philomyth.us » Geeking

Joining the Android Revolution

Emmanuel — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:19:30 +0000

I can’t remember how long I’ve been using a Windows Mobile device as my daily communicator. It was even before I made the switch to GSM. And before that, I was using Pocket PC as my pre-phone PDA. Well, the wait for Android is over and the time has come to embrace my Google overlords (J/K).

For all the time that I was with Microsoft’s mobile platform, although it was not really an open platform, a fringe developer community (centered around xda-developers) filled the gap to make modifications and “improve” the user experience. However, as Google has pushed Android to be a viable mobile operating system and a more open development platform, it was time to make the jump.

In a nod to HTC smartphone success, I was originally trying to maintain my loyalty, but they were taking too long to come out with a high-end Android device on ATT. So after seeing the Samsung Captivate in action, and hearing Samsung’s announcement that they would be limiting their Super AMOLED screen to their own devices (i.e. no AMOLED for HTC), I made my choice.

The Samsung Captivate is a part of Samsung’s Galaxy S family which is a big push using the Android operating system into mobile communication and multimedia devices across multiple carriers. In addition to the awesome 4-inch screen, the Captivate with Android has some other cool features that I like:

native Gmail, Contacts, Calendar support (push, stars, labels), including Google Apps accounts.
strong apps and widget development and support via Android Market.
open user development environment (xda-developers, still my favorite)
Gorilla Glass for screen protection
nice hardware touches: sliding USB port door, clever and secure access to battery and rear slots

However, there’s no such thing as perfection. So here are some gripes and dislikes, some are Android-related which have workarounds and eventual solutions while others are hardware-specific limitations:

fail to filter My Contacts (stupid Samsung customization) [xda-dev]
no default select of Google Calendars for new events [xda-dev]
no native Google Docs support (come on, Google)
no camera flash (limited indoor and night shooting)
no front-facing camera (do I really need video calls)
camera rotation tagging (annoying landscape/portrait fail)
slow GPS lock (supposed fix coming)

After using the Captivate for almost a month, I’ve pretty much settled on my current installed apps which are listed on AppBrain. Here is a highlight of those that I use more regularly:

FBReader: ebook reader
Google Maps: full featured maps, navigation and places
Cubed (3): music player
mVideoPlayer: video player, duh
Astrid Task List: syncs with Remember the Milk
Google Listen: podcast player (streamed and offline)
LauncherPro: customizable homescreen
JustPictures!: photo viewer (local and flickr)
Profile: sound and settings by profile
Google Voice: full integration and control
AppBrain: application manager integrated with Market
Yelp: restaurant reviews
Root Explorer: file manager with root access

For some of the apps that are more web-based, it will be interesting how they come up with offline support when you are off the grid. Another wishlist app is something that can do automatic background cloud-storage syncing, whether for photos, docs or any other files.

A note on tablets. When Apple first came out with the iPad, I bought into the idea that tablets were going to be a new viable form factor. At the time, I was thinking that Android would be a great platform, and there are quite a few Android tablets launching in the coming months, including one from Samsung. But after using Android on the phone, it seems that any tablet based on Android would still feel like a big phone. This is not a dig on Android, but more like a recognition of how well Android works in the smartphone form factor. And just as the iPad is limited by iOS, I think the right platform for tablets would be a full-fledged operating system like Google’s Chrome OS. Regardless, it’ll be cool to see how this plays out in the coming year.

Feeding the Ebook Habit

Emmanuel — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:56:14 +0000

I have been reading books in digital form for some time now. It started with using my PDA to access my Bible using Laridian’s PocketBible. Once I got used to the convenience of reading on a handheld, it was a natural jump to ebooks.

I started out reading on my Windows Mobile device and continue to do so because the one thing I have with me all the time is my phone. The e-reader software that I used back then was Peanut Press, which was later bought buy Palm, and then bought again by Barnes & Noble.

Lately, I have been testing a free program called Freda, which uses the increasingly more common and popular ePUB format [wikipedia]. With all the e-reader and tablet talk these days, there are a lot more options for accessing ebooks and ebook libraries as well as new hardware form factors.

For now, I’ve settled on managing my ebooks locally (rather than in a proprietary marketplace). I have found a couple tools that help make this easier. The first is a desktop e-reader application called Stanza which can also do some basic format conversion. They have since been bought by Amazon (you see the M&A theme going on in this marketspace) and development seems to have stalled since the Big A have their own Kindle platform to promote.

