Colin Charles Agenda

On my Nexus 7 today, I got this message from the FT app: FT could not be opened because it is not connected to the Internet. This is an odd error message.

The best way to fix this? Clear the cache in Android (just for the application). Or you can Force Stop the application afterwards and it should restart just fine.

Why? There are issues with HTML5 app cache. Some resources: Debugging HTML5 Offline Application Cache, Fixing app cache from the FT themselves, and some sensible comments at Stack Overflow.

I happened to be awake last night so I caught the announcement via livestream for Facebook Home. I’m glad its just a system launcher. There are many (I myself on my phone use Nova Launcher), but from the demo, this is beautifully designed with a new take on the interface. The demo showed it being smoother than butter ;)

Chat heads look interesting. Some may claim it being bothersome or unintuitive, but most iOS users have this already turned on via accessibility settings assistive touch since the home button breaks far too easily. Why a little white dot when you can now make it do things for you?

I was impressed with the amount of partners on launch day. Buy-in from manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, Sony, Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE, Alcatel. Chipmaker like Qualcomm. Telcos like AT&T, Orange, EE. I can only expect this to grow of course. Gives great competition in the mobile landscape for 2013.

You see, FirefoxOS has a huge amount of partners & buy-in. I continue to be surprised that Ubuntu doesn’t have a similar page.

Am I switching from iOS as my main phone? Unlikely. I’m almost certain that many at Facebook, including Zuckerberg runs on IOS. But I will be playing with this on my secondary device (the Galaxy S3). I’m a little surprised that the April 12 launch isn’t available for the Nexus set of phones… and in Asia, the Galaxy Note form factor is popular, where did that go?

HTC First will be the first device to come with the Facebook Home system launcher as a default. I’m not sure how this is different to them applying skins and admitting that Facebook does it better. This isn’t the first time they’re playing around with a Facebook phone though.

Interesting times as Facebook has confirmed that their strategy is clearly mobile first. The fact that they built this on top of Android can’t really impress Google very much ;)

Others have also covered this well, i.e a strategy for Facebook, how this isn’t good for privacy.

I tried running Inkscape and it wouldn’t start. It seems that OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) doesn’t ship X11 any longer, and you have to use XQuartz.

You’re then forced to log out & log back in. Once that is complete, Inkscape and others work again. This problem doesn’t exist with The GIMP any longer as that is now native. Here’s hoping Inkscape moves with the times too.

I shared this from The Economist quite some time back: Counting raindrops. Here is an example of folk using mobile phone networks themselves for weather forecasting. 

Today I stumbled upon Cumulonimbus. They have an Android application called pressureNET, which makes use of the barometer in some Android phones. This is user-contributed atmospheric pressure readings, embedded on a Google map. It is available to view at http://pressurenet.cumulonimbus.ca/.

It seems many devices have a barometer as well. Samsung leads the pack with the Galaxy S3, S4, Note, Note II, Galaxy Nexus. It also comes with the Nexus 4 & Nexus 10.

On OS X Mountain Lion, df now has lots of extra inode information. This is the new default according to the man page (turning on -i). The workaround to get the old df output is simple – just use -P. So df is now aliased as: df -Ph

byte@lovegood~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  iused    ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   465Gi  237Gi  228Gi    51% 62130995 59797234   51%   /

byte@lovegood~$ df -Ph
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   465Gi  237Gi  228Gi    51%    /

Much friendlier.

I was at the launch of EMAGINE yesterday, and all of us walked away with a door gift: an EMAGINE mini wireless keyboard.  

When I first saw it I thought it would be a Bluetooth wireless keyboard (potentially handy for a tablet). Sadly, I notice that you need to connect it via USB. It works like a clicker.

Its vendor is Sonix Technology Co., Ltd. The manual is clearly written in China (words like “Accissories”). It’s been around for quite some time (testing on Fedora 7, Ubuntu 8.10, etc.).

It’s a 2.4GHz wireless mini QWERTY keyboard, comes with a touch pad as well (so you can mouse around).

Plug it into Linux or Mac OS X and it “just works”, without drivers. You end up having to power the device on/off. It comes with its own USB-based charger (no wall-plug), so I presume you’re meant to charge it/dock it at the EMAGINE device itself. 

In the package contents though, it suggests you only get a remote, not this keyboard. Beta testers (I’m not one) claimed that they already had a keyboard.

I’m not sure that the keyboard is made for many regular hands. I consider my hands no larger than the average, and find it quite difficult (not impossible, just strained) to type with two thumbs as it is a little too wide, thanks to the touch pad. Your mileage may vary. Then again, how many of you want to do serious keyboarding in front of your TV?

Next up, some thoughts on the EMAGINE (based largely on tweets from last night). I do plan to order one to give it a twirl.