Category: Miscellaneous babble

My Nexus 5 arrived a couple of days ago after I shipped it back to LG to have the power button issue repaired. After it was received at LG, the post-assessment email said the phone was out of warranty by date code, and that I could have the phone repaired for $45, or have them do a full refurb for $179. I opted for just the repair and a few days later it was shipped out. Total turn around time from mailing out to coming back was 13 days.

Unpacked the phone, popped the SIM card back in and booted it up. Took a while, but the phone worked just fine, just like new. It came back with 5.1.1 (Lollipop) installed, but quickly picked up two 5.1.1 updates, and the next morning my phone was telling me the 6.0 update was ready for downloading.

Getting all the apps reinstalled was a bit of a long process, but went pretty smoothly. Fortunately I had recently backed up all the important stuff, so data wise I didn’t really lose much.

While the Nexus 5 was off being repaired, I put my S2 back into service as a wifi only device, which worked out reasonably well. Using Android Beam to transfer (via NFC) the few files I had collected/modified back to the Nexus 5 worked out pretty well, and was nice and easy.

Now the Nexus 5 is pretty much fully restored and practically feels like a new device.

Well phooey. My Nexus 5 appears to have suffered the same hardware failure my S2 suffered a couple years ago. The phone doesn’t do anything when I push the power button, although sometimes if I push it hard enough it will come on. Plugging the phone in causes it to power up, flash the Google logo on the screen, and then it immediately shuts off and begins the cycle all over again. It doesn’t even stay on long enough to get into recovery mode. That also means I can’t back up or copy anything off the phone.

None of the usual incantations have helped, so it looks like a call to the Google help center is in store. It’s a couple months out of warranty now, so I doubt there will be anything they can do aside from have me send it back to LG and pay for them to repair the phone.

Another alternative is to see if any of the local cell phone fix-it places around here can do that kind of repair (or just replace the board the switch is on) or to find a switch or mother board and replace it myself.

Off to deal with people on the phone.

Update: Decided to ship it back to LG for repair. After speaking with a Google tech support person and doing a bit of troubleshooting with him, he established that it was out of Google’s warranty coverage period and put me in touch with LG support. At LG, the first person I spoke to said their warranty coverage was 15 months from purchase, and the repair would probably be covered under warranty. Had to dig around my email archive to find the proof of purchase they needed (it had to have the IMEI number), and when I called back the second person said the warranty coverage was 15 months from the manufacture date. So now I have no idea if the repair is going to be covered under the manufacturer warranty or not, but they have the info they need so I’ll let them sort it out there. I’ll have the repair done regardless of whether it’s covered or not.

Whoops, broke my glasses today.

I was just cleaning them, felt a snap and heard the tinkling of a lens hitting the desk.

Had this pair for about 3 years, and was thinking it was probably time to replace them soon. These ones survived a remarkably long time relatively scratch free unlike my other glasses which have never lasted more than a couple years before they got so scratched up that it was like looking through a hazy window.

This pair was starting to lose the anti-reflection coating though, so it was about getting to the time for replacment.

Fortunately I still had the pair before this one that Connie made me stash away for just such an emergency. There wasn’t a significant change in the prescription between the two, just needed replacing because of haziness due to scratches.

Off to the optometrist to get the eyes checked tomorrow for a new prescription.

Connie’s been after me to read the Harry Potter series for a while now. It’s not one that’s ever been on my radar to read but last month I started in on them after finishing off Asimov’s Foundation series, Robot series, and derived books.

It’s a pretty decent series, and I see the attraction of it to many people. The Wizarding world is quite the interesting universe to live in. Reading it was pretty easy, and most of the books I was able to get through in 2-3 days.

The series turned out to be an enjoyable read, and like many of the other books in our library, it will probably be read a few more times.

Now that we’re finished with the books, we’ll start binging on the Harry Potter movies.

Digging more into this strange camera artifact problem I’ve been having, I decided to try uninstalling/reinstalling the Google Camera app. In this case, it means uninstalling any updates and and updating again from the Google Play store.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the update (2.5.052) didn’t help things. The shifting is most visible with the red in the map on the book cover, but it’s a global shift in the entire image.

Then I thought I’d just uninstall the updates and revert back to the built-in version of the camera app (2.4.018) to try that out. Much to my surprise, I got a perfect picture.

It’s pretty reproducible too. With the latest update, the colour shift artifact is there. Back to the built-in version, it’s gone. This is getting a little more interesting. Seems more a software issue now than hardware like I was starting to suspect earlier.