Point Element

I was using housing.com android app last week to take a look at the rentals in my area.  I wanted to contact couple of owners. And of course I needed a profile. So I checked out their login page. Google login is supported, so I logged in using my gmail account. Then I tried to update phone no. The app crashed.  Then I tried same thing using housing. Com website. And as I logged in using Google, the profile page just won't show a phone no field textbox. There was a label and an update button but no place to type the no.  So I have up using housing.Com and moved onto 99Acres. Here i didn't have any problems. 

I cm across this couple of days back. I was travelling with couple of cousins. And one of them started navigation on his phone. It was a Lollypop phone. The 3D navigation screen won't show. Instead only 2D screen was shown. We thought it might be because of Lollypop. So I started maps on my phone. I have android 6. But my Google maps also did the same thing.  Then my other cousin started Maps on his phone. This is a lenovo with Android 6. There maps worked fine. So we went through all the settings etc, but could not find any explanation.  So maps sucks sometimes. At least the new 2D navigation worked alright. 

I had seen this update few days back. Now a whike has passed and no more major breakage was reported, so I decided to go ahead and upgrade. This is mainly an enhancement update. I updated over commandline since I dont know if and when this will be available by Intex. As usual devel-su, followed by ssu re 2.1.3.7 and version --dup finished the upgrade. It was kind of small at 170MB mentioned on the Jolla Blog. After upgrade was complete I rebooted the aquafish and its working fine without any major breakage. The one thing I noticed is the UI now is even smoother and responsive. I intend to check out the enhancements one by one. And Im going to see if they have solved the WiFi issue I have been having with Enterprize wifi with MSChapV2 auth. Lets see. I have been using Aquafish for a while now. And my experience has been great overall. The battery life is great. The smoothness and speed is great. It feels much more value than my other cheap phone - Panasonic T44. But again the extr...

If you are using an Android phone, you must know the amount of user data that's getting shared with advertisers by the OS, the various Apps and maybe every webpage that you visit.  Yesterday I ordered a battery for our family camera. It's a Sony Cybershot W510. Nice entry level camera and it's working great all these years. Recently I noticed the battery life has taken a hit and this comes with a rechargeable battery. So I ordered one off Snapdeal for 700Rs. That's about $11 . I also searched for the battery on Amazon. I also did something else - added a W800 Cybershot to my Amazon wish list. I'll probably buy the newer one in couple of months and gift it to parents while I keep and use the old one. I do stuff like that. I keep the shittiest of things for myself and give everybody else better things.  Anyway this morning I just added a file in ADM downloader app. And at the bottom there was a Amazon add for W810 Cybershot cam. Spooky!!! Makes me hate targeted advert...

Finally I got fed up with my slow laptop and since the memory thing did not work out, I was feeling desperate. So I decided to byte the bullet and spend couple of thousand more rupees and ordered a hard-disk and a mouse from Amazon.  In couple of days got them too. I was going to be out of town for weekend, so I quickly put it all together and then put Ubuntu Mate 17.10 on it.  Then watched couple of episodes of a tv show and did bit of web browsing. And I can say it all has been working great. The new hard disk is plenty fast. The Logitech mouse is serviceable. The pointer a bit once in a while but otherwise it's fine. This has greatly improved the usability of my age old laptop. 

Recently I felt adventurous and I decided to upgrade my poor-old laptop's RAM. I thought I would get a 2GB RAM module and sell the old one on OLX/Quickr. The new module cost about 800Rs and I could sell the old one for about 300Rs. So 500Rs for 1 more GB of RAM was acceptable. At the same time having 2GB RAM meant I won't have slow web browsing anymore. So I went through the listings and selected one Hynix module. I got it in about 3 days, but it won't work. Unfortunately it was not a Amazon fulfilled order so quick returns were not an option. But I raised a query to Amazon support to get seller details for RMA last night. Instead this morning I got an SMS telling I am getting a refund. Well, that works anyway.  So thanks amazon. Now I'm thinking about getting my local repair guy take a look at the offending RAM module to check if there's any problem with my laptop compatibility. I'm thinking of getting a HDD since this laptop is running on a Ubuntu Live USB the...

It's a really funny tale. What happened was like this - my laptop's touch-pad does not work. So I use an ancient Microsoft mouse or I used to! The mouse's left button was finicky for a while. And yesterday it decided to die.  I being the adventurous all-repair guy, decided to use a old soldier I had to rewire the mouse. I thought I could melt out the dead button and replace it with the middle click one. It's just two soldier points on the PCB. Well, after turning on the soldiering iron, it shorted out in 2 minutes.  Hmm. I took out the screw-driver and opened it. Turns out the wires were not copper or aluminum but were probably iron!!! And were completely rotten out!! WTF!!! After cussing for two minutes, I remembered having an old laptop adapter cable which I could reuse.  After half an hour of messing with pliers, connections and everything I managed to get the iron working again without the little light inside, because I broke the resistor connecting the light. Anywa...

