Finally, Google Drive

The long rumored Google drive is finally here.

To keep it short: it is basically DropBox, just with some Google Docs integration... or rather, Google Docs is - once you sign up for Google Drive - replaced by it.

Therefore, in addition to DropBox you will get all your Google docs mirrored to your local folder as well. And you start with 5GB free.

"Real" Google Docs (like sheet, draw, ...) are represented as their own file type, e.g. .gsheet, .gdoc, .gslides ... and are only synchronized as a link to the web application, instead of a OpenDocument or Office file.
Well, at least some integration.

All other file types from Google Docs (like .pdf etc) are fully synced in their native format.

Those Instagrammers...

Weird bunch ... honestly.

Last week they were busy complaining that Android users started to ruin their community, because it was no longer iPhone-only... WTF ??
Now they all threaten to leave Instagram, because it has been acquired by Facebook.

I do understand the fear that a larger company like Facebook can ruin the smaller startup and the service... and we have seen that a lot of times, so it would not surprise anyone...

But we leave now? Give them a chance, and let's see how it turns out over the next couple of weeks.

Instagram for Android

Instagram finally became available on Android. And the Apple-Instagram-fanboys hate it...

I - however - love this... Have to try it out.

I'll probably give up Lightbox ... which was sort of the interim replacement app.

Digg this...

Just noticed how uncool digg is.

Not to remove the submission and comments ... yeah, I get that... Would sort of break the networking/social aspect of it.

But only through the contact form and no direct action in the account settings to close it?

That's bad.

Keyword Search on Google Chrome

I discovered this one by accident (i.e. I must have hit the tab key at the right time in the location/search bar), so I did some (re)search and found an awesome - somewhat hidden - feature on Chrome that I was missing all the time.. mainly because I'm using it a lot in Firefox.

Keyword search

i.e. you just type a keyword for your search engine / site and the browser will do the rest for you.
In Firefox you just type the keyword for the search engine followed by the search term and then hit enter.
In Chrome you type the keyword for the search engine, then tab, and then the search term (and enter):

As soon as you hit the tab key the label of the location bar will change to the search engine/provider you associated with the given keyword like this:

You can configure those search providers in the Chrome options; the fastest way is to right-click into the location bar and then select "Edit search engines..."

There you provide the name, keyword ans search URL (with a %s for the keyword, like in Firefox).

And that's it.

I still have to get used to the tab thingy...


PS: turns out the tab is not necessary, space will do as well - just like Firefox... so even better.

New Gadget in Town

No, not the new iPad... I'll stick to my (original) iPad for the time being.

It's about something different.
Just a month ago I decided it was time for a new car radio, because the old one we had (from 1998!) was just that... a car radio (with CD player).  This is our old 1998 Audi... so no fancy stuff that came with the car...

Since we have all our music and podcasts in iPods or our smartphones, the radio did not do much good anymore.

I opted for a Blaupunkt Toronto 410 BT (as in bluetooth), and it is fantastic:

• bluetooth hands-free... finally
• bluetooth streaming ... so I don't have to cable-connect my phone for a short ride.
• iPod (or others) via USB
• SD slot for the permanent car collection :)

Actually I took my old iPod mini with a battery that only lasts for about 1 hour - so totally useless in the wild -  loaded it with music and put it in the car... Since it gets the power over USB there, the dead battery it no longer an issue, and I have more music in the car now, than I ever had on CDs there before.

So on my next trip alone, like my bimonthly trip to Ljubljana, I can listen to podcasts without end... without any of the in-ear headphone nonsense.

On Mobile, Apps and the Cloud

The other day I heard about a bartender app for Android that seems to only have a lot of drink recipes and some tips&tricks.
So basically this is a book(let) made into an app.
Yawn.

Why are so many phone and tablet apps just stupid books or references?

Dear developer, you have a full phone/tablet at your disposal, meaning:

• you know where you are (location)
• you have the time, date, durations, ...
• you have (more or less) full internet connectivity

So, e.g., for a cooking app, don't just tell me to do something for 5 minutes, start a freaking timer, and tell me when those 5 minutes are over!

With internet connectivity  you have unlimited compute power, currently called "the cloud". 

