I made the switch a few weeks ago to “ART” (Android RunTime) from Dalvik on my AT&T LG G3. All I have to say is HOLY COW… I think I have nearly doubled my battery life. I normally unplug my phone around 7:30 AM and by the time I plug it back in at night around 11:30 PM I would be down to 15% battery life. Right now it is about 1:45 AM and I am still sitting pretty at 54% battery! I am thrilled to say the least.
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I had some trouble finding some good examples of syntax and full explanation for creating VHD files (attaching new hard drives) from the Azure Powershell command line and attaching them to existing VMs. Here is my quick and dirty method of doing just that…
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Well, I had my Xiaomi Mi3 stolen recently :(… luckily my work replaced it for me with an LG G3 from AT&T. This is the first time I have gotten a mainstream android smartphone from one of the big networks and I was in for a few surprises…
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Ran into a fun issue today… I had a pair of Server 2012 R2 servers in a remote office that refused to sync the proper time for their clocks. No matter what I did they were always off by five minutes. One of them was a domain controller for the office.
In the process of fixing the issue I learned about an interesting feature in hyper-v that was the root cause of all my trouble. By sharing my experience, hopefully you will avoid the same issues I ran into.
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I finally found a few minutes to write up a short how-to on getting your Chinese Xiaomi Mi3 Smartphone rooted, westernized, and cleaned up!
To make your life much easier, I have actually written a couple of scripts that can be used to remove all of the Chinese bloatware from the phone, install the Google Play Store, and a separate script if you want to root your device.
Now, there are already several pre-packaged roms available that come somewhat cleaned up and with the Play Store pre-installed and are even rooted… however these are all based on development (dev) releases of roms from Xiaomi. In my experience, the dev roms tend to be a bit unstable and a bit sluggish compared with Xiaomi’s production releases. I have also found that the primary method Xiaomi promotes for flashing ROM’s, while very easy, isn’t the best and tends to result in bugs and issues. However there is another Xiaomi supported method using a feature called “fastboot” which is very easy and results in a solid install of Android.
A ROM is simply a type of software/firmware that is installed on special Read Only Memory. In this case the ROM files contain the operating system, Android, and other pertinent files that are required to make the phone work. The installation process is called “flashing” and the terms ROM and Firmware and usually interchangeable.
So the beauty of my method is that you get to use a production rom from Xiaomi which is stable and fast, but you get the advantages of a cleaned up dev rom in that it is totally stable, with a working, minimalist install of the Play Store and you can even root the device you choose. I am not a big fan of the MIUI launcher, nor will many western users be who are used to the advantages that come with using the Google Now launcher and its variants on other phones. Once you are finished with this tutorial you will have the latest features that Google is offering in Kit-Kat including voice actions (saying “OK Google” to your phone which tells it to listen to you and then you can ask for stuff or give commands).
So here is a high-level of what I will be walking you through in more detail. (more…)