Operating Systems
Windows, Unix, Linux
Hot phones drain your battery faster.
Today’s phones will drain your battery faster when they are hot. For example, if you are driving and have your phone on the console where the sun is hitting it, the battery becomes less effective. Another example would be having the phone in your shirt pocket at an outdoor event where the sun is hitting it. Continue reading
Android Nexus 7 – Periodic “Starting Android – Optimizing application x of x” IOW Lollipop sucks
My Nexus 7 has been a mess ever since the Google Lollipop update. A new issue is cropping up where the tablet will spontaneously reboot. When it restarts, it goes into a “Starting Android, Optimizing app n of nn” mode.
After checking on this, it appears that I’m luck because the tablet will start up when it is finished optimizing. Some people end up with a tablet or phone that is rendered useless by the device looping in this mode. Continue reading
Privacy Danger from Android Flashlight and other apps
A friend sent a video about the dangers of Flashlight apps for Android based devices. Let me say that I am an App Junkie with dozens of apps on my phone and tablet.
The problem is that these apps are apparently being used to spy on your devices. Every app tells you what permissions it needs in order to be installed. However, most of us ignore that notice. Continue reading
Re purposing an old android phone as a security camera.
I had been considering trying to use an old android phone as a security/monitoring device. One example of an application would be to be able to check the basement to make sure that the sump pump was operational if I was out of the house.
I came across a great article on HowToGeek as to do exactly this. Continue reading
Trying Android 5.1 (Lollipop) update on my Nexus 7
My Nexus 7 tablet was running extremely well until I installed the Lollipop update. It went from being trusty and reliable to crashing and hanging every 2 minutes. I applied some of the fixes such as clearing the system cache which helped a bit. I also put Advanced Task Killer in the tray and started using that to kill all processes **IF** I could get the thing to respond when I turned it on.
I had visions of taking it to the skeet range, yelling “Pull” and having someone toss it in the air. Continue reading
Freeing up space on an Android Phone (or other device)
The storage on the phone side of my Samsung Galaxy S3 was almost full. The phone was slowing down dramatically for even the simplest tasks.
I tried some space freeing apps, tried to deleting the cache and tried to move the as many apps as I could to the SD card. Even so, the most I could free up was 500MB. Continue reading
Companionlink stopped working around 10/3/13
I noticed that Companionlink was failing to sync properly. There is an update to build 5074 at http://www.companionlink.com/downloads/updates.html
A second lease on life for old PCs with Linux (Ubuntu)
I have a couple of old XP machines lying around. They are old machines with limited resources. Endless Windows updates have caused them to slow to the point where they would lose a race with a drunken snail.
In many cases, Linux would run more quickly on a machine than Windows. Continue reading
Oracle’s Virtual Box – virtual machine for windows
There are times when being able to run a virtual machine on your windows box could come in very handy.
For example, I was testing a website. I wanted to clear the cookies from my chrome browser but that would have caused problems with other work that was in process. I was able to fire up an Oracle VM VirtualBox machine and test the site with firefox. Continue reading