Lets go through the SF OS section by section. 1. Introduction Recently Jolla released this Kiiminkijoki update to Sailfish OS. A few days after the release I got it on my AquaFish. Lets see how Sailfish feels after the update. I have not done any big review of SailFish (henceforth called SF), I'll try to go in detail about the whole system and the SF experience.  What was the update for? Recently Jolla got in a contract with Russia and is developing SF for Russian Govt and this has meant quite a bit of feature addition to SF. A lot of these features landed in SF 2.1.0.11. And some more in 2.1.2.26 which got pulled unfortunately due to an issue with Lock Screen. Anyway a lot more stability fixes and features made to Kiiminkijoki.  What are main fetaures? DropBox API v2 support Updated version of Alien Dalvik Browser, conenctivity, input and keyboard, Notifications, SDK fixes A lot of CVE Security fixes And a lot of bug fixes 2. Display Connectivity and Battery Life Display brightnes...

I have entered a kind of void these days. I spend five days a week in office. Every day I come home, I spend most of the time bing-watching TV serials and movies. Life has become boring. The Raspberry Pi 3 has collected a ton of dust. And seems like getting a display for the Pi will probably happen in 2018. It sucks! Anyway, coming back to the tech aspect, I have been very successful in milking the last drops of life from my age-old Acer Laptop. These days it runs on Ubuntu Mate via a MicroSD Card. It doesn't have a hard disk, touchpad is dead, only two USB ports, and a dead battery. I'm thinking I should take the dead bits out. That means the battery and the CD Drive - that will make it feather-light. Maybe in Ultrabooks territory. It unfortunately won't cure the yellowed display. But I have found out that when the content on the screen are interesting you forget about the yellow tint very quickly. I used to have a black-and-white TV in my childhood anyway.  So that's ...

Well, since these days the only thing I do with my home laptop is watch a shitload of movies and TV Shows, I don't have anything to share about my adventures right now. But in my office work, I'm facing much adventures. So this is a story about that. I am an embedded programmer these days. Yeah, it is a far cry from the server to desktop coder I worked as few years back. But I want to stick around in my current company and besides it pays the bills ( and EMIs and few shouks that I have). Anyway so I was given a task to run the embedded C code on Desktop and that also on Windows. Now we have an allegory - windows means Visual Studio. So because of this I have a VS2012 install lying about on my Windows partition of office laptop. So I created a branch of the main embedded code. And then created a project in VS2012, and imported existing files. And start compiling... It was really frustrating. On first compile I got roughly 3000 errors. By next day I had fixed almost all the issue...

We - me and my family - wife, brother in law and Sister, went for an outing couple of days back. It was great, nice sunny weather, empty roads and riding the scooters, it was awesome. We hit a snag on a village road - one of the scooters got a puncture. We got out the toolkit but we were not much helpful with it. Thankfully couple of villagers helped us. The problem is the scooter wheel has four nut-bolts holding the wheel to the drum with size 14 bolts. The drum is held to the main shaft with a size 24 bolt. What happpened was the toolkit had only size 14 spanner. So we got on work on the four bolts. Turns out couple of the bolts are made of low-quality soft metal, and the spanner slipped twisting the edges and the wheel could not come off. We did not have size 24 spanner, so we took the other scooter and got a mechanic from 10km away, he had the tools, and soon we had the scooter running. Lesson learned - keep extra spanners - proper round type - flat spanners suck. And bolts are shi...

I have told you in my last post that the 320GB old HDD failed to handle the works. Now today I was looking for some other solution. And I thought of swap file. Upon searching the internet I got to this solution. So accordingly I created a 1G .swap file on the external HDD. Then using mkswap utility I formatted it to swap, and later using swapon utility mounted it as swap. After this I checked the system opening multiple programs and testing the swapfile usage. As of now I could open GMail and GDocs both in Firefox and the laptop has been smooth sailing so far. I know it cannot handle a lot of load. But for me this was the last use case. And I'm happy that its working with whatever limitations. So that's all. This old Acer laptop does have some life in it yet.

So like I mentioned in last post, I did find the old external HDD. And I installed Ubuntu Mate on it.  Hmm. Didn't work out. The drive threw too many read errors. Screwed!!!  Guess no google docs for me. 

