Facebook map: Many Check-Ins disappeared!

Once again, after adding locations to the Facebook map, another issue emerged.

After adding locations earlier this year the whole Facebook map stopped working. 

However, after reporting it, in August the map with its connected locations returned. The issue was fixed as I could check various places I went.

At the beginning of December I added another album and connected the pictures with location tags, but after that, many locations of my map disappeared, but not all.

And I discovered a pattern: Mostly locations like airports or cities remained, but places like mountains, accommodations or other private spots remained not marked on the map.

Maybe another issue. Did one of the locations I added triggered the it? Or was it rather just a coincidence with a bigger problem? I couldn't find other postings of similar issues so far, but apparently general issues with the Check-Ins happen from time to time.

Let's see when this one is fixed!

Pokémon GO 0.129.2.: Lots of Pokémon in Japan!

Now in Japan, I feel like I find more Pokémon than ever before. And Generation 4 is coming!

Now leveled up to level 23 and many more Pokémon on my belt I'm currently running through Japan and I noticed that I can catch many more than before. Most likely because I'm mostly in a city and the chances are therefore higher.

And through this high amount of Pokémon I was able to level up easier and could now finally evolve my pocket monsters. For example all three first Generation Eevee evolutions which seem to be really competitive - especially Jolteon (サンダース) with CP 2032.

According to my Pokédex I have seen 255 different Pokémon and caught 178 of them. With Generation 4 now being added I've got to catch monsters I've never seen before. And since I'm playing it in Japanese since I haven't played games including G4 Pokémon. Especially モウカザル already been one of my favorites.

I also got some more experiences with Gym battles. But it can be really annoying on bigger public places like train stations. Playing with Team Red after trying a few times I defeated the opponents Pokémon, but as I needed a few seconds to recharge my own defeated monsters, I couldn't place my own Pokémon there as another team already took over the gym. No chance, some areas are just to busy.

But even if I could keep the gym at another place - it's not like some at a village where you can keep the gym for a while to receive some coins. I think my record of keeping a Pokémon at gym here in Japan was maybe a bit more than an hour. But still, that was outside Tokyo.

Generally, I have a better feeling for the game now. Using the friends option to exchange presents I also quite interesting. Let's see where I can go from here!

Until my next "Pokémon GO diary" entry!

Why I cannot download Japanese apps?

If you go to Japan and open the Google PlayStore you'll find out that you are unable to install some local apps. But is there a solution to work around that problem?

Let's take the example of 'Dragon Ball Legends' which was released this summer. And in the Google Play Store there is a 'western' version and a Japanese version.

However, if you search for the Japanese version using katakana the game doesn't appear in result list. Just English suggestions.
But why?

The reason is that your Google Play Store account needs to be associated to the country Japan instead of your local one.

If you currently live in Japan it makes to be able to see all the apps.

Therefore, what's the next step?

Change to the country! I would suggest the following way (via browser):

• Login in Google PlayStore website 
• Go to "Google Account" in the upper right
• Select "Payments and Subscriptions"
• "Manage Payment methods"
• Go to setting to see your "payments profile"
• Change it to the "Japan" and add necessary information
• Confirm and wait (can take maybe a few days)

Once it's completed, check on your phone if your are connect to the correct payment profile associated with the country you are living. Now go to PlayStore and see if you can find local apps.

And that's an example an how it should look.

Clearing up old Windows versions

If your space is getting less and less there are many ways to clear up some free disk space...

On way is definitely clearing up temporary browser data or the Windows-TEMP folder (C:\Windows\Temp).

Another way is using a tool like TreeSizeFree to narrow down the areas where some big files are hidden. Sometimes there are big video files or downloads you are not aware of anymore.

But, also important is checking if your computer was reinstalled in a way to keep the old version active. You see that, by checking the C drive, if there's a Windows.old folder. If so, you can proceed as it follows:

For Windows 10, go to Settings/Storage and check for Change how we free up space automatically. Scroll down and you can check for cleaning up old Windows versions. It takes a while, but once that's done you can make up a lot of space. In my case more than 30 GB.

Tokyo Game Show 2018 - Jump Force, One Piece World Seeker...

This weekend I went for the Tokyo Game Show for the first time and I got the chance to test a few of the new games which caught my interest.

Knowing there would be a long queue I still arrived a bit late which made me wait for almost 2 hours to get in.

