A New Baby - Raspberry Pi

Finally - thanks to Max, I got my new baby:

a Raspberry Pi.

What for, you ask?

Don't know yet... I'm thinking along the lines of

• a thermostat - with some fancy features
• a power meter - for some "private" smart metering

Any other ideas welcome.

Today I finally found the time to get the beast running: only needed an SD card (believe it or not, I could not find any SD card at home... probably because my Nikon uses CF). 

I also got myself a new Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse; the first time I'm using a wireless... but only because the Pi is next to the TV (via HDMI cable), and I don't want any more cables lying around.

Apache is running, the dhcp lease is permanent... cool times ahead.

Oh boy!

Last Friday, late  afternoon, just when we arrived at our b&b for our 2 days vacation in Styria, my beloved HTC One S went into a reboot loop. Meaning, it would power off, restart and right after the HTC logo reboot again, and again, and again, ... forever.
Didn't change when connected to power.
Didn't change when I let the battery run out (which was fairly fast and easy with this behaviour).
Nothing.
After about 2 hours I was not only really annoyed, but also quite allergic to the Quietly brilliant logo and sound.

So I finally managed to get into the bootloader or diagnostics menu (or whatever it is called). The one you get when you press volume-down while powering up. There I - after some playing around - decided to go for a factory reset.
This helped.

Bad thing is, I only had a 2 months old Backup I took with My Backup Pro. Not only that, I didn't actually have it, because it was on the memory of the phone I just wiped...
At this time, I really wished, the HTC One still had physical SD cards...

And this in the middle of nowhere. I only had an Edge connection from time to time.
Luckily the b&b had at least free Wifi, so I could re-install all my apps from Google Play.

From there it was easy: all contacts were synched with Google. Nothing to do there.
My emails, tasks, appointments are of course all "in the cloud" and/or on our corporate server(s), so once I logged into the respective app, it was done.
My photos/videos got periodically backed up to Dropbox with the automatic camera upload. Nothing lost there.
Most podcasts I had in Google Reader, and BeyondPod does sync with Google reader. Good.

The only real pain (apart from losing all my achievements in Temple Run) was to get the application settings back again. Still working on some of those.

Lesson learned: always do a backup and do it to an external medium or the cloud. Will set this up tomorrow.
Really.
I swear.

How to Prevent Tangled and Broken Earbud-style Headphones

Oh I really need this.

via gigaom

ToS;DR

We all know, that no-one ever - ever!! - reads the terms-of-service of a web service. So in a very laudable effort, the guys around ToS;DR did this for us.

ToS;DR is of course a play on the ever popular tl;dr, which is not a broken HTML tag, but stands for too-long, didn't read:

Said whenever a nerd makes a post that is too long to bother reading.

(source: Urban Dictionary)

ToS;DR - short for Terms of Service; Didn't Read - takes care of that:

They created a dash board of the most important web services out there, and flagged them from class A (green) to class E (sooo red, you don't really want to touch it) with the most important aspects and consequences of using said service, like e.g. that twitpic by the terms of service you agree to (!) takes credit for your content.

This catalog of services and their ToS is just great. Imagine, this were to be represented as XML (or in any other machine readable format); then a browser extension could actually flag web pages you visit according to their service, i.e. really warn you about your "loss of copyright" (exaggerating) if you upload to twitpic...

I want this!

Look, What I just did to my HTC One S!

No, the Jelly Bean upgrade is still not here for HTC One S, but at least here in Europe we got the 4.0.4 upgrade on ICS.

Upgrade was totally smooth and flawless. And now, back to waiting for JB...

Listen, listen, gone.

So, finally, Google Listen is gone from my mobile.

I'll stick with BeyondPod.

Google Play Store Gift Cards

According to several reports, the Google Play Store is finally getting gift cards.
Google Play Store Gift Cards - Great Idea!:

This essentially places the Google Play Store on par with the Apple iTunes ecosystem.

It means that anyone can purchase apps and content from the Play Store, without the need for a credit card.
For example, my kids!

