Top 5 Android apps
Here is a quick roundup of my top 5 android apps. I consider these a must have on any android handset.
WaveSecure
WaveSecure is the must have security app on your phone. It can help track down lost or stolen phones, remotely track the location of the phone/sim information, and even remotely lock or wipe the phone is needed. In addition, you can use it to backup/restore data on your phone. Finally, if your phone is stolen and a new sim card in inserted, WaveSecure will lock down the phone unless the secure code is entered.
WaveSecure is currently free for Android but costs $19.90 per year subscription on other platforms.
Contact Owner
You can never be too paranoid. Another security app that displays your (or anyone else’s ) contact information on the “lock screen” of your Android device, so that if you happen to lose it the finder will know how to contact you.
Advanced Task Manager
While there are other free task managers, this app is a step above and beyond. The user interface is well thought out, clean and professional. You can view process/system level information, memory footprints of currently running apps and if you have root access, you can terminate running apps. You can also white-list apps that should not be terminated.
Currently sells for 99c.
Google Voice
If you make plenty of long distance/international calling, this is a must have app. No longer do you need to call a central line, remember passcodes and then dial the international number. Just setup international dialing through voice, and dial away just like you would any local contact. International rates are very reasonable and sound quality is impeccable. In addition, messaging to and from voice is free and no text messaging charges apply. Check out the site for all the other goodies that generally apply to Google Voice and aren’t specific to Android.
Wifi tether for Root Users
This doesn’t apply to the community as a whole because you need to be running a custom ROM with root access. This app created a wireless access point to which you can connect your laptop to and then tether connections through your phone’s data connection. It couldn’t be easier to setup, supports encryption and in general works great.
There are many other apps that came close but didn’t make the top 5 cut. Some of them include Gesture Search, Juice Defender, Meebo IM, Shazam and Sipdroid.
Ice cold decks
This is how geeks do poker. Ben Joffe figured out a way where it doesn’t matter where you cut a deck, a cold deck can be designed such that a specific player always wins.
What if God was one of us?
The life of God is pretty well documented. Their stories are of someone who didn’t behave the way you and I would when faced with adversity. Essentially they teach the readers to practice enormous willpower, strength, patience, courage amongst many such qualities.
If I come across something amazing, I’ll hype it up a little more when I spread the word. The next person who hears my version probably adds a bit more. Eventually the final story is just a super glorified version of the original.
Imagine what happened to the stories of the Gods over thousands of years and millions of people’s interpretations and hype. So was God just really someone between us? Maybe years from now, people like Ghandi might end up being worshiped in temples.
First Impressions: Windows 7
I was one of the early adopters of Windows Vista. My mistake was to choose a newly designed OS from the ground up and then choose it in a 64-bit architecture. There were two main reasons why my Vista love was short-lived. Lack of drivers and too many annoying security questions. I lived with XP ever since.
Windows 7 finally made it to my laptop about a month back. I’m very impressed. Drivers so far have been no problem but for some I did have to dig a little deeper. Jump lists, Aero peek etc are all new and exciting features all built in making the need for 3rd party software redundant. The UI is clean and stylish making it at par with Apple’s OS if not marginally better. Boot times are quick (though not scientific, I feel it is significantly faster than XP on the same laptop with the same configuration). While the default security options are quite obstructive and chatty, it was easy to disable (unlike Vista).
Other than the obvious features, there are some minor ones I really love. Since I didn’t stick with Vista long enough, its hard to say if they were introduced in Vista and I just happened to find in 7. For example, I love the fact when I can vertically maximize windows by pulling one edge to the end of the screen. Hovering over taskbar items shows a little preview of all open windows for that app and keeping your mouse over it for a while makes all other windows except that one disappear. You also see similar effects with Alt+Tab. Process handling is by far the best thing about it. If an application hangs, 7 will grey out the app making it clear to the user that it isn’t responding. Also if you try continue to use (maximize, close etc) an app that isn’t responding, 7 will prompt with a dialog asking if the app should be terminated or diagnosed for problems. This is much more convenient than having to bring up task manager and find and kill the app.
Overall, I’m very pleased with 7. I highly recommend giving it a spin.
when one closes, another ‘Lane’ opens.
Quite a week it has been for USC football. First Pete taking off. Now Lane coming in. A good thing? I don’t know.
Pat Forde from ESPN summed it up quite nicely. “At this rate, Lane Kiffin is an 8-5 season at USC away from a $50 million contract to coach Peyton Manning and the Colts.”
