Category: Computer bits

The Asus Transformer Prime I ordered arrived yesterday. After an agonizing one hour wait for it to charge up enough to power up, it spent another hour or so sucking down apps from the market after I finished setting it up.

It’s been pretty fun to play with, although I haven’t done too much with it yet aside from exploring the Asus interface slapped onto Android. It came with Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) installed on it already. Looking forward to seeing ICS on my Galaxy SII.
The screen is pretty nice, and gets pretty bright when you turn on the IPS+ mode (for daylight viewing).

Wifi range isn’t all that great, because of the aluminum back, but I knew that already from what I read in various reviews. Same with GPS it seems, although I haven’t taken it outside yet. It detects no GPS inside the house, while my phone will pick up a few satellites.
Next task is to figure out how to get my computers to see it when I plug in. Android ICS uses Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) now instead of USB Mass Storage to connect via USB and there are a few more hoops to go through.

The main reason I decided to get myself a tablet was so that I could go through the stacks of journal articles without having to spend all my time in front of the computer reading them or wasting a lot of paper printing them. I think it will work out pretty well for that, although the aspect ratio of the tablet isn’t exactly optimal.

One thing I have noticed so far is that charging via USB port isn’t very effective. It doesn’t seem to charge if it’s being used, and only very slowly if it’s off or shut down. It seems like the Prime’s power draw is about the limit of what USB ports can provide (mine anyway).

harging happens best using the wall wart.

Really liking the Prime so far.

Just about 2 months with my Galaxy S II and so far no major problems. Still an awesome phone. It’s already taken a few tumbles, but fortunately it’s been well protected by the case and screen protector, so no damage at all.

Battery life is pretty good, and I can get through pretty much the whole day on a single charge and still be over 50% battery. Heavy internet use or being stuck in an area with poor signal or data will suck the battery dry pretty quickly though. Spare batteries FTW.

It also doesn’t seem quite so big in my hand anymore now that I’ve been using it for a while.
One annoyance I’ve run into is that if you drain the battery low enough to trigger Power saving mode, all the things that Power saving mode turns off stay off. For example, display brightness goes to minimum and stays there. Sync turns off and stays off. Screen timeout goes to the shortest setting (15s) and stays there. So once you manage to get your phone charged back up, you need to go in and re-enable or reset things back to your preferred settings. It’s a somewhat minor annoyance until you start wondering why you’re not getting any email notifications, or why you can’t see the screen when you walk outside anymore. Then you realize the Auto-sync has been turned off and screen brightness has changed from auto to minimum.

The things that Power saving mode resets or disables can be changed, but if you start telling it not to disable things, it kind of defeats the purpose of Power saving mode.

Ran into an odd situation with my computer (Fedora 16, using KDE) where Dolphin kept telling me the trash was full even though there was nothing in it.
~/.local/share/Trash has a three directories, presumably where things are stored in various states of “trashed-ness”. All of them were empty but Dolphin insisted that the trash was full whenever I tried to move something there. Verified in Dolphin and in a terminal window that all the folders were empty. Even deleted them just in case there were any invisible hidden files.
The Trash folder also contained a file called metadata. Looked like a regular INI style file with just one parameter: size. In this case, size was set to some freakishly large value with like 20 digits or something (I didn’t really count). Having run out of things to do at this point, I decided to delete the file and hope that if it was important, Dolphin would recreate it.
After getting rid of the file, the Trash worked properly again!
Apparently Dolphin uses the metadata file to store how much stuff is contained in Trash. It seems reasonable to assume that Dolphin checks the value stored in metadata against the maximum size for the Trash configured in Settings. If the metadata value exceeds the max size setting for Trash, Dolphin tells you the Trash is full. In my case, a messed up size value got written to metadata and Dolphin wasn’t going to let me send anything to Trash even though it was physically empty.

Saw this cool circuit board stylus from Spun Pens on Etsy (via a Make Online blurb) and decided it was just too cool not to have.


It was a little bit smaller than I expected, but that was just because the shiny and want factor kept me from reading the full description so I really had no idea how big it would be. It appears to be made with an actual circuit board, not just printed on something. It would be interesting to find out how it gets rolled up like that.

A dome of some kind of soft material allows the stylus to work with capacitive touch screens. It works really well, better than some other styli that I’ve used. It requires a little bit of a firmer touch than you’d need using a finger, but not too much and doesn’t take long to get used to.
It’s pretty cool.