Category Archives: Tech & Gizmos

You can make money without doing evil

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So I was going to check out a video on YouTube which turned out to be geobanned: Unfortunately this content is not available in your region because the owner has not granted the respective music publishing rights. Bla bla.

All right, I thought, this has happened before. Let’s try the phone which is on a non-proxied network. Only I was reluctant to go through the hassle of navigating to the video by hand and tried to look for an easier solution, such as sending a link directly to the Android browser.

It didn’t take long to find the Chrome to Phone extension-app pair which was just what I was looking for. Or so I thought. Because when I tried to install the app on the Nexus S I was greeted by the following error message: This item cannot be installed in your device’s country.

Really, Google? Where’s the much praised Android freedom now?

Shadow Cities

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Your city is a game. You’re a mage.

Foursquare let you share your location, meet friends and comment on places. Chromaroma transformed public transport into a multiplayer game in London. And now a shadow city is unveiled, coexisting with the real one you’re living in, in which you’re a mage battling others like you. Check out Shadow Cities, a location-based multiplayer game for the iPhone:

You’re walking down the bank of the Danube. Suddenly your instincts flare up, signaling danger. Can that suited-up guy who just took off the tram be an enemy mage? You reach for your phone to cast a spell…

Regardless of the realization, the idea is awesome. Unfortunately the app is not available in the Hungarian store yet and the game is limited to the iPhone, no Android client so far. Still, isn’t it fascinating where technology is taking us?

Life’s a game after all.

Gmail

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Partly due to the horrid implementation of the stock IMAP mail app on Android and partly due to the elegant new look of the web interface you may recall that I made the switch to Gmail a while ago.

After a few days of use I devised the following inbox-zero method:

  • Mail I read and been done with gets archived.
  • Mail that requires some kind of action later gets starred then archived.
  • After processed, starred items are un-starred.

This seems to work well enough so far.

However, the one thing I have issues with is search. I’m spoiled by the MobileMe / Mail.app power-search which indexes everything instantly rendering the use of folders and the like obsolete. Say I am looking for the confirmation email from my hosting provider, Laughing Squid: a quick search pops all messages with these keywords no matter where they are or how long ago I received them. Why would I want to organize mail into folders then? Or, for that matter, stick labels on them.

Enter Gmail: for some reason the search does not find all the emails I want it to find. Maybe it doesn’t search in messages received years ago or doesn’t index them all, I don’t know. Alternatively, something got messed up during the import and some of the emails weren’t copied over…

On the desktop I bought Sparrow because it was made specifically for Gmail. I am yet to test it but I’m afraid it will suffer from the same search problem. One solution would be the shiny new Lion Mail.app (which indexes everything) but would that be able to use the archive method Gmail prefers with the labels?

On that note I still haven’t found a use for labels.

Windows 7

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The update system has never been the strong suite of Windows. I suppose everyone remembers fondly the pop-up dialog windows of XP prompting you to restart that came back right away when you closed them. The Windows 7 version is similar but at least you can specify a 4 hour grace period (at most) until which time the notification does not come back to pester you.

What happened today on my work PC was really annoying, though. I was happily typing away closing in on the end of a paragraph, ready to smash ‘Enter’. At this precise point the god-forsaken pop-up reared its ugly head and it stole the focus from the then current window. As a result my ‘Enter’ went to the default selection on the dialog window, which was, you can probably guess: ‘Restart now’. I could only watch helplessly as the system closed down all my open applications one by one, severed the remote desktop connection, and commenced updating itself.

I understand the problem that users are reluctant to restart to update so they need to be educated, but really, dear Microsoft, really, a focus stealing pop-up? Do you call this UX?

Gershwin

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It was really smart of me to stick to default theming: WordPress 3.2 (Gershwin) is here and all I needed to do was to click the auto-update button. The whole process took about 30 seconds.

You’ll all notice the brand new design that came with this release, Twenty Eleven. It looks much sleeker, more modern. In the spirit of the minimalism introduced I also removed the latest posts, latest comments, meta and tag cloud widgets from the sidebar. By the way, redoing the widgets was the only task required by the theme update, everything else went over seamlessly.

The new look includes support for mobile devices: it looks good on phones as well, without using any additional plug-ins. Also instead of the constant header you’ll find a random image among the few I have selected and uploaded from my Flickr stream. My only woe is that apparently the list of header images uploaded cannot be edited from the admin interface, a feature I hope they’ll integrate.

Nexus S

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These days it’s enough to produce an iPhone from your pocket to be labeled with several unpleasant stereotypes, such as a fanboy, living in a reality distortion filed, (unjustly) rich, a zombie, likely gay, etc. I don’t think I managed to convince people otherwise either, so now y’all can yell ‘Ha!’ because my new phone is an Android. This is going to be one giant post detailing my experiences so far.

Nexus S

A bit of a background: up until now my main phone was an iPhone 3G from Softbank. Since Japanese carriers don’t offer unlock, upon returning to Hungary I was left with no other choice but to jailbreak and carrier-unlock myself. If anything, this made the iPhone perform even worse under the latest software versions. 4.1 was marred with constant 8-minute reboots rendering the phone nigh unusable, but even after upgrading to 4.2.1 everything was still painfully slow (albeit stable). Seeing how Android worked on my brother’s ZTE Blade I was tempted to make the switch, but not until the massive price drop of the Nexus S by T-Mobile did I make the move.

