Point Element

Versions: RMX1825, RMX1821 Network Technology GSM / HSPA / LTE Launch Announced 2019, March Status Available. Released 2019, March Body Dimensions 156.1 x 75.6 x 8.3 mm (6.15 x 2.98 x 0.33 in) Weight 175 g (6.17 oz) Build Front glass, plastic body SIM Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual stand-by) Display Type IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors Size 6.22 inches, 96.6 cm 2 (~81.8% screen-to-body ratio) Resolution 720 x 1520 pixels, 19:9 ratio (~270 ppi density) Protection Corning Gorilla Glass 3 Platform OS Android 9.0 (Pie), planned upgrade to Android 10.0; ColorOS 6 Chipset Mediatek MT6771 Helio P60 (12 nm) Mediatek Helio P70 (12nm) CPU Octa-core (4x2.0 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4x2.0 GHz Cortex-A53) Octa-core (4x2.1 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4x2.0 GHz Cortex-A53) GPU Mali-G72 MP3 Memory Card slot microSD, up to 256 GB (dedicated slot) Internal 32GB 3GB RAM, 64GB 3GB RAM, 64GB 4GB RAM Main Camera Dual 13 MP, f/1.8, 1/3.1", 1.12µm, PDAF 2 MP, depth s...

This post relates to current situation in Indian Telecom industry. Recently courts have decided that the telcos should pay more to govt as part of AGR revenue. The telecom sector was inefficient for last few years with outrageous data charges, pathetic service and huge indebtedness due to high spectrum charges and regulatory boondoggles. 2G spectrum auction was a big screwup by govt. And later rapid introduction of 3G and 4G meant the incumbent telcos did not manage to recover what they spent on spectrum.  Next came Jio and caused bankruptcies all around. Most small telcos shut shop. Others brought in loans and funding partners and some merged.  Now current position is Vodafone Idea - which merged last year, are going to go kaput if they are made to pay 90000Cr Rs in next 3 months. Airtel has more than 1Lac Cr of debt. Heck, even Jio has around 40000 Cr of debt. So now only way is for fares to go up. And after bit more consolidation, they will go up. But where is the quality?  And I th...

Recently I noticed that I'm using Chromium a lot even though I have Firefox installed. The reason turned out is the browser shortcut on panel. Anyway I fiddled a bit with panel and got Firefox there too.  Then came usage. Turned out I needed few addons. First came Adblocking. Then h264ify for youtube on raspberry pi. Then after using this setup for 15 mins I found out google sites don't work. Hmm, bit of googling and then another add-on "User agent switcher" fixed this.  Hmm I thought now things would be great. But I was sorely mistaken. Because my RPi3B+ hanged in next 15 mins and I lost this post - which I was typing in Text Editor. And I had to restart it manually. Sucks.  So I think for web browsing on RPi3 I'm going for Chromium only.  Cheers!!

I have been using this Honor 5X cellphone for last few months. Recently I noticed that it has become unbearably slow. Google Maps was struggling. Common apps like GMail etc were crawling. PUBG Lite also was not working any well. Then I restarted the phone and it worked fine for couple of days and repeat of slowdown. Another restart and another couple of days of good working followed by slowdown. So I dug up the setting of Automatic Power Off and Power On, and have setup the phone to power down by 11PM and power on by 6AM. Also I have ensured that the free memory amount is more than 20%. I ran the phone with these settings and for a week now, no more slowdowns. Hurrah!! Now the technicals - I think Huawei's android skin is buggy and it just can't handle long runtimes. Maybe AOSP android itself is buggy and can't handle long runtimes. Probably apps/kernel gobble up memory and leak some every time something happens. Then couple of days later, no more memory. An...

THIS IS WHAT I HAVE NOW DONE TO RESOLVE THE ISSUE AS DESCRIBED This set of instructions apply to Firefox v47 (and earlier) 1. Add a correctly written and installed configuration file for in-processor INTEL HD Graphics 1.1 Portreve has kindly described how to do this here: Portreve Link 1.2 After Restart, confirm that TearFree is enabled with this Terminal Command (Cinnamon) cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep TearFree It should correctly report: 'intel(0): TearFree enabled' 2. Enable Firefox (v 47.0) graphic hardware acceleration 2.1 Launch Firefox 2.2 Type < about:config > without the brackets - It will warn 'Here Be Dragons' - click 'I'll Be Careful, I Promise! 2.3 In the Search Bar enter < layers.acceleration.force-enabled > without the brackets 2.4 It will state 'false' - double click it to change to 'true' and close the Firefox Tab 2.5 Restart Firefox 2.6.1 Confirm GPU Acceleration is active - do this: 2.6.2 In Firefox, type < abou...

