That was an interesting day in cellphone land. I collected the Meizu M6 Note from PB last Friday and switched it on for the first time in the small hours of Tuesday.
I originally wasnât pleased. I had paid NZ$80 for a warranty repair (there is provision under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 in some circumstances) and was told at the service counter that all that was performed was a factory reset, followed by a weekâs testing. In other words, what I had originally done, twice, before bringing the phone in. I replied that that was not going to work, and was told by the PB rep that maybe I shouldnât have so many apps open. Conclusion: a newer phone is far less capable than an older one.
But he wasnât the technician, and as I discovered, Joe had done more than a mere factory reset. When I switched the phone on, it was back to square one, like the day I bought it, complete with Google spyware. I wasnât thrilled about this, but it suggested to me that the ROM had been flashed back to the beginning.
Meizuâs factory resets donât take you right back to factory settings, not if you had rooted the phone and removed all the Google junk.
To his credit, this was a logical thing to do. However, within 10 minutes it developed a fault again. The settingsâ menu would not stay open, and crap out immediately, a bit like what the camera, browser, and gallery had done at different times. All I had done up to this point was allow some of the apps to update, and God knows what Google was doing in the background as messages for Play and other programs flashed up in the header. The OS wanted to update as well, so I let it, hoping it would get past the bug. It didnât.
So far, everything was playing out exactly as I had predicted, and I thought I would have to head to PB and point out that I was taking them up on the three months they guarantee their service. And the phone was warranted till December 2020 anyway. Give me my money back, and you can deal with Meizu for selling a lemon.
However, I decided I would at least try for the umpteenth time to download the Chinese OS, and install it. Why not? Joe had given me a perfect opportunity to give this another shot, and the phone appeared unrooted. The download was painfully slow (I did the same operation on my older Meizu M2 Note out of curiosity, and it downloaded its OS update at three to four times the speedâcan we blame Google for slowing the newer phone down?) but eventually it got there. The first attempt failed, as it had done countless times before. This was something that had never worked in the multiple times I had tried it over the last 18 months, and I had drawn the conclusion that Meizu had somehow locked this foreign-market phone from accepting Chinese OSs.
I tried again.
And it worked. A fluke? A one-off? Who knows? I always thought that in theory, it could be done, but the practice was entirely different.
It took a while, but I was astonished as the phone went through its motions and installed Flyme 8.0.0.0A, killing all the Google spyware, and giving me the modern equivalent of the Meizu M2 Note from 2016 that I had sourced on Ebay from a Chinese vendor.
I may be speaking too soon, but the settingsâ bug disappeared, the apps run more smoothly, and as far as I can tell, there is no record of the phone having been rooted. I had a bunch of the APKs from the last reset on the SD card, so on they went.
Meizu synced all contacts and SMSs once I had logged in, but there was one really annoying thing here: nothing from the period I was running the western version of the phone appeared. The messages prior to December 2018 synced, plus those from the M2 Note during June while the M6 was being serviced.
It appears that the western versions of these apps are half-baked, and offer nothing like the Chinese versions.
With any luck, the bugs will not resurfaceâif they donât, then it means that the readâwrite issues are also unique to the western version of the M6 Note.
Iâve spent parts of today familiarizing myself with the new software. There are some improvements in presentation and functionality, while a few things appear to have retrograded; but overall, this is what I expect with a phone thatâs two years newer. There should be some kind of advance (even little things like animated wallpapers), and with the western version, other than processor speed and battery life, there had not been. It was 2016 tech. Even the OS that the phone came back with was mid-decade. This is what the western editions are: out of date.
The only oddity with the new Chinese Flyme was the inability to find the Chinese version of Weibo through Meizuâs own Chinese app storeâonly the foreign ones showed up on my search, even though the descriptions were all in simplified Chinese.
These mightnât have been the developments that Joe at PB expected but if things remain trouble-free, that NZ$80 was well worth spending to get a phone which, for the first time in its life, feels new. The other lesson here is to avoid western-market phones if you donât find the Chinese language odd. I had already made enquiries to two Aliexpress sellers to make sure that they could sell me a non-western phone, ready to upgrade. Hopefully that wonât need to happen.
Next week: letâs see if I can shoot some video and have that save without killing the gallery, the bug that kicked all of this off.
