Category: Notes

First Day with XOX

I’ve finally pull the trigger and moved my 9 year old maxis number to XOX. I was all blind by the definition of hybrid “postpaid/prepaid” kind of a plan they had which is named “XOX Black”. Well to get a overall of the story, I have been maintaining 2 phone numbers since 7 years ago, when I got a umobile number and used it as my primary number since they had a nicer data plan to offer. So during all these years I’ve had to feed some monthly fees into my maxis line to keep it active and make sure someone else is not going to take over my number.

But that sucked, I wasn’t really able to make use of any of the credit I was buying for the maxis, as my life was getting more boring and I had to spend more time in Office and Home. I decided to find a cheaper data plan and migrate my maxis number to it, something that takes away all the stress of forgetting to top up a secondary phone on the right due date and so on. thats when I found XOX, a newly born mobile Operator in Malaysia running over Celcom Network offering kind of a hybrid postpaid/prepaid like service called XOX Black, a monthly subscription with carry-forward ability to avoid my data package loss and connectivity issues. that just sounded so good and I was all up for the change, some more my maxis card was too old that it did not even support 4G, so I had every single reason to make the change and start my journey with XOX.

Starting off was easy, like most of todays Operators I requested a sim card online to port in my maxis number to their network. The card arrived to me pretty quick, I was satisfied with the hassle-less delivery. I ran up to the office and opened the envelope. Registered my serial number in their website and boom. Lets wait for the port in to happen, I had both the new sim and the old maxis card in my phones. all ready to see the maxis losing it’s connectivity and the XOX to come up. but oops! one the lovely Friday evening while I was in a restaurant with a friend I received an email saying the port in failed because I used the wrong passport number. Well I kind of expected that, I had one of my older passport number registered with maxis and I was not sure which one of them. So I decided to leave it for the next day and call maxis to confirm which passport number do I have with them. The call went quick and easy, found the right passport number and I was all ready to re-submit my application in XOX online app. That is when I realised, damn I do not remember the serial number that was written in the envelope and I left the envelop in the office. I really had zero interest in going back to office on Saturday morning to get the number back, so I decided to try my luck and call xox customer service and see if they can give my my serial number. I did call them and selected the english as the language, the guy picked up and he started greeting me in Malay, well this is fine but I expected that selecting the language while dialing means something to them like any other customer service Centers, I started to explain my case to the customer support guy and he seemed to be able to understand my problem and he asked for my information, once I gave him the info he asked me to stay on the line while he checks. After a short while someone comes to the line and says how can he help, that’s when I asked if he is not the same guy who I was talking to earlier, he said that his colleague wasn’t able to understand what I say. Well I explained everything and he said he will try to check my serial number but because their system was under maintenance at that particular time, I’d had to call them after few hours. I don’t really like the idea of keep repeating my entire story to different customer service people’s so I asked him if it is possible for him to call me back once their system is online and he said sure. He’d be calling me back to the same number I tried to to the MNP once their maintenance is over, well hours passed and nobody called. I knew he was gone so I tried calling them again and spoke to a different person. He told me that their system is online at that time and he give me my serial number. I made it, I resubmitted my mnp request. But it appeared that it was all a waste. There was no changes in my submission status until Monday, so the MNP basically happens only during the weekdays. Last night I received a SMS off the maxis giving me their good bye wish and hoping to have me onboard again in the future. It was nice of them and I kinda missed it, but was super excited with my new half post paid XOX.

Today morning I noticed that my maxis is no longer in service. I went ahead and checked the phone with the xox sim.

But there was no service on that too, I thought that if I put my phone to airplane mode and then switch it back on again it should help. Did it couple of times but appearntly it was useless. Looks like this mnp process is more sophisticated than that, thus it needed a real reboot.

Yay! Rebooted the phone and I was on brand new shiny XOX mobile. All these happened while I was driving to work. Once I reached I tried to install their mobile app. Such a sucky app. It crashed on my iPhone and the one on the Android was so lousy, but who cares I just want a working cheap monthly service.

I didn’t waste a second and went to the process of signing up with them for the first time, but oops! There is no TAC being delivered. Tried it many times. It was saying try 5 minutes later. It was useless. I know porting into network’s causes TAC delivery issues for banks, I remember a friend of mine was experiencing it before. I went ahead to seek help from their customer service again. The CS told me that this issue sometimes happens to some new port in customers. He told me to try requesting a TAC and he’ll be reading it for me. Tried it twice and spent more than 10 minutes on the phone, nope he was not able to receive anything either.

I asked him so what’s the solution, he told me to reconnect to the network by manually selecting the operator in the phone settings. So I hang up the call with the hope that refreshing the connection helps.

It’s 0903 pm now and I’ve tried to request for a TAC from both mobile and web for more than 20 times and I’m yet to receive my TAC code.