We bought this Honor 5X in Jun 2016 to replace my wife's aging Sony xperia R. It was more than 2 years old and was getting very slow. This 5x has served my wife well for about 2 years and couple of months. Then she started experiencing slowdowns since her use of phone for translations etc is heavy.  So about six months ago, wife upgraded to Redmi Note 7 Pro with 4GB ram and its working well. Since she ditched this phone, I am using this as my main device since it's better than my then in use Panasonic T45.  Now I'm getting a new phone as gift, and while getting it, I have decided to exchange this Honor 5X with that. I'm getting about INR1600 ($21) for this in exchange. Considering the target device is INR11450 ($153), it's good bargain.  One condition for exchange is that you have to disable the locks in the device being given in. So I tried for couple of days to get rid of the PIN lock I have ben using. But the "none" option would stay grayed out and woul...

Recently I wanted to do a bit of a POC for bluetooth connection on an android phone. So had to setup Android Development environment. After browsing around for a while I saw that google is pushing Android Studio as main development platform for android apps. So I went to the google page and got Zip of android studio. Then unzipped it and started it. Turned out there are some issues, if you have to select non-standard path. And I was stuck there for couple of hours. AS (Android Studio) would download the SDK and tools to selected custom folder but would not detect the SDK. After trying couple of times and googling for couple of hours with no solution in sight, I decided to go ahead and let it pollute the system. So it installed SDK in default location. Then it took couple of restarts and tries just getting it to detect the SDK. Then I created a simple project. And tried to compile it. Turns out the compilation is crazy slow. And then it was running time. I had not added an devic...

I have been meaning to update Linux Mint on my laptop for a while now. It was running 18.something. It was running fine, but then I saw the reviews for 19.1 and thought it's bit better than 18 series. So got a USB and upgraded. The upgrade (actually it was replacement since I always format the / partition), went fine. Then it was couple of days of sporadic usage to setup everything. Once that was done I spent some time just using the machine. And what I have is positive impressions. 1. Wifi - It's improved, no more disable/enable networking when you have turned on the hotspot. 2. System seems smoother. 3. There were couple of issues with screen tearing. But after applying a solution for inter graphics - tear free setting, it seems to have fixed it. 4. Icon theme is better. 5. Desktop feels slicker and modern. Just the small things. So overall good. And I got latest application versions. Cheers!

Previously I used to use GEDIT and terminal for manually compiling C/C++ code. Next I got tired of it, and put together a small script that would take a file name and compile it. But still running the compiled code was pain. So I decided to get an IDE. First tried QTCreator. Turned out, it can't do plain C++ code. So next I did a journey to find a better IDE. 1. Anjuta: Official Gnome IDE. I used this 6-7 years back and back then it was very feature limited and things did not work all that well. Now though I installed it and the hello world program compiled fine and ran. Only dependency was on glib for which I installed libglib2.0-dev package and go! Don't know about debugging or other stuff. 2. Next installed codelite 2: Install and config was fine. It asked for plugin selection. I installed only enough plugins for C++ use case. Then coding. IDE is quite good. It detected GCC and compiled the hello world program. But it could not run the executable. Kept giving return 1. Then ...

It's 4 months since I ported my cell phone number to Jio network. I have been using it full time for now. I have below observations: 1. 4G network is good for data. Speeds are quite good. 2. Small issues like range loss, sometimes data disconnect when having full range of signal etc are present but with lower frequency as compared to Airtel. 3. Couple of times the phone stopped getting calls and SMS, even though it showed full network. So this is serious issue. I missed few calls till I realised something is wrong. I toggled Airplane mode and that made it work. But data was working fine during this time. 4. Call disconnections are lower when compared with Airtel. 5. Voice quality issues are present. Many times we can't hear other person well. We need to disconnect the call and reconnect. Overall on data services front it's improvement. But on calling front not so much. Thankfully I'm paying an amount that's one third of what I was paying to Airtel. So much greater p...

Recently my current company gave us a training on Test Driven Development (TDD). So today lets see what's TDD and how is it different from our everyday programming. Test Driven Development is a way of developing programs where you focus on the testing aspect of the code and write unit tests and code together. How this is different from your day-to-day coding is that we write all code at once. Then we either before or after write the unit tests. Then we unit test the code. And then we find bugs and we fix them. In TDD, we write tests and then we write code to make that test pass. Once we have gone through all the tests, and written all the code to satisfy the tests, you are done. So the advantages: 1. All code is unit tested. 2. Since we are writing only as much code to satisfy unit tests, code bloat should be less. 3. Since we are thinking only enough requirements for testing current tests, code should be cleaner. 4. Since we are coding, testing and debugging in one go, time should...