Now that Aotearoa New Zealand has lifted our COVID-19 restrictions after getting rid of the virus on our shores, other than keeping our border closed, I Tweeted:
Last time I felt this much part of a national team was when celebrities sang ‘Sailing Away’ to the tune of ‘Pokarekare Ana’. #COVID19
and between Cachalot on Twitter and I, we actually wound up with a variation of the song (incidentally, he was first with the chorus, showing that great minds think alike).
Here we come, weâre isolating Here we come, weâre on our way In a team thatâs called New Zealand Weâre together, thatâs our way.
Then back to the refrain.
Out of respect to the language in which the song was composed, te reo MÄori, here are the original, poignant lyrics. It’s a beautiful, heart-wrenching song. There’s a further explanation to it here.
PĆkarekare ana,
ngÄ wai o Waiapu
Whiti atu koe hine,
marino ana e.
Refrain
E hine e,
hoki mai ra.
Ka mate ahau
I te aroha e.
Tuhituhi taku reta,
tuku atu taku rīngi,
Kia kite tĆ iwi
raru raru ana e.
Refrain
Whati whati taku pene
ka pau aku pepa
Ko taku aroha
mau tonu ana e.
Refrain
E kore te aroha
e maroke i te rÄ
MÄkĆ«kĆ« tonu i
aku roimata e.
Usually I find it easier to express myself in written form. For once, Black Lives Matter and the protests in the US prompted me to record another podcast entry. Iâm not sure where the flat as and the mid-Atlantic vowels come from when I listened to this againâmaybe I was channelling some of the passion I was seeing in the US, and I had watched the news prior to recording this.
My Anchor summary is: ‘Personal thoughts in solidarity with my black friends in the US. Yes, I posted a blackout image on my Instagram but it didnât seem to be enough. This is my small contribution, inspired by a Facebook post written by my white American friend Eddie Uken where he reflects on his perspective and privilege.’ Eddie’s Facebook post, which is public, is here.
Off to PB. The M6 Note was under warranty after all, so itâs now with PB Technologiesâ service department in Wellington, after I explained it could have trouble doing readâwrite operations and the tech saw the camera and gallery hang (usually they just shut themselves down). I paid over NZ$400 for the phone including GST, and fortunately for me, Iâm only 17 months in to my ownership. (You may think NZ$400 is cheap, but I don’t.)
However, before I committed it to service, I had to find a way to get the old M2 Note going. I explained to one of the phone salesâ crew at PB my predicament: despite buying new chargers and cables, the only way to charge the phone was to drive to Johnsonville where it was last âservicedâ. And, as usual, hereâs the kicker: he plugged it in to his nearest micro USB charger and it fed it with juice, instantly. He said it was the cheapest charger they had in store. It also turned on immediately for him, whereas Iâve never been able to get it goingâremember, there are only three buttons here, and I have tried them all. âYou have 86 per cent charge,â he saidâback home it showed nil, refusing to turn on because the charge was non-existent. Your guess is as good as mine over this.
The really great thing here is that everyone believed me. I guess these techs have been around enough to know that devices are illogical things, and that the customer isnât bullshitting you, but more at a witâs end when they come in with a fault. He sold me a new charger (NZ$18), which worked. Of course, charging it on the cable that fed the M6 Note doesnât work: it says itâs charging, and the percentage keeps dropping. Again, your guess is as good as mine over this.
Tonight itâs getting fed the new Adata cable, which took it to 100 per cent earlier tonight.
Up side: how nice to have my old phone back, with Chinese apps that work and look good. Down side: my goodness, a four-year-old phone is slow. I didnât think the M6 Note was that flash when I got it at the end of 2018, but after 17 months, I got used to it and find the M2âs processing lagging. The battery isnât lasting anywhere near what it used to, either.
I originally needed the M6 in a pinch, as at the time Dad was heading into hospital and I couldnât risk being out of contact. The M2âs screen had vertical lines going through after a drop, rendering things difficult to readâand what if I couldnât swipe to answer? The M6 wouldnât have been my immediate choice: I would have preferred to have researched and found a Chinese-spec phone, even if every vendor online, even Chinese ones, touted their western-spec ones.
If PB fixes the issue, great. But if not, then I may defect to Xiaomi at this rate. Meizu cares less and less about export sales these days, and there appear to be some vendors who can sell a Chinese-spec phone out there. The newer phone was also buggier: whether that was down to it being a western version, I don’t know. The M6 Note didnât represent the rosiest of moments, certainly not for Dad, so Iâm not wedded to it getting back to full health. Letâs see how they go next week, but at least I now have a cellphone that rings againâoneâs only concern is how much charge it holds.
