Point Element

So today I decided to take the plunge and completely reset my Aquafish to recovery image to see if I can get the enterprize WiFi working. A bit of background: SFOS did not support Enterprize WiFi using TLS etc back in 2.0.5.6. In 3.1.2 I guess, they added support for that. I have Work WiFi at office that uses TLS with MSChapV2. And on 3.1.2(or whatever that release was), I did manage to connect to my Work WiFi once. The Captive portal login appeared in SFOS browser, I logged in and was able to access the internet. But after that one time it never connected. So I reset Jolla, upgraded once again and tried but to no avail. Now Recovery image reset is something else. It does not just reset the settings. But rather wipes out the partitions and writes partitions from recovery image. The process is straight forward. Remove the battery and after inserting use [power] + [vol+] button to power device in Recovery Mode. The phone displays message to conenct to PC using USB cable and ssh to it...

I have been using Meld for about 3 yrs. And it has been solid. Until today! Actually what happened is I have not been using Linux and Meld for last 3-4 months. Today I required some code merging in Linux. So I fired up Meld and started going at it. I was about halfway, when suddenly my laptop hung. Wait! Ubuntu never hangs! So after struggling to open a System Monitor windows for five minutes I went through the apps and voilla. It is meld! WTF! Then I saw that Meld has opened separate threads for all the docs I have opened and merged and closed. But it conveniently forgot to kill those threads and each thread was eating about 120MB memory and there were about 30+ of them. Gods! Anyway, I killed Meld and the system recovered from the butchery. Then just to coonfirm I opened the folders in merge and confirmed that my analysis is correct that indeed for each opened file a new thread is getting created and when file is closed it's not getting closed. Ok, I check the version - it's ...

Last week a new update for SFOS is released to early subscribers. Thats v2.1.4 Lapuanjoki. I have been using v2.1.3 kymijoki on my Intex Aquafish for a while as my main phone. And I think SFOS is god enough for daily use. I have a few android apps like - WhatsApp for communication, WPS Office for PDF EBooks, A Better Camera as better Camera app, todoist as TODO app and that's it. I'm getting decent battery life on an average of two days. Of course I had to shoot down couple of problems of errant android apps and downgrade Play Services version. So now the android apps display an annoying pop-up for upgrading Play Services, but they work fine beside this. The upgrade breaks a lots of things - causes battery drain, instability etc etc. So I'm better off with older version and few annoying pop-ups.  Of course I can always get rid of android apps, but right now that's not possible, so I live with compromises. On system front the few things I miss are - apps should be ab...

So few days back I started using my Intex Aquafish as my daily driver. The phone is great at a basic phone. Calling and internet works fine. Whatsapp also works fine and so does Google Drive. That's almost all the use cases for me. But something threw a spanner in the works. I tried installing few more apps, and they get stuck at Installing screen. Then couple of days back I started seeing large battery drains by gms.persisttent. After a lot of googling and searching I did not find much. But then today I hit the lottery. Found out that I someday mistakenly upgraded Google Play Services and that caused all this. Anyway, how to revert back. Big question. After fiddling out here and there, I found out that I have to search for Google Play Services in Store app, and from there I could downgrade Play Services. Once that done and after testing half a dozen installs and checking battery draws in Battery Log app, I confirmed that this indeed fixes the works! Cheers!!!

I have a number of old phones. Mostly they just hang around in a box of all other computer hardware. I have two smartphones, one feature phone and one dumb phone.  First one is Intex Aquafish. Great phone, but since it can't connect to my office network (Crazy!!!), can't really use it.  Next one is Karbonn S1 Plus which is ancient now. Gifted this to sister, she used it for 2.5Yrs., and by then it was quite busted. Battery gone, frame cracked, power button barely working, and horizontal white lines on screen. I gifted another phone to sister. But this phone is not totally dead. I replaced the battery for 300Rs and reset the phone. Turns out it works fine as a standalone GPS navigator. So that's it. Its hanging around like that.  Next one is a Nokia C5. This was the first phone I gifted to sister, before the Karbonn. It works fine, but no it's quite obsolete. No wifi, Symbian etc etc. But the thing is it's still a fine phone. I use this as mp3 player these days. Work...

Never thought I'll say bye bye to Firefox ever. But this week I did say bye bye.  On pc Firefox is too slow and often unresponsive. Clearing profile and fresh install didn't help.  On the other end, Vivaldi is so much more responsive, fast and light. Damn good.  On mobile Firefox often won't connect to net. Don't know why. I'm using dolphin browser. Not as polished and with some weird preferences. But it works faster and is much lighter.  So that's it. Adios Firefox. 

I am an exclusive user of Firefox. Recently I got the Quantum upgrade. Firefox seems to have become faster. But it seems to have become more bloated. On my 1GB RAM entry level android, it often seems to be crawling. Same situation is on my laptop with 2GB RAM. The sites load fine but it just gets unresponsive once in a while. I have only one plugin - that is uBlock origin. And it's a necessity. So I have decided to try other browser - something that's light and doesn't eat away the RAM like it's donated freely. Lets see if I find anything. The first one I tried out is Vivaldi. It's from Opera's former team. And it looks promising. I loaded gmail and google drive. It loaded quickly since I have good internet here. And the browser did not seem to be all that slow. Then I opened my tech blog and later opened one planning sheet which has quite a few excel formulas. At this point Firefox starts hitting RAM ceiling and starts getting slow. No such thing for Vivaldi. T...