Three Ways To Use The Galaxy S4 USB Port For More Than Charging The Battery - Maybe.

A number of times recently, I have found myself with the pressing need to send someone a file via email in places where the only nearby Internet access was in my pocket; my cell phone.  In theory I should be able to tether the phone to my laptop long enough to make that happen, but in practice that isn't always the case.  For one thing, my phone isn't rooted, and most of the tethering utilities only work on a rooted unit.  For another, having seen the way that using a typical smartphone as a hotspot drains the battery at warp speed, there's no guarantee that I'd be able to keep the connection alive long enough to get the job done.  So I went looking for a way to transfer the file from the laptop to the phone.

And I found several.

The first, which sufficed in a pinch but wasn't particularly practical, was to transfer the file to the micro SD card that I'd installed in my phone soon after acquiring it.  With my Samsung Galaxy S4, this involved removing the protective case, the battery cover, and the battery.  I pulled the SD card out of the socket, slid it into the USB reader I carry around with my camera, and plugged that into the laptop that had the needed file.  It took the usual 45 seconds for that 13-year-old laptop to remember that it knew it had a USB port, gripe about kids on its lawn, and recognize the card, and then I was able to copy the file over and tell it to eject the USB reader.  After retrieving the card from the reader and slipping it into the phone along with the battery, I was able to restart the phone, use my file manager app to find the item I needed, attach it to an email and send it on its way.  It took longer to reassemble the outer case than to find and send the file.

And that was what made me decide that I needed to find a better way.

So, when the modern user needs a tech gadget that the folks at the electrotoy stores haven't already been pestering you mercilessly to buy, where's the first place to look?  Hong Kong!  But flying there is too much of a pain in the neck with all the TSA crap (not to mention costing even more than a cab ride from Penn Station to La Guardia), so the logical thing to do is - hit eBay.  Every Hong Kong merchant with a son-in-law who needs a little extra income has a dozen seller IDs on eBay these days, so there are lots of sources selling what looks like it amounts to the same thing.  And sometimes they are.

And sometimes they are... crap.

The first thing I decided to try was the OTG 3 in 1 Mobile Phone Connection, for less than $3 including postage to the USA.  (OTG is an acronym for On The Go, bestowed by the Android folks for accessories that plug into the SB socket.  It's not a brand name.)  It had a Type A USB socket, a regular SD slot, and a Micro SD slot.  Such a deal!  I ordered it.  Actually, at that price, I ordered two of them, so that we'd have one for the other phone as well.  A couple of weeks went by, and they arrived in my mailbox.

Eagerly, I plugged one into my phone, inserted the full-size SD card from my camera, and went looking for photos.  Yup, it accessed them.  Sort of.  About half of them, anyway.  Some of the photos produced error messages; the phone complained that it didn't know what to do with them.  So I tried the next step; I attempted to copy one of the not-compatible photos to the internal SD card, and then send it to myself via email so that I could see if the file was really munged or if the phone or the reader was the problem.  To make a long story short, by the time the file got to my laptop, it was so trashed that it was useless.  But worse, so was the directory on the SD card.  (I was later able to recover everything, but the mess that was made of that SD card's file structure was impressive.)  However, since I had ordered two of these units, I had a spare!  Maybe it would work.  Ummm, no, it didn't.  At all.

Well, not to be deterred, I figured that I'd just erred by buying these from the wrong seller; it's not unusual for ultra-cheap stuff from Hong Kong to be cheap because it's the rejects from honorable father-in-law's factory, of which some are OK and some are not so OK, but we can afford to make customer happy by replacing because we pay so little.  And that works acceptably for both parties if the minimum return shipping isn't $11, which is more than I'd paid for the units.  So the smart move was to ditch 'em and move on after griping to the seller and getting the expected "Happy to replace, here is address to return.  So sorry." message.

So I found a different seller, with recent feedback on the identical item that looked promising, and nearly the same price.  (Actually, slightly cheaper, but what the hey, the feedback looked good.)  Ten days later, I had that version.  And they did, in fact, work better, but they were still limited to 16Gb and smaller (no 32Gb) and they didn't work well with class 10 cards at all.

