Latest posts for tag phone

On Android, there's a spellchecker popup that occasionally appears over the keyboard, getting very annoyingly in the way. See for example this unanswered question with screenshots.

It looks like a feature of the keyboard, but it's not, and so I looked and I looked and I could not find how to turn it off.

The answer is to look for how to disable the spellchecker in the keyboard section of the android system settings, not in the android keyboard app settings.

See for example this answer on stackexchange.

The LineageOS updater notified me that there will be no more updates for LineageOS 14, because now development on my phone happens on LineageOS 16, so I set aside some time and carefully followed the upgrade instructions.

I now have a phone with Lineageos 16, but the whole modem subsystem does not work.

Advice on #lineageos was that "the wiki instructions are often a bit generic.. offical thread often has the specific details".

Official thread is here, and the missing specific detail was "Make sure you had Samsung's Oreo firmware bootloader and modem before installing this.".

It looks like nothing ever installed firmware updates, since the Android that came with my phone ages ago. I can either wipe everything and install a stock android to let it do the upgrade, then replace it with LineageOS, or try a firmware upgrade.

This link has instructions for firmware upgrades using haimdall, which is in Debian, instead of Odin, which is in Windows.

Finding firmwares is embarassing. They only seem to be available from links on shady download sites, or commercial sites run by who knows whom. I verify sha256sums on LineageOS images, F-Droid has reproducible builds, but at the base of this wonderful stack there's going to be a blob downloaded off some forum on the internet.

In this case, this link points to some collection of firmware blobs.

I downloaded the pack and identified the ones for my phone, then unpacked the tar files and uncompressed the lz4 blobs.

With heimdall, I identified the mapping from partition names to blob names:

heimdall print-pit --no-reboot

Then I did the flashing:

heimdall flash --resume --RADIO modem.bin --CM cm.bin --PARAM param.bin --BOOTLOADER sboot.bin

The first time flashing didn't work, and I got stuck in download mode. This explains how to get out of download mode (power + volume down for 10s).

Second attempt worked fine, and now I have a working phone again:

heimdall flash --RADIO modem.bin --CM cm.bin --PARAM param.bin --BOOTLOADER sboot.bin

I try to run my phone on Free Software as much as I can.

I recently switched to LineageOS. I took it as an opportunity to do a full factory wipe and reinstall, to simulate a disaster recovery.

Here's a summary of the basic software I use:

• Operating system: LineageOS
• Application store: F-Droid
• Contacts and calendar sync: DAVdroid and Radicale. I posted some setup instructions some years ago, though it shuold be simpler now thanks to Let's Encrypt
• SMS sync: SMS Backup +
• File sync: Syncthing
• E-Mail: K-9 Mail
• XMPP/Jabber: Conversations
• Sat nav: OsmAnd
• Public transport information: Transportr
• Telegram: the Free client from F-Droid
• Hi-Fi remote control: M.A.L.P.
• Note taking: Lesser Pad