
Onyx Boox C67ML (newer version)
Arta Tech InkBook
Tolino Vision

IIRC there are a couple more Onyx devices as well.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by GERGE

PDF is the single most terrible document format ever. There is no way around this. There are many terribly generated PDFs around.

There definitely are, since there are many engines for generating them some which follow specs better than others. Not to mention the multiple versions and extension levels of PDF. I get PDF's a work from time to time that I can't open in Acrobat or other PDF readers I have installed.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by davidfor

That does suggest it was that book causing the all problems. It's a pity you couldn't have tried open the Awards or stats after reading a different book.

I'll try creating a nice big kepub to see if I can break it. But, as this was a kepub from Kobo, can you send me a link. I haven't been in the mood for Peter F Hamilton lately, but I'll look at the preview and pass it on to Kobo.

I can still test it. Although I have patched sickel I can still tell when the original sickel would have rebooted by the amount of time the reading stats takes to open.

The time the reading stats tile takes to open after a device restart does seem to be related to the current read. I guess it doesn't keep the stats as running totals but has to trawl through the database to compute them from the individual reading session data for the book. So if you have a large book that has taken a long time to read (i.e. many sessions over many days) then it will take much longer to open the tile than for a book which hasn't had many reading sessions. So perhaps not directly related to the size of the epub itself, but to how complicated the reading history for that book is.

I guess some of the reading stats have to be computed when you open the book for the first time after a device restart too, so it can compute and display the time to finish.

The book was this one, it has the problem where the publisher has put more than one chapter in a file, and it has an incomplete TOC so the KePub synced from Kobo has some automatically-generated TOC entries titled "Untitled chapter". Unfortunately that is not altogether uncommon for backlist books. Stats say it took me 31.1 hours to read at an average 42 minutes per session, but I took a break and read another book part way through so it was spread out over a week, and I might have opened the book a few times back around the time I bought it which was a few months (and firmware versions) ago.

Edit: Another factor is probably that I keep all the books I have finished on the device, and it has been a long time since I did a factory reset, so to compute the stats for total hours read is always going to be slow the first time if no running total is kept. Even with a newly opened book as current read, the stats tile takes a long time to open the first time after the device starts.

My database probably has a fair bit of cruft, but this is just a consequence of the hardware and firmware being so solid and reliable, I've never had a corrupt database and so never needed to do a factory reset (although I did do one by accident last year sometime.)