But the wait was worth it. Many big halls and so many different stands. After running around for getting a general impression of the event I stopped at Bandai Namco, because one game got me really interested:

It's Jump Force. A game which puts several characters from JUMP magazine together, including Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto and more! The trailer itself gave me this "I wanna play" feeling with showing great stages like Namek, Himeji Castle or New York's Times Square. After a wait for around 30-40 minutes in the queue I got to play a 3 vs 3 battle. I selected Frieza, Luffy and Vegeta to fight on Namek. The demo was for two rounds until the first fighter was knocked out. The game is fun to play and the graphics are running stunning to see. I couldn't get deep into special moves or combos - at the end I just found out how to switch characters during the fight. It generally left a great impression and as there seems to be a story with a few from Akira Toriyama exclusively created characters makes the entire game even more interesting...

Following that I stopped by at the racing game area and some nostalgia put me into the line to test another game: V-Rally 4! Back in PS1 and PS2 days I liked the series. Especially I spent many years in the career of V-Rally 3 in the mid-2000s. I wasn't aware that finally a sequel is coming! The demo was one stage with a GoPro-sponsored car with a big rear wing. I clearly underestimated the cars reaction in the corners causing me a few crashes at the beginning. Plus: Manual shifting was activated! However at the end of the stage everything went more smoothly and I slowly got ready for more. It certainly brought back some nostalgia!

So... Since I was in the area - time for the next racing game: MotoGP 18! To be honest: I haven't played a lot of MotoGP games in the last decade, but there were times of the old MotoGP3 and 4 which I got to play a lot. Therefore, as expected it didn't take me long to get into the flow. Unfortunately the riding helps were activated and the difficulty quite easy. Meaning that despite a crash in lap 1 out of 3 and some general starting difficulties I was able to reach P10 at the end with Valentino Rossi! Was really fun to play again!

As it was getting afternoon, there was one more game I had to try out! Back to the Bandai Namco area and this time in the One Piece World Seeker queue! The game trailers were already promising showing an game-exclusive storyline with many major characters like Aokiji, Fujitora or Lucci involved. Ahead of the demo you get a manual to memorize the important controls. Once you get started you are playing Luffy running up a hill punching some marines. You get used to the attacks, especially the Red Hawk is quite powerful. The whole graphic of the landscape is quite impressive! After a fight with Kuma you are confronted with Sakazuki alias Aka Inu. The fight is a bit more difficult than the previous one, but still no problem. But Sabo comes to help Luffy as the demo ends. At the end you also get some stickers from the characters of the game, nice!

As the time was running out I soon left the place. It was quite interesting how much is offered there to see and play! A fun and inspiring day came to an end. Of course there was so much more to see like many other franchises I'm not that involved in, but I'm sure everyone would have found something interesting! Until another time!

Is my phone listening to me?

I was aware that such situations exists that even your voice while having your phone in your pocket could be used to get information for personalized ads, but recently I was surprised by how far it went...

Annoyed by odd volume numbers...
It happened recently at work and (interestingly) with switched off WiFi and no mobile coverage at the place I was working. I was having the phone in the pocket while I talked to a colleague and he was telling me that he always gets annoyed by the volume settings on the radio if an uneven number is used. Either 12 or 14 is fine, but neither 13 nor 11! He claimed that many people where having this issue forcing them to correct the volume every time.

Although the conversation was in German, the following day Facebook suggested me a video about the exact thing in English where people discussed that in a car! Coincidence?

Talking about a certain software?
Or: Recently I had a job interview when I was asked about having experience with a certain software. A few days later Facebook suggested ads showing exactly that software and other products of that company. And I wasn't using any WiFi, I only had connection with via mobile data.

Apparently companies like Google and Facebook are denying such things. But secretly the situation could be different and it's definitely interesting.

What are your experiences? Let me if you had similar situations in the comments!

Lenovo G70 touchpad reacting slow and on its own

From time to time the touchpad mouse can have some weird issues, recently it was reacting automatically and slow at the same time making it difficult to use at all.

It came all of the sudden: After booting my Lenovo G70 one day the above described things happened. The touchpad mouse reacted weird and unfortunately I did not have another external mouse to test.

The settings in control panel still seemed normal.

I know this laptop had some mouse issues sometimes such as that the mouse suddenly froze and needed to be reactivated again.

This time it was something else, so I rebooted and it didn't change at all. So I got to use an old trick:

• turning off
• removing the battery for a few minutes
• pressing the power button for 30 seconds
• waiting little bit
• putting back the battery
• turning on again

And then the issue was gone. Easy and efficient!

Facebook map fixed!

The world check in map on Facebook is finally fixed, but what was the reason?

For that I don't have an answer since I did not receive any message that it was solved. I just tested it by coincidence and it worked again.

Back in May after tests with several browsers I came to the conclusion to send my issue to the Facebook Help Center, after I noticed that it did not work for weeks.