And thus it gives more revenue opportunities to app developers in the Android ecosystem.

Well, let's see when it will become available outside the US...

Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client for Android

Finally, with my move to an ICS device I do have a VPN client compatible with our corporate VPN, Cisco AnyConnect. For earlier versions, this was only sort-of available for rooted devices, and I did not really want to root my old HTC just for this.

But now for Android 4 and above (ICS+) there is AnyConnect ICS+ available in the Google Play Store.

 Setup and installation is straightforward. Of course you need to know the connection details of your VPN (hostname, mainly; assuming you do know your userid and password anyway).

It comes with a nice widget for fast and easy access; remembers your userid after the first connect, and also shows the VPN status with a key (connected) in the notification area.

Works great.

Still don't know what I should do in the corporate network with my mobile, though.

Replacing Google Listen

The other day Google announced they would discontinue Google Listen (my favorite podcast fetcher and player for Android until now):

We launched Google Listen through Google Labs in August 2009, to give people a way to discover and listen to podcasts. However, with Google Play, people now have access to a wider variety of podcast apps, so we’ve discontinued Listen. People who have already installed the app can still use it, but after November 1, podcast search won’t function. You can access your podcast subscriptions in Google Reader in the “Listen Subscriptions” folder and download them from the Import/Export tab.

So I finally did some research for a good podcast player for Android; my criteria were:

• use or at least import my current podcast feeds from Google Reader
• an option to restrict episode download on Wifi only
• an option to restrict episode download only when charging (not too critical, though)
• easily accessible controls for play/pause and skip
• good control over the order the episodes play (playlist)
• good UI
  

I found all this in ... drumroll ... BeyondPod.

What I really like is the smart play list, where you can configure BeyondPod to e.g. take all episodes from category x from oldest to newest first, and the all other episodes from category y. I use this to start with all the short 2-5 minutes episodes from e.g. FM4 or OE1 (both from Austrian public radio), followed by the longer ones, e.g. Tech News Today, or In Beta.[1].

The concept of categories makes it easier to configure update frequency, order in which to play episodes, etc etc. Really nice set of settings there.

BeyondPod comes as a free trial version, with all features enabled for the first 7 days. After that, you either continue using the free version - what they call "Lite" - with a limited feature set:

When using the Lite version, you can still add feeds, update, download and play your podcasts. The main limitation is that in order to get the latest episodes, you have to manualy refresh each of your feeds using the circular "Refresh" button located in the top right corner the Feed Content View.

This is too "Lite" for me, so I purchased the BeyondPod Unlock Key from the Google Play store for €5.51/$6.99 so I can continue to use the full version. Still worth the money.

I moved to BeyondPod about a week ago and I'm glad I did.

btw: you can find a review of BeyondPod All About Android episode #5 (minute 38:20)

--
[1] other weekly podcasts like TWiT, or TWiG, or AAA I still listen to on my iPod nano

Data Usage Monitor in Android ICS

Found this while playing around with my HTC One S running Ice Cream Sandwich (aka ICS, aka Android 4.0) while on vacation and roaming (!).

If you pull down the Settings menu or open it via the apps screen under *** more you will find a Usage menu.

Opening this will reveal some very useful and detailed statistics about the data usage of your phone.

You can see the wireless data as it accumulates over the data usage cycle as you define it. Since I am on a corporate plan where the billing cycle starts with the first of the months, I set the usage cycle to the month. If your billing cycle starts on the - say - 21st, you should change this to 21st to 21st of the following month. Set the Reset data count value for this.

You can also set two different thresholds.

1. A simple warning when a certain data volume is reached within the usage cycle - see the 1.0GB bar in the graphic
2. A real limit, where - once reached - the phone will no longer allow a data connection. As you can see I have not activated the hard limit.

If you scroll down further, you can see in detail how the data is been use per application. This lets you easily identify data hogs, giving you some good data points when you want to tweak your data consumption.