As I said in last post, after dithering for a while I got a USB hub. Got it from a local retailer here for 400/- rupees. So now I can do much more with the dying Acer laptop. The hub itself is minimal affair. What I hate about it are 2 things - 1. it's packing was real shitty affair - no clear lines saying where to cut to get the thing out 2. the hub has flat wire which leads to the USB port - I don't have much confidence in it. Lets see how far it goes. Anyway now that I had the hub I could connect the external mouse, my portable HDD and my phone simultaniously I thought of trying to find a light distro which could let me use the 1GB RAM best.  Enter Puppy Tahr - Puppy Linux is great little distro, and Puppy Tahr is based off Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS's packages, which means best of both worlds - Firefox and VLC.  Thing is Firefox with couple of Google Docs tabs still kills my 1GB RAM, which in Live USB mode isn't backed by any SWAP memory. Unfortunately I don't have any ...

This is my first laptop which I bought way back in Aug-2010. Thats about seven years now - and over the years it's catastrofically failed twice. Once about three years back it's mainboard died, I got it replaced for about 8000/-. And found out the power brick was dead too. Ok. Another 800/- bucks got me a non-brand Adapter. OK. It worked for a year since, and then one sunny day died again. I bought a Lenovo G405S for about 19000/- rupees and didn't bother to get this one fixed. It stayed in a box up with some junk for a while. A fortnight ago I got the other laptop - a Lenovo G480 which my sister uses now exclusively - repaired for 2200/- because I managed to get it wet and fried.  So I decided to see if I can get this old Acer Junk repaired. Gave it to the Repair center - the guy quoted 1800/- Rs, I okayed. Got it yesterday, also got an original Acer Adapter for 1550/- Rs too. Don't want to take another chance with no-brand junk. So the laptop is now repaired. Got it h...

So it's been a bit of quiet here lately. I mean I used to put up 2-3 posts a week back then for some time, and now I'm doing 1-2 a month. What's going on here? Has my life become so much quieter? Actually it's kind of true. These days there's almost nothing going on. On work front I've been stuck on an embedded project where I'm coding in 'c' - meh! On personal front I'm kind of down these days. You must remember I bought a Raspberry Pi3 a while back, but I'm yet to get a monitor for that PI-HTPC I wanted to do. I should be learning new things - but since I'm not doing anything in Qt - I just don't have any real need to do anything about it right now. So aaah, I've been just spending my days doing 8 hour work days, and 12hr weekends. Mostly I'm watching B-grade Hollywood movies and reading sci-fi. I've managed to hit a good series - The General by David Drake, and it's quite immersive. I'm reading A. A. Attansio...

Last week, due to bit of an accident involving a full bucket and it's broken handle, my Lenovo G580 got some water inside. It wasn't completely washed out, but bit of splash got left side of laptop where the VGA port is. When I saw what has happened, the laptop was charging, and so I quickly turned off the power adapter. The power light was ON, so I long pressed the power button to power it off. Then I removed the battery, and opened back panel and removed RAM, WiFi card and HDD. Then let it all dry for two days. After this I put everything in and tried to start it. Nothing at first. Then I connected the power adapter and tried charging, the charging light came on. Then I tried power button. This time I got one short beep followed by three long beeps, and then again another beep and stop. No display. So started my hunt for a good laptop repair center in near vicinity. I remembered the Acer's repair. I think I got duped off there for about 6-7thousand rupees, since the idiot...

Couple of weeks back I bought the cheapest Fiio I could find. That's the matchbox sized A1 portable amplifier.  It costs me about 2000Rs. It's portable. Good a small battery inside. Charges off computers USB port with supplied micro-USB cable. Provided items are two clips, two stereo cables, one micro USB charging cable and a user manual alongside the portable amp unit.  Let's get right into the experience. The amp is decently loud. The provided three equalizer presets are not much help though. The tiny form factor makes it ultra portable.  My only gripe is I don't have any heavy headphones/ weak audio sources to use these.  My Soundmagic ES1 run fine on my years old Nokia C5. Heck even the 32Ohm Sennheiser HD349's run fine on that.  So there's that!! Maybe I wasted my 2K!!😃

Just read this somewhere in news. WTF Xiaomi????

If you must remember, then I bought this android phone for my sistsr as her first android. It replaced the aging Nokia C5-00 5MP, her first phone. It was a decent value for money phone back then. It shipped with android 4.1.2 and stayed stuck there forever. Since it was with my sister who stayed with my parents at my hometown I didn't have much chance to do any real hacking/modding of it. So it worked for last two+ years.  Then after two years it's original battery gave up. So I purchased a replacement online for 200 odd rupees and that gave it a bit of lease of life. Then next year it fell few more times and finally the screen got damaged enough to produce some lines on it.  Being a loving and caring brother I told sister that I would give a new phone. But I couldn't find a decent phone and so gave her my - then about a year used but still in pristine condition -Nubia Z9 mini and she's enjoying it since.  So the Titanium S1 stayed with me for last six months, being ...

