Well, that was fun.
I recently had a tablet ‘donated’ to me. It’s an older model, and recently it had been giving it’s former owner fits. Repeatedly dropping WiFi connections, ‘freezing’ in mid-operation, you name it, it was doing it.
I was mainly interested in getting a tablet as an entertainment device: something I could watch movies and anime on, listen to music, and maybe read a book. So I didn’t figure I’d have as many problems as it’s owner had been having, and besides, it came at the perfect price: free.
First thing I found out about it was that outside of the built-in memory, it had no memory. It had a slot for a micro-SDHC card, but one hadn’t been installed. Quick trip to the local Walmart revealed that I could buy a card that would max out the possible memory for under $7, so it came home with me. Then the fun started. I did some research to find out how best to transfer files between an Android device and a Linux platform. Strangely enough, even though Android is based on Linux, doing a file transfer via a USB cable would require me to install an special file transfer app on the tablet, and even then the information I could gather indicated that the transfer would be both slow and prone to errors. But the card came with an adapter that would allow me to plug it directly into my Linux machine, so I decided to just load the files I wanted onto the card before installing it in the tablet.
It took some time to do this, even with the higher speeds available via the card adapter interface. Dumping 5+GB of music files alone took over five minutes. And the file folders holding my different anime series were roughly that size too. Throw in figuring out what I wanted to have on the tablet ( I had a lot more available than the card could accommodate), and I spent most of Wednesday morning getting the job done.
Wednesday afternoon is one of the times I volunteer to be at the local Democratic Party headquarters, so with all the files transferred, I plugged the card into the tablet and took it with me to see how well my experiment worked.
The results were mixed.
It took a bit of poking around just to find the anime and movies. Turns out, they were all available in the “Gallery” app. Individual series folders holding the episodes were represented by a single image from one of the episodes, so not hard to figure out what was where. For some reason, even though they were loaded as individual files, all the movies ended up lumped together behind a single ‘tile’. Tapping it opened the tile up, revealing a sub-tile for each movie. Decided to try watching an anime episode, so picked one at random, tapped it, and selected an episode for the sub-tiles. The episode opens, and I watch it through before trying another anime series. This one had most of the sub-tiles showing a scene from the episode, but not all. Those that didn’t had a ‘generic’ scene, so I tried one of them. Up pops a message “Can’t play video.”. Okay, why three episodes in the middle of the series aren’t opening, I don’t know, but that’s something to figure out later. Back out, I try a movie, one of my favorite, “Your Name”. The tile opens, and the message “Can’t play video” pops ups even though I can see the video playing behind it. Stop, try again, and this time no message, but also no audio. Another problem to sort out. Time to see about the other content.
Now things get interesting. I can’t find an app that will even see the books I have loaded on. They’re all “Project Gutenberg” downloads, and I’d moved them all into a folder to cut the clutter on the card, so I reasoned that either might be causing the problem. Then I try the music file, and get the same result: nothing can find the music files. Basic trouble-shooting done, and a few ideas for solution in hand. I settled back to enjoy the remaining time at the headquarters watching anime.
Today, I decided I’d pop the card out of the tablet and try a few ideas I’d come up with. First off, I thought I’d see if what was keeping me from seeing the books I had loaded up was them being inside a file folder. So I put it in, shifted the ebook files out of the folder and ditched the folder before ‘unmounting’ the card and putting it back into the tablet. Still nothing. Fine, I reasoned, I’ll just ditch the files, free up a few hundred meg of space, and see what I can do about the music files. So I power down the tablet, open the access panel to get at the card and go to remove it.
For those of you who have never handled an micro SDHC card, they are tiny things, less then half the size of a postage stamp. They slide into a slot on the side of your device and ‘click’ into place when properly seated. To get one out of it’s slot, you press in with a finger nail and release. The card should pop slightly out so you can grasp it for removal….but it is spring-loaded. So, if you’re not careful it can do more than just move into position for removal….it can literally pop out of the device and go sailing out of sight, which is what my card did.
In my case, not only did the card go sailing, it flew over my shoulder and dropped into an area by the chair I was sitting in that holds a trash can and a few other items (it’s nick-name is ‘the junk corner’, to give you an idea of what it’s like). I didn’t see where it went, all the information I had was what I heard. What I heard was the card striking a hard surface, then bouncing off to go…..somewhere.
And it’s still there. I pulled the garbage can, looked under it, around it, and found nothing. Cleaned out most of the junk in the corner, and again found nothing. Then it was time to sort through the contents of the garbage can, by hand, to see if it had gone in there. Nope, checked everything, found nothing.
So the moral of the story? Be damned careful where you work, and remember what you’re working on too. Tomorrow morning I might go out and buy another card, but for now I’m going to spend some time kicking myself for my own stupidity.