Google Contacts importing nightmares.

General

Years ago I wrote the ultimate address book that has people and addresses as separate tables in a database where people can have more than one address.  It worked well.  Now I want to use something in the cloud, and can’t find anything that works as elegantly.  To keep things simple I plan to use Google contacts.

Easy.  Export my contacts, patch them together in Excel and import them as a google CSV.

Except that google exports in one format but is unable to import back again!?  Very frustrating, and their help files are dreadful giving no help at all on field headings.

At least they allow you to roll back your contacts, so my mistakes were able to be fixed. 

Later:  I eventually sorted it out, but it took a lot of pain to do so.

Flash Player on CM7.1 fixed (hack?)

General

Like others, I realised that flash player was not working properly on my CM7.1 ROM.  , but that’s the pain of rooting I suppose.

Much fiddling and I worked out how to get the thing going.  The main issue I had was that the named path:

/data/data/com.android.browser/app_plugins/com.adobe.flashplayer/.macromedia/Flash_Player/config.data

did not exist, but I worked out

  1. that it does not exist until the browser has tried to run a flash file and my problem was with BBC’s app
  2. .macromedia is a hidden file (ls -la finds it)

So in the end I went through and did

chmod 000 /data/data/com.android.browser/app_plugins/com.adobe.flashplayer/.macromedia/Flash_Player/config.data

Changing the red text for any app that does not work.  I am still using Terminal for this, I can’t get adb to work and have not got round to the massive £2.50 for Root Explorer.

Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) on Desire HD

General

I am getting to grips with this rooted phone stuff. This morning I backed up my phone’s state using nandroid, then installed an ICS Beta from xda-developers.  ICS is the new integrated version of Android that is formatted for both tablets and phones.  It looks very nice, and I could almost use it except for the fact that the camera does not work (yet).  When the camera is operational I may well mover over to it.  I suspect that this will be the quickest way to get this update for my phone.

After playing for half an hour, I backed up the ICS install and then restored my CyanogenMod build.

I have not tried undervolting yet.

CyanogenMod, underclocking and undervolting

General

It is all working now apart from one panic where I appeared to scramble the recovery image (ClockworkRecovery) and had a heart stopping wait to see if I had bricked the phone.  This appeared to be related to ROMManager being linked to all zip files on the sdcard.

Now I am trying to reduce battery use, I have been using androidforums again, more specifically a post on undervolting, but need to calibrate the battery first, something I have never done.  The instructions on androidforums use a LordMod set of apps for undervolting, but I have also read that CyanogenMod is already undervolted.  I think I will leave it for now. The calibration is clearly needed though.  My phone is charging, the battery says 100% but the current is still flowing in to the battery!