So I have never yet tested the GPS thoroughly in Panasonic T44, but somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that this is something that doesn't work on this phone of mine. But I managed to ignore it for all these days. Then this week I really need the GPS because I'm going touring this coming weekend and having the GPS would be blast.  So I checked the GPS in google maps. Doesn't work, the fix I get is triangulated from cell towers. Next I downloaded a number of GPS Diagnostic apps and checked through them. The best GPS Diagnostic and info app is "GPS Test". It's icon is a radar like circle with green/red dots in it depicting satellites. This showed that the phone is getting the sat list, but is not able to get any signal. Then I put the same app in my Intex Aqua Fish, and it worked fine there. I even got the fix in a few seconds outside on road. Well, sucks! So there can be multiple reasons for this. Maybe the antenna connection is loose, or there's no ...

For last few months I have been seeing this very annoying bug of VLC where the navigation strip hangs while video keeps playing in background. Its very annoying when I quickly want to go through any video, since I cannot see the progress. So on Ubuntu I have installed SMPlayer. It may nt be as good as VLC but at least it works!!!

Recently I was noticing slow start-up on my laptop. It has Ubuntu 16.10. It comes with systemd. I had a number of programs collected through almost one year of use. So I first went through Synaptic and removed the ones not required any more. This helped to some extent. Systemd has a nice tool called systemd-analyze that gives you a clear picture of all that's happening with your system at start-up. So using systemd-analyze critical-path, systemd-analyze blame, and systemd-analyze plot > plot.svg, I got loads of information about the bunch of things that are making the start-up slow. So I went through disabling a number of unwanted services and removing few more programs/utilities and finally got the boot time down from 57sec to 32Sec. I'm stuck there though. But again my laptop is five year old Lenovo with Pentium D 2.1GHz processor and 2GB of RAM and a 320GB SATA HDD, so maybe that's the best it can do!

    We have been struggling with the leaking front fork seals for a while and Pratibha Motors Authorized Service Center didn't have the replacements for about a month. So I searched and found Mulraj Auto Authorized Service Center. Wife took the bike there for servicing. Next day we got the bike back. Actually previously we were looking only for seals replacement, but by the time the bike reached the service center it had covered about 3100KM, so we thought to get the 3rd servicing done.      The bill was INR 430/-. They had tightened the bike. Looking at the engine assembly it looked like it's all opened up and put together. The bike was cleaned, with grease applied to brakes etc. The leaking seals were fixed of course. The idling was tuned a bit and the scooter doesn't stop while idling. But still it idles like a haffing dog!!! I checked it out with a 5km short ride, and I could see the difference in pickup. Maybe they replaced the faulty crankshaft and flywheel. So the bi...

https://www.motorbeam.com/2017/03/bikes/hero-maestro-edge/hero-maestro-edge-recalled-silently-1-5-lakh-units-affected-scoop/ So some news about our Hero Duet. Looks like hero motocorp has fucked it up for good.  We have done about 3000 km till date. And the scooter has become kind of rubbish with leaky suspension and reduced pickup. Probably needs a service. So hearing this news I asked wife to dump it for servicing.  Let's see if the servicing guys fix this turd.  On the positive side - Hero did get some things right. Above 55kmph no vibrations. So good for highway riding. So is stability at high speeds - which may be because of the weight. But still with good suspension it gives you confidence. The light is not enough in night and needs tune-up for proper focus. But we keep on forgetting it every time we give it for servicing. Maybe I'll correct it when I start self-servicing the bike. Oil change and basic engine tune up doesn't look all that difficult.  The seating is no...

Recently I noticed my almost 5Yr old Lenovo G580 laptop which comes with a dual core 2.3GHz Pentium B930 processor, was running hotter than usual. Generally I use my laptop for internet browsing, little bit of office documents and mainly watching movies and TV Serials. So it was not as much bother, but upon looking into it - I noticed with the help of HWMonitor program, that even on idle it's running at about 60 degree celc. This is hotter than average. Two problems I could see was 1. The thermal paste has dried out and become useless, 2. The fan is not kicking in. After going through a number of articles on internet about thermal paste I decided to get the cheaper version abd try it out. Mind you the average ambient temps here are in 35 degree celc range these days, this being summer. So last week I ordered an el cheapo thermal paste for 130 INR, that about $2 - qty is 10gm. Got it yesterday. Went home and after unscrewing a dozen screws and getting nicked here and there, I manage...

