I did a operating system upgrade on my Samsung Moment this week. Before I did the upgrade I backed up some of the stuff on my phone like my text messages.
First, the Android phone syncs to my gmail account, so much of the “stuff” on the phone is inheriently backed up, living “in the cloud” as they call it these days. Also, much of the ‘other stuff’ like photos are saved to the SD card, which the upgrade didn’t touch, so they are safe as well.
This left the actual applications, texts, and call history on the built in memory to get erased as part of the upgrade.
I had 60 different applications installed on my phone. About a third are great, gotta haves, a third are used when I get bored, want to show the phone off, whatever, and the rest are duplicates, trying to decide which one is the best, which I would keep. Now I could write down all the app’s names and search for them again one by one. However one of the apps I have is Astro File Manager, which has a built in app backup utility. So, I simply did a select all and backed up everything. The restore process was just as easy. A few apps need to be reconfigured such as WordPress (which I am using to write this) which is a mild annoyance, but the same as setting up email on the phone again.
This left the phone call and text messaging history. The phone call list isn’t a big deal. I use google voice so all the important calls are automatically stored already. This leaves text messages, which tend to go to my cell directly instead of google voice.
I used two apps to backup my texts. ‘SMS Backup’ and ‘SMS Backup & Restore’. SMS Backup syncs your texts to your gmail account. You can define a tag that they are labeled as so they are easy to look up. They are handled in batches of 200 at a time, so if you have lots of texts, it can take a while. The coolest part of this tool is now all my texts are searchable along with my email. How cool is that?
The other tool is ‘SMS Backup & Restore’ which copies all texts to the SD card and then loads then back into the phone. It took a couple of seconds to backup over 1400 texts to the SD card and a few times longer to copy them back. Its nice having my text history.
Both of these SMS tools have an autobackup feature in them, which I have turned on in case my phone bites the dust.
Last night I finally got my cell phone operating system upgraded.
Let me tell you, it was a challenge.
The new update came out last Friday I think. It’s a 100mb download, and some hoop jumping.
I first tried to do the upgrade on Sunday morning. I downloaded the file (tip, click ‘more details’ to make the download link appear), tried to un-install the Samsung USB drivers – I didn’t have them, but I uninstalled some Samsung CDMA modem drivers from my previous phone for good measure. I reboot my computer. I start the installer, and it gives you the steps to take to do the update. Take the battery out of the phone, put it back in, do some funky 3 finger start on the phone to get it into ‘download mode’, plug it into the computer. Now it says to unplug the phone from the computer and repeat the steps in the previous sentence. Okay… Ah! Now it wants me to update. I press Start Update.
It was rather anti-climatic. It didn’t do anything. I wander off, do things for an hour and a half come back to check. Nothing.
The phone says “DO NOT UNPLUG TARGET” in letters that are not warm and friendly. So, I unplug the target (phone) and cross my fingers. Take the battery out, restart the phone. It’s all in good shape. Sweet! I didn’t wreck my phone.
Last night… I try this again. I reboot the computer. Close all the auto-start applications. Kill services that use the USB ports like the ipod utilities thingy. I start upgrade software, follow the plug it in, unplug it, plug it in – I tossed in a ‘turn yourself around’ for good measure.
This time it did something… for about a minute, than it errored out, saying it can’t connect to the phone. This is after I had seen it issue a ‘format()’ command to the phone.
I tried this about 3 times, and gave up. So I pull the battery, restart the phone, and OH OH. “Unable to locage .jpg or .png” in red letters across the top of the screen that are most certainly NOT notoriously large and famously friendly letters.
Crud. (fill in your favorite explicative here… repeatedly) I just bricked my 2 month old Samsung Moment doing the Android 2.1 upgrade!
So, in a last ditch effort of heroics and utter despair, I wander my depressed little self to the office to do an hour’s worth of work and try the upgrade on my work computer.
