László Varga

… is the record for battery up-time for my phone. Yes, it is no big deal if I compare it to other GSM telephones, but from a Samsung Galaxy S, I think it can be considered quite the achievement. How was this achieved? Well, I simply adjusted the phone to my needs, which are: around 10-15 minutes of phone conversation daily, a total of 10-20 minutes of gaming, the usual wake-up alarm and some occasional surfing on the net.

Good, but how does one “adjust” the phone to these needs? One step is to turn off the GPS and Wi-Fi. This first step extended the battery life from 8 hours to almost 2 days. The big magic, however, happens if one can “convince” the phone to run on good old GSM mode only. The problem is, simply setting the Network Mode to “GSM only” will not work: it will still keep mobile internet connections alive (At least it still works in Vodafone network in Romania).

The next step is to head to the Android Market and search for a good tool that turns off all 3G/EDGE/GPRS functionality. After some searching and selecting, I found the perfect little app: it is called “APN Switch”. It is basically a widget consisting of a single button: to turn off the extra features above GSM. Whenever I need to surf on the net, I just push the button, and voila, I have mobile internet again. If I am done, I just push the button again, and it’s off 😀 . Great little app, I think it is worth to try it!

[#2]

Driven by my hidden geek instinct which is always fascinated by gadgets, I have decided to upgrade my telephone to something more than just a mobile phone. I decided to give a bunch of money to vodafone in exchange for a Samsung Galaxy S. The whole transition from a Nokia 6234 to this device was kind of like when I first decided to buy myself a mobile phone (a Nokia 3310 back then).

Yes, the phone part is nice, it works. The camera: better than the old one (and with HD video it beats any of my digital cameras I have had or currently have). The real transition for me is: the GPS and mobile internet. The GPS is great. By default it uses google maps to locate your position, it is quite accurate and it even responds to rotating the camera well. The mobile internet part is also great, because of a combination of two things:
– it always switches to a nearby Wi-Fi (instead of 3G/HSUPA)
– there is FREE Wi-Fi access in almost any public area in Cluj
(Yes, this is the same with any other smart-phone but for me this is a new way of life, so don’t even think of spoiling the joy 😛 ).

My initial joy was quite frankly blown to pieces by the sad news that for some reason it did not want to use my home router (Linksys WRT54GL) to access the internet. It connected to it, I could even reach the settings on the router, but still no internet connection. I even registered to a forum (which by the way seems nice) to find some answers to my problems. The good part was that there were no problems with other routers, but mine (but why? 🙁 ). So I tried every setting one by one on the router: everything was ok, no blocking, no filtering, I even removed all protection from it, it still did not budge. I said to myself: I WILL NOT GO TO SLEEP UNTIL THIS WORKS (bad idea): I stood awake until 3:30 AM.

But why did I stay awake that much? Well… I DID manage to fix the issue 😀 : there is a very friendly button (well, now it is) in the router settings, that I completely ignored the entire day: Reset to factory default. I did the reset, re-built my wireless network and voila it worked like a charm . So the official verdict: great phone, great router, stupid user 😛 .

[2]

On one of those days when you simply do not know what to do, here’s an idea: clean up the disgusting mess from underneath your laptop keyboard.

There are actually several reasons to do this:
– The keyboard will be clean
– It will keep you occupied for a while (it took me 2 hours)
– It will be less likely that you will have the heart to eat at your laptop again

So, how does one clean the laptop keyboard? Simple, follow these steps:

1. Get something thin with which you can gently pop out ALL your keys. Click off your keys from the joint, and arrange them in the exact same position they were on the laptop (it’s fun and it will keep you from pushing every key till you find the spot, when you will need to put it back).

2. Next carefully take off the joints themselves. These can be tiny and fragile pieces so be gentle with them. Take your time, study the mechanism. In my case some of them are really, really tiny.

3. Clean off the area underneath the keyboard. Use some kind of alcohol to do this and under no circumstances water (duuuh). It can also help if you have a brush of some sort to do this (I used toothbrush that I bought especially for this job 😉 ).

4. When everything seems clean, move on to the keys themselves: a little alcohol, a little brushing, a little polishing and you’re done with one key. Now, do it about 100 times more 😛 .

5. If you are done with all keys (or if you got really bored, whichever comes first) put all the keys back to their position. Hopefully you kept my advice from the first step and did not just pile them up. If not, then you will have lot’s of fun finding the right spot 😀 .

6. Enjoy the shine of your freshly cleaned laptop 😉

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