T=Machine

Android 2.2 has a nasty bug where it disables the SD Card on Google Nexus One phones.

Fine, I found a workaround. But there’s a down-side – what happens when you only AFTERWARDS remember that it’s got the ONLY copy of several hundred photos, including plenty of uniques that can never be re-captured?

No way I was getting the photos back – after all, it *formatted* the card.

But … saved by Google’s poor OS … a couple of days after I’d formatted the card, I had the thought:

Hmm. This Android OS has a lot of design flaws and bugs. I wonder if … “formatting” the SD card doesn’t actually format it, but simply marks all the files as deleted?

After all, it’s flash memory – older Flash cards could only be formatted a set number of times before they’d stop working. Maybe, just maybe, Google’s OS doesn’t do what it says it does…

Yep, turns out that’s what it did: mark all the files as deleted, without actually deleting them. So I was able to get back about 95% of my photos. I could probably have got all of them if I’d known in advance that the format … doesn’t format.

Time for … CardRecovery

http://www.cardrecovery.com/

Card Recovery is awesome. It’s an excellent example of one of the best sales techniques:

1. Free (no barrier to trying it)
2. Very easy to use (idiot-proof)
3. Shows you exactly what you’ll get for your money (it does all the work FIRST, and shows you the photos it’s recovered – all of them!)
4. Offers a one-click, in-app purchase of the “full” app, that will actually *save* all those photos it’s recovered
5. Reasonably priced

I got to the end, and was expecting something vicious – $500-$1000 price (after all, they have you in a vice at this point). Their software proved it was possible – the data was still there – so I prepared myself to manually recover the files, even if it took many hours. I’ve been using computers so long that I’ve had to do data-recovery by hand more than once, in the days before data-recovery firms existed.

Most “data-recovery” firms do this: get the customer in, get the physical media off them, show a tiny piece of data to give the customer hope (oftenn deliberately NOT mentioning how much data is missing), then charge outrageously high prices for their services, because at this point it’s hard for the customer to back out of the deal.

CardRecovery was barely $50.

No hesitation, I bought it on the spot. Especially since I’ve now got this handy utility should I ever need it again in the future…

Filed under : fixing your desktop

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Google’s Nexus One auto-upgraded a few weeks ago, to Android 2.2

It immediately broke itself. It was no longer able to use the SD card.

As a side-effect, it was impossible to install any applications. Making this a very expensive, very heavy, very slow excuse for a mobile phone.

The error was that the SD card permanently unmounted itself, with a message in status bar “SD card can now be safely removed”, accompanied by an error if you tried to install anything: “your SD card is unavailable or missing” (or words to that effect.

Factory-reset of the phone? Still broken.

By fiddling around, I eventually found the solution (and you’re probably not going to like this): Format the SD card.

Yep. It seems that Google changed something between Android 2.1 and 2.2 that – in some cases – makes it unable to read the SD card any more.

For the record, other things I tried include: remove the card physically and reseat; dismiss the error messages and try again; install apps from private sources (e.g. our own apps we wrote).

Filed under : fixing your desktop

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Apple added some of the earliest, best *hardware* support for mouse and trackpad gestures (2-finger swipes, pinch/zoom, etc), but has been very slow to add support for gestures to their *software*. Out of the box, OS X can do almost nothing with them. Previously, I’d used the quick-n-dirty-but-it-works “MultiClutch” app to make OS X much more usable.

But I broke my laptop, bought a new desktop, and had to re-install everything. Today, I found this awesome app:

http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=1619

Why’s it so awesome? Well, plug in an apple mighty mouse, hit “Show Live View” and start touching your mouse. You can visually track all 4 touch points, and try out a variety of funky custom gestures.

NB: this isn’t old-fashioned “move the mouse in circles” gestures. Oh no. This is the new-style “glide your fingers over the surface of the mouse” gestures (treat the top of your mouse like an iPhone).

Great little app. Even has a decent UI, and options for exporting/importing settings, so you can setup some very complex setups on a per-app basis, share them with colleagues, etc.