I was really impressed with Lane and Sarkisian while they were at USC. Since then however Lane has been in the news for all the wrong reasons, mostly his big mouth/ego. His coaching skills seem far from perfect. Not sure how excited I am about fall 2010.
Part animal, Part plant. Complete coolness.
How cool is this. Now if only we humans could evolve to be something like this and solve our climate chaos.
Insight into people’s thoughts.
Gaining insight into people thoughts is hard, almost impossible. However, Google stores searches and uses this to predict what others might search for. This is an incredible tool. Here are a couple of examples of the kind of this to expect.
Here are screenshots from Google for what girlfriend expect from their boyfriends and vice-versa.
Another example is how people look for depending on where you are on the world. The first is an example of US searches. The second for searches in India.
Interesting huh?
When droid doesn’t
I’ve been comparing V’s iPhone to my G1 for a while now. If you are wondering who wins, its my old Sony Ericsson dumbphone. If you need a phone that does everything that a phone should do, it does it better than these smarter guys.
The iPhone looks great. You can’t beat how even the worst apps look so good. However, if you want a smart computer in your hands, this isn’t it. Sure you can check email and browse but you can’t background apps, everything is tightly controlled by Apple making it very frustrating for a tech buff like me to appreciate.
The G1 shine in these areas. However, it’s also its pitfall. I’m running cyanogen’s modified ROM. It gives me the latest and greatest in Android releases which I cannot get officially. But I also get random crashes, extreme slowness at times and other quirks that make the phone unusable at times. You could argue I could stick with the standard Google ROM. But then I’m running software that is a year old. Also, by running the official ROM, it does resolve all my issues. I can still run multiple apps in the background. This still makes the 500Mhz processor crawl to a halt at times. Since Android cannot control what apps are good or bad, or how much processing times each app takes up, it ends up making the phone unusable. If I stop all backgrounding apps, the phone is useful again but then, its just the iPhone.
So does iPhone have it right then. Yes and no. The ‘closed’ Apple policy has advantages. It can control things like user experience by blocking on not providing certain features (ie backgrounding, full bluetooth control etc). Users end up with a phone that works well under most circumstances and with ample battery life.
Android provides users with the platform ‘openness’. However, this leads users frustrated with a phone that could potentially run terribly slow or drain the battery within hours of use.
I think Android has the right approach. A lot of the problems are limitations of hardware. A faster processor, better battery can go a long way to alleviate the current issues. The openness is a more important aspect to maintain. Early adopters will feel the pain.
In the meantime, if someone has an old SE phone, I’d love to have it.
Reproductive biology: Girls on top
Fascinating post about how evolution is beyond us.
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15125173
Reopen Sesame
The open sesame post describes a way for password management that is quite effective. However, there are some shortcomings. One, you need software which means when you don’t have it, you don’t have your password. While this isn’t a problem for most of us who are always online, it’s hard when I’m traveling in India and the concept is free wifi isn’t as common. Another problem is security. Supergenpass, it seems, can get access to your root password if executed on malicious sites. Lastpass stores all your passwords online (encrypted using a root password of your choice) making the prospect uncomfortable for some.
Here is an alternate solution to strong passwords. Come up with a small strong password that is easy to remember. Let say your root password phrase is ‘camelot’. Now come up with a consistent ciphering algorithm.
For example, replace all A’s with @ or all O’s with zeros etc. Capitalize every third letter.
Now, your root password becomes something like ‘c@Mel0t’. Now for each site either prefix or suffix the site name and apply the same ciphering algorithm.
So, if you visit www.google.com, you end up with a password like ‘g00glEc@Mel0t’.
Use this approach to create more replacements or change to rules so you come up with your own. One thing a lot of people might point out though is someone who has access to one password now knows your root password and hence can guess the passwords to all sites. This isn’t entirely true. A lot depends on your scheme. For example, if I need a yahoo password using the scheme above, it becomes ‘y@H00C@mEl0T’. Since the rule was to capitalize every third letter, the root password differs from the google one. Also, since you come up with the rules, you can make them as complicated as you need. For example, capitalize the 3rd letter, if the 3rd letter matches your cipher don’t go the cipher. Using this rule. Your google password becomes ‘g0OglEc@MelOt’ and yahoo becomes ‘y@H00C@mEl0T’. The your google password now starts with ‘g-zero-caps o’ as opposed to ‘g-zero-zero’.
Lets hear your innovate ways to password management sans software.