May 2015 in the Life of Ben (Blog)

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Restoring my Lumia 820 (23rd May 2015)

Cloud backup was from 29th August 2014. Is this triggered manually instead of being synchronised automatically?

“Problem with restoring backup”

Message says some things couldn’t be restored.

Did a phone update check and it found an update. Before update:

Downloads and prepares itself, then lists these as the things which will be installed:

It installed while I slept. When I woke up it asked to restart, which I allowed. This was quickly completed.

Checked for updates and after a little while it found quite a list!

After several minutes (not hours) it finished. Then I got a call. Ignored it and let the phone restart. Priorities.

I texted them back and then checked for updates. Yep, it found the bridge to Windows 8.1!

It installed. Did another restart and checked again. Yay, it’s Windows Phone 8.1!

It showed me the new agreement and then some questions about WiFi Sense and app updated.

This was interrupted by Device Hub requiring a restart, on top of opening a multi-step wizard that I wasn’t actually able to click on. :-/ Had to do the restart and then re-do my answers to the questions as I hadn’t been able to confirm them before Device Hub interrupted me.

After the restart and completing the questions I visited the website about what was new. This was listed in the notifications centre as a text message. This was the first time I ran Internet Explorer on the new phone so I went to Custom settings.

Alarmingly, ticked by default in IE was this setting: “Send browsing history to improve and (where available) personalise services.”

The website mentions Update 2 re-arranges the Settings menu into categories. I started looking for that but noticed the Action Centre had something available. Opened it and after some noodling arrived at my Apps list. the “access point” [sic] app said “pending” so I clicked it and got the Store app. It listed several apps which were getting updated in the background.

I left them to it.

Disaster! Despite removing several apps at the start my Apps list now has the dreaded alphabetical dividers. Noooo!!! ¦¬\

A couple of hours later I noticed a pop-up message saying: “We’re going to download a critical update”. I guess that’s why all the other apps were pending, although it’s weird how this message wasn’t showing for several minutes and the first app (Calendar) got halfway before stopping in the “Pending” state.

A while later a full screen alert appears saying: “Install Critical Update”.

This restarted automatically and did the double cog animation for a long time. When it finished a full screen alert told me it was “all up to date and good to go.” Love this tone of voice. Hope it will be applied throughout Windows 10 in the UK! Action centre told me “2 apps need attention” so I clicked that and it opened the Store app, listing some as “action needed” and others as another status. I clicked the “retry all” button and away it went through the 10 or so which were in the queue. A few hours later when I checked my phone, everything was done except for Skype. It needed consent, which I denied. An earlier version was already installed, so I uninstalled that. Here is what I wanted to uninstall:

Visiting Staffordshire (17th May 2015)

(More to follow.)

Spin London (10th May 2015)

Had a really nice pulled pork burger from a small american truck called run by Burger Lab. The fries had some mustard sauce with freshly cut spring onion.

(More to follow.)

Internet Explorer Edge (8th May 2015)

Last week, Microsoft announced that instead of IE 12 they’ve made a new browser called IE Edge and that’s what Windows 10 will use:

(This browser was previously called Project Spartan.)

Among other things, it drops support for tons of old IE specific features, using HTML5 and other new standards instead:

Biggest change I’ve ever seen to IE!

Their new developer site is very Windows Phone. A lot of CSS3 being used there. CSS Animations and Transforms instead of JavaScript to power the movement!

Looks like Microsoft have finally caught up – and aren’t slowing down.