This assumes you’ve tried all the normal methods of reducing drain – apps like BetterBatteryStats, Wakelock Detector, etc, the built-in battery stats, trimming permissions, using Pie background restrictions, etc.

I very rarely see this mentioned anywhere when people are trying to track down mysterious Google Play Services/Android OS/Android System drain – most people seem to resort to a factory reset, which won’t fix the problem when the issue lies in dodgy apps.

The fix is really simple:

• Open an ADB shell
• Run top
• Interact with your phone as normal, and take note of anything using more than 0.5% CPU
  • Ignore Android system processes, except anything containing gms (Google Play Services) – see below if this is consistently using CPU
  • Process names may be truncated, in which case cross reference the PID using ps -A | grep 12345
• Lock the screen and wait a bit, then again look for unusual CPU usage
• Install Greenify
• Greenify any apps you’ve found, taking care to ‘ignore background-free’ (which is a misnomer)

If you do the above and still encounter Google Play Services/GMS CPU usage:

• If you are on Android 9, unrestrict all background apps. One of my apps seemed to be able to send GMS into a continuous loop by being background restricted – unsure which.
• Consider partial de-googling, such as by disabling/uninstalling the Google app
• Try disabling ad blockers
• Watch logcat for any obvious errors/loops from badly written apps

Doing all this got me from 3.5-4 hours SOT to 5+ hours SOT on my Google Pixel – fixing the drain that Android Pie added and getting me back to where I was on Oreo.

For anyone interested the apps I ended up Greenifying included: Spotify, my banking app, MS RDP, and a few other obscure ones. To reiterate, none of the apps showed up in any battery drain diagnosis apps, or in the system battery stats.

GNU Tar lacks an option to print the tar label and exit immediately – it can only print the label as part of reading the whole archive. This works ok-ish for hard disks where ctrl+c is instant and without side effects, but is unsuitable for tape drives.

The following simple perl one-liner prints the label from a tar archive passed in stdin:

cat my.tar | perl -e 'read(STDIN, $header, 100); print(unpack("Z100", $header)."\n");'

An alternative, hackier, approach is discussed in my post on LTO tape drives: https://darkimmortal.com/2018/10/adventures-with-lto-tape-for-home-casual-use/

Goes without saying that I’m returning the item manually and not following their advice!

Hello, I recently opened a return and the seller has sent me a refund before I had a chance to print the postage label, and now the option to print a postage label has disappeared. How can I get the postage label to return the item with?

Alright, thank you for the confirmation and sharing the details with me. I can understand that you are concerned about the return case in which you received the item and refund both. I will look into it and help you with best possible resolution from my side.

Just to confirm, are you referring to item “redacted”?

yes that's the one

I have checked the case details and found that case is closed as seller has issued the refund to you. Now, you are not required to take nay further action in this. You can keep the item or you can return it by communicating with seller. However, the case is closed so no further action is required.

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