Tag: Android

Context Menu. Context Problem.

For months I’ve been fighting with search options in the little bar that appears over text on the various Android devices I’ve been working with. When Microsoft came out with the Microsoft launcher and their next big blue E browser, Edge, for Android phones, I thought “why not check it out?” and let it install on my Nexus 5. I fiddled with it a few times and then forgot I let the Microsoft stuff install, and then the Nexus 5 power button broke and it went into a bootloop and I had to have it repaired, and then I had to have it replaced, and then I had to replace the replacement that wasn’t what I was sold…

So anyway. The Microsoft launcher is still on my current phone. I don’t mind it being there, but it is still there and something that it did is driving me nuts now. At some point after I changed phones the first time, the bar over selected text changed. It looks like this now.

Three searches. Three, and two of them are Bing searches, and they don’t say which ones are Bing. Now, I don’t mind the Big Blue E being on my phone. I don’t even mind the amusement of occasionally switching to the Microsoft launcher just to see what Microsoft thinks will sell me on coming back to their operating system on my phone (never mind that it is still at heart Unix/Linux/Android) but what I do object to is the Microsoft launcher and/or Edge changing my search options and not giving me a way to take out the searches that I’m never going to use.

Today I decided that I would humor the Son and I installed the Ecosia search app (it plants trees!) thinking that adding a search engine to the phone would at least allow me to alter the system parameters and I could finally get Bing out of my phone or at least off my search options, but still no dice. I can’t get at the search options in the pop up over a text selection.

So now it’s time to start searching for a solution to this problem. None of the search engines can figure out what I’m asking for. It isn’t a menu; at least, that word doesn’t produce useful search results. Using pop up or popup as a search term gets me results that offer to help me remove malware and unwanted popup advertising. It isn’t a bar. It isn’t a task.

I’m finally reduced to asking the various search engines

what is the thing called that appears over selected text in android

Google Bing DuckDuckGo Ecosia

None of them give me exactly what I want except Google. Google, who has been spying on my searches for the better part of twenty years and so knows me best. DuckDuckGo did offer me this article on Popular Science – 24 hidden Android settings you should know about which was interesting at least, if not what I wanted. Also? I have something hidden that needs adjusting. I don’t know what the name of that thing is, but that thing should have been on the list of things in an article that purports to tell me how to adjust things that are hidden. Quod erat demonstrandum. Clearly there should have been 25 hidden things to talk about.

However. This article:

For some, especially those of us in the approaching-the-over-the-hill gang, working with text on our phones can be cumbersome. Because smartphone text itself, context menu entries, and all the other tools for working with text are so small that they render simple tasks, such as selecting an address or phone number, copying it, and then pasting it into the target app, is not only hard to see but also somewhat difficult to manipulate.

The good news is that, with features like Smart Text Selection and Text Magnification, later versions of Android (versions 8 and 9, or Oreo and Pie) have found ways to alleviate some of the tedium.

online-tech-tips.com

…offered up by Google, didn’t actually answer the question but it at least gave me the phrase “context menu“. Now I have a name for the thing I want to change. That makes the job easier. Well, I should say, it makes the search manageable. I don’t want to program a new menu so the article on Tutlane.com that is part of the explanation for what a context menu is, isn’t going to help me. But that article gave warning that maybe what I wanted to do wasn’t explained anywhere because it was going to require learning to program in order for me to do it. Using the search string: 

"android context menu" change search

I came up with this hit on Reddit in which the solution they found for removing Bing from their context menu was to,

Found a Microsoft launcher that I was testing out a long time ago still installed.

Uninstalled

Resolved

Redditisfun

Pulling the Microsoft launcher from my device did alter the context menu in question. To completely get rid of Bing I have to remove Microsoft Edge too. That’s too bad. I was entertaining using the Microsoft launcher and possibly Edge as well. There isn’t much hazard in doing this now because they are no longer dominant and so no longer the prime targets. At least, not in the mobile computing realm they aren’t. Google and Chrome are the prime targets there. But I’m not willing to put up with Bing search in order to do any fiddling around with alternative launchers for an Android device. Microsoft shoots themselves in the foot once again by forcing me to use Bing as a search engine in the context menu. Context is key.

