Problem solved.

Factory reset my phone yesterday, I was becoming too OCD about the battery so I tried a last resort factory wipe and looks like the phone is completely fixed now. Still rooted because the WakeLock app is so awesome. I actually thought factory reset wasn't too bad this time around, I wrote down exactly what I had in the folders that I had so it was really easy to put back apps in place (wasn't very time effective though). Still think Samsung should create software similar to Apple's that at least puts your apps back in their respective folders.

Spending the day doing my assignment for MCC, struggling with it a little because there's barely any literature (apart from one paper) on criticisms for the Lewin change model. I'm laughing slightly because the assignment guide says "Bear in mind that an essay is not putting down everything you know or can find on a topic" - well arguably, it kinda is, but you're just twisting what other people say to favour your assignment topic. 

I can't even put down "everything I know or can find on a topic" because I can't actually find anything on the topic... Not that being on here is being anymore productive that is.

My Odd Red Eye and Bad Lectures.

Saying 'red eye' because I don't want to use the term 'pink eye' as we all know what causes a pink eye...

So I've had 1/4 of a red eye for the past few days, I'm pretty sure it's not an infection because I'm not weeping pus or constantly crying out of one eye. I did get some episodes of blurryness though but after a few days of being on Viscotears (these eye drops are magical, seriously, if you get dry eyes often invest in some Viscotears), the blurryness went away - I hope I'm not going blind.

I had the worst example of a lecture today, I'm glad I decided to be late and miss the first 30 minutes, I'm less glad that I didn't decide to be a lazy bum and stay at home. I could've been more productive with coursework if I stayed at home. The lecturer gave us a lecture on being obvious - "a balance scorecard is a scorecard that is balanced", thank you captain obvious. He spent the little time that we had defining every definition that was already written down in our workbooks. I really felt like I left that lecture with no more knowledge than I had before coming to the lecture. I felt like I gained no more knowledge than I would have gained staying in bed and sleeping till 3pm. He even kept us 30 minutes longer to explain some more pointless information that is already written in black and white in our books. Believe me, everyone was a bit pissed off by the end of the "lecture". By everyone, I mean the 9 out of 20 of us that bothered turning up.

So glad I have the day off tomorrow... Oh wait, I have coursework to complete since I'm going to a friend's birthday on Saturday.

With regards to my earlier Android KitKat entries on battery issues and stuff, the issue was actually fixed for about 2 days, but now it's draining again. Did a little more research and I'm actually planning to go more in depth with fixing the issue by rooting my device - except this time, I'll make sure to unroot before I install any updates. So the plan is to root the phone, see what's draining my battery using Wakelock/BBS (whichever is better, I haven't actually tried out BBS yet but Wakelock doesn't seem to show information in a language I can understand...) and nip the problem in the bud.

Weekend off work.

Just had a nice weekend off work despite having to do coursework on Friday and Saturday, but then again, that's pretty standard for me. It's March now and I have 3 pieces of coursework one due each week back to back at the end of March, so I'm trying to make some progress at the moment before I stress out and have a breakdown. I've "started" two pieces, these pieces of coursework are easy but I really should think about what I'm writing before I write things now. Literature search is a pain as well, mainly because there really is no literature that I can work with at the moment - I mean how many people write journal articles about how to interview properly?? I guess I'll just cross that bridge when I get to it.

Sunday was a rare day for me, usually I work so it was nice to have a week off. The weather was perfect too. Went out for lunch at Vapiano in central London with the bf, we actually didn't know what we wanted for lunch, at one point it was McDonalds, then it was Burger King, then we upgraded to Pizza Hut, then we considered KFC and finally we were like ah Vapiano! So we ended up there and had some pasta for lunch.

I had the carbonara here, it was actually really nice that day, it wasn't too thick and heavy. I've noticed at Vapiano, it really depends on which chef you go to, there was once I had the carbonara made by someone else and it was thick as hell, I couldn't even finish it. This was perfffff. The Arizona green tea here is really nice too, perfect with my pasta. 

