OnePlus One Issues, As Well As The Good Points

Having had a OnePlus One for a couple of weeks, these four things have happened.

1) One random time it forgot all the WiFi passwords I had set.

2) One random time all my profiles were gone and the profiles feature reverted to the default settings.

3) Last night I watches Agents of Shield on Netflix. This morning my lock screen wallpaper was set to an Agents of Shield promo graphic.

4) Twice, my location preferences reset to default, briefly disabling Google Fit and other location based apps.

None of these are horrible, but they are weird.

The phone is offering me the OS12/Lollipop update now, but from what I read there appear to be remarkably pretty severe bugs in it. As much as I'd like to see Google's Material Design in Android 5.0, I think I'll pass on the update.

All that said said, this phone is awesome. Very fast, very configurable, excellent battery life, great mic and speaker, excellent camera and display...  I'd recommend this phone highly.

Mounting a Samsung Galaxy SIII on Ubuntu

Ok...  So it turns out that at some point Google changed Android so that mounting a phone as USB mass storage is no longer an option!

WTF?!
Really!!?

Yep.  Really.
As in really astonishing.

The phones now only offer MTP and PTP.  MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) is the default, and, out of the box, this doesn't even work on Windows XP much less Linux.  For Windows the drivers are, get this, carrier specific (did I already say WTF?  Yes, I did?  Good, but it may be worth saying again).

So, in a nutshell, a completely bullet proof, near universal, and dead simple method of getting files on and off a device like a Samgung Galaxy, has been replaced by a propitiatory method, available only on selected operating systems, certain versions, no Linux, and only then with some extra tinkering that your Mom can't do.
Well that's just awesome!

Here's an easy work around that resolves this for later Ubuntu releases and similar, without installing anything.

With the phone plugged in, drop down the notifications, on the device, and look for the USB connection item.  Select it.  Next you get a couple of check boxes for selecting either MTP or PTP.  Change it to PTP.  Nautilus loves PTP.

You can now browse around the mounted phone and drag and drop files as it should be in any sane version of this world.  The computer thinks it's a camera.  Whatever computer...

Other good choices include various FTP servers for Android.  They work fine of course, and I also tried a program called WiFi File Explorer, or something, that is essentially an HTTP server that can manage get and put requests.  It worked fine, and has a web based browse.

Have fun.

4.1.1

Today on a whim I hit "update" in settings on my Samsung Galaxy SIII (from T-Mobile).  To my surprise, it started downing something!  Something big!

...Another stealth, please-don't-crash-our-network-by-upgrading-all-at-once, update from T-Mobile!  What could it be?

Minutes pasted like days...  But an eternity and a couple reboots later later...

Jelly Bean!

With Butters!  And Google Cow!
Awesome!

A Broken Android Gallery

This is the gallery on my Android phone.

All these broken images used to be thumbnails for images that had been deleted long ago.  The thumbnails would show, but selecting an image would only show the broken image icon.

Finally, in desperation  I connected the phone to a computer and went and deleted the thumbnail files.  Now it looks like this.

The "images" can not be deleted.  The phone has also crashed and rebooted twice today while I was "viewing" these so-called "images".

I've cleared the application's data, rebooted, installed other gallery applications and done other things as well.  So far, it remains hosed.

I think Google+ did this.  I had all sort of "fun" with "instant" upload and Google+ in the early days.

Latitude

Once upon a time, a few days ago, I fired up Google's Latitude website to see how information was collecting lately.

Google Latitude has a fun feature where, if you enable it, it will save your location history, using information from your phone.  The web site can draw a map of this history and show some colorful graphs.  It can also share your location with others so you can tell when all your friends have a party and don't invite you!

Neat!

But on this occasion, wow was I disappointed.  There was no fiend information, and no map or charts.  It showed my current location, but it was wildly wrong.

Puzzling...

I reload.  Logged in again.  Still nothing.

Then I remembered something I had noticed before, long, log ago.  I went to my phone (a Droid 2) and started the Latitude application.  Settings...  Location settings...  There are two check boxes in that panel.  One selects "track my location", and the other selects "track using this device" (I assume some chimps have more than one).  On my phone both these boxes had helpfully unchecked themselves automatically for me.

Yes, I have seen it do that before.

I then went right back to my PC and reloaded the Latitude page.  Wham!  There is all was!  Graphs, history, cool map, and friends!  Just like that!

I don't know when those boxes uncheck themselves.  It's possibly during a Latitude update on the phone.  Google likes to keep us on our toes.

It is kinds funny that all the history information was there, just not shown, while the boxes where unchecked, for some unknown period of time, possibly quite lingering...  But Google's like that.  They don't know the meaning of "rm".