Well after all, welcome to XOX. I hope I can sort this out soon. To be fair I’m writing this on my phone using my brand new XOX card 😎

Fix: OnePlus 5T Face Unlock Slow Down

Did your shiny Oneplus 5T Face Unlock slow down? I still remember how instant I could get to the home screen once I setup my face unlock on my brand new Oneplus 5T a month ago, but few days back I got to notice that there is a delay between when Facial recognition is done and when the phone unlocks.

This wasn’t about the process of Face Recognition, I knew the Face Unlock was still fast but what I was experiencing was seeing a slow sliding animation of unlocking the phone.

In the beginning I thought it was due some update, maybe OnePlus has added some more security measurement to the process, a week ago when one of my colleagues bought a 5T.

His brand new setup was running on the latest Oxygen OS and the Face Unlock was fast. this made me think about what could be on my phone and not on his that causes this issue and the only thing I could think of was my launcher. I am not using the Default launcher shipped by OnePlus on my device, I am running on Microsoft Launcher, so I thought that’s it, catch ya. But I eventually realised that the devilish animation is not coming from my launcher either.

Well after some search it turned out that the issue was due to change in animation speeds in my phone when I activated my Developer mode. I do not remember changing any of these settings but looks like activating developer mode made following settings to get the default value of 1x.

So if you are experiencing slow face unlock or finger print process on your OnePlus 5T and you’ve activated the developer mode sometime during your usage, I highly suggest you to have a look at these settings.

 

Fix Cordova issue with Gradle Wrapper missing From Android SDK in MAC.

Out of the sudden I was not able to build and run my cordova projects on my android phone by getting “Error: Could not find gradle wrapper within Android SDK. Might need to update your Android SDK.” .

It was not a normal SDK issue. after looking around it turned out that Google has changed the location of gardle wrapper in their sdk which was causing cordova not being able to find it. thus trying to run / build the apk was giving out the below output:

Blame is on Google but it seems Apache has fixed this issue in the next version of android-platform for cordova. so if you are one of the victims of errors above you can do this to solve your problem.

lets hope this helps some people out there, stuck searching over a solution like me.

Incoming search terms:

  • mac cli Error: Could not find gradle wrapper within Android SDK Might need to update your Android SDK
  • cordova 7 gradle wrapper fix
  • could not find gradle wrapper within android copy templates
  • could not find gradle wrapper within android sdk windows
  • gradle not found cordova
  • mac android gradle wrapper miss
  • mac could not find gradle wrapper within android sdk
  • template gradle wrapper

Cleanup!

recently I have been experiencing few important breakthrough moments of my life, which led me to look at things from a different perspective, thus many things that used to fit in my previous believe system are now wrong.

So I have decided to remove some of the older posts of my blog which I no longer agree with their contents.

with the hope that no one ever is in need to read those old material, I would like to wish you all a great weekend.

Should you kill background tasks in Android?

Should you use task killers or not

This debate has been there for a while now. When first Android came up lots of apps started to gain people attention by promoting themselves as a task killer and speed booster. I have used them too, there is no blame on them. Android is not doing a good job in restricting applications on system resources. That’s why we are having Android phones with huge hardware specifications that are even more powerful than many of our first computer, but in real world these devices start to lag after installing few apps. This is happening while Apple iPhone products which have much lesser amount of RAM and CPU run smoothly because Apple was strict about resource consumption by developers.
Although now days Android marshmallow is offering features like doze to reduce the battery usage of devices while they are sleeping, it’s still lacking on a proper background task manager.

If you have heard of greenify you should know that it is one of the most popular task killers among Android users at the moment.
Greenify will let the user to kill the background running apps by basically force stopping them. Well that is a really cool and handy app but does it really necessary that you do that to your apps?

My friend was asking about my idea on this yesterday. It’s obvious that when you kill an app and you start it again it uses more CPU time than when it’s already in the background, which will cause more battery drain.
But at the same time it really makes your phone and other apps experience when you don’t have tones of apps in your background.

What I’m trying to conclude here today is that both parties are right. Those who say that task killers are making phones faster and those who say that task killers actually drain your battery faster.

So should you be using a task killer? Or if you are using it, how should you be doing it?

To make sure you are aiming for both better performance and more battery life of your phone when you are using an app like greenify, you should look at yourself and see how do you use your phone. what are the apps that you use the most daily.

if you are a heavy Facebook user and you are one of those whom open Facebook every 10 minutes, then greenifying Facebook application on your phone, not only will not help with your performance, but even it will drain your battery every time you lunch it.

But let say you have ebay application installed on your phone, just like me, and you only use it few times in a month, Then greenifying that background service is not harmful but helps with over performance of your phone and battery life too.

Hope this writing can give you a bit of clue that whether to use Task Killers or Not.