Android Phones

Last post for the night... I've always used the simplest free cell phone I could get. No fancy features, no data plans. But a few months ago, my wife started to bug me about getting a smart phone. Strange, because she's not a techy person, but she is always on E-mail or the web at home. Buying her a smart phone means I have to buy the same model for myself, because I'll have to teach her how to use the darn thing, and I'll be the one to have to fix things when they go wrong.

So, if I'm going to have a smart phone, it might as well get a good one. Since I'm a Sprint customer (I get a good company discount there) and their data plans are cheaper than most the other guys, I bought the two of us HTC EVOs.

Yeah, if you play too much with it, the battery life sucks. But after the novelty wore off a little, I haven't had any problem making it through the day. OK... I have a charger at work and in the car, and if I remember, I plug in.

Very clever apps! I'll list my favorites another time. Yeah, the iPhone was first and inspired the whole idea and many of the apps, but there's more than enough Android apps out there to avoid iPhone envy.

Using Calibre with a Kindle

Right... we'd spell it caliber in the US (is in size of ammo). This is an free open source multi-platform (Windows, Linux, and Mac) program that translates various formats into various E-book formats. Useful enough, I suppose, but what's really cool about it is that you can schedule it to go out and get any one of many magazines and newspapers, or your favorite blogs at a specific time, format it for your Kindle, and E-mail it to your Kindle account so when you wake up in the morning, it's already there. It works great and it has ready made canned recipes for lots of lots of different sources.

All I have to do is to leave it running when I'm gone and my subscribed Wall Street Journal (the recipe has a place to put your username and password), Orlando Sentinel, magazines, and my favorite blogs will show up in the morning at the hotel, free while I'm away, as long as they have WiFi. That also gives me plenty to read on the airplane also.

I find that I don't read many books, because I rarely have time to finish time them in a timely fashion. But I ravenously read newspapers, magazines, and blogs all the time, so this is great! So while I'm off trying to read more books, this is a great way to stay informed on the road.

Kindle

I received a Kindle for Christmas (3G, WiFi only). I've read several E-books both on my laptop and Palm TX, but I was never happy with having to be rushed because the battery is going to be dead in a couple of hours. And, of course, I didn't have much battery left to do other things besides read. Plus, it's hard to read for a long period of time with the back lit screen shining in your face through fuzzy fonts.

The first time I saw a Kindle in the store, I thought it was a dummy model. The display looked like it was a paper overlay with the text and images on the surface, instead if behind it. I liked the idea of having a long enough battery life to not have to worry about it, but they were expensive and only had a couple GB of memory (though that probably would have been more than enough).

The latest version is smaller, lighter, with twice the memory, better contrast, longer battery life, and cheaper. Plus it's as easy to hold as a paperback for long periods of time. OK... so I put it on my Christmas list.

So far, I like it. For reading, black and white is just fine, thank you. And images render nicely in black and white, so I'm more than happy to have the e-paper display than a back lit LCD. It's nice to just leave it on, have it go to screen save, and pick it up days later, reading for hours on end without hardly making a dent in the battery charge.

The operating system, such as it is, is pretty primitive, and though it can browse the web in a pinch and does a decent enough job for casual use, you wouldn't want to surf the web much with it. But for just reading books, it's perfect. If I want to do something else, I'll drag out the laptop.

Teamviewer

Forget Hamachi (earlier blog), Teamviewer is much more refined as a remote access tool. Plus, it's portable and cross platform. I can access my Ubuntu desktop or my wife's Window machine from another Linux or Windows PC anywhere without having to reconfigure my firewall. Hell, I can even do a pretty decent job controlling either machine from my Android phone using their app. Plus, it's portable and even the full version can be put on your keychain. And to help others, you can simply send them a simple small executable via E-mail and all they have to do it is run it without having to install anything.

For the one time support user, it generates a random number each time a username, and a random number for the password. They'll have to tell you those numbers over the phone to let you access their machine. Plus, they see what you're doing (and will hopefully learn). When they exit the program, nothing's left running and there's no access.

It's free for personal use. The company seems reputable enough and the link is encrypted, but it's not open source, so who knows if there's any back doors or vulnerabilities. Needless to say, I don't leave it running unless I know I might need access.

4 Years of Ubuntu

I played around with a few Linux distributions before finally biting the bullet and loading Ubuntu 7.04 as a dual boot on my Windows XP machine at home. For those needing a secret decoder ring, the year of the version is before the decimal point, the month, after (i.e. April 2007). Before I knew it, I found myself living in that partition and rarely booting up windows. Ubuntu was great then, and has been getting gradually better since (new version every 6 months with a long term super stable version every two years).