Hmmm.  Not so good.  Not utterly useless, but still not what was wanted.

So I went looking again, and found the 5 in 1 OTG Smart Card Reader, and the much more brute-simple OTG USB connector/adaptor cable.

The 5 in 1 Smart Card Reader shared a lot of the apparent characteristics of the 3 in 1, in that it had a Type A USB socket, a Micro SD/TF socket, and a regular SD socket.  But this time, all three of the inexpensive units that I ordered at least functioned identically, albeit still with issues relating to 32Gb cards.  No SD cards were harmed in the testing of this device, however, but the build quality still left something to be desired.  The Micro SD socket inside the plastic shell didn't precisely align with the slot for it, so it felt like it was scraping the card when it was inserted; not the kind of tactile result that builds confidence.  At least they weren't the complete fiasco of the first two batches.

But that still left the utterly simple and basic just-a-Type-A-USB-socket  version to try, and therein was a better result found.

Although in fact it was of no greater eventual utility than the 5 in 1 Reader, since it appears that the 16Gb limit is at least in part an Android 4.4 limitation, the device recognition was MUCH faster when something was plugged in.  I'm assuming that this was because the phone's own USB hub was looking directly at the connected device instead of having to rely on the handoff through the external hub of the multi-connector Reader.  With my trusty but somewhat venerable IOGear SD reader plugged into the USB cable, the recognition of the SD card was also much faster - and when I subbed in a regular USB flash drive, the file structure came up essentially right away.  WINNER!

Anyway, here's a shot of the business ends of all three units for comparison:

And since inevitably I got curious about the utter-failure units of the first batch, I popped their cases off, and inside one of them I found an obvious attempt to wire around a problem; there was a jumper added from the Type A socket to one of the cable connection points.  That unit was the least functional of the pair, and having seen evidence that they knew it had problems before they shipped it, my suspicion that those were factory seconds or outright rejects got supporting evidence.  

Anyway, the most important information to take away from this, in my opinion, is that the Android 4.4 OTG feature itself isn't quite ready for prime time, but if you're sufficiently careful not to hand it the only copy of some data that you need transferred to the phone or attached to an email, you have some potentially useful options available to accomplish that.  And the simplest works best, unsurprisingly.

On the making of ice cream at home

A bit over a month ago, a friend tantalized me by reporting the acquisition of a flavor of frozen dessert that sounded particularly enticing; dark chocolate chunk black raspberry coconut-based ice cream.  (It was nondairy, so it's technically not "ice cream", but that's a more readily recognized description than the FDA terminology.)   I looked everywhere in an ultimately futile effort to find some - and couldn't get in touch with the friend to find out where it came from.  Then, last night, I was picking up some stuff at The Store I Rarely Patronize when I noticed that they had an economy-grade 4-quart ice cream churn for $17 on clearance, just a bit over half price.  I grabbed it.  Tonight, I picked up a set of first-approximation ingredients for an attempt at making something that would hopefully be similar.

As could be expected, it didn't quite get there, for a variety of reasons.  And it turned out that there are a lot of things that aren't in the instructions that come with the churn.

So, here are some general tips about the process which I learned in the making of Batch Zero Point Five:

 -  If you will be including fruit in the recipe, and you're working from bagged frozen fruit from the grocery store, THAW IT FIRST. No matter where it came from, run most of it through the blender or you won't get much of the fruit flavor in the final product.  And use LOTS of fruit.  If you want two quarts of ice cream, figure on using anywhere from two to four cups of fruit puree. (Note:  The first version of this said "quarts" instead of "cups" for the amount of fruit.  That would still work, but you'd get something closer to sherbet.)  You can also add chopped pieces of fruit for the sake of appearance, but it's the puree that you mix into the main slush that will deliver most of the flavor.  Don't stint on it.

 -  If you are using whipping cream as one of the ingredients, the mixture you place in the churn needs to be fairly cold going in or you'll end up with butter on the paddle. But if you're making nondairy stuff (such as coconut-based), adjust the temperature (usually upward) to ensure that the starting mix is LIQUID.  Under no circumstances should you start with something that's the consistency of whipped margarine or room-temp shortening; it just will not mix. 

