Author: jamesclay

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No more space…

Nexus One

One of the key issues I have my (slightly ageing, but still useful) Google Nexus One is one of storage. Yes it has an SD card slot, but the problem I am having is with the onboard phone storage.

There is only 200MB of onboard storage and though many Android apps can be run off the SD Card, some of the key apps I use can’t.

I recently downloaded an update to the Google+ App that comes in at 10MB which immediately resulted in the Nexus One throwing a hissy fit. I was able to get that app moved to the SD card, so the phone calmed down.

What this actually means is that I can’t use the Google Nexus One in the way I would like, in trying different kinds of apps. This was never a problem on the iPhone where the onboard storage of 8GB or 16GB made it much easier to manage apps.

There is no way to upgrade the onboard storage from the 200MB, so for the moment there is very little I can do.

Does anyone know if this is still an issue with the newer Android phones?

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Flickering

Well Flickr has undergone a makeover and their website is now very modern and stylish.

Flickr

It reminds me very much of the iPhone app, so where is the iPad app then?

Yahoo have also changed what you get in the “free” account, before you had a limit of 200 photographs and no full size images. Now for free you get one terabyte of storage and full resolution images.

Flickr

I have a Pro account on Flickr and there are still some advantages to having that, but it’s impressive that Yahoo have taken the plunge to move Flickr forward to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google+.

Certainly with the way that the Flickr API works, it makes sense to grab a free account and use Flickr as a backup to your other photo sharing services. Having an account doesn’t mean you need to partake in groups or have contacts.

Flickr for me is quite old school Web 2.0 and I think that’s the reason I have stayed there, rather than move to shiny new services. I do do the Instagram, but will usually copy images from there to Flickr.

It’s interesting to see how old school Yahoo is now evolving, as it’s not only do we get a new Flickr, but they’ve just gone out and bought Tumblr. Interesting times.

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Adding Apps to Google Drive

If you are a regular user of Google Docs (sorry Google Drive) you will know how useful it is. What I didn’t know, well didn’t register with me, was the way that you can integrate a whole range and variety of apps making it much easier to create stuff.

On a regular vanilla Google account when clicking Create you see the standard document formats that we are all use to. However at the moment if you look down you can see Connect more apps.

Connect with apps

Click this and you will bring up a new dialogue with lots of different apps.

Connect with apps

I do like Draw.io which makes it very easy to create diagrams.

Draw.io

Movenote is a very nice presentation tool that combines video with a document, making it very simple to create short learning objects.

There is also MindMeister mindmapping.

MindMeister

As all the files are stored in your Google Drive you can access them from any computer with a modern web browser.

I am still exploring the different apps available, but if you are already using an app, drop me a comment about which apps you are using.

Update: Just a quick thank you to Yousef Fouda @YFouda who showed me this at the AOSEC meeting today.

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Goodnight Netflix

When Netflix started in the UK back in January 2012 I was quite intrigued having heard about it a lot on TWiT network podcasts.

I was initially disappointed with the range of films and television programmes, older films and television series, but did give it a go. So I have now been subscribing for well over a year and have certainly watched some good tv series and films.

This month though I have decided to relinquish my subscription. The main reason is threefold, since moving house and changing from FTTC back down to ADSL, streaming video has been a bit of an issue, more so when other people in the house want to use the internet tubes. There has been a fair few times I have cursed Netflix for stuttering, only to find out that my son was streaming BBC iPlayer at the same time! Secondly, I am not really using it very much, I seem to be watching a lot less television as I get older and certainly a lot more selective; this leads into the third reason which is what I am actually watching on Netflix in the main are repeats of things I have seen before. For example I re-watched BBC’s Hustle and enjoyed that, but I had seen that on the TV before. I am certainly not taking advantage of other stuff on there. As for films, they do add new films regularly, but apart from the “B” movie dross that use to fill the shelves of your local video rental place, there are very few films that I want to watch and many of the new films I do want to watch I have found I have already seen at the cinema, I bought the Blu-Ray or rented the DVD from the local library.

So after a little consideration I am going to terminate my subscription and say goodnight to Netflix.

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Retiring

iPhone 3GS

After many years good service I have decided to retire my iPhone 3GS. It was the first iPhone I had purchased, though I had been using an 3G for work for about a year. When I got it I was totally impressed compared to the 3G and it did so much more and much better than the Nokia N95 it replaced (which was in itself a replacement for the LG Viewty I had that was an awful phone and was “broken” from when I got it). The Nokia N95 is, or was a great phone, it still has one of the best cameras in any phone I have used, and there are features of the Symbian operating system that seem to work much better than the same features on iOS. There were a few apps that I used on the N95 which I really liked and again haven’t been really surpassed on iOS.

I used JoikuSpot for many years to tether my laptop to the internet. This was a great app and very reliable, though it did kill the battery. The Nokia N95 was one of the first phones to have 3G and WiFi. I have never been that impressed with tethering on the iPhone and as a result rarely use it, much preferring to use Android on a Google Nexus One for tethering.

The other app I liked was Shozu which made it really simple when taking a photograph to upload automatically to Flickr or my blog. As it linked into the phone operating system, this meant you could use the standard camera app. Due to Apple limitations with how apps work with iOS, you can automatically upload images to iCloud, but not to other places. You can have an app that automatically uploads when you take a photograph, but you need to be using that app when taking the images. I have tried Shozu on iOS, but it isn’t as smooth as it was on the Nokia N95.

