Cubicgarden.com
Yes its that time again… Time for the phone upgrade and I’m really not sure which one to go for?
I want to get another Android phone but I don’t want to get another Gingerbread (Android 2.3) phone because thanks to Cyanogen I’m already enjoying Gingerbread on my HTC Desire. This means the HTC Sensation is a no and the LG Optimus is heck no running Froyo. I’m also thinking although I really like the Samsung Galaxy S2, and it will be upgrading to Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4). I’m interested to see what else might be hitting the market soon… No idea when the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is coming to Orange but I might wait and see what comes in the next few months.
What would you do…?
I finally got a tablet from Samsung, the 7.0 plus. You may not know but I was holding out for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 when the 10.1 was released. I remember seeing the Motorola Xoom and thinking that it was a shocking size. Then Apple started getting itchy in the court with Samsung… Anyway after a few months Samsung announced they were creating a 7.7 version but once again it was like gold dust due to the (poor) Apple court case.
I’ve always liked the old Samsung Tab 7 but running Android Froyo (Android 2.1) was never going to be a goer for me. Even with the OS upgrades. Specially because I already have a Archos 7.0, which I bought a while ago for the sake of having a very nice XBMC remote. Even weirder, the Samsung Tab 7 always seemed to hold its value, even with the new Galaxy Tabs.
Finally Samsung upgraded the Tab 7 with Android Honeycomb (Android 3) to a dual processor, lots more memory and space. Then named it 7 plus to avoid confusion with the 7.7 which is still not available in the UK (as far as I can tell).
Long story short – I’m finally got it and am somewhat happy with it.
Everyday I kind of want to root it and put Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4) on it. Honeycomb is nice but I find the Samsung Touchwiz stuff painful. Even more painful than HTC’s sense. I’d heard bad things about Touchwiz but never experienced it till now. I assume it won’t be long till I root it at this pace.
The tablet size is good and fits nicely in the same pockets as my Kindle. Yes its quite a lot heavier but very comfortable to hold and use. Compare to my Archos, its runs super smooth. For what I need it to do, it works great. I also finally worked out how to install apps which I’ve already paid for, which is good to know.
I HATE the proprietary power/data connection. For years I’ve laughed at Apple iOS users for there proprietary connection and now I have to feel the same pain (thanks a bloody lot Samsung) I really hope they also have to do a micro USB dongle for the EU too. I’ve not really found a reason for the IR port yet, but I can imagine it replacing my universal and Wifi remote.
The tablet does sometimes reset its self but reboots quickly, I assume its something to do with Touchwiz personally. Generally the Tablet or slate as I prefer is great and I may have to loose my Archos Tablet to a ebay auction soon. It doesn’t replace my Kindle which still has that super light and amazingly readable screen. Actually its great to push stuff from the Tab to the Kindle for committable reading…
So generally I’m happy and making full use of it at work. Its good, now if only Samsung would bring Android 4 to it, if not Cyanogen is my friend.
Lots of rumours about the next Xbox currently… but the most interesting thing I’ve heard is… around the more powerful Kinect and multidisplay output.
I instantly started wondering if finally BBC R&D Surround video could work in real time on consoles? Something I was wondering if the Playstation3 could do a while ago.
I know they maybe thinking about multiscreen type applications but actually surround video is a perfect fit… imho
For sometime I’ve been trying to get Gnome Extensions (still alpha) going but for some reason most of the good ones failed to install. However when I head home (after Christmas in Bristol) I give it a try, and it suddenly all works.
Its a bit of a hassle to get it working without Firefox but now I got quite a few installed.
Including…
- Activities Button Text - changed the text to say cubicgarden now
- Music Integration - useful to know whats playing and change the seek
- Coverflow Alt-Tab - Back to the Compiz style switching
- Calculator - Great for quick calculations
- Journal - Seems to bring up relevant stuff in the overlay mode
- Jump Lists - You can search for categories not just apps
- Notes Search Provider for Gnote/Tomboy – Search notes (more on this in the next post)
- Recent Items - Rearranges the search by recent items
- App Search – Searches for available apps not just installed apps
- Status only icon - Removes your name from the top right
Generally I’ve installed many of them but turned off the ones I don’t really like.
Although I really like Gnome3 Extensions, I’m really liking the look of the Unity Lens extensions (for example, Youtube, Piratebay, TomboyNotes Lens) I’m seeing going by in my Google reader via sites like OMGUbuntu and Webup8.
I’m not totally sure how hard it is to create the Gnome Extensions but I gather its mainly Python with a smidgeon of JS and CSS? It would be great to see even more extensions including some of the Unity Lens ones. Certainly could make use of some of the internet connected ones…
Generally I like what the Gnome team is doing, installing a Unity Lens is much more trouble than a Gnome Extension, now all we need is many more of them and a better way to search and sort them.
