A couple of sketches of La Trappiste in Canterbury, Android phone memory problems, oh what the hell memory problems in general.

Yesterday morning, while the more pious family members were out god bothering, I went out and bought several boxes of books for my bookshop, we all then went to Canterbury.

The object of the mission being clothes and shoe shopping, an activity to which I am allergic, so I went of to paint the town.    

Having painted the view from La Trappiste in Canterbury, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Paintings%20and%20drawings%20of%20Canterbury I thought I would try to find a location to paint La Trappiste from.

This one is from Mrs Jones's Kitchen, which was ok

And this from Café Chambers which was better.

Both are preliminary sketches I think aspects of the drawing, particularly the perspective needs practice.

Over the last few weeks my phone has been giving trouble, the symptoms were messages saying not enough memory to update this app or that app, combined with the whole thing slowing down.

I started out removing apps that I didn’t really need, which worked for a while, I installed Cleanmaster which worked for a while, but yesterday I ran out of solutions.

My phone is a Galaxy Note GT-7000, the mark one of the Note series and is typical of the sort of old smart phone that you can get on Ebay for about £50, it dates from 2011. In terms of memory ROM RAM if you like, it has four different memories.

About 1 GB of RAM, which does the thinking and about 75 GB of ROM, which does the storing. 

Back in the day RAM was made of lots of tiny ferrite beads threaded onto a matrix of copper wires, currents in the wires caused the beads to be charged or the charge to be read where the wires converged. This was all a long time ago and don't trust my memory on this, but I think the first RAM computer memory I used was on a wooden frame (wires threaded between holes in the wood) about a foot square, and about 1 kilobyte. The ROM was on magnetic tape on big reels.

On my phone the ROM memory (storage in the settings) is called,

1 “device memory” about 2 GB, this is where the apps and bits of the apps you can’t move elsewhere have a sort of life.

2 USB storage about 11 GB, which is just like a memory card you can’t get out of the phone.

Added together this 1, 2 and 11 and 1 of RAM makes up the 16 GB that it says on the packet.

3 SD card storage, which is the memory card which you can put in the phone, I think this can be anything up to 64GB and is you usually where you store you pictures, docs, music and videos.  

OK we all know there is 1 GB missing and this is mostly taken up with the operating system, on the phone this is called Android, on a conventional computer it will be called Windows or some such thing.

Fortunately there is the other memory called the cloud which all your stuff is automatically stored to, providing you phone is set properly and that memory is on the internet, so it still stays there if your phone explodes or something.

The only solution was taking the phone back to its factory settings.

So now I have a laptop running Windows 10, a tablet running Lollipop 5.1 and a phone running Jelly Bean 4.1.2, fortunately all interconnected by the cloud.

Having wiped the phone I have got my memory back and nearly everything it had on it before the memory problem was reinstalled automatically once I signed on to Google.

What I think happened was that the phone started backing everything it did on the internal memory, and lost the ability to delete it.