Interloper View

I recently noticed that my android phone was incurring data charges (while I was not on data plan). Initially, I thought it might be due to a virus, rogue app or some setting I may have accidentally activated. In order to trace the issue, I started removing apps from my phone, but the data charges kept happening. On the first day the charge was RM5 but subsequently it ranged between 2 cents to 20 cents. In order to stop the hemorrhage, I activate a one month plan. The one month plan was RM 30 for 30 days, but the unknown data usage had already cost me RM 15 without any benefit to me. I also tried resetting the phone to factory mode, but found that the phone automatically restored some of the applications that were still installed - great feature, but not when I am troubleshooting this data leech on my phone. Resetting the phone helped in resetting the data counter and allowed me to see the amount of data consumed. It was the background data were incurring the cost of my mo...

If you have a calendar that you want to help a friend subscribe, this is how you do it: Send them a link with the following <url> followed by the calendar id. The url is as follow: https://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid= For example, if the calendar id is 2skpnamedhqnlhfesc3l77qvkk@group.calendar.google.com then send them a link as follow: https://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=2skpnamedhqnlhfesc3l77qvkk@group.calendar.google.com Try it out by clicking here . When the link opens, Google Calendar will ask whether or not to add the calendar The Malaysian School Holiday calendar is used in this example

This is a follow up from my last blog posting . It turned out that the HK Video Note 3 phone had a bad motherboard which had to be replaced. As for the 9.9 inch tablet, it recently became corrupted and would not start. After the HK Video screen, it just stayed on the screen with the word Android on it. That was recovered by the person at the store by pressing on the power and the - volume button to restore the OS on the tablet. After recovering the tablet, I decided to take a closer look at the default configuration of the tablet and found that it comes with a task killer installed and is rooted. I suspect that most of the issues I encountered is the result of the task killer killing critical processes in the background. As mentioned, I encountered issues where core applications failed and could only be recovered by resetting the tablet to factory mode. I am not sure if effect of the task killer is due to the fact that the table is rooted or because of the OS version. I did ...

Image courtesy of    phanlop88 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I recently decided that Android operating system is now mature enough for me to get a cheap alternative for tablets and phones. Ten inch tablets are all more than RM 1000/-. The exchange rate is US$1 = RM 3.25. In order to test my theory, I bought three devices. They are: 9.9 inch tablet from HK Video (‎AM10D1B‎) (RM 699). 5.5 inch phone from HK Video - also known as Note 3 (RM 599) 7 inch phone pad from Asus (RM 699) UI All three devices came with Android 4.1.x installed. Quite often those using HTC phones and other branded Android phones and devices complain about how the HTC Sense or third party UI weights down on the devices. However, when I started using the above devices, that was the first thing I missed. I preferred the keyboard that came with HTC Sense UI instead of the keyboard in HK Video. Android 4.1 had a lot of added features compared to the Android 2.3 on HTC Desire HD. Batte...

One of the labs for Google Calendar known as flair has stopped working. Flair is great to add pictures and symbols on your calendar entries to make it easy for you to differentiate the events or highlight specific events. One alternative proposed in Google Group question on this problem is to paste image characters directly in the calendar event. This can be easily done using characters from this site . All characters are found in this page . Here are a few examples of image characters found on the site: ☃☎☂

In Part 1 , I covered how you can make Gmail, calendar and Tasks to help you manage your emails and reminders and in Part 2 , I covered how the Google Apps can leveraged for collaboration and communication. There is still another component of the Google set of tools which I find extremely useful. The final component is called Google Sites. Bookmarks I use it to bookmark the sites I usually use in the course of my work. It is true that you can add bookmarks to your browser and in some cases also set your browser to synchronize the bookmarks across different machines. However, you may come across situations where some applications will only work with certain browsers or cases where you might have to use someone else’s computer. Have a page will all the bookmarks will be more handy. Since it is a web page, it can work across different devices and OS. The same page can also be shared with others in your company. Blogger or Google Site Google Ste pages are more s...

Google platform provides a rich set of tools for management. In Part 1 , I focused on Gmail, Task and Calendar. I shall continue with other tools and how it complements my activities as a manager. Collaboration Google documents strength is in collaboration. It is very easy to create either a Document (Word), Spreadsheet (Excel) or Presentation (Powerpoint) and collaborate with either your team members or people in remote locations. I indicated the MS Office equivalent in parenthesis for those who are more familiar with the Microsoft suite of tools. When you share the documents, you can either give others the right to edit the document, comment on the document or just view the document.  In a meeting, the attendees can edit the document and everybody else in the meeting can view it. Comments can also be used to raise questions and highlight items for others to respond to. Each collaborator can activate a setting to trigger to inform them of any changes in the ...

The following are some of the ways I use Google platform to manage my time, team and projects. Reminders For simple reminders to perform something on a given day, a calendar entry works best. Set it either to occur once or repeat daily, weekly or monthly. Examples for such reminders are: writing weekly reports, paying subscriptions, having a regular 1-on-1. Gmail Task Follow ups To follow up on tasks, the task option is best. There are two ways of creating tasks. Click on add to task while you are reading a mail. When you do that the tasks will have a link to that mail. Only one mail can be linked to a task. Create a task directly. The task option is great when you need to take notes and keep track of progress, you can place notes in the task and change the due date of the task as you proceed. However, there are limitations to the task feature. The entries in the task is personal and cannot be assigned to others. If you are using the brow...

I previously wrote about unlimited storage I found on internet. One of them happens to be Google Plus. Using Google Plus app on Android, you are able to turn on auto backup for all the photographs taken using your Android phone. This worked well but I found the backup stopped working properly - it stopped uploading my photographs. Initially, I thought it was my account because I was able to log into another account and get those photos uploaded and when I logged into my original account, the upload worked. However, that trick only work once. There is now an option in Google Plus to either upload your photos in full size but you are only given 15 Gbytes free space (this will may change with the unified storage - where all Google products will share the space) or use standard size with unlimited free storage. Recently, I came across the following article . I did some experiment and found that the application had difficulty uploading photos that are more than 5 Mega pixels...