The process of updating the phones involves downloading over 500 megabytes in a single file called “Simple Upgrade Tool. It takes hours to download on DSL but promises 15 minutes to install to your phone.

The 15 minutes is about right, but there are a whole series of steps to process as part of that 15 minutes, some of which involve taking the back off the phone and removing the battery and replacing it, unnerving to those who are not tech-savvy, and great warnings that this “flash” of the phone could destroy everything you hold dear, so add an hour or more to your time for backups and syncs of everything, redundant if you are paranoid like me.

Let me backtrack a little to show you how complicated this doesn’t have to be. I got the notice a few weeks ago that an upgrade was waiting for me. Unfortunately, I was sitting by the side of a dying friend and priorities don’t include racing to my desktop computer to download a huge file for hours, play with batteries, and USB cords. When I was ready, there were no buttons, no handy reminders, no one-click options for me to process the update. Instead, I had to do a search all over the web until I finally found a news report that led me to the download instructions, wasting more of my time as I had to find the update rather than have it awaiting me on my phone. The past two updates have been the same. This is really dumb customer service.

All so far has gone well and my phone is running through its final stages of the Android Update. Yet at the bottom of the instructional page I find this request.

The request is “Did we do a good job with this document.” Well, that’s the real question.

What I read is “Did we make your life easier with this entire process?”

Yes, the document was easy to read, had big pictures, and stepped me through the process, and it matched the process for the most part that I experienced.

No, the process was not easy. Why did I have to download this huge file for hours, tying up the Internet and slowing everything down on my drip of a connection? Why did such a huge file be necessary for what took less than 15 minutes to install as an operating system on my computer? What do I do with this half gig space waster program? Uninstall it? There is no follow-through on this, Samsung. Now what?

Why couldn’t I have just woken up and found a note on my phone that said, “We adore you and want to reward you for your payment of our over-charging fees and control of a monopoly in your nation that restricts a free market for easy-to-use, affordable cell phones, by giving you the chance to push a single button to give your phone a face-lift, making it more user friendly, faster, and not so taxing on the battery or your brain.” Fifteen, or I would have given you thirty minutes, you would have had a customer not just rejoicing but praising you to the world via social media and on every street corner.

I think of those living on their phones, no laptop or desktop computer in sight. How did they handle the update?

American mobile companies be warned. We’ve taken your abuse lying down for a long time. We’ve been apathetic for far too long. One day, folks. One day we will get smarter and let our dollars do the talking for us, and you will appreciate my recommendation that you make us praise you not condemn you.

Am I satisfied? Absolutely not. Do better.

The extra money goes to Domains by Proxy®, a “separate” company that provides private registration services to keep your name and contact information out of the WHOIS listing.

When you renew a domain today with Godaddy, you have no alternative to say no to private registration. Personally, I never choose it. I’m a public figure and have a reputation to uphold and my contact information on my domains is critical as I set an example for others. If you have an issue with my website, you contact me FIRST. That’s the right way to handle it, the professional way. I have never chosen to make any of my sites private, but when I renewed recently, private registration was forced upon me, with no option to remove it, adding twenty dollars to every renewed domain, adding up to an additional $100 or more to my order. That’s outrageous.

In several Godaddy forum posts, including this one on removing private registration, people are complaining that this is being added without their permission, action, and that it is a big bother to not make it easier for people to choose. Their response is:

Having a separate account for your private registration is an extra layer of security that is included with the Domains By Proxy service we offer. When private registration is added to a domain name, a domain hijacker would need to gain access to not one, but two accounts to move the domain name to a different registrar. You are welcome to use the account retrieval system at DomainsByProxy.com to gain access to your account so you can cancel the private registration.

To remove private registration forced upon you, do the following:

1. Remove your order by emptying your cart at Godaddy.
2. Go to Domains by Proxy® and try to login. As you have never set up your own account with them, you have to jump through some hoops to get logged in.
3. Request a new login by entering the site you are trying to renew.
4. Get the confirmation email with your customer number.
5. Request a new password with your customer number.
6. Once logged in, select the accounts associated with that domain and cancel your private registration.
7. Go back to Godaddy and refresh the listing of your expired domains. It should now say Public Registration.
8. Select the ones you wish to renew and you will find the $20 private registration fee now gone from your order.

