Galaxy Nexus, Dell XPS 8500 and USB Ports

I knew this before, but just proved it once again, that not all USB ports on my new Dell XPS 8500 are equal.

I realized it when I tried to connect my Galaxy Nexus to my new Dell so that I can do android development.  All 4 ports on the front and on the top of computer failed to establish the connection, but the port and the left side of the top roll worked.  In fact, I don't event need to explicitly install the Samsung driver, and everything just started working.  So ... strange.

HTC Desire is now officially a feature phone to me ... because of Puzzle & Dragons

I rarely turn on my phone HTC Desire partly because my pre-paid voice plan doesn't have data support, and rarely do people call me.  After all, my Galaxy Nexus with no voice but "unlimited" (slow down after 2Gb) data plan does all I need to do daily.  Still I used once in a while thought of using it more as a voice phone with internet capability, and it as such.

Today, though, I found that this damn phone even suck as being a internet capable device when I tried to install and play Puzzle & Dragon on it.  Sure it installed the app alright, but the speed was sooooooo  freakkkking slooooowwww  down to a torture level.

So, yep, my HTC Desire is almost dead to me except being a feature phone.

Google Chrome and Google Bookmark

Since Firefox constantly messing up on my desktop machine (Mac Mini 2009) under Windows 8, I decided to completely give up on Firefox and just use Chrome.  With extension support, Chrome pretty much does everything I want a browser to do.  The finally problem is to add the ability to add page to Google Bookmark, and even that has been solved by the suggestion here.  So goodbye Firefox, I don't miss you.

Nexus 7 and watching movies on Flash drive

There is a reason why Nexus disable accessing thumb drive directly from micro USB port: it drains battery life fast.  10 hours battery life will turned into 4 to 5 hours.  I learned that during my recent flight to Montreal (Quebec, Canada).  I kept watching movies and TV shows on the flight using my Nexus 7 and various thumb drives, and of course my Nexus 7 was rooted.  After watching 2+ hours of video, I found the battery drained down to 50%.  So with that means watching 5 hours will use up all the batteries.  That's not good for a long flight like the one to Hong Kong.  And unfortunately there's no external battery, no microSD slot or a model with 64 to 128Gb of storage.  Still, I will continue using Nexus 7 as video playback device in trips because it works so well and can handle almost all video file formats.

wonder which device to blame

Today our family is driving to Toronto, and I found this the perfect moment to try out thethering feature of my Roger iPad mobile phone plan.  So I turned on the Personal Hotspot feature on my Galaxy Nexus.  MyPad 3 and my Nexus 7 was able to pick up hotspot, but not my Microsoft Surface device.  I was puzzled, and kept trying various options.  Eventually, I yanked out the SIM card, and use it on my iPad 3, and use iPad 3 as personal hotspot.  Now, all my devices, including Microsoft Surface, are able to access Internet.  So I am pretty puzzled now.  I don't whether I should blame my Galaxy Nexus lame at being a personal hotspot, or Microsoft Surface sucks at accessing personal hotspot.  But at least I am glad that I have various devices to try out different options.

So I can still root after 4.2.2 update on Nexus 7

I was so used to accepting all the update on my Galaxy Nexus phone that I did the same on my Nexus 7 when a 4.2.2 update alert popped up.  Only after then I realized that the N7 was, once again, unrooted, and I lost one HUGE feature on my N7: watching video directly from thumb drive.  So now I need to find a working rooting instruction for Andorid 4.2.2 on Nexus 7.

Luckily, the old one that worked is still working as long as you follow a few lines of instruction on the site to make it working on 4.2.2. .  I tried and it worked pretty well.   So ... I am happy again :-D .

Rooting Nexus 7 ... again ...

I didn't realize that rooting is not a one shot deal.  I thought once I applied root to an android device, it will stay rooted forever.  Most tech genius on the net will read this and poke fun on my stupidity.  Yep, making mistakes, and then learned from the mistakes.  That's how civialization get birthed and evolved.  You are welcome.

Anyway, I figured it out a few days before I my trip to Canada, and found that my Nexus 7 couldn't recognize the thumb drive I hooked to the device, and thus couldn't play the videos on that thumb drive.  Not good, consider how many hours of boredom I need to endure during the whole trip.

I rooted the Nexus 7 back when it was JellyBean.  Now the system already updates to 4.2.1.  So I guess I have to do rooting again.  The good thing is that since I rooted once, I don't need to wipe my device to root again.  So found this tool called "Nexus Root Toolkit v1.6.2" (NRT_v1.6.2.sfx.exe), downloaded it and installed it on my Lenovo S12 Windows 8 OS device.  Problem came as the app didn't seemed to work.  Searched the web, and found out that the app and the driver it uses had problem on Windows 8.  No problem since I kept the Windows 7 partition exactly because of this kind of situation.

So I installed the app, and this time I found that it bitched about missing Nexus 7 driver.  No problem again, because I had it in my shared drive (usb_driver_r06_windows.zip).  After that I followed the instruction, and eventually got a rooted Nexus 7.  Now I can watch video during my Canada trip.  Yeah.

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