Proving the Obviously Untrue - hardware

Swan Heated Tray repair

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 14:40:51 +0000

We have a nice Swan Heated Tray courtesy of my Mum. It's useful for lots of things, heating plates for dinner and then placing serving dishes on it, or for keeping a stack of pancakes warm on Sunday. Unfortunately it stopped working recently. The red power LED still lit when power was applied but no heating. Google produced no answers (which is why I'm writing this for anyone following a similar trail). The helpline couldn't help, and theoretically the tray was under warranty, but with no receipt we couldn't follow their advice to return it to the store. So I had to fix it myself.

You should obviously think twice before messing around with something (a) electrical and (b) which generates large amounts of heat. Please don't kill yourself or burn your house down, that will make us both feel really bad.

The tray is fitted with triangular screws which reinforces my comments above, but not having previously purchased some triangular screwdrivers, these were next to be acquired. I figured they might come in useful for something else in the future.

Taking the device apart shows that basically it's quite simple, there are some blocks through which elements do the heating, a lot of glass fibre (so wear gloves) to protect the underneath from the blocks.

The inside of the tray. You can see the connections on the two right most blocks where I removed the section of cabling that was not working.

There are also a number of polythene covers to hold the corners of the blocks, though it seems a few were missing. There was no obvious fuse much to my surprise and irritation. A bit of testing with a continuity tester showed that a particular loop of cable was no longer doing its job. I pulled it out, and pulled back some insulated sheathing to reveal the culprit fuse.

The culprit

Replacement fuses can be obtained here. I teased upon the crimps with a precision screw driver and fitted the replacement, crimping it very firmly back in place. Then it was a matter of putting it all back together and testing it was appropriate safety measures in case of problems. All working again.

Rooting and Upgrading the HTC Desire

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 08:23:00 +0000

I have been asked by a few friends to document how I did this. All the information is derived from elsewhere and its currency may be limited. Trying to root and flash phones is potentially dangerous. You need to take your time and consider what you are doing carefully. If you break your phone, you own the pieces. This worked for me, but I can make no guarantees. You get the idea.

Read the whole article before you start please.

The HTC Desire is a lovely phone, but it has two pretty annoying flaws. First of all the battery life isn't great, but that's not what this article is about, and secondly, the internal memory is very limited. I thought when I got the phone that Froyo would save me because it had apps2sd. Apps2sd allows you to move applications from the internal memory to the SD card, but it has some serious limitations:

apps with widgets and some other bits won't work properly from SD
many apps only partially move to SD
some huge apps won't move at all (I'm looking at you Google).

The ROM images I was getting, from Google to HTC to O2 were out of date, and they clearly didn't even care about fixing some significant issues (like the broken authentication in the HTC Peep program). This wouldn't matter because you could install a decent twitter client if you had the memory... oh... you get the idea. I was rapidly having to remove apps hand over fist with every upgrade, and my Daughter was complaining about their absence. So I decided to sort it out.

Some ROM images have the rather different data2sd. This allows you to treat part of your SD card as the internal memory of the phone. This makes a crucial difference, no messing about partially moving to "SD", but allowing a large amount of memory to be treated as internal.

Step Zero: You will need

This process will take some time, during which you won't really be able to use your phone. Make sure you have time. If it works you will have to do some work setting some things back up, it will to some extent be like having a new phone; some work can be done to minimise this. See below.
For this to work you will need a half decent SD card. Mine is a class 6, 8G card. The class information is written in the card in a number with a circle on it, and has to do with the speed of the card. Class 2 will apparently be painful. Class 4 is apparently fine. But I already had class 6. Get a decent card.
Some means of mounting the card on your PC, usually an SD to micro SD adapter.
Possibly a blank CD, and some spare Hard Disc space for backups.

Step One: Backup Your Phone.... Really

Even if this all works it will be like having a new phone to some extent, so expect to do some setup again. If you don't have time, don't start. Backup your phone. I had Backup PRO which I used to backup everything. I did this to the SD card this time, but actually, I should have done it online instead (or as well). I'll explain why later. Backup PRO wasn't free, but it was cheap and has been more than worth it for me. I've used it several times.