I don’t know that Reddit is fun, but I finally have to admit that Reddit is useful. So much for the article where I blame Reddit for destroying the Blogosphere. And it had such a good title too.

Where is my Phone?

When I bought my latest phone and paired it with my Aftershokz bluetooth headset, a bone-conduction headset that allows me to hear sounds my ears no longer pick up, the nearly pure Android OS on the phone worked beautifully. Now that I had a phone that was something near current in technology, I discovered that the tech allowed me to do things that I had never thought to try doing before.

Things like telling my phone to find itself for me. It’s a bluetooth headset, it is securely linked to the phone, all you have to do is trigger the voice dialer on the headset and ask the headset “where is my phone?” then the helpful Google assistant speaks again and offers to ring the phone for you. Or rather, it did until sometime in the last few weeks.

The brain fog that is a side-effect of Meniere’s symptoms leaves me pretty much a basket case for days at a time. I spend a lot of time looking for things that I’ve set down somewhere, but I can’t remember where. As I’m standing there looking for my phone I remember I can ask the headset to find the phone for me. So I ask the question. This is the response I got.

An app? Why the fuck should I download an app? Why would Google seperate out the functions that were available right from the headset, and put them in an app? When I finally found the phone, conveniently located exactly where I last left it, I downloaded the app and then tried to use it to find my device. The app helpfully told me that the phone was in my hand. Well, duh. There was no function at all within the app to allow it to do the thing I used to do by triggering voice dial on the headset. Or as I said to Google in my feedback,

This app is fucking useless. If I had two phones, maybe not. But now when I ask Google “where is my phone” it unhelpfully directs me to get this app rather than offering to ring my phone as it has done for me for the last couple of years. Why in the hell would you take that functionality out of the OS? Now I have to own two phones or use a desktop computer to access the device connected to my Bluetooth headset? Why in the hell should I have to do that, when the two devices are securely connected?

Feedback that Google promptly deleted, probably because I violated their feedback standards by cursing at them. What do they expect when they break shit that works? It’s not like this is the first time. I doubt that it will be the last time, either.

For the last week Android has unhelpfully directed me to download this useless app, the app that only tells me when the phone is in my hand, the app that cannot possibly locate the phone’s precise location using current technology even if I had two phones so that when I lose one I can find it with the other, that app was what Google wanted me to go use. Until today. Today, on a whim, I asked the headset “where is my phone” and it responded “I can ring your Motorola phone for you. Would you like me to do that?” as if the last week of hopeless irritation had been a bad dream. I nearly cheered, but instead just told the voice “no”, which it quite typically didn’t understand and unhelpfully informed me that it could only ring the last two phones I had, to which I responded with what it could go do with itself for all its troubles…

…but at least that one useful function has been restored. I would prefer not to lose the phone in the first place, but at least I haven’t driven down the road with my phone sitting on top of my car. Driving along wondering where I had put the thing but confident it was in the car since my audio kept playing on the bluetooth connection. At least I’m not that forgetful. Yet. Who does that? Did someone do that? How would I know?

Editor’s note. I discovered that the phone, when it is on, goes through this behavior. When the phone is locked it instead offers to ring the phone. I’ve just started making sure the phone is locked before I set it down now. Beef is now crow.

Authenticators

The Microsoft authenticator asks to use the Microsoft authenticator to sign in. There is no joke here, but if there were, that would be the punchline. While setting up the Microsoft authenticator on my Android phone, the authenticator demanded I use the authenticator that I was setting up to authenticate my identity. To be fair, the Google authenticator would have done the same thing if I had added my Microsoft account to it instead of setting up the Microsoft authenticator, but that isn’t where this article started. It started with Microsoft software insisting I turn myself inside out in order to find my own skin.