Everyone is talking about HP’s announcement that WebOS is going open source… Which is great news and one of the best moves they could have done with WebOS. However I do wonder if WebOS might go the way of BeOS?
What I mean really is… by the time WebOS goes open source, will it be too late like I would conclude BeOS or rather haiku was/is…? Linux become the de-facto open source platform and BeOS took too long to finally become open source. HP really should be taking advantage of the fact there are a lot of people who bought Touchpads and Hackers are falling over themselves with the possibilities, now! Or at least sooner than 2013! Which would be a real shame because I actually quite like WebOS…
OMG!Ubuntu is running a poll on what desktop environment linux users are using…
The results are actually quite surprising on two counts…
- Gnome 3 is actually quite high with over 28% of the vote (over 4000 users). Even though you have to install it separately in Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10.
- Gnome legacy is surprisingly low (lower than XCFE and KDE) for all the fuss about moving forward…
I know its not anything scientific but its a good sign… not quite sure what it says about Unity?
A few people have recommended the eatery application to me, which is from massive health. (Aza Raskin’s new startup).
I have a lot of respect for Aza Raskin and some of his view points, although I do disagree on quite a few. Massive health’s ethos has certainly spiked my attention in the past and the eatery should do the same. However…
- I’m frankly fed up of apps only being on the iOS platform
- The crowd sourced methodology is useful but too fuzzy for myself
- It underplays the possible importance of such an application (which might be its plan from conception)
Most people know I use Foodfeed.us a lot to document what I’m eating by tweeting @having. I use to take pictures but as I discovered my NHS dietation’s computers block the images and won’t allow her to click on most of the social sites. So the description has to be reasonable enough.
The eatery might be very useful for little groups of people trying to help each other to eat better if it works the way I think it should/could. As a global thing, its not that interesting and I’d go as far as to say, its actually counter-productive. No one wants to know/be told there in the lower end of the healthy eaters. I won’t even go into the gaming element, what a way to make everyone else feel like crap?
Might be wrong and once again I can’t play with it because its iOS only! So I’ll reserve judgement till then…
I recently filled in a group of people at work about how I work, and I thought it might be interesting to readers of my blog…
I have the Thinkpad X220 which is a BBC R&D laptop and running Ubuntu 11.10 (as of this week, but its going back due to hardware problems).I switch between the BBC R&D network and the BBC R&D wireless network when I want raw (un-proxyed) internet access. This actually works well because I don’t need to use my BBC desktop machine unless I need to accept a calendar request and send it to my gmail (which is pain, more details about this soon).I’d hoped to get Gnome Evolution working with the socks5 proxy as it should be able to deal with my Calendar as it has Exchange support but currently no Socks5 support (why I have no bloody idea!). So I’m trying out sockisfy and Tsocks… But right now I’m using Mozilla Thunderbird 7.1 with the IMAP interface to get emails when I switch to the R&D network.This also means it limits the time I’m in my email and means I get more done… (Something I know from using Rescuetime in the past and tracking my usage at work) I tend to switch to the R&D network about 3-5x a day for about 20mins each time but most of the time I’m on the non proxied wireless network.This means I automatically get disconnected from IRC, Tweetdeck, Gtalk, etc when changing to the R&D network but I do have the essential things like Twitter and Gtalk on my mobile phone which is always connected to the Wireless network. I could change the proxy settings but I kind prefer it that way, although I did add foxyproxy to Firefox because it was a pain not being able to browse a site someone sent via a BBC email without digging around the preferences.
It does seem a bit of crazy way to do things but I quite like it and means I’m not watching and replying to emails all the time. Now I just have to wait for the Thinkpad X220 to be fixed…
“FLOSS” (Free/Libre/Open Source Software), and “FOSS” (or F/OSS, Free and Open Source Software).
I attended the Floss Unconference fest yesterday at Manchester Conference centre (a location I had planned to use for BarCampManchester2 due to their ability to do overnights and excellent warren like structure).
The event was reasonable but not well attended, which was a shame. It needed about another 30 people to feel more busy and active. Not quite sure why people never came out for it…? But to be honest I only spotted it by hearing a tweet from Teknoteacher. Anyhow, at the end of the day there were lightening talks and I jumped at the chance to talk about software which really needs to be developed on Linux. I’ve adopted this post to apply to most Floss type things…
First up…
- What happened to Say my name desert? The developer moved to announcefy but frankly its a downgrade and I’m just about to uninstall it because they’ve been talking about plugins for yonks and they still don’t exist. Instead I just installed Call Announcer which seems to do what I want, but we’ll see…
- In the same vein, locale what happened? I’ve switched to the hyper geeky Llama which operates based on radio cell towers so in theory it shouldn’t eat so much power as locale. But to be honest I’ve not really had time to mess with it and tweak it.
