Month: May 2013

I grew increasingly frustrated with the poor battery life that my iPhone5 offered, to the point where I eventually decided to switch phones.  After searching I settled on a Samsung Galaxy S4.  Since I first turned it on, it’s thrown errors periodically saying “Unfortunately CloudService has stopped”.  There’s very little help available for this issue online, but all occurrences link to Samsung handsets or tablets.  After a lot of searching, factory resetting, and head scratching, I found it comes down to something related to Samsung’s cloud services and possibly dropbox.  I did a factory reset again (probably not necessary) and never signed in to anything.  Using the camera, then going to image galleries used to show the issue, now nothing.  I added dropbox, and importantly, enabled image sync (one forum post in this thread said this).  Still working perfectly.  The one key thing I haven’t done is logged in to any Samsung services on the device.

So, if you’re unlucky like me and googleing away to find a fix to this issue, just clear anything Samsung from your accounts.  The CloudService is named using android’s namespace so it looks like it is part of Android but some forum posts indicate it is safe to remove.  I haven’t gone there, but if there’s ever a way of rooting it and loading the Nexus flavour of Android on, that may be a good way to go.

In summary: factory-reset, do not sign in to anything Samsung.

We have a “thing” in Australia.  Twice a year, your neighbourhood has a council cleanup day.  You put all the things you don’t want on the pavement on a Sunday, and some time that week the council trucks come around and take the no-longer-loved items away.  They take their time coming round though, as an entire ecosystem, or economy, has emerged around this tradition.

Every so often I drive past something I can’t believe is being dumped.  Last time this happened, it was a spectacular cast iron table base, with a piece of cheap and nasty laminated chipboard in place of the original table top… I couldn’t help myself.  I stopped and picked it up: Continue reading “DIY: Table Restoration”