It worked! I managed to save my phone. Work was a bust, but my phone no longer is!
Enough of that little sob story. Well, besides the fact that the update completely wipes the phone clean. You have to reinstall and re-setup everything. I did use some backup utilities which I will talk about in a later blog post.
Android 2.1 feels a little bit snappier on my Samsung Moment. The letters seem to show up on screen just a little bit faster then before. There doesn’t seem to be that slight hesitation in pulling down the Notifications window.
The first thing that is noticeable is the new ‘sleep screen’ for lack of better terms. It has the current time and date in notoriously large and famously friendly letters which looks really sharp. It also has 2 sliders, one to unlock the screen, the other to toggle the volume.
I can turn off the lock on the phone as you now turn on the screen using a swipe, which is nice. The first thing I had noticed when I got the phone is that it liked to pocket-dial. I had to turn on the screen lock just to prevent this.
The camera app is a little bit better. I was always fighting the old one over the flash. It was about 3 seconds to turn the flash on or off. The new version is about a second, plus there is now an ‘auto’ mode, which is nice. I wish you could just tap a button to toggle the flash mode or something.
The only other thing that the update has done for me that I have seen is allowed me to use some of the cooler applications – like Google Goggles.
Two apps do seem to be broken – Google Voice and Listen. I use Google Apps for your Domain, and that seems to be messing with both of these apps while using Android 1.5 it worked fine. I use both of these quite a bit – especially Google Voice, so this is a major bummer for me. I mean, roll-back level, if I had the option to.
So, overall, the upgrade was a wash, and I lost more then I gained in it. Hopefully I can get Google Voice working soon, which will put the upgrade at a mild success in my book.
I think I want to convert one of these into an electric car. I will have a 7 mile drive one way, so an electric car with a 30 mile range will give me 100% extra range in case I need to drive something other than my usual route.
If I get one, I will get one with the tow bar that you see people dragging these around behind an RV. That way if it breaks down or just run out of charge, I can hook up to it and drag it home.
I had a rough week this last week, so I decided I needed to build something. So I built a bell siphon for an ebb and flow grow bed (also called Flood and Drain grow bed_ for the 75 gallon fish tank in the living room. This will allow me to grow plants using the fish water. This is pretty cool, as it means that the plants will remove the nitrate buildup which is the primary reason people need to do partial water changed in their aquariums.
My 75 gallon aquarium in the living room before I added the aquaponics component to it.
The whole thing will be completely automated and cost me less then $50 including buying tools and leaves me with lots of spare parts. 3 pieces of 4 foot PVC pipe with only about 6 inches cut off of each, so I have enough of this to make half a dozen more if I wanted.
A bell siphon is a passive autosiphon device that allows a continuous flow of water into a container to periodically be drained completely out of the container. This is good because it allows me to have my Eheim aquarium canister filter output into the grow bed, and the bell siphon will flush the bed regularly, aerating the plant roots.
To start, I assembled a drain out of plumbing PVC parts. This consists of a stand pipe to go inside the aquarium, 2 fittings to work as a bulkhead nipple, and an offset to route the water around the aquarium lid into the drain tube.
Showing where the tub will go.
My wife let me buy the parts and take over the 75 gallon aquarium in the living room with my plants. She had it decorated really nicely, but my plant stand was evicted from its spot to make space in the baby room. They needed a place to go, and I used this as an excuse to work on the aquaponics setup.
Katie and Bella Supervising
I started fiddling with the pieces I had bought and realized that I didn’t get all the right pieces I wanted, but I had gotten enough to make it work.
The bottom half of the bulkhead and the 90 degree angle. The angle will provide the offset to go around the tank lid.A bit of glue oozing into the joint. This needs to be cleaned out to provide less water flow resistance.
I used an antique brace with an adjustable size bit to cut the hole in the plastic. Basically, the edge of the bit would score the plastic. It worked great, except for the plastic cracking. I siliconed it up, but, to my great annoyance, the silicone was old and didn’t set. I had to clean it off and go get a new tube and try again.