So please use it.

And not just by providing storage in the cloud (as cool as the HTC/DropBox deal is), use it for real computing.

Also, while we are at it: I venture a prediction:

Within less then 12 months, we will not only get free cloud storage with our phone, there will also be offerings for a free cloud-hosted virtual machine with your tablet.

So then, you'll get your Windows 7 or 8 PC as a VM and just use it from your tablet.

I'm pretty confident on this.

HTC got it

Kudos to HTC.

In Barcelona they announced that with each of their new Android smartphones - of the HTC One series - customers get 25GB of storage on DropBox.

They did not go for an HTC Cloud Storage, but decided to cooperate with DropBox. Good. Because DropBox has apps, users, APIs, ...

I wonder how the HTC internal IT guys fought this decision ("we can do this ourselves").

Good for you, HTC.

Back to the basics for my phone

As much as I love my HTC Desire Z (or Vision for the US guys), it had one major flaw from day 10 or so.

For about 90% of the incoming calls, when I answered them (drag, or click on the <Answer> button), the phone would not really answer the call, it would keep ringing... and the other party would continue to get the ringback tone. After 7 or 8 or so rings, it would finally put the call through. Sometimes it would take too long, and I'd lose the call.

Annoying.

Very annoying.

Well, my dear friend V. noticed this behaviour the other day on my phone (granted, after a couple of beers) and told me there was one of those creepy #*codes that would switch of some networking stuff and make it work normal.

So while he was searching his archives to find this code, I also did some googling myself and found this behaviour described like this:

If you sync your Facebook contacts (on an HTC Desire)  this could happen; and the solution -   delete the Facebook contacts - seemingly did help a couple of users.

Well, it was a convincingly high number of users that reported both the problem and the success through removing the Facebook contacts.
So I gave it a try, removed all my Facebook contacts, had a co-worked call me (a couple of times) and it seemed to work.

3 hours later, V. sent me the code.

Enter the following code in the dialer screen. *#*#2347#*#*

So I did.
(and got a "CFU query when camp-on is off" message... talk about non-cryptic :))

It still works fine.

Only problem now is, ... Against everything I learned and preached when I was working in software support decades ago, doing heavy problem determination work... never ever change two parameters at the same time, when you want to get to the problem source... never ever ... you understand?!

Well I here did... So I still don't know what made the phone work, removing Facebook contacts or V.'s cryptic CFU-query-when-camp-on... code.

So if anyone else runs into this problem, please try only one of them, and report back here.
Thanks

Anyway... my phone is now back to its basic functionality, taking calls.

This is a good one...

It's The Little Differences

To quote Vincent Vega:

Vincent: But you know what the funniest thing about Europe iPhone vs Android is?
Jules: What?
Vincent: It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that they got here, but it's just-- just there it's a little different.

Like on the iOS virtual keyboard you have the key to switch to numeric on the left:

whereas on [edit: HTC] Android you have it on the right:

For some reason I'm used to the former, i.e. Apple way, and therefore on my [edit: HTC] Android phone I always hide the keyboard...

It's nice...

... to see Google clueless... for once.

Thunderbird Clipboard Bug Fixed

Wow, indeed in Thunderbird 10 the clipboard/paste bug from Excel/OpenOffice is indeed fixed.

Weird Thunderbird Bug

Since I upgraded my Thunderbird to version 9 if could no longer paste tables from OpenOffice.org Calc to Thunderbird as a table... they always get inserted as graphics.
Paste-without-format would just copy the plain text, but - of course - no format.
The problem has also been reported with Microsoft Office and LibreOffice.

I did not really notice the first couple of times, until co-workers started to complain that they no longer could copy/paste elements from my "tables" because they were images.

Did some searching on the web and found the bug ... indeed introduced in TB9 supposed to be fixed in FB10 (have to test this on a vbox):

The actual problem is when Thunderbird parses the meta-data of the clipboard, it does a locale-specific parse of a decimal number (the version)... but the version string will always contain a dot (.) and never a comma (,), since it is not really a decimal number. So there is a difference between e.g. German and English system(!) locale, i.e. the problem will appear on German windows, but not on English windows.

