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title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. |
descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001. |
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| Wednesday, April 23, 2025 | |
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If you needed an excuse to get on your Apple high horse, I got a new one yesterday. My super old Android phone -- used essentially only when running for... reasons, mostly Pokemon Go reasons -- popped to its last page of apps after I unlocked it today just long enough to show three new apps there before it snapped back to the first page. Real useful ones like Slotomania and some tiles game. I didn't realize getting apps slammed onto your phone was a thing. But it is! And has been for over a decade!
What the absolute heck? I've always sort of thought of internet-enabled devices as ecosystems where code fought it out for resources, especially after the Sony rootkit CD scandal. This is similar, I think. My Android has a TextNow SIM in it now, for which I pay a total of $5 annually [sic] for a static number plus unlimited calls & texts, and, though unlocked now, the phone originally came from Tracfone, which still has a splash screen on startup and an app that I apparently can't erase, or can't erase without a lot of googling I'm not excited to do. Maybe it's Verizon, since they bought Tracfone and they apparently install stuff without asking? Maybe? But what a dumb, invasive, short-sighted way to squeeze a few more cents of revenue out of your users. I don't think iOS lets this happen. That it can happen on Android is "low key" (as the kids say) an argument against 3rd party app stores, which these carrier apps have essentially become. Ultimately I don't know where these stupid apps came from, but at least I'm not hallucinating? Labels: android, app store econ, ios posted by Jalindrine at 4/23/2025 06:05:00 PM |
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| Sunday, April 25, 2021 | |
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Every three or four years I buy whatever seems to be the best "cheap-flagship" Android phone on the market to test responsive websites and Android apps I'm developing... but also to see what it'd be like to use Android as my mobile OS. I use a throw-away Google account (whose backup address is a main account, so they probably know what's up), but, past that small identify obfuscation, I usually allow it to know where I'm at and not worry about too many privacy revelations, a big change from how I act in iOS. That said, I do tend to use DuckDuckGo, Here maps, and really like Fair Email, the latter the only Android-exclusive app I've paid for beyond a few Humble Bundle Android games years ago. About four years years ago, I got a Nokia 6. Excellent phone. Nice big screen. Performance was kinda shoddy and the camera stunk. I only used it with my SIM a few times as my "real" phone, and wow, bad camera. But it seemed like a lot of phone for $200. I had no idea. The $120 Android phone... with a year of service.Recently I bagged a Moto G (2020) on sale at HSN with a "year's worth" of Tracfone service for $120. (thanks, SlickDeals) It only comes with 1.5 gig of data, but it has 1500 minutes and 1500 texts that can be used over the duration of a year which -- combined with lots of WiFi usage -- might actually be doable. I'm flabbergasted. The phone's size is right in between an iPhone 12 and a 12 Max at 6.4". I generally like smaller phones, and tentatively plan to get a 13 mini to replace my SE2, but I'm always jealous of my Android phones' giant screens. Cheap components, surely, but the larger size really is nice. It's as large as you'd want a one-handed iPad to be, which is essentially what it is, tall as you can stand and, like single-wides going down the interstate, width limited by the width of your hand. It's hard to reach the tops of some poorly designed apps, and the app icons on my first home screen matches my limited thumb reach (see below -- can you do that on iOS? I think, short of empty spacesaver icons, no), which is weird to see, but when I'm reading and browsing, the giant screen is fantastic. 
