Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

I and my family have just returned from a multi week vacation around the USA during which Google Now proved invaluable time and time again: 1. It became an essential navigation tool whether travelling by car, by public transport or on foot. Its accurate prediction of bus and train times was particularly impressive and it generally offered a choice of routes. 2. It proved invaluable for its ability to locate nearby services:  "OK Google where is the nearest Post Office" etc. 3. It magically extracted details of flights, car hire and hotel reservations from my email and provided updates and useful reminders such as "You should leave at such and such a time to get to this flight". 4. It provided weather information about our current location as well as our home. 5. It provided up to date currency exchange rates 6. It provided us with tourist information about popular sites near our current location the clicking of which would provide further information inc...

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...

Apps are all very well but sometimes you just need a short-cut to a bunch of files in a folder. Android doesn't have any built in method of doing this so you need to rely on a third party app. The one most commonly recommended for this purpose these days seems to be ES File Explorer. This is a powerful file manager so chances are you will find lots of other uses for it but here are quick instructions on how to use ES file manager to create a short-cut to an Android folder on your home screen. 1. Grab ES File Explorer File Manager from the Google Play store. 2. Make sure you have place on your home screen for at least one standard size icon before you begin. 3. Run ES File Explorer and navigate to the folder you wish to create a short-cut to. 4. Long press the folder (it should highlight with a tick). 5. From the menu at the bottom of the screen select "More". 6. Press "Add to Desktop"   and you are done. 7. Go back to your home screen and the short-cut ...

Dropbox and Google drive are great for storing stuff if you have an internet connection but both of them use cloud storage and only download a temporary versions of files when you access them. Sometimes it is useful to keep a permanent offline version particularly if you are going to be without an internet connection for a while. The app Folder Downloader for Dropbox  does exactly what it says on the tin.It downloads an offline copy of any Dropbox folder.  The app  is straightforward to use and does not require any dodgy permissions. 1. Grab Folder Downloader for Dropbox from the Google Play Store 2. Make sure you have Dropbox installed on your Android device and that you are logged in. 3. Run folder downloader. Initially it will ask for permission to access Dropbox so say yes. 4. Now Folder Downloader should be showing you your Dropbox files. Navigate to the folder you want to download and click "Download all to". 5. The screen changes to your Android device...

Alien Rage: Am old fashioned corridor shooter with up to date graphics and great meaty weapons. What is not to love? Well lots apparently because it got mediocre reviews but I really enjoyed it. There is nothing very original about the game but so what? It is great fun. To the Moon: This is more of an interactive story than a game but it tells a good story and it tells it very well. Be warned it's a love story and a tear jerker at that. The Witcher 2: Finally gotten around to installing this and starting it. Twenty hours played and still enjoying it but I am still in the first settlement. After a very action packed opening with a huge siege battle and and dragon the pace slowed down considerably. I did have one boss fight with a giant Octopus but I found it more annoying than epic. Age of Wonders: An old classic that appears to be one of the inspirations for Kings Bounty. There is plenty of clever tactics required and the game-play quickly distracts you form the ancient graph...

The rogue-like Enchanted Cave is one of the rare mobile games that caught my attention for more than a few minutes. I liked it because my understanding of the game game organically evolved through several phases each lasting just long enough to keep me from getting boredt:: Stage 1. WTF this game is hard I can't even make it beyond the first few levels without dying. Stage 2. Ah now I see how to make permanent improvements to my character. I can finally begin to make some some progress. Stage 3. I'll grind for a bit now to prepare my character for later levels. Stage 4. Ah, Now I have figured out the the combat model. I see how the numbers work and I can prepare carefully for every battle. The game becomes less random and more puzzle like. Stage 5. Now we are rolling. I am going to make a run for it and see can I get to the final boss and take them down. It is worth noting that the author of the Enchanted Cave has just run a successful Kickstarter campaign for "The...

There doesn't appear to be any way to add  custom location labels to the current incarnation of Google Maps (Android and Desktop) and it is driving me nuts. It is not just that I miss being able to give saved locations friendly names like "Uncle John's place" or "My Golf Club". It is also that there are loads of places which the current version of maps doesn't seem to be able to provide any address for at all. These include the tennis club I bring my daughter to and the headquarters of a major company that I visited this morning. Not only does Google not know where these places are. It has no mechanism of addressing them because they do not appear on a standard road with a standard building number. I live in a major city in which Google employs several thousand people and this is still an issue here. I can only imagine it is a complete deal breaker for those living in rural locations where every address is something like "The cottage beside Murphy...

