Deconstructing One UI – Mapping the Screen Interception and Telemetry inside the Samsung Browser

Anyone that that personally knows me also knows I have a slight obsession with battery life optimisations and services running on my devices.

Recently an update to the Samsung browser version 30.0.0.63 (Android) brought about several glaringly obvious issues that impacted my usage and consumed significant battery.

The first issue was in video playback; when ever I would play a video through the browser the audio and video frames would be out of sync. Watching videos with anyone talking their words were out of sync to the video by a few milliseconds this became annoying quickly.
The next issue would be that every few minutes the video would stutter; to be clear here it would briefly pause for a second and then resume, when it resumed it trigger the videos playback overlay. This too quickly grew tedious.
Manual tapping the screen during playback which normally brings up the playback controls would also make the video briefly freeze and stutter.

I did the obvious and attempted to search online about this new release and determine if others were experiencing similar issues I found little of any relevance.

This is article although somewhat long winded explores and exposes a significant tracking services it includes many examples taken straight from my device logs.

MTG Life Tracker for KOReader

We have created a MTG Life Tracker plugin for KOReader, this application allows player to track life totals in Commader and Standard game variants.

The MTG Life Tracker plugin supports 2-6 players, primarily created to stop using a phone as a life tracker and have something more passive.

New MTG/TCG products available now

We are thrilled to announce the launch of two brand new storage solutions, custom-designed by us right here at Oddineers Ltd., built specifically for the dedicated Magic: The Gathering (MTG) player and card game fans in general!

We know how much time and care goes into building a Commander deck, and keeping those precious cards organised and protected is just as important as the gameplay itself. That’s why we poured our passion for TCGs into creating these custom containers.

Farewell Gruntle

A post to immortalise a furry friend; Gruntle another stray that I had adopted several years (along with his buddy Fruntle), spoilt, noisy (meeps) and full of character. Gruntle suddenly took a turn for the worst (chest/lung cancer) although he likely hid it until he couldn’t and was put to rest on 17-04-2026.

Farewell Fruntle

A post to immortalise a furry friend; Fruntle a stray that I had adopted several years ago took a turn for the worst (GDV: Gastric Dilatation Volvulus) and was put to rest on 05-02-2026 (this post is a bit late; as I couldn’t bring myself to write about him).

The model is too powerful: A software engineer’s perspective

Agency vs Inference: LLMs, or AI as some like to call them, are token generators. For a model to “break containment“, “send an email” or perform any other action outside of generating a token, it needs a functional bridge (APIs, tool-calling, or a shell environment) to perform these actions. If it “escaped“, that means a human either misconfigured or deliberately enabled it to perform said task.

The model might be conscious

When a CEO says “The model might be conscious“, what they actually mean is “Our valuation needs another zero.“.

As engineers, we know the “ghost in the shell” is just complex algorithms and a very expensive GPU bill. There is no soul in the transformer; there’s just a Softmax function guessing the next word. Calling a next-token predictor “sentient” is like calling a calculator “mathematically gifted“. It’s not thinking; it’s just incredibly fast at being a parrot.

Update Gitea repository mirror authentication credentials

Recently I had to update a few hundreds repository mirror authentication details; after just a handful I explored the API and was surprised that the API had not route available to achieve this.

Tasker plugin for Transcribable

This article demonstrates Transcribable’s Tasker plugin integration found in Transcribable v1.12.04 from open testing branch. It’s a preview for several new core function one of which allows integration in to Tasker. The integration allows users to send or retrieve text to Transcribable.

Remote Camera for ESP32-S3-EYE – Home Assistant + ESPHome

This articles covers a simple camera server configuration for streaming and snapshot capture for use with ESPHome.