But what ever it was: I'm glad it's finally fixed and that I can look at it again from time to time.

So it took three months, what's your experience about that situation?

Pokémon GO 0.111.3.: The hunt continues!

With a better phone and the ongoing summer I got myself going again on the hunt for Pokémon!

Next entry on my Pokémon GO diary - or better 'once in a while blog'.

With the current summer and a better phone I found the motivation to go on the hunt again and I heard from other players that they are still active.

Plus, I still have so many Pokémon eggs from several places around the world such as Las Vegas, New Zealand or Canary Islands. So I decided to incubate all of them now by going for a walk or several runs by bicycle (I know, not really recommended, but it's in the countryside, so...^^).

So by running around and catching various Pokémon from the Kanto, Johto and Hoenn region I could increase my level from 11 to 16. Still not much, but alright for a casual player.

I won battles at the gym now a few times and also got some PokéDollars (I think that's how the currency is called), so let's see what I do with that.

Looking at my PokéDex there's still a lot to find. Out of the currently available 375 Pokémon I only caught 92 and saw 136 of them! So the hunt will continue! 

Dragon Ball Legends: First impressions on the new fighting game

Released this summer - 

a new Dragon Ball game is out. This time for smartphones - and for free! So it's very to check it out.

Throughout the past couple of months I was aware that this game was in the making and about to be released in summer, but I somewhere missed the point that it was actually free to play.

A colleague at work got me into it since he was already playing for a while.

So, to the game itself:
Story wise you follow Shallot, a new game-only Saiyan, who is gets in touch with for Z fighters for the Tournament of Time.

The battle system itself is quite easy to play: You get cards for sprint attacks, blasts or little power-ups (as seen on the screenshot). You can charge yourself by holding your finger on the touch screen and also do single punches or blasts without using the cards.

Your are in a team with up to three fighters with which you can switch during the battle. Each character needs to be leveled up, be it by single training, joining the story battle or playing against others. You can exchange a friends code and fight against friends.

Apart from that you are able for daily summons - means that you can get new characters - for example recently they added some movie characters like Freeza's brother Coola. 

As it seems they are adding more and more content to the game like extra story arcs, characters... So I hope we should see more Dragon Ball Super characters soon.

Therefore, I can recommend the game, it's fun to play!

TheSuperAdmins #005: Plenty of time!

TheSuperAdmins return with an issue which goes through the minds of many admins... A fair question...

See all comics:
TheSuperAdmins page

Fixing HDD and CPU always up to 100%

Today I could fix a case where a computer got incredible slow over the years, but it took to check lots of points...

First of all the issue was initially hard to figure out where it's coming from. 

Either the HDD in the Task Manager went up to 100% or the CPU - or both together. Even when no application was started. Narrowing down which service or application was at fault was difficult as well as it was always another one.

So I tried first with the 'obvious' solution which you find quite often online: Switching off services like 'Windows Search' or 'Superfetch'. Initially it seemed like no change at all. I even checked the hard disk since I even found sites where users where claiming having issues with the Toshiba DT01ACA100. But the HDD was fine so far, nothing visible with checking tools.

So what else... Such issues can come through viruses or malware so I gave Malwarebytes AntiMalware another go. And it found more than 4000 suspicious entries! After clearing them all and going for another reboot, let the software went through after to check if the malware is really gone and suddenly the issues got less!

Surely, right after booting the computer still took a while 'calm down' in terms after processor and hard disk usage. But then you could finally reproduce it by opening the Firefox browser and open certain websites. Or starting MS Office software.

Generally websites using flash took pushed the scale high again, but after certain tests to fix that issue within FF failed and I tried the same with Google Chrome which was faster and and slightly better.

And now after several restarts the computer finally seems fine again - hopefully it remains!

Back into PS2 homebrew: FMCB & OpenPS2Loader

After a long time I got yesterday back into configuring a PS2 for homebrew software - and this time the slim version!
In the past I've played a lot around with PS2 homebrew software from emulators, media players to HD loaders. My own old console is from 2004 and I added a hard disk and was able to launch games from there - using tools like HDLoader, HDAdvance or OpenPS2Loader.

The latter played a part again yesterday: A friend of mine got an PS2 slim and I remembered about the possibility to play games from USB. So as the first thing I tested with my Memory Card, if the homebrew menu works with the silver PS2 slim. As I read somewhere there were issues with certain firmware version delivered with newer slim models.

However, it was no problem: FMCB started with the extended boot menu. In the following I installed it also on the Memory Card of my friend. As there were issues with the file manager (ULaunchELF) of my Memory Card which was unable to open elf files properly, I copied the FMCB installer on the USB drive and added the elf in the boot menu via the FMCB configurator as a workaround.

