Point Element

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...