My last purchase of Panasonic P75 was a bit puzzling for me when I checked out the soc name and the specs. Point was, the soc was mentioned everywhere as  MT6580. But my previously purchased phone Panasonic T44 also has the same soc. Plus the same specs, but when I used both the phones I could clearly tell which one was faster and which one was slower.  As I saw in daily use Panasonic P75 is definitely faster, smoother etc with same 1GB of RAM, with same soc clock speed of 1.3GHz. So what's wrong? Turns out the soc info for the cheaper phone was incorrect. It has MT6580m soc. This is what's a watered down version of MT6580. And so this is what's causing the difference in performance. Since from what I saw in actual usage - the mt6580 is faster so Android is smoother there as compared to mt6580m which feels only adequate.  Ciao.

One of my test servers was crashing with multiple connections. Digging in I found out that I have used same object for QTcpSocket and disconnect signal was not getting received before getting new connection. So client should send disconnect before connecting on new connection. So digging in client code, I found nothing. Okay. Documentation... Found out there's close() function in unistd.h which can be used to close a socket connection. Okay, made a call to that with socketfd, and voilla! Bug fixed! Server's safe. But going to have to add handling for rogue clients. Adios.

I wanted an entry level android for my mother. Being entry level meant about INR 4000/- of budget. That is about $60. I looked at a number of phones in budget segment, but problem being there was no main-stream brand present here. All I could find was Micromax / Zen / iBall / Intex / Xolo. No Samsung / LG / HTC / Motorola / Lenovo / Xiaomi / Oppo / Vivo etc here. I found couple of old gen ZTE's and one current gen Alcatel ( Pixi 4  - retailing for INR 5000/- ). Not interesting enough. The oddball is Panasonic which offers decent Android phones from INR 3000/-. In fact I use a Panasonic T44 these days as my main driver - bought it for INR 3200/- or about $48. It serves me well with 2500mAh battery and all needed functions. The only thing I miss is IPS LCD, but for me battery anxiety is a thing of past now. Apparently we have too many other things to be worrying about instead of cellphone battery. Haha. Anyway so for me the criteria for the purchase was set. Big battery, decent specs...

So I wanted to download only images from this one website for archival usage. After looking at all ready available page, I couldn't find anything suiting for my purpose. So I decided to throw in a little shell-script. It went on as follows: The pages are incremental in index. So I can use a while loop to fetch all pages one by one. Done. Need to fetch the page. Wget is fine. Done. Then I need to look for the image URL in retrieved HTML. Hmm. Bit of grep with cut does that. Done. Next get the actual image. Again prepare the image URL and wget. Done. Error handling? Gaah. Nothing since this is not that trivial. After testing for few pages it was golden. So I put it up with counter loop of hundred images at one time. That's because this script is kind of slow since I don't know nor care to put in multithreading in shellscript. Gaah. Plus as I later found out having 100's counter is good since wget hung out when the net went down for a moment, and I had to restart the scrip...

Yesterday we went out for an outing on our bike. It was about 90kms round trip. We left in morning and planned to be back by noon. Going was nice, with normal weather. After reaching the place and sightseeing for about couple of hours we left by 11:30AM. We could feel the heat. It was not scorching yet, but we felt like we should have left an hour early, since it was easily an hour and half's ride back with all the traffic. So we were only 10kms away when the scooter lost power. We tried electric start first, but it won't start. Then we tried kick start, and still nothing. So we searched the net and found a mechanic and had him sent someone over. Then after 45 minutes couple of young mechanics reached us. After fiddling with the scooter they managed to kick start it. Initial prognosis was dead air filter. So we rode to their garage, and got it replaced in about half-an-hour. In Hero Duet the filter comes as a block of striped foam. In bikes it's often a round hose-lik...

Been reading about the troubles with LG. To be frank, LG actually has crappy phones. Their mid range is non-existent and their high end is in search of identity. Add in these QA issues. I mean come on.... I have seen phones getting literally cooked at about 45-50 degrees when gaming and they did not fail - e.g. my Nubia Z9 mini and few more older phones. If LG cannot make a phone motherboard, they need to be put out of phone making business. Latest news is they have a Class Action lawsuit in US. Hmmm let everybody know LG hardware is crap. For comparisons we have not heard such things from almost all other manufacturers. And please leave aside chinese knock-offs. They can't even align their plastic edges. Haha. Cheers.

It was a surprise announcement. But then again maybe Mark Shuttleworth saw the writing on the wall, and thought about stopping the bleeding. And so the culling began... I was kind of shocked when I read Jono Bacon's post. Why? Because I'm not much online on G+. And Jono's was the latest post on Planet Ubuntu. Anyway I did try Unity 8, and it did look slick. Funny think is probably KDE has similar graphics and animations for ages, and they never appealed to me. Frankly I just hate the way KDE looks. The odd highlights, the cramped fonts, the weird effects I immediately disable... gaah!!! What I saw in Unity 8 though, I liked it. Anyway again Canonical has few resources and they are better spent on improving Canonical's longevity. Because It's Canonical that took Linux to the masses and not Redhat or SuSe or anybody else. For that..... Salute!!!