FMCB was successfully installed on the Memory Card and I added the OpenPS2Loader to the Memory Card and linked it to the main menu.

Now, via the USBUtil GUI tool I selected a few games to test which were converted from ISO file to a certain format to be able to be booted via OpenPS2Loader 0.9. A 32GB USB flash drive was used and as the games were launched you could notice that it takes a bit longer than using a DVD. Of course the internal HDD drive is the quicker way, but only with the older bigger PS2.

Both tested games, the infamous fighting DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 3 was still working quickly (you could only see that the in-game transformations were slower than usual) and the fast racing game Burnout Revenge was also running well.

Plus, I also tested the old bicycle racing game Downhill Domination which was quite nostalgic played it again after a long time!

Therefore, still nice having these tools for the good old PS2!

Facebook Check-Ins Cities not loading anymore

Actually one of my favourite features on Facebook and it's currently not working. Can it be fixed?

It noticed it already a while ago, since I like checking the world map especially after checking in to lots of places around the world after a long travel. 

However, I cannot use this feature now for a couple of months. I cleared the cache, using IE or Google Chrome making no difference. As soon as you go to 'Places' the loading bars are running.

I googled for the issue if other users are experiencing the same and it seems that it can happen from time to time. In this thread in the Facebook community Help Center there was simple the suggestion to report the issue to Facebook.


So, I did the same, now waiting for response. As soon as I know something I will get back to that!

And if you have any experience on that feel free to comment!

Why can't WhatsApp be more flexibel?

Anno 2018 - WhatsApp has 1.5 billion users and is therefore still THE messenger. However, there still many things I'd like to be addressed in the future...

Two years ago I wrote an article about things WhatsApp can improve in the future. Things like video calls have been introduced, documents like PDF can be sent, but there are many things I'd like to see different.

Starting with the way the account is used: The ID for the login is basically phone number from your SIM card. Therefore in situations when you lose your SIM card, switch to a phone with another SIM card format (especially on travels) and/or a phone broke down, it's getting complicated to use your previous account.

And even if when you need to use a new phone number, but with the same Google account there's no way to use a backup from your GoogleDrive since its connected to another phone number.

Especially that case could have been solved way easier. They could introduce an option giving your Google account or your email address as an secondary login option. Or is that too risky for being misused since the SIM card is a safer option of course (but it looks different if the phone gets stolen...).

It's definitely something which could be worked on since it's it would make the app more flexibel.

Speaking of 'more flexibel', the database export could be better. There are third-party applications making a proper export and not just a text file.

I remember the MyPhoneExplorer which could make short message exports nicely as an HTML file. I don't see why WhatsApp could offer something like that themselves.

Anyway, let's see what happens in the future and if they are going to add some features making certain things easier...

LG K5's battery problems and end...

My LG K5 or better probably the battery faced (or is still facing) a slow death while being on the travels. A look back on my only 10 months with that phone.

After four years with Samsung Galaxy S3 mini before this phone not even lasted one year. I can easily see, 'Of course, because it was free', but the issue is most likely related to the battery.

But from the beginning: As I got it seemed like a step forward for me on one side - since there was an Android 5 version installed from the beginning. But it had lots of downsides: The camera was worse than at the previous Samsung. And there was not even a proper music player pre-installed.

No chance of making a playlist or anything. I additionally added the Vanilla Music player for at least being able to let multiple run in a row.

And the phone storage was a big problem: I was always close on the space, even if I had put media files on a separate SD card - but I was really limited on the amounts of apps I could install.

It wasn't even possible to extend the app storage through an SD card. And then came the biggest issue: The battery.

First it was alright listening to music all day at work, but then it got rapidly less. I went to flight mode quite often to keep the battery alive. Especially WiFi and mobile data cost a lot of energy.

In March I reached a point where the battery went down to 0 within 15 minutes. I could only temporary start the phone again. And the charging process got weird: Sometimes it went quickly to 100% or it remained stuck at 0%. Often you need to put in on charger for an hour to be able to boot at all.

This situation confronted me with the situation: New battery for around AU$40 (if I find it) or switch to another phone.

And I find a good price for a Huawei Y7 the situation was easy to solve. Just migrating the data is a matter of patience. As the LINE backup went easily via bluetooth, WhatsApp needs to saved different as my current backup is not up-to-date and I also need to change the phone number since I cannot activate WhatsApp on new phone with a European number while being in Australia. Probably I will temporary switch...

Anyway, since the LG was free, it was alright. But now I already feel better using the new Huawei phone.