 You can see how my home screen's triangle matches that orange space on the plus-sized phone screen. I also want to admit that the "hole punch" selfie cam is great. It's so small (smaller than the red dot I put on the screenshot, above) that it seems like a single notification icon. Huge win over a notch. I realize Apple wants to put that under the screen, but until they do, this is superior. Apple really needs to figure out how to Face ID with less real estate -- or make it optional. The fingerprint scanner is moved to the back of the phone to stay out of the way of the screen. Smart. There's no face unlock, which is what allows the single selfie cam, but I've hated Face ID since I bought an iPhone XR and gave up within a year. Performance is... amazingly competent. I only sense some slowdown occasionally. Gaming is okay. Asphalt 8 plays extremely well so far, but, strangely, Pokemon Go has stuttered a few times. The macro lens (there are three lenses, macro, wide, and normal) is a waste of space, but it's otherwise a heck of an improvement over the Nokia 6, as it should be. I don't think it's as good as my iPhone SE2, but it's close. Give me more play time. And the battery honestly lasts for more than day. You could go two, maybe three light days with this thing on a single charge, no problem. And it's USB-C, so charging or finding a battery pack is pretty easy. It has 64 gigs of space, expandable to 512 with an SD card. Gosh I wish Apple allowed SD cards. With an iPhone 12, you're paying $150 just to get from 64 to 256 gigs of internal space. What a racket. Just buy this phone and put it in your other pocket. For $120. Let that sink in. $120. $120 with, at worst, several months of minutes and texts. Look, I like Apple. I use iPhones as my daily driver. But how much is someone's privacy worth? Is it $300-700 every two years? Tough call. I'd like to think so. I also suspect that's an inflated view of my self-worth. What do they really learn about me, and how is that likely (lots of caveats here, admittedly) going to influence my life going forward? You know what's more to the point? More to the point is asking how much someone can afford to spend on privacy. If I'm having a hard time making ends meet and you offer me a giant phone and ostensibly a year's worth of service for $120, I'm buying it every time. And the experience really isn't so far from iOS that I'm going to regret it in my day-to-day for an instant. posted by ruffin at 4/25/2021 12:18:00 AM |
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| Thursday, February 13, 2020 | |
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I gave away my iPhone to someone who needed it more than me, but also because, admittedly, I hated the XR's Face ID and I'm waiting for the new "SE" with the latest CPU but no Face ID. In the meanwhile, I've been using an old Android phone -- the first Nokia 6, upgraded to Android 9. I've also been using my AirPods, which I didn't give away, hooking them up as plain ole Bluetooth headphones to the Nokia. At first, things were great. But yesterday in the Starbucks while I was trying to drone out the, um, ambient noise, the AirPods weren't giving me any serious volume, and I could barely here ye olde tunes at full blast. Turns out this is a common problem. The solution is insane, but works. Cnet has a decent overview, apparently stolen from Reddit. I'll hit the high points. Now for the step the cnet author misses:
Voila. But be careful. They can go pretty loud now. I wonder why mine started out loud and then went soft. I kinda wonder if using them with my Mac, for instance, set their internal volume low. Without a switch to change volume, maybe the AirPods use the same idea, but do it all in software my Nokia can't access. But I haven't tried reconnecting them to my MacBook (I use Tooth Fairy, which makes it pretty easy) to see if I can set them high there and then re-pair with the Android phone. I guess I should. Not nearly as cool as they are with an iPhone, but still by far the easiest headphones to carry with me, and they're with me nearly as often as my keys are at this point, because I hate "ambient" noise almost as much as Face ID. No, not true. There are few things I hate as much as Face ID. ;^) Labels: AirPods, android, apple, howto, noteToSelf posted by ruffin at 2/13/2020 08:33:00 AM |
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| Wednesday, July 24, 2019 | |
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You might remember a recent post I had on Spotify releasing a "lite" version for Android. It looks like Uber is getting in on the action. From an article on FastCompany: Uber Lite seems designed to directly combat some of the problems that Uber has faced internationally by making the experience of booking a car easier for riders. By actually talking to its users, the company realized that in Android-dominated countries, which tend to be non-Western, many phones were not designed to run an app as large as Uberโs. In many of these places, internet networks and GPS arenโt as reliable. And less tech-savvy users were getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of text, which was harder to read outside on lower-quality screens. Increasingly there are computers everywhere. They're not all $800+ computers. But in an era of micropayments and microsubscriptions, where thousands of split cents add up to real profits because duplicating apps is still all but free, making these smaller, low-bandwidth apps that appeal to emerging markets is obviously a smart idea. posted by Jalindrine at 7/24/2019 11:35:00 PM |
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| Tuesday, July 09, 2019 | |
Now that’s a good idea. For the price of an intelligently written, broad-install base app, Spotify gets two things: More ads served and a foothold in developing areas. Interesting that it’s Android only. About time the non–10%ers got a major app specialized for their OSes too (not kidding, and this isn’t an Android knock – read the blurb above, again: 4.3 isn’t playing around). posted by ruffin at 7/09/2019 07:57:00 PM |
