Macbook pro charging lights

One of the offspring had a problem with his macbook pro today.

When plugging the magsafe adaptor in it lit up very very faintly green with a regular tiny flash of orange.

The MBP would not start up. It looked very dead. No lights, no sleep light no battery indicator lights (why did they remove that on the retina ones??). no whirring, no buzzing, not even any CD grinding.

Well it had done, but then like a doofus he clicked every combination of buttons anyone on the whole interwebs had ever suggested. ever. for anything…

I jangled around with it for a bit, tried a few different adapters, then gave the magsafe socket a good seeing to with a cotton bud.

Macbook fixed.

Yay.

It seems all the SMC PRAM reboot, reinstall, rejigger, rescue meddling he tried did not moff anything important up – the joy of user level access right?

Maybe he’ll take a bit more care of it from now on??

nah…

New Android apps website

Things are hotting up in the app-i-sphere…

So much so that I have taken the plunge and chucked 10 quid at a domain name to make it all serious sounding.

The website is here. As the name suggests I am specialising in simple apps, mainly of the utility variety

Its still a work in progress, but it is the new home for the business side of my Android app development.

I will continue(if you can call it that!) blogging here for a more informal, irreverent, behind the scenes view. Simple Apps will just be product announcements and support infrastructure.

ttfn

Updateaholic

blinkin flip will this phone ever stop updating???

My WF has been begging me to let it update itself for weeks. I have resisted as, as far as I can see every update makes these phones less useful and less friendly.

I am all up for security, but I am less of a fan of having someone elses retarded design ‘philosophy’ rammed down my throat. Or having useful features stripped away before my eyes for no apparent reason, except presumably to drive us all to competitors – are there any? really?. LineageOS maybe.

Anyway it updated and immediately notified me of a new update. I really thought it was just a stale notification (I have a missed call notification stuck since Sept 2017). Eventually I clicked it. Update to Google security Sept 2017. ohhh kay.

Next of all… Notification – updates available!

ohh kay. Update to Google security Nov 2017. ahh ha.

Next of all … Notification – updates available!

What the effing eff???. Update to Google security Jan 2018. Err ok… Oh I can’t battery is now too low!! and no doubt disc space is getting a bit fraught too will all these hundreds of megs downloads.

I’ve lost count now whether that was 3 or 4 or more updates and restarts, but the phone has been out of action most of the day. On the plus side no data appears to have been corrupted, and the apps I have tried (including, most importantly, mine) still work.

At least it didn’t do it in the middle of some live reporting event as happened to a BBC reporters PC the other day – killing the feed for millions of web users worldwide.

hey ho

When AVD doesn’t start

if the (gradle)  error is this:

Emulator: libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so

Emulator: libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

Then the solution is to enable software in the AVDs emulated performance graphics drop down.

more info here.

I keep forgetting this and then giving up on Android Virtual Devices.

That said the one I just started pinned 2 processors at over 100% for almost an hour. And was hideously unresponsive when it did deign to ungraciously accept commands polite requests.

I thought USB debuggery was slow and finickity until I went back to the emulator.

I notice Genymotion no longer have a free tier, although 150 quid ish pa is hardly a huuuge burden for a successful appreneur like moi. (I could easily cover that cost in under 2,000 years at current income levels!). Or I could continue buying cheap dropped handsets…