You will have to do this with each individual domain name unfortunately. If there is an easier way, please let me know.

And while I’m bitching at Godaddy for this, honestly, you should not force this upon your users. It is rude, inconsiderate, and makes some sweeping assumptions about their needs.

Let us choose!

I’ve ordered episodes and seasons of Stargate SG1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe so many times in the past few months, it’s a wonder I don’t have the full collection. Ah, but I do. I own most of the Stargate series on VHS, DVD, and even BlueRay. That’s not the point. I wanted to watch them one after another as part of a nostalgic bent of mine lately, and I wanted to watch them as I was doing other things, so I started watching them on my phone and tablet.

Amazon Prime allows me to watch tons of shows and movies for free as a member, yet you still do not have a video watching app, and it can be tricky to set up your mobile device to watch the shows.

For those reading a home, to watch Amazon Prime Instant Videos on your phone or tablet, open your web browser and set it to Desktop Mode. Then prepare to spend too much time with Amazon Customer Support getting refunds for your accidental digital orders.

Call it “fat fingers” as Google recently did when they changed their Google Ad system to ask if you meant to click an ad instead of automatically billing the ad owner every time you accidentally clicked on an ad. Call it a slip of fingers. Call it poor UI. Whatever you want to call it, I’m sick of finding out that I bought an episode or the entire series when I did not mean to.

Come on, Amazon. The videos on Amazon Prime Instant Video are free. That’s part of our membership.

When you are a member, the web pages on Amazon display Amazon Prime information on shipping and other data. When you are logged in, who cares if you are a Prime member, the system knows you are logged in and delivers information and data related to your wishes, clicks, and recently visited items. So why is it so hard to turn off the BUY buttons when a Prime member is viewing videos that they are entitled to for free? Or at least move it into a spot that we can’t hit it by accident? Or make the damn app we need so we can partake without constantly nagging you all to refund our money buying something we are getting for free?

Before I go any further, if you are having the same problem, here is where to go to request a refund. Amazon doesn’t make it easy to find the link so here it is: Amazon.com Help: Contact Customer Service. Click the yellow CONTACT US button. This will start the process for submitting an email to them, or you can use the live chat. I go for the email so I don’t have to feel like I have to explain too much.

This happens so much, they even have a form letter via email they send you, something like this:

Hello,

I’m sorry for the inconvenience caused.

I’ve checked your account and see that a refund of $1.99 was issued to your credit card for order #D01-XXXXX on December 9, 2012. Our system indicates that the refund is complete.

You’ll be able to view the completed refund here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/your-account/order-summary.html?orderID=D01-XXXXXX

This refund should have appeared on your next statement after December 9, 2012. If you don’t see the refund, you may want to contact your bank to ask about its status.

REGARDING THE REFUND FOR ORDER D01-XXXXX:

Amazon Instant Videos aren’t returnable after purchase; however, because of the circumstances, I’ve made an exception and issued a refund in the amount of $14.99 for Stargate Universe Season 1. The refund will be applied to the payment method used for the original purchase, and should complete within the next 2-3 business days. Once processed, you can view the refund here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/your-account/order-summary.html?XXXXX

This video will be removed from Your Video Library as a part of the refund process.

I’ll consider your comments about including a feature where some verification be made before placing the order for videos as a feedback and send them to Amazon Instant Video team. They’re always looking for ways to improve our offerings and may be able to make this feature available in the future.

Customer feedback like yours is very important in helping us continue to improve the experience of watching our digital videos. I appreciate your thoughts, and I have forwarded your suggestion to the appropriate team.

If you have any further queries, please contact us again by visiting the link below:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/digital-video.html

I hope this helps. We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Here are my solutions to Amazon Instant Video watching nightmares. They are easily implemented, and in fact, some of these are currently being used by Amazon. One of my proposals is featured in this image.