This is a lot like using your Google voice phone number as part of your two-step verification process. You can’t two-step verify if your second verification is behind a firewall that requires the second step to penetrate. There is a workaround for the Google voice number problem, however there is no way to authenticate the authenticators unless you have two phones with one phone already authenticated. This is because you can’t get the Microsoft authenticator on a Windows desktop installation (Google? Mozilla? The ball is in your court.) It is only available for Android and iPhone.

I’m stuck in this predicament because I was trying to troubleshoot software issues on my Motorola phone. I’ve recently become addicted to Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem, but it crashes all the time. All the time as in about four screen changes to the next crash, crashes all the time. Maddeningly frequent. In an effort to see what was causing the problem I reset the phone to factory specs and then preformatted the SD card as part of the phone’s internal memory, a step I had neglected to perform previously, then activated applications until I started noticing the crash issue again. The cause of the crashes? My malware protection application appears to interfere with the wifi calls within the game program, and I’m not about to turn off my anti-malware application. So no fix on that score, but the phone does appear to function more predictably for other programs, so worth the trouble of going back and setting it up properly.

Or at least I thought that way until starting to reactivate some of the less frequently used Android applications. The Facebook and Twitter apps tw0-step verification worked just fine. Annoying but doable because I hadn’t switched them to using an external authenticator (luckily) If I had made an authenticator my second step to log in, then I would have immediately discovered this problem when I tried to log into those applications. The Steam mobile application is almost that bad. It at least gives you an option for hey dumbass this is the authenticator in question. Deauthorize it. I only used the Microsoft authenticator for Microsoft, and today I notice that I’m not signed into Bing.

Why do you need to be signed into Bing?

I’m glad you asked that question. Pull up a chair, it’s a long story. Today’s Windows spotlight image was of a very beautiful series of fields in Japan, but this is also the day when Microsoft doesn’t link the spotlight image as part of the splash screen display, a clickable link that allows you to look for versions of the specific image shown. Allows you to look for versions of the image that can be shared, or allows you to research the location as an educational effort or a possible travel destination. Bing is where the links on the splash screen go to, and I wondered if logging into Bing might give me different search results.

This image on Shutterstock – My Pinterest board

So I tried logging into Bing. Bing promptly demanded that I approve the Microsoft login from my authenticator app. I open the app on my phone, it doesn’t know it’s the authenticator for my phone and my Microsoft account. The authenticator wants me to authenticate on the authenticator that is being authenticated. Now the loop is complete. But it isn’t just Microsoft’s loop, it is Google’s authenticator loop as well. This would have been a problem if (will be a problem when) I discover that I used the authenticator for another program (fingers crossed) I’m not sure what good a mobile authenticator is if I have to go through this much trouble just to get them to work properly.

My Blizzard authenticator is a fob that I’ve managed not to lose for ten years. It still works ten years later and as long as I don’t lose it (fingers crossed) it’ll safeguard my Blizzard account without causing me to turn myself inside out trying to troubleshoot the problem. More than can be said for mobile authenticators.

If you lose your mobile device or (like me) reset your device to factory specs and reinstall all your apps from the Google backup you will have to re-authorize all your authenticators (at least, all of them that I’ve run across so far) If you use the Google authenticator for your Google account as part of your two-step verification, you will lose the ability to open your Google account. More importantly, you will lose access to any other account that relies on it as part of its two-step verification process. This is also true of the Microsoft authenticator.

So, how do you avoid the authenticator loop? Well, Microsoft allows you to remove the authenticator from your Microsoft account after you log into it with a browser. You will have to remember your password and be able to get a second verification by email or SMS if you have two-step verification set up. You can then follow the process for installing the authenticator again as if it was a new installation. You can also use the Google authenticator and add your Microsoft account to that authenticator if you like.

