• Dave M. Strom Technical Writing
  • Resume & Writing Samples
    • My Resume
    • My Writing Samples
  • Published Stories
  • Audio Stories
Dave M. Strom: Technical Writer

OK Google, Play My SD Card Music!

12/12/2016

0 Comments

 
I had trouble playing music from my LG G3 phone. I tried saying, "OK Google, play Rock Shop." Rock Shop is on the Robocop sound track, which I have synced to my phone from my iTunes via iSyncr. It did a web search instead of checking my phone.

I think I found the answer. I needed my phone's music to be visible in my Google Play Music app. (I used the Android Music app to play my music, it did not do "OK Google" well.)

In Google Play Music, my playlists were nearly all empty.  I sync my iTunes music via iSyncr to my phone's SD card, which my Android Music app saw and my Google Play Music app did not. So in the Google Play Music app...
1. I hit the menu icon (three bars in upper left corner)
2. I hit Settings, Storage location.
4. For Choose storage location, I selected External.
5. I also hit Settings, Refresh. That might have helped.

I can't get it to play my playlists. Yet. Works on my iPad's Siri! But what's with "Hey, Siri" (using Siri without pressing the Home button) only working if my iPad Air is plugged into USB power? Grr! Another reason to buy an iPad Pro. I'd better hurry up and finish my novel (thus becoming the next Stan Lee).

P.S. My phone is still fussy. It plays most songs I "OK Google" request, like Mona List Overdrive (from The Matrix), but it would not play Super Chicken (theme song of a great oldie cartoon). And both those songs are on my phone. I then tried, "OK Google, play Super Chicken from my phone." It did not find the song. Why? Because on my phone, the title is one word: "Superchicken."
0 Comments

Extracting notes from an unopenable, unconvertible, un-emailable, and undownloadable Pages document on an iPad.

8/27/2014

0 Comments

 
(Another old post from one of my Wordpress blogs.)

I went to BayCon 2013 on Memorial Day weekend and went to lots of panels. I took lots of notes using my iPad and an older Zaggmate keyboard cover. Several days later, I tried to open that document. A popup window told me that “The document can’t be opened.” I also could not email the document or copy it to DropBox (I have Documents 2 Free for DropBox): the document could not be converted to Pages, PDF, or .doc, which it has to be before it can be emailed.

I figured that if I could get that document onto my MacBook Pro, I would find some way to open it and extract the yummy gooey notes within. So I thought, it is about time I used my iCloud. I had an iCloud account, I had just never used it before. Silly, since I use DropBox a lot.

On my MacBook Pro, OS 10.8:

  1. In System Preferences / iCloud, I clicked Documents & Data. I think I also signed in here, but I also signed in through Safari.
  2. In Safari (hmm, maybe I should be using Chrome!), I went to iCloud I signed in. (I entered my mac.com email to sign in, since I was not using my iCloud.com email.)
  3. In Safari, at https://www.icloud.com/#iwork, I clicked on the Pages tab. Guess what. Empty. I need to set up the iPad to sync.

On my iPad (I have an iPad 1, so I am stuck in iOS 5):

  1. In Settings, and under iCloud, I turned on Documents and Data.
  2. Under Apps: Pages, I turned on Use iCloud.

On the http://www.icloud.com/#iwork page, all my document icons showed up. But they were not synced yet. It took a LONG time for all my pages documents to sync to iCloud. In fact, some were still syncing, after SEVERAL HOURS!

The document I wanted finally synced. I clicked on it and tried to download it. And I could not. The document had to be converted to Pages, PDF, or .doc before being downloaded. And as before, it could not be converted.

So after some googling (http://www.macworld.com/article/1163291/icloud_iwork_sync.html), I found another way to access the document from my Mac.

On my MacBook Pro, in the Finder:

  1. I navigated to (my user name)/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~Pages/Documents/. Note: I have my MacBook Pro set up so the Finder shows hidden files, like the Library folder (you could also select go to folder on the Finder menu and find Library). Also, once I clicked on Mobile Documents, the Finder said I was in iCloud. I was!
  2. In the iCloud-based Mobile Documents folder, I opened com~apple~Pages and then Documents.
  3. In Documents, I saw a list of my Pages documents that were in iCloud. (By the way, I did NOT perform ANY changes within these iCloud folders, for fear of really messing things up, because Apple does NOT intend for you to access iCloud in this convoluted way.)
  4. I found the document that contained my BayCon notes! YAY! But I could not copy/paste it onto my Mac; again the conversion problem when I tried to paste.

So I had to crack open the document directly in iCloud.
  1. I highlighted the document, and from the Action icon, I selected Show Package Contents. Yes, Pages docs are packages with various goodies within.
  2. In the package contents, I used TextMate to open the index.db file; TextMate seemed a good choice to open a generic file and find text within, but maybe TextEdit would have worked also). index.db was the only file that seemed to contain the text for my notes. (The other files were plists or pngs.) Lots of garbage symbols and useless text in index.db.
  3. I scrolled down, and found LOTS of my notes. I copied and pasted them into a TextEdit file on my MacBook Pro.
  4. I repeat: I did NOT change anything on iCloud, such as the index.db file contents!
  5. TRIUMPH! I have my notes back!

I also selected all in index.db and copy/pasted into another TextEdit file. I’ll try editing out the garbage and see if I get more notes that way, just in case I missed anything. But so far, I think I have recovered nearly all my notes. It is good to be a nerd.

0 Comments
    My Published Stories
    Picture
    Buy the ebook with Holly's first story!
    DETAILS HERE.

    Archives

    April 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    September 2014
    August 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013

    Categories

    All
    AI Assistant
    Album Art
    Android
    API
    App
    Dropbox
    Google Play Music App
    IPad
    ITunes
    Knowledge Navigator
    OK Google
    Pages
    Playing Music
    Play Music
    Siri
    Technical Writer
    Viv

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.