1. Ebook orders have a link when you order a book that asks, “Did you order this by mistake?” Click it an it will instantly take you to a refund screen. Love it. Why can’t this type of confirmation, yes or no buttons, be part of the purchase of digital media like videos?
2. Move the purchase buttons away from the watching buttons. Seriously easy. Put the purchase button on the player under the album art, so to speak, of the show. Put the watch on the opposite side. No chance a slip of the finger could hit that. Move the season purchase button to the left side of the screen instead of the right where it sits right directly under the full screen view button. You want to watch it in full screen, right? You’re going to hit the “buy season” button.
3. One Click Ordering may be turned off, but when viewed on a mobile device, it appears that whatever feature that turns off One Click Ordering doesn’t work. No matter what your personal preferences or setting are set for, and mine are set to turn One Click Ordering OFF, it’s on for mobile devices. That’s just wrong.
4. There is an Amazon app and an Amazon app store app. Give us an app for watching Amazon Instant Videos or incorporate the ability to watch them into the current Amazon app.

See, those aren’t hard. They make sense. It costs money to refund money. Think of the money you would be saving if this was done better. It takes time and energy on the part of customer service, but mostly it pisses off customers, something Amazon is not known for, so why now?

Amazon, it’s about usability and customer experience and you are lacking it in the video area.

Amazon, while you are at it, please fix your video player. I’ve experimented with Dolphin, Firefox, Chrome, Maxthon, and several other mobile browsers and it takes three or four tries to get the player to work. I’ll sit down for lunch and a watch of a show and 20 minutes later I’m done with my meal and I’ve forced the closure of the browser repeatedly and cleared cache, RAM, and everything to get it to finally load. The show starts and when it’s done, I close it, but not before noticing that I’ve somehow purchased the damn episode. Now I have to go to my desktop computer and fire off another customer service email to request a refund.

I’m tired of nagging you, Amazon. You are better than this. I’ve been a loyal customer since you first started. I started with Prime early on, too, once we got back to the states where it could do me good. I love the things you are doing with Prime, giving us more than just free shipping, but I’m almost worn out with this video shit. It’s eating up time in the day I just don’t have and I need what time I do have to relax, not be pissed off at you all.

Thank you.

Myst and its sequels are beautiful mind games, challenging the best in us through complex puzzles accompanied by phenomenal real-life graphics. My husband and I would play these together, discussing strategies and solving the problems over meals and long drives. We’d email or instant message chat back and forth things to try or experiment with to solve the puzzles. They took our minds other places while we were in places and dealing with things we didn’t want to deal with. Great distractions, but more than that – great mind teasers.

We’ve been searching for Myst replacements for years on our desktop computers without success. With the new drive in mobile games for cell phones and tablets, we felt confident that the need for Myst-like brain games would generate something. After several years of poking, we’ve found some possibilities. Unfortunately, most of these are more like pretty maze games rather than mind-benders.

I used to think there was a difference between a Myst-like problem-solving game and a simple hidden object adventure game. As the games improve their visual quality, the simple games of finding hidden objects to solve puzzles can become as interesting as Myst-problem-solving games that require a little more brain power. I’ve included some well-reviewed hidden object games in the list below accordingly.

To be true to the concept of a Myst game, I believe the game should put you in the key role of the player, giving you a vested interest in solving the puzzles. There should be little interaction with other characters, just you and the environment, where the pieces of the puzzle tell more of the story than the characters could. The puzzles should make you think, fuss over, and experiment with before solving, but not be too simple nor too inane. You should shout with joy when you figure them out, not groan. This is where many of the new games miss the mark. I rarely have the overwhelming impulse to jump up and down and shout, “I did it!” Or do I experience the water-cooler effect praising the game long after finishing the play.

It’s sad because we need this form of escapism today more than ever.

Reedu

Reedu by Nomuda Games has been well reviewed by many as a good Myst-like game except for the “gory” parts, as one reviewer described.

According to the official description:

…We can say that what starts out as a journey through a dangerous land of aggressive plant life – which may or may not house your only true friend- quickly spirals into a far-reaching intergalactic and inter-dimensional adventure drawing into it notions of time, space, mythology, and science.

This is not a simple exercise in shoot-‘em-up gore without substance. Bubbling underneath the surface of the textured netherworlds is a story that delves past the superficial and into what may be considered philosophical (we’re not Descartes, but humor us for a moment). At the very least Reedu: The First Explorer will give you ample amounts of moments to debate with friends and strangers. What can we say? Space-time…it’s a tricky thing. You never know what will pop up. Just ask Charlton Heston and those damn dirty apes.

