What does my first Android Phone have to do with My Cloud? I’ll get to it later on in this post. Yes! I’m doing my diatribe thing again.
Recently I got into Amiibo collecting and spent an atrocious amount of money on these plastic figurines marketed on Craigslist at four times the original price because Nintendo produces only a limited amount to create this fake market of supply and demand. The amiibos would sell at Best Buy for about $15 and the supply would run out within hours of their release, then you would find them listed on Craigslist, from scalpers, for about $40 to $60 for the same amiibo.
Amiibos are plastic figurines that has a NFC tag on the bottom of the Amiibo. You tap the figurine on your Nintendo controller and a treasure chest will appear within your game such as new outfits, epona (a horse), swords, shields and so on. Each figurine is boxed with a metal shield on the bottom to prevent you from scanning the figurine within the box, so you have to open the box, take the figurine out in order to scan the NFC tag into your game.
I’ve completed my collection of 18 Amiibos, all of which has to do with the game “Breath of the Wild” costing me a mere $800 for the full boxed set collection. In order to retain the original value of my $800 expenditure, the figurines must remain boxed, thus I cannot scan the NFC code under the figurines to be used in-game.
Due to the lack of availability of the desired Amiibos, the hacker community created an App to create these NFC tags using the NFC reader/writer chip on an Android phone to write to NFC sticker tags costing about 50 cents a piece.
Thus this story leads into my first Android Phone.
I bought a used Sony Xperia Z2 and in a way it was serendipity because when I first saw it on Craigslist, I fell in love with it immediately; apparently the seller told me afterward that he had only listed the phone only a couple of hours prior. What is there to fall in love with? well it is made by Sony for one thing of which I always loved as a brand name and secondly the price was perfect at $140. I didn’t quite trust Samsung; mostly from the rumors that it can get quite overheated
As with any new toy, it sat on my desk for a few days before I decided to investigate the process of how to create NFC tags for my game. Apparently the process goes something like this.
- Download and install Tagmo
- download two hacked bin files
- start up Tagmo and point it to the bin files
- load up an amiibo file
- write the tag
So I downloaded the Tagmo APK app and I managed to install the Tagmo app without any problems. The problem came about downloading a larger multi-directory zip file.
So I downloaded the WD My Cloud app so I can download the zip file from My Cloud.
See where I am heading here?
Three hours later… I almost wrapped my head around this one… the Download folder is not quite the main download folder. There is an internal Download folder that is seen by the Zip extractor, but it isn’t the same Download folder as the one for the Web. In addition, the WD Cloud has a download folder under internal/My Cloud. Yes I know, if I did a search I would have found the post that talked about it on this forum. I did find it, which is why it was only three hours later
I am still unable to point Tagmo to my Download folder to get my Amiibo files as it expects the amiibo files to be in its own Tagmo directory, of which I don’t think I know where Tagmo got installed. However I did managed to read in a NFC tag from one of my amiibos and then wrote it back out to a Ntag215 sticker. I tested the new tag in my game and I am stoked that I got it to work.
I love the fact that I am no longer in a Walled Garden much like my old days of Microsoft where files are installed in as many places as possible and years later you are still finding remnants of programs that you installed decades prior.
It probably makes a lot of sense that My Cloud would have its own download folder as well as the Web browser should have its own too. It is true for the iPhone as iPhone doesn’t really have a download folder at all but the WD Cloud does have its own download folder and when an iPhone app opens up, lets say, a book, the file gets copied to some magical place within my iPhone.
I am really complaining about nothing but just the fact that I spent 3 hours poking at everything on my phone looking for something as simple as my downloaded files, I think there is something wrong with this experience.
It reminded me of my Cloud experience where layers of sign-in, creation of passwords would obfuscate the fact that we are signing on to WD’s My Cloud service, followed by signing into your own Cloud device but we didn’t know that when we first set up the Cloud. It becomes clear later on, but not at the time of setup.
This all leads back to WD in that they never understood why its users gets frustrated. Like the time I connected “My Book” with “My Cloud” and turn them on simultaneously and it would lock only a few minutes later and for months I kept posting up to say “don’t boot up your Cloud with a USB drive attached” and nobody listened. WD never said anything for four years and to this day, I still don’t know if this issue has been solved - “Booting up a cloud with UNSCANNED USB drive attached”.
In the end though… now that I do understand what my “My Cloud” is doing, it is an excellent NAS and Cloud.
As to my first Android Phone, it is a breath of fresh air in comparison to my walled garden iPhone. I don’t have any plans on using my new Android phone as my phone, but because it has an SD card slot that can expand up to 128GB of storage, it might just be my new media player.
Thanks for reading.