New story, Dark Age Chronicles: The Awakening

I so forgot to post this so I'm going to quickly post links to the next chapter in the series.  The Awakening itself is split into two stories.

• Shadows of the Dead
• Lifting the Shadows

Enjoy!

Asus ZenFone 2's Battery Life

I bought the Asus ZenFone 2 (ZE500CL) purely because I was drawn by its Intel Atom processor and it seemed like a decent device.  The one thing that really got to me was the woeful battery life.  I had the choice of getting the ZE550ML one which had a bigger battery (2500mAh vs 3000mAh). However, it has a bigger screen and houses a quad core processor.  I don't need a quad core phone and the 5" screen can barely fit in my palm so a 5.5" screen is way worse!

I've shut down a lot of services but I could barely get half a day out of my phone without needing a charge.  It got to the point where I was bringing my charger where ever I go.  Sometimes, a USB power bank as well.  Then, I discovered that I had GPS and location turned on.

I had not realized how much this thing sucks the life out of my phone battery.  Turning it off makes the phone last quite a bit!  What an amazing discovery and also a massive face palm on my part.

Flashplayer and Linux Mint

So a vulnerability was found on Flash that made Firefox disable the Flashplayer until people updated their plugin.  Adobe released an updated version of the last non-Chrome version of Flashplugin for the update but I seemed to be running into some issues with the browser not picking up the latest version.  So, what I did was re-download the latest version of Adobe flashplayer.  Then, I copied libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so and /var/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so.  Then, restarted Firefox and checked the add-ons.  Finally the latest version was recognized.  Back to regular programming.

Android and GPS

So, I've been traveling way more frequently than I used to and I figured having the GPS on my Android devices could be handy.  However, I realized that my Acer Iconia Tab A500's GPS never actually worked.  Also, the MoveTab had GPS that worked really well and then suddenly stopped working.  If I remember, GPS never worked for my Samsung Galaxy Pocket either.  All of these nonfunctional stuff got me reading and investigating just how to use this equipment.  Read that after the jump!  Note that a lot of the focus of this article is on my poor Acer A500 and its horrible GPS.