Calibre Reborn

My USB 3 Card Reader was delivered today and thankfully, after inserting my microSD card, my laptop recognised the storage device and I was able to copy an old backup of my Calibre library from an external hard drive to the new card.

Opening up Calibre on my laptop I was able to redirect it to the new library and so I'm up and running again. I don't know how many ebooks I lost by not backing up more regularly but it's no matter. I had thousands of books and wouldn't have been able to read them all given several lifetimes. It was in essence a vanity project with me collecting ebooks and trying to create a massive e-library that I could brag about.

Not that there's anyone much to brag to. Nonetheless, it's good to have recreated the library even if its not quite in all its former glory. I know also not to trust in SD cards and so I'll make sure that I backup regularly to an external hard drive. As I've said before, it's time to replace my old mechanical hard drive with a newer SSD that doesn't need to be massive in terms of its storage capacity.

Figure 1

Figure 2

My old drive was one terabyte in capacity and the same sized SSD costs around two million rupiah or about two hundred Australian dollars. See Figures 1 and 2. However, it's not urgent as the mechanical hard drive is still perfectly serviceable.

ADDENDUM

Even though some books from my Calbre e-library were lost, they may reside on my Google Play Books website or via the Kindle app on my iPhone, so those locations can be checked as well.

SD Card Reader

I ended up ordering a SD Card Reader online rather than going to Bintaro Plaza, thus saving money in the process as items are always significantly more expensive in the malls. Here are the specifications:

It all looks good but I'll to wait and see if it does the job. At least it has a USB C connector as well so it is future proof if I move to a more modern laptop in the future. If it is functional, I'll transfer my Calibre library that is on my external hard drive to the micro-SD and continue saving books to the relocated library. It should arrive between the 15th and 17th of March.

I should invest in a new external SSD drive at some point because my current mechanical hard drive is a little unstable, a slight movement can cause a break in the connection. One step at a time however, and so for the time being I await the arrival of my latest accessory.

Thoughts on Backing Up My Calibre Library

I thought it was time to back up my Calibre library that now is 39.8 GB in size and so I dusted off my trusty 128 GB SanDisk and thrust it into the USB 3.0 port on my old 2013 MacBook Pro. From previous experience I knew that this would be a slow process but today I got to thinking about how slow. Figure 1 shows the situation.

Figure 1

The USB 3.0 ports on the MacBook Pro can transfer data at the rate of up to 5Gbps. Now that's 5 gigabits per second. There are 8 bits in a byte and 1024 x 1024 bytes in a megabyte (MB) so that translates to a transfer speed of up to 640 MB/s.  For my file transfers I'm achieving a rate of around 4 MB/s which is 160 times slower than the maximum possible! This seems impossibly slow.

However, if we look online we find the following (see Figure 2):

Figure 2

Even SanDisk only claims a speed of up to 100 MB/s for this particular device and  presumably this is for reading of data and not writing. Furthermore, the thumb drive spends more time checking that writing and so if there are many small files (and I am transferring 34,646 of them), the transfer time will be very much longer than if I were transferring a single 39.8 MB file.

On this particular site, it's claimed that 3.0 USB has a 10~20 MB/s write speed and if that's the case then the 4 MB/s for my worst case scenario (thousands of small files) is not unreasonable. Overall it's not a problem for me because I'm in no hurry and I only carry out the backup every couple of months or so.

I'm also merging the latest library with the older one and this probably adds to the checking time as the new folder (every book has its own folder) has to be compared to the older one. It would probably be quicker just to delete the old library and simply copy the new one across.

An alternative approach would be to make a note of any new books added and then drop their folders into the library backup from time to time. On reflection this makes the most sense and the update would then be almost instantaneous given the small file sizes involved. The current library on my MacBook's SSD and the library backup on my SanDisk will be identical once the transfer is complete. This would be a good time to implement such a scheme. I'll test it out and report back.

Even if I don't make a formal note of my added books, it's easy to identify them by looking at the current library (arranged in chronological order) and noting the dates of books that are newer than the time of my last backup. This could be painful if I let too much time elapse before checking because I will have to locate each book's folder in the database and then copy and paste it across. For a few books it's no problem.