Recently I noticed that my Ubuntu installation has become slow to boot. It has seen couple of dist upgrades and a lot of application install/remove's. So I decided to dig in and see if there's anything I can do about it. First thing is how to measure current boot time. After a quick google search I ended up with following commands. systemd-analyze systemd-analyze blame systemd-analyze critical-path systemd-analyze plot > plot.svg systemd-analyze prints something like: Startup finished in 9.002s (kernel) + 22.322s (userspace) = 31.325s Which means system is taking 31.325 Secs to boot, out of which kernel part is 9Sec and remaining is user part. systemd-analyze blame prints list of applications/ services according to time taken to load. critical-path option shows a critical path graph and highlights applications/services which are taking more than average time. plot option plots a nice graph of the booting process. There are other ways too. E.g. if you want to see more in what...

Well, I have been using Ubuntu 16.04, then 16.10 and now about to upgrade to 17.04 whenever it gets released. Problem is with Unity is we get updated Nautilus. And over the time I have seen the changes that have made me say WTF!!! More on this later. But this caused me to switch to Mate. I didn't want to replace my existing installation because there are about a dozen apps and half-dozen drivers that I have installed for office work. And I don't want to go through re-configuring everything again. So I just installed Mate desktop and been using it. Frankly, Mate is killer. It's lightweight and so fast. Very responsive. I didn't have much problems with Unity's search the app metaphor since I pin half a dozen apps which I use regularly, and that's it. But Unity has been pretty sluggish and I used it only because the indicators and stuff keeps running without breaking over updates.(Have used XFCE and LXDE, both exhibited this issue.) Anyway, so Mate it is for me. Le...

I started noticing this issue recently when I used Ubuntu to copy large files - anything more than 600-700MB. When the copy started, it would start with good speed of about 25-30 MB/S, but then after about 300MB it would slow down and soon go into single digits. Also System Monitor would show kswapd0 popping up and bogging one core so that system performance would take critical hit. This would happen only when the source/destination was ntfs partition. At first I thought kswapd0 to be the culprit since it was the one hogging the system. But after lots of google searches I found out ntfs.3g driver to be the culprit. What happens is that ntfs.3g driver - whatever version is available in kernel 4.4, allocates huge buffers and does not free them, so if you looked in top, you would see the buff/cache part of memory swelling to ridiculous sizes - in my case when copying 1GB file buff/cache swelled to 3.5GB (WTF!!!) from 500MB. Anyway after trying a number of solutions below one is the one th...

I recently parted ways with my Nubia Z9 Mini. Gave it to my younger sister as her Karbon S1 Titanium ran out of steam. Thing is I can do with an entry level phone. So I was on the lookout for a decent and cheap android. There are some compromises though - screen is going to be small, RAM not much - 512MB to 1GB, and battery life might take a hit depending on the capacity and model. After browsing through multiple times on the roaster, I settled on a Karbon A91 Storm but the unit I received came with a damaged battery - with a dent in it. It did work when I popped it in risking an explosion, haha. The phone was totally meh with a terrible build of android and the hideous champagne-white color scheme (which by the way I mistakenly selected :C) made it a no go.  Further hunt led me to a number of cheap phones - some from companies whose names were totally new to me, didn't even have websites etc, to costly entry level phones from established brands. I also decided that I needed to up ...

It just so happened that AquaFish was the only smartphone I had at hand when my Nubia temporarily died. I used AquaFish for almost a month and these are my findings. It's a good device - screen is good, call quality is above average, Sailfish OS runs well, almost no weird behavior like dropping signals/missing SMS/ call hanging. Telephony was quite good. The handset feels good in hand and I had people asking me which this orange phone is!!! The crown is of course Sailfish's gesture driven UI. It's quite natural and I have never missed android's home/recent/back buttons. The UI is responsive and there were not one native application hangups. Few android applications hanged up in various use cases - e.g. WhatsApp with GIF's etc. Not a huge deal breaker. The SD Card support worked fine, MTP connection to Laptop Windows/Linux was solid. No weird 0 Byte files or anything. Camera worked fine. In fact I captured some good photos. I have attached a snap here. Notifications ...