 -  Most of the recipes you will see call for sugar in one form or another.  Yes, you can substitute a no-calorie sweetener instead; I used sucralose in Batch 0.5 to acceptable effect.  The results will not have quite the same mouth feel, but it'll still be good.

 -  Chocolate chunks may be better held until the end of the churning, and then mixed in with a spatula or large spoon while the ice cream is still at soft-serve consistency.  (That's where you stop the churning process; it hardens to the final consistency either in your freezer or sitting in the churn with the drive stopped.)  If you put the chocolate chunks in at the beginning, they may all end up near the bottom of the mix.  Ditto for whole blueberries.

 -  Be prepared for problems; have a bucket handy that you can dump that ice and salt and water into from the churn's outer bucket.  If you stop the unit for some reason, a layer of ice can form very rapidly in the mixture on the inside of the churn, freezing the paddle to the container.  If that happens, you will need to remove the inner container, run some warm water over the outside of it to free everything up, dump the outer bucket's ice/salt/water mix into another container, and then reassemble the churn/paddle/drive and get it back into the bucket before putting the ice back in.  If you try to just slip the inner container back into the ice and water, you'll almost certainly end up with ice jammed under the inner container that will keep you from getting the drive latched back down. 

 - A lot of these units have a drain hole in the side of the outer bucket up near the top.  It's there so that if you get overenthusiastic with adding ice, the excess water will run out onto the table, countertop, your lap, the floor, or whatever, instead of getting into the ice cream.  Salt in the ice cream would be a not-good-thing, so don't block that drain hole.  Unless you're making a batch of ice cream that's close to the capacity of the unit, you really only need to keep the water and ice level about two inches above the initial level of the ingredients inside the canister.  For a small batch, that may result in the bucket being just half full; you don't need to worry about overflow at that point, but you do have to be concerned about the possibility that all of the ice will melt.  It's best if there is at least some ice down at the lower levels, and plenty at the top for the salt to work on, but I don't recommend stopping the churn to pour out water; just add ice and salt, and keep going.  If the water level is close to the hole and you've got ice piled up above the rim of the bucket, there will be some overflow shortly.

 -  The instructions I have found (both with the unit and elsewhere) call for crushed ice.  Don't sweat it; if all you can find is cubed, it will do, but you will have to do a lot of scooping of more cubes into the bucket as the cubes melt. Those same instructions call for rock salt.  If you live in an area where rock salt is sold in huge bags dirt cheap because of snow and ice (or other really hard water), using rock salt makes sense.  If, however, you live where this is not something that you need to keep handy, then any kind of salt will do.  Buy whatever is cheapest per pound without having to lug home a huge bag.  Here, that's the local store brand non-iodized table salt.  It worked just fine, at less than a quarter of the price of rock salt that was sold for use in making ice cream.

 -  Unless you like frozen desserts A LOT, or you're having a party for a dorm full of teenagers who generally treat the tableware as the fourth course of the meal, a bigger batch just means that you're going to have to finish a whole lot more of that flavor before you can move on to the next one.  Experiment with small batches - but bear in mind that a batch much less than a quart of finished volume (figure that's what you'll get from 20 to 24 ounces of initial mixture) may not churn very well.  And the cleanup task is identical regardless of how little you made.  (If you make way too much, it can get larger than normal, of course...)

 -  With great ingredients come great frozen desserts - sometimes.  Taste the mixture before committing it to the churn; if it's not right, fiddle with adding more of whatever's needed until it comes out the way you want it.  It's much easier to fix a batch that hasn't gone in yet than to rework one that came out wrong.

 -  If you decide to use high-fat coconut milk as your base, eat the final product somewhat sparingly.  Coconut oil has an annoying laxative effect when consumed in excessive amounts - and that amount varies from person to person.

I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect that this thing might be able to make frozen daiquiris.   That is an experiment which will have to wait for the days immediately before a party...