Now to the desktop…
- Rescue time is great but the Linux client is hell to install and run. But to be fair at least their is one and the developers do recognise it. This fits perfectly with the quantified self movement and needs more development effort!
- Widgets on Ubuntu need a rethink… Screenlets have been very quiet in years. Although to be fair, OMG! Ubuntu might have a solution to put KDE widgets on to Ubuntu.
- I mentioned data portability apps and what I was thinking about was the state of web pipelines such as Conduit, Yahoo Pipes and If this then that. If this then that has certainly kicked up the dust in this area but I really want to see more focus here, specially in the FLOSS community
- The home server market is still there and slowly growing, but still theres no real traction in the FLOSS community it seems. Microsoft stopped innovating too which is perfect time for the FLOSS community to get a leg ahead. Someone shouted out about some project, but later when questioned admitted it was vaporware right now. If/when Amahi finally shift to Ubuntu I may switch to using that, because thats the best I can find.
- Why can I not find a Google Tasks application? Right now I’m using the Webframe widget (hence my bug bear with widgets) but it doesn’t cache for offline support, so its not a good solution. I hear Gnome 3.4 has a webOS style system, so you can run HTML5 apps natively but right now all I can find is stuff about Waylands which runs apps in a web browser. On the Unity front there seems to be some traction… If only Tasque or Tomboynotes would sync with Google Tasks!
I’m sure theres plenty more but these are my thoughts right now…
Sriram Peruvemba, vice president of marketing at Eink, gives us the latest news from Eink, they announced that they will ship between 25 million and 30 million Eink screens this year, just for the Eink e-readers like the Kindle 4 and Nook Touch. Yup you read right, 30 million of those devices to be sold this year.
Is it only me but does the device he’s playing with look exactly the same as the new touch screen Amazon Kindle? Can’t believe I didn’t spot it before really. Anyway its a interesting little interview, but still odd there not going for the bigger display areas?
First impressions of the Amazon Kindle Fire?
Fantastic! Its roughly a 7inch Kindle/Tablet with some decent power and enough storage for general consumption… And its only 199 dollars!
That means even if they shift the dollars price over directly into pounds its still a very reasonable price. Funny enough its about the same price as the HP touchpad when it was on sale.
Theres still quite a lot which is unknown such as side loading apps, which version of Android and ultimately how hackable the device will be but Amazon have totally blown the Nook Color out of the water ($249). In fact a lot of the tablets will struggle against the Kindle Fire, even the Ipad. The Kindle fire is just so cheap that it will be come a thing people will just have. Amazon have gone for the mass which frankly isn’t a bad idea at all.
Not having the Android Market isn’t a massive deal because frankly its just a matter of getting the developers to submit the same application to the Amazon store instead. Amazon have really taken the ideals of free and open to the maximum, now if only I was in the States! Maybe I can buy one off the back of the amazon account confusion…?
The other Kindles all look good and finally its good to see Amazon releasing a Touch screen version for all those who can’t live without touching the screen. But for now I’m sticking with my Kindle as I’ve not really seen enough to make me switch, plus I like the keyboard anyway.
Been thinking about getting a Tablet for a long while for the purposes of aiding with my needs to better write notes, recite things, etc. I was hoping the 7inch Samsung Galaxy tab would have dropped to much lower price by now but its holding its price quite well still.
So avoiding all the Apple crap, I was pushing for the Samsung galaxy tablet 10.1, then they announced the galaxy 7.7inch (not to be confused with the older 7inch) and at the same a 5inch sudo tablet which actually looks like a oversized phone. But I quite like it because it reminds me of the ipod touch (not in looks but more in how could be used) and I’m it would make a very good note taking device specially if I can get a bluetooth keyboard working with it?
Yes it won’t have Honeycomb (android 3) on it but to be honest I’m not that fused. Gingerbread (android 2.3) has most of the things I need, would use. I’m also expecting Icecream sandwich (android 4) will be hacked on the device once the source is made publicly available.
Will be interesting having a stylus too, specially since theres very few apps which support the stylus…
Recently I’ve had the joy of taking the tram into work everyday. I keep meaning to buy a monthly pass but having to get a photocard done at the GMPTE (greater manchester transport, like TFL is to London) but forget. Anyway some people may have noticed I’m tweeting a lot of links and passages from my Kindle. This only works due to the wifi hotspot on my rooted HTC desire, because of course the Trams don’t have wifi but have the advantage of being above ground and crossing Manchester City centre.
One of the posts I read via Linux Magazine was about the design choices going into the next generation desktops.
The post talks about the outrage by different communities involved with the next generation of desktops.
