Tech Spot

This is for a Motorola Moto G XT1028. YMMV for other variations or generations of the phone, but these instructions are fairly generic. The important thing is that you are able to find the appropriate recovery image for your phone. For me, CWM and Philz Recovery didn't work, but TWRP did. A lot of posts on XDA forums and Android StackExchange have steps for enabling USB debugging mode using the ADB shell. But what if you can't even see your device in "adb devices" in the first place? If your screen is broken and illegible, like mine was, you can't navigate via touch to enable debugging. This was the problem I faced. It took me several hours to really understand the solution. I won't go into detail for most of these steps as there are many guides already: Restart the phone in fastboot mode and connect the USB cable from your PC From your PC's command line, run: fastboot devices List of devices attached TA965XXXXX fastboot If yo...

I have been using Github Atom quite a bit. The more I work in it, the more I feel the need to tweak it. Not out of boredom, but rather that some of its usability is actually annoying. One of the things I just was able to adjust to my satisfaction is the vertical scrollbars while using the One Dark theme. On a Linux Mint install, Atom's scrollbars were frustratingly difficult to use. It is not a problem when you're working with smaller text files, but if you work in large ones you will find yourself spending inordinate amounts of time trying to grab the scrollbar with the mouse. Here is a hacked together styles.less (On Linux: Edit menu > Open Your Stylesheet... On Windows: File > Stylesheet...) CSS that will widen the scrollbars in both the tree view and editor with a well contrasted green-on-black color combo. As for a decently readable dark contrast syntax, you could try the Dark Plus ( dark-plus-syntax ) theme, which is neither too dark nor bright for editing H...

I have Synology's Mail Server enabled and running, but I couldn't find it in /usr/syno/mailstation like some other blog posts mention.  It turns out that in upgraded versions of DiskStation (I'm currently on DSM 5.2), the directory paths have changed.  In fact there appear to be no recognizable package names in /usr/syno. It looks like they moved it into /usr/syno/etc after I ran some find commands.  Try this path:  /usr/syno/etc/packages/MailServer DiskStation> pwd /usr/syno/etc/packages/MailServer DiskStation> ll drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 May 25 08:08 . drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 Apr 13 15:33 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 2014 OldConf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6144 Apr 8 2015 alias.db -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3072 May 9 14:56 attachment_filter.db -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11264 May 25 08:08 log_statistic.db -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1079 May ...

After installing some alternate window managers and playing around, Linux Mint 17 would freeze or get stuck during the bootup sequence. It looked scary: Anachron... Starting Samba... Stopping Samba... Fortunately, there was nothing wrong with the Linux kernel or anything like that, just that the window manager wasn't able to display. These are some hotkeys that might help you get to the console shell. F1 toggles between the Linux splash / loading icon and the console log Ctrl-Alt-F1 through Ctrl-Alt-F6 bring up the terminals (tty1-tty6) Ctrl-Alt-F7 is specifically for the GUI / X session I found some messages like: "Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds", and the following in .xsession-errors: /etc/mdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup... localuser:user being added to access control list Script for none started at run_im. Script for auto started at run_im. Script for default started at run_im. x-session-manager[2466]: CRITICAL: We failed, but th...

Linux Mint is a great variation of Ubuntu. I have mainly used the xfce flavor because I wanted something lightweight to run on my old laptops. I had tried other distributions like Puppy Linux and Lubuntu but they didn't seem polished enough. I admit I have not tried Lubuntu in awhile so it may have improved. With all that comes pre-configured with Linux Mint, I still find I am always looking for that special custom theme or other software to improve my experience. Here's a list: System: Hardinfo for System Information (kind of like Windows Device Manager) Menu/Theme/Appearance: Out-of-the-box Kokodi theme with the Xfce-dusk Appearance setting makes a very pleasing, well contrasting dark look (see screenshot below). There are also good custom xfce themes like DarkCold (highly readable dark theme) Update 9/19/16: My new favorite dark settings use the LiNsta-Black-Plastic xfwm4 theme with the Adwaita-Dark gtk-2.0 appearance.  It actually provides a contrasting b...

I have run Windows XP in Virtualbox for years.  Very stable, with decent performance. It is paradoxical that Linux guests with the same settings run very slowly, with choppy graphics performance.  So I looked at the usual suspects, such as the vbox Guest Additions, BIOS/hardware virtualization settings, etc.  I've read tricks like enabling (and some have recommended disabling) 3D acceleration even for non-graphical usage.  Trying various recommendations, a 64-bit Linux Mint (Rebecca 17.1) XFCE guest with 768 MB RAM and 128 MB vRAM was still running like molasses. The solution in my case?  Increasing the CPU from 1 to 2 (something I have not had to do with my Windows XP guest), made a world of difference. The suggestion was buried in this thread:  http://askubuntu.com/questions/287863/why-is-my-perfomance-too-bad-in-virtual-box

First, you'll need the Motorola Device Manager . The driver files will probably get installed to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Motorola Shared\Mobile Drivers\Drivers You'll need to run Notepad or your favorite text editor as Administrator, and edit the motport.inf file.  Add the following lines underneath both the [Motorola] and [Motorola.NTamd64] sections.  Note, the PID_XXXX code in the strings below may vary depending on the device you're trying to connect.  This particular one is for a first generation Motorola Moto G phone. %USBMOTQCDIAGPORT% = USBMOTPORT, USB\VID_22B8&PID_2E91&MI_00 %USBMOTQCDIAGPORT% = USBMOTPORT, USB\VID_22B8&PID_2E29&MI_00 Sources: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=53094886&postcount=398 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=55014382&postcount=686