Cellphone Storage
I'm on my second smartphone, a low-end Android phone. I once had an iPhone for business purposes when I worked for a well-known defense contractor, but I've never understood the logic of paying hundreds of dollars for basic communication. It reminds me of my first MIS professor, Al Napier, who used to ridicule people who bought PC's to store recipes--functionality easily served by a 99-cent plastic recipe box. It took a while for me to buy my first personal cellphone; I had an auto mishap driving down I-5 to LA from the Bay Area. I was in the middle of nowhere. A truck driver stopped and let me borrow his cellphone.I remember when I started my ownership, domestic long-distance was a modest monthly fee supplement. Up to that point, I had been using long-distance minute cards to save on long distance calls. It didn't take a lot of calls to cover the premium, and now it's basically a bundled feature for most plans. I stayed with my first vendor for maybe a dozen years. They were charging something like $25 for 100-300 minutes of month--and overage charges were nontrivial. Even 300 minutes a month meant 10 minutes of use per day--including incoming minutes. So I still maintained local phone (or later ISP-bundled digital phone) service, which I would use for longer calls like tech job interviews.
I was aware of text and data options but these were expensive surcharges, and I was paying a separate ISP charge already. I could print off driving directions while I'm at home, etc. I had other ways to play music in the car. So what led me to make the jump? A mobile company offered an all-you-could use voice minutes, texts, and data (although high-speed was only guaranteed for a certain usage cap) for about $35/month. So basically I didn't have to watch the clock in placing or receiving calls, which allowed me to consolidate communications (but I still have a Google Voice account, which provides a call summary and transcript of received voice mails). I'm still not big on texting, but it's a preferred mode of communicating among my siblings, I get shipping confirmations (e.g., for Mom's Christmas gift being delivered today) and appointment confirmations, work-related weather delays/statuses, etc. As for data, I've used Google Maps, and I can shuffle through my Pandora channels through my new car's Bluetooth connection. (Of course, like all database administrators, I have contingency plans. A good example was when I drove to an unfamiliar destination in Pennsylvania, and Google Maps suddenly lost connection near the destination. Luckily I also had a Garmin device (and I'll often bring a USB power bank with me--my experience with 2 devices is the battery quickly runs out of juice, no oral warning), plus I had printed driving instructions.
This is a long context for discussing a recent installation of a SD card in the current smartphone. I still remembered migrating apps to the SD card I installed in the first phone. (The first was a cheap Chinese brand, and one day my password no longer worked. My carrier was unsympathetic, pointing out the warranty had expired.) Apparently in the preoccupation over reloading apps et al. in the new phone I never bothered to buy and install an SD card. I started getting notifications about running tight on internal storage. (Unlike computers or tablets where you can see the SD card slot filled or empty, you have to remove the back of the phone to find a slot near the battery.) I was trying to find a button to shift apps to the SD card (Android doesn't make this easy from what I can see; you have to drill into storage for the app to see if it has a change/transfer button, and most don't). The bottom line is if an SD card is installed, you will see a relevant entry in the storage settings of the phone. At some point, I realized and verified I didn't have one installed. Nor a big deal: I could buy a 256 GB one for about $30 (including tax/shipping), more than enough for apps and other file storage.
Properly seating the tiny card took a few tries for some reason, but soon I found maybe 1-2 dozen apps to migrate to the card--enough to stop the annoying storage alerts, but it soon started nagging at me I could be using some of that humongous storage for other purposes, like a copy of my iTunes/other music libraries. This would enable me, with the right app, to play music offline, say with spotty Internet coverage on the road or while flying.
Here's where a major usability issue came into play. I can recall tethering my old phone via USB connection to my pre-Windows 10 computers and being able to see the phone and storage for file transfer, bur couldn't see it in my patched Win 10 environments with my new phone. It took a variety of tweaks, including non-default setups for USB/other tethering.and in one case changing USB cables (the original was fine only for charging from the PC; I never could get the tethering status to change, though) and a reboot was necessary for my main notebook--plus at an earlier point I got a pop-up alert on the phone saying I had to authorize functionality. Not very intuitive at all, and numerous sources on the Web weren't helpful (except a suggestion to consider swapping the USB cable).
