So I updated my S5 to Android 6.0.1 using Cyanogenmod, and I’ve noticed some slight lagging. Apps tend to close themselves randomly, normally when less apps are running than on Android 5.1.1. Also, when using the tethered connection, there’s some lag there too, causing my online games to judder. Though that part is only hypothetical, I’m going to test this by downgrading my phone back to 5.1 and verifying whether there’s lag on my connection there. If there isn’t, I’ll report this as a bug.

Irony? Or suspicious?

9 February 2016 #

As you might know already, Swiftkey is going to be bought by Microsoft. And suspiciously, this morning I found an update to Swiftkey. But it keeps failing to install. The other 6 updates installed fine. Just Swiftkey refuses to update. Suspicious? Or just coincidence?

Posted from WordPress for Android

James Veitch: This is what happens when you reply to spam email | TED Talk | TED.com

3 February 2016 #

[ted id=2405 lang=en]

So... my office made me use a Macbook Pro...

25 January 2016 #

AND I HATED IT.

It won’t boot ISOs unless you hdiutil it, which is an Apple propriety tool, or the ISO has been EFI enabled already, and since it’s not open source, I can’t even do that beforehand.

The Macbook won’t work with a known good HDMI cable (which I use with a Desktop PC), unless it’s Apple branded - which Apple being Apple, isn’t the least bit surprising…

I’ve tripped over their power supply more than once, and putting it at the plug end make it bulky and ugly.

My first course of action with regards to the setup? Trash MacOS and install Ubuntu. Of course, Apple make things endlessly difficult – I had to hdiutil the Ubuntu ISO to make it bootable, then install Ubuntu. After which, the Macbook wouldn’t boot.

Thanks to the install guide at Linux Mint:

community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/…

I found out I had to fiddle with the efibootmgr tool to change the boot order, and it works fine now. But then I had to figure out how to right-click on a no-button mouse touchpad. The hack is found on the Debian site (look at the mouseeemu post at the bottom). So now I have a clickable touchpad, with right-click being “ctrl+click”

wiki.debian.org/MacBook

Phone Flashing - Part 2

19 January 2016 #

Further to my previous post, here’s a run down of what happened.

I’m currently running Cyanogenmod or a variant of it, which has lots of nightly builds - normally I choose not to flash but on Sunday, I decided to try. Probably a mistake.

Cyanogen updated from Android 5 Lollipop to Android 6 Marshmallow, which meant after I flashed, I was getting huge numbers of “sorry but xxxx crashed”. I suspected the Gapps was out of date or incompatible with the android version I had, and I was right - a different version was needed. So I flashed that also but that didn’t work, so I rolled back to my last good backup, which was from November 2015, that restored fine, and I’m back to where I was, minus a lot of app changes and updates needed (I uninstalled/reinstalled a lot of apps since that backup), fixed that, reupdated my apps, and redid both my app and my Nandroid backups so I’m good to try again sometime.

I lost a good hour to two hours over this, so let this be a reminder to make sure you have good backups before flashing. I was lucky I only lost 2.5 months of changes, and that was easily fixed, but losing ALL your data because you don’t have a backup is never fun (I’ve been there)

Why Spatial Audio Is Such a Big Deal for Google Cardboard | WIRED

18 January 2016 #

As someone who’s tried Google Cardboard, I am pretty keen to see this happening.

FOR ALL THERE is to love about Google Cardboard, it’s still a bare-bones experience. It’s barely even VR, really. But the cheap, smartphone-based viewer offers the VR-curious an easy window into 360-degree video. Pricier headsets like the Oculus Rift and Sony PlayStation VR, designed for gaming, deliver more than a cool stereoscopic viewing experience. In addition to the immersive visual eye-candy—users can explore virtual spaces, peek around corners, and, using hand-held controllers, interact with digital objects—these sophisticated VR rigs offer truly lifelike audio.
When a monster sneaks up on your left in a VR game, you’ll hear its slobbering tongue lashing at your left ear. When a shot comes at you from above you and slightly to the right, you know exactly where to return fire. When The Edge tears through the opening riff of “Mysterious Ways,” it reverberates around the stadium.

The high-priced headsets from Oculus, Sony, and HTC pack the processing punch to deliver “spatially oriented” audio experiences that consider direction, distance, and environmental factors when creating the soundtrack. Cardboard, powered by your smartphone, can’t do that yet. But earlier this week, the Cardboard team made it a little easier to give the audio in these apps a bit more realism. Asthis blog post from Google Cardboard product manager Nathan Martz outlines, the Cardboard software development kit for Android and the Unity game engine now support spatial audio. This platform update paves the way for Google Cardboard to become something more than a gateway drug to true VR.

Source: Why Spatial Audio Is Such a Big Deal for Google Cardboard | WIRED

Phone Flashing

18 January 2016 #

Tried to flash my phone over the weekend – failed miserably and I had to restore from my backup in November. Which meant a lost a lot of settings and apps :(

I really need to keep my backups up to date :/

My mother-in-law was confused by this obituary, so she read it to me... - Imgur

23 December 2015 #

Probably the best obit I’ve read in a long time. And the funniest too.

[embed]https://imgur.com/kO5VrYQ[/embed]

That moment....

