Category: Android

Moving or copying files from one Google drive account to another

I have seen questions on the web about how to migrate (copy/move) files from one GDrive account to another. There are many reasons, such as migrating from one Google account (such as company) to your personal account, etc.

WARNING: you may be violating your company policy by moving/copying files from your company Google account to a personal. I advise you to consult your company security officer or equivalent before doing this.

There are other reasons for wanting to copy or moving large number of files from one GDrive to another. Such as for me. I shared a folder in my GDrive with my family for putting our family photos in a central location. My family have G account, and there own GDrive. It seem that Google make it painful to copy files from one GDrive to another. Their suggestions is some form of downloading the files to your local drive first, and then uploading it to the other GDrive that you want.

This is painful!!! There are so many reasons why it’s painful…. 😉

The solution I’ve used is to install Google Drive app (supports OSX, Windows, Linux, Android and IOS).

Link Google Drive app to one Google account, and now you can treat the files in it as on your local drive and drag from there to the GDrive account you want to copy to.

Nexus 7 (2012 Wifi) and Kitkat 4.4

I had a scare this weekend with thinking my Nexus7 got bricked by Kitkat update from Google.

Thursday night (11/21/13), my Nexus 7 let me know that it has d/l’ed Kitkat and ready to update.  I told it to go ahead since the last few times, updates from Google went fine without any problems.

After my Nexus 7 rebooted and updated, it then rebooted again and seem to be taking a long time at the boot up screen (bouncing color balls).  It was late, past 1am, so I left it sitting there on the dresser next to bed and forgot about it.  The next night, Friday, I saw it sitting on my dresser and remember about the upgrade, so checked it and found it is STILL at the bootup screen!!! WTF!

I pressed the power button to reboot.  Same thing…. Crap!  Tried it a number of time, no luck.  I was tired, so I left it there in the bootup screen.  This evening, I had time to look at it again and the damn thing is still at that screen.  It has been a while, so I had forgot how to boot into recovery mode, sigh.   Anyway, checking online found lots of complaints from people with similar problems.

This post on AndroidCentral was the one that solved my problem.  Just thought I shared it.

The following snippet is from AndroidCentral post, I am putting here in case the post goes away.

 

” I was in the same situation and ran into that issue as well. What I did was download the 4.3 factory image from here:  https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images

Make sure you get the correct one for your device. I have a 2013 wifi so I chose: Android 4.3 (JSS15R)

Inside that downloaded file, you’ll find image-razor-jss15r.zip. It’s a couple of levels down. Unzip the files from there to your SDK folder (should be boot.img, recovery.img, system.img, userdata.img, and cache.img).

Boot your Nexus 7 to the bootloader (volume down + power) and connect to your PC with USB cable. Do NOT go into Recovery mode yet.

From the command prompt, make sure you can see your device: fastboot devices

Then, run the following commands:

fastboot flash boot boot.img
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
fastboot erase system
fastboot flash system system.img

At this point you have a clean install of 4.3 JSS15R.

Now go to Recovery mode and sideload the 4.4 OTA as you originally tried and it should work this time.

I followed these steps and was able to update to 4.4 without losing any data. YMMV”

Note: Once I was sure that I can boot 4.3 without losing my data, I actually updated to 4.4 using the above method.   The difference is that once in Recovery mode, I don’t do sideload, and I wipe dalvik cache, plus format /cache partition.

Dec 10, 2013

And now 4.4.2 update appeared on my Nexus7 and Nexus10.  Once again, I accepted the update on my Nexus7, let it boot into recovery and proceed to messed it up.  My fault this time.  I thought it would be as complicated as the previous update from 4.3 to 4.4.   I had to use fastboot procedure above to fix it.

For my Nexus10, I just had to accept the update to 4.4.2.  Boot into bootloader, flash CWM recovery, then boot into recovery and ‘adb sideload’ the new SuperSU.

 

airpush spamming my android phone

I’ve started getting these spammy notifications to my notification bar (where else? :)). They appeared after I installed and updated several apps, but for the life of me, I could not remember which ones, since the notifications didn’t appear till a day later.

It turned out to be spams from a company called xapush.com. Googling found lots of complaints, and a possible solution. There is an app in the Market, called xapush detector. So I installed that app, and it told me there are two apps that is using xapush.

1. Overclock Widget – org.freecoder.widgets.overclock
2. First Aid – com.usa.health.ifitness.firstaid

Hmm, I don’t mind ads supporting free code, but this is over stepping the boundary. Ahhh, it turns out there is a new option in Advanced Settings for Overclock Widget, where you can turn off airpush. Yay!

Android tablets

I’ve been wanting (drooling) over Android tablets for awhile now.  Almost bought one several time over Christmas holiday, but managed to stop myself in time.  Knowing that new (dual core Tegra and Android 3.0) things was coming help convinced me to wait for things to settle down before diving in.

In the meantime, I’ve been educating myself as much as possible about Android, phones and tablets.  I did exchanged my two plus years old RIM Blackberry for a Droid 2 Global.  That helped me get familiar with Android, its Markets, apps, rooting, etc 🙂  It took some getting used to with the way Android apps and phone work.  I’ve been so used to my Berry (it’s perfect for email, text) that I almost swap my Droid phone back for the Berry!!!!  I’ll have to say that RIM has done a great job with making their phones work seamlessly in the mobile email environment.  It was painless to get mail from my various accounts – Gmail, Yahoo, IMAPS hosted on my personal server at home, etc.  Also love the way I can customize how I get notified (alerts) when different type of email come in.  Oh my god!  The way I can customize it is just so awesome and easy to setup and use!

Anyway, sorry, back to Android tablets.  I almost bought the Velocity Cruz (T103, T105, T301 and Cruz Reader) several times, and glad I did not.  Stay away from the Cruz and any other tablets that are not based on ARM chips.  The Cruz tablets are based on MIPS architecture and you will have a hard time finding community support.  There are some hacking on the Cruz, but most of the Android hacking community is focused on ARMs and a minority on x86.

This is because Android was first released for the ARM architecture, with the development and emulation done on x86 (build and toolchains were done on Ubuntu x86 Linux at Google).  So there are lots of supports and knowledge out there for those two architecture.

Sooooo…. there was a sale for the Viewsonic G Tablet, and it was at the right time (weak moment) and I bought one.  Heh.  Anyway, so far I am happy with it, only had it for 4 days.  Got an AOSP 2.3.4 build running on it.  I’ve pulled down CM source repo and am going to build my own.

More to post soon.