Hardware

The first thing to notice after unboxing is how the whole device is slightly curved, including the screen, making it look quite elegant. It’s also really nifty that the front does not have any real buttons: the usual four controls are part of the touchscreen. This I really liked; – coming from an iPhone – the less physical buttons there are the better.

The back is cheap-looking plastic partly enameled with a dotted mesh. However, the lower part has a slight bump due to which it sits very comfortably in hand and has the right balance. It is also possible to tell which side’s up without looking at the phone directly.

Even though it’s bigger than the iPhone, it feels lighter, no doubt thanks to the toy-plastic housing. I suppose time will tell how sturdy the design is after all. It’s still admirable that they managed to improve upon the usual soapbox look, anyway.

My only woe is that they put the wake-up button to the right side. On average I try to push the non-existent button on the top a few thousand times per day. Habits like this die hard.

The screen does not only impress by its curvature: it’s gorgeous. The resolution is a little lower than the iPhone 4’s retina display but still a huge improvement from that of the 3G’s. (Even bro’s Blade has a better looking screen than my old iPhone.)

I had no issues with touch responsiveness. Some complained on forums about the device gathering fingerprints easily but that doesn’t bother me at all and also I consider it inevitable anyway.

Gingerbread

The phone came with Android 2.3.3 but offered the latest 2.3.4 to be installed over the air instantly. Every observation in this post is based on this stock Gingerbread version.

For starters I was amazed by the sheer speed. After the iOS 4.x & iPhone 3G combo it felt like driving your own car instead of mass transit. I’m sure that an iPhone 4 offers the same blazing performance, but for a good deal more money.

I wasn’t a complete stranger to Android of course, and contrary to popular belief I am not a religious zealot of all things Apple either. For instance I liked the sleekness of the black tinted Gingerbread UI instantly, and once the basic logic of Android is understood, it is quite easy to operate.

The fact that not only icons but Widgets can be placed on the home screen is a welcome addition. I managed to set up my spaces quickly. The only irksome task was organizing the icons: unlike the iPhone they did not seem to move around automatically when I tried to change their order.

The reason why the Nexus S appealed to me anyway, was the fact that it’s a Google standard device. Hopefully I won’t have to wait ages for any third party manufacturer to port the latest OS version or put up with some modified “UI enhancement” they hastily put together.

Market

Things are not so ideal once third party apps come into the picture though. If Google has a HIG and/or a CSM these documents must be locked deep in some vault so that developers may not even glance at them accidentally. I was shocked by the sheer ugliness of most of the apps in the Market. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, the 1990s called and they want their UI elements back. Why is it so hard to use the stock controls for example?

The Market is a jumbled mass of horribleness anyway. It badly seeks some kind of prioritization algorithm. Even searching for popular titles doesn’t guarantee an official result on the first page and when I tried to find all the EA Games offers I got a bunch of cheat codes and walkthrough apps instead.

I don’t really see myself just browsing around for interesting apps like I did with the App Store and so far searching for app ideas on the web proved to be more fruitful than doing so in the Market.

Mail

This one didn’t go too smoothly. Started well enough when – to my surprise – the stock everything-but-gmail app found all the required settings automatically and proceeded to download the me.com emails. Unfortunately push was out of the question and apparently if I deleted something it still remained on the server. The game breaking omission however was the fact that apparently the stock email app is unable to move emails between folders. I understand that they want to steer people towards gmail but this is ridiculous. Exchange isn’t supported either which makes all the snide comments of the fanboy community about iOS’s late Exchange support somewhat interesting.

I was recommended K-9 mail which I promptly downloaded. It lasted about five minutes on the Nexus. The settings just went on and on and the contextual menus were absolutely arbitrary. For some reason it only managed to activate push on the Inbox and the Drafts folder as well. (Probably unimportant to most people but the application icon is really ugly, too.) I miss the iPhone’s Mail app a lot: nothing I saw in the Market even came close.

Finally this morning I threw in the towel and set up a migration of emails to my gmail account. Google won.

Music

One thing I cannot live without is music. I started out with the built-in music app, but that didn’t recognize ALAC, which I use for most of my lossless albums. Unfortunately every other music player I checked out in the Market was so unbelievably disgusting I resignedly turned back to the stock player.

Apparently a piece of software called doubleTwist offers the best iTunes integration for Android. The first go was a fiasco: it only copied one track of each album over but subsequent attempts had better results. At the moment I set up the OTA sync as well. The promised functionality is automatically watching iTunes playlist changes and syncing new songs to the phone whenever it’s connected to the home network.

On one hand it’s nice that I can just upload something to the USB storage and it can be played instantly. On the other, however, I miss the convenience of making playlists in iTunes and then just syncing them.