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| Friday, October 26, 2018 | |
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Finally updated to Mojave on my MacBook Air (2017). It’s nice that the login screen no longer has fuzzy text. I’ll admit I never really understood why Apple let the first thing you saw on the box be as craptastic as that text was. I understand that Apple can do a great job polishing things, but I don’t know that I believe they always do. Other than that, so far I haven’t seen much exciting from Mojave. I will say I’m pretty happy having purchased this MacBook Air now. I was worried they’d upgrade the MacBook line immediately after I purchased – and they did – but they didn’t touch the consumer laptops, and won’t until next week. $750 for a decent MacBook in June (during a great sale at Best Buy) doesn’t look as bad as it did originally. Another unexciting thing: I did preorder the XR. Idk, that’s extravagant, and I don’t understand all the reviews calling the XR “affordable”. It’s not. It’s an insanely indulgent item. Unlike my Nokia 6 that I’ve been using for the last two weeks (long story), the iPhone SE and 6S I used previously both remain nice, fast phones. I don’t need an XR. You can spend much less and still have a great smartphone experience. But even though I filled out the official form that says “leave the phone here” with my number and order number on it, UPS decided they’d rather not be bothered with leaving my phone at my home. Thanks for nothing, UPS! I can pick it up at their office, saving them a trip, if I want… between 7 and 8pm tonight. That’s it. That’s the window. So great thing I preordered that phone. /sigh If I’m lucky, I’ll play with it Monday, maybe Tuesday, night. It will be interesting to see if I change my tune on if it’s worth purchasing later, once I’ve used it. Coming from a 6S, I imagine it’ll run rings around it and take much nicer pictures. But do I need something that expensive, even if I use it an hour or two a day? Um… goodness, no. posted by ruffin at 10/26/2018 05:07:00 PM |
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| Thursday, June 19, 2014 | |
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Scott Hanselman (shanselman) on Twitter: Scott Hanselman @shanselman ๏ฟฝ The Amazon phone is a direct line from my wallet to Jeff Bezos' wallet. That's exactly right! So isn't that success for Amazon? More importantly, isn't that a plus for us? Look, even I wrote about the power of the store in your pocket as far back as 2008. That's what's driving mobile sales. That's what's driving Apple's stock price. It's about a store where they know your name (maybe not you, but your name), have your credit line waiting, and match you with purchases as effortlessly as possible. It's been painful, but one idea that has haunted me for over a decade, but that I finally accepted this year, is that the first world has That is, the US is a nation replete of citizens with money to spend. You don't have to have that much money to have a discretionary dollar today. (Okay okay, yes, yes, I know. But stay with me.) If we stipulate that many of us are going to waste money (My $5 for Unread that I finally gave up on is an example, as is last night's $3 for Vesper, right? Talk about discretionary spending...), isn't it better than we waste that money conveniently? Isn't Fire's Shazam for books and movies then a benefit? I don't understand the Fire phone pushback. It's not iOS. But in a world where anyone making more than $25k a year is buying a few songs and movies every year, Fire seems much better at putting that store in my pocket than anything to this point. And that's the future in a first world economy. (This disjointed post is why the good blogs edit, but I think you get my drift.) Btw, this formatting issue with Blogger is killing me. I think it's finally time to get a new blogging engine. * You can tell I'm still resisting this one. Big picture economic beneficial doesn't necessarily mean (nor not mean) ethically beneficial. Labels: amazon, android, apple, hats of money, ios, smartphone posted by ruffin at 6/19/2014 11:18:00 AM |
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| Wednesday, May 28, 2014 | |
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Wow, the Xamarin blog tells us that Xamarin 3.0 is out, and that it's got this great new package of features to make creating cross-platform UIs VB6 IDE easy called Xamarin.Forms. Awesome, right? Let's download the new version. Got it. And now to open a new project.  Take one didn't work out so well. Okay, let's close it and try again with a new Xamarin.Forms project. First, it didn't give me all three projects like it said it would, only Android. And then, when I ran the Hello, World that was preconfigured...  Wow. That was great fun. I can't try it out without spending $299. Why let the starter version create the project type if I can't even F5 the out of the box skeleton? Looks neat and all, but I think I'm back to where I was yesterday, finally getting iOS UIs created programmatically, skipping Interface Builder entirely. Actually insanely easy, and I'm upset I didn't start doing this months ago in what little iOS Xamarin time I can squeak out. UPDATE: From today's (5/30) webinar: Q: Any chance we can get Xamarin.Forms working with the starter edition? Right now, it's past the size the starter lets you compile. A: We're looking into that. :-) posted by ruffin at 5/28/2014 07:07:00 PM |
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| Sunday, September 16, 2012 | |
