Samsung Galaxy S3 – Dr John's Tech Talk

Move phone number from one Verizon phone to another

Intro
I happened to have an old, deactivated Samsung Galaxy S3 lying around and an active one whose screen just went dark. Searches on how to transfer the phone number led to a lot of dead ends and frustration. So i winged it based on common sense.

The details
I suppose this trick will work on any set of closely related phones that use SIM cards, but the best chance of success is to have identical phones.

After trying to call *228, taking out the battery and finding and noting my IMEI number in the end I just decided to swap the SIM and SD cards. And that worked!

So that makes the hardest part of this just getting the SIM cards out, and that’s not too hard at all. I used this video as a guide, though I think this guy must have had contact glue on his fingers to get that thing out so easily!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFQpQB5Gx5U

I doubt that the apps came over, but the phone number immediately worked, which is my primary focus right now.

Conclusion
Swapping SIM and SD cards permitted me to move a Verizon phone number from a malfunctioning Samsung Galaxy S3 to one that had been deactivated. I did not need to note ESID numbers, call Verizon support or do anything else whatsoever. I don’t think it was even necessary to move the SD card, but perhaps by doing so some of the pictures and application data will be available on the new phone.

References and related
Helpful Youtube video.

Setting up my Galaxy S3 for remote host access

Intro
I just got a Samsung Galaxy S3 last week. Before long I was wondering how I might use it to access my cloud server if indeed it was at all possible.

The Details
Looking at my other Android devices I decided to install Terminal Emulator. That’s a cute application, providing shell access to the underlying OS of your phone. But it’s fairly useless. You get a shell, but your account id, 10155, has essentially no privileges, and you can’t do much more than ls, cd, ps and top. You don’t have enough privileges to look into interesting directories. So you can’t do anything interesting. There’s also no native ssh so you can’t connect to another host.

To ssh to my Amazon cloud server I got the app ConnectBot. This app shows promise. I was able to connect to my server. I read some of the introductory screens which gave some helpful tips. So I quickly learned how to resize the window. I found 80×39 is a good size in portrait orientation. Yes, the font is tiny, but it is legible. Getting an elusive Esc or Ctrl character isn’t bad at all, just tap the top half of the screen.

So running constantly refreshing screens like top worked out fine.

vi was a problem. It used multi-colors in displaying my code. Comments, in dark blue, are not legible to me. In fact using vi at all on this device with a soft keyboard is quite unnatural. It might be better to use a curses-based editor like pico, though I haven’t yet tried it. But w/ vi, I found I could get rid of the multi-colors by setting the TERM environment variable to vt100. It had been screen screen. Once that was done:

> export TERM=vt100

vi displayed all characters in white, and background in black – quite legible.

Conclusion
It’s a strange world where you can administer a virtual server on a device that fits in the palm of your hand, and achieve fairly powerful effects.

Being a resourceful person, I had alternatives to reach my server. There is a web-based terminal emulator which works surprisingly well. See this post for a description.

connectBot is a native ssh remote terminal app and is actually useable as such on a Samsung Galaxy S3, if your eyes are still good! Pay attention to a just a few usage tips and you’ll be in full control of your server.

References
See this post for the world’s most natural, unobtrusive ringtone.