Point Element

Google Takeout is a service that lets you download all your data available with Google. Funny thing is that we don't actually get how much data we share with Google.  With Android, App logins, GMail and many other google stuff the integral part of our life, we share a bootload of data with google. So this week I downloaded my google data using google takeout service and I was surprised when the archive turned out to be 6.39GB in size.  I'll be analyzing what all I've been sharing with Google. My expectation was about 2.5-3GB max data since my Gmail and Photos are using about 2GB at present. They managed to hit 3GB six months back so I trimmed both in spare time. So I was surprized with >6GB figure.  Lets see what all has ended up with google... Photos 5.2GB GMail 350MB Drive 650MB Rest all services few more MB. I was frankly surprised with the amount of space photos are taking, but then I recalled that only full resolution photos count towards the calculated storage. And...

We all have those relic phones which are replaced by yourself/cousins/relatives and ended up with you as secondary or tertiary phone. This was the phone I gifted my sister as her primary phone in 2012. She used it for about two years, then she wanted a big touchscreen phone so I got her an entry level droid. And so the Nokia was discarded as a secondary. The entry level droid  - a chinese knock-off by a local company is still kicking after about two years and a battery replacement, but now this Nokia has ended up with me. Funny part is I love this phone. it's small and simple. Gives very good battery life. Is a pleasure to use  -all these buttons. And is a good mp3 player too - again thanks to all the buttons I don't have to take it out of pocket to skip to next song.  Well, I have been using this as my secondary device for about a year now. I charge it maybe once a week, have all my contacts on it - took me a painful evening to send them one by one using bluetooth. I'm lai...

Well, it's been a while and I actually didn't spend much time on the app all this while. But today I decided that I'm going to spend at least couple of hours on it. And I did. Kind of solved couple of big issues too. Maybe not completely, but progress still. So the summary is I was facing issue with deployment of the database. It's sqlite db and I didn't know where to place it and how ty place it. So after lot of googling and some forum searching I found a way to deploy data files on Sailfish. After applying and troubleshooting couple of issues here n there I got the database working. But the problem now is, it works only when the app is run from sdk. When I launch the app from inside, no DB. Well atleast the role are going to the device. Teething issues. Another problem is the UI is all screwed up. This should not have happened because on desktop was all Sunny and Rozy. Anyway I'm yet to get to Sailfish specific stripes anyway so I'm thinking it wou...

Update: On Wed 2016-11-08 I gave in and visited the nearest Airtel Care Store. Thankfully the people there were very helpful and they knew the exact problem. So they gave me a 1800-xxx-xxx number for televerification. Once it's done they asked me for ID proof which I did not have at the time. But I visited them in evening and submitted the ID Proof. After this I was given a new SIM Card. This got activated in about two hours and the phone service was started. The SMS service was started after 24 Hours.  Hush! That was an experience. So this proved that Airtel's OnCall Customer Care sucks but the Airtel Care stores might be the ray of hope. Well, lets see how the postpaid services work out for a while. Or else we can always port out!!! ----------------------- Sometimes you look at the many hours you spent looking at your prepaid packs n the best combos and stuff, it seems like a waste. Me too. So I decided to convert my Prepaid Airtel connection to Postpaid. And it has...

Update: Finally after couple more follow-ups the refund was initiated and delivered to my account three days ago. It was interesting to see the lack of processes at Foodpanda and it does not give me much confidence. Mainly because they depend most on their CC Execs to keep track of things and the requests do get missing as I found out with my refund. Anyway at least I got the refund. ---------------- I have been a loyal customer of foodpanda for about two years. For single IT professionals having the food delivered at doorstep is a boon especially when you are exhausted after a 12-14Hr workday and just not wanting to go out for food. Having food home delivery services like Foodpanda, Swiggy, JustEat etc helps a lot in maintaining peace of mind. But then once in a while that peace of mind gets eaten up when any of them screw up.  I have had my experiences dealing with unprofessional and lousy restaurants, delivery screw-ups and what not. But that has been generally rare exper...

So I have been using Tata Docomo Photon Plus WiFi USB Dongle for a while now. My experience remains unchanged. On most if the days it just cannot connect to the 'plus' network. Mostly it connects to the 'Wiz' variant, which is CDMA1 RevB with about 115kbps(Yeah - It's kilobits!). Anyway, when it manages to connects to 'plus' variant which is as I believe CDMA2 the speed is good. I get about 1-1.5Mbps which is good. But again with the INR700 pack it's just 2GB of high speed goodness. After that it's 115kbps crawl. But since it's unlimited, I am okay with it. Heck, I once even managed to upgrade my Sailfish OS phone using the slow network.  So the outlook remains same. INR2500 is too much investment in Tata Photon Plus WiFi USB dongle. It's just not at all a strong contender for Dongle of the month or year. The good thing is it does work in it's own moody way. And if you can live with it, it's an okay deal. But still I wish I had gone f...

Not much happened for last couple of weeks. I was busy with things to work on the app porting. But three days ago I tried something to get the latest update. Here's the story with the background.  The background:  Intex Aqua Fish is a Sailfish OS phone with partner space enabled. What that means is whenever there's any update by Jolla e.g.  Fiskarsinjoki  v2.0.4.14 , you don't get it right away on Aqua Fish. It goes to Intex and then after validation it reaches you.  Anyway as you all know Aqua Fish is just clone of Jolla C, I decided to try out some tinkering on my own. My inspiration is following link: https://together.jolla.com/question/148893/how-to-make-aqua-fish-to-think-its-jolla-c-not-modem/ So after reading the steps, the provided script, and the comments carefully and multiple times, I started with the script.  The script failed saying I had some conflicting packages. So after going over instructions of how to clear out the offending packages in about half an hour...