Entries tagged as googleRelated tags android austria fail german gnu-linux hardware phone public transport review samsung anti-spam career fun gentoo internet flickr social web www yahoo comic cw geography debian history kernel programming bluetooth diy electronics rant crypto education finance guitar movies private tablet softwareSaturday, June 21. 2014Android smartphone coming up, III![]() I’m adding to my phone history: A look back at the Galaxy NexusI only noticed recently that this phone never had a “Samsung” tag at all; while Samsung indeed was the hardware manufacturer, that device simply was a Google phone. Surprisingly, I was less into rooting/modding with this phone than I was with my first Android phone, the Motorola Milestone, although the pureness and openness of the Nexus devices was dedicated to such purposes. Maybe because Android 4 finally featured a lot innately: Useful home screen, editing contact groups & birthdays, taking screenshots, mobile data usage control, unlocking by face recognition, panorama camera mode, rich notifications, better search, better messaging. I only rooted it once it was clear there won’t be any further updates; I did so to be able to use advanced anti-theft features. But now it’s beginning to bug me that the hardware (RAM) is getting old (small); the phone is lagging a lot if the uptime reaches one week. I had to turn off various useful but RAM-eating services, like, live wallpapers. Well, it’s 2½ years old. Mentioning Android features, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Google Now experience becomes the actual core in the future, making devices smart and active companions that exactly know about their users’ habits. ... and the AppIe ¡PhoneYes, I used an ¡Phone 4 for some months. I didn’t find it that intuitive like it was always praised; e.g., where do you find email settings? No, not at all in the email app, but in the system settings! Also, the ¡Phone has no idea of the concept of widgets or background services. There is no such thing as a third-party keyboard with swipe gestures and text prediction, or a service that changes settings according to detected current conditions. AppIe physically seals phones and notebooks, tries to trick users into buying entirely new devices by making component upgrades expensive or impossible. Yet, ¡People only seem to care about the smoothness of animations. Whoever buys AppIe, it’s their own fault. Coming up: Samsung Galaxy S5
I notice, Samsung is the new Nokia: Every jerk has got one—people who don’t know how to mute their phones or change the standard sounds. I’m the next in line! ... and the Gear Fit
Do they also build toothbrushes? Saturday, March 17. 2012Status quo of my web usage, II![]() Changes during the recent months:
Thursday, December 1. 2011Android smartphone coming up, II![]() A look back at the Motorola MilestoneI’m continuing the history of my [cell] phones by replacing my two-year-old Milestone. It literally has been a milestone: It was my first smartphone, and I could do everything with it (which, of course, wasn’t specific for that device, but for Android in general): Contacts and calendar were magically in sync with Google’s web apps. I could browse the web fully, even start embedded Flash videos—a zombie technology, considered dead since years. I used the GPS to do local exploration, e.g. with Google Maps/Places, used location-based games like Brightkite (meanwhile dead), Foursquare or Gowalla (which I lost interest in soon), or recorded my bike rides. It’s so “living in the future” to pan through Google Street View on a mobile device. I was root on a Linux system. GTD task managers and note apps are in sync with their respective web apps. I access important files in my DropBox. I receive audio streams from Google Music. I hold the phone up to a speaker and it freaking tells me what song it’s playing. Apps with AI (e.g. text predicting keyboard apps) are popping up, just as those implementing computer vision and augmented reality. However, since several months my most used app is Running Services (which I called ruining services), followed by Android’s internal Task Manager: I had to cope with the phone’s limited RAM of only 256 MB every day. I could hardly install additional apps, although I had already applied a mem hack. It was a regular task to copy a Google Maps upgrade from /data/app to /system/app using Root Explorer (and do a hot reboot followed by deleting the old cache file). The phone also had a memory leak (since that infamous Android 2.2 upgrade that every European Milestone user was whining for for months), occasionally killing the alarm clock app during the night, making a precautionary reboot necessary every other day. However, I didn’t have the nerve to flash one of those very experimental alternative unofficial ROMs—Argh, the locked bootloader!—as they often introduced heavily disturbing and way too serious bugs, which I consider out of the question for a productive device that simply ought to work. The actual problem of course is that developers are constantly bloating their apps, keeping track with the hardware specs of the most recent phones. My Milestone even got two hardware upgrades: A new and stronger battery, and a new LCD, which I had smashed accidentally. Phone vs. tabletSo, I’m getting a new phone, but I didn’t really want to: Actually, I’m leering at an Android tablet since more than a year, and my intention was to use that device primarily and reduce the smartphone to a simple phone. I want to use a tablet as a kind of e-reader that supports handwritten input—I want to write formulas and draw freaking arrows!