Upgrading a Nexus S to Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich)

There's been major excitement (albeit very localised excitement) in this house following the news that Nexus S phones would be automatically upgraded to Android 4. However, as the days turned into weeks I began to wonder if I should ignore my phone provider and do the install myself.

I almost went ahead with it over the Xmas holiday, but news reports about Google suspending the process because of unspecified problems made me back off. Yesterday I cracked.

The process was very simple, and took less then ten minutes. I followed these instructions here. There were no incidents, although I would advise you to read all the instructions before setting out. (I have nobody to blame that I didn't read the words "when you see the warning triangle" before I actually saw the warning triangle.)

What's Android 4 like? Well, the Look & Feel of the UI has improved, and it looks like I no longer need a couple of apps because Android now does the job for me. The default Camera app is much better, and there are several other enhancements. Nothing earth-shattering, but perhaps I haven't yet found all the changes. (I only a couple of hours ago found that I can dismiss individual notifications by swiping over them from right to left.)

Now for the downside: I have encountered three problems since I upgraded.

Most worryingly, last night for the first time ever the screen stopped responding to touch. I tried to power it off, but of course couldn't confirm the action. Then, when I pressed the power button to turn off the display, it was still faintly visible. After a few cycles the phone started responding again, so I quickly powered it off fully before it changed its mind. It hasn't done it again since I switched it back on.

Secondly, I've had notifications that Google+ has stopped. Google+ seems to be built-in, because you can't uninstall it. I disabled it instead, in case it's behind the first problem.

Finally, I've twice been told today that my phone provider is unavailable. To be fair this does happen, but not often, so I mention it here for the sake of completeness.

All in all, I do like the new look, but it may take a few days before my confidence in the phone's reliability is fully restored.

Speeding up my PC--the cheap way

Personal computers, in my experience, tend to silt up and slow down. My Dell at home was little more than a year old and already noticeably slower than when I first booted it up. Of course, I look at what's running in the background from time to time, and remove anything that looks suspect or unnecessary (such as the Adobe and QuickTime quick start tasks), but it never seems to have much effect.

I'm toying with the idea of buying a solid state hard drive, of which I've heard many good things. Trouble at the moment is that they're still so pricey that it wouldn't be much more expensive to just buy a faster PC.

Last month I lost it during a particularly slow session, and decided to take drastic measures. I would often hear the hard drive working, even though Process Explorer (this is a brilliant program, that replaces Task Manager with something really informative--highly recommended) showed no significant CPU activity, and I decided to remove stuff I'd installed that might be responsible. First to go was 'Everything', a nifty program that indexes the files on your hard drive. It's really quick at finding files, but I hadn't made much use if it, so I ran the uninstall program. "Uninstall Everything?" came up the prompt. With clammy palms I clicked on Okay. That didn't seem to do much, so I moved on to Google Desktop.

Google Desktop is another program that indexes the hard drive, as well as your e-mails and any web sites you've visited. It too is really fast, and, on the occasions I've needed to find a lost e-mail, has proved invaluable. However, I was desperate, so out it went. From now on I shall rely on the fact that all my e-mails come in via a Google Mail account. I'll search through them there instead of on my Dell.

And amazingly, that seemed to do the trick. My PC is once again a fast machine, and the hard drive doesn't (often) sound busy when nothing's supposed to be happening. Is this a known drawback with Google Desktop, or just a side effect of my PC configuration? All I know is that I feel like I've saved two or three hundred pounds.

Still, those SSDs do look tempting.

CLCL

I can't remember where I found out about Nakashima Tomoaki's CLCL, but I do remember that I was sufficiently taken by the idea of a program that remembers a list of everything I copy onto the clipboard, whether it be snippets of text or whole files, that I downloaded and installed it straight away, and I've been using it every day since. A few months later I was able to get it set up to act as a quick launcher too, and I use that every day as well.

Despite being so useful, some of the installation instructions took me a while to work out (which explains the few months gap I just mentioned), so I thought I'd lay out here what I did to get this excellent program working.

First, and unsurprisingly, you need to download it. I got my copy at http://www.nakka.com/soft/clcl/index_eng.html. Download clcl112_eng.exe (or one of the other language variants, if they're a better match for you than English). While you're there, also download the two tool plug-ins, tool_text and tool_utl, and the three format plug-ins.