It looks like this latest phone reset lasted all of eight days, as today, all the bugs returned, all indicating to me that the M6 Note has some sort of readâwrite error. PB has offered a link to file a report and asked that I drop phone and form in to their Wellington store, but I may call to double check that it is under warranty.
If I do, I need to figure out a way to charge my old phone, since thatâs been impossible since its ârepairâ. Go in with a phone that works in most respects other than a busted screen, come back with a phone that has a fixed screen but doesnât charge, regardless of charger, except, of course, the one at their shop. If I can get it going, then that saves a few hundred dollars buying a replacement, which Iâm loathe to do.
Thereâs also one further option, to buy a new SD card, in case that is the culprit, but considering the phone has difficulty deleting files on its internal storage, I doubt very much that the card is at fault.
Iâve already been chatting to an Aliexpress vendor in Shenzhen to confirm that they can sell me a new Meizu with Chinese spec, since I have zero desire to get another western-spec one that I have to root in order to remove the Google spyware. And if this M6 is any sign of what a western-market phone is like, then no thanks. I also need to do a lot more reading about the Note 9, the potential replacement, to check the frequencies and capabilities. With Meizu doing less and less outside China, decent information is harder to come by.
Iâve done factory resets twice already this month, each time wasting hours replacing all the apps and settings. Since the resets have put me right anywhere from a day to eight days, then I donât relish having to do one a third time, with the very real possibility the phone will conk out again. Amanda and I are back to having half a phone each: hers rings but you canât talk into it; mine doesnât ring but you can make outgoing calls.
How I had such high hopes that the Microsoft Intellimouse Pro Special Edition bought at NoĂ«l Leeming would be a successor to my Intellimouse 1.1. The short version: it isnât.
It might be a successor to the Intellimouse Explorer 3 on which the shape is modelled, but for those of us who prefer symmetrical mice, because the higher right-hand side supports your hand better, it literally was a pain.
There are only some counterfeit ones going for a decent price on Ebay, and I really should have snapped up more of the second-hand ones when I had a chance. The mice now at Recycling for Charity are, like all those reasonably priced ones in shops today, tiny. I imagine mice from the early 2000s aren’t even getting recycled any more, since it’s 2020 and the “old” stuff is from last decadeâafter the manufacturers began to shrink them.
Asus did a good job with its ROG Strix Evolve which I bought three months ago, but I find that the absence of tapering at the front and the overall tightness of the buttons didnât serve me that well.
The Intellimouse 1.1 is back here as my reserve, and the Asus is on the mouse pad. It took all of a few seconds at my desk to know that Microsoftâs revived Intellimouse wasnât rightâand one wonders why they couldnât just keep making something that worked so well for so many of us.
I was lucky to get the similarly shaped Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 five years ago, a dead-stock mouse made in 2005 that had been sitting at Corporate Consumables. In between the properly sized Microsoft miceâthree in total, including my first in 2002âI had all manner of other types but nothing was as comfortable.
When you go to some websites selling mice, they tell you that you can hold their product like a âclawâ, as if that is a positive attribute. Once again we see the need for humans to adapt to technology, rather than the other way round. I can see why one might need to do this given how mice have shrunk. If your handâs like a claw, then you may be the modern equivalent of the Chinese women who had their feet bound in the 20th century. You may feel that is the fashion, but you need not live with it.
I did it. On Saturday night I reset my Meizu M6 Note again, the second time in eight days, taking it back to factory settings. Except this time I didnât load Whatsapp or Signal. Two days later, my phone remains OK.
I suggested to PB that it may have developed a readâwrite fault, as deleting photos from the internal memory takes minutes (if it ever completes), which the warranty should cover. It also would explain why the gallery, camera and the downloadsâ folder wouldnât load properly, since they each tried to access the internal storage. I also had difficulty restoring my SMSs with SMS Backup, with the operation crapping out before completingâthough strangely, today, the SMSs are back without any intervention from me.
But it also wouldnât surprise me one bit if Whatsapp wasnât compatible with Android 7 nowâInstagram never was, not fully. To save a load of time I wonât be putting messaging apps back on there. I lost a second evening to this and Iâm not keen on losing more.