During my visit to HK, I bought myself a Polaroid camera and happened to have it with me so we took some selfies... Practice selfies actually, since I bought a separate lens to attach onto the Polaroid that has a mirror on it. It's really hard to use... There was one where we were ridiculously close up, I guess my short arms aren't cut out for taking selfies on the Polaroid. 

Went to watch Need for Speed later that evening in 3D at the Odeon in Leicester Square. Tickets were damn expensive because it's on a huuuuge screen and because it's 3D. We were actually disappointed in the movie, when I compare it to the Fast and Furious franchise, this one is really bad for a racing movie. The story was cliche, we knew this kid was going to die from the minute he showed up and we could predict what would happen in the end. Ever since the kid died the whole movie exploded into some sort of revenge plot for the main character. I think we just watched it for Aaron Paul because me and the bf are big fans of Breaking Bad LOL. Props to Imogen Poots for her witty acting though, perfect portrayal of what we British people are. 

Ended the day by having some Nandos, I imagine I'll be having a lot more Nandos within these 2 months since we have too much free chicken to claim before they expire in May. Had some bubbletea in chinatown before we went home. I usually buy the Mango QQ from Chatime but I decided to try the Passion Fruit Green Tea. It was bitter as hell but for some reason, I actually quite enjoyed it... 

So it's Monday today and I have a lecture later. It really sucks to be having lectures in the evening, I wake up at 3pm because I sleep at 7am (yeah, my sleeping pattern has once again, reverted back to some awful state), then I go to uni come home, do no work and sleep. I think I'll have to start waking up earlier to do some coursework before uni so I can actually come home and afford to do nothing without feeling guilty as hell. 

Have a good week peoples! 

Android KitKat Battery Issues & Possible Fix??

Ok, so I had the chance to test this OS out today. [Beware, this post is very technical and full of complaints.]

I've noticed the battery drain is just awful on KitKat, when my Galaxy S4 is idle, the battery gets drained even when nothing is being done with the phone. Back on JB, my phone never did this, I would be on idle after full charge, hop on the tube, get off 45 minutes later and still see 100%. Today, I was already on 88% by the time I arrived at uni. Really unimpressed with this whether it's due to bugs or not but KitKat is supposed to be lightweight and SAVE on battery rather than drain it. 

The main issue that I've been having is that Android OS and Android System are the 2 things that are draining most of my battery. I've been a keen watcher of my battery and what exactly is using most of my battery ever since I joined the Samsung crew and usually it's the screen that takes up majority of my battery life but that's normal for me - it makes sense that whenever I use the phone, battery gets used up right? At the same time, things like Android OS and Android System used to use about 3-4% of my battery life. Ever since KitKat, I've notice Android OS and Android System usage shoot to about 18-20% and my screen is still around 20-30%. Therefore if you do a bit of maths, my battery is around 60% by this point and I've only had it off charge for about 4-5 hours. This is really abnormal as when I used to be on JB, I could use my phone for 48 hours before I needed a charge. 

I've been looking for a fix all day (even in my finance class since I sped through all the questions, my lecturer had nothing to say since I got them all right), but managed to find nothing concrete in terms of a solution. A lot of the problems were geared towards the Nexus 5 (since they got KitKat before everyone else), but no real solution for the Samsung users. 

I saw solutions such as do factory reset - I absolutely hate doing factory resets on Samsung, mainly because Kies DOES NOT back up your settings and layouts with folders etc so any customisations you've had, you will lose. Only thing you keep are well, the things you backed up - which is pretty lousy and minimal considering iTunes backs up EVERYTHING so even if you do a factory reset, when you restore your backup, everything just looks the same before the reset. Why, Samsung? Why?

Another "solution" was to disable location/turn GPS off/turn the Wifi on always to Wifi during sleep only when plugged in. I ask myself why people call these solutions - these are not solutions, these are workarounds. Why would these features even be available if Android developers know they will drain the battery? It doesn't make sense to compromise performance of the phone as a solution to battery drain issues. The problem must be deeper than just Wifi/location issues.