Now run clcl112_eng.exe. It's an installer, and by default unpacks into C:\Program Files\CLCL. You should find you've now got four new files: readme.txt, CLCL.exe, CLCLHook.dll, and CLCLSetup.exe.

CLCL.exe is the clipboard program. It needs to be manually launched, so I put a link to it into my Startup folder under the Start menu. If you run it now, you should notice a paperclip icon appearing in the taskbar. This is a shortcut to CLCLSet.exe.

CLCLSet.exe is a bit confusing. If you double click on the file icon in C:\Program Files\CLCL, it will bring up the CLCL Options dialog. However, if you click on it in the taskbar, you get the CLCL viewer instead. Also, if you right click on the paperclip icon, you get a pop-up menu containing the clipboard history, the Options dialog, and the viewer.

There are endless ways of configuring CLCL, so I will only describe what I've done with it. I find this works flawlessly (for me), so hopefully it will for you too.

Setting up the clipboard history

1. Run CLCLSet.exe to get into the Options dialog.
   
2. Choose the Action tab.
3. Click on Add...
4. Set 'Action' to 'Menu' and 'Call type' to 'Alt + Alt'.
5. In the 'Menu' area, click on the line marked '(New content)'. Don't be put off by it being greyed out.
6. Now click on the 'Content' dropdown, and select 'History(Ascending)'.
7. Hit OK.

You should now find that pressing ALT twice in quick succession will bring up a menu containing a history of everything you've put onto the clipboard since CLCL started running (and this history is retained from session to session).

Setting up the Quick Launcher

1. Run CLCLSet.exe to get into the Options dialog.
2. Choose the Action tab.
3. Click on Add...
4. Set 'Action' to 'Menu' and 'Call type' to 'Shift + Shift'.
5. In the 'Menu' area, click on the line marked '(New content)'. Don't be put off by it being greyed out.
6. Now click on the 'Content' dropdown, and select 'External Application'.
7. Fill out 'Title' and 'Path' for an application of your choice; e.g. 'Python 2.5' and 'C:\Python25\python.exe'.
8. Pick the executable for 'Icon path' too.
9. Hit OK.

You have now added a quick launch for Python 2.5. Pressing Shift twice in quick succession should bring up a menu containing 'Python 2.5'.

Clicking on '(New content)' also allow you to add several other useful features, such as 'Options', 'Cancel', or sub-menus (via 'Pop-up menu').

The CLCL Viewer

I mentioned the CLCL viewer, that comes up when you left click on the paperclip icon in the task bar. The main use I make of this is to edit the contents of the clipboard.

CLCL Tools

Earlier on I said to download two tool plug-ins, tool_text and tool_utl. The tools inside them let you perform a variety of actions on selected text, such as wrapping in quotes, changing case, etc. I will now explain how to install these tools.

The download will give you two zip files. Unzip these and you should find a DLL in each one. There is also the source code and a text file, but these can be ignored. Move the DLLs to a sensible location, such as under C:\Program Files\CLCL.

Now bring up the CLCL options dialog again. Pick the Tools tab. Click on the Browse button and select one of the DLLs. Then select the first tool in the list that appears. Click OK twice to get back to the main dialog.

Repeat this until you have added all the tools in both DLLs. I'm afraid that I have not found a way to import all the tools in a DLL in one go.

To use these tools, go back to the instructions for setting up a quick launcher. Where it asks you to select 'External Application', select 'Tool' instead. In this way you can add the tools to your menus.

CLCL Formats

As well as the tool plug-ins, there were three format plug-ins. These will extend the range of formats available to CLCL, and to install them you have to perform these steps.

Unzip the downloads. Take the DLL in each one and move it to a suitable folder, such as the same one you put the tool DLLs into.

Bring up the CLCL options dialog. Pick the Format tab and click on the Add button. Now click on the Browse button and select one of the DLLs. This will bring up another dialog containing a list with one item in it. Select that item and then press OK twice to get back to the main dialog.

Finally

I hope these instructions prove useful to someone one day. Looking through the options dialog, I realise that there is plenty of stuff I still don't understand. The Window tab in the options dialog is a complete mystery, for instance. If anyone can illuminate that, or any of the other bits I've left out, please let me know and I'll add them to this guide.