Monday 24 November 2014

Amazon Instant Video Content Protection Error

I recently subscribed to Amazon Prime Instant Video and discovered issue with playback on my PC. 
When I tried to play a video a Contents Permission Error 6036 came up :

Amazon Instant Video Contents Permission

This meant one of my cables , the DVI cable between graphics and the monitor was not HDCP compliant. I found this quite annoying having to unplug the monitor anytime I wanted to watch a video on the TV which was attached via HDMI. 
The solution I found was to change the settings within Amazon Instant Video settings from Silverlight to Adobe Flash Player :

Amazon Instant Video Contents Change to Flash Player

This also took care of my problems with slow buffering caused by Silverlight. 

Hope this helps and any questions please leave a comment!

Saturday 22 November 2014

Rooting Acer Liquid E2 and Increasing 1GB Internal Memory

Hello this is a little post with links to information about rooting your Acer Liquid E2 and possibly increasing the internal memory limit.

Firstly though BACKUP everything. Seriously do it!

For Liquid E2 running Android 4.2.2 and above you can use Kingo Android Root . See this thread  for full information about it and how to use it. I used this method on my phone and it worked just fine.

For Liquid E2 running Android 4.2.1 and below there are a number of different methods - see this thread for instructions.

As you may have noticed the Liquid E2 has a 1gb internal memory limit which is quite low and easily filled up. You can use a cache cleaner and move as many apps to sd as possible but it still fills up . 
There are a couple of other methods that could be used and I am going to try out to gain some more space on my phone. 

Firstly is this method here which is a fairly technical method. The advantage is it uses space from the second internal memory of the phone and not off the sd card. 
The disadvantage is you basically will have to start from scratch setting up the phone again.

The second method is using Link2SD where you create a partition on your sd card and download the Link2SD app which symbolically links the apps from sdcard back to internal memory . Instructions to this are here . 

I mentioned at start and I'll mention again make sure you have everything backed up off the phone!

Hope this helps.

Monday 10 November 2014

Ok Google Voice Search on Android Jellybean

I thought I would quickly write up how I got the OK Google Voice search to do the voice detection from the homescreen on Android Jellybean ( v 4.2.2) . 
Ok Google Voice Search APP
Firstly is to make sure the Google Search app is fully up to date and the Ok Google Detection is enabled in the app. You need to set the language to English US as well.

For those on older non KitKat phones and tablets the way I made OK Google hotword detection was to download the Nova Launcher
In the Nova Settings you can enable hotword detection . This should work from the main homescreen but not from within other apps that you may be in.

There is also the Open Mic +  app but I haven't tried this method out as yet as I am still playing with the Nova Launcher .

I hope this helps out and if you need any help do leave a comment below.

Tuesday 29 July 2014

Mobile Phone History

Hello all today I thought I would do a list of all the mobile phones I have had (far too many!). I always very much enjoyed getting new phones as they were a relatively inexpensive way of playing with new tech and gadgets. As such I was an early adopter of new phones and frequently bought phones that others wouldn't get - such as all the Siemens phones whilst everyone had Nokia 3310 phones! As the list below shows I bought some good phones and well some that were less than brilliant.

Motorola M3788 Mobile Cell Phone
Motorola M3788
This was bought for uni and was pretty basic. If you wanted to text someone you had to remember the number as there was no selecting from phonebook

Nokia 5110 Mobile Cell Phone
Nokia 5110
 Again another phone for uni , simple but easy to use with snake of course !

Siemens S25 Mobile Cell Phone
Siemens S25

This was where I diverted off standard phones and in my opinion onto much better Siemens phone. The S25 is probably still my favourite phone for features such as midi playback, infrared, wap , easy to use and seriously rugged - I dropped it more times than I can remember! 
Siemens M35i Mobile Cell Phone
Siemens M35i 

This was supposed to be a more rugged waterproof version although I never tried submerging it !

Siemens M50 Mobile Cell Phone
Siemens M50

 To be honest I just liked the way it looked it was quite a bit different to the others
Siemens C55 Mobile Cell Phone
Siemens C55 

 I got this C55 because it was a very small phone and battery lasted for ages
Motorola v2288 Mobile Phone
Motorola v2288
The only think I remember about this one was it was free and had a radio - I think once the credit was used up I just used it as a portable radio!