The other application that I have been making good use out of is Calibre which is a library management application. The real power of Calibre is its ability to convert ebook formats intelligently with pretty good results. It is also able to sync and manage all your ebooks, but I haven’t really gotten into those functions yet.

There’s a Boxee in my Revo

Emmanuel — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:19:58 +0000

Lately, the INOi MH720 that we use in our living room to watch movies has been showing its age, having trouble with new audio/video codecs and subtitle formats. I had been considering getting a new media player, but after looking into, figured it might be a better deal to get a nettop to use as a media center and as an additional family computer.

I finally settled on the AspireRevo 3610 and got lucky picking up the last one from our local Fry’s. It came equipped with 2GB RAM (enough for basic needs), 160GB hard drive (no big deal since using externals for storage) and an NVIDIA ION chip for graphics (hardware acceleration for HD video), along with an HDMI port out for both audio and video (easy HD connectivity to home theater).

The nettop came installed with Windows 7, which has and once again turned out to be a good upgrade. At first the network folder sharing was throwing me off because I was used to the previous Windows method. But after I got the hang of using HomeGroup [how-to geek], everything came together nicely. No more long USB cable running along the floor to transfer shows

For the media player application, Boxee came out with their latest beta, which does a nifty job of integrating local and web content to make a more complete browsing and watching experience. Basically, Boxee scans local folders and then displays the multimedia files with additional descriptions from the web, along with web-based episodes. It can even grab subtitles directly from opensubtitles for both movies and TV shows. Also, to keep from drowning in kids’ cartoons, I created a separate Boxee account to manage their content.

As for the remote control, the nettop came with a wireless mouse and keyboard, but that’s not very user-friendly for regular media use. I wanted to stick with our trusty universal remote URC-200 which has worked fine all these years, even with the different component upgrades. Unfortunately, the nettop didn’t come with an IR port. So I got a cheap media center remote with an IR receiver included. I used the media center remote to program my universal remote with the basic functions. Then, I found a program called Intelliremote which allowed me to control multiple applications with customized functions for each.

On a side note, I got to try out AmazonBasics when I ordered an HDMI cable. It was a good deal, came quick with Prime, and nice not having to wrangle with clamshell plastic packaging.

Of course, not everything is perfect particularly when on the “bleeding edge”, so here is my list of issues with the current setup:

Boxee’s latest version does not have the ability to manually add, correct or update media files and descriptions.
There’s some occasional strange resolution behavior when turning on the HDTV with Boxee already running in background.
Annoying ads on web episodes, but nothing to be done about that.
Flickr App on Boxee has been running slow, hopefully just a beta glitch.
BBC App limited by geo-location (what’s with cold-war era borders).
Easier customization of Boxee Homepage.
Latest Boxee beta broke support for embedded subtitles (i.e. anime not working)
Stronger parental controls on Boxee to limit content access.
The current remote setup has limited mouse and text input ability.
Windows 7 Homegroup folder sharing not backwards compatible with previous Windows versions.

Welcome to Your New Hosts

Emmanuel — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:08:24 +0000

After complaining for over a year about IX Web Hosting, I finally got off my butt and did something about it. Over the course of a couple of months, I have consolidated most of my domains over to GoDaddy and have transferred all my blogs over to DreamHost. I am hoping that this serves as a more reliable and stable setup than IX, which had constant security and stability problems.

Of course, all these changes are in the background, so if it worked (unlike last time), you guys shouldn’t notice anything except hopefully faster load times and perhaps less downtime.

Here’s a list of reminder notes for the next time:

One-click Installs are cool, except when they forget to tell you that they use customized database prefixes which don’t match previously backed-up database pointers.
Mirrored domain pointers and temporary database hostnames are helpful in transition but have to remember to clean them up and not leave any broken “links” once you go live.
Webshell on IX turned out to be a blessing, saved time on backing up the complete blog directories.
Apps used: Filezilla for FTP and PSPad for code editing.

Philomyth.us moved (and nobody noticed)

Installing New Windows

Emmanuel — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:36:00 +0000

I have had my Thinkpad T61 for over 2 years, and for the first year Windows Vista worked just fine. But in the last few months, I have been having annoying performance freezes. At first, I thought it was the battery going bad, then I tried changing the hard drive (thanks, Chik) which worked great for a while but then it started to hang again.

With all the hype about Windows 7, I was looking forward to making the switch. After running for a week now, everything is working great, even with the “unclean” install (more on that below). Almost all my applications installed without any problems, there were only a few that had to be run in “Compatibility” mode.