Despite my reservations on those two aspects of iOS, the rest of the features of the 3GS were very impressive. The key ones that stand out to me were the way it handled text messages, once I got the 3GS, was when I started to use SMS and texting. I really never got the hang of it on other phones, but with the “real” on screen keyboard I found I could handle that and I did a fair bit of texting compared to before. The camera was certainly a big improvement on the 3G, but still not as good as the N95. One aspect of the improved camera was that the iPhone could now more easily read QR Codes. The big difference really though was how easy it was to buy and install apps. Getting apps through the iTunes ecosystem made it very simple to get them. With previous smartphones you would need to go to different developers to buy apps and install them in different ways. If you needed to reset the phone you would need to ensure you had backups. With the iPhone you could get software from a range of developers from just one place. As a result I got hundreds of apps over the last few years for iOS. At least with Google Play today, you can have a similar experience with Android.

The main downside of the 3GS was the battery life, with careful conservation you could make the battery last a day, but if you did anything too power hungry then you would find, as I did, that the battery would run out in the afternoon. In the end I bought a case with an integrated additional battery. This did work well and ensured when I was using the phone intensively it would at least last the day.

The real tricky part of retiring the iPhone though was cancelling my contract with O2! I was out of “contract” on my pay monthly account, so there was no termination fee, but cancelling was very difficult, even when you eventually worked out that you had to “speak” to an adviser, all they tried to do was to keep you as a customer, can’t blame them I guess, but it was annoying. It also seemed to take ages…

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Safari Crashing

Safari Crashing

Over the last few weeks I have had an annoying bug when using Safari on my iMac running Lion. Now and then when I add a new tab (to paste in an URL, or opening a link or image in a new tab) Safari just quits.

If I restart Safari it “kindly” re-opens all the pages I had open, not always convenient if I was logged into an e-mail service or my blog.

It must be a bug with Safari as more often than not I am opening a blank tab, not clicking on a particular link or something similar.

At the moment it is annoying and a search of the internet tubes seems that I am not alone. However there doesn’t appear to be a solution either.

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Haven no wifi





Yorkshire Coast

On a recent short break at Haven Holidays’ Primrose Valley I was impressed that there was wifi across the site, including the entertainment complex and encouragingly in the caravans across the site.

Alas it wasn’t free.

Well you could have 15 minutes for free each day, and then you could pay for more if you needed.

Well 15 minutes is okay to quickly check e-mail or the Twitter, but nowhere near enough to stream an episode of Doctor Who or similar on BBC iPlayer.

I did check prices, and thought £15 for four days, wasn’t too bad. Before I parted with my money though I wanted to check how fast it was. So I signed up for my free 15 minutes and was very disappointed, very slow and much slower than my 3G connection was. It was about 1Mb down and a lot less up. I was mainly interested in using the wifi to upload photographs to Flickr.

So I decided not to use the free wifi and stick with 3G.

Towards the end of the break I “accidently” connected to the free wifi and this time was quite pleased with the speed of the connection. It was much faster than before. I wonder if the poor connection I initially had was either down to lots of other guests trying out and using the free wifi (probably unlikely) or the awful weather, cold, wind, snow we were having at the time?

In the end I think if I had my latter experience to begin with I would have paid the £15.

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Lack of connectivity

Lack of connectivity

I know I shouldn’t be, but I am consistently and constantly surprised by the lack of connectivity that I see and find on a daily basis.

At the time of writing here in Weston super Mare I have no signal with Vodafone and just GPRS with O2.

There is a BT Wifi Hotspot, but at £5.99 for an hour I think not.

The lack of conduction means that I can’t access Google Docs to write this, also means Evernote isn’t an option. So I am using Pages, but not using iCloud, so will need to transfer the file later or when I do have connectivity do a cut and paste.

Without a decent connection I am loathe to try and deal with email. Too many people send big emails with attachments, or links which I can’t deal with on a slow connection.

Of course I could turn off the phone, but them I wouldn’t be able to write.

I could read a book, well if I had remembered to bring a physical book with me then I could have read that. I did try and read a book I had purchased from the Google Play Store, alas I hadn’t downloaded it to this device and I can say similar things about iBooks and the Kindle app.

It would have been sensible to download stuff in advance. The trouble is that unless you know already, how poor the connection is, you will be otherwise stuck.

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Google Reader is Dead

Google Reader is Dead

Google have announced that they are retiring Google Reader in July.

Retiring implies that Google Reader will be taking life a little easier, spend a little more time in the garden, visit National Trust sites, watch Countdown. Retiring implies that we might actually see more of Google Reader as they will be less busy than they were before.

No Google is trying to tone down the reality, the reality of course is that Google are going to kill Google Reader dead!

I’ve used Google Reader for many years, but probably like most people in recent years I’ve not used Google Reader natively, I have used it to deliver RSS feeds into services such as FlipBoard. This has to be one of the reasons why Google are probably retiring the service, the main reason of course is Google+, however another reason must be that we used the Google Reader service (and API) but we rarely visited the actual Google Reader service on the web. This gave Google very opportunities for monetisation compared to other things they do such as Gmail.

There is some concern that the death of Google Reader will actually result in the death of RSS. The reason for this thinking is that curation and sharing of news has moved from RSS onto social networking sites such as Facebook and the Twitter.

Interestingly ask yourself where did you hear about the death of Google Reader first? Was it in Google Reader, or was it on the Twitter? For me it was on the Twitter, and this says a lot about why we are now using social networking sites for sharing news and moving away from RSS.

I do like RSS, it makes sense to me, an easy way to push content to people. However it never really made the mainstream, as a background tool it was perfect, but is (I nearly wrote was) reliant on good tools for making RSS user friendly.

I still want to curate and collate RSS feeds from various sources so I am now looking for a similar alternative, what are you going to do?

Graveyard Photo Source