Motorola E365 Mobile Cell Phone
Motorola E365 
This was my first cameraphone. It took pictures and you could sort of tell what they were !

Sony Ericsson P900 Mobile Cell Phone
Sony Ericsson P900 
The p900 was another of my favourite phones - it was the first touchscreen phone I had. Whilst ubiquitous now in 2003/4 a touchscreen was almost unheard of. The phone spent more time in the hands of others drawing pictures on it! The phone even could store music and video on it. The front keypad was also removable to make a full touchscreen phone. If I could charge it I'd prob still use it!

Nec E808 Mobile Cell Phone
Nec E808
This was the first 3G phone launched on the three network.As you can see it was quite a different design to standard phones and designed to be more media oriented. Again you could use as an mp3 and movie player.

Sharp GX30 Mobile Cell Phone
Sharp GX30
The Sharp gx30 had the first 1 megapixel phone camera (if you stood still long enough to get a non blurry picture!). It also had the cool second outer display.

Motorola V500 Mobile Cell Phone
Motorola V500
The Motorola wasn't a particularly fancy phone it was just a good phone to use and my favourite of the flip phones.

Motorola A835 Mobile Cell Phone
Motorola A835
This was one of my less than great buys it was only the third 3G phone released so I had to buy it. But it was freaking huge. Damn thing was tall and very chunky - you could use it as a weapon. It had an mp3 player but it took an eternity to copy anything across. Another early adopter purchase!

Motorola E1000 Mobile Cell Phone
Motorola E1000 
A somewhat better 3G phone the E1000 was. It had better camera and media handling abilities. It also had the little nib style mouse in the middle of the keypad which was quite cool. Alas too much dust ended up under the screen which was a shame.

Nokia N70 Mobile Cell Phone
Nokia N70
Now we are getting to more modern standards of phone with better quality camera, memory cards able to hold more, improved internet browsing and music management. Another one of my favourite phones with good battery life.


Nokia E51 Mobile Cell Phone
Nokia E51
This Nokia was a more business oriented phone although that said it worked pretty well in the media department. It also was very nicely sized and lightweight. And like all the Nokias excellent battery life.


LG U990 Viewty Mobile Cell Phone
LG U990 Viewty
 Another early adopter phone purchase by myself. In principle the phone seemed good an iPhone beater as it was touted. Unfortunately it didn't live up to the hype. The screen responded when it wanted to, buttons broke, the camera was good as long as everything was still. It looked good and when turned it on its side to take a photo it even had the appearance of a camera. It just wasn't usable as a day to day phone in the end.

Nokia 6220 Classic Mobile Cell Phone
Nokia 6220 Classic
After a less than brilliant touchscreen experience I went back to more classic option. The Nokia 6220 was one of my fav phones again. It was easy to use, did all the things the newer touchscreens did, very solid build and a battery with a ridiculous life - I left it on for over a week without charging once! It had a decent camera and removable battery. I still use the phone when I go to festivals because it won't run out !

ZTE Blade Mobile Cell Phone
ZTE Blade
This was a bargain phone as it was a direct release from one the OEM phone makers. It had a very good quality screen for the price and was pretty thin phone. The camera wasn't so great on it and the lack of internal memory was a killer at times. But it did spawn a wide variety of ROMs for it which meant you could upgrade the OS as newer versions of android came out.

Sony Live With Walkman Mobile Cell Phone
Sony Live With Walkman 
To be honest this was a cheaper phone although the specs maybe suggested it should have been better. It was a good a being a music player but I found it a pain to use with problems developing and subsequent updates making it slower. It wasnt one of my favourite phones and rather annoyed me by the end.

Acer Liquid E2 Mobile Cell Phone
Acer Liquid E2
This is the current phone I am using. So far I am pretty pleased with it, it has a good large 4.5inch screen, plenty of power behind it, comes with a pretty vanilla android and so far Acer have been regularly pushing updates to it.Importantly to me it had removable storage and battery - I wouldn't buy a phone without either. Battery life is suprisingly good as well compared to my previous phones. The only issue is the 1gb internal mem - you can move apps to sd but some don't move.