Reedu was released as a sequel of episodes. Episode One: The First Explorer was released in early 2011. Unfortunately, the Nomuda official blog has had no new updates since October and their Twitter account has been dormant for about as long, even though announcements were that a new episode would be out the first of the year. Reviews of Reedu were hopeful but not good. We’ve glanced at it and decided that the shoot ‘em up aspect of the game didn’t make it worth our time, especially as we don’t know when the next episode will be released.

Google Play: Reedu
Amazon.com: Reedu

The Lost City

The Lost City by Fire Maple Games is a beautifully rendered visual experience with lovely music and sounds, but the game is not designed for intelligent adults. the developers of The Lost City, Mahjong Forests, The Great International Word Search!, Sunken Words, and Fire Maple Games!. Most of their games are word-based games but Lost City and Grisly Manor are testimonies to their potential as developers of Myst-like games, but they lack the true brain-bender experiences of Myst.

It’s a maze game, wandering through lovely landscapes and beautiful scenery to solve incredibly simple problems to gain access to new areas to explore. Most of the time is spent moving around back and forth and repeating your virtual footsteps, solving a problem in one part of the landscape then backtracking to put the next piece into the puzzle at the opposite end.

My husband lost interest within a few minutes. I kept on out of sheer determination to find something intelligent and mind-testing in the game. I didn’t find anything, and my fingers were in pain within 20 minutes of the back and forth navigation. The idea of being able to change the environment visually by switching seasons is a lovely graphic effect, making some things passable by freezing the water between you and your destination, finding blooming flowers, hiding things with snow, was a beautiful effect, which unfortunately led to more racing through the environment to get to the season-changing buttons.

Still, it’s a step in the right direction. It’s perfect for game novices and young people just wanting to explore and waste some time and not challenge their intellect. It’s also a game that is easy to complete, this qualifies.

Amazon.com: The Lost City
Google Play: The Lost City

The Secret of Grisly Manor

The Secret of Grisly Manor sets you on a mission by your uncle to explore his mansion home for clues and solve the puzzles to find out what happened to the missing uncle. By Fire Maple Games, the reviews are all over the place on Amazon, spread almost equally among the five star rating system. In general, they state low re-play value, too short, not very challenging, but visually beautiful and well constructed. All love the graphics.

Like “The Lost City,” it is another beautifully graphic visual game without much in the brain-challenging department. There is a lot of wandering around and moving back and forth over already traveled territory to put all the pieces together, but it amuses for a while. Especially good for novices and younger people.

Amazon.com: The Secret of Grisly Manor
Google Play: The Secret of Grisly Manor

Other Myst-like Games for Android

The following are Myst and Riven style games for the Android that we haven’t explored yet. I’d love your feedback on these if you have played them.

• Azada: Trapped in a haunted room, you must help release Titus from the magical spell and solve puzzles and fill in missing pages to an enchanted book. Google Play, Big Fish Games (direct)
• Infernus: Amazon.com,
• Forgotten Places – Lost Circus: Play youth detective and solve the mysteries of the nightmares Joy has about a circus. Amazon.com,
• The Treasure of Mystery Island: Parachuting onto an uncharted island, this is a lost treasure hunt. Amazon.com, Google Play
• Pirate Mysteries: A mysterious tale of monkeys, masks, and hidden objects on a deserted island. Amazon.com, Google Play
• Magician’s Handbook: Cursed Valley: Using the Magician’s Handbook, you search through the Cursed Valley to find hidden objects and solve mysteries. Amazon.com, Google Play
• Dream Sleuth: Catherine has strange dreams and turns into a young sleuth to solve the puzzles to discover the secret behind a kidnapping crime. Amazon.com, Google Play
• The Mystery Of The Crystal Portal: A journalist has to solve the riddle of what happened to her archaeologist father lost after making a discovery that could change “the course of humanity” in this hidden object adventure. Amazon.com, Google Play

How to Play Myst on Your Android Phone

If you are tech-savvy, here are some solutions for playing Myst, Riven, and others on your Android phone. Note that rooting may be involved.