It's a device that plugs into your TV and connects with a phone, tablet or computer to stream audio and video to your TV.  Ah ... I see so is it a stand alone receiver then that just needs a phone or table to act as a remote? Well, not exactly - you see the phone or tablet needs to be connected to the internet itself and you must first run an app on that device in order to stream it to the Chromecast.   Ah ... so the Chromecast is just acting like a remote display for your phone?   Well, not exactly because only certain apps support the Chromecast (notably Netflix and Youtube). Most apps don't support it.   OK, I am beginning to understand, but for those apps that do support it the content is coming from your phone and being sent to the Chromecast right?   Well, not exactly, Once you initiate the app on your phone and send it to Chromecast then the Chromecast seems to get its own copy directly from the internet. You can put the phone to sleep and th...

Google Now keeps directing me to a spot in some isolated woods near my home. I am pretty sure I have never visited that spot.  Is Google trying to tell me something? This intelligent personal assistant is also convinced that the only blog I read on a regular basis is Greedy Goblin though I have never subscribed to him. At least I have finally managed to convince the oracle to stop giving me a daily blast of profanity from the Urban Dictionary. For years I tried to resist the ever more intrusive data gathering of Google, Facebook and similar services but a few months back I bowed to the inevitable. Accepting that Google, GCHQ  and the NSA already have more than enough information to profile, analyse and categorise every single aspect of my on-line existence I decided to go all in and at least try to get some benefit out of it. I started a new Google+ account in my own name to which I linked my email accounts and web searches. I switched to the Chrome browser and turned on loc...

We have long known that the conventional Windows based PC is struggling to compete with Apple and Android devices but now even main stream media are reporting on just how dramatic the decline in PC sales is. I personally think that Microsoft have accelerated their own demise with the awful Windows 8 and that they could still buy themselves a few more years of support from their traditional power user base if they just threw out Windows 8, tarted up Windows 7 a bit an re-released it as Windows 9. However as someone who has been using Microsoft powered PCs extensively for almost 30 years I think it is useful consider what I still need a Windows desktop for and how I would cope if it were no longer available. In Work: Firstly I use a large multi-screen PC for my work. In my job I have to do a lot of content creation. This includes Word, Powerpoint and Excel  projects that would be very painful to do on a touch screen interface but that could fairly easily be ported to a Mac or ...

You might think you have played a game like "The Room" before but you haven't. The basic premise,  solving a series puzzles to unlock increasingly more challenging levels  sounds familiar. There is a plethora of games involving rooms, locks, gates, cubes etc that employ this mechanic. Yet "The Room" is different in a few key respects.  In the first instance the sheer quality of game sets it above most of its peers. Beautifully ornate artwork and animation  show off the game's multi level puzzles while an atmospheric sound track adds greatly to the ambience. What really sets the game apart for me though is the effortless way the game tackles difficulty scaling. Difficulty is the greatest problem for any puzzle game. Too easy and the game becomes boring for lack of challenge. Too hard and I will eventually give up in despair or be forced to make a humiliating trip to Youtube to find out how to proceed. "The Room" deals with this by including a p...

If you are one of the new migrants to Netvibes you may not realise that it has several mobile clients. You may want to try them all out before choosing the one which suits you best. I mix and match depending on the deice I am using and the quality of my internet connection. To get each version just type the url into the address bar of your browser. wap.netvibes.com This text only version of Netvibes looks really ugly but I find it very useful useful on my phone. It gives you the information you need with no extraneous distractions and you can always click the header of a post to get to the original webpage if you need more. Great if your internet signal is weak because it uses almost no bandwidth. It only seems to show RSS feeds though so any fancy Netvibes widgets don't show. It doesn't seem to be able to judge screen size so be prepared to do a bit of manual zooming to use this. mobile.netvibes.com This is the official Netvibes entry point for all  mobile devices. It...

Banner message across the Netvibes front page today (emphasis is mine): If you're experiencing slowdowns or feed latency, please bear with us as we work hard to handle a huge amount of new users . Thank you for your patience If you aren't familiar with Netvibes it offers a customised web portal (like the soon to be shuttered iGoogle) but it also includes a very flexible feed reading capability (like the soon to be closed Google Reader). I suspect that the big influx of new users are all migrants from Google. I have been using Netvibes for several years now. I originally switched from iGoogle and Google reader because Netvibes has much better support for mobile devices, even on Googles own Android platform but I am very happy with Netvibes overall and heartily reccommend it.   EDIT: Looks like I was right. Netvibes official blog have credited the increase with the closure of Google's reader and has already put up a helpful "how to migrate" page .

