Samsung Galaxy S II (thinking its charging all the time)

I'd thought I'd share some information about this phone to stop people spending money on getting it fixed unnecessarily.

I was bought this phone by my wife on my 50th birthday in March of this year, and to be frank it's a brilliant phone, it has performed faultlessly since it was switched on for the first time.

However like most electrical things they do suffer from wear and tear, and although the phone has been looked after and has barely a blemish on it, it did fail on me.

Namely the usb charging port, initially I didn't think there was anything wrong with my phone other than the battery not lasting very long, so I downloaded battery saving apps etc thinking my battery was on it's way out, but they didn't show anything untoward.

So being an utter unashamed geek I decided to get to the bottom of it and rooted my phone to get into the internals and see what was going on.

I found out that a wakelock was keeping my phone from deep sleeping, a wakelock is basically a kernel mechanism for Android power management. When a thread holds a wakelock, the kernel will refrain from entering a low-power state.

Now the wakelock in question was "vbus_present" which basically means it thinks it's plugged into the charger/usb port.

So I cleaned out the usb port on the phone with a soft toothbrush, then proceeded to blow it out with compressed air, neither of these things worked.....

Eventually I decided to look at the port with a high magnification camera from where I work, it was pretty obvious the central spade connector was pushed down away from the position it should have been in.

So after removing the battery and power source and with the help of a small flat bladed screwdriver I gently lifted the central spade (it's VERY small) upwards towards the screen side, until it was central, not thinking for a minute that it would do anything because I thought the usb charger side would straighten the spade out when inserted, and at this stage I had already called Orange (EE) and Phones4U to find out how to return my beloved phone for repair. 

To my surprise the wakelock disappeared. A fluke I thought....no it wasn't it's been consistently fixed since this rather bizarre fix I stumbled across.

Just for information the USB charging unit in these phones is easily replaced by yourself for around £10 and you can get the part from here.

etradesupply

So don't be fooled into paying large amounts of money to get your phone fixed

it's 8 screws and the job is done... there are even video's online to show you how.

Well I've hit the half century

It was ominously looming on me my 50th year on this planet..... I have to say I wasn't looking forward to my birthday.... 

My ever thoughtful and darling wife had been deceiving me for weeks, I knew something was happening but I've got to be honest I had no idea what she had planned.... she finished work early and then when I finished work,  she turned up in the car without the kids, which immediately got me on edge.... we drove, and drove... it started to get dark, we still drove out into the wilds of Wales....  

then the water pump blew on the car..... we sat there looking at each other, Andrea had a bit of a melt down because the surprise had been scuppered by the BMW's water pump going and dumping our entire coolant over the road, and we were out in the middle of nowhere... and by nowhere I mean absolutely nowhere even the local sheep were miles away.....

So we had a discussion after the minor hysterics and I explained that logically to decide what to do that she had to tell me where we were going .... So I asked would we lose any money if we cancelled, apparently yes..... all of it.... Soooooooo I spoke to our friendly garage owner on the phone and he gave me a number of somebody local in St Clears who did recovery..... and then I phoned my parents and my father eventually picked us up from our wilderness break down, and carried us to our final destination...... The £95 sting of the vehicle recovery marred things somewhat, and we knew we'd have a massive repair bill for the water pump (well I did)

My father bless him turned up about an hour and a half after we broke down and drove us to our final destination.......I have to say I was blown away with this 5 star hotel, they upgraded us because of our unlucky car troubles and probably because they felt sorry for us, but I wasn't complaining ... it was stunning, the whole place was pure sumptuous luxury.... They had a treatment room/spa.... hell there isn't any point in me describing it on here..... 

just go here and take a look at the place 

http://www.peterstone-court.com/

Amazing place.....

We were booked in for two nights weekend break and it was worth every penny......

Having to go down to the bottom of the enormous drive and wait for the local bus to take us into Crickhowell did raise a few eyebrows with the locals on the bus.... We were the only guests who didn't have our own car... but I've got to say it didn't dampen the weekend very much at all....

My wife also sprang a surprise visit by our friends on the Saturday night which was a lovely surprise.....

I've also been rocketed into the 20th century with an Android smart phone, which I'm still getting to grips with......(which by the way I'd managed to lose on a walk within hours of getting it... but it was recovered.....eventually)

Overall I've had the most fantastic 50th birthday a person could wish for.....and I'm married to the most thoughtful, loving and beautiful  uber fit wife a man could wish for :) 

Adobe Flashplayer & older PC's & Linux

I'm putting this up here so other Linux nerds don't spend hours figuring out what I have......

I have an old Athlon XP 2800 system knocking around which was earmarked for Freya (my 5 year old daughter.....running linux of course.... start them young I say ).... everything went swimmingly with the installation until I tried to use flash... no go, no error messages just "cannot load flash plugin".

Now I'm no stranger to hardware/software/operating systems, it's been my bread and butter for many many years.....(you don't need to know how long...but lets just say I'm an elder geek, in fact I was a geek before being a geek was fashionable....sigh) 

I went through all of the hoops installing from different sources, using different browsers, setting rights on the libflashplayer.so file, you name it I did it ....nothing nada, same error.

I initially thought it was maybe because of the low memory the pc had, but no.....

it's a really really simple fix

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags

which will look something like mine below except it won't have the SSE2 flag

fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good nopl extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch lbrv

if it doesn't have SSE2 in it, you'll have to go back to the 11.1.102.63 version which is here 

that will solve your problem, unpack that into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins directory or wherever your browser is trying to load it from and it will work..... you can even just overwrite the newer libflashplayer.so file .....

Job done