Point Element

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 ...