Category: technology

Unity comes into focus

ubuntu login screen with alternative environment

On Friday I tried using Ubuntu’s Unity interface, which some people rightly pointed out I really didn’t like.

When I first saw Unity and tried to use it, I didn’t like it but over the last few months I’ve seen more of what Unity has to offer. The HUD, Lens/Scopes, Ubuntu on Android and now Web App Integration.

I’m not totally switched over yet, however…

One of the first things I did was hide the dash and menu because I don’t like it eating up my desktop space. I still hate the fact the menu for each application is at the very top right but I’ve started using one application full screen every workspace. It kind of works but still drives me nuts.

I have changed Unity so its workstations are stacked on top of each other just like Gnome Shell, however I miss having a dual screen setup with one which stays static. Having dual screen and workspaces seems a little too much? Sure I would get use to it after a while.

The Dash or overlay is a bit messy compared to Gnome 3’s and I frankly find the way you navigate around a bit poo. But that was before I learned about Super + S and Super + W. I haven’t got the hang of the Hud yet but we’ll see how things go. I also find the gnome extensions very useful which seem to be missing under Unity.

I do still find Unity very noisy, I much prefer the Gnome Shell look, so if there was a skin which looked like Gnome Shell and acted like it, I’d deploy it in a heartbeat.

No matter what, I find the Ubuntu Unity Web API really interesting and I’ll be looking forward to seeing if Gnome Shell adopts some of Unity’s features or Unity chills out in the future.

Replacement for those #kindle tweets

Amazon kindle 3

I use to tweet from my Kindle to tweet interesting things I was reading but people and followers complained there was no link to the actual article or post. And to be honest they were right.

Its frustrating that the Kindle can do so much but Amazon’s ecosystem refuses to support self-published content.

However I finally given up on the Kindle for tweeting interesting news bits. Don’t get me wrong, its still my device for long form reading – because frankly the e-ink screen is still the best screen to read text on for me.

This change was made easier with GReader and Plume Twitter client on the Samsung 7+ Tablet. Plume will hold the twitter messages in a queue till I get back online, which is usually at home or work. This also slightly eases the need to enable wifi teathering on my HTC One X (something I can no longer do, till I root it).

The only issue is, when I’m finally back online, all the tweets are posted one after another, which can look like a bit of a tweet flood to some.

I’m also thinking about paying for Instapaper because its rather handy for sending stuff to my kindle (I know I can do it via the free.kindle.com address but I quite like the fact it groups them and sends one a day when theres something new). On top of that Ars Technica’s subscription model isn’t so bad. And access to the full text RSS feeds would be very handy.

Cloud storage advice

We were discussing cloud based solutions in the office today, now that Dropbox offers double the storage for Pro users. I now have 130.25gigs of storage (up from 78gig) to sync and play with believe it or not, thanks to everyone who used my referral codes (mildlydiverting, seansines and djadams) plus HTC for the extra. We got into the topic of what I use myself?

I use Dropbox for general stuff and syncing across all my different devices including Ubuntu and Android tablets and phones. However I use Spideroak for actual machine backups…

Why?

Well I like what Spideroak do about security and privacy. Compare this to Dropbox’s terms… and what happened last year!

This was confirmed when I heard Steve Gibson’s Security now on Cloud Solutions.

Cloud Solutions
After catching up with the week’s news, Leo and I examine ALL of the various cloud-based synchronizing, storage and backup solutions we could find. I survey each one in turn, and Leo chimes in with his own personal experience with many of the offerings. We conclude that SpiderOak looks like the winner, though Jungle Disk is still in the running.

Zero knowledge encryption is very useful and although I know theres way to encrypt in Dropbox (I actually have considered using them myself for somethings) I don’t really want to encrypt and decrypt on my Android device each time.

For me right now, there quite different parts of the market (although Spideroak do have dropboxes too) and I’m happy with that for now.

Honeycomb to Ice Cream Sandwich and back

I have a whole range of Andorid devices now.

