sangsara.net

Tag: Troubleshooting

  • Fixing freezing and battery drain issues on modern Kobo readers such as the Clara Color

    How to solve a problem where a Kobo ereader will hang or freeze or completely drain to 0% battery life overnight

    I’m posting this in the hopes of helping anyone with the same issue.

    I own an older Kobo Libra H2O model and never had any problems like this, but it happened often with my new Kobo Clara Color. I would pick it up in the morning and find the battery flat. Or I’d be using it and it would lock up and require a hard reboot. It would also lose my reading position in a book when this happened.

    The reason (at least for me; your mileage may vary) can be traced back to ePub files that contain errors such as improper markup or missing font specifications. This can happen if you’re loading your Kobo with ePub files other than those sold through the Kobo e-store, such as privately authored files or converted documents.

    You can address these errors in the free open source book management app, Calibre. Select a book in the main list, then press “T” or choose the menu option to “Edit Book”. Then look in the toolbar for an icon that looks like a bug, which might be labeled “Run Check”. This will scan the ePub file for errors, and offer to fix them automatically. Most of the time, this will solve all problems. Occasionally, a file may have problems that can’t be fixed, in which case you may have to delete or edit some HTML elements yourself, if you know how. When you’re done, press the equivalent of ‘Cmd-S’ to save the changes, and close the window.

    Finally, you’ll want to use a special Kobo-optimized form of the ePub format called KePub (or Kobo ePub) when transferring the files to your Kobo. This format is apparently fully compatible with all ePub readers, but offers enhanced performance when used with Kobos, so you may notice page turns and searches are faster.

    In Calibre’s settings, go to the Plugins page and find the option to install external plugins. Search for KoboTouchExtended and install that, then configure it to automatically convert books before sending them to your device. You can refer to this Reddit thread and the links within it if you run into any trouble.

    If you don’t use Calibre, there are standalone tools for converting ePub files to KePub such as this web-based one which does everything in your browser — no uploading to servers involved.

    Ever since doing this a couple of weeks ago and transferring all my books over again, I haven’t run into this issue despite using it quite a bit.

    Summary

    Problem Cause: ePub files with errors, such as improper markup or missing font specifications, can cause freezing, battery drain, and reading position loss on Kobo Clara Color.

    Solution: Use Calibre to check and fix ePub file errors, then transfer the files to Kobo using KePub format for enhanced performance.

    Plugin Installation: Install the KoboTouchExtended plugin in Calibre and configure it to automatically convert books to KEPUB format before sending them to your Kobo device.

  • Fixing an iOS/iPhone issue where apps don’t save photos with the original date and time metadata

    How to solve an iOS/iPhone bug that prevents third-party editing apps (e.g. Lightroom, VSCO, AgBr) from retaining the date/time metadata from the original photos when saving new edited files

    I’ve tried to pack the right terms in the title and heading above in the hopes that you’ll find this page if you have the same problem that I did.

    For several years, edited photos saved from apps like VSCO wound up with the “current” date and time as the “capture time” on my iPhone, meaning that they don’t sort chronologically alongside the original photos when viewing the Photo Library. I noticed with one app that when I made edits on my iPad, it worked as expected, i.e. the original capture time was retained, but mistakenly believed it was a bug in that specific app that only surfaced in their iPhone version.

    Last week I discovered this behavior in the new AgBr app, and got to emailing with the developers. In that process, I realized it was a problem with my iPhone, and most likely down to a bug in iOS rather than the photo editing apps.

    Without further ado, the solution is to “Reset All Settings” in your iPhone’s Settings app (under General → Transfer or Reset iPhone). This will undo many of your longstanding settings, such as known WiFi networks and cards in your Apple Wallet. It’s a pain in the ass, but much better than wiping the entire phone and starting over from scratch, which is what I thought I would have to do.

    I have no idea when I picked up this problem, but it’s a deep-seated one that has followed me across several iPhones, resurfacing with each migration and “restore from iCloud backup”.

    Funnily enough, I chanced upon the solution while whining about this problem to Michael, and while I was celebrating with way too much joy than fixing a computer problem should give someone, he pointed out that just a few weeks earlier he had also solved a longstanding problem with Safari on his Mac while telling me about it. I think we’ve figured out a winning formula.

    Summary

    Issue Description: Edited photos saved from third-party editing apps on iOS/iPhone lose the original date/time metadata, resulting in incorrect chronological order in the Photo Library.

    Cause: Likely a bug in iOS.

    Solution: Reset All Settings in the iPhone’s Settings app (under General → Transfer or Reset iPhone), though it will reset some settings.

  • Fixing Battery Life Problems on a Kindle Paperwhite

    Fixing Battery Life Problems on a Kindle Paperwhite

    If you’re noticing that your Kindle’s battery life isn’t what it’s supposed to be, or are looking for information on how to solve the “Books not yet indexed” problem, this post may help you.

    I bought my Kindle Paperwhite while on vacation in Japan, where they are significantly cheaper thanks to a campaign against the entrenched Kobo readers in that market, but noticed it wasn’t living up to stated battery life claims. My previous Kindles didn’t either, but the problem was less noticeable because I used them more at the time, and thus charged them more frequently.

    I recently left the Paperwhite alone during a busy stretch of two weeks and was shocked that the battery had gone nearly flat.

    After poking around online, I discovered that the Calibre software I use (a popular open-source ebook manager) causes a feature of the Kindle to misbehave.

    When idle, the Kindle tries to index your ebooks so you can perform word searches quickly, but if the file is corrupted or in some way fails to conform to the Kindle’s expectations, it gets stuck indefinitely trying to repeat the operation. That drains the battery, and those books never finish indexing, which must affect searching and navigation.

    You can test if this issue is affecting you by performing a search for some nonsensical string such as “jejficueh” which you know won’t appear in any books. If you see a section titled “Books not yet indexed” appearing on the blank search results screen, then you have a bunch of books that never finished indexing.

    For books downloaded through Amazon’s Kindle store, the solution is to delete the ebook file and download it again (at no charge).

    But because we don’t have a Kindle online store here, mine is manually loaded with mobi files, PDFs, and the like. Deleting and re-copying the affected files wasn’t helping.

    After reading forum posts by similarly troubled users, and some proposed solutions, I found out that Calibre does something strange to ebook files when you use the “Send To Device” button to install books on a Kindle connected to your PC/Mac. This is what you’re SUPPOSED to do, by the way. The solution is to click “Save To Disk”, which outputs a clean file to some location on your computer such as your Desktop (again, Send To Device shouldn’t be doing anything different, but it does), and then manually copy the book onto the Kindle using your regular file manager e.g. the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer.

    It’s probably a bug. I’ll be writing to the Calibre guys, but just wanted to put this out here in case it helps anyone.