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FOSS Patents: If Google can cancel Acer's license, why should Apple have to grant one to Google?: Acer is a member of the Google-dominated "Open Handset Alliance" and was about to release a smartphone running an Android fork named Aliyun, which was created by Alibaba, a Chinese Google competitor, but Google essentially says: "you're with us or you're against us". You can be a member of the OHA and an official licensee of Android, or you want to distribute forks (derivative programs), in which case we'll throw you out of the OHA and cancel your official Android license. Google got its way. It's strange, but endlessly fascinating, how corporations configure themselves around Free and open source licensing. Some places use GPL'd software on their server, but argue that's not distribution, so they're not under any obligation to release the source (I've forgotten how the argument goes, but I've worked for people who claim it). Others, like that bizzarre kickup around MySQL, have strange forks of code into Free and non-Free codebases. Did MySQL really never incorporate anything submitted by the community? Or there's the dual licensed stuff, which really isn't a huge deal unless you're doing it retroactively, like Mozilla, where, iirc, some stuff had to be rewritten before the new licensing was done. And here, it's not the code so much as the access to the coders. Support is worth as much as the code in some cases, especially when the code is especially complex, like I'm assuming Android is. Probably more important here is early access to Google's R&D, which Acer stands to lose if its most favored nation status is revoked. It's hard not to exploit Free software. Apple didn't always play nice with WebKit and Darwin (and still doesn't give back everything, I'm sure), and, in Darwin's case, wasn't under any compulsion to do so. With webkit, we're lucky to have an Apple that follows the LGPL as closely as they do, I'm afraid. Android, in my opinion, pretty obviously stole some of Java. GPL'd software has been discovered in a number of closed source products. Google's maneuvering of cultural affiliation, loosely de/coupled with and from open source software, is the obvious move. I wonder if RMS would (or, perhaps better asked, should) even be against what Google is doing. Should you get to see Free software as it's being developed, before it's released? Is Android the perfect example of how open source can power commerce? Labels: android, apple, free, Google, gpl, lgpl, licensing, linux, open posted by ruffin at 9/16/2012 02:11:00 PM |
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| Sunday, August 26, 2012 | |
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Devilโs advocates play up sympathy for Samsung after Apple trial โ RoughlyDrafted Magazine: Google hasnโt been tremendously successful with Nexus, but it has up until now been forced to compete against both Appleโs iPhone and Samsungโs counterfeit iPhone. Google and its licensees, along with RIM and Microsoft/Nokia, now only have one iPhone to compete against, making their jobs all that much easier. I still think Dilger's a blowhard, and am happy to see whichever rumor site was reflagging his crazy posts has stopped, but he's got a great point here. All of Android gets to start competing differently instead of competing against every other phone company as they try to make a better iPhone. Honestly, every freakin' smartphone is the same. It's a monoculture extraordinaire. Where's the bright green phone that's shaped to fit in my hand allowing me to text with Engelbart's chords? It's about time someone kickstarted a little ingenuity. At some point, they might get lucky, make a better mousetrap, and take the iPhone down. Hopefully the courts have moved these guys' cheese. Labels: android, iphone, smartphone posted by ruffin at 8/26/2012 06:24:00 PM |
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| Wednesday, March 21, 2012 | |
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I've learned two important things about my underpowered Optimus V Android phone this week. First, even apps that's aren't stored on your phone's internal memory may be eating up a pretty hefty chunk of that limited resource. Use the indispensable DiskUsage app to look around in "App Storage" and see what's silently eating your space. I took off lots of seemingly innocuous, rarely used apps (Walgreens (order pictures directly from phone), StubHub, and a few others) that seemed to plant small (1 meg or so) souvenirs into internal memory, and got a ton of space back. Secondly, I've been wondering why Google's Maps app didn't keep at least a high-level, coarse map on SD card just so you could know you're in, say, Texas, not South Dakota, even without internet. All too frequently, when I'm off the beaten path, all I get is a situated triangle/arrow stuck in a Tron-like grey grid. Because I didn't have much space on internal memory, I'd kept uninstalling Maps' updates and hadn't noticed this new feature... โDownload map areaโ added to Labs in Google Maps for Android - Official Google Mobile Blog: When youโre visiting an unfamiliar location, Google Maps for mobile is great for getting an idea of how close you are to your destination, where streets and landmarks are in relation to each other, or just for getting โun-lost.โ But what if you donโt have a data signal, or youโre abroad and donโt have a data plan? We say that if you use Google Maps for mobile, youโll never need to carry a paper map again. The โDownload map areaโ lab in Google Maps 5.7 for Android is a step in making that statement true even when youโre offline. Since I've freed up a good deal of internal memory, I was able to download and hang onto Maps comfortably. Nice feature. Now a cached 10-mile by 10-mile square isn't coarse data all over, but it's a huge improvement. I've been riding the train a good deal recently, and it tends to go into places really near large roads, but apparently not close enough to get a good signal with Virgin Mobile. So I've filled in the dead spots with caches to know about where I am even when the phone's 3G connection would prefer not to tell me. posted by ruffin at 3/21/2012 06:50:00 PM |