There are two up sides: I donât need to get a new phone, and if I did, I finally found a vendor on Aliexpress whoâll sell a Chinese-spec Meizu. No more of these western editions: they are less reliable, with a less well stocked app store, and you canât update the OS. You have to root them to get rid of the Google spyware. I may stick with Meizu but I really wonât be buying domestically again.
This Pukerua Bay Tardis was the last thing I shot before the cellphone’s camera and gallery failed
First world problems: the cellphone. Right now my partner and I have half a phone each, so between us, we have one phone. She can receive calls on hers but no one can hear her answer. Mine no longer rings but you can hear me speak. So I guess the way to communicate with us, while there are no repairers within easy reach during Level 3, is to call her, we note down the number, and one of us calls you back on my phone. Oh, and neither of us can take photos any more: hers has had an issue with SD cards from quite early on, and mine developed an inability to function as a camera last week.
Iâm not that bothered, really. Iâve no real desire to get a new one and while itâs a shame to lose a very good camera, one wonders whether I should just get a camera. After all, those last longer than a mere 18 months âŠ
The fault on my Meizu M6 Note isnât easily explained. Iâve spotted similar errors online, solved by deleting the app cache or app data. That doesnât work for me. The camera crashes on opening, as does the downloadsâ folder. The gallery is a grey, translucent screen that does or doesnât crash eventually. The stock music and video apps cannot find anything, though the stock file manager and ES File Explorer tell me that everything is there, and the music and video files play.
Iâve not lost any important dataâIâve always backed up regularlyâand Iâve transferred everything off the SD card, including all SMSs and contacts, as well as photos.
PB (who sold my phone) says this is a software issue (avoiding a warranty claim) but Iâm sensing that the phone is crapping out whenever itâs trying to write to one of its disks. That sounds like hardware to me. I can transfer files via ES File Explorer but it crashes immediately after the transfer. It doesnât appear to be the SD card, as when I unmount it, it makes no difference.
Meizu has been useless: no forum answers and no customer-service answers, though I did contact them during the CCP Workersâ Day holiday and mainland China was, it appears, shut.
Iâd go back to my old phone but the only way to charge it is to drive to Johnsonville and ask the repair shop to charge itâthatâs been the only way since they repaired the screen last year. They claim they havenât altered the charging mechanism, but since no charger in this house works, not even a new one, I canât explain why this is. The techs there are mum because it would be giving away a trade secret, I suspect. It seems I need a special charger since the manufacturerâs one is no longer compatible, and, guess what? I bet you the repairer will sell me one at some ridiculous price.
But for now it is rather inconvenient, making me wonder: just why on earth do we need a cellphone anyway, when we have perfectly adequate land lines, when they become this much of a nuisance? They are frightfully expensive for little, fragile trinkets that I now increasingly use for just calling and not apps. There is no utility to a phone that can only be charged at one location, and there is no utility to the newer phone to which no one has posted a ready solution.
Last night, I reset the newer unit to factory settings, and, happily, none of the Google BS returned. Maybe it was software. I still canât do any updating with Meizuâs official patches, which is annoying. But for that brief, glorious period, I could take photos again. The camera, gallery and downloadsâ folder would open.
I did have to find, with some difficulty, the Chinese version of the Meizu app store, since I never saved the APK separately. This at least allowed me to get some of the Chinese apps not available on Meizuâs western app store. It was a shame to see some of the apps I once had no longer in the catalogue; presumably, the licence had expired.
And there I was, for about five or six hours reconfiguring everything, and Iâm now suspecting that I should not have put the thing into developer mode or downloaded Whatsapp. Those were the last things I did, content that all was well, before waking up this morning to find myself back to square one, with the bugs all returned. The log files tell me nothing other than Meizuâs servers not responding properly (theyâve been getting progressively worse supporting people outside China).
I never wanted Whatsapp but for one friend formerly in Germany, and one of Dadâs friends in Hong Kong. The former has moved back here and can be reached on Facebook, accessible via a basic browser. And sadly, I doubt I will hear much from the latter now that Dad has passed away. He knows my regular number anyway, and if I had a cellphone that rings, maybe he could call it.
Since Whatsapp and Instagram are owned by Facebook, it would not surprise me if both were becoming less and less compatible with Android v. 7, and Iâve charted Instagramâs increasing, Facebook-era faults on this blog before. If Facebook canât get its basics right on its flagship site, then why should I have their crap in my pocket?
