Tong Family

OK, this is a miscellaneous list of silly bugs that thing that we all get to live in our daily lives.

Fastboot in Android

I have a new Android phone and somehow I managed to get a screen that just said “FASTBOOT” and I had no idea what to do. It turns out that if you power on your Xiaomi, Motorola, Google, or OnePlus phone if you power up while holding the volume down and power key, you will get into this mode.

This lets you flash the system. The problem is that if you didn’t mean to do this is completely unclear how to reset out of this. Just pressing the power button doesn’t work. In fact, you have to hold it down for 30 seconds to reboot and get back to regular mode. You are warned.

NordVPN hangs Internet access with bad DNS entries

OK, I think I posted about this before, but every month or so, I can’t access the internet at all on my Macbook. The typical tricks are to make sure that NordVPN Threat protection is off and that VPN is off. Also rebooted the machine but nothing worked.

The trick is that sometimes Threat Protection (which uses its own private DNS to intercept calls), leaves in the WiFi settings their DNS servers in the network settings. So make sure you check these when you have an internet problem.

Of course, figuring out where these disappeared to in Ventura isn’t easy, but I find the easiest thing to do is to go to System Settings > Network > Wi-Fi > _your network_ and click on the three dots, and then you get yet another set of panes and look in DNS and make sure there is some strange number there.