Decluttering a Motorola pro plus

Bloat removal. Even though I said I wouldn't do it I've started disabling the some of the packaged applications just because they were always popping up in context menus and annoying the bejesus out of me. Rather than just provide a list I'll try here to provide some information about each application so you can decide if you want it or not. Also, I'm removing these one at a time and running the phone for a week or so in order to weedle out any unintended consequences. So, this list may get longer in time, please check back if the tension is not too much for you.

There's a variety of ways you can disable these applications.

• You need a rooted phone.
• I'm using "ES File Explorer" from the market to rename the apks to something else (in fact I'm appending ".old" to the end of the filename so I can reverse it and restart the application easily if I need to. Note this file explorer takes a bit of fiddling with in "Settings" to do this job.

APK	What's it do
7Digital.apk	Alternative Music player that tries to sign you up to online services, keeps appearing when you don't want it and eats up your RAM and memory card.
gotomeeting.apk	Some hideous collaboration software that would give my IT security guys a heart attack even if I could persuade anyone else to use it
RichLocation.apk	Amalgamated location Social Sign in to tell all your fabulous friends exactly where you are. I don't need them to know.
RichLocation.apk	Amalgamated Social Sign in to tell all your fabulous friends what you are doing (i.e. status updates). I don't need them to know any of that that either.
TTSService.apk	TTS. If you don't know what it is you don't need it.
GlobalUnplug.apk	This puts up a popup which tells you to switch off your charger from the wall to save energy when you unplug your charger from the phone. It can quite frankly stop that immediately.

Motorola Pro Plus - a review

Completely subjective review from a few weeks use. The phone is upgraded to the latest and probably last 2.3.6 release:

• Battery is a bit rubbish - it will barely make a day of fairly average usage. 
• Motoblur is for me just all noise - I've ended up removing all my accounts from the Motoblur umbrella and using the standard, individual Android apps to access email, texts etc. I've decided I don't want them blurred. Annoyingly I need to keep the Motoblur account itself to get phone updates.
• It was really difficult for me to get my corporate email working as I wanted so I ended up using an older (froyo) version of the email application, getting that to work was in itself a trial however it's synching fine now.
• It's crashed once, which is once more than my old android phone did in a year!
• Having a physical keyboard is 1000x better than a touch keyboard.
• The screen is great - I don't play games etc. but it's certainly big enough for everything I want on it. Slightly annoyingly because it is oddly proportioned, certain apps (e.g. BBC iPlayer) don't show up on Google Play. If you can get hold of the APKs (e.g. by pulling them from the store with another phone) they generally load and work just fine.
• It's just slightly bigger than I expected - my car mount and my well worn phone cover won't work any more :(
• The performance of the gallery is super slow. I'm still trying to get to the bottom of that one.
• The advertised 4GB onboard storage is useless. It's actually 1.3GB of accessible memory (the rest is used by the system). As I generally use about 2GB of memory, I need to use an SD card. Once you stick a SD card in the phone, it starts humping everything onto that and ignores the internal memory!
• Some of the apps  (I'm talking about you Samba sharing) live in that nether world of not quite working right.
• Managed to Root the phone which unleashed some goodness (e.g. it no longer says "TESCO" (my network provider) in the status bar all the time.

Root a Motorola Pro Plus

Not exciting at all, however none of the instructions elsewhere seem to exactly describe how to root this clearly unloved Moto Phone (I don't know why - it's great!) once it's been upgraded to 2.3.6.

For Windows download the latest USB Drivers from:
http://developer.motorola.com/tools/usb_drivers/
These come in an installable msi package - you'll need to run this first. Best to do this without the phone plugged in by USB.

Once that is done plug in the phone with a USB cable, it will NOT give you an option to go into USB debug mode. Instead choose "Motorola Phone Portal" which will, amongst about a thousand other things, connect the phone in debug mode. You must also have the "USB Debugging" option set in "Settings->Applications->Development". Wait a while for it to finish...

Download the exploit directly from the clever chap who did all the hard work:
http://vulnfactory.org/blog/2012/02/11/rooting-the-droid-4-a-failed-bounty-experiment/

Follow the simple instructions on that webpage and you are done.

Throwing Light the Right Way - Left.

Well, six (6) years of MOT's on the KLR650, and this year the nice MOT man told me it has a foreign headlight and so the dipped beam casts light the wrong way (i.e. to the right and it should be to the left). I should have known this because I'd looked at the headlight several times for the appropriate UK biased 'E' markings and they are not there. I simply developed wilful blindness to the fact and seen has no-one has mentioned it before...

Anyway, first step e-bay. Nothing doing, it's all crap. Knackered looking parts (existing headlight is actually nice apart from it's recently discovered fatal flaw) and the pictures on there don't show those all important markings without which they may well be as bad as the one I have. It would take more energy than I can summon to start asking difficult questions of the denizens. 

And obviously I'm not going to buy one new of Kawasaki. Do it yourself time.

First thing is looking at the pattern in the headlight glass. Normally you can see a pattern of striations which guides the light for the dipped beam to one side or the other. The old-fashioned way of fixing this was simply to tape over that pattern to get it through the MOT. Except there is none on this headlight. The pattern is plain. Which is actually a good thing, because there's not a lot an enthusiastic bodger can do about patterns cast in glass.

