Reclaiming disk space on Android devices

My smartphone has been complaining lately of a lack of space. It has almost a Gigabyte free so I don’t really know why it thinks it has a problem but, nevertheless, I decided to see how to fix it.

One of the things one can do is to clear cached data. And, on my version of the OS (Android 7.1.2, Nougat), this is really simple.

Navigate to Settings – Storage – Internal shared storage – Cached data – Clear cached data. Note that “This will clear cached data for all apps.” Now, while this might result in some items loading more slowly, I don’t believe it can do any real harm.

On my ‘phone it freed up about 0.5 GB of memory and made the lack-of-space message go away. So far, I haven’t noticed any issues resulting from the loss of cached information. So, I’m happy!

References:

Clear All Cached App Data At Once on Android
https://lifehacker.com/clear-all-cached-app-data-at-once-on-android-1443937040

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Safely removing a USB drive with a bash script

In a previous post (Safely removing a USB flash drive) I noted that, when removing an external USB drive, Linux Mint 18.2 (Sonya) provided a message indicating that “It is now safe to remove the drive”. However, I sometimes noticed that, even though this message was displayed, the red LED on my USB flash drive was still flashing, indicating that disk activity was still underway such that it wasn’t necessarily safe to pull the plug. Furthermore, the safe-to-remove message does not occur in Linux Mint 18.3 (Sylvia) – perhaps because it didn’t really work?

Updating LineageOS

One of the reasons that I installed a custom ROM on my smartphone was so that I would be able to update the operating system and maintain some level of security. And, sure enough, the installed LineageOS 14.1 provided notifications of available updates, essentially on a weekly basis.

Customizing Mint’s login screen

One of the things I don’t like about the default login screen in Linux Mint Cinnamon Version 18.3 (Sylvia) is the availability of a guest session. Fortunately, it’s easy to disable this function:

Incorrect System Time in Linux Mint 18.3

After putting a fresh installation of Linux Mint 18.3 (Sylvia) in place on my dual-booted laptop computer, I noticed that the system date was fours hours slow. Previously, I found this to be related to the difference in which Windows and Linux handle time. In particular, Windows uses local time while Linux uses Universal Time Coordinated (UTC). However, the previous fix no longer worked.

Synchronizing IMAP folders in K-@mail

As I noted in a previous posting about K@mail (Turn off notification sounds in K-@mail), “Dr. Google doesn’t seem to know much about this app. So, support options are pretty limited.” This turned out to be once again the case when I found that only the Inbox folder for my IMAP account was being synchronized by default.

Moto G3 – Navigating XDA Developers

Custom ROM’s for Android devices are available from the XDA Developers web site (https://www.xda-developers.com/). Initially, users who are new to the site may find navigation a little difficult. This can certainly be the case when trying to locate relevant material for the Motorola Moto G3 smartphone.