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		<title>Lots of mobile issues &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2015/09-September/04.xhtml&gt;</title>
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			<h1>Lots of mobile issues</h1>
			<p>Day 00181: Friday, 2015 September 04</p>
		</header>
<p>
	When I awoke this morning, I found that instead of still being under my bed, our cat was not on top of the bed with me.
	Since then, she has moved around the bed a bit, and occasionally leaves it, but even when left alone, she continues to mostly gravitate towards the bed.
</p>
<p>
	For quite a while, I&apos;ve wanted to disable the &quot;Phone&quot; application on my mobile, but the usual interface for disabling system applications doesn&apos;t allow this.
	When looking at the &quot;Phone&quot; application in the system menu, the option to disable it is greyed out.
	I&apos;ve been told that there is a way to disable any such application from the command line, but had yet to look into it until today.
	Because I wanted to be home as much as possible while the cat gets used to her residence, I didn&apos;t really have anything productive to work on.
	I looked up instructions telling me that to list packages, I should run <code>pm list packages</code> and to disable a package, I should run &quot;pm disable {package name}&quot; as root.
	I tried disabling com.android.phone that way, but it did not work.
	Instead of removing the &quot;Phone&quot; icon from the application drawer, it removed it from the system menu but left it in the application drawer, still usable.
	After fiddling with it a bit and rebooting several times, I decided that the only way to disable the calling functionality was probably to outright delete the &quot;Phone&quot; application.
	I decided to install &quot;/system/app mover&quot;, move the &quot;Phone&quot; application to where I could back it up and delete it, back it up, then uninstall it.
	However, upon moving the application, complications arose.
	First, the &quot;Phone&quot; application crashed, popping up a dialog asking for confirmation of the message.
	That didn&apos;t seem so unexpected, as it had just gotten moved.
	However, every time I confirmed the message, it would pop back up again! It seemed the &quot;Phone&quot; application insisted on restarting.
	No matter how many times it crashed, it would not stay down.
	I tried rebooting the device, as it was the only thing I could do with the device in that state.
	After rebooting, &quot;Phone&quot; crashed once, then stayed down.
	However, the <abbr title="Global System for Mobile Communications">GSM</abbr> signal icon had disappeared entirely! It seems the &quot;Phone&quot; application is somehow tied to the wireless capabilities of the device.
	I find this particularly frustrating because Android tablets do not have the &quot;Phone&quot; application, yet they still connect to the network.
	For some reason, the &quot;Phone&quot; application is necessary for connection, but only on so-called &quot;phones&quot;.
</p>
<p>
	Undoing the move of the &quot;Phone&quot; application was not easy.
	&quot;/system/app mover&quot; could not find the application to move it back, so I had to do it manually.
	First, I verified that the two application directories were located at <a href="file:///system/app"><code>/system/app</code></a> and <a href="file:///data/app"></a><code>/data/app</code>.
	Then, I tried using the <code>mv</code> command.
	It shouldn&apos;t be very hard, right? Wrong.
	<code>mv</code> failed due to the two directories existing on different partitions.
	I tried <code>cp</code>, but that didn&apos;t work either.
	This time, the problem was that the <code>/system</code> partition is read-only.
	I tried running <code>mount --help</code> for a hint as to how to remount the system as writable, but the command wouldn&apos;t take the <code>--help</code> flag or the <code>-h</code> flag.
	I couldn&apos;t look up the answer online because I had no connection; my laptop was offline due to not having an <abbr title="Internet service provider">ISP</abbr> and my mobile was offline due to this mess I caused and was trying to clean up.
	I tried running <code>mount --help</code> on my laptop to see if instructions existed there, but the instructions there were incomplete.
	There was no mention whatsoever about remounting.
	I cobbled together <code>mount -o remount,rw</code> from part of the <code>--help</code> output with some broken fragments of information in my own memory, and tried running that.
</p>
<p>
	When messing around with the mobile, one thing I did was turn on &quot;fixed dialing numbers&quot;.
	I don&apos;t know what those do yet, but it seems that that feature is buggy and messes with connectivity as well.
	If fixed dialing numbers are turned on when the device boots, connectivity will not be available until the feature is turned back off.
	However, when the feature is first turned on, connectivity will not be lost right away.
	Instead, no issue will be seen until the next time the device restarts.
	The connectivity issues caused by that took much longer to solve, though I didn&apos;t actively try to figure them out the whole time because I had no way to know if the issues were caused by my device or caused by the carrier&apos;s towers.
</p>
<p>
	It seems that some scammer got ahold of a bunch of my mother&apos;s personal information, including her full legal name, telephone number, and the last four digits of her Social Security number.
	He called her up claiming to be the <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr>, saying that she had accidentally committed fraud on her taxes or something.
	He claimed that the <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr> had audited her taxes, and she owned them money.
	If she wouldn&apos;t pay, he said that the <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr> would take her to court.
	When she refused to pay, not believing he was with the real <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr>, he claimed that an officer would be be at her door in forty-five minutes to <q>put her in handcuffs for a really, really long time</q>.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	That sounds very legitimate.
	Of course, the officer never showed up because there wasn&apos;t any real legal issues going on.
</p>
<p>
	At our new residence, we&apos;ve got a greenhouse full of edible plants and some corn stalks growing outside it.
	The landlord said we can take whatever vegetables we want from there, and that many of them are ready to harvest.
	Today, we tried opening up some of the corn ears and found that they are not the generic yellow that we expected.
	Instead, the corn is a variety of fun colors.
	Most of it is varying shades of green and purply-grey, but there are also reds, purples, and a few standard yellow mixed in.
	Each kernel, even on one cob, seems to be a different color, aside from the yellow ones which all matched.
	The cobs themselves are still yellow, as are the sides of the kernels that are not directly exposed before removing kernels from the cob.
	It&apos;s unfortunate that corn kernels are so attached to the cob that removing them seems to damage them.
	Once I have Internet access back up on my laptop, I plan to do some research on how to safely remove corn kernels for planting.
	It would be fun to keep this atypical corn around.
</p>
<p>
	I am cut off from the Internet tonight and cannot update my <a href="/a/canary.txt">warrant canary</a>.
</p>
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