In my cases here (just for demo) a good idea would be turn of one of the podcast players (I have both, BeyondPod and Google Listen active right now... more on this later), and also restrict them to Wifi only... Or maybe do less Facebook while commuting :)

Very useful indeed. If you are running ICS already, take a look at it.

BTW: You can turn this on for Wifi, too. This will give a separate tab on this page.

Wonderfull errror message

Thank you, Facebook... that really helps.

btw: I only clicked on a Instagram link on Facebook. The error itself is from http://graph.facebook.com/l.php?u=http....

Android ICS for Raspberry Pi

Wow, ICS is coming to the Raspberry Pi... you know that little cheap alsmost DYI computer.

This sounds like serious fun!
I just might...
I just might...

CalDAV for Android

I've been looking for this since my first Android last year, but at that time there was no CalDAV support for Android. So I had to use the Notify Active Sync solution my company provided. This basically allowed to sync the calendar (and email, ...) as ActiveSync (from the handset's point of view) to our corporate calendar/email/...

With the re-installation on my new HTC One S I found that there is a ("native") CalDAV sync for Android, and luckily our corporate calendar supports CalDAV.


With CalDav-Sync beta from the Google play store you create - as expected - an additional calendar and set up a new profile in "Accounts & sync".

You can change the sync interval, the range of events to sync (past and future) ...
There are also some kludges and fixes for weird calendar or phone behaviour, e.g.  that some Android phones seem to create events only as tentative.

The default mode is a one-way sync from server to phone only, but all you need to do is disable this option, and - voilà - you have a two way sync from server to phone and vice versa.
I have had this running for about a week now and it works like a charme... Although I have to admit that I did not try any synchronization conflicts yet.

HTC One S

For almost exactly one and a half years my son was the owner of a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini pro. To be precise, he had two of them, probably three - since we had the first replaced immediately. With all three of them, the Sony showed huge problems with charging the battery after a while. We already went through an external charger, which worked fine. So it was never a problem of the battery, or the USB cable.

So about a week ago, I decided to get myself a new phone and pass the HTC Desire Z on to my son.

At first I could not really make up my mind between

• HTC One S
• HTC One X
• Samsung Galaxy S III

So I want to a A1 store, where they had all three of them on display.  The S3 and the One X are of almost exactly the same size (in all three dimensions; or four if you include weight :) ). Although the display of the One S is significantly smaller, the whole body of it is only marginally smaller than those two.

Since I still don't like the Samsung skin, and I - quite frankly - love HTC Sense, the choice was only between the two HTCs.

Or in other words:

• Do I need 1280 HD on my phone? - No
• Do I need NFC? - No... not yet, not sure if ever.
• Do I need a 4.7 display instead of 4.3? - No
• Is the One S display sufficient ?  - Yes
• Do the One X features justify 100 EUR more? - No

There. I ended up with a HTC One S and I'm totally happy with it.

Android 4.0.x (Ice Cream Sandwich)  and dual core are just ... wow.

I'll continue to report on my love for this gadget in the weeks to come.

Thunderbird left alone

So it appears that the Mozilla Foundation decided to no longer support, i.e. fund, Thunderbird.

There will be only security updates and patches, and the community is of course free to continue developing Thunderbird.

I guess email - and thus Thunderbird - is not innovative enough for Mozilla, and in a way I can see that. but then again, I've been using Thunderbird even as my corporate email client for about 10 years now and never regretted it. Or even envied the Outlook users. Quite on the contrary.

At least since Lightning, the Calendar add-one, got mature. For a global search (indexed, of course) I find Thunderbird even superior. Ctrl-K is (after Ctrl-Shift-K and Ctrl-M) probably the most used short cut for me in Thunderbird.

Well, let's hope the community continues to support it - I'd hate to go back to Outlook.

Finally an SSD

In the last two weeks I enjoyed two BSODs on my ThinkPad T500 with Windows XP. Each took me about 15min to recover, i.e. from reboot to getting back into our corporate VPN and Thunderbird and Firefox running again. And guess what, I did not really have the time for this...

So I decided time was ripe for a solid state drive (SSD). Although XP does not optimally support SSDs (e.g. no TRIM), there is still a huge improvement.

