Phone memory confusion in my T-Mobile G2x

Posted on Monday, December 26, 2011 by tao

I was confused by the phone memory structure of my T-Mobile G2x Android phone. I cannot find the photos and videos taken with the default camera app. Did some digging online and experiments offline, and the following is my findings.

There are three kinds of memories in my G2x. The first, internal phone storage, the RAM of the phone, so to speak. In most of the cases, the user cannot directly access or modify the content in this chunk of memory.

Second, the phone memory. It is called phone memory in Manage Apps, but in the Android file system, is it referred as /sdcard/. Sometimes it is also referred as the internal SD card. That’s quite confusing, since it is not a SD card that you can plug in and out. It has a DCIM folder, and the photos and videos are stored in /sdcard/DCIM/Camera if there is no external SD card installed.

Third, the read SD card. It is the SD card that the users can swap in and out. It is mounted at /sdcard/_ExternalSD. It is also referred as the external SD card. If it is mounted, the photos and videos go to this location by default, otherwise, the they go to internal SD card.

So, for photos and videos, the default location is

/sdcard/_ExternalSD/DCIM/Camera

And if external SD card is not present, the default location is

/sdcard/DCIM/Camera

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Proper way to connect and disconnect external hard drives

Posted on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 by tao

A couple of months ago, one of my external hard drives went belly up. Fortunately, it was still under warranty, and Western Digital sent me a RMA replacement. The most important of all, I had the opportunity to copy all the content to another volume before I sent it back for RMA.

The lesson: always have double, or triple copies of your important data on different physical volumes. Also, it is better to follow the manufacture’s suggestion to properly connect and disconnect the device.

From Western Digital’s documentation, the proper way to connect a USB or FireWire hard drive is the following, and the sequence is important:

To Connect

  1. Plug the power adapter into a wall outlet. You can try a power strip or UPS but if you have problems with the drive, try connecting it to a wall outlet.
  2. Connect the power plug into the back of the drive. It’s okay if the drive powers on, then off, or if you see some lights come on for a brief second.
  3. Connect the USB or FireWire cable directly into your computer (do not use a USB or FireWire hub). If your drive has more than one port, only use one. Do not connect both the USB and FireWire together to the computer.
  4. Connect the other end of the USB or FireWire cable into the external drive. The drive should then power on (you shouldn’t need to use the power switch), if your computer is on, Windows should detect and install the native Windows drivers for your drive. If the drive is formatted for your computer system, it should show up in My Computer with a drive letter.

To Disconnect

  1. Please ensure that any files residing on the external hard drive are closed and no programs are accessing the hard drive.
  2. Eject the volume through OS, safely remove the drive for Windows, Command-E for Mac
  3. The hard drive will spin down and turn off on it’s own. When prompted, You can unplug the USB or FireWire cable and/or power cable.
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Comparison of my phone cameras with my other cameras

Posted on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 by tao

I am curious of the cameras on my new T-Mobile G2x phone. This phone has two cameras, the back camera is 8 M camera, the front one is 1.3 M camera.

So it would be interesting to compare with my other cameras:

Camera Pixels Pixel size, um^2 Sensor size, mm Type
Canon 350D 3456×2304=8M 6.4 22.2×14.8 CMOS
Nikon D40 3008×2000=6M 7.9 23.7×15.6 CCD
Canon SD1000 3072×2304=7M 1.87 5.744×4.308 (1/2.5″) CCD
T-Mobile G2x back camera 3264×2448=8M 1.4 4.6×3.4 (1/3.2″) CMOS
T-Mobile G2x front camera 1280×960=1.3M 1.75 2.24×1.68 CMOS
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Fast switching Input methods on Android phone

Posted on Tuesday, September 6, 2011 by tao

On my T-Mobile G2x phone, there are two pre-installed input methods, or keyboards: Android stock keyboard (Gingerbread), and Swype keyboard. I also installed Google Pinyin keyboard for entering Chinese. Google Pinyin keyboard can sync with the mother-ship for my customized Chinese dictionary.

Android stock keyboard can only enter English, while both Google Pinyin and Swype keyboards can enter both Chinese and English.