A feasible solution I saw was to do a cache wipe - for those of you who don't know, you boot the phone into recovery mode and you get options such as reboot, wipe data, wipe cache and apparently wiping the cache sometimes solves battery drain issues - sadly, this solution didn't work for me. 

There were other solutions that involved rooting the phone and downloading some sort of battery monitor but I don't want to root my phone again since I almost bricked it last time I upgraded a rooted phone. It's safe to say that rooting Android is no where as simple as jailbreaking an iPhone. I had to learn so much developer lingo to get my phone back to working order when I upgraded to 4.3 and it pretty much rendered my phone useless with no Wifi or network. 

So I took it upon myself to try a few solutions out myself. I tried disabling a couple of things such as disabling NFC and S beam (those fancy Samsung data exchange via touching your phones features). That didn't really do much but it IS a part of Android System so I just left them disabled. I had a look through the phone to see what could be included in this Android System but didn't actually find anything (so many dead ends to my "solutions"), I wiped the cache of some Android related apps under the app manager in settings. None of these seemed to decrease battery drainage massively so I did a last resort battery pull and guess what? It's actually fixed my phone (well, I hope it has). 

So far so good, I've been on 60% for the last 30 minutes, without any idle battery drain. I'm actually just waiting for Android System and OS % to decrease to show that the problem has been fixed. I'm hoping to see results tomorrow when I do a full charge overnight to reset the %s. But at the moment there's been no increase in the battery usage of those 2 and I hope it stays that way! 

So guys, tl;dr - do a battery pull, pull out the sim card too, wait for 1 minute, put them back in and turn on the phone. 

Nerd post: Android 4.4 KitKat

So 4.4 KitKat has finally dropped for Samsung phones. Today was the day I finally moved away from 4.2.2 JB.

I was reluctant to upgrade at first because last time I did, things went horribly wrong. I upgraded to 4.3 and was left without wifi (for some odd reason wifi could not even be toggled on and off) and a really unstable network. I had to go through the long ass process of downgrading back to 4.2.2 which took me about 4 hours to do. Obviously, I didn't want to have to go through that again so I've been putting off upgrading anything for a few months now.

Finally took it upon myself to upgrade today and surprisingly it worked, got to 4.3 fine without problems and then surprisingly the next upgrade went to 4.4 without problems as well. KitKat doesn't look much different to JB, I was expecting a lot more changes to the interface and icons but everything looks pretty much the same. I was probably expecting it to look like my boyfriend's phone, he bought the Nexus 5 preloaded with KitKat - lucky Google phone users got KitKat before the official release to other phones.

I'm actually glad that not much looks different since I'm a change hater, only thing I was a bit like "ewww" towards is the main clock on the lock screen. I could swear it looked different on JB but it looks a bit blocky and square for my liking on KitKat. Haven't managed to test the performance of the new firmware but I'm hoping there's not much change there either, I was pretty happy with the speed, battery life and overall performance of 4.2.2 so hopefully the upgrade hasn't affected the battery life much with all the new features (which I'm yet to see).

I noticed there's a Samsung app called Knox installed with 4.3. I've heard a lot of bad things about Knox and how it prevents downgrading so I have yet to actually enable the app - at the moment I don't plan to downgrade but just in case, it's better to leave the bad things untouched.

Overall, I'm pretty happy that the upgrade went well, I was actually just upgrading to test if there's been a fix for all the problems that people have been reporting regarding the wifi and network stability but looks like everything is alright now. On the contrary, I was actually preparing myself for a night of downgrading again in case 4.3 screws me over, but I can sit back and enjoy playing around with KitKat for the rest of tonight instead.    

Happy days.

I've jumped onto the Walking Dead wagon.

Yes, I've finally got round to watching The Walking Dead. 

I've watched Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad so now it's time for me to jump on The Walking Dead wagon as well. Currently on season 2, I'm pretty much forcing myself to watch all the early episodes because similarly to Game of Thrones, it's starting off really slow but I know the good parts will happen later. So I'm basically cosy'd up in bed marathoning TWD whilst drinking green tea - perfect end to my Tuesday night. 

