Technical help and resources

Did google books just break?

I like to limit my book searches by publication date, for a variety of reasons.

Guess that’s not happening.

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That’s a weird one, considering it’s a Google search. In that it works for me in Firefox but not in Chrome:

That’s pasting the exact same URL in both.

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Huh. Could be a difference in the value of some retained cookie that Google uses to tailor search results?

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So… I’m not sure anybody can help with this, but if nothing else this gives me a chance to talk out the problem and maybe figure out if I’m understanding it right.

My Samsung Tab S4 tablet’s “hard drive” (I know it’s not an actual hard drive, more like internal memory, but the term’s convenient) is almost full, and performance is starting to suffer. From what I’ve read, if I understand it correctly, it’s an Android OS issue: not-visible-to-user backup files are created and eventually fill up all the space. (It happened with a previous phone, but I was able to coax it to function until my carrier made me buy a new one.)

In theory, the simplest fix would be a wipe to factory default standards… but I figure I’d lose certain passwords, settings and such that I’d like to keep. Sure, picture files and such are pretty easy to copy to a flash drive, and a lot of things already live on the additional SD card I installed. But Android’s file system isn’t straightforward or even visible much of the time. There’s nothing that’s labeled, for example, “your_progress_in_GameXYZ.arc” to grab in Android like there might be in a regular computer, ya know?

Ideally, there should be a way to just go in and yeet the backup files, but that would probably require rooting, which I don’t quite trust myself to do. Maybe I could take it to a phone fix-it store, but that might be a bit more complex than they’re able to handle (if I can even explain what I want in a way they’d understand.) Most people would probably just get a new tablet, and for various reasons, I really don’t want to. The tablet’s old and outdated, but it’s good enough for me and what I want to do, if I could just get rid of the hidden bloat.

Thoughts, anybody? Am I on the right track at all?

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Depending on how the device is locked down you could connect it to a computer and access the files on it as if it was a regular mass storage device. If that doesn’t work, you could enable developer mode and get direct file system access that way (no rooting required).

I’m not an Android expert but I have been doing some development on the platform recently so I’ve been forced to get more familiar with it. Take everything I’ve said with a grain of salt.

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@Nightflyer:

Seconded, re: hooking it up to a PC. But I also just remembered using an app called Total Commander on Android. I can’t remember exactly why I had it - I think some other app recommended using it to troubleshoot file permissions (but on Android?) or some such. It was more powerful than using the built-in file manager (e.g. My Files, on a Samsung). After a while, I no longer needed to troubleshoot (or whatever I was doing where I needed Total Commander) so I haven’t used it in a long time.

This was on a phone, though - not a tablet.

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