• How to play Myst on an Android phone – Allocosm
• The Iso Zone Forums • View topic – Play Myst, Riven, and other P&C with ScummVM on DROID!

Why Aren’t There More Myst-like Games on Mobile?

While I’m still puzzled over why there aren’t more Myst-like games on desktops, the puzzle of why they aren’t on mobile is fairly obvious. The computer processing power to manage the high resolution motion graphics is demanding. Processors and server space are improving but we are still pushing them to get a realistic experience.

Still, why aren’t there more Myst-like games in general for the now more powerful computers? Computers have come a long way since Myst was released in 1993 by two brothers in Spokane, Washington.

The demand for high-action and violent games seems to push games like Myst into the background with the low blood-letting and splatter quota. Still, with the continuing popularity of Interactive Fiction games and problem-solving puzzle games, while not a huge commercial market it should be market enough for more Myst style games.

Myst was the bestselling PC game until 2002 when The Sims broke its records. As of 2003, more than 12 million copies were sold and I still find them occasionally in thrift shops and used book stores. Myst was converted to iPhone in 2009 and has made its way onto Nintendos and PlayStations and Pocket PCs, but nothing has been released for the Android, a demographic crying out for Myst-style games. The tablet market demands higher quality interactive games, so now is the time, folks.

I hope you’re doing well!

After looking through your site: , we found that neither it was making visitors attract towards your site and nor to your business/services.

If you are interested we want to increase the number of visitors to your website as it is important that you have a top position in search-engines.

Our search-engine-optimization experts will run a ranking report showing you exactly where your website currently stands in all the major search engines. Then we will email you our analysis report along with the recommendations of how we can increase your ranking, and improve your websites traffic dramatically.

We strictly work on performance basis and can assure you of getting quality links with a proper reporting format for your site as well.

We wish you the best of luck and looking forward to a long and healthy business relationship with you and your company.

Please do let me know if you have any questions.

Note the colon and comma without a site name in the second sentence. That’s a clue that this is a form letter, not personal, and worth dismissing or marking as spam immediately. I usually mark these as spam. I recommend you do the same to add these to the filters that keep this crap out of your inbox.

…we want to increase the number of visitors to your website as it is important that you have a top position in search-engines.

Sorry, the only way you can increase the number of visitors to my site in regards to search engines is to rewrite or write new content on my site. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all the SEO games over the years and trust me, content works. This is my site, my content, and I don’t want you touching it. That’s my job.

I also don’t want to be in the top position on search engines. Think about this a moment. I want to be in the top for the things I want to be known for and the matching content I have on my site, but not necessarily at the very top. Others are wiser than I, so they deserve top ranking. If I write the answers they need to the questions they ask, they’ll find me, usually after a bit of digging, but they’ll find me if they need me.

If they aren’t finding me, I need to notch up my content to feature the words they use to look for my answers. That’s me paying attention to the words I write and choosing wisely.

Our search-engine-optimization experts will run a ranking report…

There are tons of those free on the web. Why would I need you when I can do it myself?

We strictly work on a performance basis…

Well, so far, your performance sucks. This is the same form letter I get from hundreds of different “we fix your page ranking and SEO” sites and services. Has your company undergone a domain name or company name change? Twelve times in the last week? No. So this is a form letter that anyone can copy and paste into an email spam bot and spread around the world. Lose many points on that one, in addition to the point lost for not identifying my website in your bot.

Other points lost? Search engine is not hyphenated, nor is search engine optimization (go on, call it SEO). You start off personal without knowing anything about me or my site or business. There is nothing original or personally directed at me or my site. They haven’t done their homework. If they did, they would know they have picked the wrong person.

Part of the expertise in SEO is attention to details. The little details can make or break the success of your site. The words are part of it, but so is the user experience, what people see, what they notice, how they move through your site, navigation, and how calls to action are not just perceived but acted upon. No auto-bot report is going to give you that feedback. You want someone truly vested in the details, the little things.

Don’t Be Led Astray By SEO and Page Rank Scams

There are fantastic companies out there doing good things with keyword optimization and search engine optimization techniques. There are thousands of websites offering great tips on how to optimize your site yourself, at no cost and a little bit of homework.