This is something I feel very strongly about because of my disdain of Ubuntu’s unity desktop. I understand some of the reasons which make it opinionated software but it doesn’t mean I have to like it 
So I switched to using the very much beta Gnome3 desktop which is a breath of fresh air but also has problems (even on my new thinkpad x220).
At work I tend to switch between the two because I’m driving a 24″ full HD display along side my laptop screen, so keep logging in and out for reasons I’ll explain another day.
In the post, it talks about how Gnome3, Ubuntu Unity and KDE4 have had problems because they all have made some difficult changes. But to be honest this is consistent with Microsoft Windows 8′s move into Metro and OSX’s move into a more iOS type platform. All are tricky and full of people upset and confused.
To be honest they could all learn from the points of the post…
- Don’t change too much too quickly
- Build user testing into each stage of the development
- Whenever possible, leave legacy features in place
- Don’t impose work-flows from above
- Beware of designer fads
- Don’t view function and aesthetics as separate
- If a design is too noticeable, then maybe it’s too clever to use
- Talk to your readers as you work
There all valid and good points. I’m sure most of the linux desktops are doing most of these. Interesting point however is the tension between
opinionated software and the last point talking to the users of your work. Being too proud or too precious will ultimately put you in a worst position overall in my book, but I’m sure others would totally disagree…?
It wasn’t long ago that I removed the OKCupid application from my android phone because frankly it wasn’t all that and it was more like an extension of the website. But I was talking to my friend Nicola who I had been telling for a while to stop paying for online dating sites. In the past she has filled me in on the problems Guardian Soulmates was having post there redesign. But today she filled me in on OKCupid’s new beta application feature called Locals.
In actual fact Locals I’d heard about but hadn’t tried till she explained it.
Simply its Grindr for the OKCupid crowd… Sam Yagan (OKC founder) explains why its anti-grindr
So Grindr is obviously the most successful mobile dating app out there. The things that make it so successful—I’m going to terribly stereotype this community—but it’s larger used as a vehicle for short-term, physical relationships. Now it turns out, taking the stereotypical heterosexual case, that the vast majority of women don’t want that. In fact that’s what creeps them out the most about this. They’re worried about stalkers, they’re worried that it’s 10:30 at night on a Friday and you know someone at the bar next to you thinks you want to have sex with them.
How is OkCupid Locals different?
Number one, we’re populating Locals with the OkCupid database. Our entire reputation is built around the fact that we have this data-oriented way to understand people’s personalities. We can actually layer in compatibility. So now, when you make yourself available in Locals, it’s not just, “Oh, who are the people around me who are hot and horny at this moment.” It’s sliced by who are the people around me who are compatible with me. Instead of it being like everyone’s out there in this meat market, it’s more like I can say, “Who wants to go to karaoke.” You can post that not to just everyone in the West Village, but you can say: everyone in the Village who has a compatibility with me over 80 percent.
It sort of cleans the unwashed masses. It’s like, ohhhhh. You’ve been on OkCupid for a couple years, you know that people with high match percentages tend to be people that you could tolerate having a beer with. (Or not—there are creepy people everywhere in every compatibility index.) But in general we’ve got this sort of filter of the users, which I think is super valuable.
And I he’s right, you can just say something like I’m in X place for Y amount of time. Then set who you would like to see there (based on your OKC profile), so for example mine options is Girls who like guys and everybody.
The thing which makes me think this could be a success is the fact I was already doing this on twitter as such. For example I’d say, I’m in central London tonight, anyone fancy joining me for a meal or a drink. Because I have quite a few twitter followers I tend to always catch someone but now I can do the same and hopefully meet some real cool people who, who knows might be rather cute.
Locals really hits the head of what makes OKCupid so cool. One of the secrets of OKC is its social nature. Its more like a place to hangout, do quizes, talk to people, etc, etc. Dating is a massive part but I know people who just use to chat to people in passing, read there journals and fill out the weird and wonderful quizes. If they can get people to do locale too… then there on to a new massive success
I know most people will screw up there face at the notion of Locals but for someone as public as myself, its going to be a whole lot of fun…
Iris Todorovic showed me her netbook and I was interested in the fact it had Android on it along side Ubuntu. It was Android Donut (or 1.6) so a very early version of Android, plus it was a Intel ATOM CPU. So I got thinking surely someones ported Android to a x86 / AMD64 processor architecture and made it work on a standard PC?
And I wasn’t wrong…
This is a project to port Android open source project to x86 platform, formerly known as “patch hosting for android x86 support“. The original plan is to host different patches for android x86 support from open source community. A few months after we created the project, we found out that we could do much more than just hosting patches. So we decide to create our code base to provide support on different x86 platforms, and set up a git server to host it.
Excellent, I’ll be giving it a try…