Changing the decimal symbol to a dot (.) in the Windows system settings will actually "fix" (circumvent) this problem. I just tested this.
Not sure, which system-wide setting I should keep now...

As I noticed in the bug, the fix is to treat the version as a string, not a (decimal) number.... That's better.

Start 2012 by Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions

Wow, the most simple app ever... just links :)  mypermissions.org

Start 2012 by Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions

If you have a habit of trying all new services that come around, and use your Facebook, Twitter, Google, ... account to sign in, then you'll have a mess in the apps/services permissions in Facebook et al.

My Permissions.org just has the links to all those plattforms, directly to the permissions pages.

So simple, yet so useful.

Bookmark this!
Visit it every odd month!

Favorite Equation

This is not really IT related, but geeky enough, I guess.

The other day I read a post or article about job interviews in the tech sector, like Google et al... And - so the article went - Google (if I recall correctly) once asked a candidate what his favorite (mathematical) equation was.
That made me think...

So here are my favorite equation(s) - not a surprising choice, given that my background is electrical engineering.

1. Euler's Equation (wikipedia link)

This one keeps fascinating me since I first heard it in an early math lecture at TechU Vienna. It goes like this

(or rather substitute a j for the i... as I said - electrical engineering :) )

What's so fascinating about it, you ask?
Well, it contains 5 elementary constants/numbers  (0, 1, e, π, j) and it contains the 3 basic arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication, exponentiation)... more on Wikipedia.

2. Maxwell's Equations (Wikipedia link)

No surprise here for an electrical engineer, again, right ?

I'll show the most simple (and differential) form here, since I think this shows their beauty best:

For an explanation and the more general form, check out Wikipedia.

And why those?
Well I think the symmetry is apparent. And they are so fundamental to basically everything


Also, according to Wikipedia, I'm not really alone with that choice:

A poll of readers conducted by The Mathematical Intelligencer magazine named Euler's Identity as the "most beautiful theorem in mathematics". Another poll of readers that was conducted by Physics World magazine, in 2004, chose Euler's Identity tied with Maxwell's equations (of electromagnetism) as the "greatest equation ever".

So... rather mainstream, right? Would not get me a job at Google :)

Evernote Clearly

A new tool to read article-like web pages (blogs, news, ... ) without the noise.

Evernote Clearly

Our newest browser extension for Chrome and Firefox makes a beautiful, distraction-free reading experience on the web with just one click.

Get Evernote Clearly →

In the past I used to achieve this, by saving those articles to ReadItLater and the read them (without noise) on my iPad. With Evernote Clearly I can do so immediately in my browser...

And this is, how this post looks in cleary... leaner.. more easy to read.

Available for Firefox and Chrome.

The Top 30 Android Apps And Games Of 2011 | TechCrunch

Nice selection from TechCrunch...

The Top 30 Android Apps And Games Of 2011 | TechCrunch: The best Android apps are thus the ones that can both push the technological envelope while also remaining accessible to the vast majority of users. This is no easy feat.

Not necessarily my view with every app, but a good starting point for all you new Android owners...

It definitely shows that in 2011 the Android ecosystem - while it did not fully catch up - narrowed that gap to iOS. And apps are increasingly becoming tablet ready or compatible as we go into 2012.

iPad Video App Freeze

Since I updated my iPad[1] to iOS 5, I frequently had the problem that the video app that comes with iOS is simply frozen, when you open it.

Even closing the app does not help.
A reboot of the iPad did not help either.

My idea was to somehow not start the video app, but launch a video directly, but for lack of a file manager on iOS, this is not easy.
Turns out it is... simply do a spotlight search for a known video name, wait for it to appear in the search results and tap on it there. Next best thing to a file manager :)

Voila, the video app should start and not freeze...
Works everytime for me know... a bit cumbersome, but still.

Hope that Apple will fix this.

--
[1] first gen iPad, that is

Letters to Steve

Nice easy reading for the holidays...  a collection of Steve Job's email responses...
and no, it's not just a book full of "Nope" and "Yep"... :)

Maybe a little bit too close to the Steve Jobs Bio by Walter Isaacson which I finished only a couple of weeks ago.