Google killed off their PageRank public information a few years ago because of the abuse and misunderstandings around how it all worked. People used it as a score card and baseball bat to their heads rather than another piece of the puzzle. Whole advertising markets were based upon your PageRank score, not taking into account the bigger picture. Many lost money over Google’s changes in PageRank – for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of their sites, content, and audience. It was a joke, and Google took it off the table accordingly.

Basic SEO is easy. Treat it organically. Let search engine algorithms do their work. You concentrate on producing easy to understand and read content, make it findable, and you’ll just saved yourself a thousand dollars. When you’ve optimized your own site, then go to the experts to get it fine tuned, relying upon their expertise to guide you through the big picture maze, not the small minded fixes.

Here are some quick tips to avoid being lured into these SEO scams:

• If they don’t know who you are, what you do, or can describe your site in detail, ignore it.
• If they send you a cold calling email, ignore it. Only choose companies you know, trust, and that come highly recommended by people you trust.
• If there are gaps in the text or spelling mistakes, spam it.
• If they make promises you know aren’t true, spam it.
• If you have received these in the past with the names changed, spam it.

Again, do not take these personally. They haven’t checked your site. They don’t know anything about you. This is a phishing exercise and by the sure bulk of the mass emailing they do, they manage to pick up enough suckers to keep themselves employed. Don’t be one of them.

While we understand a scratch or dent on a product caused by a customer would constitute cosmetic damage, we’d call this situation something other than “cosmetic.” As a result, we contacted HP…

…[after offering a newer-model keyboard to the complaining customer] HP researched support calls for the reader’s original product and didn’t find other customers experiencing this issue, so the issue appears isolated.

As I scanned through old issues of the magazine and found this, I have to admit that I squealed my frustration. Since the earliest computer keyboards, I’ve been calling for deeper laser cut letter embedding instead of “stick on” or “paint on” letters and numbers on keyboard. I even spent a few months working with the Microsoft hardware group on testing and reviewing their new line of keyboards to ensure the letters and numbers stayed and weren’t worn off within a few months or less.

Unfortunately, my highly vocal complaints to the keyboard manufacturing community continue to go unheeded as I personally continue to wear out keyboards. Microsoft does have the only keyboard I’ve found that lasts the longest, Logitech the next longest in my information research.

I trained to type on a manual keyboard but quickly switched to an electric as soon as they gained popularity. Yes, I have a strong key strike, and yes, I have long nails, but the keyboard should should put up with any form of abuse for more than two or three months. Few do.

If your keyboard wears out sooner than you think is appropriate, please nag. Nag them to replace it. Nag them to make the letters and numbers last.

Too few people just get a new keyboard or stick on new keyboard number and letter stickers or use a permanent marker.

Complain. Complain loudly.

Unless you are heard, companies like HP are going to continue to think that worn out keyboard keys are isolated cases.

The current bitch and whine is also a lesson in what not to do even if it will let you do it. You won’t get away with it.

After the rash of 10 cent apps on the Android Market, Tech Hubby and Nag got addicted to the constant hunt for new apps. Discovering new ways to get those cool apps faster, we installed Chomp, Best App Finder, Ondroid – Top apps chart, Best Apps Market, and My Daily Free Amazon App.

I did say addiction, right?

As you fill up your phone with a ton of apps, even if it’s got more RAM and SD Card space than your laptop, you want to play safe and move some of the space wasters from the phone’s storage to the SD card. The newest phones play well with this…to a point.

The point is that if your App has a Widget, it cannot be moved to the SD card. Don’t risk it if you use that widget on your launcher screen. Experiment with it if you do not use their widgets, but take care if you change your mind.

The App 2 SD is brilliant at showing you the options for which apps you can safely move to and from the SD card. It gives you a warning to alert you that you should think twice before doing so. appSaver helps you backup and save apps on your phone. It also now features an App 2 SD feature, unfortunately without really clear warnings with the latest update segregating what you can and cannot move to SD Card. Unfortunately, that came a bit too late. I went forth and blew my phone up.

