Wednesday 22 February 2012

android 2.3.5 + htc sense 3.5 + facebook do not play nice...

I finally tracked down the incredibly annoying problem of incoming calls crashing com.android.phone (ie: the process that actually handles the incoming call!) Turns out something was attempting to draw absolutely nothing onto the canvas of the dialler (thanks android logs!). It was in fact a Facebook linked contact (with no image).

While there are a few documented work arounds. The simplest (albeit brutal), is to stop Facebook from synchronising contacts. More details are on the google group. In short:

Load Facebook app:

  • Settings -> Syncronize -> None
  • Logout
Android Settings:
  • Accounts and sync
  • Remove Facebook
  • Remove Facebook for HTC sense
Start answering incoming calls :-/

Monday 20 February 2012

rip aopen red thingy

Circa 2004, AOpen EZ65, With the delightful opening engrish passage in the user manual: "fun your life".
A subtle shade of bright red too.

8+ years of 24/7 use. Firstly as a (at the time) pretty reasonable Windows desktop; then as a no-hdd, usb bootin' webbrowser/kiosk machine; then a general purpose linux/samba/ssh/lamp/dns/virtualbox/general-shit-kicker server. I think I paid about $400 for it. So that's pretty good mileage.

I briefly considered looking harder into the reason it failed, maybe reanimating it Frankenstein-style (since I can't buy any new parts that would actually fit). But I figured it deserved some peace and quite after all these years of service without hiccup (until now).

I guess it's time to see if it's old duties can be services by a virtual machine now...

Saturday 18 February 2012

At 64KB/s, there's only one choice for search...

Sad days over the weekend, we where were capped at 64KB/s on the home ADSL connection.

I'd hardly call myself a fanboy, but Google still trumped Bing by a long margin.

Results for searching for a pretty popular term:
Google loaded the first and second results pages. I even had time to click on a search result and have the site load up before Bing even bothered to show me a home page and textbox to type anything! Good thing I wasn't in a hurry (64KB/s teaches patience if nothing else).

Regardless, 64KB/s is a pain I don't want to relive...