(but  not in that order) I recently wanted to print something from my Android tablet to a printer. The process turned out to be more convoluted than I expected.  Android uses a service called Google Cloud Print for printing.  What this means is that in order to  send a file  from my tablet to my printer I first had to send the  file over  the internet to a Google server which then sent it back via email to my printer.  This despite the fact that my tablet and printer were less than two metres from each other and both connected to the same wifi network.  Such a roundabout route offends the engineer in me. I guess it is just another part of the price we must pay for all these great services companies like Google give us.  The more of my data goes through Google's  servers the more they know about me for the purposes of advertising. Privacy advocates can freak out at this point but I have long since reconciled myself to that trade...

My current phone is a two year old Samsung Galaxy S I9000. It is long out of contract and costs me very little every month for calls and data.  It is in great condition and it does everything I need a phone to do so it is hard to justify a replacement at this stage. Nevertheless the Android version 2.3 (Gingerbread) running on felt old and slow in comparison to a recently acquired Nexus 7 tablet running Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) so I decided to have a go at an upgrade. I hadn't done this for a quite some time and I was disappointed to discover that Samsung themselves stopped offering official upgrades for this phone after Android 2.3 so I would have to look for an unofficial upgrade or mod if I wanted to do better. The open source nature of Android means it is supported by a vast hacking and modding community. This is an advantage in that there is a huge array of mods out there catering to all tastes and offering many improvements over the official stock operating ...

Apps are great, providing one click access to applications and services in a format that is optimised for mobile viewing. But.... Every app you install eats up some of your limited storage space and many apps continue to use system resources when you are not using them like push notifications and live desktop widgets. If you are running out of space or if your device is slowing down due to app overload then you need to do a clear out. After all you probably don't need that interactive guide to a city you visited 8 months ago and only the most dedicated twitterers really need a pop up notification every time one of the 872 people they are following makes a tweet. Happily there is a way that you can continue to have one click access to many of your favourite services without wasting any of your mobile device's precious resources. Simply use your browser to create a home screen bookmark to the web version of the service you want. Many websites such as Facebook, Gmail and Twitte...

Google has changed the rules of its Play store so that you now need to be on Google+ to leave a review. I think this is a bonehead move. Google's Play store  for Android apps has been a big success.  It has become a serious rival to Apple's  market leading App store and may even grow to surpass it. Google+ on the other hand has not managed to dent Facebook's dominance of the social networking space. Many, many users of other Google services have chosen to to pass on Google+. Perhaps they are happy with Facebook. Perhaps they just don't use social networking. I suspect that forcing people into Google+ before they can rate Android apps will damage the Android store more than it will boost Google's struggling social network.

I had to endure two hours of annoying distraction from a Siri using passenger on a recent train journey. I have long been of the opinion that talking to your phone (as opposed to talking to a human through your phone) is a gimmick. I dismissed the voice search capability of my Android phone after no more than five minutes of playing with it and that train journey convinced me that Apple's secret Siri sauce has not made the experience of talking to a machine any more palatable. It was bad enough that we other passengers had to endure the Iphone user's loud and often misinterpreted commands to their phone but they had set up the device so that every single response was also relayed in an annoying computer voice even to the point of reading entire emails aloud. It was late, I was tired after a day of business meetings and despite Hollywood stereotypes we Irish are not a confrontational lot so I did my best to ignore the distraction and catch a bit of sleep on the journey home...

I have been playing an inordinate amount of " Andor's Trail " a free open source dungeon crawler being developed for the Android Platform. The concept is familiar: explore the world to kill monsters to gain experience and better gear so you can explore further and kill more monsters and dot dot dot,  but the execution of that concept is shaping up very nicely in this still under development game. It is not finished, it has no sound at all and several quests cannot be completed but  the game already has has a multitude of locations, quests and monsters and the graphics look great to me. A word of warning the game can be very grindy particularly at lower levels. The mobs hit hard and healing is very expensive so you may find yourself forced to farm a few beginner locations over and over in order to level up and earn cash.  I have said before that I don't do grind so I generally try to do just enough grind to allow me to progess. That approach makes the game quite ch...

It is not by chance that I have an Android phone while my wife uses an Apple product. After eighteen years of marriage it has become patently clear that we hold mutually opposing views on the value of branding. My lovely wife is a brand junkie. She has an inherent distrust of generic products and if possible she will always go for the most expensive market leading brand. I on the other hand am not so much a brand agnostic as a brand atheist. I actively seek out cheaper products and avoid buying the market leader ever. I will trawl the internet and walk the roads for lesser known alternatives and nothing pleases me quite so much as finding a little known product that costs less and performs better that the brand leader.   I am sure this opposition was a cause of strife in the early years of our union but 18 years of happy marriage has a way of moulding a couple's habits together. Compromises become so embedded you forget they are even there. At this stage we apply our prefer...