—, replacing my non-electronic (cardboard) tablet that holds printed sheets of paper and a pencil. So far, my workflow is to print research papers and read and annotate them with pencil on paper. There are also computer science e-books with hundreds of pages involved, printed incrementally, where I can only carry the currently read sections with me. Sadly, it seems that such a device is still months away. One of the main issues for me is that all of those 10.1" tablets currently only have a pixel count of at most 1280 along the wide edge, resulting in ~140 ppi, what I consider way too low compared to the densities of ~250–300 ppi of current phones. Another thing is precise stylus input using an actively powered stylus, allowing effective palm rejection. Slowly, that technology evolves, e.g. with Samsung’s Galaxy Note. Also, although Android 3.x had been optimized for the tablet form factor, it appeared having been rushed to market. I expect an incarnation of a tablet that meets my expectations within the next months, with an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core CPU, Android 4.x, and e.g. Samsung’s S Pen. But I’m not going to wait any longer. Coming up: Samsung Galaxy Nexus
As I use to say: With that phone, I won’t need something else for years again. Thursday, March 3. 2011Admin search FAILTuesday, February 2. 2010Syncing Symbian to Google: SOLVED![]() I found out how to get all my calendar entries into Google: Sync the events into a single iCalendar file using OpenSync’s Sunbird calendar plugin and import this into your Google calendar. In Sunbird I exported an empty calendar into a local iCalendar file and used this as a starting point; a plain empty file was not enough. Unfortunately, there is a known annoying bug preventing entries that are older than one month from getting pushed to your Android smartphone—only noted as a “small” bug by Google, though. You’ll have to re-save those entries in the web calendar to update their modification time and have them synced to your phone. This, however, won’t work by updating their LAST-MODIFIED time stamps in the iCalendar file prior to the import. Friday, January 15. 2010Syncing Symbian to Google hardly possible![]() As I’ll get my Motorola Milestone on Monday (W00t! W00t!) I tried to get my data from my Symbian cell to Google somehow. I made several syncing attempts:
Sigh. Luckily, not much of my data should change within those few days remaining. Sunday, December 20. 2009Android smartphone coming up![]() Or: A review of the Nokia N73The history of my cell phones had its preliminary end in January 2007, almost three years ago, when I got my Nokia N73, a Symbian S60 based device. I was quite satisfied with it, and it was quite robust as well. I could sync contacts, calendar and tasks with Evolution via Bluetooth and SyncML by the help of OpenSync. I regularly used the e-mail client with IMAP/TLS and SMTP/TLS. The built-in browser did its job, despite its bugs. I bought a license for the LCG Jukebox app to be able to play Ogg Vorbis files. The cell’s camera was OK, though not very fast to launch; a quick sneaky snap was almost impossible. Features that I never tried were video calls or Push-To-Talk. After a while I used it more and more extensively for internet access. It was my morning newspaper on the train during the week and at the breakfast table on the weekends. I had to cope with websites that didn’t provide a “microbrowser” friendly http://m.whatever.com/ version. I used a dedicated app to access timetables of the local public transport system. I used the non-GPS(!) based geolocation capabilities of Google Maps. I used the IM client Fring and bought a license for the Identi.ca/Twitter/Facebook/Google Reader client Gravity. Because of the browser’s bugs I installed Opera Mini. But I had severe memory problems, I couldn’t run no two of them at once—so quite the behavior of the Crapple diePhone. Also, there was always a different and minimalistic browser launching from a text or from Gravity. A cumbersome copy & paste of a URL into the “real” browser killed Gravity. I had to fav tweets or dents to look at URLs on the PC at a later time; I could thus hardly dare to retweet them from the cell. As it was a branded device, there were apparently never any software updates available, although it definitely had its flaws. It took me 2½ years to finally notice that I should have faked its device ID so that I could’ve updated it as if it were unbranded. But after those three years I decided that it was just too late to mess around with it, as I thought it’s time for something that comes up to my needs. Coming up: Android
Yeah, Google is a data leech. I know. But what should I do? Buy the you-know-what instead? Btw, this will be my second Motorola device after my StarTAC 75 from 1998. Friday, August 21. 2009Google found me![]() CODE: # grep q=stephan.paukner.cc /var/log/apache2/access.log
74.125.75.1 - - [19/Aug/2009:22:27:50 +0200]
"GET /gallery/d/3633-3/clouds.flv HTTP/1.1"
200 24576 "http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=
stephan.paukner.cc" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U;
Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909
Firefox/1.5.0.7"
# whois 74.125.75.1 | grep Name:
OrgName: Google Inc.
NetName: GOOGLE
OrgTechName: Google Inc. Interesting that a Google guy/gal uses an ancient Firefox on an ancient crappy OS (Win XP). Testing purposes? And interesting also that this was a targeted search. Apropos, I tried to re-establish Yahoo! as my default interface to the web. It turned out to not deliver the results that I expected, but Google did. Another argument against Yahoo! is that they’re flirting with Microsoft; too bad that Yahoo! 0wns Flickr.
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