The authenticator is the second application whose data I have had to restore externally, the other one was my medical ID program containing personal data that I hadn’t saved anywhere else. Luckily I had shared the data directly with several physicians, professionals who happily gave me my own data back after I realized I had lost my only copy (now backed up externally) there is no way to transfer the authenticator security tokens to a new phone as of this writing. I’m just glad I never relied on the Google authenticator for my Google account. If you have done this, here is how you turn two-step verification back off. You’ll notice that the first thing you have to do is gain access to your Google account. So if you’ve already lost access to your account, you have my sympathy. I wish I had answers for you.

So what have we learned here? Well, I’ve discovering that mobile authenticators are almost more trouble than they are worth, and that’s three things I learned from resetting my phone to factory specs. I guess it was worth the trouble after all. Still wish I could get that game to stop crashing.

Windows 10

Twitter
Microsoft Windows 10 Pro

I had no problem upgrading to Windows 10, that is the shocking news in this article. I didn’t  loose any data in the change because I haven’t relied on Windows software to do anything aside from run my computer in well over a decade now. I use Chrome or Firefox to surf.  Irfanview to view photos. Google Docs to write documents.

There is malware protection native in Windows 10 as there has been since Windows 7, they just don’t tell you where it is and that it is running anymore unless you go looking for it in notifications; notifications which are now on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen.  In the series of buttons on the notifications bar that comes up when you click on it, you will see one called settings. This can also be found from the Start menu which Microsoft wisely put back after taking it out of Windows 8.

Settings is where all the functions which used to be found in Control Panel are now located. Rather than have some arcane vernacular unique to Windows, Microsoft has elected to make their OS more like the other OS’ on the market making the learning of multiple platforms less tedious.  A wise decision on their part since most people now use an Android variant as their OS.

No one likes change.  The Wife complains every time her software is updated and she is my go to tech for hardware.  I don’t do hardware, but software I have few problems with.  Windows is now more like the other three OS’ that I use.  I find that 10 is a major improvement from 8 or 8.1.  It has been the least painful upgrade I’ve done in a lifetime of using Windows (starting with 2) DOS, Linux and when I’ve been forced to, Apple products.  It found all the drivers necessary to run my hardware before attempting to install new software.  For the FIRST TIME EVER I did not have to go out on another system and track down drivers that would have been available had the OS simply checked in advance before replacing the previous software.  I didn’t have to do anything other than restart the system and everything worked perfectly. I was as shocked as you are right now.

This is my basic rule of thumb when modifying anything on a computer; backup the data! Always backup your data because it will inevitably be lost.  Every single time I’ve upgraded in the past, this has been a true statement.  This is the first time that I felt no pain at all in changing to a new OS. I’m seriously waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It couldn’t possibly be this easy.

I hear your fingernails being dragged through the dirt as you try to desperately cling to the version of Windows you have now. Don’t deny it, you are terrified. Here is a newsflash for you, you will eventually have to upgrade. There is no avoiding it. On the other hand, there is no need to upgrade now. At some point your hardware will fail and you will be stuck using the latest version of whatever, and you’ll wish you had familiarized yourself with the software previously so as to ease the transition.

Here’s a bit of wisdom from my days as an architectural CAD guru. When AutoCAD transitioned to a Windows-based format the pushback from users who liked the DOS-based version was deafening. Professionals in the design business were swearing up and down that they would never switch to the new version; and yet within a year, all of them had changed programs. Some of them changed to non-AutoCAD drawing systems and had to learn a whole new program anyway, but none of them still used AutoCAD 10. There was no point in continuing to use it because the nature of collaborative design dictated that they had to move with the times. They had to do what everyone else was doing or be left behind. Be driven out of business.

Embrace change. That is my advice. Upgrade or switch to using Linux. You’ll thank me for it. 