Generally, I could live without it. Maybe tomorrow night Iâll give the reset another go. Iâve saved most of the APKs from this round, and it was a good opportunity to do without some apps that I seldom used. But I already lost a day to it earlier in the week, a night to it last night, and I face the prospect of more hours to come. These things are not productive when they take up this much time. And I donât like typing on tiny keyboards, I do absolutely zero work on them other than calls since it is impossible to compose a logical email (which you then have to somehow sync back to the desktop to maintain a full, professional record, wasting even more time), and they serve only a narrow range of purposes, photography being one. Iâm still quicker looking at a paper map than relying on a device.
However, I donât like faulty gadgets that have cost me hundreds of dollars, and since a reset solved the problems for a few hours, it might be worth one more shot to at least bring things closer to normal, useful or not. Letâs at least have that camera and music back.
Finally, a podcast (or is it a blogcast, since it’s on my blog?) where I’m not “reacting” to something that Olivia St Redfern has put on her Leisure Lounge series. Here are some musings about where we’re at, now we are at Level 3.
Some of my friends, especially my Natcoll students from 1999â2000, will tell you that I love doing impressions. They say Rory Bremner’s are shit hot and that mine are halfway there. It’s a regret that I haven’t been able to spring any of these on you. Don’t worry, I haven’t done any here. But one of these days âŠ
I know what youâre thinking. âDid he have six kids or only fiveâ. Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself.
A lot of the world’s population has come together in the fight against COVID-19. Except Facebook, of course, who is exploiting the virus for profit. Facebook has done well in the first quarter of 2020 with positive earnings. Freedom From Facebook & Google co-chairs Sarah Miller and David Segal note (the links are theirs): ‘Facebook has exploited a global pandemic to grow their monopoly and bottom line. Theyâve profited from ads boasting fake cures and harmful information, allowed ad targeting to âpseudoscienceâ audiences, permitted anti-stay-at-home protests to organize on the platform, and are now launching a COVID âData for Goodâ endeavour to harvest even more of our personal information.
âMake no mistake, Facebook having more of your data is never âgood”, nor will they just relinquish the collected data when the pandemicâs curve has been flattened. Rather, theyâll bank it and continue to profit from hyper-targeted ads for years to come.’
It’s been a few weeks (April 19 was my last post on this subject) since I last crunched these numbers but it does appear that overall, COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done are dropping, several countries excepting. Here is the source.
France 167,178 of 724,574 = 23·07%
UK 171,253 of 901,905 = 18·99%
Sweden 21,092 of 119,500 = 17·65%
USA 1,095,304 of 6,391,887 = 17·14%
Spain 239,639 of 1,455,306 = 16·47%
Singapore 17,101 of 143,919 = 11·88%
KSA 22,753 of 200,000 = 11·38%
Switzerland 29,586 of 266,200 = 11·11%
Italy 205,463 of 1,979,217 = 10·38%
Germany 163,009 of 2,547,052 = 6·40%
South Korea 10,774 of 623,069 = 1·73%
Australia 6,766 of 581,941 = 1·16%
New Zealand 1,479 of 139,898 = 1·06%
Taiwan 429 of 63,340 = 0·68%
Hong Kong 1,038 of 154,989 = 0·67%
Emmerdale fans will never forgive me. I’ve not been one to watch British soaps, finding them uninteresting. However, in this household, we have had Emmerdale on since it’s scheduled between TV1âs midday bulletin and the 1 p.m. government press conference on COVID-19, or, as some of us call it, The Ashley Bloomfield Show, named for our director-general of health who not only has to put up with all of this, but took a hit to one-fifth of his pay cheque. Naturally, one sings along to the Emmerdale theme, except I have no clue about its lyrics. Are there lyrics?
Never used to leave the TV on for #Emmerdale, but with #COVID19 I doâand like many, I sing along:
Who the hell cares what goes on at that farm? Donât really know who has come to some harm. Whatever you see, thereâs no cause for alarm, When we peer in the lives of Emmerdale.
Not a single like on Twitter or Mastodon. I’ve offended a heck of a lot of people.
We are supposedly at Level 3, which someone said was Level 4 (the full lockdown) with takeaways. However, we’ve gone from the 1960s-style near-empty motorways to this almost immediately.
