Android tip : Android Not Connecting to the Mobile Network

This tip provides one way to troubleshoot your Android phone or device when it cannot connect to the mobile network.

If you have signal, but cannot connect to the mobile network, take a look at the 3G icon next to the signal indicator. Are both of the arrows (i.e., the up and down arrows) either white (on) or gray (off)? In other words, are both arrows constantly in the same state no matter whether you are trying to use the mobile network or not? If this is the case, then put your device in airplane mode, wait a few seconds, and then turn off airplane mode. Here's how:

• From the Home screen, hit the Menu button on your device. 
• Tap the Settings option. 
• Tap the Networks option in the settings menu. 
• Turn on airplane mode. 
• After 5 seconds or so, turn airplane mode off. 
• Tap the Home button on your device. 
• Wait for your device to establish a connection to the network.

Basically, what you did is make your device reestablish a connection to the mobile network. Now open the web browser on your device and see if you are able to browse the Internet. Hopefully, if this worked, you should now see both of the arrows in the 3G icon alternate on and off. Furthermore, you should now be able to use the network.

If this doesn't work, then you should try rebooting your device.

There are a host of reasons as to why your device is not connecting to the network. Hopefully, this tip will provide you with the assistance you need to get connected.

Home Security by Boba Fett

Recently, my wife and I moved into a new apartment in Edmond, OK. So far, we have enjoyed the apartment and the surrounding area. I must admit that we are still a little overwhelmed by the change of moving from a rural town to a bustling metropolitan area. There are so many choices of restaurants, grocery stores, department stores, auto repair services, and the list can go on and on. With this move to a big city, there comes the concern for home security. After all, a much larger population usually comes with an increase in crime rate. Our apartment does not come with a security system, but a couple of features add to the security, namely, doors with two dead-bolt locks and the fact that we are on the third floor. For me, those features aren't enough, so I decided to hire the most notorious bounty hunter in the galaxy for my home security. The picture attached to this post shows him in action.

Now, the question is this: Does he do a good job of keeping the place secure? Well, to answer that, I'll cite a particular incident with my wife. We were coming into our apartment from running errands, and upon seeing the armed and dangerous figure poised for action, she gave a sharp gasp and a quick jump. Even the maintenance guy for the apartment complex gave him a double take--that coupled with the comment, "Whoa, that's cool." Whether Boba Fett does his job or not, he's good to have around just to see the reaction of folks entering the apartment.

The Mess of Passwords Simplified

Have you ever been asked to provide a password that must meet several requirements, making it nearly impossible to remember? After all, a password must be secure if even the creator can't remember it. The below comic demonstrates a method for remedying this password mess.

This comic was originally posted on XKCD (http://xkcd.com/936/). Click the image to see a larger version.

HP to End WebOS and Sell Its PC Business

In a set of shocking developments that could send the entire PC industry reeling, Hewlett-Packard today revealed that it will kill off its Palm webOS mobile system and devices and explore its options for selling off the business. But it gets worse: HP isn't stopping with webOS. The company plans to follow IBM and sell or perhaps spin off its PC business as well...

(Read the full article, written by Paul Thurrott.)

I read the above article while perusing my daily news feeds. To be honest, I wasn't so shocked about the WebOS news. After HP bought Palm, I suspected that the WebOS platform would fizzle. It had great potential, but it just couldn't compete with the likes of Android and iOS. Now, the news that did shock me was the announcement that HP is planning on selling off its PC business. I have never really been a fan of HP computers, but I do recognize that the computers they make are popular and that they are big in the PC business. I am curious about who will decide to purchase the HP PC line and what effect it will have on the whole PC market. Perhaps other PC makers, such as Dell and Lenovo, will step up and make a grab for some of the customer base held by HP. Perhaps the future buyer of HP's line of PCs will do something to improve not only the business, but also the computers themselves. Either way, I hope something good comes out of this for the consumer. In my opinion, the PC market in general needs a better contender than the offerings currently available.

What are your thoughts on this? Feel free to comment below.

