Be Excellent To Each Other

Someone more technically knowledgeable than me:

My phone said it was going to download a software update. I allowed it. The download completed, and it was the file was corrupted! Would I like to download again? Okay. Then it shut down. Red triangle of doom. Then re-awakened. Back to the old firmware.

Why and how would an official software update corrupt? And then try installing anyway?

Downloads sometimes corrupt, there's no reason an 'official' download would be more or less prone to it than anything else.

Fair dos. I guess I just assumed it would be the source file rather than the download that was corrupted. So there you have it!

Ah, right, I see what you mean. It's possible, but more likely in my experience that something's just gone wrong in transit.

Had to turn off location services, as the last couple of Android releases have totally fucked something up and they destroy my battery now!

So, Google. You seem to have decided to...

Not allow control of individual applications and their use of location services, it's either on or off.
Recently rolled all the google services into one wrapper and only track battery usage for that one wrapper service.
And in the latest 4.4 release stopped the ability for applications to hook into the OS battery API and find out exactly which services or apps are keeping your phone alive when it should be asleep.

Anyone would think you are actively trying to drive people away from your OS. Considering how important battery life is as a selling point, and how crap smartphones are at battery life, increasing rather than decreasing the ability of the end user to control what affects battery consumption would be a no-brainer, wouldn't it?

Fix this please Doccy G.

I read somewhere they've just changed the API so the various battery related apps will need to update their code to do things the 'new' way; although I don't know the details so that could be bollocks.

Yeah, they've changed the API so that the new way is OS protected and not available to non-google apps.

Ah, right; cunts.

I don't know if this goes in Android thread, or Mac one, but here goes.

My HTC One just went to 4.3 this weekend. Woo, right? Anyway, my Mac is on Mavericks and between the two of them, my Android File Transfer is not happening any more. Those of you familiar with my iPhone/iTunes adventures will note that my file transfer luck is close to zero at this point (okay, first world problems cross-post). Fuck!

Will I never get any new music onto any of my phones with this bloody Mac?

Have you rebooted the Mac? I had the same issue and that fixed it.

Grim.../Cras, does one of you still have the Nexus?

Do you work in IT? If not, you really should.

Grim...'s still got it, don't know if he's still using it.

Aye, it's right here. It KitKat'd itself last night.

Norty.

Fnar! Is it for sale? Sam's phone has died. Just looking at contracts for him for Christmas, not the best time of year to phone shop though.

I guess it's up to Craster.

Just, er, don't try and phone me.

I wasn't sure who had ownership.

Er... What?

I can't submit a post on the mobile site for some reason.

It belongs to Craster, but I currently use it.

I've got no troubles with the mobile site, but I'll double check.

Seems legit.

I have to restart chrome every so often on the mobile site, as the submit button stops working.

But it's not beex, it happens on all sorts of sites. It's really pissing annoying.

Oh sorry, I thought you'd had a new phone! Ignore me.

Thanks guys, I'll restart Chrome.

The reboot made it worse! It said there is no space on the hard drive (there were tens of GB before). Spinning umbrella of intrigue. Off. On again. Now it's just a grey screen with a cursor on it.

Any advice?

I can only guess that when I pointed HTC Stink Manager to my music folder (~1TB), it tried importing all of that onto my hard drive? Could it have done something so thoughtless?

Yes, it sounds very much like you've run out of space and it's ground to a halt.

Do you know how I can go about rectifying this sorry state of affairs?

Guessing I could boot it with an OS DVD in. Or try a bit of Terminal to identify and remove the offending files?

Boot in Single User Mode (hold cmd+S whilst powering on the machine) and once you're in, try using the following command:

sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage

This will wipe the data saved when the machine last went into sleep mode. The file can be a couple of gigs big, so it might free up enough room to allow you to reboot into the OS properly and sort out whatever's up with it.

Cheers dude; I'll give that a go.

Tempted to try booting from an external hard drive, but my last backup was around 100 days ago.

Actually... can I restore from backup to an old OS?

Is the backup a complete image of your hard drive or something? If so, you might already be able to boot off it - plug it in to the Mac and hold down the Option key as you power it on to go into the boot options - it'll show up there if you can boot off it.

Yyyy... possibly.

I used to be pretty regular with my Time Machine backups, so it's however complete they are.

If you boot into Recovery Mode (hold command+R when booting, or select Recovery HD when booting with the Option key held down), you can restore from a Time Machine backup. I've never done so myself, so I don't know if that means you'll lose anything newer than the backup or what.

I think I would. It's the whole computer as a snapshot. Music and big files are on an external, but I'm sure there's something nice I'd lose.

Just tried that command line. It's telling me it's a read only system!

Hmm

fsck -yf

Seems to have worked.

Back on topic, Android File Transfer still fails to recognise my One.

[edit] Giving Wifi File Transfer a go. Seems okay. Airdroid was giving me login issues.

Sorry, this is fast becoming my blog. Turns out there is a wired solution to my music transfer needs. XNJB. It's originally for Creative Nomad stuff, but given that HTC One now does MTP, and that's what Creative use(d?), it works fine.

It's not as lovely as my old iTunes - AFT method (which allowed me to drag music from the iTunes cover view into my phone's Music folder, but it does the job. And that is a victory for me at present.

I assume it is an Android phone: dual screen, one e-ink, phone. Looks good.
http://infoceanhub.com/e-ink-yotaphone- ... -launched/

Um...

I like the idea of a second e-ink screen but it looks very exposed like that.

@ Grim..., yeah the review is crap!

@DavPaz, agreed, you would need a very good cover for this.

The One Touch Hero has an optional e-ink cover that'll mirror certain functions to the e-ink screen, but I don't know if they ever actually released it as all the coverage just speaks to the announcement at the IFA back in September.

I have a very simple need for an Android app, that doesn't seem to be up on the play store, and I thought it would be.

I've switched to an all-you-can-eat mobile contract. I have a phone that allows me to share my internet connection via bluetooth, which I have turned on that setting. I have paired my tablet to it and it works fine.
However, I don't want the tablet to be constantly connected to the phone, I only want to connect up when I'm using it. To do that I have to load up the settings app on the tablet, go into bluetooth, select the settings button for the paired phone, then press the "connect to this device and use its internet" checkbox. The same in reverse to switch it off. A bit of a faff to do all that each time.

That seems like an easy thing to make into an app you can have on your homescreen that you tap and it toggles the setting, doesn't it? Nobody has made one though...

Use a Near Field Chip and program the settings to it?

At the risk of continuing that proud beex tradition of ignoring your question: why are you using Bluetooth rather than Wi-Fi?

If I knew how to set the setting, I would probably do something with Tasker.

Bluetooth is much kinder on your battery.

Could you do it the other way by turning Bluetooth on and off on the phone side instead?

Also, is this any use:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... ngSwitcher