Mobile Phones

Clyde ripped all his CDs and has the music on his phone, but he doesn't have any backups anymore. How can he back them up from his phone? Leo says that if you backup your mobile phone, your phone backs it up. But Leo wants Clyde to also make a separate, accessible copy of the music from his phone. Connect your phone back to your computer and then let iTunes back it up and add those phones to the iTunes library.  Here's how. There's a third party program called Senuti that can also work. 

Nolan wants to know if a mesh network can be deployed with a mobile app? Leo says that the earliest uses of MESH were through a mesh of internet hotspots with mobile phones.  It talked to other mobile devices and connected them. It was to create a network where there is no internet.  Here's an article about it - https://www.technologyreview.com/s/516571/build-your-own-internet-with-mobile-mesh-networking/

Jim lives in a congested area and wants to be able to pick up his wifi signal from anywhere in the neighborhood to talk to his yard sprinkler unit with his smartphone. Leo says if you can talk to the control unit, you can talk to any individual unit within WiFi distance. But that's a call to your manufacturer support. 

Andrew has an old Razor gaming smartphone and he's updated it to Android 8 Oreo. But he's almost run out of space on his SD card, and he doesn't have any photos or videos on it. He backs up everything to Google Photos. What is going on? Leo says to pop your SD card out and look at it. See if it has a ton of temp files on it. You can even format it. Then put it back in. It's also possible Andrew bought a counterfeit card that says it's a 256GB size. It happens a lot, even buying on Amazon. There's also an app called FILES by Google, which can clean out your SD card for you. 

Eddy just wants to listen to music or stream on his phone without being disturbed. How can he turn off his phone without losing internet? Leo says that he can maybe turn it off in phone settings. He could turn on call forwarding. *72. Input another number, and it will forward all calls to that number, like a landline or a Google Voice. Then *73 to turn it off. He can also try turning on airplane mode, and then re-enable WiFi for data only. 

Seal just doesn't answer her phone anymore because of robocalls, so she just lets the phone go to voicemail. And if it's legit, she calls back. She can even put her phone in do not disturb mode, except for contacts. Leo says that's all she can really do to avoid answering a robocall. 

Suzanne is going camping in Russia for a week, out in the middle of nowhere. She wants to know how she can charge her phone while out there. Leo says that Suzanne may not be able to use the phone in the mountains. But in the city, she may have a better option. Verizon now has an unlimited data day pass for about $10/day. So when she's in the city, she can turn it on.  For charging them, Leo recommends GOAL ZERO since their solar chargers are really well made.

Marie has a cellphone that has an upside down question mark on the keyboard, what gives? Leo says it sounds like the keyboard was changed to a Spanish language keyboard. If your phone also has an upside-down exclamation mark, then that's the case. Go into the settings and reset your keyboard.

Jerry has an Android mobile phone and after an update, he lost the use of both his cameras. Can he roll it back? Leo says that the upgrade probably didn't go well and failed, so try upgrading it again. You don't really want to go backwards because of security. Leo recommends doing a factory reset to wipe the phone and reinstall the OS. Be warned though that this will wipe the phone of all data apps and photos, so back it up to Google. But in most cases, that fixes the problem. If that doesn't work, the only way to go backwards is to root the phone.