On the bright side I got instant Last.fm scrobbling. This is where Android really shines, I suppose. Unlike the clunky iPhone/iPod sync-when-connected iTunes hack the Last.fm app just hooked itself with the music player and uploaded every song on the fly. It just worked.

Less great was the earphone experience. The in-ears given by Samsung are really uncomfortable and prone to fall out from the slightest movement of the head. It took me about ten steps to shake them both out while running.

Running

Naturally there’s no Nike+ for Android. My choice of substitute was RunKeeper. The first few workouts were quite promising. The GPS tracked very accurately and when we ran together with my brother the in-shoe sensor and RunKeeper were in complete sync. I’m only missing my 1500 kilometer purple level from Nike+.

One thing that’s definitely worse is the audio feedback. Apple excels at such things, their girl coach voice sounds natural and smooth. RunKeeper’s is much less sophisticated and for some reason it doesn’t soften the music while speaking either. You can guess who wins, the audio feedback or Mark Jansen’s growls.

Miscellaneous

The camera is a nice improvement from the iPhone and the flash LED can be used as a weapon to blind people. PicPlz offers the same functionality in place of Instagram. I’m missing Soundtracking though; I just started getting into it. Another drawback is that the Last.fm app is not fooled easily and doesn’t stream radio, unlike the iPhone version.

I was happy to find the official Cut The Rope for Android. (Way better than the overhyped Angry Birds.) It would be nice to know if NFS: Shift has any multiplayer though and Scrabble is sorely missed. We loved Scrabble during train trips, my brother and I.

Conclusion

So far so good. The much celebrated openness of Android more often than not feels like an uncontrolled mess to me. I’m not interested in homebrew ROMs or modding but constructive comments and great app suggestions are very welcome.

Plus One

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Google unrolled the +1 button for websites to embed. It’s pretty easy to implement using the webmaster page.

Think of it as a like button for websites: if you find something cool you can recommend it to your friends who may receive these via their search results, personalizing their searches. More information in the explanation video.

Even though it’s located on the right sidebar it works on a per address basis: subpages – such as standalone posts – can be plus-oned independently. Additionally, it seems to have none of the horrid performance issues of the Facebook like button.

+1 if you like :]

iPhone 3G reboot

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People who know me or at least follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been plagued by a nasty bug with the hacked iPhone software since I started using iOS 4.1. During normal daily use the phone would flicker feebly then reboot for no reason whatsoever. To make matters worse in these cases the OS loaded several minutes slower than a normal boot would.

A few days ago finally decided I’ve had enough. As the first step I tried to re-jailbreak the phone and reinstall 4.1 from DFU mode. After restoring from the backup – even though the firmware felt much snappier – the problem surfaced again. Next I tried omitting the backup entirely and set up a new phone. No luck, the following day I had a random reboot again.

Then I realized (the blog post must have slipped my attention) that there actually exists a version of Pwnage tool that installs 4.2.1 without modifying the baseband. This is important because the ultrasn0w carrier unlock only works on specific baseband versions which are usually updated when new iOS versions are released.

So I updated to 4.2.1, set up as new, and finally I got a stable phone. Only there was a nagging issue: push notifications stopped working. Even though I’ve had enough life lessons about ‘if it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it’, I set out to get push back.

One offered solution is Subscriber Artificial Module (SAM), a piece of software that spoofs a fake SIM to iTunes and lets you activate as if you had the correct carrier’s SIM. Only it would have been too easy if it worked: I couldn’t find a single option that was accepted by iTunes as a Softbank SIM.

Then it occurred to me, why can’t I just restore from backup with the 4.2.1 software? After all it was – seemingly – the firmware that caused the restarts, it had nothing to do with the backup, and also I did have push before – even on 4.1 – probably as a remainder from the legitimate Softbank activation. So after several cumulative hours of flashing, organizing apps and synchronizing now I have an iPhone 3G that runs 4.2.1 with active push and no random reboots.

I could have done this sooner. Partly I was lazy to do the whole boring process of updating again and again and I was afraid I’d lose the only phone I have and can afford. Turns out I could have been more optimistic and self-assured: if I want something bad enough, keep on trying no matter how much time it needs to be done, and never give up… then it might just happen.

Chromaroma

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Az angolok a tömegközlekedésből csináltak szuper közösségi játékot.

Persze úgy könnyű, hogy az Oyster card rendszer miatt az adatok begyűjtésének problematikája már meg is oldódott. Mennyivel élvezetesebb lehet úgy metrózni, hogy közben elfoglalhatod a megállót, vagy pontokat gyűjthetsz az átszállással.

“Gratulálunk, ezzel az utaddal megszerezted a Körbe-körbe a Körúton jelvényt!”

Plusz tényleg össze lehetne kötni kedvezményekkel, Foursquare-rel. Ha turista jön, kaphatna a reptéren kis csomagot kártyával meg soknyelvű játékszabállyal, így a BKV-vel nézhetne várost.

Technológia szövi át minden tevékenységünk. A telefonjainkkal, mágneskártyáinkkal, blogjainkkal, közösségi hálóinkkal, képmegosztókkal és csiripeléssel végtelen adathalmazt, adatnyomot teremtünk miközben átutazunk az életünkön.