A lot of times, I need to switching among the three keyboards. Only Android stock keyboard has a dedicated key for switching to other input methods. When with the other two keyboards, you can either go back to the home screen, go to settings to change the input methods, or you can use the following shortcut:

Tap and hold the text input area for a couple of seconds. Then, a context menu will pop up, and you will see the option to switch keyboards, among other editing commands.

I never used previous versions of the Android stock keyboard, but I learned that the Gingerbread (version 2.3) is much better than previous versions.

Swype is faster, and very tolerant, very good for using on a shaking bus.

Google Pinyin is the gold standard for entering Chinese characters.

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Sync Google Contacts with iPhone and iPod

Posted on Tuesday, September 6, 2011 by tao

Android phones can sync contacts with Google Contacts in Gmail seamlessly. So the phone address book is always in sync with the Google Contacts. Although my iPod can sync email, calendar with Google and Yahoo Mail, it cannot keep the contacts in sync, or at least you cannot find such an option exists.

However, if you dig deeper, you will find there is a way to keep the iPhone and iPod contacts in sync with Google Contacts in Gmail. Here is what I did:

  1. Make sure Google Contacts has all the contact information you need.
  2. Delete all the contacts on my iPod. This may not be very obvious. You need to connect the iPod to iTunes, click the iPod then select the “info” tab. Remove the contact sync options, then iTunes will prompt you to remove all the contacts on the device. Do so.
  3. On iPod or iPhone, go to Settings, tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
  4. Add Accounts, choose Microsoft Exchange, fill out email, username, password, but leave the domain blank, go next.
  5. Fill “m.google.com” as the server, next, accept.
  6. In the next screen, choose “Contacts” on, “Mail” and “Calendars” off.
  7. Click Sync. Then wait a while, all you Google Contacts will be pushed to your iPhone or iPod.
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Google eBook Store

Posted on Wednesday, March 16, 2011 by tao

I did not buy books from Google eBook store before. Recently, I tried some O\’Reilly titles through it, and I am very satisfied with the experience.

First, some background: I have multiple eBook reading devices: Palm PDAs, Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, Windows Mobile PDA, iPod Touch 4, and two dedicated eInk devices: Sony PRS-505 eReader and Amazon Kindle 3 WiFi.

For all those devices, I mainly use the following eBook formats:

  • eReader PDB format, can be used on Windows Mobile, Palm PDA, iPod Touch/iPhone, Windows and Mac desktops. It cannot be used on Nokia 770.
  • mobi format, can be used on Windows Mobile, Palm PDA, iPod Touch/iPhone (through Kindle iPhone App), Kindle, Nokia 770, and Windows PC. It cannot be used on Sony PRS-505 and Mac desktops.
  • ePUB format, can be used on Nokia 770, iPod Touch/iPhone, Sony eReader, Windows and Mac desktops. It cannot be used on my Palm, Windows Mobile, and Kindle reader.

I use multiple eBook vendors, such as:

  • eReader, purchased by Fictionwise, but still has its own site
  • Fictionwise, purchased by Barnes and Noble, still keeps the store front
  • MobiPocket, bought by Amazon, Kindle format actually is a version of mobi format, but this store is dying, maybe by design
  • Sony eBookstore
  • Kindle Store

Previously, I was more satisfied with Fictionwise/eReader, due to the fact that I prefer my Palm devices. But unfortunately, it has a rather limited library. I like my Kindle device, but I don\’t like the closed format used by Amazon, although it has the largest title collections.

Now, I prefer the ePUB format, used by many vendors, including Barnes & Noble Nook, Borders Kobo reader, Sony reader, and the wonderful Stanza app for iPhone/iPod Touch. The DRM is done through Adobe Digital Edition, which is not too bad.

Kindle store has the most comprehensive collections, and their eBooks used have a lower price tag than other ePUB vendors, Sony, Barnes and Noble Nook, Borders Kobo etc.

The situation changed after Google entered the scene. Google eBooks can be viewed online, inside your browser, and offline through various devices, since it uses ePUB and Adobe Digital edition. It supports most of the eBook reading devices, except Amazon Kindle, of course. Since I have more ePUB devices than Kindle, I naturally prefer the ePUB format.

