Month: August 2018

The Galaxy S7 I ordered came sooner than I expected. Inside a large shipping box was a considerably smaller and fancier box with the phone.

Comes with a few accessories including earbuds and a OTG adapter.

The SIM card tray also holds a MicroSD card for extra storage, which is nice.  Going to have to get another MicroSD card now.

Size wise, the screen is about the same as the Nexus 5, but the phone is physically longer than the Nexus 5.  Seems to be about the same thickness.

Going to have to get used to flipping the USB cord over when I’m plugging it into the phone.

Setting up the phone is pretty easy, as with most Android devices these days.  Four OTA updates were downloaded including one that brought the phone up to Android 8 (Oreo)/Samsung 9.0 (the phone shipped with Android 7/Nougat).

The phone naturally comes with a fair bit of bloatware including Facebook, Instagram, and Whats App, in addition to all the other Samsung apps.  Out of the 32 GB of memory on the phone, 21.2 GB is available for apps and storage.

Seems to be a pretty nice phone so far.  Time to get all my apps reinstalled.

While shopping for a new phone yesterday, I came across Samsung‘s Certified Pre-Owned phones.

We do more than hit the reset button. Before any device gets labeled Samsung Certified Pre-Owned, it gets completely taken apart and rebuilt by the same engineers who build our new phones. They replace worn out pieces, and we include the same one-year warranty our new phones come with for extra peace of mind.

At the moment, the only model available is the Galaxy S7.  I also considered the Galaxy S8 at $499, but the S7 at $349.99 won out.  I like that the S7 has a MicroSD slot for extra storage.  It was a nice feature on my Galaxy S2 that I’ve missed having with the Nexus 5.  A Google Pixel 2 would have been a nice replacement, but it’s a pretty spendy device and I hear the Pixel 3 is just around the corner.

With 32GB on the S7, I’ll have plenty of room compared to the 16GB I had with the Nexus 5.  It was getting pretty crowded with all the apps I wanted to keep on my N5.

Hopefully S7 will be here by the end of the week or early next week.  Should be fun to play with.

We stopped by Lidl yesterday to do a bit of shopping, and I saw these organizer containers in the Middle Aisle Of Surprise, so I picked up a couple.

At $3.99, they’re pretty inexpensive and have a decent number of compartments.  Perfect for organizing the electronics components that I don’t already have in bins.  They stack nicely, the transparent lid makes it easy to see what’s in them, and the dividers provide lots of options for compartment sizes.

After stuffing the two I bought yesterday, I decided to go back and pick up four more today.  Should provide me with sufficient small parts storage for a little while.

A couple days ago, some time between 6-9PM, the wifi on my Nexus 5 turned off, and wouldn’t turn back on again.

Rebooting the phone didn’t help.

Attempts to re-enable wifi (Settings/Wi-Fi) just ended up timing out with no results, and the wifi disabled itself again.

Bluetooth still works.  Cell service and data still works.  Just no wifi.

After doing a factory reset yesterday, my Nexus 5 started behaving even more strangely.  There were lots of random freezes and spontaneous reboots while using the phone.

Even more strangely, sometimes the wifi would come back on, but only for about 30 seconds or so.  Very intermittent and not at all reproducible.  Wifi would flash back on briefly after a reboot, but then get disabled again.  Most times wifi just stays disabled.

Time to think about getting a new phone I think.  If it was just the lack of wifi, I could probably deal with it.  The random freezes and reboots are more problematic though.  This one has lasted 4 years (a refurb I received when my original developed screen issues and then needed a repair for the infamous power button issue), which is pretty impressive for cell phones these days.

I suppose this might be a good opportunity to give LineageOS a whirl to see if that will help with the wifi issue.

Update: After a few more reboots, the phone stabilized and there weren’t any more random freezes or reboots.  Still no wifi though.  Installed LineageOS onto the phone, which went well.  Didn’t resolve the wifi issue though, so it’s probably hardware related.  On the plus side, the phone is now at Android 7.1.4 (Nougat).

Over my decades of using computers, I’ve made more than a few attempts at using Emacs, some more successful than others, but always ended up reverting back to something else like Geany or these days, Atom.  When I’m in the command line (which is fairly often), vi/vim is usually the editor I use, mostly because it’s quick and easy to start up.

A little while ago, got the bug to start using Emacs again when I got introduced to Spacemacs.  Although it also has vim keybindings, I’m mostly using Emacs keybindings.  I’m working hard to make Emacs my primary editor (mainly code editing at this point), and will try to work in some of the many other things Emacs can do later.  I’ve heard a lot of good things about org-mode, which is on my list of things to learn.

One thing that’s different about my attempt to immerse myself in Emacs this time around is that it also seems to have come with a desire to learn Lisp.  No idea why, or even what I’d do with it, but it’s prompted me to acquire a few Lisp books, including one on Emacs Lisp and Land of Lisp.

Where this will take me, I’m not sure.  I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with Lisp yet aside from reading a few chapters about Emacs Lisp.  I don’t have any projects on the horizon that I can see doing in Lisp just yet, but you never know what will come up.