Here are some some lessons learned:

“Clean Install” in Windows 7 does not include formatting the old partition [technet]. This was a bit of a shock when I found my original TEMP directory intact and after rooting around a bit found a folder called WINDOWS.OLD that kept the data from the previous install. Next time, choose “Custom Installation” and re-create the drive partition [engadget].
Using Google Docs as an online notepad works great when re-installing systems. I could pull-up my documentation from any system without having to look for the actual file on disk. Gotta love the cloud.
With more apps and files based off the web, there is less junk to install and backup/restore on a new system.
Sometimes, Microsoft can still make good software .

And a list of leftovers:

Videolan has a known driver bug in Windows 7 which causes pixelation (not limited to 64 bit installs). [Update 11/13/2009: VideoLan came out with fix in 1.0.3]
Not sure if this is because of my “unclean install”, but folders and drives that I have renamed will revert after a restart. [Update 11/13/2009: I suspect this was SongBird over-aggressively managing external drive names and folders]
Some programs with the option to launch at startup have to be manually added to the STARTUP folder.
Old screensavers don’t seem to work properly.

Same Blog | New Look

Emmanuel — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:17:54 +0000

Time for another design update for the ol’ blog. It’s been almost 2 years since the last makeover, which along with less frequent blog posts is a likely result of increased facebook / twitter usage.

WordPress, the back-end to this site, has made some significant progress and is now at version 2.8.x. The developers and community have done a great job making it more user-friendly in posting, managing and maintaining. Version updates are now one-click as well as plugin installs and updates. No more fiddling around with zip files and FTP.

For this latest re-design, I went with a theme called Carrington that I’ve been keeping an eye on and wanting to learn more about. It is developed as a complete CMS theme framework, which is way beyond what I need, but interesting to look into (at least for me).

The layout of the front page is pretty similar to the previous version. The biggest change is moving the moblog pics to the top bar. I have also jazzed up the Archives page to make it more visual.

There are more changes to the secondary pages due to the new theme, such as Tag, Category and Date Archive pages, which can be accessed in the sidebar. And partly with the new theme, I have made some of the page elements context sensitive depending on what type of pages you are on. For example, when you are on a post page, you can see a list of Related Posts in the sidebar, along with the clutter of front page badges hidden.

So far, this re-design looks to be pretty functional and stable. As always, if you see something that isn’t working, please let me know.

P.S. I meant to publish this post last week, but I got distracted trying to do some integration of posts and comments with Facebook, but the coding is just not quite there yet as a workable solution.

Social Networking Boundaries

Emmanuel — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:44:42 +0000

For a generally anti- social personality like myself, the current social networking reality has me a bit stuck as to how to retain control of my online and offline persona. It takes multiple personality disorder to a whole other level, in managing our myriad of work and personal, family and friend networks. Trying to keep them distinct verges on the impossible, when even in real life, the lines aren’t that clear to begin with. And what about the whole private versus public visibility concern, let alone being able to determine who is a friend or a stranger.

As in everything that the internet touches, both good and bad, it makes the “worlds colliding” feeling accelerate quickly into the unmanageable. I think that whatever we put on the internet is inherently public, but with so much content out there it used to be virtually trivial. However, with the increasing ubiquity of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, connecting web content to real life identities has become a bit too obvious.

Facebook does a decent job of controlling the visibility of personal content. But twitter by design does not. So in an effort to establish my social networking boundaries, I have made the first step of protecting my twitter updates. This has the primary effect of privatizing my tweets (through which I have started to announce different blog posts) so that I am not publicly visible on twitter, and thus shutting it down as a public conduit to my web content.

However, Facebook is not off the hook. After having lived on Facebook for a couple of years now, I am reviewing how I want to use it in managing my personal connections. I am moving towards being more conservative with the people that I connect with through Facebook. I also like the idea of keeping work connections on a separate site like LinkedIn, but it does take extra effort, which may be worthwhile once it is all setup.

This issue of social networking boundaries is an evolving one, and more than likely, this post will be irrelevant or at least outdated in the very near future. But, I just wanted to get my thoughts down so that it gets me to act on them, and gives me the opportunity to review them down the line.

P.S. In a further blurring of boundaries, I tried to integrate the comments on this blog with Facebook, but haven’t been able to get it to work, which may or not be a good thing.

Geocaching

Emmanuel — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:14:29 +0000

In the past few months, we have gotten back into geocaching [wikipedia] as a family activity. It has turned into an outdoor activity that we can do wherever we are around town. The girls enjoy getting the descriptions and hints and then hunting for the caches. They particularly like the caches with loot that they can exchange.