  • Archos 70 running Android 2.2 Froyo
  • HTC Desire running Android 2.3 Gingerbread (cyanogen mod 7)
  • Sansung GT-P6210 Tablet running Android 3.2 Honeycomb
  • HTC One X running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

Although I hardly use the first two (actually need to sell my HTC Desire on ebay soon) I do find switching between the Samsung Tablet and my HTC phone a bit of a pain. I have done things to make switching a lot easier like installing the Ice cream sandwich keyboard. But theres enough differences to confuse me once in a while.

To be honest I can’t wait for the tablet to get upgraded to Ice cream sandwich… In between I’m getting a lot closer to installing Cyanogen’s Mod 9 version as it seems pretty stable? on the wifi only version of the tablet.

Also need to attempt the Ice cream sandwich upgrade for my Archos, just to see what happens…

RescueTime for Linux (beta)

I got Rescuetime installed and working on Ubuntu! Thanks to Joe’s comment on my blog post about Rescuetime meet Arya

After years of broken promises, missed deadlines, and disappointed RescueTime Linux users, we are finally preparing to launch the officially supported Linux version of RescueTime.

Up to now, the only option for Linux users was the open sourced version of the RescueTime Linux Uploader hosted here: https://launchpad.net/rescuetime-linux-uploader. While this have worked out for many users, we have always wanted to have a version of RescueTime for Linux that mirrored the functionality of our Windows and OS X versions.

If you want to take part in helping us test out RescueTime for Linux, read on!

I take it all back Rescuetime! And thanks a lot Joe for alerting me to the beta, thought you guys gave up on Linux

Even worked for the latest Ubuntu with Gnome shell…You can also download a Deb file for i86 or x64, making it so much simpler than the bzr file previously. Finally make sure you file any bugs and give feedback as it is a beta…

The HTC One X reviewed

HTC 1x

People have been asking me for a review of the 1X phone since I mentioned getting it last Wednesday.

This won’t be a complete review because I haven’t really gone through the features and the like yet. To be honest I only just moved everything across and set it up on Friday. Engadget has a complete review too…

Thoughts…?

The HTC 1x is seriously an amazing phone! But it does have flaws…

Right off the bat, the battery life is poor. So far its lasted just over a day before needing power. Because I’m use to doing this for my old HTC Desire, I tend to be not far from power or armed with some kind of USB cable. What bugs me is the HTC 1x doesn’t have user removable battery meaning I can’t carry around a spare battery like I know some of my friends do for there phones.

I’m hoping the battery life won’t get worst because if it does then, wow! I know some of you are saying, well what do you expect for a quad core phone? And maybe your right, but coming from a single core its a small shock, specially on a brand new phone? Update – Looks like there might be an unofficial fix…

On the other side, it charges extremely quickly. Which means my Powermonkey thing should keep it powered up when no plug or usb is near.

The size of the device is just right for my large hands, but what scares me is its so bloody light it feels like I could crush it. Worst still I keep checking my pocket to make sure it hasn’t fallen out because I’m so use to feeling weight in the pocket. Its so light I was able to put it in my shirt pocket while shopping the other day and almost forget it was there. There wasn’t even a noticeable weight in the pocket, although you could just about see it because of its sheer size.

I can’t explain to people how light it really is…! Compared to my desire it feels like half the weight and compared to a iphone 4 it feels much lighter. A iphone owner said it feels cheap based on its weight. But feeling how strong it actually is, I would disagree.

I was lucky enough to get the black 1x not the white one and to be honest it truly looks the business. Everything is beautiful about it, including the micro drilled holes for the speakers front and rear. The multicolour led is pin sharp meaning you can spot it from across the room but also makes my HTC desire’s status light look like a 60w bulb.

I have noticed it get quite warm when charging first time, not noticed it getting warm since.

The sheer size does mean your typing with your phone a lot but its fine with it. Although I’d like to have a decent keyboard as the HTC sense one is pants.

It does come with Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box which is really strange. I’m so use to Android 2.3 gingerbread it feels odd coming away from it. On top of that, I’ve gotten a little use to Android 3.2 honeycomb from my Samsung Tab 7+. So I’m in that strange cross over point between all the different versions. For example not having a menu key is bizarre and I keep wondering if I’m missing something.