Now backup your SD card. Either mount it as a drive or take it out of the phone and put it in your adapter or whatever. Copy everything to your PC as files (in the past I've used dd, but this is not needed).

Step Two: Root Your Phone

At some points in the past this has been very tricky, but this was easy this time. I went to the Unrevoked website, and downloaded the software to flash the phone. Follow the instructions carefully and read all the guidance. Click on the Desire, and your OS, and download what's needed (some extra drivers for Windows please note). I was using Debian GNU/Linux at the time.

Turn on "USB Debugging" (Menu >> Settings >> Applications >> Development) on the phone, and then plug the phone in (leave it as charge only when it prompts you). Run the software, wait, and in a few minutes your phone should reboot with ClockworkMod and root access. Note some people suggest you need to run the program on your PC as root, I did need to do so.

Step Three: Check you can access recover mode

For some reason I couldn't do this with the volume buttons on power on, so I did the following. Power off the phone. Hold the "back" (hardware button) down. Now press power on. You will get to the Bootloader screen. By using the power button you can run the Bootloader. This brings another menu and (after some patience) allows you to move up and down with the volume buttons until you pick "Recovery". Now press the power button again. When the phone reboots it will be into recovery mode. Peruse the options, see that you can navigate with the optical trackball and the back button.

Step Four: Possibly install a ROM manager

Now you can pick an alternative ROM of your choice. But this article following on below is specific to the Supernova ROM.

I installed ROM Manager (and it's cheap but not free upgrade) to allow me to download ROMs and flash them, and I flashed Cyanogen... but I didn't like it. I did it for old time's sake and much as I tried to bring myself to like it I found I missed the HTC Sense stuff (that surprised me). You can experiment with all of this. I strongly recommend you opt to wipe user data on a major ROM change, the phone will probably hang if you don't when you reboot, and you'll have to get into recovery mode anyway and do it there.

Step Five: Get the ROM files

The ROM I went for was Supernova since essentially it's a good, HTC Sense oriented, Gingerbread based ROM with the data2sd extra. In other words, you get newer Android goodies with much the same user experience, but don't have to worry so much about the memory. You need to sign up to the website and then go to the download links and get the ROM and data2sd installer. Copy them to your hard disc for now.

Step Six: Prepare your SD card

For the data2sd to work, you need to prepare your SD card with a FAT32 partition (for general use) followed by an ext4 partition (for use as internal memory). Don't panic if you're not a Linux user. There is a way to do this for you.

In Debian, I installed gparted. I then put the SD card in its adapter and in the machine. The machine may mount it automatically... make sure you unmount it before proceeding. Run gparted and follow on below.

If you are using another OS, get the GParted live CD.

Follow these instructions carefully.

Make sure the GParted is accessing the correct device in the pull down before you start, make sure the disc space in front of you looks correct. YOU DO NOT WANT TO ACCIDENTALLY REPARTITION YOUR COMPUTER'S HARD DISC. TAKE YOUR TIME. Personally I went for about 7000 MB on FAT32 and the remainder for my ext4 partition.

Get out of GParted, back into your regular environment (close GParted, reboot or whatever). Now copy your SD card backup (remember that, right?) back onto the card. Finally copy the two ZIP files from the Supernova website (the ROM and data2sd installer) into the root of the SD card. Dismount the card and put it in your phone.

Step Seven: Install the ROM and data2sd bits

I recommend you read and follow the official instructions carefully from here in. Note I didn't bother with the radio code because I was confident it was already very recent. Follow the instructions very carefully to be sure the data2sd will work correctly... note there are a few very specific things you must do and must not do in between boots.. Basically you need to use reovey mode to do a factory reset, navigate to the ROM ZIP and install, reboot, change a few settings, back to recovery, navigate to the data2sd ZIP, install, reboot.

Step Eight: Restore as needed

You should now have loads of space in internal memory. Check in Menu >> Settings >> Applications >> Storage.

I then put in my Google credentials and restored everything after downloading Backup PRO again. Because my backup was on the SD and it was copying to SD, it was slow. I recommend using the online option. Be patient, if you are restoring call logs and SMS messages it will take time, do not navigate away. Wait for it to finish and immediately restart. Think twice about copying "settings", I always worry it will cause the newer ROM to cease. Your mileage may vary.