Rooting Android

The Wife’s phone is dying. She’s insisted she didn’t need a smartphone for decades, but now she wants one.  One problem; we’re dead broke.  We had to steal from Peter to pay Paul this month in the first place, large phone expenditures aren’t in the works for us.  If you want a phone that works well with today’s apps, you seem to need a new phone.

There are actually multiple problems here. We found a service called Ting.com a while back, a service that saves us serious amounts of cash on cell phones. Ting.com makes them cheaper per line than standard wired service if you don’t spend hours on the phone every day. There is only one problem with this service, you have to provide your own hardware.

Luckily there is a service for that, too. Several of them, in fact.  I like Glyde.com, I bought my current HTC device from them. My first foray into this strange world of buying used phones, I bought a different device, only to discover that the memory constraints on the phone were so limited I couldn’t update the phone to the current software. Couldn’t unlock the bootloader (whatever that was) much less root it. I picked HTC the second time out because HTC allows you to unlock the bootloader right on their website. Gave the first phone to my son. His first cell phone. That he leaves everywhere except in his pocket. Perfect phone for him.

Bootloaders. Rooting. It was a whole new language that I had resigned myself to learning, so I began exploring exactly how to even talk about what I wanted to do to the device, trying to figure out what the verb rooting really meant outside of swine behavior.  I apparently needed a new rom to flash after this rooting thing; and I was certain I wanted to avoid bricking the phone, because that sounded bad.  I mean, you can’t call with a brick, even the rocks know that.

I quickly discovered that it’s a minefield out there. Even if you find the right boards, half the links don’t work. Even if you find links that work, most of them lead to shady back-alley websites that I wouldn’t want to visit without protection; much less disable security on my phone and engage in behavior that my phone warns me I shouldn’t do even with people I know.

I’m under time pressure here.  The Wife wants an iPhone. The cheapest one is twice what I could pay for a comparable android device. She’s listened to me whine about this HTC device for months now, I’ve convinced her that you can’t fix old phones to do the things we want them to do, and I haven’t even gotten to the point of trying to modify my phone. It is time for me to bite the bullet. Now or never.

About 12 hours ago, I jumped in with both feet. I got my token from HTC, Unlocked the bootloader. Rebooted. Yep, there goes all those old text messages.  Glad I didn’t want to save those. Well, it doesn’t seem like I did anything else.  Head scratcher.  I scrounge around for old links.  Hey, what’s this? I can just download one program from xdadevelopers and it’ll root my phone? Well, getting superuser status on the phone is the next step (what rooting means. SU, superuser. Known to those of us who Linux. Yeah, I knew that) so that’s probably the right thing.  Xda’s users seem to be some of the more knowledgeable types out there, so I’ll bite.

Works like a charm. Now what?  Can I delete apps? No. All that damn garbage like Sports & Racing apps still clogging up the system. I really, really don’t want to go find a rom (image) to flash (load) while under time pressure.  That is the kind of thing you do to phones you’re not counting on using for a bit, altering all the interfaces and playing around trying to break the software.  I just want a program.  An app.  Something that will delete crap I want gone, move crap that I want somewhere else so that the 500 megs of phone memory stays as open as I can get it. Back to the Google. Wait, there’s a root uninstaller? Really? On the Google store, even? Nice.

Bye bye Tweeter. Sports you are out of here. Racing, go drive somewhere else. All you old pre-installs for Twitter, Facebook, etc.  All of you are now uninstalled. I’m going pro with this app. Hey, I can move stuff to the card with this puppy.  This is what I’m talking about! Where was this power months ago? I feel like a programmer, which is a dangerous delusion for me.

I’ve been tweaking, deleting, and tweaking again for the last 12 hours. Convinced The Wife that we could save a few dollars on a second HTC device, and I can make it do what she wants it to do (fingers crossed now) so the time pressure is off.  Now I’ll have a play phone for a few days at least. Time to find an alternate rom I want to play with.  And backup.  I need to find a rom builder.  Back to the Google.