App Spotlight: Random Mahjong

Title: Random Mahjong
Developer: Paul Burkey
Price: $1.93 (free version available)
Platform: Android

For years I have enjoyed playing a game of Mahjong. Depending on the number of tiles in the puzzle, it can be quite challenging. On nearly every device I have owned in the past, I looked to see what selection of Mahjong games were available. Most of the time, I download one of them.

Recently, I came across an app for the Android OS called, Random Mahjong. I downloaded it to my HTC Evo to give it a try. Immediately, I was impressed with how well this game was designed and how well it worked with the platform. It didn't take me long to realize that this game was a keeper. In fact, ever since I downloaded the app, which was early last month, I have played it nearly every night before I go to sleep. I told my wife about it, and what did she do? She downloaded it... and enjoyed it. Random Mahjong is not just a simple Mahjong game. It has two types of gameplay: Standard Game, and Quick Game.

Standard Game gives you three difficulty levels, easy, medium and hard, to choose from. You then begin with a board that has a small amount of tiles on it, where you remove as many tiles as possible. If you complete the board, you advance on to another board with more tiles. You continue on this pattern until you run out of tokens (you lose one token for each failed attempt to clear a board, and you gain a token for clearing a board on the first attempt). The maximum board size is 152 tiles. Once you reach that size, each board that follows is the same size. Every time you clear a pair of tiles, you build points. The object of Standard Game is to build up as many points as possible before you run out of tokens.

Quick Game has two modes: Custom Level, and Preset Level. Custom Level simply allows you to build a board by setting the difficulty level and the number of tiles. The game then randomizes the layout and all you have to do is clear out the tiles. You do not gain points for clearing tiles. This game mode is for those who want to play a certain level of play and just play. Preset Level mode is similar to Custom Level except that you choose a difficulty level and a size category for the board. Each difficulty/size configuration has several premade boards you can play. With this game mode, you can start from the first board in the easy/tiny configuration and work your way through each board, progressing through the boards all the way to the last hard/big board.

There is a lot of Mahjong to be played in Random Mahjong. So, if you like Mahjong, this app is definitely worth its price.

How to Securely "Wipe" a Hard Drive Using Ubuntu 11.04

When you sell or pass on a hard drive to another person, it is a very good idea to make sure all of your data is removed from the drive. In doing so, you basically have two options: format the drive or wipe the drive. Wiping a hard drive is far more aggressive than a simple format and it ensures that you securely remove all data on that hard drive. The process is somewhat simple and requires some use of the Terminal. Unfortunately, with Ubuntu's new Unity interface, this process takes a little longer than is necessary due to some curious changes to the way a user is to access applications. To begin, download Ubuntu and put the image on bootable media* (instructions are on the Download page of the Ubuntu website), and then follow the steps below.

Before you begin, your computer will need to have Internet access in order to install the wipe command. Also, please make sure you have all important data on the drive backed up. Wiping a drive will permanently remove the data, leaving no possibility of data recovery. Finally, this method of wiping a drive is only meant for magnetic storage media of hard disk drives and not solid state storage media, such as SSD drives or USB flash drives.

1. Boot your computer to the media with Ubuntu.
   
2. When prompted, choose the option to "Try Ubuntu."
3. When the Ubuntu desktop appears, you will first open GParted. Click the Ubuntu logo in the upper-left corner of the screen to activate the Dash. When the Dash paarears, type "gparted" (without quotes) into the Search field and press the Enter key. Note: if only one partition exists on the drive, you may skip steps 4 and 5, except to take note of the partition location (e.g., /dev/sda1) and close GParted.
4. Mark all partitions for deletion and apply the changes. (A guide to steps 4 and 5 can be found in the Intermediate Partition Actions section of the GParted Manual.)
   
5. Create a new partition with the default settings and apply the changes. Take note of the partition location, as it will be required for wiping the drive. It will be in the form of /dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1. Close GParted.
6. Next, you need to enable the Universe software source. Using the Dash again, type "synaptic" into the Search field and press the Enter key.
7. When the Synaptic Package Manager opens, dismiss the introduction pop-up. From the Synaptic main window, click the Settings menu and then choose the Repositories option.
   