HTC Desire versus Apple iPhone 4

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:29:13 +0000

I have both these phones. The HTC Desire is my personal phone, and runs Android (in this case Froyo, Android 2.2). I've been using Android for some time now, and regular readers will know I haven't been shy about commenting on its problems in the early releases. I also have, and have had for about the last month, an Apple iPhone 4, running iOS 4, for work. I've been promising some people a comparison.

Disclosure: I'm not really an Apple fan. From the moment I started to play with some in QUB, I disliked the single button, the cotton wool interface that kept you from "harming yourself", or doing anything deep. But I know that has changed somewhat, the latest Apple computers, while still having that fluffy exterior now have a decent operating system underneath. So I'm going to try to be as fair as I can be.

First a comment about the build quality. Both phones feel very similar both in the hand and in the pocket, the iPhone feels like it has a better build quality, but then you do expect solid hardware from Apple. Both phones have a button on the top to "wake" the device. Both have volume controls on the side. The iPhone has a nice feature of a slider button that mutes the device at one go; the Desire requires you to put the volume slider to zero (there are other ways, I know). The iPhone has one big button at the bottom, reminiscent of the one button mouse, and this is an area where the Desire wins hands down, with more physical buttons including the search, back button, the menu button, the home button and the optical trackball.

A note on the intuitiveness of the interface. Apple claims that their interface is so intuitive you don't need any instructions. I must say I find the Android (Desire) interface more intuitive, and when you start that phone for the first time, it walks you through the basics. Very helpful for beginners.

Anyway, time is short and some people are waiting on this review, so here's a potted comparison.

Feature	iPhone	Desire
Basic Interface	Uncluttered, but uninformative, no widgets, no live wall paper, no active folders. Dull, one size fits all. Switching between tasks and back again is inelegant. Notification of outstanding items is cleaner than standard Android.	Very rich, combinations of apps on the desktop, widgets and all the things mentioned by their absence for the iPhone. Much more personalised. Task switching, particularly the back button, is much more elegant. HTC Sense is nicer.
Phone	Disastrous. Frequently won't connect calls when my Desire will. There seems to be something else at play here and I've reported it. Both phones are on the same network BTW. It's more awkward to change numbers on the fly and many other things. But it's very pretty.	Much improved in Android over the last few versions, the ease of dialling, changing numbers is much better. Finding contacts to dial is much easier and faster. Oh, did I mention it works?
Voicemail	Fancy. Asks me to set it up every single time I turn on the phone. Recently while travelling, I couldn't pick up a voicemail because of this for about an hour, by which time I was sitting with the caller.	Not Fancy. Works all the time.
Workplace	The stock mail client is very pretty, and for example, links to appointments easily (but makes it hard to see if you are free). It has limited threading support which is really nice.	The Android exchange support is, in my opinion, superior. It lacks threading, but does have follow up support, which I take to be vastly more important.
Apps	Legendary, but there are relatively few free quality apps. For example, I struggled (still haven't) found a decent calculator (not the built in one) that is free. I find the market app rather clunky. Can't find any decent external exchange apps that work.	Many problems with the Market were fixed in Froyo, the apps available seem to be broader in nature, and many more are free (my perception). Choice of several exchange apps, more fully featured than iOS.
Software Keyboard	Simple, elegant, but frustratingly difficult to type complex content, having to change layouts all the time.	More cluttered, but actually as easy to use, better word prediction, less switching between layouts.
Battery Life	Initially winning hands down, but now hogging battery like no tomorrow, can't make it through an average day. I don't know what's causing the problem and so I'm just deleting apps all over the show.	Vastly improved over other phones, still an issue, but actually appreciating it more after the iPhone
Music	Very pretty. iTunes integration. This is also the problem. A cheap player I bought for my Daughter allows me to just dump music on it and it works. What I had to go through to get Music onto the iPhone because of my unusual setup, well, it wasn't easy. Oh, and by the way. iTunes sucks. I mean really... disastrous, but with no alternative.	Bulk device, you can just copy the music on and it works. Plays music just as well as the iPhone, in fact better because the former occaisionally and inexplicably stops. Wide variety of music players.
Video		Flash.
Web	Browser is probably prettier than Android's and allows more Tabs, seems to be slower though.	Native Flash is an advantage here too.
Notifications	Really dreadful, and a well known problem in the Apple community. Poorly handled, and when they pop up, and you go to use the phone the notification is just gone.	Elegant system that allows multiple notifications each of which take you straight to the issue. Persist, unobtrusively, until dismissed.
Calendaring / Time	Automatically setting the time to the wrong time since the clocks changed. Manually fixing this makes calender entries wrong. Setting it back to automatic makes the time wrong again.	Google Calendar back end more open than Exchange. Exchange functionality built in too. Minor quibble, cannot change the colour of the Exchange calendar. Date / Time works. Minor quibble, on a non rooted device you can't use ntp for ultra correct times. Can't on the iPhone either as far as I know.
Oddities	My laptop supplies power out of USB while it's off. I use this to charge my Desire if need be. The iPhone requires the whole machine to be on for it to charge the phone.	The power connector on my Desire seems to be a bit stretched, so if I'm not careful, it's not being charged. The Desire asks, when plugged in, whether it should charge, act as a disk, do internet tethering etc..

