Chp 873. Dobby's journal: Leaving Dehradun.

Hello and woof woof. My name is Dobby and I will be taking over my pappa Kima's blog occasionally from now on, so I hope you visit this blog regularly for my exclusive updates.

Trust me, my posts will be much more interesting than pappa's updates.

So, where do I start?

This is so exciting!

Well, for starters, I am a 1-year-old "local" breed. Some of you may also refer to me as an "Indian" or "Desi" dog, while others use more distasteful words like "stray" dog, but the correct term is actually an "Indian pariah dog".

Yup, that's what I am. A proud Indian pariah dog. :)

I never knew my real mommy and daddy, all I remember was coming into this world with a lot of pain. There were just dirt, hunger and diseases all around me, and I thought I would not survive my first week of existence, until mommy Lalani saw me dying at a roadside and rescued me!

She took me home from the streets of Dehradun and slowly nursed me back to health. She inserted all sorts of pointy pins into my body and made me eat many bitter tablets. She painstakingly cleaned me up completely and for the first time in my life, I realized those worms and other creatures attached to my body were actually not supposed to be there at all!

It took around a month for me to completely recover and mommy Lalani was always there by my side to take care of me. Soon I was able to sit up on my own and even start running around.

It was then that I learnt mommy Lalani had named me "Dobby" after this House Elf character from Harry Potter. But I think I look much better than him. What do you think?

Mommy Lalani treated me like a royal prince. She said something about "Covid-19" and that the reason she could give me all her time at home was because of the ongoing lockdown. I didn't understand what that was but I was so glad she could give me all her attention.

Sometimes she would scold me when I was naughty, but in my defence, all I wanted to do was play with things, and is it my fault that they get destroyed so easily? Humans should make things more durable, I swear.

She also scolded me when I played in my favourite mud. Such a killjoy right?

But most of the time mommy Lalani loved me, and I love her so much in return.

However, the "Covid-19 lockdown" that mommy Lalani had talked about was soon over. It was time for her to start travelling for work again and that was sad.

As she had to regularly travel for a week or two, she left me with aunty Anjali whenever she was away. Even though I love spending time with all the other doggos there, I miss mommy Lalani the most.

There was this one time mommy Lalani came back home from one of her long trips, and when she came to pick me up from aunty Anjali's place as usual, there was something different about her. She was happy and excited to see me, just as I was, but there was this new sadness inside her.

It was then that I learned mommy Lalani's own mommy had gone to a better place. I cuddled with her as much as I could, hoping to return the love that she had given me when I was almost dead.

Soon it was decided that mommy Lalani would send me home to Mizoram to live with pappa Kima because of her continuous work trips, as it was also getting expensive to put me in other people's care.

I hadn't met pappa Kima yet but mommy Lalalni was always on the phone with him every day, morning, noon and night, so I guessed he must be a good guy.

Pappa Kima would regularly order nice chewey bones for me all the way from Mizoram. He even gifted me a lovely cake on my birthday (although I only got to eat one small piece and mommy Lalani ate the rest).

I was really looking forward to meeting him. But I was going to miss all the time I spent with mommy Lalani, including all the daily evening walks she took me around the WII campus.

Mommy Lalani assured me that at Pappa Kima's farm, I wouldn't even need to be harnessed and that I could run around free as a bird everywhere. That sounded very nice.

However, mommy Lalani told me that there are no macaques to chase around and tease back in Mizoram. I was ok with that. I was actually starting to get bored with them.

Before sending me to my new home, mommy Lalani did the final steps of preparing me for the journey, like giving me my second dose of vaccinations and also snipping my balls off. :(

I miss my balls.

Finally, once I was healed (ball-less but still with a lot of balls), the dreaded day arrived.

Time to say goodbye to my dear mommy Lalani. We both didn't sleep properly that night. I could hear mommy Lalani crying in the dark. Thankfully, because of her cry, she couldn't hear me crying either.

The next morning before dawn, a sweet gentleman arrived at her doorstep and he whisked me away.

And just like that, it was goodbye Dehradun, goodbye mommy Lalani.

I'll end this post for now, as pappa Kima is giving me the looks because I'm taking over his computer for too long. Be sure to visit again to read about my long journey home and my experience with Mizoram.

Until then, everyone, woof woof.

Chp 872. WhatsApp backup recovery FAILED.

In my previous post I wrote about how WhatsApp can automatically delete your account if you're inactive for more than 45 days.

After my phone conked, I bought a new phone, but I wanted to recover my old WhatsApp local data before installing WhatsApp on my new phone. Eventually, I spent more than 3 months trying to recover it and finally gave up.

When I installed WhatsApp on my new phone and tried to sync my old Google Drive backup, I discovered that WhatsApp automatically deletes your account (hence deleting everything including your Google Drive backup) if you install WhatsApp on a new device using the same number after being inactive for more than 45 days!

Such a tremendous loss for me... :(

So, yeah, I'm starting as a completely fresh user on WhatsApp again.

Anyway, in this post, I want to share my attempt to recover my local backup from my dead phone. :D

Some of you may wonder why I took more than 3 months trying to fix my phone. The reason is simple - Bloody Corona.

Mizoram, unlike other states in India, had seen the strictest lockdown restrictions in the country. Ever since the second wave hit India, Mizoram had been under lockdown almost the entire time. And so, due to that, it was not possible to take my phone to a repair shop.

I decided to order the required parts from Amazon and tried to fix it myself.