Filed under : fixing your desktop

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(Google just made a major change to Gmail accounts in the UK, now that they’ve settled a trademark case brought against them. This is great – it will simplify mailing list management for a lot of people, and everyone in the world can (legally) be “@gmail.com”)

However … I’ve now had two friends write the above (“it said I didn’t have to do anything”) when asking for help with the changeover. Hmm. When the message came up for me first time, I got that impression too, but looking at it more closely, it doesn’t explicitly say that:

Anway, two friends in quick succession is a suggestion that I’m going to have to answer this question a few times. Instead, from now on I’ll just send them a link to this blog post :). Copy/paste of my original response:

Sorry, Google’s instructions aren’t very clear. You need to click the “more info/FAQ” link to get the “true” instructions, which include this gem:

“Mailing Lists: If you have signed up to send mail to mailing lists on behalf of your @googlemail.com address, you might need to re-register for the group using your @gmail.com address. Google Groups will automatically accept your new address.”

…although Google is being disingenuous when they say “might need to” – they know that *most* mailing lists will require you to manually change address, re-signup, or ask the admins to change your address :).

I like the visual approach that Google took here – the page is simple, clearly formatted, etc – but it’s tragic that it fails to include the critical information. “Breaking every mailing list you are on” should not be relegated to “Have questions? Not sure you want to switch?” – it should be right there on the main screen with a big red warning sign. I’m intrigued as to how the page was designed: it’s hard to believe that the usability people missed something as obvious as this. Are mailing lists not used that much by Gmail users? Even harder to believe. Have mailing lists fixed the gmail/googlemail problem? Possibly, but none of the ones I administer have (mostly for orgs that are using mainstream “free” list managers).

Filed under : fixing your desktop

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Why couldn’t I stop thunderbird from downloading 2GB of files that it is absolutely not supposed to download in the first place?

Ah, well, it turns out … there’s a bug in the basic “include folder for offline” GUI, whereby it is COMPLETELY IGNORED for certain folders. One of those folders being … the magic “All Mail” folder in Gmail.

Instead, you must use a *different* part of the TB GUI to kick the damn stupid software into doing things properly in the first place:

“Right click on the account in the Folder pane, and click on Subscribe..
You can then tick or un-tick the subscribe box for each folder.
Click on OK when you’ve finished.”

This seems to work, having just tried it. Although … I also went into my profile and manually deleted the monstrous All Mail file – but before I did the above hack, TB (dis)loyally would immediately start redownloading that folder each time you started it up. Now it merely downloads the headers (at least that’s counted in MB, not GB). Now you can have your email client, with about 4 pages of manual hacks, work as … a basic IMAP email client.

Filed under : fixing your desktop

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The font-settings in ThunderBird are terrible: the default settings are ugly, and the GUI is too broken to let you change them. Fortunately, if you hand-edit the config files, you *can* change the fonts, as much as you like.

Sadly, the options etc are undocumented, and easy to get wrong. Incidentally, not only does TB have *no* help or documentation (why not?), if you go to the online “knowledge base” and search for something fairly obvious like “fonts”, you get nothing – not even the usual 3-years-out-of-date result that’s normal for this app:

For future reference, here’s how I made my fonts go from “ugly” to “delightful”.

Changing fonts in Thunderbird 3 – theory

For reference, in case TB fixes their fonts in future, here’s what you’re supposed to do, but doesn’t quite work yet:

1. Go to settings
2. Go to Display tab
3. Click on the Advanced button in the Fonts section
4. Configure font options, per-language

In reality, here’s what happens

1. “Western” languages (Europe, USA, etc) in TB often do not use the “Western” font settings
2. …rather, they use the “unicode” font settings
3. …which aren’t available in the TB GUI
4. …and they don’t always use them as expected

Changing fonts in Thunderbird 3 – practice

There are a couple of things that DO work, and which you need to set anyway, so:

1. go to Setttings -> Display tab -> font-settings -> “advanced” button
2. Choose Serif or Sans-Serif (bizarrely, this is a GLOBAL setting, even though the GUI claims it is a LOCAL setting) – this will affect all other font choices
3. *try* setting the font-sizes, I think it sets global defaults (but … looking through the config file, those “defaults” appear to be over-ridden in most places … by default)

NB: TB is … confused … when it comes to font choice. The obvious way to make a desktop app is to ask the user “which font do you want to use in place X?” (where X = “email body”, “compose window”, “menu items”, “dialogs”, etc). Windows has been doing this for more than 15 years. TB instead arbitrarily declares different parts of the app as “Proportional” or “Monospaced” or some combination of the two. Even if you tell it not to use monospaced in certain places, it mostly ignores you. It doesn’t tell you which is which, and it’s not documented, you have to work it out by trial and error.