I'm honestly struggling to find an area where the iPhone wins hands down against its competitor. I can't think of one. I imagine if the iPhone is the only smart phone you are used to, it seems miraculous. It probably seemed that way against Android 1.1. But Android has grown up now, and it makes the iPhone look just stupid by comparison. I couldn't recommend an iPhone to anyone. Sorry.

By the way, I fully accept that perhaps when I get used to the iPhone I might come to love it more, but I'll be surprised.

Fixing g1 Accelerometer

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:56:23 +0000

I had noted before that my accelerometer had broken on my Android g1 phone, so that one axis was out by about 40 degrees. Despite lots of "helpful" suggestions from my friends on how to fix it (you know who you are), nothing worked. This did.

Connect to the phone with adb (from the Android SDK), in the following way.

./adb start-server
./adb shell
# cd /data/misc/
# mv amkd_set.txt amkd_old.txt
# killall amkd

Now it works.

Cyanogen Android ROM on the g1

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:37:25 +0000

I've had my Google development phone, the g1, for some time now. I haven't had the luxury of time to write anything for it, but I mainly wanted it to try out Android anyway. I've reviewed the phone before, and again after some canonical firmware upgrades.

I use the truly excellent K9 application for mail, it has good support for self signed certificates, now has IMAP push support and is generally excellent. However, it stores all the mail on the shockingly limited internal memory on the device. That, and upgrades to things like Google Maps, adding truly excellent new functionality, left me constantly looking for applications to remove.

This is why in the end I decided to try Cyanogen's ROMs. Since I have a development phone, I didn't need to root it, and just followed the relevant instructions (in truth, I couldn't be bothered to downgrade the OS to root it first).

Here are some observations about the new ROM:

Apps2sd is amazing.
I have the whole pleasure of trying different apps all over again, without sweating about every byte. I don't have to worry about how much data is in my contacts (whether I assign them icons), my emails, and so on. I have plenty of room. I was delighted to be able to install DocumentsToGo. Which makes the phone much more useful for work emails. Loads of great apps I had to remove have been reinstated, and I can play with others, like the awesome Google Googles.
Extra workspaces
There are five workspaces, making for more widget playroom. I now have a calendar app taking up a whole workspace with the events to come. Excellent.
It fixes several problems I had with MMS functionality.
- It fakes a variety of user agents, meaning that a test video message I sent myself on o2 finally worked, for the first time ever.
- The stock ROM allows you to prevent data access when roaming, which is good. But it also doesn't fetch MMS when roaming, which is (for me) a nuisance, and these are usually on a different tariff system. So when you receive an MMS on roaming, you end up enabling all data access to quickly receive the MMS, and then turn it off again. The Cyanogen ROM has an option to retrieve MMS on roaming.
UI feels snappier
USB tethering
can be enabled, which JustWorks (TM) with Debian. Excellent.

On the downside, I have had some reset problems, but admittedly I have sometimes been pushing the phone very hard indeed to test it. And the battery life on the g1 is still awful. I know Noodles has solved the problem by not actually using his phone :-), but I want to use mine.

