Thursday, March 23, 2017

Samsung Gear S2 Won't Turn On - How I fixed it

I was a reluctant buyer of a smartwatch. I got the Gear S2 refurbished a few months ago and I ended up really liking it. Unfortunately, I had one charger die and had to replace it. Otherwise, it has been all good.... until yesterday. I grabbed my watch off the charger and it was dead. It wouldn't even turn on. The charger indicator LED showed blue as if it were charging. I went watch-less for the day. Upon returning home, I tried the following steps which brought my Gear S2 back to life:

  1. Remove any protective backing from the watch (I had a protector skin on it)
  2. Plug the charger into a computer USB (low voltage) port
  3. Place the watch on the charger
  4. Wait 2-3 minutes
  5. The watchface should light up and show that it is charging
  6. Let it fully charge (will take awhile)
  7. Take it off charger and power on
  8. Back to normal! Charge with regular power adapter again as needed
Essentially, my watch refused to charge on the regular power adapter. It would only "trickle-charge" on the lower voltage power source. I think it was in some sort of protective anti-overheating mode as it had been very hot when I pulled it off the charger when it wouldn't power on. The low voltage charge must have been "allowed" by the software whereas the higher voltage charging was being restricted. Just my theory...

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Prevent Ionic Header from Auto-Scrolling Content to Top when Header is Tapped

An interesting piece of functionality in Ionic that only became aware of today is "tap-scroll" which auto-scrolls to the top of the screen when the header/title of the view is tapped. This only seems to work in iOS and caused some strange behavior in a view that had some custom scrolling related javascript code. This led me to look for ways to disable this cleanly. It turns out there is an attribute available on ion-header-bar called "no-tap-scroll" that can disable this behavior when set to "true".

Take a look at ionic.bundle.js and you'll see this defined for ion-header-bar.


When setting no-tap-scroll="true" on the ion-header-bar element, you'll be able to disable this auto-scroll to top functionality, which I think is rather unexpected behavior.

Synology Cloud Sync with Multiple Folders / Directories

If you have a Synology NAS running DSM, you are likely familiar with the Cloud Sync package. This package has lots of potential, but has one major blocker: each account can only sync one folder. This has supposedly been addressed via "tasks" in newer DSM versions (6+) but if you are stuck on an older version of DSM, you are limited to syncing one folder to the cloud service of choice (i.e. Drive, OneDrive, Amazon, etc). This is problematic if you have a folder structure where folders like Homes, Videos, Music, Photos, etc are all top level shared folders with various permissions. Say you want to back up all Homes and also Videos, Music, and Photos... you must back each one up to a different cloud service. This is a deal breaker. Alternatively, you can move your folder structure around, but that is also a deal breaker if you have multiple users with different permission levels on these folders.

What is the solution for DSM < 6 then? Permanent Symlinks
With permanent symlinks, you can create "virtual" directories that Cloud Sync will see as real directories to include in the sync. This allows you to have something like "\homes\user1\movies" that actually points to "\movies". Granted, your cloud backup folder structure will be different than your actual folder structure, you will at least get everything backed up.

To implement this, there are two steps:

  1. Make the links:
    1. SSH into your Synology
    2. Run "mount -o bind ‹TargetDirectory› ‹VirtualDirectory›"
  2. Make them permanent
    1. Run the link scripts at startup (more info at https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?t=102158)