I have been using a cell phone (like most of the so called civilized world)
for several years now. I have always intended to learn more about the technology
involved and collect some notes .... right here.
But I never seem to get around to it.
New phone (google Pixel 6)
After 5 months of stewing about what to do, I ordered a Pixel 6 on April 20, 2022.
It arrived on April 27 and I put it into service April 28.
Easy from the phone, but from the desktop?
There is a Chrome extension, "Desktop for Instagram" that seems to be
the easiest option.
Carriers
I have always used Verizon and been entirely satisfied with their service.
There seems to be some validity to their claims to have a reliable network.
Note that there are two "schemes" of cell phone transmission and encoding:
CDMA - used by Verizon and Sprint
GSM - used by ATT and T-mobile
They are incompatible, and a phone designed to work on a CDMA network may be
hardware incompatible with a GSM network. Apple is the only maker I know of that
sells phones that can work on either network -- though this may depend on the specific
model number. The carriers have various stupid rules also that may limit your ability
to change from one carrier to another, though this is always in a state of flux.
To move an APP from device storage to the SD card -- go to Settings, More, App manager.
This gives you a list of your apps. Visit each one, it should have a button that says
"Move to SD card" (sometimes this is greyed out).
Text clients - Chomp SMS
Years ago I switched from the default android client to "chompSMS".
I liked it well, but some issues arose that made me want to switch.
Namely ads and some bugs sending messages.
Text clients - Handcent (forget it!)
Just today (11-30-2020) I switched from "chomp" to "handcent" which labels itself
as "Next SMS". The motivating thing was sending text messages and finding out hours
later that the text had not been sent. This typically happens when I am in a remote
area and send something very important. I want a notification that slaps me in the
face if a message doesn't go out, not just a flag that I will see days later when
I revisit the thread. It remains to be seen if "handcent" will do better.
But I already like one thing -- when I have several recipients, it shows me all of them
up front in a compact way.
I like Handcent, except for one thing. It is murder on my battery life.
Others are complaing also, while some are in denial. A common suggestion
is to go to "Go SMS". To be more specific, I took my phone off the charger
mid morning (10 AM) and by 9PM the battery is nearly dead. I could go for
nearly 2 days before Handcent came along.
So we gave Handcent less than 24 hours. It was nice, at least I liked the way it showed
conversations with multiple people much better than chomp. I didn't have enough time to
get to evaluate other features. I am not sure about Go SMS, I wish Handcent didn't have this
stupid battery issue as it looked pretty nice. I corresponded with the handcent team and
they sent me various versions to try, none of which solved anything. I gave up.
Text clients - Textra (looks promising ...)
Now it is July 15, 2021 and I am going to try another text app, this time "Textra".
Two things are motivating this. One is that about a month ago, "Chomp" started
injecting ads. I can pay a one time "pro" fee that is less than $5. For life they
say, but do I believe them? Even more annoying is a bug where I get errors trying
to respond to multi participant mails and even some old message threads. This could
be a global android problem, but switching to Textra may help diagnose that.
Getting photos from an Android phone to linux
The MTP protocol seems to be the thing. On my Fedora 30 system, I do this:
simple-mtpfs mountpoint [options] (this is the usage message)
simple-mtpfs -h (gives help)
simple-mtpfs -l (lists devices)
With my Samsung S4 connected via a USB cable, I get:
simple-mtpfs -l
1: SamsungGalaxy models (MTP)
The github page for this gives better documentation than the usage message.
Source is completely misleading and optional. If you only have one
possible device (like I do), you ignore that and just supply a mount
point as in:
cd
mkdir mtp
simple-mtpfs ./mtp
....
fusermount -u ./mtp
Note the "fusermount" command to unmount the device.
The simple-mtpfs software works with "fuser", which is a driver
that supports a user filesystem, for better or worse.
If you had multiple devices (which seems highly unlikely, but who knows,
maybe you want to copy files from one phone to another or something),
you would use:
simple-mtpfs --device 1 ./mtp
But never mind all of this, the simple command works and I see stuff mounted
under ./mtp -- and no need in my case to fiddle any settings on my phone or
answer dialogs. There was a long delay waiting for my phone show up and
my Fedora desktop briefly showed a useless icon about a Verizon phone.
The trick now is finding my photos (which is what I want in this case)
in the mounted directory structure.
There are two directories, "Phone" and "Card". Pictures does not have
what I want. However each of these has a DCIM directory.
I like to have any commands I won't remember after a week in a Makefile.
Then I can just go to a directory, find a Makefile there, look at it,
and be back on the air without hassle. So I set up this simple Makefile:
# mount and unmount phone
list:
simple-mtpfs -l
mount:
simple-mtpfs /home/tom/Phone/mtp
umount:
fusermount -u /home/tom/Phone/mtp
pull:
rsync -av mtp/Phone/DCIM/Camera/ Camera
So, all my phone related stuff (including the mount point) is in the Phone
directory on my linux machine.
Note that I added a "make pull" command to pull any new photos off of my
phone and maintain a mirror of my phone photos on my linux machine.
So now the scheme to pull photos off my phone is:
-- connect the phone with a USB cable
cd Phone
make mount
make pull
make umount