TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

Symptom : Your favorite game and/or games have disappeared from your Home screen and app drawer. They are not hidden or uninstalled. You can see them if you search in the app drawer, but can't otherwise see them, or re-add them to the Home screen. You may notice other apps that have the same problem. They will also be games.   Solution :  Gaming Hub has been set to "Show game apps In Gaming Hub Only".   Go to "Gaming Hub", click the three-dot menu, click "Show game apps", reset to "In Gaming Hub and the Home and Apps screens". Why the f^#k anyone would WANT an app to hide other apps unexpectedly is utterly beyond me.

 Problem:  After restoring your PIA connection from after it broke using router-based VPN, you do not have full connectivity.   Specifically, none of your smartphone apps or smart home devices work properly. Your router IS connected to the VPN You ARE using the correct encryption, port, and ca.crt combination They DO have a working internet connection They CAN see the internet They DO work outside the VPN But they can't log in to, or access, their respective servers through the VPN: Gmail: Useless "View more" link that does nothing Banking apps: Can't log in Starbucks: Endless "Finding stores" Ecobee:  "Trouble connecting to your device" Honeywell Home: Endless startup Ratuken Kobo: Endless accessing "My Books" Smart Life: Endless startup Lastpass: Password vault is empty Roblox: Endless loading Minecraft: Can't join multiplayer servers Terraria: Can't join other players  Pixel Guns 3D:  No multiplayer available Ecobee thermostat...

Further to my previous post , I have found XWidget to have a lot of good options for information displays on old Androids. New development of XWidget has reportedly stopped , but the app still works fine.  Rainmeter is (presumably) intended to replace it, but it doesn't (yet) work on Android. The free version allows you to access a fairly good library of free widgets.  If you want the others (such as something from this massive collection by jimking ) you need to pony up a couple of bucks . Despite the developers insistence that it was possible to transfer downloaded widgets to Android, I could not make it work. XWidget would not connect to my phone (yes, I checked the driver). [Update 2019-04-06]:  The .XWP files for Xwidget are nothing more than zip/rar archives.  You can open them directly with WinRAR and extract the working files without the need to install the PC application, as described below. Original text: "My workaround was to unpack/install th...

No shortage of sites telling us we should be re-purposing old phones rather than junking them. I wanted to make a wall clock / weather station.  Easy, right? Nope. Many issues, including: -  The phone did not support a landscape home screen, meaning widgets were out. -  Most weather apps looked like crap. -  Many weather apps also did not rotate into landscape. So, several things to fix.  Very frustrating for what should have been a trivial thing, took much longer than I expected. As I wanted landscape mode, that meant an app and not a widget.  I tried out 10-12 weather apps and was not happy with any of them in landscape; most of them did a bad job of using all the available real estate. Some solutions: 1.  Install Nova Launcher .  This allows most any phone/tablet to have a landscape home screen; it also hides the status bar. (It can't hide the home/back buttons - that's part of the OS.  But it does everything else.) ...

In many ways, smartphones and tablets are struggling to meet their potential.  In my opinion, nowhere is this more evident than in the grocery shopping application. (Note I used to use ToMarket, then stopped using it because it was not handy any more.) --- Everyone thinks of shopping apps as a 'simple' application.  It is anything but simple.  It is, in fact, quite a problem in information management. The ideal shopping app would theoretically have all of the features below: -  Very quick app setup -  Enter large amounts of information quickly -  Create lists quickly, including remembering recurring/favorite items -  Track items by category, store, and location -  Determine total cost from a given list -  Guide you through the store quickly and efficiently -  Track coupons, discounts, and sales -  Sync shopping lists across multiple devices -  Add ingredients from recipies instantly To accomplish this, you n...

If you have any combination of multiple Google Apps and Gmail accounts, you're probably sick of signing out and signing in to different accounts to do different things.  Fortunately, Google allows "multiple account sign-in" that can alleviate the pain.  Makes it sooo much easier to manage all that email. The feature is not supported across all Google services (like Blogger, for example).  Not working for you?  Try these other solutions from TechRepublic.

Like many people, I had to do this when setting up a Google Apps account - I needed my personal calendar and Apps calendar to both show up on my phone. You often cannot just add another Google account to an Android.  You typically get a "Can't establish a reliable data connection to the server", which is complete crap.  Essentially, you are stuck, unable to add another Google account to your mobile - dumb, but true. However, if you follow the instructions so helpfully provided by Marc Fonteijn , you can get it working.  No import/export required.  Basically, you share the Calendars between both accounts, and give both sides the ability to edit events on both calendars. If you run into the bug where "Share all information, and outsiders can change calendars" is not shown as an option:  Set up the share email accounts anyway.  Shut down all your Firefox windows, restart Firefox, and clear everything in your history.  Then sign back in to your Apps ...

OK, you're stuck in the middle of the pissing match.   What do you do? Maybe try Google Apps. I'm usually pretty wary about this sort of thing.  I don't want to waste time, I'm leery of cloud-based 'stuff', and 'free' services are often anything but.  So I did some homework, and here is what I found: Apps is (supposedly) to custom domains what Gmail is to personal domains.  In fact, it seems that there is no difference between a Gmail account and an Apps account - except Apps email 'comes' from your own domain name. For example, in Gmail, I am "titam@gmail.com".  In Apps, I am 'titam@titam.com'.  Cool. Aside from that, Apps is just Gmail.  Sure, you do get Calendar, Drive, Docs, etc.etc. thrown in for good measure, but for the purposes of getting off GoDaddy email and on to something else, the Apps mail service is what we really need right now. I've used Gmail for a while now to back up my GoDaddy email.  So I kn...