Saturday, March 28, 2015

Moto 360

I've been playing with the idea of getting an Android Wear smart watch for some time now. Specifically I had set my mind on the Moto 360, and luckily a dear friend of mine (and fellow geek) owns one. So after a brief intro (over some beers) I was even more inclined to get one. Then one of our local discount retailers (Hofer) had it on offer, and more or less at the same time it has been offered at quite a reasonable price on eBay (including some additional watch bands).

So I got it from ebay. Yesterday it arrived.
Ok, the unboxing is less spectacular with a pre-owned device, but still nice.
Charge the watch, install the Android Wear app from the play store and follow the instructions.

First thing I did, was send a text to my son (who was clogging the DSL line again) via the voice dictation on the watch. Boy, did I triple check this before sending :) But it worked flawlessly.

Half an hour later I was conducting a Facebook Messenger chat partially from the watch...
Why? Because I could.... (and I needed to test it).

And then, just for the fun of it, I told my watch to play some music on the phone. Soooo cool.


So, over the next couple of days I hope to find some more meaningful use cases.
One thing I really hope for, is that I can keep my phone in my pocket when I receive a text or any other notificaiton while I'm on the train/commute... Let's see how that works out.

And, oh,  thanks, Max, for making me do this.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Android Automatic WiFi Login - no more

One of the most useful Android apps - Wifi Web Login - stopped working with Android 5.0/Lollipop. The reasons seems to be that Lollipop now continues to use the mobile data (3G, ...) connection if fails to connect to the internet through wifi.

So whenever you are connected to a (public/free) hotspot, which requires a web login (or just acceptance of their terms of service). Android will ignore the Wifi, until you login/accept.

Actually, a good move.
But it seems to break Wifi Web Login, which automated this for me anyway...
Now I'm back to logging in manually...
Still easier than before, because I only have to drag down the Wifi notification, and accept the ToS for some standard hotspots.
But sort of a step back.
Hopefully this will get fixed, but neither the webpage nor the play store hint towards a fix.