Edit the master config file:

1. go to Setttings -> Advanced tab -> General -> “Config Editor” button
   • NB: another bug in the GUI – that button appears to be some local setting; it’s not, its the most important part of all the “Advanced tab” settings; I’ve no idea why they hide it like this
2. use a filter of either “.serif” (sic) or “sans-serif” depending on which fonts you want your TB to use
   • (I think you’re nuts if you use anything but sans for email, but it’s a personal choice)
3. The two you need to set for “email bodies” are:
   • font.name.sans-serif.x-unicode

   • font.name.sans-serif.x-western
4. The two you need to set for “GUI dialogs” are:
   • font.name-list.sans-serif.x-unicode

   • font.name-list.sans-serif.x-western
5. The *one* you need to set (but could also set in the main GUI) is:
   • font.default.x-western

(I’m still using TB 3; I need a desktop client at the moment, and I find myself still using it. TB 3.0.4 seems to run well on OS X. It’s fast enough and with little enough RAM that it’s easy to leave running and forget about it; earlier versions of TB on OS X would kill your Mac, and had to be force-quit frequently. With this version, I keep forgetting I’ve got it running, until it sends out a Growl…)

Filed under : fixing your desktop

3 Comments »

When you run Thunderbird, and connect to gmail, it downloads your inbox.

Then it does nothing, for an hour or so.

When you run Thunderbird a second or third time, OR when you first synch a single IMAP folder (I don’t know which of these two events triggered it) it waits a minute, and then spontaneously downloads your entire GMAIL account. Since Google makes it very hard to delete emails, this probably amounts to a huge amount of data.

It also means downloading two (or more) copies of everything that has a label.

If you tell it NOT to download folders, it ignores you and downloads them anyway.

On my laptop, I don’t have several gigabytes of spare storage to carry every piece of random crap ever sent to me on Gmail. I cannot run Thunderbird. I hereby giveup! I wish they’d dump the “clever” stuff they don’t seem to be able to make work, and just provide a simple, straightforward, “email that does what you tell it to”, and *then* add the rest by plugins…

If you *don’t* use Gmail, TB is looking like a viable option right now (although still lacking features that its predecessor – Mozilla Mail – already had).

(I tried every option on the folder – they all said the folder would NOT be synchronized, even as the activity manager was saying “now downloading 1 of 15,000″ (ish))

Filed under : fixing your desktop

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Thunderbird just released an update a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I’d try it out.

Day 1: Thunderbird refuses to check email. See this screenshot, note the timestamps, while I’m sitting here waiting for an email that should ahve arrived a few minutes ago, desperately pressing the “get mail” button, and thunderbird refuses to do anything at all:

I’m not sure I’ll bother with a day 2; an email client that cannot fetch email is no email client at all.

(although, that said, I’ve noticed a fascinating bug with Google’s iPhone contender (the Nexus One) – it cannot send email, even though it displays a message saying “Sending email…”, unless you switch the phone into a special “synching” mode, or manually tell it to Refresh the inbox; until you do that, the “Sending email…” message displays forever, not actually doing anything. Basic testing that Google apparently forgot to do, sigh)

Filed under : fixing your desktop

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There’s a major bug in Firefox (allthough I left at “normal” severity, leave it to the maintainers to judge) that’s been around since Version 2.0 (maybe earlier). I’m *pretty* sure that Mozilla (i.e. precursor to Firefox) did not have this bug. It’s been bugging me for years, and I’ve seen lots of people complain about it, but the latest release still hasn’t fixed it, so I went hunting. No bugs found.

Not any more:

Bug 525266: Disk cache is deleted when browser restarts
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Filed under : fixing your desktop

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EDIT: the fix that worked for most (not all) people on the internet … doesn’t work for me. Even with reboot. I have no idea how to fix this now :(.

Look what they’ve done to the latest release of Eclipse: (old version at top – rendering CORRECTLY on high-res monitor; new version below – rendering BLURRY on high-res monitor)

(note the side-by-side compare with the old version – in the same screenshot – so presumably Eclipse 3.5 is using a different font-rendering call than Eclipse 3.4).

i.e. it’s now unusable on OS X. Unless you enjoy headaches and probable permanent damage to your eyesight (oh, you like that? OK. Good for you. Leave the rest of us – with decent LCD monitors – alone, please).
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Filed under : fixing your desktop

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I had to do some iPhone prototyping recently, and we had a trial copy of Unity to hand. I thought this was a great excuse to try using it. First impressions of the editor/IDE/environment – at least on OS X – are not good.