Oohps! I cracked the bottom of the grow bed. No worries, a bit of silicone will fix it right up!
After two days of futzing with this thing, I finally got a dried silicone seal around the stand pipe and over the crack. The grow bed will sit on top of my 75 gallon aquarium so I designed the drain to offset around the aquarium lid. No drilling holes in the lid… yet…
The stand pipe drain assembled and ready to seal in place with silicone
I then made the bell siphon which sets over the stand pipe. I again used my brace and a smaller bit to drill holes in the 3″ PVC pipe. This made it much easier to cut with the PVC cutters I had bought. The 3 inch was just to thick for me to cut otherwise.
Using a brace and bit to drill holes in the PVC where I will cut it to make the bell siphon.The notches in the bottom of the bell siphon allows water to flow in easily.
A slight design flaw (um, the drain) left me with a grow bed that wouldn’t sit on the aquarium stand lid. A bit of scrounging around, and I found a plastic crate that I am using. The grow bed sits on the crate, which leaves enough room underneath for the drain to fit. It looks a little precarious, and I would like it to be the 4-5 inches lower, but it works for now.
The grow bed sitting on the aquarium light hood.The canister filter has nearly filled the growbed. The water height is limited by the height of the stand pipe.The bell siphon sitting on top of the stand pipe. This is where the magic happens.Looking at the whole bell siphon drain.The threaded bottom allows me to potentially change how I drain this grow bed if I wanted to.
The growbed is continuously filled, and intermittently dumps into the aquarium below.
The water from the grow bed returns back to the aquarium here. The grow bed is still filling in this photo.Bell Siphon draining into the aquarium. See all the water flowing out?
I placed my plants around the grow bed and the few items that where required to stay on the tank stand – family photos. I think it looks pretty good in the house! I hope to grow lettuces and herbs such as basil in it. Things that we eat regularly and are best fresh.
I only have desk lights with CFL bulbs right now. I think it looks pretty good!The tank looks good with the aquaponics on top!I am pretty sure I can’t feed everybody in the photos… yet…
UPDATE:
You can visit http://mike.creuzer.com/2011/12/i-doubled-the-sump-space-in-my-aquaponics-rig-today.html to see this same siphon and growbed in use on an expanded system.
Isabella Grace Creuzer was born on April 20th 2010 at 2:22 a.m. She weighed in at 8lbs 3oz. and was 21 and one half inches long/tall. Her mother was in labor for a little over 6 hours with no pain medications at Sherman Hospital in Elgin, IL.
It’s amazing how much the above paragraph means to me. Katie always gave me a hard time while she was pregnant that I wasn’t interested in the baby. I kept telling her that she wasn’t all that real for me as she was just creepy movements of the belly. Watching and helping her be born has no way I can convey what it meant to me.
I just have to say that I am extremely proud of my wife
Of course, with everything I do, there’s a story about it.
So… I’ve been trying to stay close to home the last couple of weeks being we have only the one vehicle. I didn’t want to leave Katie without a way to the hospital if the baby decided she was wanting to come NOW. The Monday before the baby was born I was down in Batavia giving a couple of presentations on web development stuff. The Sunday before she was born, I was down in Aurora co-demonstrating making Traps and Snares.
Monday the 19th I saw some aquarium fish offered up on freecycle. I seem to run an aquarium rescue or something. I offered to pick them up Monday night at 6. Other people had expressed interest in them, but I was the only one who gave a time. I had to run to storage to pick up my cooler that I use to transport fish in. Then off to Hanover Park. I picked up the fish – I think the guy only got 2 of the 5 types of fish he IDed correct HA!