Postscript

I received a brand new  Nexus 5 for my birthday, and that has kept me beautifully distracted since I got it. I can finally play some of the games I’ve been wanting to play and install several apps that just were too big for the HTC Evo Shift. My heartfelt thanks to the friends and family who made the gift possible.  It really was the only thing I wanted, one of the few things I can use while essentially bedridden for days at a time.

‘Former’ Palm user?

I’m beginning to think it’s time to trade up.

I’ve carried a Palm device since Handspring first offered it’s Visor. While I was content to nestle in the (expensive) corporate software world that Bill and his buddies have carved out, Palm desktop’s Windows exclusive interface was not a problem. Now that I’ve struck out into the (nearly) trackless wilderness of Linux, trying to get my Palm devices to reliably sync with any version of Linux has proven to be more problematic than I had ever envisioned.

Consequently, I was heartened to hear that Android rolled-out the long awaited open source OS for the as yet sight unseen gPhone.

By creating an open platform, Google is trying to make money not on software or hardware sales, but by creating vast hordes of ad-susceptible phone users. Google can be less selfish about design, and less worried about stumbles on the road to perfection. Google boss Eric Schmidt told us today that they would not be in the business of clamping down on independent development, and from the sound of it, would be encouraging carriers to adopt a hands-off policy toward third-party development.

Gizmodo – Analysis: Google’s Android Phone and the Four Carriers

Intrigued by this development, I wandered by the Engadget site, only to discover that

Palm, which has been struggling for years through countless setbacks to introduce its own Linux-based mobile OS, in the mean time using a continuously cobbled-together version of Palm OS 5 (originally introduced in 2002) throughout. Palm’s first attempt at a next-gen mobile OS, dubbed Cobalt, is announced in 2004 and quickly becomes the stuff of vaporware legend, delayed over and over until ACCESS eventually buys the flagging PalmSource (more here on how that whole thing went down); ACCESS pledges to finish development of Palm’s misplaced next-gen mobile OS, and then license it back to Palm (among other companies).

But Palm’s had enough, so earlier this year it announces its intentions to release its own Linux-based OS — again — but this time without the help of its spin-off sister company Palm Source (which, of course, is now a part of ACCESS). And that new OS is quickly hyped and lauded — and then delayed. Yet again. Pushed back into late 2008 at the earliest (although we won’t be surprised if Palm revises and makes that 2009 or even later). And so we ask, Palm, where the hell were you when Google was rallying its Open Handset Alliance?

engadget – Palm: assimilate with Android or die

Yes, where the hell were you, Palm? Why am I still forced to juggle an OS that has essentially remained unchanged since 2002 with newer and faster PC’s and their constantly updated OS’s? Why hasn’t a shift to a Linux based Palm OS come about? Why is the Palm Desktop still exclusively set up for corporate software solutions (Windows/Mac)?

Most importantly, will I have to endure a brain transplant? Long before the iPhone ad, or even the iPhone itself, I frequently referred to my Palm device as my brain. So will I need to get a brain transplant? Will I have to find some other smartphone manufacturer’s product that I can make myself understand in order to get a device that plays well with the OS that I intend to use for the foreseeable future? A Linux OS?

Will we ever see a gPhone? Google executives won’t say … yet. For now, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says there will be a variety of Android phones offered by several wireless carriers. But even without a dedicated gPhone, we can all look forward to a software platform designed to better the user experience, while also being light on the pocketbook. All the while, Google is extending its seemingly endless grip on the technological world.

TradingMarkets.com Google platform challenges Mac, PC markets

So, in the meantime, I’ll keep carrying my Treo 650. I’m just not sure what manufacturer I’ll be purchasing my next device from.

Postscript

It was LG. That was the next phone after the last version of the Treo that was made by Palm. It was an LG, then it was an HTC and then it was a Nexus 5. I’m currently using a Motorola/Lenovo G5. Get me as close to pure Android as I can get, please. That’s what I’ve determined that I want. As open source as I can get without having to program it directly myself, please.