We have also tried combining biking with geocaching which makes both activities more enjoyable, since biking makes the transportation part of hunting easier and geocaching gives purpose to our exercise. We have even recruited cousin Toby to join us in our Biking + Geocaching events.

When we first dabbled in geocaching about five years ago, we used a big black and white GPS unit and had to print out the geocache info ahead of time, which made it difficult to be a “spur of the moment” activity. In the intervening years, GPS and data technology has advanced to the point that paperless geocaching is readily accomplished.

Now, our Windows Mobile-based phones are equipped with GPS and mapping software via Google Maps. Couple that with a nifty geocaching software called GCz, we are able to download geocache entries and even do a simple search of caches nearby our current GPS location, wherever we are.

Here’s a geocaching.com badge link of what we have found so far:

We still need to work up to hiding our own caches. That will be the next level in our geocaching adventure.

Let us know if you ever want to go hunting with us. Who knows, there might be a cache right near where you are now.

Digital TV in the Air

Emmanuel — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:06:20 +0000

For a few years, we have been using a couple of Tivos to record all of our shows that were coming in over cable. But as more shows were available online, we found that we were watching less and less of the cable content from our Tivo. And with the analog to digital switch transition for Over the Air (OTA) content, we would be able to get high quality digital content for free. This was a perfect opportunity for us to ditch our cable tv subscription.

Of course, this change required some equipment changes to accomplish. The first challenge was that our LCD TV did not come with a digital TV tuner since we had bought it before the US finalized its protocol. On top of that, the Tivos that we had could not record HDTV content. So I decided we could solve both problems with a new Tivo HD, which had 2 built-in digital tv tuners AND could record HDTV.

Next was to figure out how to receive the OTA signal. I decided to go with a Terk Indoor Antenna which simplified wiring and setup. And with the Tivo HD which seemed to have a more powerful signal decoder, we have been able to get most of the channels and shows that are available.

One of the benefits of switching over is that the girls have been getting better shows through the different PBS channels. And after the first few days, they don’t even miss the Disney channel anymore. Good-bye, cable tv.

HTC Fuze

Emmanuel — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 23:48:09 +0000

After having used my 8525 for just over a year, I have moved on to my next device, the HTC Fuze from ATT. I had been hoping and waiting that Google Android would develop quicker into a legitimate business PDA phone, but doesn’t look like this’ll happen for another year.

ATT has been better about pricing their higher end phones, so I was able to pick one up at a local store with a nice rebate. They did have to replace the SIM chip with an updated version, but there wasn’t any problems or delays with activation like I had the first time when porting over from Verizon.

The best feature by far with this phone is the 480×640 resolution screen. It is sharp and beautiful, considering I was coming from the previous Windows Mobile device standard of 240×320. The camera is also a significant improvement with auto-focus at 3.2 megapixels AND flash.

Sticking with HTC devices is definitely the way to go. Especially with all the”development” going on at XDA-Developers. I was able to read up on my new phone (which is codenamed Raphael) on their forums and wiki. There is also a website dedicated to this specific phone called Fuze Mobility, which is more user-friendly than trolling the XDA-Developer forums.

At first I had a difficult time getting used to the new TouchFLO 3D interface that is loaded on top of Windows Mobile 6.1. Initially, it seemed to be just “eyecandy” while slowing down the usefulness of the device. After a week of trying it out, I was able to find some modifications to speed up the overall device and also to customize the look and design. In the process, I upgraded the ROM and radio improving overall function, reception, data connectivity and battery life.

One new function on this phone is the built-in GPS. So far, it works pretty well, I mainly just use it with Google Maps for Mobile. It will be interesting to see if and when there are more location-aware applications coming out for Windows Mobile.

Here are the main software applications that I have running:

Seven: push e-mail and contacts synchronization with Gmail and Gmail Apps
PhoneWeaver: profile switching
Oggsync: calendar synchronization with Google
AE Button Plus: customization of hardware buttons
Conduits Pocket Player: listening to music, streams and podcasts
Palringo: multi-IM client (except for Skype)
Skype: chat and VOIP
eReader: reading ebooks
Laridian PocketBible: multiple Bible versions, commentaries and devotions

For the most part, I am quite happy with this phone and can’t think of too much that I would want to improve. The speed is one area, but it is just a matter of time before xda-developers figures out the optimum settings.

I ended up having to get the SIM unlock for the phone, since I will be going to Asia next week and couldn’t wait 3 months until ATT would give it to me for free