So I bought a Corsair Series 3 Force 120GB for only 100 EUR...
and a cheep USB/SATA external enclosure, so I can connect both the old hard disk and the new SSD at the same time.
Also, since I'd have a spare 160GB hard disk after the swap, a USB box for this would serve me well.

Well, day #1: the enclosure I got for 9.90 EUR, the Fantec Alu-2503 with USB 3.0, was a crap. I tested it on two different computers with two different drives, but it would only show up as a USB device for about 10 seconds, and then only the bridge itself, but never the drive. Regardless what I did. I gave up then.

Day #2: Bought 9.23 EUR Revoltec enclosure with only USB 2.0 and this worked fine.
I kept the harddisk on the internal SATA port and the SSD on the USB.
With my Acronis DiskDirector I copied my XP partition from the hard disk to the SSD, copied the MBR and then ... tried to boot from the SSD.... failure.
Moved the SSD to the native SATA port, still nothing.

Problem was, I could not find my XP recovery/install CDs... So I had to work with my Win7 DVD which has a different boot mechanism and MBR... etc etc...
So I was fighting various BSODs, NTDETECT, BOOT.INI BOOTMGR and NTLDR error messages.
Swapping the SSD and HD on USB and internal every 20minutes ...

To cut a long story short: On Day #3 with a lot of partitioning tools (diskpart.exe, ...) and the help of the Ultimate Boot CD, I found the problem to be in the partition order with the service partition on the SSD... I manually edited BOOT.INI and voilà it finally worked.

And wow, this is amazingly fast. XP now boots to being fully usable in below 2 minutes instead of about 10. The CPU goes to 100% for about 30secs when everything starts up at once, and with an SSD services and applications really start up all at once.
Thunderbird, Firefox, Chrome, OpenOffice... they all start instantly.

WOW.
To quote a friend: "SSD FTW".

What-if...

What if RIM had bought Palm two years ago (instead of HP)?
Well,  we still might  have webOS still around and RIM in a significant position in the smartphone market with a winning OS.

Just a thought...

Dropbox to kill off public folders?

According to several articles like this (Dropbox to kill off public folders? | Internet & Media - CNET News)
or this (Dropbox Will Soon Be Done With Public Folders, But Existing Users Get To Keep Them)
Dropbox might get rid of public folders for new accounts.

So this is a good reason to register your account now.

Android v iOS

The three top areas where/why I think Android is superior to iOS:

#3  Notifications
Apple really has to fix them in iOS6... currently they are just laughable.

#2 Widgets
Yes, a lot of widgets are just noise, but many are really helpful, like tasks, calendar, clock, ... maybe messaging and/or email inbox even (although I don't use that)

and
<drumroll/>

#1 the Share Intent
This is what you usually see in an app as the "Sent to" or "Share" menu item or button.

Just take the example of Read-It-Later (or pocket as it is now called). On iOS you have to install a bookmark-let  and manually edit the URL (which cannot really be considered user friendly), and then it is still clumsy. On Android the application just declares that it is capable of receiving URLs and voila, it will be in the list. And it can be done from any application that allows to share.
Or Dropbox, or ...

This is really the thing I miss most on my iPad.
 

Firefox 13

So, yet another Firefox update.

Version 13 with the new homepage (featuring buttons to bookmarks, downloads, history, add-ons, sync and settings) and the new tab page looks  suspiciously chrome-y to me...

I don't think it will have a huge impact on me, but lets just see over the next weeks.

Google Acquires Mobile Productivity Company Quickoffice

Google Acquires Mobile Productivity Company Quickoffice | TechCrunch: "Google Acquires Mobile Productivity Company Quickoffice

So, will Quickoffice become the long-awaited mobile frontend for Google Docs Drive? The current mobile HTML version just s.cks... So any  proper client is welcome... And Quickoffice is probably the best mobile office pack out there.

Good.

Lenovo dumps the good old ThinkPad keyboard

Look at this... Lenovo decided to dump the good old (IBM) ThinkPad keyboard in its recently announced T-series upgrade.