I had a pretty nice Tuesday today, I ate too much though. Woke up in the afternoon, went over to my boyfriend's house to wake him up to go out. We shared a box of 20 nuggets and had ice cream because we're fatsos. Ended up going to Oxford street to shop around until dinner time. I bought a new trenchcoat from Zara, their trenchcoats are so pricey but last so long and are made of good material so it was worth the monies invested. Only thing I'm not too keen on is the colour, but anyway, this is the trenchcoat I ended up buying.

The style and material is nice, I really like the length of this trenchcoat because I'm pretty short, many trenchcoat styles are way too long for my height so it makes me look even shorter than I already am (unless I wear heels). This trenchcoat sits nicely at thigh length when I put it on so it's great, I can wear it with heels and without. 

We had bolognese for dinner, was supposed to have KBBQ but we both weren't feeling it at the time. KBBQ is one of the meals me and my boyfriend have as a treat when we're really hungry, because it's expensive to have, we try and limit it to only when we crave for it or if it's for a special occasion. We got bubble tea after at Chatime. Chatime is a really popular Taiwanese bubble tea place in Chinatown, there's pretty much always a queue that goes outside of the shop because of its popularity. But because me and my boyfriend go near closing time, the queue isn't so bad - there's still a queue but waiting time is about 3-5 minutes to get served rather than the 20-30 when you go during lunchtime or late evening. I ordered the Mango QQ bubble tea today, I was so tempted to have the Hazelnut Milk Tea but because I just ate dinner, I didn't want something so heavy after so I settled for a cold juice drink. Definitely a better choice. 

My mouse broke recently and my boyfriend bought me a new one and sent it to my house LOL. He's missing me playing league with him so he went and bought me a gamer mouse, I'll miss my shitty bubble mouse that I bought for £4 off eBay :( 

Back to uni tomorrow, sigh, I hate having evening classes since I get home really late, miss out on dinner with my family and then I feel too lazy to do any work =/ 

Why do I always leave things so last minute?

It's currently 4am and I've just finished teaching myself how to use Final Cut Pro...

I'm a complete noob at anything video editing related and iMovie was driving me mad because it won't let me cut my video and save it (something so simple right?) so I resorted to getting Final Cut Pro. I always end up getting more complicated and sophisticated programs instead of standard ones just because the standard ones can't even do something as simple as cutting and saving. Oh sorry, it's called 'exporting' in the video editing world. These video editing apps aren't really for people like me looking for the MS Paint equivalent of video editing. 

So tomorrow I'm going to be mock interviewing my boyfriend as part of my mini project for my degree. I can already see how badly and how long this will take us. He really needs to be serious for at least 30 min tomorrow or else I'm going to be very pissed off. I really just want to get these 3 mock interviews videoed and edited and ready to go because I really need to start the write up even though this project will only be 3000 words long. Seeing as how painful a further 500 words to my standard 2500 word essays can be, I really want to start early as my deadlines are all clustered together... again.

It seems like this semester is finally picking up pace, no more relaxing after uni and chilling on my days off. I need to start buckling down and getting these deadlines out of the way by skipping a few more of those pointless-nothing-to-gain lectures and just getting some of that word count out of the way. 

Other than boring uni stuff, life has been pretty chill. Just sitting around, going out, getting ill, coming home, suffering through the illnesses, going to work through the illnesses etc. I have this week off work though, the last remaining hours of my holiday pay (until next month), I planned to spend it doing work but it looks like I'm going to be catching up on precious relationship time that has been long overdue. It's the weekends that I have off work that I really wish I didn't even have work at all on weekends, but H&M staff discount and my practically non-existent presence at work really doesn't make it seem as bad as I make it sound. 

I remember saying student life would be perfect if I had a good balance between studying and weekend work (back when I had no job and just spent my days as a student bumming around living off student finance)... Oh how wrong was I, money is definitely NOT easy to make. You realise that when you're no longer protected by the financial bubble known as a student loan.