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| Thursday, March 31, 2011 | |
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From AppleInsider | Google clamps down on handset makers to stem Android fragmentation: Though it has long heralded Android as 'open,' Google has recently taken other steps to gain control of its mobile platform. Just last week, it was revealed that the company had closed availability of the source code of Android 3.0 Honeycomb, a tablet-specific version of its platform. There's a new-ish mode of engagement with open source that's open source once we're done with it. This allows people thinking about adopting the packages to vet everything fairly well and to mitigate the dangers of being unsupported in the future if, here, Google's support for Android died. But what it allows the provider to do is to retain rights to every bit of code, and fork into a proprietary branch their future development. That is to say, if you release a package you've written completely by yourself under the GPL and never accepted patches, you could then release version 2 based on the same code as a copyrighted, proprietary, closed source piece of software. That's what Google's doing with Android. You initially get more adoption than a closed platform because the source is out there for anyone to maintain if they need to so that they can keep selling hardware, but once enough folk use it (initially for that but later for other reasons, like broad adoption), BAM, close up shop. You've gotten the adoption benefits of open source with the later benefits of proprietary lock-in thanks to planned obsolescence driven by consumer capitalism. It's sort of the issue with BSD for me. BSD really isn't Free Software, precisely because it's too freely (little "f") exploited. OS X is here thanks to FreeBSD's overly unrestrictive license. We'll never see tons of the changes Apple made to the codebase, and are lucky to have gotten anything from Apple via Darwin. Similar with KHTML and Safari, though there Apple has been great about giving back with WebKit. Up until now, at least. Because the software's not properly protected (and here I include LGPL v2), Apple owes us nothing. What good is it if your work only creates a standard for Square One? You want to ensure the future versions enabled by your continues to be an open standard and a force for *cough* good. Neither of these modes of producing open software, BSD or open after we're done with it, are really "open" in spirit. Both are waiting for conventional modes of production to exploit their resources right back into a closed situation. Bless their hearts. Labels: android, ethics, F/free, Google, hats of money, open posted by ruffin at 3/31/2011 11:12:00 PM |
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I can't move Apps to SD card? - Android Forums: Only certain apps can be installed to the SD card. The developer of the app controls this, not the OS. This is not a backup mechanism, it's for performance & clearing space on the internal storage. That said, many apps will actually experience a performance drop if moved to the SD card do to the slower speeds. Nice. My Optimus V won't stop yelling at me about its internal memory card being full -- all of 31 megs from its 180 are left. Nevermind the 12 gigs I've got open on the SD card. That's not cool. And apparently the OS imposes some restrictions on your app if it's not on internal memory, like this report of a Pandora widget that disappears when the app's on SD. So let me reiterate. This phone only has 180 megs that can host popular, fully featured apps. Apps that require internal storage include... New York Times Google Reader DoubleTwist RunKeeper Amazon Appstore Amazon mp3 Wow. Apparently the SD card was initially only for media file storage. With Android 2.2, you could start putting some apps on SD. That's a serious limitation. If I was paying a typical price for monthly service, there's no way I'd put up with this. (For $130 and $25 a month, well, I can live with some pain.) /sigh This isn't as smooth as an iPhone, that's for sure. posted by ruffin at 3/31/2011 04:29:00 PM |
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| Sunday, March 27, 2011 | |
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I grabbed an LG Optimus V Android phone on Virgin Mobile's prepay plan, and it's pretty impressive. It's only $25 a month for unlimited data and 300 minutes. I'd been Tracfoning for a couple of years, keeping an iPod touch in my pocket for sort of a poor man's smartphone. I didn't think I'd appreciate 3G internet so much, but I am. One of the best parts of Android is the ability to use mini-SDHC cards rather than paying Apple's $70 for going from 8 to 32 or $100 for 16 to 32. The downside is that the tether-paradigm Apple's got, where you basically manage your phone inside and out in iTunes. With iTunes, when I lost my first iPod touch and got another, I lost nothing. All the apps, music, podcasts were all on iTunes, and sync'd right back over without a hitch. With Android, swapping cards can be a real pain. If you've got apps on the card, you can't, apparently, just copy data over and onto the new card. Somehow, the apps forget they're apps on the way over. Instead, you have to move apps from SDHC to the phone's internal storage -- and on the Optimus V, that's paltry -- and then to the new SDHC. That's not fun. One swap to figure it out. One swap to move apps from SDHC-old to phone to SDHC-new, and then a second rigamarole to get the rest. It's not smooth. I guess the lesson is that you should buy an SDHC card, the largest your phone will hold, with the phone. Don't use the one that comes with it (mine had 2 gigs). Save yourself a little trouble. posted by ruffin at 3/27/2011 09:19:00 PM |
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