That's when I met the biggest hurdle.

Amazon delivery to Mizoram was fluctuating between "close" and "open" during the past 4-5 months. One week we could place our order, and the next week the very same item showed "cannot be shipped to your location" notice, which again was removed the next week after that and we could place our order again, and so on.

And even if we managed to place an order during that very small window frame and our orders were approved and despatched, items that arrived at Mizoram (Vairengte check-gate) during active lockdowns were automatically returned!

Even if the items managed to enter Mizoram during a non-lockdown phase, we again had area-wise "containment zones" (depending on covid positive rate surge within a particular locality). Such "containment" lasts for just a week or two, but if the items reached Aizawl and the locality of the main Amazon office was under containment during the same time, the items were returned!

And finally, even if the main office wasn't under containment when the items arrived, if the delivery location (my address in this case) was declared a containment zone, again, the items were freaking returned! Seriously, why couldn't they just wait for a week and leave the items in their warehouse till then?

Aaaaaaargghhh. Now you can understand my frustration?

Of course every time my orders were returned, I was refunded the full amount. But that's not the point. In fact, I was at a point where I no longer gave a sh*t about the refund, all I wanted was just my bloody orders.

After many cancellations spanning across 3 months, I finally received all the parts I had ordered. Phew!!! Here are the three elusive items:

OnePlus 6 BLP657 battery from The Black Store.

USB Charging Board Port Flex Cable from Shinzo.

14-in-1 Professional Mobile Tool Kit from MMOBIEL.

And with those items finally at my disposal, I was ready to perform my first ever OnePlus 6 operation!

The hairdryer above belonged to my sister and I used it to heat the back panel of the phone so that it would loosen up the glue and I could easily pull it open using a suction.

I watched a lot of YouTube video tutorials and one of my favourites was this video by Wit Rigs. I must have watched the video at least 100 times, by-hearting every little step.

But as the saying goes, doing something by theory and practical are completely different. For instance, opening up the back panel was tough AF!

In the above video (and other videos uploaded by different techies), they easily heated the back panel and opened it. They made it look so easy, lolz. In reality, though, things weren't like that. I eventually ended up "tripping" my sister's hairdryer, much to her anger :D. I had to go and borrow another hair-dryer from my neighbour.

Finally, I managed to crank it open, cracking the glass back panel in the process.

I lamented my loss, but at the same time, I was elated that I could finally open it. 

Here's the opened back panel.

I followed every step that was mentioned in the above video.

The "magnetizer" tool that came with the tool kit was extremely helpful. Once unscrewed, I could just take the tiny screws out from the tiny hole using the magnetizer tool directly (or rubbing my screwdriver to it so that it transferred its magnetic property).

Everything went on well after that. No hiccups. I was starting to think God didn't hate me after all. :)

And then of course, it happened. Murphy's Law. The final screws that needed to be removed were stuck! No matter what I did, what tool I used, they couldn't come out.

Aaargh. So close to the final step!

Guess what I did instead then?

I attached the new battery, and then took the new USB port cable and attached it to the phone motherboard directly and then connected the charger to it! And yes, my phone started charging! :D

"I'm a genius!" I exclaimed to myself. :D :P

Slowly, my phone was charging up. I was sooo excited because I was finally going to bring my dead phone back to life again!

While it was charging, I tested my phone and it rebooted, with no issue!

But that's where I think I made a very fatal mistake. You'll find out about this a bit later below.

And so my phone slowly kept charging and charging, and finally, it was 100% again!

With trembling hands, I detached the charger. I could hear an imaginary drum-roll in the background as I pressed the power button again...

Nothing happened.

Pressed it again and again, and again.

Nothing.

It was starting up just a while ago while I was charging the phone, what the hell happened?

And so I decided to screw back all the screws properly, thinking there must be a loose connection as it was still opened up. But even then, the phone was still not switching on.

I opened up all the screws again, removed all the parts, and then attached all of them again and tightened all the screws. I didn't even need to refer to the YouTube video anymore as I was becoming a pro at it.

Once done, I pressed the power button again.

Still nothing!

I was really starting to panic. I watched many other videos and read many forums, and finally decided to dismantle the motherboard and have a look at the power circuit.

It was then that I noticed one thing!

In the YouTube video, the cable leading to the power button looked like this (circled below) -

Whereas MY phone power button cable looked like this -

Can you see the burnt-out cable in my phone above (circled)?

That was probably why my phone was not starting up. But then, how did it start up while I was charging the phone earlier?

I looked at the photos I had taken earlier, when I had first opened the back panel, the photos taken before I had attached the battery and USB port cable. I wanted to investigate this anomaly.

It was then that I noticed, in the first few photos, the power cable was perfectly fine!

I'm not a mobile phone repair expert nor do I understand circuit boards, but I do know that a wrong voltage can blow a fuse in an electrical wiring system.

The fact that I had connected the battery and USB charging port so unorthodoxly must have somehow fried the power cable when I switched it on while it was charging.

Aaarrghhh, why was I so damn impulsive!

Had I not done that, had I just waited patiently, I don't think this would have happened. Alas. I paid a price for my impetuosity.

Ordering a new power cable would again take so many days, and that didn't guarantee a full phone recovery either. Finally, I said, "Screw this!" and installed WhatsApp on my new phone without retrieving my old local backup, hence losing every WhatsApp data in the process.

Now you know the story behind it. :D