NB: In general, in terms of what can be done with it etc, I’m a fan of Unity. But I’ve never developed with it directly myself, and I’m now finding it surprisingly painful / steep learning curve.

Need to know basis

None of the built-in tutorials work, flat out, because the startup code has apparently changed substantially since they were written. The tutorials keep talking about things like “create a new project; by default it will X and Y and Z” but Unity no longer does any of those by default. Sadly, the tutorials don’t tell you how to get any of those manually – because, you know, they’re done for you by default, why would you ever need to know how to do them by hand?

File Association Theft

I was also *extremely* unhappy to discover a short while later that Unity has stolen the file association for PHP files. Under OS X (thanks, Apple) managing file associations is a surprisingly irritating business, as bad as with Microsoft Windows (Apple deems users too stupid to be allowed to simply edit associations – but applications are allowed to overwrite each other with absolute trust from Apple, and no user intervention allowed), so this is a pain to fix. In particular, I have an entire *suite* of applications and IDE’s for doing web editing, including a specialized high quality PHP IDE. Not any more; Unity has clobbered that with a crappy text editor that does nothing more than basic syntax hilighting. This is pretty offensive: firstly, don’t steal my files without asking, and secondly – give me back my IDE!

NB: I have no idea how it has done this, but Unity appears to have overridden OS X’s systems for file association management – following the standard procedure (e.g. here) has no effect, and Unity keeps stealing control of the files immediately that you confirm you want to give the assocation to some other app.

At this rate, if I can’t find out what it’s done to my OS and undo it, I’ll be uninstalling and deleting Unity with extreme prejudice in the very near future. Sure, this is partly Apple’s fault for assuming all apps are perfect and all users are not, but at a simpler level I just cannot afford to have a non-functioning development computer just because of one badly behaved application.

Filed under : bitching, dev-process, fixing your desktop, iphone, programming

10 Comments »

For some reason, Firefox 3.0.7 force disables the KeyConfig extension (itself a workaround for Firefox bugs that have been around for more than 2 years and gone unfixed).

The main problem is that on OS X, the keys for editing in a textfield get overridden by firefox re-binding the same controls for moving back and forth in page history.

e.g. Press the OS X key combo for “jump to start of line” == Firefox will instead hit the Back button (and you cannot disable this directly inside Firefox. I did once try to do it through hand-editing config files, but it didn’t work)

Why is this still not fixed in Firefox? I’ve no idea (although I have a vague memory of FF developers specifically advising people to install KeyConfig as it provides not only a workaround (you disable the broken “feature” of FF) but it also adds a lot of useful missing functionality).

Anyway. I’m now in a really bad position that any form filling in Firefox is difficult and sometimes wipes data – that includes everything from “replying to emails” to “writing blog posts”. Hopefully I can find some hack that forces Firefox to re-enable the plugin (or I can find a copy of the last working version of firefox which allows KeyConfig to run, and uninstall Firefox, and install the working version)

NB: Firefox does, of course, warn you when plugins are going to be disabled. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that the reason I had the KeyConfig plugin was not so much a “nice little add-on” as “essential fix for core bug in Firefox” :(.

Filed under : fixing your desktop

6 Comments »

As a quick followup to this article (how to workaround the bug in Microsoft Office 2007 that breaks your fonts in Windows), I had to show someone today what I meant when I said that their laptop was set to “blurry” mode, and realised there was a quick way of testing it.

If you can’t be bothered to try it, here’s two screenshots that demonstrate precisely why I hate blurry fonts on any good-quality LCD:

The image on the left is Windows in “blurry” mode (with forced anti-aliasing of all system fonts). The image on the right is the exact same system, just with blurring turned off. Note that the way Windows renders fonts, the title bar of the two windows looks significantly different. This is really annoying, because the left hand title IMHO looks much nicer – but that same effect isn’t applied to the rest of the window, including the menu bar, which looks awful.
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Filed under : fixing your desktop

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(do you have fuzzy text in Outlook 2007? hard to read fonts? System settings for fonts broken in Office 2007? Help is at hand…).

You have to do a couple of things to fix the one bug, and I had to find all the different parts of the solution in different places, so I put them all together into one post here.

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Filed under : bitching, fixing your desktop

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