Periodically, my  Nexus 5 phone’s battery life is terrible. On good days, if I don’t use my phone, the battery discharge rate is slow – many hours later, the battery meter says there’s still over 90% of the battery charge remaining. But when it is bad, my unused phone can have its battery drain in 8 hours.

I have found two things to improve improve the battery life on my Google Android Nexus 5.

• One is to clear the system cache partition – this cache setting is not accessible from Settings.
• The other is to replace the Android launcher with Nova Launcher, available for free in the Google Play store.

How to Clear the System Cache Partition

To clear the system cache you need to enter a hidden Android start up menu, usually by starting your phone while pressing the power and volume control keys simultaneously. For specific instructions, see this explanation for the Nexus 5 (it might work on your phone too – this does work on my Nexus 5). Another list from a mobile phone service describes how to do this for other phones (I have not tested any of those).

Every few months, the battery life has gotten really bad. But after clearing the system cache partition, the phone returns to normal performance. I hope this works for you.

I noticed this might be related to my installing lots of apps on the phone, over and over again. Some days I’ll install my test app 10 or 20 or 30 or more times. After a few weeks of doing this every day, battery life problems develop. I clear the system cache partition and the phone is fine again.

You can learn more about the Android system partitions by reading this article.

As you may know, http is the old way to access a web site. https is the newer secure method that encrypts data sent to and from the web site.

Last year, Google announced it would rank search results such that web sites accessed via https rank higher than those using http.

This web page has been using http – which is okay since there is nothing secret or controversial about the content here.

However, on 7 March 2017, Firefox will launch an update that will issue a security warning when visiting web sites using http.

Consequently, we need to switch our web sites from http to https which involves paying a fee to buy an SSL security certificate and re-configuring software and servers.

I have successfully converted my coldstreams.com web site to https as a test for the conversion. So far everything looks good.

I will eventually convert the appinventor.pevest.com web site to use https also. I do not have a date for that – it could be next week or the end of the month.  When I do the conversion, their might be a temporary period where you receive a security warning about accessing the web site, depending on how I do that update.

Time to bring this blog into the modern era. The old style layout looked the same as most blogs of the past 5 or more years. The new layout is visually more interesting and appealing. I will be making a few more changes to this new layout, over the days to come.

Ed

Wow! I just checked the web server data and the server estimate the http://appinventor.pevest.com web site is now read in 183 countries!

Using the United Nation’s count of 241 countries and territories, that means residents of 58 countries and territories have not visited yet!

But that means people in up to 183 countries are learning how to program Android apps using MIT App Inventor!

Saw this sign at a campground, identifying 4 separate roadway loops where people may camp.

For programmers, this sign is amusing. “A Loop”, and “BCD Loops”. BCD stands for binary coded decimal, which is a way of storing decimal numbers for financial calculations. I know, bad joke – but one of those things that makes us software developers have a good laugh 🙂