ADDENDUM: November 4th 2020

I've tested the folder copying update method out and it works fine. Quick and painless. Definitely the way to go in future. I downloaded Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" after a recommendation by Jeremy Corbyn shown in this tweet.

The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela DavisIn his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

Testing Out The Raspberry Pi 400

 

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the ports on my newly acquired Raspberry Pi 400 with the following specifications:

• Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.8GHz
• 4GB LPDDR4-3200
• Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5.0GHz) IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac wireless LAN
• Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
• Gigabit Ethernet
• 2 × USB 3.0 and 1 × USB 2.0 ports
• Horizontal 40-pin GPIO header
• 2 × micro HDMI ports (supports up to 4Kp60)
• H.265 (4Kp60 decode); H.264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode); OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.0
• MicroSD card slot for operating system and data storage
• 78- or 79-key compact keyboard (depending on regional variant)
• 5V DC via USB connector
• Operating temperature: 0°C to +50°C ambient
• Maximum dimensions 286 mm × 122 mm × 23 mm

Figure 2 shows its actual appearance.

Figure 2

I bought it on a whim for my 73rd birthday and it only arrived today. The operating system was already installed on the 16GB memory card and, after connecting the power and the monitor, I was up and running in no time. The first hardware issue that I encountered was with Bluetooth. My ancient monitor has no inbuilt speakers and so I assumed that I would be able to listen to sound using my Bluetooth earbuds. Not so. The Raspberry Pi's Bluetooth 5.0 did not detect them.

I've only ever used the earbuds with my iPhone and they work flawlessly on that device. I succeeded in connecting to them from my Ubuntu laptop and the connection was terrible but it was still, technically, a connection. With a second set of Bluetooth earbuds, I encountered the same problem. I'll come up with a solution to this Bluetooth "invisibility" sooner or later probably, after all it's only Day 1. I know what I'm letting myself in for. If I didn't want any problems, I'd simply go out and buy a Mac of some description. I still may do so but for the moment I'll enjoy tinkering and troubleshooting with my new toy.

Software-wise, it becomes clear that the Chromium browser and the Chrome browser as two different beasts as the following extract from this site explains:

Google Chrome is one of the most popular browsers all over the world. And Raspberry Pi is the most popular mini-PC device. But unfortunately, they can’t meet together –  there is no Chrome build for Raspberry Pi (and for any other ARM-based PC except Chromebook). You can use a number of other browsers (such as Epiphany, IceWeasel or even Lynx), but will face a lack of functionality.  Many Pi-world enthusiasts use the open source version of Chrome – Chromium browser. But this isn’t a full replacement.

Chrome includes a number of proprietary libraries and in some cases, you need to use authentic Google software. For example, you can watch videos on Netflix or Amazon Prime with Chrome and can’t with Chromium. Good news that there is a simple solution to override this issue. Using Exagear Desktop allows you to get full x86 Linux environment. And this means that you can launch any application available in x86 Linux world, including Google Chrome!

Maybe I'll try Exagear out at some point but at the moment I have 4GB of RAM and a 16GB memory card as permanent storage. I need to be careful not to overtax these limitations. If possible, I'd like to upgrade to 8GB RAM and swap the memory  card for a fast SSD. I need to watch some tutorials on the subject to determine if this is possible.

ADDENDUM:

I'll quote from the article on this website:

Updating the firmware is as important as keeping your operating system and software up to date, though there might be less frequent stable updates. The main importance of this is security patches. If vulnerability in the code has been found, your Raspberry Pi firmware needs to be updated to reduce the risk of it being exploited.

The other reason is performance enhancement. Though updates usually only bring minor changes, some offer major benefits. For example, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s November 2021 update increased the turbo-mode clock from 1.5 GHz to the 1.8 GHz for recent Raspberry Pi 4s.

If you’re running Raspberry Pi OS, your firmware options are limited to what’s offered by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. We’ll mention some alternative Raspberry Pi-compatible operating systems later.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has put a lot of work into making the initial setup and update process for Raspberry Pi OS extremely easy. It’s detailed on their website, but the basic steps are to check for updates with sudo apt update followed by running a full upgrade (if there’s anything new) with sudo apt full-upgrade. Using this process, you’ll be updating the operating system as well as the firmware to the latest stable releases.

My hope of course was that this update would solve my Bluetooth problems. As if it would be that easy! The update made no difference whatever in that department.