The Trillionth Blog

Android phone like an Ipod touch (follow up)

monty — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:07:43 +0000

Because of some end of year travel, my side of the family celebrated Christmas early this year. The android phones as ipod touches that I mentioned in an earlier post have worked out great.

The key app to making this solution work for me is called Smart App Protector Free. It allows me to give this wifi connected handheld computer to my kids (both under 10) without worrying about what they might google or see on youtube or stumble across on the web. Smart App Protector lets me leave wifi on so they can have a text chat app with their cousins while blocking their access to youtube or google or the browser. I also have searching the market locked down because there are plenty of inappropriate apps there too.

Another nice solution I found is that I can leave their phones in airplane mode while turning wifi on (android 2.2) which makes it so the phone isn’t constantly searching for a cell tower to talk to (since the phones aren’t activated). This saves battery galore.

The kids both have their phones (LG Optimus Vs purchased for ~$50 new on black friday) loaded with game apps. They have also discovered how fun it is to be able to text their cousins and parents (and soon grandparents maybe).

I just wanted to follow up after my first post to say that the Android as an ipod touch has worked out great so far. I recommend this for other parents looking for a way to avoid buying a $200 ipod touch.

Effin Park Place

monty — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 21:30:39 +0000

Last week I had some time off for the Thanksgiving holiday. One day I played a 3 hour game of Monopoly with the kids. Early in the game, Z landed on Parkplace (owned by M). Z was low on cash so M gave him a discount. Instead of ~$200, M only made Z pay ~$100. M said that he was willing to give Z the discount because Z “is my brother and he entertains me a lot”. Maybe we’re doing something right as parents since the kids don’t use EVERY opportunity to crush each other.

For Z the game ended as he slid into Park Place (we were playing Monopoly with the speed die which causes you to slide into a property where you will have to pay). M had 3 houses up on Park Place and the rent was too much for Z. This was the end of the game for Z. As we counted out money and mortgaged properties, Z sat back, took a deep breath, shook his head and said “Effin Park Place”. I tried to reprimand him while laughing out loud. He’s 8 and he’s already knows the right way to use “effin”. Well, maybe we aren’t doing that good as parents on the language front.

Use your Android phone like an Ipod touch

monty — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:21:14 +0000

Your old android phone can act like an ipod touch for your kids. It has wifi, music, games, apps. You don’t need to have the phone activated to use it this way. I just bought 2 for $50 each (optimus v at target black friday deal) to use for my kids. They have been bugging me to get them an ipod touch but I wasn’t willing to spend the $200 per kid to make that happen. So, I spent $55 per kid instead. I downloaded ~25 games and an app to lock other apps so I can keep them off youtube and google. I copied over their kidsbop ripped mp3s and tada – android like an ipod touch for <$55. Christmas this year isn’t going to break the bank!

Airflowing – New Seaside Application

monty — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:44:29 +0000

Checkout airflowing.com a new Seaside application written in Pharo. The site allows you to organize all your creative work in one place including sales, tasks and finances. I haven’t tried it out but if you do, please post a reply here with a review to let us know what you think about it.

Optimus V – Rooted with GingerBreak 1.2

monty — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 20:14:26 +0000

I finally rooted my Optimus V phone. The only reason I took the risk was that I was running out of internal memory and I needed to either get rid of some of the bloatware that comes on the phone or delete apps that I wanted to keep.

I used GingerBreak 1.2 which I got from here. It worked fine. Then I used Root Uninstaller Free to uninstall these stock apps:

Email
Scvngr
Twitroid
Where
Poynt
Downloads

Then I used Titanium Backup * Root to force my ATT Uverse app to the sd card because it is the biggest app on my phone (13mb). I would have just removed the ATT Uverse app but sometimes I really want to remotely set my DVR to record something while I’m out.

After all that, I still have 47mb free.

I looked into adding Adobe Flash. I downloaded Flash apk 10.2 from some site because the market won’t let me install Flash 11. It installed OK. I tried to download the apk for version 11 but it would not install. Flash 10.2 might have worked but Crackle only works with Flash 11 so I gave up, uninstalled Flash 10.2 and called it quits.

I also looked into overclocking but I don’t think it is worth risking bricking the phone.

Status update

My 3g still isn’t perfect but it works most of the time. The biggest complaint I have is how it sucks the battery dry from time to time. I still use the free taob (toggle airplane on boot) app from the Market. I’m home most of the time so I’m on wifi and luckily wifi works great. As much as I’ve had problems with the 3g, I still am glad I got this phone at the $25/mo price when it was still available at that price.

I’ve been looking into getting the new Motorola Triumph or HTC Wildfire S or Optimus Slider. The cheaper 2 have the same problem – low internal memory like the Optimus V. The Triumph has other problems like the size is a bit big for my liking.

Addonics NAS 3.0 Adapter Review

monty — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:13:19 +0000

Well, I had high hopes for this little thing. It seems easy enough – connect you USB drive to the NAS 3.0; connect the NAS 3.0 to your router; tada you now have a network drive that you can reach from all your networked computers. Well, it didn’t go that well for me. I connected my NTFS formatted 1TB Fantom drive to the USB port on the NAS 3.0 adapater. I could reach the web interface and see that it said ‘No drive found’. Disconnect, reconnect, same thing. I tried my FAT32 formatted 350GB external drive. Same thing. I tried my 1GB USB memory stick. Same thing. Then I tried connecting my drives to the printer port. All of them worked. Unfortunately when you connect a drive to the printer port it only allows read-only access to the drive. Fail!

I called tech support and was routed around several times before leaving a message. I kept calling and eventually reached a person. He diagnosed it as defective and transferred me to sales.