8. In the Software Sources window, check the box to enable "Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)." (A visual can be found in the Repositories section of the Ubuntu Help site.) Click the Close button.
   
9. You will be notified that you need to reload the sources. Do so by clicking the Reload button in the Synaptic Package Manager window. It may take a few minutes to reload. Close the window.
10. Now, you will install the wipe command. Using the Dash, type "terminal" in the Search field and press the Enter key.
11. At the prompt, type, sudo apt-get update and press the Enter key (wait a few moments for the prompt).
12. Next, type, sudo apt-get install wipe and press the Enter key (wipe will take only a minute or two to install depending on your Internet connection speed).

Now that you have the wipe command installed, you are ready to wipe your hard drive. There are a host of options for wiping a drive, but to keep this post aimed at a relatively simple approach, I will mention two different ways to wipe your hard drive. You can either choose to perform a thorough wipe or a quick wipe of your drive. The thorough wipe will of course take considerable more time to complete (based on my usage of the wipe command, a thorough wipe could take roughly one hour per 4GB of data, which means a 500GB hard drive might take a little longer than 5 days to complete).

To perform a thorough wipe, enter this command in the Terminal:

• sudo wipe /dev/[partition location from step 5 above] (example: sudo wipe /dev/sda1)
• If asked to wipe a special file, type, Yes, to do so.

To perform a quick wipe, enter this command in the Terminal:

• sudo wipe -q /dev/[partition location from step 5 above] (example: sudo wipe -q /dev/sda1)
• If asked to wipe a special file, type, Yes, to do so.

And now you wait...

After the wiping process completes, a partition will need to be recreated on the drive. To create a new partition on the drive, simply repeat steps 3-5 above. You now have a hard drive that has had all of the data stored on it securely removed. It is safe to be passed on to the next user.

NOTES:
* As an alternative to downloading Ubuntu and putting it on bootable media, you can install the hard drive you need to wipe into your existing computer (via SATA or IDE cable) and begin with step 3 above.

A Few Shortcomings of the Amazon Appstore for Android

I've been using the Amazon Appstore for Android (Appstore) for some time now. Whenever I'm looking for a new app for my Android device (an HTC Evo from Sprint at the time of this writing), I do begin with the Appstore. I like the Amazon system and the ease of discovery the Amazon website provides. The Appstore provides the necessary features I expect from an appstore, namely, remember my purchases, provide a simple method to update my apps, and help me discover new apps for my device. While the Appstore does those things quite well, there are several ways in which it falls short of being truly competitive with the Android Market.

Before I get to the shortcomings, I'd like to highlight a few features of the Appstore that I find to be notable. First off, the Appstore app itself has a relatively clean and user-friendly interface. The home screen offers users to see the top 100 paid apps and the top 100 free apps, browse the several categories of apps available, search the Appstore using a search bar, and see the current free paid app of the day, which segues to the next notable feature. Every day, the Appstore features an app, for free, that normally is a paid app. The apps vary from day to day, but I'll often find a useful app that just happens to be a free app of the day. Finally, and I think this is the most notable of the notables, there's the feature to test drive an app before you buy it. This feature is truly impressive. Test driving an app allows you to use the app in your computer's Internet browser without having to download it onto your Android device. I'd like to see a test drive feature on other app stores, such as the Android Market and the Mac App Store. Now that I've highlighted a few good things, it's time to take a look at some things that could use improvement with the Appstore.