I get home with my new fish and dinner is ready. Balsamic Vinegar Chicken. Katie had starting selecting menu’s based on folk lore saying that it would help kick off labor – like the Mac & Cheese with A1 for lunch – she was ready to have the baby. The chicken was wonderful, like usual. We finish dinner, and I start to get the fish ready to be moved into my aquarium. Katie put away dinner. She put something in the fridge and thought she had an accident. You guessed it, her water broke!
So, I have a wife leaking on the floor, fish in a cooler that need to be put in their new home, and mothers to call saying the water broke. Katie’s phone has a near dead battery. She’s on hers, I am on mine. Doctor is called, Mothers are notified. We get ahold of our Dula while Katie is in the shower as she refused to go to the hospital without the shower. The Dula says she will meet us at the hospital because Katie’s contractions have started in earnest by this point in time – about 15 minutes after her water broke.
After a brief gathering of stuff that couldn’t be pre-packed as it was needed for day-to-day living and couldn’t live for 2 months packed away, we where off. I calmly drove the 1 mile or so to the brand new Sherman Hospital. We walk in wheeling our bag and get all signed in. Our Dula arrives, so we sit and chit-chat and make sure everything is all right.
The nurse checks Katie – 3-4cm dilation 100% effacement. Basically, we are 1/3 the way done in an hour.
Poor Katie didn’t get but 2 minutes of rest between contractions once she started. It’s hard to get tweets in between contractions when they are that close together. I didn’t want to not hold Katie’s hand for every one of them. Midnight finds us at about 9-10cm dilation, and the doctor is called in. We start pushing in earnest at this point. The doctor arrives, and we start to collect nurses. By the time the baby is born, we went from 1 nurse to 4 plus a doctor. I think a fifth one snuck in after the baby was born and started to clean up the baby.
The baby is a little Houdini. The nurses never could keep a baby monitor pointed at her for very long. She kept moving around, and slipping out of range. It’s “Ok Katie, Push”, “Ok, Katie, Relax”, find baby with monitor, repeat.
At one point Katie says that she just wants to go home. The Dula got a kick out of that, saying every mom has said that at some point in the delivery.
After a great amount of pushing and straining, and one round of “I want drugs, give me drugs” the baby is born. The drugs where skipped as the nurse pointed out that they could repress the baby’s breathing.
No drugs. How hardcore is that? Again, I am incredibly proud of Katie. I also don’t think I ever want to get into a fist fight with her. I’d loose.
As was pointed out earlier, she was born at 2:22. It wasn’t until about 5am or so that the doctor’s gone, the baby’s cleaned up, the nurses left us alone, and our Dula leaves. We rest. I have this little chair thingy that folds out into a bed, not very comfortable. I want one for at home.
I get up again around 8am. Nurses coming and going. Get Katie fed breakfast. The baby’s doing good. So I wander home about 10am to take a shower, take care of the critters at home, grab the laptop from the office, etc.
I grab some lunch (taco bell) and get back to Katie and my daughter.
All kinds of people come in to see Katie and the baby. Pediatricians, nurses, doctors, nursing consultants, housekeeping, the kitchen. Nobody to see me! That’s not true, two people from work visited, so I can pretend they where there to see me.
Day two at the hospital was about the same thing. I worked on my blog (what you are reading now, notice it’s a lot different?) as I hadn’t had time to work on it for the last two months and Katie was hogging our daughter while she was awake.
I just puttered around, fetching stuff that was out of reach, smuggling in frostys, Mt. Dew and Fast Break candy bars. If it wasn’t for having my baby girl there, hospitals are kinda boring.
We left Wednesday night so we had a night to ourselves, the three of us, before family started showing up.
Not much sleep that night, Bella, again the little miss Houdini, kept escaping her cradle her grandpa and I built her and ended up in bed most of the night.
So, in short, I am lucky I was home when this all started, the baby, mom and fish all survived the ordeal. Brother is now a Big Brother to a human kitten – poor fella. I am now a proud husband and happy father. My life sure has changed the last couple of years!