At this point my options were to cross ship a new product meaning they would charge me for a second product and then refund me once I shipped mine back OR return the item and have them ship me a new one OR return the item and give up. I gave up.

Some observations:

The UI is easy to use and basically intuitive
The device is very small and comes with a network cable and power cable
The drive access just worked fine when in read-only printer port mode
The instructions that come with the device are pretty good
The company is very small (~17 people). Usually this means great service like – oh, sorry it doesn’t work we’ll ship you a new one asap and you can discard the defective one we just sent you. Instead they wanted to charge me for a 2nd one or have me wait for my return to go through before sending me a new one
The reviews of the 2.0 were sketchy. Most sites don’t even have reviews of the 3.0. That should have tipped me off to potential quality issues.
I hope my product was just defective and that most of the NAS 3.0 adapters they sell work. I would like little companies like this to succeed selling a useful product.
This is the 2nd NAS adapter type device I’ve tried. Someone please make a non-crappy NAS adapter – there is a market for one!! I know because I keep wasting money returning products that don’t work.

Verbatim MediaShare Home Network Storage Server NAS server – 1 TB Review

monty — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:08:35 +0000

I read the reviews that say this thing has a bad UI but wow that really isn’t saying enough. For me, I could not get almost anything to work. It turned on and I could get to the completely pathetic and clumsy UI but:

I could not get the printer to work in anything other than Normal mode. I have a HP 5610 all in one. I only cared about getting the printing to work. It did work but not in Fast Draft mode – despite the half hour I spent trying to make it use Fast Draft
I could not get it to show my connected external hard drive (all 3 that I tried)
The UI blows. It is stunningly bad – non-intuitive, confusion, ugly
There is absolutely no documentation at all for this product. It doesn’t come with any and as far as I could tell there isn’t any on the makers site. Fail!
Returned to Amazon for a refund within 1 day

Optimus V.. spoke to soon

monty — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:26:02 +0000

Ha, I posted that things were getting better for me. Then the next day I went out to dinner. In the hour and a half that it took to eat, my battery dropped from 85% to 15% on 3G only. My wifi was off. My gps was off. I never turn bluetooth on so it was off. Bummer.

Most of my time has been at home on wifi lately so I think I was just fooling myself into thinking things were getting better with 3G.

Optimus V – Getting Better For Me

monty — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 04:00:36 +0000

It has been a while since my last Optimus V post. I haven’t had problems in a long time. When I’m home I stay on wifi which works fine. Over the last few months, 3g has been working pretty well for me.

I have found that leaving wifi on while on 3g (away from home) tends to drain the battery pretty fast.

I think Virgin Mobile has changed their service in some way to help correct the problem. I haven’t had to reboot my phone in a while. I haven’t had to pull the battery in a while. I don’t know what they did but it seems to have seriously helped the issues.

I do use some app (taob – toggle airplane on boot) that puts my phone into airplane mode for a few seconds after a reboot. I’m not sure if it is still required but it doesn’t seem to be hurting anything.

Knock on wood; The Optimus V seems to be getting better for me.

Android Free or Cheap Calls

monty — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 03:54:36 +0000

I’ve been trying out several options for free or very cheap wifi calling on android phones. I have an LG Optimus V and most of my time is spent at home because I work from home. So far here are some options I have come up with.

Free Outbound Calling – Nettalk

Nettalk is a free android app that lets you make free outbound calls to real telephone numbers. Call quality is sketchy and calls drop pretty frequently. It is free so you can’t get mad but I still find it too unstable for frequent use.

Cheap Outbound Calling – Skype

Skype out costs $2.99/month. Call quality is pretty good. So, if you don’t mind paying a little per month is is a good option.

Free Inbound and Outbound Calling – GrooveIP + Google Voice

GrooveIP is an android application that makes it possible to use a Google Voice account for free inbound and outbound calling. You have to setup your Google Voice phone number to forward to your Google chat (it is an option in your Google Voice account). Somehow the GrooveIP app hooks in to the Google chat API. Call quality is pretty good and this option offers both inbound and outbound calling. The GrooveIP app costs $3.99 (one time charge).

Free Inbound and Outbound – IPKall, CallCentric, CSipSimple, Google Voice, Google Voice Callback

Setting this one up was complicated but it works well. You need:

CallCentric.com free Call Freedom SIP account. This allows you to receive unlimited incoming SIP calls
IPKall.com gives you a free Washington area phone number. This number forwards calls to your CallCentric.com SIP account.
CSipSimple android app receives SIP calls
Google Voice account setup to forward calls to your IPKall phone number
Google Voice Callback app makes it so when you dial a number, it instead uses Google Voice to call you back and connect you with the phone you were trying to call

When you make an outbound call, you use the normal android dialer to place a call. It tells Google Voice to call you back on your IPKall phone number. The IPKall phone number routes to CallCentric and then to the CSipSimple app on your phone.

When you receive an inbound call on your Google Voice phone number it routes to your IPKall number which routes to your CallCentric SIP account which routes the call to your CSipSimple app on your phone.

This one has been working pretty well for me. It was a pain to setup but it is pretty clear and makes free inbound and outbound calling possible.

Magicjack – Not Working

After reading a lot about how you could set Magicjack up to forward calls to a SIP app like CSipSimple, I went through the trouble of decyphering my Magjcjack SIP username, password and proxy server. Then I realized that this option hasn’t worked since 2009/2010. Apparently Magicjack changed something about their password authentication scheme to prevent people from using Magicjack with a SIP app to make calls from any SIP calling application (android or other).