Photo to unlock seemed like a joke, but I have enabled it and when in decent light it works very well. So well I wasn’t even sure it was working correctly. I tried holding a picture up of me and it didn’t work btw. Mainly because its so quick and if it doesn’t recognise you or the conditions are bad it switches over to the pattern lock in seconds. Google really made the whole thing work extremely smoothly!

Software wise, I’m very tempted to root the phone and put stock ICS on it! Everytime I look at the HTC sense desktop it winds me up that I can only have 4 icons in a row! On my Desire with a much smaller amount of screen resolution I could do 5 or even 6 under cyanogenmod 7. The HTC 1x has a incredible resolution (yes it looks incredible!) but its wasted because HTC limit its capability. However there are some good things about HTC Sense 4, including Dropbox, Evernote, Flickr, etc support (although I still had to download the actual apps?). I was also happy to see the ability to use as a USB drive, Wifi Hotspot and USB tether device put in by Orange. Although I’ve not tried the wifi hotspot with my Kindle or Tab 7+ yet (which was the sticking point before and is now…).

Ice Cream Sandwich has some amazing features including the ability to track exactly how much data each app is using over a month. You can even set your limits which is handy for those on lesser data plans.

So would I recommend this phone to other people? No I wouldn’t. Its a dream phone for many people but its sheer size and the battery issues make it hard to recommend. I would say the HTC One S might be a better phone for those more sensitive to battery power and size.

HTC One X and Dropbox up a tree…

Today I finally received my HTC One X from Orange. I swear I will do a full review once I find sometime to really set it up and play with it. But generally I’m mighty impressed with the weight and the size isn’t so big.

I’ve not really had a chance to set it up except throw in my google accounts and get dropbox working… Nice that it was built in from the get go. And I happy to get this email from Dropbox…

Hi Ian,
Congrats on becoming a Dropbox Guru! We’ve awarded you 23 GB of bonus space for the next 24 months! You now have 75.75 GB of space. Thanks again for supercharging your HTC device with Dropbox.
Enjoy,
– The Dropbox Team

That is a nice ton of space, I’m sure I can find something to fill the space with… I’ve already started syncing my Mixes across…

Free documents and Slideshare

I received this email the other day and I thought it was quite interesting…

Hey cubicgarden,
nomnex sent you a private message on SlideShare.
“Thank you to make and upload your latest presentations in an open source format (.odp) Anyone can view them, anyone can look at the content (pictures resolution, text effect, etc.) All the best, nomnex “
You can view nomnex’s SlideShare profile.

In his/her/it’s profile is this funny little story.

Linux Fedora 15 LXDE. Unfortunately for me, my system freezes when I watch the flash presentations directly on slideshare.net (the Flash plugin is not resource friendly on Linux). I have to download and play them with my player (mplayer)

If I knew I’d get this response everytime I uploaded a Open Document I’d do it more often 🙂

Notification and email management

Fedora 16 & Gnome3

Been thinking about replacing my work mobile phone for a while. Its a XDA Windows Mobile 6.1 phone and to be honest the battery life and general use it shocking. Unfortunately the BBC don’t support Android for work mobiles but they do support iPhones and Blackberry. Interestingly they also don’t support Windows Phone 7 either which is strange because they did support Mobile 6.1/6.5.

I almost went with the iPhone option as it has the advantage of remote BBC email and a familiar modern operating system.

However I’ve been thinking about my email management…

There was a period while I was running BBC backstage when I was getting roughly 150+ emails a day not including any mailing lists emails. I was dealing with it, only just… I felt crap because I was missing stuff and not really catching up with people I promised email back. Not only that, I knew I was much less productive because I was always firefighting emails coming into my inbox. This was confirmed by using Rescuetime for about a year or two. Once I get it working with Ubuntu, I’ll be quantifying my work more often. Rescuetime say they are working on a Linux version which is easier that.

I recently also adopted the 4 sentenc.es thing after seeing Oli Woods email signature one day…

The Problem
E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.
The Solution
Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.
four.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be four sentences or less. It’s that simple.