Symptoms of a Smart Phone Crisis

The phone suddenly started losing wifi signals. I was two meters from my wifi router so this was odd. Then it flashed the Sprint logo and did a fast reboot. When it came back on, it couldn’t find the wifi connection. Thirty seconds to three minutes later it would reboot again, no matter what I was working on, and whether or not I was holding it or it was sitting quietly on my desk. Within an hour, the battery was dead, and I was pulling my hair.

Thinking virus, I started to uninstall the last few things I’d installed. With the time to reboot so short, I could barely get one thing uninstalled when the phone rebooted.

Instead of going through all the 36 hours of nightmare trial and errors, let me tell you what my solutions could have been, and then what it was. I’ve found that these symptoms are the result of several possibilities, all with much the same answer. These things are trial and error resolutions, so best you have all the possibilities in one spot, unlike me who hunted and hunted with little sleep.

Battery Doesn’t Fit Right

If you are using a Samsung S2 phone, international versions prior to Fall 2011 had a slight flaw. The battery area was a tiny bit too large for the battery. Jump around, run, bike, or walk down the street and the battery could shift away from the contacts, causing the phone to reboot.

I found many solutions in the various Android forums on using a piece of paper, preferably a small sticky note, to stick down into the battery compartment with the “tail” of the paper laying beyond the compartment’s edge opposite the contacts. Place the battery in properly and allow it to fold at the edge. Cut the remaining visible paper and this should add enough compression to keep the battery wedged up against the contacts while you move.

For many, this was the perfect solution. Not for me.

Viruses and Evil App Attacks

Some virus attacks will drain the battery and disable the wifi capability to force the phone onto 2/3/4G. Per the norm, never download anything not tested and checked by others and only from known verified sources. If you like risk, make sure you have a solid virus protection app installed and keep it updated.

My research found that the majority of my symptoms matched a virus attack, but the rebooting didn’t. A reboot or two, maybe, but not consistently and in a timely manner. I couldn’t keep the damn thing on long enough to download another anti-virus program, but evidence led me in another direction.

App Conflict Battles

Occasionally, apps won’t play nice together. If they are sitting on your phone turned on only when you need them, this isn’t an issue, but when they are TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) living in the background or foreground together, they can be worse than siblings in the back seat.

The solution is to uninstall each “live” app, especially those with active widgets, and test to see if this resolves the issue. Be patient as sometimes it takes a bit for them to figure out the evil sibling is out of the room. It’s a hunt and peck game, though, so watch a movie or television show while you’re at it so you feel like you aren’t totally wasting your time.

A possible solution for many was to do a a hard reset and cache clearing on the Samsung Galaxy S2 and cache wipe. This is not a factory reset that will clear out everything and make you start over. Your apps and data will be saved, but it clears the cache (and possible problems). This simply “flushes” the cache and hopefully removes the problem.

1. Remove the battery and let it sit batteryless for a few minutes.
2. Replace the battery.
3. Hold down the UP volume key and the ON button until you see the Samsung logo and a DOS like colorful menu pops up. This is the factor reboot menu which can be the life or death of your phone. Move cautiously.
4. With the volume key, move down to wipe cache partition.
5. Press the menu button (the house).
6. Move to the reboot system now item in the list.
7. Press the menu button to select it.
8. The phone will reboot.

This worked for a few minutes longer than usual, so I knew I was on the right track, but it wasn’t the issue.

Moving Widget Apps to the SD Card

This was the winner for me. By moving apps with widgets I was using to the SD Card, the timely nature of the reboots was a sign that when the widget refreshed its data, it couldn’t find the files it needed, forced it off WIFI, and the conflicts caused a reboot.

The clue I’d found the right solution? I removed the SD card and the phone worked perfectly, though the apps that required the card didn’t work.

I worked for hours with the Apps 2 SD program to move everything I could back to the phone from the SD Card and uninstall anything suspicious, but the reboots happened often faster than the actions I was taking. The processors on the phone got so hot, I couldn’t touch the phone from the midway point up. I removed the SD card but that wouldn’t move or uninstall the apps that were causing the problem.

As not to bore you with all the things I learned along the trial and error trail, here was the solution.