Google eBook Store

The most important fact about Google eBook store is, other than the ePUB format, it also matches the price of Kindle store, and greatly expanded the range of titles of all the ePUB bookstores. Now I can confidently buy ePUB books from Google store, knowing that the Amazon Kindle eBooks no longer have much of a price advantage.

Before Google enter the eBook business, I can only buy the eBooks of David Pogue, my favorite technology writer, from Amazon Kindle Store, but now, his books are available in ePUB through Google store. I can read his books on most of my devices. Kindle is just too closed and limited.

Purchasing Google eBooks is easy, but you need to hook your device through USB to load the files, no wireless options. But that\’s perfect fine with me, I rarely use the Kindle whispernet to buy books anyway.

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Finder Slide Show

Posted on Sunday, March 13, 2011 by tao

With Mac OS X, there is a nifty feature called Finder Slide Show. In Finder, select multiple icons, then hit the spacebar, you will have a nice slide show!

Hit Command-Enter, you will have a Expose like index, neat indeed!

In OS X 10.4, you can only view pictures, but since Leopard OS X 10.5, you can view PDF, Word, etc. Really nice.

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The trailing slash (/) in cp

Posted on Sunday, March 6, 2011 by tao

Just realized that

cp -R folder1 dest

is very different from

cp -R folder1/ dest

The first command copies everything inside folder1 to dest, but not folder1 itself.

The second command copies folder1 itself (and everything inside it) to dest.

In this case, using dest and dest/ will have the same result.

Pay attention to the source, the trailing slash character is very important.

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Archiving files and folders on multiple platforms

Posted on Sunday, March 6, 2011 by tao

I was organizing my external hard drives, DVD, CD-R archives this weekend. I need to copy a large number of small files in large folders. For example, although an application appears a single icon in Mac OS X Finder, it is actually a folder, containing a large number of small files. Copying such an icon from DVD to hard drive may take very long time. If you have a large number of such icons, copying them with Finder will take a really long time.

With command line command, such as

cp -Rpv source destination

it will take less time. But that is still a large number of files to copy.

The best way to copy such folders is to archive them. Tested several different formats on different platforms, here is my favorites:

Mac OS X:

Use Disk Utilities (Finder -> Cmd-Shift-U) to make dmg archives. A single dmg (disk image) archive file can contain a large number of small files, with compression, and preserving Mac OS X metadata, such as spotlight comments, color labels, resource forks, etc). It is superb.

If the number of items is small, you can also use the Finder File -> Compress items (Or highlight, then right click) command. It will archive multiple files and folders into a zip file. It also preserves Mac OS X file metadata. Spotlight comment is such a useful feature in Mac OS X, I use it extensively with Spotlight search.

Windows:

After an elongated trial and error process, I settled for WinRAR. A superb utility, especially for its foreign language character sets support. You can use Chinese, Japanese, and Korean file names safely with WinRAR.

Although there is a command line RAR version for Mac OS X, it does not support resource forks and OS X metadata. I had a really bad experience with Mac RAR command line utility. It corrupted some of my old Mac Classic files). On Mac OS, always stick to dmg, and the built-in zip in Finder.

Linux / UNIX:

Of course, tarball. Always use tarball with gzip or bzip2 compression.

to explode (retrieve, decompress) from a tarball,

tar -xzvf tarballfile (gzip compression)
tar -xjvf tarballfile (bzip2 compression)

to archive into a tarball,

tar -czvf tarballfile directory-to-archive
replace z with j for bzip2 compression.

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Copy large folder in Mac OS X

Posted on Sunday, March 6, 2011 by tao

Similar to the Windows case, in Mac OS X, it is better to copy large folders using command line than the Finder GUI command. For some reason, coping large folders (>50 GB, 10k+ files) is prone to failure with Finder GUI drag and drop command.

Open a Terminal window (In Utilities folder, Cmd-Shift-U), type the following command:

cp -Rp source destination

-p option to preserve the original properties, such as modification time, access time, file flags, file mode, user ID, and group ID, as allowed by permissions. Access Control Lists (ACLs) and Extended Attributes (EAs), including resource forks, will also be preserved.

That should take care of it. Throw in an -v option to be verbose.

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