Category: Toys & Tech

I accidentally deleted all of my Gmail contacts with my Android phone…

…but this is why I use Gmail instead of, say, Hmail or Ymail. I restored all 1,000+ of my contacts by logging into Gmail on a PC and doing the following:

  1. Click Contacts.
  2. From the More actions drop-down menu, choose Restore contacts.
  3. Choose the time you’d like to revert your contacts list to (e.g. 10 minutes ago, one hour ago, one week ago, etc). We suggest that you also make a note of the time that you restore your contacts, in case you’d like to return to where you started.
  4. Click Restore. You’ll see a confirmation at the top of the screen when the rollback is complete.

You can perform a restore from up to 30 days ago.

This info plus more can be found on the relevant Google support page.

USB 3.0 in full matzofrackin effect!

We’re leaving for the US tomorrow night, so I’m preparing a full data backup of our most important work plus digital photos that now number in the hundreds of thousands and date back 14 years or so. It all adds up to less than a terabyte because I store the big files like RAW format photos and midget elephant tentacle pr0n elsewhere. So the backup method I started from our last trip back home is to copy everything to an external HD and store it at our home in the states – it’s a pretty ideal offsite storage solution.

I went to buy a 2.5″ USB hard drive at the computer store and found that last year’s flood has driven the price on HDs up at least 20% even here in Thailand. The one major difference in spec on external HDs from two years ago is that most of them feature USB 3 now. Eager to see if it really makes a difference or not, I got home and promptly dumped my photo archives on it… It really is super fast! It feels like the transfer speed is limited by the speed of the drive now instead of bottlenecking at the controller. The transfer rate holds steady over 40 MB/second and peaks at over 50, which is a hell of a lot faster than I remember the USB 2 drives being.

Screenshots with HTC Desire HD

My Desire HD, which is running original (non-rooted) Orange system software, was recently updated to Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread) and HTC Sense 3.0. Along with all the UI improvements and improved battery performance came a very cool feature: The ability to capture screens built into the system.

To capture a screen (take a screenshot) with an updated Desire HD, hold down the power button while pressing the Home key. By default, the phone will make a camera shutter sound to let you know it captured the screen.

This same procedure will work on some other updated (Android 2.3.5, HTC Sense 3) HTC phones, and apparently on Apple iPhones as well (which they will teach you FOR FREE at your local Genius bar!).

New Google TOS & Privacy Policy

Quite a few people have asked what I think of the new, unified Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. The short answer is that it’s nothing to worry about.

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If you are smart, you use Gmail above all other free email services because it works the best. You probably use a bunch of other Google services as well. However, Google is a successful corporation that does not place your interests above their company interests. It is entirely conceivable that they may screw you some time, in some way. Until it happens, just enjoy the amazing shit they provide to you at no charge.

Besides, Facebook is already screwing you much harder than Google could even dream of.

Fake Kingston Flash Drive

I went to the annual Chinese festival in downtown Maha Sarakham last month; this is one where they host Chinese opera at the business association meeting hall (I uploaded crappy vids of the opera this year here and here). Aside from the performance, which I generously bear for up to three whole minutes every time I go (once every couple years), I also like walking the wide area of stalls filled mostly with unimpressive yet numerous food vendors.

At the end of one row of stalls was a memory card/USB thumb drive vendor selling at very low prices. I picked up this 8GB Kingston stick for a couple hundred baht with the intention of filling it with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Yo Gabba Gabba episodes for the kids, which they can use with our DVD players at home and in the car.

Unfortunately, the plastic case of the flash drive separated into halves within a week of unpackaging, and most of the files stored on it were corrupted or lost even after low level formatting. I had noticed that the packaging looked a bit suspect just after buying it, but had used fake name brand USB sticks before and hadn’t had any problems… I took a closer look at the packaging:

It's true, nobody reads the fine print!

Lesson: If you buy fake crap, sometimes you will be burned.

Es verdad.

During my first year of study at Tenri University in Japan, I met my cousin Erisa. She was from a line of my dad’s family, the Yoshidas, who emigrated to Mexico, whereas my family went to Los Angeles. I never even really knew we had Mexican relatives until I met Erisa.

She spoke zero English, and I spoke high school level Spanish (just enough to not be able to do anything with), but we were both starting to learn Japanese, so we ended up using that over the time she was in Japan (just a couple of years, whereas I stayed for 13 or 14 cumulatively). We were both totally Japanese in appearance, so it must have been a sight when we had these multilingual conversations out in public.

Even though I was using e-mail and laptops before anybody else around me, nobody else was, and I’ve lost track of many good friends from those days. So it made me immensely happy to reconnect with Erisa on Facebook back in August, by accepting her friend request and commenting on one of her posts. She just replied to the comment today, so I guess she was busy or whatever, but I know I can contact her whenever, now. Maybe this leaves the door open for me to visit family in Mexico sometime…

I still hate Facebook for being evil and selling my private information to boner pill companies, but it did a good job for me today.

Free SMS Messaging in Gmail

This could be a killer new feature for some people. Apparently Google at least partially pays for it by the return messages from the mobile device (that you’ve first sent a message from Gmail).

The way it works is that you start with 50 credits (displayed in the Gmail chat window where you send the initial SMS message). Every SMS message you send from Gmail uses one credit. Every message replied to from a mobile device restores 5 credits (for a maximum of 50). If you use all the credits, 1 credit will be restored automatically in 24 hours. So I guess you could game the system (because you’re a rebel screwing the system, man) by never replying from a mobile device.

So I’ve been trying it with both supported carriers (DTAC and True) in Thailand this morning, and there’s one big problem: The messages are arriving to the phones 8 to 10 minutes after I send them from Gmail. Too slow. The return messages are much faster, taking 2 or 3 minutes, but this is also very slow compared to sending between mobile devices in-country. I hope Google can use their magic influence to make their free SMS messaging a bit more usable in Thailand, but maybe it’s a case of you get what you pay for.