I compare that with the battles I have at work trying to keep my XP desktop running. I'm constantly doing maintenance on it (most of which is contrary to IT policy). The antivirus and other corporate software is constantly in the way. The computer fragments easily and the registry is constantly getting corrupted. It halts, does funny things, and crashes at the worst possible times. Yes, as an engineer who writes some of my own software, I'm hard on a machine. But I have the same problem at home on my wife's computer at home, and all she does is surf the web and do E-mail.

With Ubuntu, I run Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome and other applications that I was using before in Windows, but THIS operating system keeps going and going. For every hundred strange or annoying things Windows does, Ubuntu does maybe one. I rarely reboot it, and in fact, I rarely even think about it. Isn't that the way a computer SHOULD be?

What I Use Most Often

Not in any special order:

Ubuntu 10.04 - What my machine boots up into and where it stays (instead of Windows)
Teamviewer - Cross platform zero configuration remote access software
Chrome - Fastest browser out there, synced across my different machines
X-plane - Great flight simulator (Linux and Windows)
Picassa - Cross platform photograph organizer ($5/yr for 20 Gigs of photo storage from Google )
Zumodrive - Cross platform "cloud storage" (2G free account)
SpiderOak - Cross platform backup/sync (2G free account).
TrueCrypt - Encryption for sensitive home files and for travel.
Thunderbird - Cross platform mail client
Google Earth - Endless fascination
Google Calendar - Accessible from anywhere. It sends SMS reminders of appointments to my phone
Google Reader - My RSS reader. Not pretty. Web based
iGoogle - My home page for my browsers. Various TTD lists and widgets
Google Voice - Screen calls, web voicemail, ring multiple phones. Another Google freebie
Skype - Free PC to PC voice and video. Cheap international phone calls
Stellarium - If you ever loved astronomy
Miro - Find/download videocasts
VirtualBox - I run all my Windows stuff in a Virtual XP machine using this
Quicken - For personal accounting, Windows only :(
FlightPrep - Flight Planning software, Windows only :(
iTunes - I buy. I do not steal.
Pandora - Background music. Find new stuff
PortableApps - Many of my favorite apps, carried with me everywhere on a stick
Puppy Linux - OS on a stick and runs from RAM. Very fast and useful

Virtualbox

What if you want to evaluate or work with multiple operating systems, or different versions or configurations of the same operating system without each affecting the other? One simple way is to set up multiple partitions on a hard disk, and install the different operating systems or versions on different partitions, then select which operating system you want to use at boot time.

While that’s the time honored way to do it, it’s become more common to run different “guest” operating systems under different “virtual machines”, running under a “host” operating system. The virtualization application intercepts the guest OS accesses to and from its “hardware”, translating them on the fly to use services of the host OS. Each guest thinks it has exclusive rights to hardware, when it fact, the hardware of the guest is a creation of the virtualization application.

There are several advantages to doing this. You can save snapshots of the guest before you make a major change or test unstable software. If it doesn’t work out, the entire virtual machine can be rewound to a previous state. You can back up the entire virtual machine, and delete it from the host’s hard disk at will. Another advantage is that you can have the best of both worlds. Run a beta version of Windows, without risking your stable version. Run different Linux applications without having to reboot to Windows, or vice versa.

Virtualbox (virtualbox.org) is a free (Open source, or with more features for personal use or evaluation only) program from Sun Microsystems which does a great job. Simply have it create a “virtual disk” of the desired type and size, give access to your CDROM or ISO image to the guest, and install. You can map or share the host’s peripherals, including its network with the guest, and, with the personal use version, you can even share the host’s USB peripherals with the guest. Hardware video acceleration and remote desktop to the quest is also provided.

You can run the virtual machine in a host window, but it’s usually easiest to give it its own desktop. You can then simply switch between host and guest desktops. You can even merge the two operating systems on the same desktop (which can be a bit confusing). The guest application windows then can run alongside host application windows, each retaining the look and feel of the parent OS.

Applications running on the guest often run as fast as they would natively. But you do have to divvy up and allocate the hosts RAM between the host and guest(s), so it works best if the host has a lot of RAM. You’ll also need enough real disk space to hold all the guest’s virtual disks.

I use it to continue to use some Windows applications in a stripped down virtualized version of XP home. Those are the Windows applications I can’t do without (flight planning, Quicken, RSS readers), but running from with Ubuntu (Linux) host. Having a stable host OS is also a good idea, because if the host goes down, the guests crash. I have yet to find a Windows app which doesn’t work well into the virtualized XP environment.

Highly recommended.