24 November 2015 #

… when you realise you deleted the wrong folder and that folder you deleted was a system folder…

Hacker Scripts

24 November 2015 #

I just gotta share these :)

https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts

Hacker Scripts
Based on a true story:
xxx: OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown… If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.

xxx: So we’re sitting here, looking through his, uhm, “legacy”

xxx: You’re gonna love this

xxx: smack-my-bitch-up.sh - sends a text message “late at work” to his wife (apparently). Automatically picks reasons from an array of strings, randomly. Runs inside a cron-job. The job fires if there are active SSH-sessions on the server after 9pm with his login.

xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from “Kumar” (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like “help”, “trouble”, “sorry” etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply “no worries mate, be careful next time”.

xxx: hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like “not feeling well/gonna work from home” etc. Adds a random “reason” from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.

xxx: (and the oscar goes to) fucking-coffee.sh - this one waits exactly 17 seconds (!), then opens an SSH session to our coffee-machine (we had no frikin idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs linux and has SSHD up and running) and sends some weird gibberish to it. Looks binary. Turns out this thing starts brewing a mid-sized half-caf latte and waits another 24 (!) seconds before pouring it into a cup. The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes desk.

xxx: holy sh*t I’m keeping those

Original: http://bash.im/quote/436725 (in Russian) Pull requests with other implementations (Python, Perl, Shell, etc) are welcome.

A photo is shaped more by the person behind the camera than by what is in front of it

12 November 2015 #

“A photo is shaped more by the person behind the camera than by what is in front of it”

youtu.be/F-TyPfYMD…

Having a preconception of the subject affects how a photographer takes the photo, including having no preconception at all.

RPHM App

5 October 2015 #

Just got an email from the RPHM organisers. There’s an app in the Google Play store that allows you to track the runners (including me) during the race, and also provides split times as they run over the timing mats. For runners, it also shows you where you are on the course at that time. Although I wouldn’t recommend it – you need to make sure you’re not running into the barriers :D

Google Play: royalparksfoundationemail.org.uk/1L97-3PL8…

Spotify just got a lot more creepy....

21 August 2015 #

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/cant-squat-spotifys-eerie-new-privacy-policy/

SPOTIFY RELEASED A new privacy policy that is now in effect, and it turns out that the company wants to learn a lot more about you and there’s not much you can do about it.
We encourage everyone to read the whole privacy policy before downloading the update or checking off the “Accept” box, but in case you have better things to do, here are some highlights from it.

…

“With your permission, we may collect information stored on your mobile device, such as contacts, photos, or media files. Local law may require that you seek the consent of your contacts to provide their personal information to Spotify, which may use that information for the purposes specified in this Privacy Policy.” – Spotify
Like a jealous ex, Spotify wants to see (and collect) your photos and see who you’re talking to. What kind of media files Spotify will collect from you is vague, and why the company needs it is unclear, but it’s doing it regardless. Also, the fact that Spotify expects you to go through your contact list and ask everyone for their consent in sharing their data with Spotify is–what’s the word? Oh yes: it’s ridiculous.

…

“You may integrate your Spotify account with Third Party Applications. If you do, we may receive similar information related to your interactions with the Service on the Third Party Application, as well as information about your publicly available activity on the Third Party Application. This includes, for example, your “Like”s and posts on Facebook.” – Spotify
It shouldn’t surprise you that if you connect your Spotify account to Facebook, Spotify will be able to see the information you post there. If this bothers you, we suggest that you log into your Spotify preferences and disconnect Spotify from your Facebook account (more information on how to do this can be found here). After all, Facebook isn’t all that necessary to use Spotify (unless, of course, you want your friends to know you’re listening to Owl City).

…

“If you don’t agree with the terms of this Privacy Policy, then please don’t use the Service.” – Spotify

… I value my privacy, so I’ll stop using Spotify. Bye Spotify, I won’t miss you.

Google Drive FUSE

4 August 2015 #

Found this tool which exposes your Google Drive as a FUSE mount, allowing you to copy to and from your drive as if it was a directory on your desktop. It is slow, though.

github.com/astrada/g…

Installation instructions for Debian (Wheezy):

xmodulo.com/mount-goo…

Google Music Syncing

14 July 2015 #

Found this link whilst hunting for suitable methods for syncing my Google Music collection. Seems to work (so far), but it hasn’t finished syncing my music yet.

www.sjnewbs.net

Richard Branson on Turning a Disadvantage to Your Advantage

15 June 2015 #

Richard’s insightful look at living with a problem and using it to turn it to your advantage

Whenever something goes wrong or you find yourself at a disadvantage, often the best way to handle it is to turn a negative into a positive. I learned this early on as I struggled with dyslexia, a learning disability that affects reading comprehension.

Richard Branson on Turning a Disadvantage to Your Advantage.

Russian government threatens a ban on Google, Facebook and Twitter

27 May 2015 #

Roskomnadzor, a Russian government agency that oversees communications and media, threatened late last week to block access to Google, Facebook and Twitter if the social media services don't hand over data on certain Russian bloggers.
The government agency demanded Google, Facebook and Twitter hand over data about users, particularly Russian bloggers with 3,000 daily readers or more. Rozkomnadzor also asked the services to delete content that promotes protests and other unsanctioned public events, Reuters reported.

via Russian government threatens a ban on Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Why machine translations are always a problem...

23 May 2015 #

www.youtube.com/watch

Docker Builds - Update

25 April 2015 #

As I relied on grive to do the sync between my local machine and Google Drive, where the builds were stored, I found out (at work, ironically, since we use some Google APIs), that Google shut off some of their APIs on 20th April, which killed some of our functionality and also, killed grive’s functionality with some really cryptic messages in the console window. Nonetheless, I found that an alternative, “drive” works, although a hell of a lot slower.