There have always been three reasons for a ThinkPad (IBM or Lenovo)

1. they keyboard
2. the physical stability
3. the trackpoint

One less... too bad.

I really don't understand it - it cannot be the cost of production, because most ThinkPad users will gladly pay the higher cost and thus price for the classic keyboard. They already do anyway.

Or maybe it's a royalty/patent thingy with IBM... who knows.

Oh, Google...

Google not only just renamed their docs to Google Drive, a couple of weeks later they also released a new iOS app for faster access, more responsiveness on the suggestions, etc etc...

Why, oh Google, did you guys forget to rename Google Docs in this app ??

Why handset manufacturers love cloud storage

In the last couple of weeks, every new Smartphone seems to come with cloud storage attached, e.g. the 25GB you get with HTC - as announced in Barcelona earlier this year.
I think there are good reasons for the manufacturers to prefer cloud storage over SD slots/cards:

• A SD increases the cost of the device - not by a lot, but still.


• It imposes physical restrictions on the design, because the SD slot it obviously has to be accessible.


• Preferable not hidden behind the battery, otherwise you will get bad reviews


• The capacity of the SD card will for some weird reasons affect reviews, too. If you only include 8GB of SD storage, reviewers will tell their readers to get some other smartphone with 16GB... If you include a too large SD card it will drive up cost and price...


• Also, if a customer decides to replace his SD card with a larger one, the phone manufacturer will not see any revenue from it, but SanDisk and others will.

However, going for cloud storage

• will have no impact on the manufacturing cost


• will not impose any design restrictions


• and you can upsell your users to higher capacity and make mony from it.

So, no wonder they love cloud storage.

SwiftKey X Keyboard for Android

The other day I heard about SwiftKey X keyboard for Android (I think it was on All About Android) and since I was not really too happy with my default HTC keyboard (on my HTC Desire Z) I though I'd give the free trial a try.

Well, it quite convinced me. The auto-completion and prediction is quite good, since it takes the data from my own history... (SMS, twitter, facebook, ...) So I found it to really suggest the phrases as I use them... Even in mixed English/German environment.

Sure I had a new set of typos to surprise people, I hope I caught most of them...Let's say I had my fair share of damn you autocorrect moments.

Anyway, I really got used to the new prediction within a week or so, and should be back to my normal rate of typos... or hopefully less.

Yesterday - when the trial ended - I bought the full version.  $3.99 is really not a lot :)  I'd have bought the full version earlier, if I had remembered that I was running on the trial version... I did not see any limitations there.

So if you are unhappy with your current Android keyboard... give SwiftKey X a try.

I can really recommend this.

Finally 3.4

OpenOffice finally made it to 3.4
And - of course - it now has the Apache branding...

Get the details here.

Seems like minor changes only over 3.3, but let's see.

Finally some movement.

A Kindle on my mobile

Today was the first time that having the Kindle app on my (HTC Android)  mobile really came in handy.
I picked up my daughter from her English drama rehearsal,  which ran 45min 1 hour late and I had nothing to do. No podcast to listen to,  no gadgets with me except for my phone.
So I synced to my current reading position and continued to read my current book.
A bit cumbersome on 3.7" but better than nothing...

Why do I have to manually set the time on a Kindle?

Granted, I'm still spoiled by ye good olde Palm (Pilot).

So one thing that really annoys me is when the clock on my gadgets get totally out of sync.
Like 1hr 5min on my Kindle 3 - ok, the 1hr most probably stems from DST and not from an inaccurate clock, but still.

I expect my connected devices to get their time from the network (or from the PC, depending on how they are connected).

Why can Whispersync synchronize books and my position within this book, but not get the time from some source on the net? Or the PC when I connect the kindle via USB?

This is annoying.

To fix the time you have to go to Home > Settings > page 2 > Device Time > ...

Gimp 2.8 for Windows

Finally, the Windows installer version is available for GIMP 2.8 at GIMP - Downloads

Looking forward to the new single window mode...

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