Okay, so a bit of an ego hit weekend for me for the tech department.
Now and again the tech gods like to keep me humble when I believe that I'm a bit of an expert on things.
Starts off with some new toys to play with and set them up okay. Then I noticed odd things:
- My Home app was saying that it's detecting another home mini to set up. It's saying it's the name of a speaker I previously set up and can't seem to go through the setup process, yet I can't clear out the notification in the app that there's something to set up. Hopefully, it's not the neighbours'.
- Then, my Pixel 3 XL freezes. Just mid app and all I can do is hard reset it. When it finally reboots, it's now lost its ability to do the vibration thingie. Noticed it when I put my fingerprint in... usually, there's a subtle bvvvt when it works. Hrmm... I try all the settings. Nothing. I factory reset it. That somehow made it worse as whenever I would try to wake lock (pull it from my pocket and turn the screen on) it would take up to 30s to display and have an error with SystemUI. Instead of factory resetting it again, I decided to do the Android Q beta. Which fixed the SystemUI lag, but the vibration motor is still out. Had a nice chat with the Pixel support team who inevitably says I'm on my own (it's not a warrantable item as I received it from other means). Note, this is the same device I've also had that weird 'death mode' on as well.
- Helping a friend with their phone that seems to be pocket dialling and weird locations for weather on the home screen. Try all my tricks of the trade and no dice. Factory resetting was a bit of an ordeal because with Samsung you need their account password, which is separate from Gmail (and he uses Hotmail for that account). So 3 passwords later I've left him to finish the factory reset at home.
- Setting up the P30 Pro again (yay) for some further testing. I swear in the past that when I log in and set up Chrome's password sync (Smart Lock for Passwords) with the right passphrase, I'm able to bring up the synced passwords as I set up other apps. But no dice. Try all the right nooks and crannies on support and closest I get is that when you go into SETTINGS / GOOGLE / SMART LOCK FOR PASSWORDS on the P30 Pro it says it's failed to authenticate credentials on this device. No amount of Googling has been able to help me overcome this one. Bollocks...
- In setting up a few devices this weekend, my factory reset Pixel, the P30 ... I've noticed that my Google Calendar looked a little empty. Turns out whenever I pop the app on, only a couple of my 'calendars' are actually 'syncing'. I had to go into the app, go to my calendars, find the 'others' and click each one at a time to get its option and turn on sync. Weird. You'd think all of them would be turned on by default. Oddly enough the only one to be turned on right away was my son's calendar that I've set up that he shares to my account so I can add/edit his appointments for him. Absolutely weird.
Some days.