I had intended to use, as recommended in another post, Double Twist (including a host PC application) to sync my music library to the phone SD card, but it only seemed to recognize storage devices on the PC itself, not the cellphone/SD card. Don't tell me I'm going to have to mount my phone SD card directly in my PC SD card slot to sync my library! I recall reading someone say to create a music directory in the cellphone SD card root and the music app, like Double Twist's cellphone app, should see your files. So I copied/pasted my iTunes/other music folders to that root music directory. Sure enough, all the songs/albums appeared in Double Twist app, and it's fairly easy and intuitive to build playlists.
My New Notebook PC Display
I typically use external keyboards and mice with my laptops; in part, this is due to my fair share of coffee spill issues over the years, and I prop them up on elevated stands (it's much cheaper and easier to buy USB accessories). But one thing I've never really used is external VGA/HDMI displays (I did have one for my backup desktop, which didn't come bundled with a monitor). I have used multiple units at work over the last 3 years which allowed me to use more screen space without having to toggle windows, e.g., keep my email inbox on one screen while working or browsing on another. But at home I have multiple notebooks side by side so there is little advantage to emulating my workplace setup.Well, that was until my main workhorse notebook PC started developing what I call a Northern lights effect on my integrated display; it was still legible but highly annoying. To be frank, I had never checked my notebook for monitor connections until after I placed an order for a $50 display via Amazon. I had made sure the display was VGA-compatible because I knew I had VGA ports on 2 slightly order laptops. When I saw no VGA port on the workhorse, my heart sank--until I saw the HDMI port. (I knew the display was an HDMI one.)
The only annoying bit in installing and using the new display was it didn't work connecting to the second HDMI port on the monitor (the closest connection to my laptop). However, I did see the display turn on as expected when I switched to the first port. The new display is bigger and better than my notebook display.
But I did experience an unpleasant, unexpected side effect. While I was preparing my daily political post, the Youtube clip I was playing had a lower, more tinny sounding output. I eventually realized that the sound was coming from the display and my sound default had somehow been displaced. I reverted the change to get back to normal. At some point, I'll review how to fine-tune the display output; I just didn't like it being switched without my knowledge.
Other Issues
It's arbitrary to list others, because it seems like a new problem crops up nearly every day. But here's another example, around the time I was dealing with my cellphone SD issue, I discovered that none of my purchased Amazon Music was stored on my tablet SD card--other file/types, yes. Among other music, I've purchased a lot of Christmas collections over the years and had planned to carry my Fire tablet with me on a planned trip, much like my incentive to store offline content on my cellphone. I was somewhat confused because my Kindle purchases are automatically downloaded to the tablet.There are online/offline modes to My Music on the tablet. I hadn't really used the app on the Kindle (I usually use my Amazon Music app or cloud portal to play my licensed music.) I saw a status like "no songs downloaded" in offline button and there was a download button, which I pressed with no status response. In the online section I saw which showed a small fraction of songs which played directly (but not stored from what I could see on my card, and I think there was a Kindle option that music would be stored there). The other songs seemed to be marked as in a queue, presumably for download but would not play automatically on selection. I eventually discovered I could play the queued songs indirectly through a right-click option. But it didn't seem like any of the majority of queued songs were downloaded overnight. What was going on with the queue, and how could I check its status? I didn't seem to find an adequate explanation, including from Amazon's website.
Long story short, I eventually found a Fire tablet setting to automatically download purchased music, which was not enabled by default. Almost immediately soon afterwards I could now see a significant percentage of SD storage taken by music files, and when I toggled on My Music Offline, I could see literally hundreds of tracks available.
I'm not saying relevant documentation isn't available on Amazon or other tech sites; it may be be an artifact of my queries. I guess it would have helped if I could have found a quick start document like "how to download purchased music on your Fire tablet after installing an SD card".