I was almost ready to give up on the Nubia - already had given up on it. But then today I put it up for charge and lo behold! The notification LED started blinking in an SOS pattern. So I googled the internets, and found similar cases for various brands of mobiles. I let the phone charge on. There was nothing on the display yet. Then on one post someone mentioned that they had more luck with a 2.4A charger. I remembered that I had one microUSB power adapter I had purchased for my Raspberry Pi3. So I plugged in the phone to this 2.4A 5V adapter. And suddenly the charging animation showed up. I cannot explain my joy! Then I let it charge till 20% on it. After I used normal 1A charger to fully top up. And now the Nubia Z9 mini is back!!!

Will write just the conclusion here: Networking is complex! Ciao

Happened on 25th Feb. What happened was I put it in my rucksac as I was riding a motorcycle back from some trekking, and my trousers didn't have a decent pocket. When I reached home, took out the phone for downloading all the awesome photos I took on the trip, and it was dead as a rock. Tried to revive it using charger, nothing. Then connected it to laptop and saw a USB malfunction error, means either the port is damaged or the board is damaged. So a f*#+ moment. Called zte customer care no and got address of nearby service center. Lets see what they say. On the other news, haven't yet gotten around to get a TV or monitor for the pi3, so its sitting quiet, waiting. Ubuntu translation continues in my free time on launchpad.net - about 170066 strings remaining. Nothing much else. Ciao.

For last few months I have been hammering Mr translations for Ubuntu on Launchpad.net. It's exciting. As of this date Marathi is top translated Indian language for Ubuntu. The count of untranslated strings is still too high - 170601 as of this post, but I'm hammering at it one string at a time. Sadly there are not many contributors. Maybe if I could recruit even a handful of people that would increase the pace many fold. But I'm not much social and so refrain from it. Well, That's it. But I'm happy to note that I love this work.

TCP IP blues Recently the project I'm currently working at job started sending some diagnostic data from vehicle to server. I was involved in the vehicle side development. So it was UT time. Found out manually testing the various datasets is painful. So to automate this, I used my Qt skills and hammered together a small TCP IP client for sending prepared datasets to remote server. This will help us in UT. Nokia C5 5MP audio quality I have the old Nokia which my sister abandoned after shifting to Android. I have put some songs on it and use it as a Mp3 player. And funny thing is its audio quality is superb. As compared to my android phone - Nubia Z9 Mini, wife's Honor 5x the Nokia sounds better. I don't know why, but it just is better. An actual metric would be this: the Nokia can comfortably drive my Sennheiser HD 439 while with both the droids, the sound is tiny. Sucks!!! Using Intex Aqua Fish as daily driver I'm using the Aqua fish as a daily driver fo...

Just read about the latest update which was given out to early release testers for sailfish.  It's version 2.1 and it updates qt to 5.6, users bluez5 for Bluetooth, and contains a bootload of bug fixes.  Feeling excited. 

So back at the end of Jan the dev builds for Android 7.1.1 started up on mokeedev.  I didn't want to go for them till they had a stable release out. But eventually I got bored and one fine evening downloaded the latest nightly and gappa for Android 7 and went ahead.  The installation was similar. On first bootup I had a surprise - a lot of apps wont start. Looking around I found out that the permissions are reset. The apps should be asking for permission instead of crashing. But anyway, I enabled various permissions for apps based on my knowledge. It sorted out about half of them. The remaining stubborn or rather badly coded apps I reinstalled from store. Then they all worked fine.  Performance wise there's not much difference. The overall experience seems a bit smoother. Battery life is similar to Marshmallow.  There are not many crashes, just an occasional app hiccuping once in a while. Functions are not complete e.g. USB tethering doesn't work yet. Otherwise camera is fi...

Noticed this after repeatedly checking their Downloads section. Want to try them out but they are nightlies still, and I'm loathe to break my only android phone these days... Lets see when a release gets out. Still excited!!!!

I had to recently reset the Aqua fish and I remember last time I said that when resetting it, you lose all your updates too.  Well, so when I reset it, I was booted to 2.0.2.3 which was the version it shipped to me. OK. I added a Jolla account, otherwise it won't search for updates. Then I checked for updates and it did get latest 2.0.5.6 update. After updating I reinstalled a number of apps and checked all the functionality. It was all working alright.  Well, this is the thing to remember with Sailfish Reset, you get back to the version that's available in your phone's ROM?/ recovery image. But if Jolla Update is working, you can grab the latest update too.  One thing I don't know yet is what if Intex Aqua Fish did not get the latest update, then what? Do I have to un-Intex the Aqua Fish and then try to get the update - which seems obvious - or something else?  