Another minor problem I encountered some weeks ago was the accelerometer suddenly starting serious misreporting on one axis. This problem seems to be becoming less severe, but even reinstalling the stock and then cyanogen ROM did not fix it. However, note I did not wipe the user data.

Cyanogen has made my phone fun to have again. And I will still replace it when a new Android handset comes out that I really like, but a lot of the urgency has gone. I'll certainly buy him a beer for Christmas.

Virgin Media, Netgear and Vidzone

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:53:48 +0000

The PS3 has an free network application called Vidzone. I downloaded it when it originally came out some time ago, but it never actually worked. It would load, show playlists, adverts, and the seize up the whole console when I tried to actually play videos. It's a shame, because it looked like a nice app for putting on some music.

Since then the PS3 itself has had a big firmware upgrade to 3.0.1 and Vidzone was upgraded to 1.0.4. Worth trying again I figured. Well, initially I couldn't get the application to crash the console anymore (I did later!), but certainly it wouldn't play videos. It did show adverts, even video adverts, playlists, everything but actually play videos. Which is weird to say the least. So to be honest, it looks like the problem is somewhere at the PS3/Vidzone end, since absolutely all other network functionality works on the PS3.

But, as a precaution I thought it was worth checking out that old bugbear, the router firmware, and there are some hints that's an issue. I'm a Virgin Media customer at the moment, for complex reasons I don't really have a choice at the moment, and they supplied a cable modem and router when they connected me (rather late as it happened). When I looked at the router firmware, it's shockingly old. So I clicked on the link for the knowledge base and downloaded the latest firmware. It failed to upload, no explanation of why. I tried every intermediate release, which took quite a while to do. They all failed.

So now I'm suspicious and confirm that, yes... Virgin are specifically blocking updates, even though many, many bugs have been fixed in the new releases. I find this pretty puzzling.

I phoned their tech support to try and confirm this in person. I suggested that I would have to buy my own router if I wanted to get round these problems, and they informed me I wouldn't be supported. I put it to them that I seem to have a choice between being supported with no actual support and no means to help myself, or getting new hardware, being officially unsupported but able to help myself. He put me on hold to check it out, a minute later the line went dead.

So if you're out there googling for "vidzone doesn't work", this might be part of the reason, but who knows? It seems it could be fixed at the PS3 end in any case. But it's a cautionary tale that the stock VM hardware might come with lots of problems you can't fix.

Roberts WM201 Internet Radio

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 23:23:39 +0000

I recently bought a Roberts WM201 Internet Radio. I've used it for a while now and thought I'd post my thoughts.

First of all, I was looking for a radio meeting certain criteria, it needed wifi, I wanted it to pack a reasonable punch since it would essentially be my main music source, it needed to support upnp media servers. I also wanted it to have an integrated transformer so that it would not have a bulky mains lead since I wanted it for my rather small kitchen. Finally I wanted it to be semi portable, so I could move it from room to room without too much fuss.

The WM201 meets all these criteria, and is based on the Reciva technology that has been well received by a few of my friends, notably Paddy and Noodles. The radio is a pretty good size, not too large and not too small, and feels really solid. It has a wired network port as well as wireless capability which is great. For complex reasons, when it first arrived I had no internet connection (no gasps, I was making do with 3G hookups). That being the case I knew I wouldn't be able to get the internet radio functionality itself working. But I figured I'd set up a local lan and get the mediatomb server on my development machine working. I was able to hook up to the LAN and enter the WPA password, but it just would not play with any functionality whatsoever if it doesn't see the servers it expects to. Now Noodles has suggested my geek privileges should be revoked for not working out how much of the internet I had to fake to get it to work. He may well have a point! In my defense I had plenty of other issues to deal with instead.

About a week later I got my net connection, albeit temporarily since some work was needed on the cable. So while the network was up I was finally able to get into all the functionality, and I was really impressed, the small display and control is really intuitive and the shipped remote control is excellent. When it came time for the external network connection to be severed again, I quickly switched the device over to streaming media from a playlist on mediatomb, but interestingly it still gave that up midway when the external connection went down. Dumb, but forgivable.