I mentioned earlier that one of the features I think is necessary for an appstore is that it remembers my purchases. The Appstore does that quite well, and furthermore, it remembers my free purchases as well. The questionable part of this feature is that it remembers all of the apps I purchased, even the ones I have long uninstalled. I find this problematic because it can cause confusion with the updating process. When I don't want an app anymore and uninstall it, the Appstore app puts the uninstalled app in a list on the My Apps screen when an update is available for that app. This is especially annoying when some of these uninstalled apps are light versions of apps I eventually paid for. The Appstore app lumps all of those apps in with the number of apps that I currently have installed that have an update ready to install. This makes it look like I have a bunch of apps to update when I may not have any to update at all. Here, the Appstore falls short because there is no way to remove those unwanted apps. The Android Market automatically removes uninstalled apps from the list of my apps. I would appreciate a way to clear out that list in the Appstore app. It couldn't be that hard to implement. It could be as simple as adding a remove function to a menu that pops up after a tap-and-hold of one of the listed apps. If Amazon insists on keeping this feature in the Appstore app, then I think they should at least distinguish these apps from the currently installed apps that need to be updated. Now, I can only speculate as to why this feature is even there in the first place. I assume it's there to get the user to download the app and try it again after the developer updates it. I can see good intentions for that, but I still would like the option to clear items out of that list.

Speaking of updating an app, when a developer does update his app, the Appstore provides a relatively simple process to get said update. For most users, that will suffice, but some of us like to see what was updated. The Appstore app does not provide this functionality. In order for me to see what the developer updated in an app, I have to go to the Amazon website using a desktop browser. I find a lot of useful information in a developer's change log and I really would like to see that information on the device on which I'm installing the update. The Android Market presents this information in the app's description, if provided by the developer. Again, this can't be difficult to include in the Appstore app, yet it has been absent ever since the Appstore was made available.

Another issue I have with the Appstore is that apps can be slow to market. Apps submitted to the Appstore go through an approval process, much like with the Apple iTunes App Store. This, of course, delays the release of new apps and app updates. I know this is a part of how Amazon manages the Appstore, but sometimes the delay is a bit excessive, as in days or weeks. From a user's point of view, this means I have to wait that much longer than the rest of the Android users--at least those who only use the Android Market--to enjoy new features or bug fixes in an updated app. Until Amazon decides to expedite the approval process, this issue will be present. I suppose it's just inherent with an app-approval system.

This last issue I have with the Appstore may not actually be Amazon's or the Appstore's fault. It may just be an issue with the Android operating system; however, I only experienced it when I installed the Appstore. This issue came from having two different sources for Android apps installed on my Evo. I have a mix of apps downloaded from both the Android Market and the Amazon Appstore. When I installed the Appstore on my Evo, I went through and replaced my existing apps with the ones offered through the Appstore. One by one, those apps were updated by the respective developers. I then received notification that I had updates in the Android Market to install. When I went to install those updates, I noticed that the apps needing to be updated were apps from the Appstore. Out of curiosity, I tried to update some of those apps through the Android Market. After the package downloaded, I was given this error: "Package file is invalid." The apps, of course, would not update because they need to be updated in the Appstore. The only way I have found to remedy this update conflict is to first uninstall the app from the Android Market and then install the app from the Appstore. Unfortunately, this work-around does not work for all apps. I have only seen this issue occur with apps I had previously installed in the Android Market and then later installed them in the Appstore. As I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, I'm not sure this is Amazon's fault. However, this issue could be very confusing for some users who might not be able to differentiate from where apps need to be updated. I know it confused me at first and I consider myself to be fairly technical.

These are just a few of the shortcomings I have found with the Appstore. Though they may be annoying to me, I will still continue to use the Appstore because I do have a lot of apps I purchased through the Appstore and, overall, I am satisfied with the Amazon system as a whole (i.e., the Amazon.com retail experience). As far as usability is concerned, I think that the Appstore is best suitable for downloading new apps and not replacing apps already installed through the Android Market. On that condition, I would not be at all tentative in recommending a new user to try the Appstore (but not as a Market replacement). Plus, I think that the discovery methods on the Amazon website could be quite helpful to a new user trying to find new apps. After all, the potential new user might get his or her new favorite app for free as an Appstore free app of the day.

A Review of Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind's Eye

Recently, I read somewhere that Amazon.com was getting a new wave of many Star Wars books for the Kindle that were not available electronically before. Among those titles was Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind's Eye (SotME), by Alan Dean Foster. I had never read that book before, so I bought it.