Recently I ported my personal cellphone number from Airtel to Reliance Jio. The process was quite simple. I just took with me my Aadhar card, and paid 60 Rs. Then the storekeeper used the jio app on his cellphone to enter my info and took a photo of me. Then entering the porting code which I generated by sending "port" SMS to 1909. And it was done. 5 days later yesterday evening I received an SMS that my number porting process is done. They will activate my number on the given SIM by 6AM today. And so in morning I saw that Airtel has deactivated my SIM, so I popped in the Jio card and then called the activation number. And after providing some basic details the number activation was done. Lets see how Jio works!

Last month I put together my Raspberry Pi desktop and tried using it as general purpose computer. Previously I was using my "long in the tooth" Lenovo G480 as main computer. Now what's changed with Raspberry Pi? Actually not much really. For couple of weeks I was using older Raspbian and it was quite unfulfilling. For video playback there was only OMX Player which did not do windowed playback. Web browsing was bit slower than I liked. And system was not fast. It lagged somewhat. Then I got latest Raspbian Stretch downloaded. And the difference was between night and day. The desktop is faster. Web browsing is smoother. VLC is provided. Full HD video playback is working. Office is working fine as well. Now, I know the 1GB RAM is actually not a lot. In fact on the Lenovo, with even 2GB RAM, things get creepy crawly after opening 2-3 tabs. So here I'm restricting myself to only 1-2 tabs. And overall it's working fine. One thing that did not work out was NTFS partition...

Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro     Released 2019, March     186g, 8.1mm thickness     Android 9.0; MIUI 10     128GB storage, microSD card slot Hybrid SIM slot     6.3" 1080x2340 pixels     48MP 2160p     4/6GB RAM     Snapdragon 675     4000mAh Li-Po Network Technology GSM / HSPA / LTE Launch Announced 2019, February Status Available. Released 2019, March Body Dimensions 159.2 x 75.2 x 8.1 mm (6.27 x 2.96 x 0.32 in) Weight 186 g (6.56 oz) Build Front/back glass (Gorilla Glass 5) SIM Hybrid Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual stand-by) Display Type IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors Size 6.3 inches, 97.4 cm2 (~81.4% screen-to-body ratio) Resolution 1080 x 2340 pixels, 19.5:9 ratio (~409 ppi density) Protection Corning Gorilla Glass 5 Platform OS Android 9.0 (Pie); MIUI 10 Chipset Qualcomm SDM675 Snapdragon 675 (11 nm) CPU Octa-core (2x2.0 GHz Kryo 460 Gold & 6x1.7 GHz Kryo 460 Silver) GPU Adreno 612 Memory Card slot microSD, up to 256 GB (uses shared SIM slot) Int...

Formula is as below:  =EDATE(A1,1) Here A1 is the cell containing previous date.  After entering above formula, you will get an integer value.  Use format cell option in right click menu, and set as date. This will correctly show the date.  Then we can drag this down for further repetition. 

Recently I hard reset Aquafish. And then I thought to update is as usual. But its not updating anymore. As usual there are few variables, the internet by Vodafone mobile is utter crap, or maybe the repositories are not working anymore, or maybe the phone itself has gone kaput. God only knows.  So I'm back to zero base. As noted previously, the phone was useless because of google account syncing issue where the contacts sync'd over google would vanish on a failed sync.  Hmm, maybe its time I dumped the phone and got another in exchange.  Let's see if I get a good deal anywhere. 

Recently the Nubia that my sister was using started showing death signs. The power button died, mobile started restarting at random. It's been over three years of good use, so I decided to get something else for my sister in exchange for this while it's still alive. After browsing both Amazon and Flipkart and also checking other old mobile selling websites like Cashify, I decide on Lenovo K8 Note on Amazon. It's price was 8000/- Rs and in exchange of Nubia I was getting about 1000 Rs off. There were many other latest phones within my budget but they did not have exchange option. And I didn't want to keep this dying phone around if I was getting some money for it. So anyway I went for it. The phone was shipped from Hyderabad and I received it in 3 days time. Amazon delivery was good as usual. Coming to the new phone - it's not exactly latest. in fact, it's quite old, released in Sep 2017 with Android 7 on board. If I remember correctly it was launched for 11K and...