1. Turn off the phone.
2. Remove the back and the battery.
3. Wait a few minutes.
4. Slip the SD card out. One press will bring it out far enough. No need to remove it completely.
5. Turn on the phone normally.
6. Carefully remove EVERY widget from your screens. All of them. Even the ones you aren’t sure of.
7. Turn off the phone.
8. Remove the back and battery and wait a few minutes.
9. Slide the SD card back in.
10. Turn on the phone using the cache clearing method above and reboot.
11. Using App 2 SD, go through all the apps stored on the SD Card and move anything with an X in the lower left corner off the SD Card and to the Phone.
12. You may need to restart the phone again, but by now, everything should be working perfectly.

Again, NEVER put anything on the SD Card that has a widget or really shouldn’t be moved. Widgets can be deceptive. They may not “look” like widgets and you’ve forgotten where they came from as they’ve been sitting there for months. Apps critical to your daily phone activities shouldn’t be moved unless they are completely safe and it’s recommended to do so, so sayeth the Tech Nag.

I love you. I worship you, so it comes with great pain to ask you the following.

Please come up with a way for irrelevant WordPress.com blog posts to stay out of my WordPress searches.

I don’t know how to do this myself, other than by restricting my searches to remove WordPress.com from the results, which is self-defeating as I’m on WordPress.com. A lot of amazing bloggers and WordPress fans are on WordPress.com and doing this will remove them from the search results.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about relevancy.

I search for WordPress fill-in-the-blank needing help with whatever WordPress thing I’m working on and I’m flooded with twits babbling about things that have absolutely and completely NOTHING to do with WordPress, and the word WordPress not found anywhere on their site other than “Powered by WordPress” and in the URL. This just shows you how powerful the keyword “WordPress” has become.

So I’m asking you for relevancy. I want my WordPress searches to matter. I don’t want to dig through who broke up with whom, who got drunk last night and crashed their car, some twit arguing with another other the current state of the world when it’s clear that neither understands the state of the world, and a million lolcats.

I want to find WordPress help, resources, and techniques that make the world work better and make my life easier.

Thank you, and keep up the fantastic work otherwise.

Lorelle
The Tech Nag

PS: This nag applies to all you dummies who installed WordPress into a WordPress directory on your server, please see Giving WordPress Its Own Directory « WordPress Codex for moving it into a non-WordPress name so you don’t mess up your own SEO and end up in irrelevant searches.

I’ve run across a few websites and blogs recently running interstitials (the modern term for “popup windows that overlay not pop) and a variety of scripts and bad code that cause browser errors.

Please stop this.

The reasons are many, but here are a few.

1. We hate them.
2. Interstitials require effort on our part to close which is not a good first impression.
3. Interstitials work on the clueless not influencers, so check your stats to see if these are really turning into conversions or annoyance.
4. Browser errors popup warnings in our faces, which is ridiculous in this day and age when it is easy to fix all these and prevent them.
5. Update your site’s code regularly, for our sake but mostly your own, especially for security reasons. It makes us think bad things when your site is so out of date our browser warns us.
6. If your site is out of date in look, feel, and functionality, what do you think that says about your content, purpose, and business?

Thank you for updating your sites and fixing all errors today.

Lorelle
The Tech Nag

When it comes to changing the world, few do so more than TED videos. Your tag line, ideas worth spreading, is a humble way of describing the power and influence of your presentations by amazing people.

However, when it comes to presenting your videos, please help improve the world by making your videos not play automatically.

I will often cruise through and open several tabs of TED videos in my browser, then life will charge back in and I’ll have to feed the cats, take a phone call, pay bills, and respond to the mundane life a tech nag leads. If perchance I have to close and restart my browser for a million different reasons, I have to plow through fifty or more tabs to find which ones have the TED videos on to stop them from playing. I’ll suddenly have 3 to 7 voices all talking at me and the video downloads will slow down my computer and browser, not to mention my horrible Internet connection.

While I’m not sure it’s a web standard yet, it is should be. Either way, TED, you exist to change the world. Please set an example for all to follow and give us our control back. Allow us to press PLAY to lose ourselves in the wisdom of others and don’t force yourselves upon us.

Thank you,

Lorelle
The Tech Nag