Today’s daily funny comes to you thanks to eclipse and the android sdk.
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app: remote droid
Whoa. You install remotedroid on your android phone, run a jar on your HTPC, and presto! you have a touchpad and keyboard to control your computer at your fingertips. Too friggin cool. The default sensitivity is basically zero so you have to adjust it to your liking. While I probably won’t use this for my main user interface since I have a logitech dinovo edge, I still think it’s a rather innovative idea.
RemoteDroid demo from Joshua Sera on Vimeo.
initial impressions: htc droid incredible
Background:
So I was an original iPhone adopter and my last phone was an iPhone 3gs. On its release day, the HTC incredible was listed on amazon for $99 so I went ahead and bought it and switched over to Verizon. My frustration with apple and its product policies has just gotten to the point where I refuse to own any Apple products (Once I get rid of my iPod, this will be complete).
I’ve had the phone now for about a week, but I didn’t really start appreciating it till I got a micro SD card a couple days ago and was able to fully utilize a lot of the phone’s potential. Two essential apps that I was referred to by friends are Ringdroid and Wallpaper Set and Save. I made my first custom ringtone using Ringdroid in about 5 minutes and have since loved my droid incredible.
Media:
Setting up the micro SD card for my media was a piece of cake. Ringtones are stored under “/media/audio/ringtones/” and the notification alerts are stored in “/media/audio/notifications/”. I store all my music in “/media/audio/music/”. On the root of the SD card, there is a folder named “wallpapers” with all my wallpaper images. The micro SD card is upgradeable so you can opt to have as much storage on your phone that you can afford (while the phone itself has 8gig storage internally).
Apps:
And now down to the bread and butter of smartphones, the Apps. Like I mentioned earlier, Ringdroid is probably one of the best ringtone editors I’ve ever used and you can do it all from your friggin android phone! Wallpaper Set and Save is also awesome for customizing your home screen. I’m still messing around with this app called Handcent which is basically a wrapper application for text messaging and offers some options and customization that the native messaging app doesn’t. Advanced Task Killer is also another must-have app that helps you maintain your running processes. Barcode Scanner is also a mobile must-have for when you need to check out those Q-codes that are getting popular now on mobile sites.
Gripes:
Ok, so it’s not 100% perfect. I’m not sure if it’s just my previous iPhone history, but the onscreen keyboard takes some getting used to. It’s definitely different from the iPhone. City ID is an app that came pre-installed on my phone and CANNOT BE UNINSTALLED. This fucking sucks. This app is pure bloatware (and I’m tempted to classify it as malware because of its shady business practices). I’m not really sure who to blame for that one (verizon, htc, city id developer), but having shit on my phone that just tries to scam money is NOT KOSHER.
Conclusion:
All in all, I do like this phone. I’ve already determined that it does surpass my iPhone 3gs (at least for me) in terms of functionality and ease of use. I just hope that Yelp updates their android app soon to support check-ins. Hopefully this brief review helps some of you.
more chrome updates
So I just upgraded to the newest dev channel version of chrome and they’ve gone and made some changes. First off, the address bar hides “http://”. It shows the protocol for everything else, but just hides “http://” for simple web browsing. The other significant change is that you can now enable plugins for your anonymous browsing sessions. I won’t go into detail on why that is uber awesome. If you’re tech savvy, you should already know. I really don’t think I’ll ever go back to firefox at this point. Chrome just has everything I need and does its job very very fast. The only browser I haven’t really experimented with is Opera, but now that the opera iphone app is out I should probably give it a shot.
oops
I completely forgot I even had a blog! I promise I’ll write up a decent post later tonight or tomorrow detailing what’s up with my life now, but since I’ve obviously been busy enough to forget blogging, I guess it can’t be that bad 
Nvidia Driver problems
So I’m home sick today and I was updating the drivers on my gaming rig. When I went to intall the Nvidia driver, it kept giving me a weird “Not a valid 7-zip archive” error. After looking it up online, it seems like Nvidia’s site has massive issues doling out downloads to non-IE browsers (I was using Chrome to download it). After downloading the driver with IE 8, it worked totally fine. Way to be cutting edge Nvidia…
morning IMs
(11:06:36 AM) steve: you do know about ass eels right?
(11:06:39 AM) me: omg no
(11:06:42 AM)me: but it sounds WRONG
(11:06:45 AM)me: JUST WRONG
(11:06:47 AM)steve: oh. it IS.
happy new year with a chrome tip
Happy new years everyone! Hopefully 2010 will be much better than 2009 and so far, it’s starting to look that way. I also want to share a small google chrome tip that I just discovered.
See those small tabs at the top left? Google Chrome lets you “pin” tabs to the navigation bar. This is great for people who have a small subset of tabs that are constantly open. More screen real estate is always good as well
update: To pin a tab, all you do is right-click it and click “Pin Tab”. Before the latest update, you used to be able to push the tab over to the left and have it pin automatically but this seems to have been taken out. Now the pin icons get bigger when you hover over them too.
MSN Spim and Pidgin
So I’ve been using pidgin forever now ever since I stopped using miranda-im. A couple months back, I enabled my MSN account which I haven’t logged into for a while. Since then, I’ve been receiving MSN IM spam everyday. EVERYDAY! Sometimes it gets so bad, it’s almost on the hour. Today I finally beat the spim. I could have beaten it on day one, but I was too lazy to check up on pidgin options.
First, go to “Tools” -> “Privacy”. From here, it’s just a matter of selecting your account and the appropriate privacy settings. For MSN, I just changed mine to “Allow only the users on my buddy list” and Presto! I haven’t received any MSN spim since!
Five years later
brian christ
“There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
Five years ago today, Brian died of a heroin overdose. I didn’t know him for that long. I hung out with him a number of times for about a year or two, but he always struck me as a good guy. Not just a regular good guy, but a good nerdy guy. This is why I wrote up www.brianchrist.com as a sort of e-memorial. I was a young novice web programmer at the time and felt like I needed to do something, anything, in order to mentally process his passing. I wasn’t a stranger to death at the time, but when someone your own age dies (especially when they’re young), I think it serves as a wake up call.
So funneling all those feelings and emotions into work energy, I basically rushed out the most simplistic database-driven form posting app without much thought to architecture. Five years later, it is still basically the same exact page with a few minor additions along the way. It’s an interesting situation when you become emotionally involved with one of your side programming projects. Any time I think I should change something on the site, I worry that people will misinterpret my extra efforts into the site as some kind of disrespect to the memory of Brian. Maybe I’m just over analyzing all this stuff. If anyone else out there has anything to say on the subject of e-memorials or just any input at all, I’d definitely appreciate it. For now, I will continue to keep the site up in remembrance of Brian and wish him well wherever he is now.