So again, what's good? It offers brilliant sound, and more volume than I could wish for. It's easy to browse through the huge array of stations, and for things like the BBC stations, it has a good interface to the "listen again" service. It works seamlessly with mediatomb on my PC. All excellent. A minor grumble is that it's not easy to switch briefly from a radio station to the playlist on mediatomb and back again, you have to go through all the menus every time. The number of stations is so huge, finding them can be a little slow, but you can as you would expect, save them to a preferred list. I hit a problem with that; my saved BBC stations have spontaneously stopped working, just showing endless retrying messages. When I go back through the menus it's all fine. Odd.

The radio becomes better yet when you use the Reciva portal to set up your "stuff", a list of your preferred stations and podcasts. Obviously it's much easier to do this on a web page, and then you simply register your radio. Now (it seemed to require a hard power cycle for me) the radio has an extra "My Stuff" menu which gives really easy access to your favourite stations and allows you to quickly select podcasts, far faster than navigating on the radio. An odd note, if you for example navigate through "listen again" in the normal way, you can fast forward, pause and rewind the playing media. But if the same stream is selected from the podcast menu in "My Stuff", you can't. A slight annoyance.

I'd really recommend the device overall, it's great. Incidentally the cheapest prices I could find were on Amazon by some distance, but time and time again, I would select a seller and only at the final hurdle be told they wouldn't ship to Northern Ireland. I've complained about this before, it would be useful to know rather sooner that I'm wasting my time. Anyway, I found a simple way to work out which sellers ship to Northern Ireland and find the cheapest of those. I selected one from each and every seller on Amazon. Then when I went to checkout I removed all those that caused complaints. It was then easy to find the cheapest remaining seller. Much faster than trying them one at a time.

Android 1.5 (Cupcake) firmware

nospam@example.com (Colin Turner) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:06:05 +0000

I recently wrote about my experiences with the Google G1 dev phone running the 1.1 Android firmware, and discussed a number of problems.

Last night I obtained the just released 1.5 (cupcake) firmware and performed the upgrade. That all went smoothly, it helped to have done it before and working out the idiosyncrasies of the process. So how does the new firmware measure up?

Initial thoughts and feelings are very good. Picture handling in MMS is hugely improved, although I still had a problem with an old video clip, but I'll see if it was the oldness that was the problem. The optional on-screen keyboard is very useful and surprisingly easy to use, with predictive words hovering just above it. I enabled the options to automatically rotate the screen upon device reorientation, that is a big improvement in general usability, and means you no longer have to flip out the keyboard just to provoke rotation.

Other improvements include the camera - much better, and video capability, although the microphone doesn't pick up sound very well on video. The web browser is also much improved and hugely more usable and readable, the auto rotation helps that too.

One very quirky problem, the one screen I've found that doesn't auto rotate on the device orientation is the home page. That rather surprised me. Overall, this is a very significant set of improvements, and I'd suggest any G1 user upgrades as soon as possible.

All of this goes a long way to making the G1 a good day to day phone for me, although I'm still having to limp from one charging source to another, I don't think I can get through a day of my normal use without charging in the car and at my desk - and yes, I'm frequently trimming back all the features to extend battery life, when I remember.

Update

Here are a few more comments after a little while of using cupcake. Of little problems and whether or not I've resolved them.

Bluetooth pairing
After Cupcake, the phone no longer automatically paired with my in car gadgetry. In the end I found that going through the settings and clicking connect explicitly for each device connected it that time, and next time it did so automatically.
MMS issues
There are still some of these, I get some images from some people that are much smaller than I remember getting from the same people with the same phone when I had the N95. It's not clear if this is because the G1 is just not allowing the same level of zoom, or what else may be to blame, but still rather small. Also, video clips are simply not playing. When I receive one I still get another text from my provider (O2) telling me I can't receive them. But now there is an icon suggesting they can be played. When you try, you simply get a number of seconds of a blank screen and silence. Suggesting possibly a codec problem, but I can find no mention in the oracle of google as to how to fix it if so, or whether I should expect it to work.
Fast switcher apps
The API that allowed apps to turn off and on some features has been deliberately disabled. Not a huge issue, but it means many apps that helped you turn on and off wifi, for example, no longer work. Unhelpful in a phone that still has profound battery life issues.