An interesting thing to note about SotME is that it was written before the release of the movie, The Empire Strikes Back. That is significant because as the author was writing the book, he did not know that Leia is Luke Skywalker's twin sister and a force user (revealed in Return of the Jedi), and most importantly, that Darth Vader is Luke's father. This lack of knowledge gave this book a very unique feel to it, even awkward at times given the way the Star Wars story played out in episodes 5 and 6 of the movies. For instance, the interactions between Luke and Leia at times are like those of two people discovering the romantic feelings they may have for each other. Sometimes, it's a little too much, but it works for this book given the fact that the author was building upon what little information he had concerning the Star Wars universe.

SotME follows a single plot line, which is contrast to nearly all other Star Wars books I have read. The only exception that I know of is I, Jedi. Typically, when you read a Star Wars book, you follow two or three different plot lines that eventually come together or provide a segue to a sequel book. This book almost exclusively follows Luke and Leia from start to finish. I wasn't too fond of the single plot line in I, Jedi, but it worked out pretty well in SotME.

If I could provide any criticism for SotME, I would point out that the story progression is a little slow and drawn out. The book spans 12 chapters, but doesn't get to the main point to the plot until the 12th chapter. Then, the book quickly winds down to the resolution. This does give the book an adventure feel, where the heroes are put in a tough situation that gets worse and they must work their way to overcome their dilemma, but the story could have had more substance. For instance, the story could have had a parallel plot line that showed how Darth Vader was made aware of the events going on in the story, rather than just have him show up at the end with only Luke and Leia's speculation as to how he knew where they were going. Perhaps if the story followed Darth Vader, it would have provided a little more suspense in the race to the main object of the story's conflict.

The author of SotME certainly had his challenges with the lack of a Star Wars expanded universe from which to form the story of this book. However, I do feel that he did a relatively decent job because there is some good storytelling in this book. Overall, I enjoyed this book. It's at least worth a check-out at the library, if it's available. On a scale of 1 to 5, I would rate it a 3. It's an interesting take on the Star Wars universe, but I probably won't read it again anytime soon because it just seems a little too disconnected from the entire Star Wars story line.

What Will I Do with the New Netflix Pricing?

Recently, Netflix had changed its pricing model, splitting the by-mail DVD service from the streaming service. What that means is that Netflix charges for the streaming service and the DVD service separately. For example, my wife and I pay for both streaming and one DVD by mail at a time. Previously, we paid just under $11 per month for that service, but starting this September, we will have to pay $8 for the streaming service and an additional $8 to have one DVD at a time mailed to us, bringing our total to $16 per month. We are not too excited about the price increase, but we will continue to pay for the services.

The way I see it is like this: even though the price for our Netflix services has increased, it is still cheaper than cable. Currently, we do not subscribe to any cable service. I just can't justify the price for what few channels I'd half-way be interested in watching. Netflix allows me to pick the show/movie I want to watch when I want to watch it, and it does it at a very fair price. To be honest, the streaming service is almost, but not quite, enough to simply drop the by-mail DVD service. I wish that Netflix could get newer titles and keep titles for the streaming service (many streaming titles expire without explanation). I'd be willing to pay more for that kind of service.

NOTE: I've heard rumors that Netflix may be increasing their rates again either by or in 2012. Perhaps they're just rumors, but Netflix price increases have all but become a trend in the past year.

Sporting the Boba Fett T-Shirt

Last week, my wife and I went to Scottsdale, AZ on vacation. While we were there, we stopped by an Old Navy store at the Promenade Shopping Center. Initially, my wife wanted to go there for, and I quote, "a belt." Well, we walked out with several items and no belt. I suppose I wasn't too worried about that since I found a little gem for myself. As I was perusing through the selection of t-shirts, I happened to come across the pictured Boba Fett t-shirt. Since I am a Star Wars fan and Boba Fett is one of my favorite characters, I had to get the shirt. Besides, they had only one in a size that would fit me. I consider that good incentive to buy.