Investment Proof submission for Income Tax Assessment Hi, This is a yearly practise that we have to go through here in India. This is applicable for salaried employees whose Income Tax is deducted by the paying organization itself.  Generally at the start of financial year (April here) you are asked to declare whatever future investments you are going to do in the current financial year. Then based on that and your current salary package, your monthly Income Tax outgo is calculated and accordingly deducted from your monthly salary.  This goes on till three months before FY ending - Dec here. So in next month - Jan., we are asked to submit actual proofs for the declared investments etc. So we have to submit the actual proofs and based on that the actual tax for the year is calculated. Then the remaining tax is deducted in three installments in the remaining three months - Jan, Feb and March.  Then by May you get Form 16 - your annual income tax report and based on that you can file for ...

Hmm, actually Hero Duet VX doesn't have a seat height adjustment capability. AFAIK on all the scooters, only Mahindra Rodeo line has this feature. Mainly it doesn't matter for average heighted ladies. But for someone of about 5Ft height, the default seat height of 70cm can be a bit too high. And my wife belongs to this group. Thankfully many accessory shops help you with the seat height. After asking around we found couple of shops nearby and visited one of them for the change. It's simple, they shave bit of foam off the saddle to get it low. It cost us INR 150 bucks.  But actually there should be an option for seat height adjustment for everybody. I don't know why bike manufacturers (except Mahindra on Rodeo) don't provide this.  To look at it other way, your plain jane bicycle provides seat height adjust!!! J

Whenever I have to deal with State Bank of India, it has been a thoroughly frustrating experience. Unfortunately since it's largest bank, gives almost best interest as well loan rates, it's the go to bank for a huge number of people. And generally it works, but then some times it plainly sucks.  My first frustrating experience was when I opened a saving account - in SBI at the behest of my parents. Problem is there are always so many people at each SBI branch, and the whole branch is like a madhouse. The tables don't have proper boards, SBI people will move you here to there without any proper information and overall it's a pain in the ass just to visit the branch to get some work done.  If you know the exact things to do, well and good. Otherwise get ready to be kicked around the branch for a while. So after going through this SBI incubation treatment for a while I got used to it. Also came to know thoroughly the lines, the delays, the slow staff, the overall chaos. Hm...

I have briefly used all KDE flavours from KDE 3.0 to 4.0 to latest plasma shell with KDE 5 series. But I could not get along with KDE for too long. I use it for few months and then get bored or just annoyed enough with the way many of the things are and hop to other distro.  My main gripes are below:  1. The themes and the overall widget animations: Animations are good and bright, catchy colors are good too - if used sparingly. But with KDE it's just too much. Every time I have used KDE I ended up disabling almost all animations, and switching to an easier on the eyes color theme. The various themes just don't look natural - they look like some snazzy designers dream. Rather take a look at the Mint themes, or Ubuntu themes - they are muted and not eye catchy. But that's something makes you forget about them and concentrate on the work. With KDE it's exactly opposite. The various colors, gradients, and changes keep grabbing at your focus. Add to that the various popups a...

Previously enabling raspbian, meant you have to boot to the card. Then enable and configure ssh service.  But with since 2016, there's a simple method. That is on the boot partition of your SD Card, create an empty file with name 'ssh' - without quotes - and when you boot from this SD Card, SSH services are auto-enabled. To create the file you can use following commands:  touch /media/user/boot/ssh sync Touch creates the file and sync ensures that it's written to the SD Card, flushing any pending write buffers for the SD Card. 

I used Ubuntu for preparing the SD Card and it's really simple. You connect the SD Card using a card reader. If it's auto mounted, then un-mount it using sudo umount /dev/sdb1 assuming /dev/sdb is the SD Card with one partition. Next extract the Raspbian image from the ZIP file. Note, the zip file is about 1GB but the image is 4.4GB since it's compressed image.  Next use dd to put this image on the SD Card.  sudo dd bs=4M if=[image file path] of=/dev/sdb   This writes the image to the SD Card. Next pop the SD Card in the pi and power up! 

So finally last night I spent some time plumbing the software stuff together and got Raspbian working on the Raspberry Pi 3 board. It needed some acrobatics but it did work. Below screenshot on my Ubuntu Laptop is the proof! J The setup:  Raspberry Pi 3 powered using Portronics 5v 2.3A power adapter connected to ethernet on  a Tenda N301 router. I don't have a HDMI display yet so I'm sort of using vnc for this. I'm using Raspbian on a 8GB SanDisk SD Card.  The things I had to do: 1. Prep SD Card with Raspbian - straight forward using standard instructions on Linux. - All OK. 2. Power up the Pi 3 and use ethernet to connect it to the Tenda. - All OK.   3. SSH to the Pi: Had to fumble a bit here but finally got around to it using a solution on Stackoverflow.com. - A bit iffy but Okayish. 4. VNC: Straight forward using inbuilt vncserver. Needed to install RealVNC client on Laptop. But then worked fine. - All OK with one download. And voilla I co...