Mobile Articles
- Airplane Mode: Battery Saver! An old phone with an old battery was still powered after two weeks.
- Android App Crashing on Start? Clear the Cache An app was crashing every time I tried to launch it. Clearing the cache fixed it without having to uninstall and reinstall, or clear the (extensive) data.
- Android Browser Using Extra Space? Check Gears! (Obsolete) Android's web browser stores several types of data: cache, history, cookies and passwords...and Gears, which might use more memory than you'd expect!
- Android Stops Syncing When Low on Space If your Android phone gets a Low on Space warning, take care of it. The phone will stop syncing messages, contacts and email until you do.
- Android Won’t Stop Vibrating Notification options are per-app and per-conversation, so if you change vibration, you need to change it on everything you've already set.
- Cloning a GitHub Repo via Mobile Firefox Even on a tablet with a big enough screen that GitHub looks like it's showing the desktop version, you might have to insist on it to get all the buttons to appear.
- Forgetting Out-of-Range WiFi Networks on a Samsung Galaxy Phone (Obsolete) The tedious solution: Rename your own hotspot, remove it from the phone, then rename it back.
- G1 Sync and Texts Blocked? Check Your Apps! (Obsolete) Lack of space can prevewnt Android from doing basic things like syncing and sending/receiving messages.
- Get Your Phone (or Tablet) a Case! You WILL drop your device. A case will make it a lot less likely for it to break. (Ask me how I know!)
- How to Change the Default Email App on Android It's not in Default Apps, so you need to clear the default preferences for your old app first.
- How to Put a Phone Extension in Your Android Contacts Use a comma for pause just long enough for the remote to pick up, or a semicolon to wait for a greeting first.
- KeePass Password Managers KeePassXC, its browser extension, and KeePass2Android are a nice, clean set of apps to manage your passwords on your OWN desktop and mobile devices, auto-fill websites and apps, and sync over your own server or cloud provider.
- Notes on E-Paper Display Computers A low-power e-ink laptop sounds great, but I haven't found any yet. Just prototypes, Android tablets, and high-powered e-ink/OLED hybrids.
- PineTab2 Notes: Getting Things Working Things I've had to do on my PineTab2 to get various features working and/or usable.
- Preventing Notification Overload My approach: figure out which ones are most and least important, then turn off the least and only keep sound for the most important.
- Reformat an SD Card for a New Android Device You can't reformat an encrypted SD card from an old Android device, but you can plug it into a PC and reformat it there.
- Third-Party App Stores Won’t Install on Android? Check Screen Dimmers Android won't react to an Install button if the screen image is filtered by an app like Twilight or Lux. Fortunately it's easy to turn them off temporarily.
- Using Bookmarklets on Android You can't use menus for bookmarklets, but you *can* use auto-complete.
- Using vi Without an Escape Key Ctrl+[ usually works as ESC, and if you can send that combination somehow, you can still use vi!
- Why Google Buzz Won’t Run on Your Android Phone (Yet) (Obsolete) Buzz relies on several HTML5 features which were added to the browser with Android 2.0. Older versions support Gears instead, which may be the way to solve it.