Sunday, December 6, 2015

Cartoons by Kutty...vintage stuff

Recently Ananda Bazar Patrika published a series of cartoons by Kutty from their archives. Sharing those over here with a touch of English subtitles from our side for those who do not read Bengali. Those were different times and these cartoons are timeless.
July, 1965. Falling rupee giving the erstwhile government a tough time. T.T. Krishnamachari was then the Union Finance Minister.
January, 1969. Regime of the second United Front government with Ajoy Mukherjee as Chief Minister and Jyoti Base as Deputy Chief Minister. Tremendous internal feud resulted in a premature collapse of the coalition government in less than 2 years.
July, 1966. Scoring an open net goal. Taking advantage of an opposition less Lok Sabha Union Finance Minister Sachindra Chaudhuri has his Finance Bill passed without much of a debate.
October, 1980. Jyoti Basu was then the Chief Minister of West Bengal. Even after coming to power Left Front government is not able come out of its 'bandh' politics. The ruling government government themselves call for a trike. Something unthinkable today.
March, 1971. Riding the thumping victory over Pakistan in the 1971 war, Indira Gandhi wins the general elections returning to power demolishing the opposition.
August, 1974. Erstwhile Finance Minister Yashwantrao Chavan tries hard to control the inflation.
After collapse of the first United Front government in 1967, United Front comes back to power in the 1969 assembly elections. Congress crushed yet again.
August, 1966. Union Government unable to effectively control the rising prices.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

How to solve iPad not charging and restart issue?

Ipad is a truly great device and my iPad2 is now my son’s best friend. He spends quite some time of the day surfing through mostly Youtube on this device. 


Everything was going on smooth with my iPad2 when suddenly yesterday it stopped charging. And when I say it is not charging, I am saying it is “not charging” at all. So when I put in the charger with the iPad switched on, iPad would not charge. And then when I shutdown the iPad and put on the charger, the iPad would restart on its own.
The battery was at around 30% when I tried to put it on charging and encountered the problem.
Many people would think it to be the typical problem where, and strangely enough, a “Not Charging” notification would be shown beside the battery symbol while you put the iPad on charging. But even though it would show “Not Charging”, the iPad would actually be charging. No, this is not that same issue.
I tried searching couple of options over internet. When I first got this solution in the meantime the iPad battery was decreasing and was around 10%. A similar but different approach worked for me. Here is what I did:

STEP 1:
Remove the charge and switch of the iPad by pressing the sleep button for few seconds.
STEP 2:
After the shutdown of the iPad has completed, put on the charger once again. The device is now expected to restart.
STEP 3:
Just when the Apple logo appears on the screen, hold the Sleep and Home buttons for few seconds to force reboot the device. 
Again the device would try to start on its own. As soon the Apple logo would appear, hard reboot the iPad in a similar fashion. Do this for few times. I did this for some 15 times.
STEP 4:
After repeating the above step for quite a few times, let the iPad come up.
STEP 5:
When iPad has started and you can see the home screen, remove the charger
STEP 6:
Hold the Sleep button of the iPad for few seconds to again manually stop the iPad. When you have done this, after few seconds the home screen will go. The screen will be blank; but not yet completely switched off.
At this point, very quickly, put the charge back. After you have put back the charges, a small loading symbol appears before the screen goes completely dark.
STEP 7:
Now the iPad would no longer start up again even though it is put on charging.
STEP 8:
Keep the iPad plugged in this state for the desired time to charge it up.

If in between if you would need to start the iPad for some reason or just to check if it is at all charging, then you can repeat Step 6 above to put the device back on charging once again.
I hope this same approach would resolve your problem as well. Please do let me know if you found any other alternative approach.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

How to Increase Memory on your Samsung Galaxy S2?

As a Samsung Galaxy S2 (GT-I9100) user I had long been facing the problem of memory shortage on the device.The device is definitely a decent one as such but had the peculiar segregation between Device Memory and USB Storage being done. Which resulted in the fact that even though the device had a total internal storage of 14 GB, only 2 GB of that is actually available of app installation and related data.
Considering the computational abilities this is not much and soon I faced problems related to insufficient space. And I had to delete app data or un-install an existing app to make app for a new one.
There are 2 solutions I would like to share over here, one temporary and the other one permanent.
Will share both of them over here for your help:

Go to the Dial Pad of the phone and dial *#9900#. A screen like the one below would come up.
Click on 'Delete dumpstate/logcat'. You will notice some of the Device Memory getting freed up by this process.
It can help you to install updates for existing apps but getting new apps can still be a problem.
The following solution is a more permanent one.


This solution helps to partition the internal memory of the phone and redistribute it as needed. For example I partitioned and allocated 8 GB of memory to the Device Storage i.e. the apps related space.The solution is captured in detail in the following video tutorial shared by techotv.com:


There are some nuances which I would want to state here:
  • Switch Off the phone
  • Press Volume - (Down), Power On / Off and Selector Keys all together to get into the download mode. After getting into this mode you may just follow the process as mentioned in the video tutorial
  • After the process is completed you will notice that the Device Memory is increased as required but the USB memory is not available. You will need to do a Factory Reset using the option available under Settings -> Backup and reset. Once this is done you will be able to get back the USB storage.
Here is what I got:
I had thoughts of changing the phone just because of this space related issue. But S2 is still a decent phone with nice configurations. Having done this I am again back to my good old, its more than 3 years now, Galaxy S2 now.
But as usual be careful; its your phone. Be careful of the model which you are using and  follow the steps as mentioned. You may end up doing irreversible damage to your phone otherwise.