Next, take the whole stupid thing apart. Front plastics off (4 bolts) 2 small bolts at the bottom adjuster and two big bolts either side of the headlight, pull out the wires and... PAYDIRT!

 

Back of my headlight showing the H4 Bulb canted off at an angle of 10 degrees

The H4 bulb is offset in the headlamp reflector at an angle of 10 degrees to the right (the difference between the red and blue lines on the picture) by the tabs on the bulb fitting into slots in the reflector. 

Here's an interesting fact - I have always assumed that the "dip shield" in a H4 bulb, which shades one side of the low beam filament, blocked the light from going to the side. Which turns out to be bollocks - it actually blocks the light from going down. So the above works because the arrangement casts all of it's light onto the top of the reflector at an angle off to the right and then from the reflector downwards to the road - and further still to the right. No light goes onto the bottom of the reflector which would cast light skyward. Which all sort of makes sense otherwise the H4 bulbs would need to be marked for left hand drive or right hand drive and they are not. Who would have guessed.

All that leads up to the very simple fix for this - extend the slots in the metal reflector so that the bulb can rotate 10 degrees to the left instead. File/hacksaw/dremmel and 10 minutes work.

It Clicks, It Pops.

Ever since I've had my Acer Revo it's been irritating me because it pops and clicks at a low but disconcerting volume through the TV I have it connected to. It would stop popping and clicking if I disconnected one of the two stereo channels*; diagnosis therefore is one of those elusive and always poorly explained  "earth loops"

So, I let that annoy me for over 6 months then splashed out £4 for a ground loop isolator from ebay:

Nothing says "High Quality" like a poorly applied black on gold label

Otherwise known as an audio transformer it's a 1:1 er, transformer which, er, isolates the earth between bits of kit thus breaking any of those earth loops.

Staggeringly, it works.

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* I don't have it connected up with the HDMI 5 channel sound because:

1.   I don't have any other 5 channel gear to connect it to
2. Ubuntu.

Flap Meat Beef Strips

Enough to make me quit vegetarianism.

Unscheduled Maintenance

Driving along yesterday in a mild summer deluge I couldn't help but notice that the wipers on my SLK were less "intermittent - slow - fast" as "occasional - weary - stopped". I expected my bank balance, personal safety or chances of getting the mid-afternoon snooze all to be at risk.

Having an eye for broken windscreen wipers my diagnosis was that the linkage was seized. The Internet says a new one is more than £100 so I'll obviously be taking the old one to bits in lieu of having anything better to do.

1. Remove both wipers; under the plastic caps on the tops of the spindles are nuts and then a bit of wriggling to get the wipers themselves off the tapered shafts.
2. Remove the plastic bulkhead shield - half a dozen self tapping torx screws then a bit of pulling. The washer jets are attached to this so just plonked on top of the engine so I didn't need to disconnect them
3. You can now see the wiper mechanism; I removed the nut which connects the linkage onto the motor (after marking it's position with tippex so I knew where to put it back...) and the motor was able to whizz around quite freely on it's own. Also I tried to move the linkage by hand and it was going nowhere - Diagnosis correct!
4. There's three bolts holding the wiper mechanism to the car - one above each wiper spindle and one on the bulkhead. Because the linkage was jammed in an odd position I had to also detach the motor to get it out (three more bolts in the middle of the big metal plate on the linkage.

Once I had the linkage out it became obvious it was seized as balls. I put it in the vice to work it back and forward with a big lever and all the penetrating fluid which freed up a little but it was never going to be right. Also I couldn't tell if one or both of the two spindles was seized. It needs to come to bits.

Can you take the sodding thing apart? Unbelievably, you can. Each of the spindles sits in a housing like this:

I am good drawer.

It's a simple case of pushing off the circlip (which is actually very easy). I did the driver's side one first and the spindle fell out of the housing with only a slight bash with a hammer. That one's ok then. Then I tried the passenger side (centre) one and, well, that was stuck.

After several rounds of violence and bad language I managed to get it out. It dragged one of the bearings out of the housing with it.

My theory about what's gone wrong here - the depression that the o-ring sits in was full of aluminium corrosion. That had forced the o-ring against the spindle and it had worn away (it was more "D" shaped than "O" shaped). Water got in and sat in the void between the two bearings and that filled with steel/aluminium corrosion. My guess is that this isn't so bad until it dries out and since there's now no water to lubricate it, it suddenly seizes.

Here you can see the spindle complete with the (plain, brass?) bearing that got pulled out of the housing. In the middle you can see where I've cleaned up the big glob of corrosion. To the left is the actuating arm and to the right is the groove for the circlip.

Anyway, all the bits were cleaned up, lubricated and re-assembled (including pressing the bearing back in) and... everything worked perfectly - better than ever in fact. I didn't have a replacement o-ring so I reassembled it with the old, tired one, however I can change that with  the linkage still on the car next time I have cause to be ferkling around in there.

Total time taken - about two hours plus procrastination.

Now, stop raining and breaking.