Everytime I send out a email to someone new in the BBC, they reply and also said they like the idea of 4 sentenc.es but can’t imagine adopting it. I use to think the same, but with a little thought, I manage to condense at least 90% of my emails exchanges down to the 4 sentences. The footer message helps to explain to the recipients that you will be very brief. Not only that, it helps to separate out email responses too.

Seems theres nothing worst than getting a chain of emails with multiple ideas and thought in them. Although I can be as much to blame for this as most others.

What I’ve recently been doing is only checking my email once every few hours. This is partly because I have to switch networks to get my work email. Yes I could mess with proxy settings and setup routes but actually I quite like disconnecting from the corporate network to catchup with Twitter, Gmail, etc. Don’t get me wrong its not just personal type stuff, its google docs, evernote, dropbox syncing, etc. All part of working life… But if they are, what isn’t?

Recently my manager gave up his blackberry, I’m sure his life will be better without it. I don’t blame him really.

The notifications can be worst than the email itself, I’d contest..

I’ve been showing people Gnome Shell or Gnome3 recently specially since I got my new replacement Lenovo X220 Thinkpad (which I’m now starting to love, now the hardware works correctly). I’m finding the management of notifications really useful and the idea of hiding that stuff away really good for getting stuff/things done. Once it really gets going, its going to be awesome for notification management.

In the meanwhile, I decided not to upgrade my phone and I’ve put the Sim into my thinkpad to use for work when I can’t get use Wifi or a network connection. Now if I could just find a Linux application which allows me to manage texts and phone calls… then I’d be very happy.

HTC One X coming to Orange

HTC One X and S in Orange Store confirmed

Updated, with the new orange store screenshot

I was considering switching network while I wait for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus but yesterday Engadget broke the news about the HTC One X and One S and that it was coming to Orange in the UK.

Not sure how I feel about the 4.7 inch screen of the HTC One X but the HTC One S’s 4.3 inch screen is but much more pocketable. The One S also looks like my old HTC Desire but much nicer and bigger. Quad core running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) coupled with HTC’s final decision to unlock all bootloaders makes these phones very attractive and a long term investment.

Certainly glad I waited and didn’t go for the Samsung Galaxy S2 or one of Sony’s other Gingerbread phones. If the Galaxy S3 does come, I can always still switch network if its a One X beater

Torrents & Magnets with dropbox

Bit torrent is changing if you hadn’t noticed already…

Torrent files are going the way of cds while magnet links are taking over.

When you download a .torrent file, you’re essentially downloading a small file that contains information on the larger files you want to download. The torrent file tells your torrent client the names of the files being shared, a URL for the tracker, and more. Your torrent client then calculates a hash code, which is a unique code that only that torrent has—kind of like an ISBN or catalog number. From there, it can use that code to find others uploading those files, so you can download from them.

A magnet link does away with the middleman. A magnet link is essentially a hyperlink containing the hash code for that torrent, which your torrent client can immediately use to start finding people sharing those files. Magnet links don’t require a tracker (since it uses DHT, which you can read more about here), nor does it require you to download a separate file before starting the download, which is convenient.

Magnet links are certainly a lot better in many cases, the piratebay demonstrated this by fitting the whole site into a 90meg file. But I have a problem which I don’t seem to be able to find a answer for…

Torrent files + Dropbox is a killer combination, it means no matter where you are as long as you got a internet connection you can fire up your torrent system without messing with firewalls, etc. As we move to Magnet links, that infrastructure just crumbles and everyone seems to suggest the hole in the firewall solution.

So if anyone knows a better way to replicate dropbox + torrents or a solution which doesn’t require punching a hole in my firewall, I’m all ears, like many people…

Ubuntu on Android

Bit of a break from the year of love..

Most people felt Ubuntu was going to launch their own mobile operating system but instead…

They made Ubuntu on Android and now you can watch it work including the surprising Ubuntu TV support here on youtube.

This even more makes me consider switching my Ubuntu sessions back to Unity from Gnome Shell, it also makes AirDroid a bit of a lost project now? However I’m really looking forward to Air/Wifi syncing because USB sync is soooo Windows CE 🙂 Although most of the time now, I’m plugged in just to keep my old HTC Desire charged up

My next phone… Its that of the year again

Google Galaxy Nexus

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…?

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7++

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus

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.