Why You Should Stop Using Gmail On Your iPhone

To me this is more an indication of whether or not you should use Gmail as a service rather than the application. Google has always been fairly open in that you should have no allusion to privacy between their services.

Applications like Apple Mail and Windows Mail have the virtue that we tend to think of them as Mail clients, from companies who also offer email services. Gmail we tend to think as both, and using any given client doesn’t change where your messages are stored and exposed; in fact it might even broaden them depending on the client and services used.

Google’s solution to the end of Hangouts is Messages. My solution to this problem has been, “Screw that”.

For the majority of my use case my SMS roll through my tablet. A process that Hangouts, as meh as a chat app is it has always been: handled well. In the years prior, I had relied on a Bluetooth connection between my Android phone and tablet to make the magic happen. In the post Hangouts world, I pretty much just relied on its integration.

Google Fi and Hangouts started the GTFO and use Messages push a week or two ago. Since Hangouts ends in January, I decided to give it a go and see how good the results would be. Well, an iPhone SE is how well that experiment went.

Using the web version on my tablet shifts from how Meh the current iteration of Hangouts is to “And why the frak am I using this?”. I figured, at least, it had to be worth while on my phone. Whether it’s the natural way it works, or an aspect of Google Fi: Messages sucks ass on my Moto X4. I dislike using the web version; I despise using the Android version. Even more so where the combination of web + phone often leads me to to using multiple profanities when the phone eventually catches up.

Originally, I had assumed that I would be using android messages when I upgraded from my old Galaxy S5 to the Moto X4. But most messages arriving through Hangouts rather than that, pretty much lead to me ignoring it. Not broke, don’t care. Well, at least for a few more years at that time.

My primary computer when I’m not doing real work is a tablet. Many of the Android tablets I’ve used ended up full blown keyboard/mouse/monitor driven workstations on top of being my general purpose tablet. Thus my phone doesn’t really see a lot of use.

Typically I use my phone when:

• Checking off my shopping list at the grocery store.
• I’ve gone to bed, and it’s easier to reach for my phone than my tablet to answer messages or read Wikipedia with one eye open.
• I’m standing in the checkout line at the grocery store.
• Waiting on food at the microwave at work.
• Suddenly need a calculator or a stop watch, and other things that were cool on a wristwatch when I was a kid.
• The rare times I actually want a one hand device more than a better device.
• The few times I rely on Maps to make sure I don’t take a wrong turn.
• The every few years I’m driving out of range of my favorite radio tower, and choose to jack a playlist into my car’s head unit.

In effect this means my phone represents 10 - 15 % of my non-productivity minded computing, and aside from answering messages in the middle of the night: I’m usually found on my tablet or I’m occupied and not available. Since I’m usually using a tablet, my phone’s data use represents an average of up to a hundred megabytes of cellular data. Drastically down from the years where I averaged several gigabytes.

Apple’s iMessage doesn’t really interest me. But it does two things for me. It fixes the suck-ass experience of using my iPad Pro with Google’s new plan for my Messages, and it makes me not want to flip my phone out a window whenever I wait for messages to sync back up 🤣.

Thus Bean Sprout has been retired in favor of Benimaru. So named because the Project (RED) design reminds me of Rimiru’s commander in chief in TenSura.

 Someday, computer shit will actually just work.

I'm pretty sure that will be the day the first Terminator rolls off SkyNet's assembly line.

That I sit here fucking with Google and Apple things, both those sentences give my sense of humour a perverse tickle to the funny bone.

Microsoft: Here's the real reason Edge crashed when Google was the default search engine

Things that happen all too often when two pieces of gorilla gonads interface with one another over a network

I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible.

Most people don’t go to such an extent to avoid the big tech companies, even for an experiment it is a bit super thorough. But makes a solid point.

“Critics of the big tech companies are often told, “If you don’t like the company, don’t use its products.” My takeaway from the experiment was that it’s not possible to do that. It’s not just the products and services branded with the big tech giant’s name. It’s that these companies control a thicket of more obscure products and services that are hard to untangle from tools we rely on for everything we do, from work to getting from point A to point B.”

Perhaps the question we really should be asking ourselves is whether or not these companies are a necessary evil.

Would such services exist, or be anywhere near as good without the help of such companies? Miss Hill points out the dominance of Google Maps and the interaction with things like Uber, and I think that’s kind of key. We had GPS navigation long before we had Google Maps and smart phones, but which would you rather use? Part of what made Google Maps what it is today is the insane investment: sending people and hardware off into the wild blue yonder to build a better dataset than simply importing maps and satellite photos could. Who the hell has that much money? Well, Google did. Some clown in their parents garage might be able to kick start the next Apple or Amazon, but they’re not going to be able to afford to run Google Streetview without monopolistic funding.

As things worked out, I’d say Amazon turned out to be a pretty great idea. But twenty six years ago: we’d probably forgive you for thinking Bezos was crazy instead of anticipating he would become several times richer than God, building one of the world’s most well known enterprises along the way.

See, we build our success upon the success of others—and our success is often in enabling others to succeed. The question is can we do that without the ginormous bankrolls and the infrastructure that entails.

I’d like to think we have yet to see the last great American tech company. But without a governmental strongarm, I don’t think we will ever see these empires displaced. Not until landmark paradigm shifts cause them to exit a market, or for profitability sake they choose to exit or destroy one. You’re not going to beat Google Maps unless they’re incompetent and you’re hyper lucky and clever at just the right time: or they choose to shutter the entire operation. That’s just how it works at scale.

Yes, I’m pretty sure that we should refer to them as monopolies. But are they ones we need, or are they ones we can ill afford? As someone who long resisted Google and Facebook, I find that a very intriguing question.

Step one: phone hijacks SMS sending to Android Messages, and disables function in Hangouts.
Step two: tablet can only sync my sent messages. Not getting incoming at all.
Step three: re-enable SMS / set default on my phone.
Step four: archive threads because now they’re two on my phone , and the other only gets a copy of mine.
Step five: send a new message from tablet.

Step six: remember that over the past decade, Google has gone from being one of my favorite tech companies to quite possibly the one that pisses me off the absolute most often. I really miss the days when their betas were more reliable than what the rest of us called release quality. Sigh.

Annoying differences in culture, or slow points of progress.

Android land:

1. Copy files over network to Pictures/Wall Papers
2. Launch set wall paper thingy.

iOS land:

1. Copy files over...fuck that's slow.
2. Copy files over USB...gah still slow.
3. Well fuck.
4. Okay, Photos has no idea of how to import from my USB drive.
5. Jack in to desktop.
6. Launch iTunes.
7. How the fuck do you make this music player push files to applications again?
8. Clicks little iPad icon that's not the obvious one.
9. Where the heck is it?
10. Google it and find directions that are out of date.
11. Screw it. *click Photos*, *drag and drop shit*. Nope that don't work either.
12. Files -> On My iPad -> Wall Papers/.... -> share -> save image.
13. Yeah, fuck if I'm doing that ~1,700 more times!
14. Launch set wall paper thingy.

That's just the short version of things I tried, being a stranger in a foreign land. Of my various attempts it's hard to decide if I feel more trapped by the '90s or the '00s. So let's just say it's unlikely I will bother to change my iPad's wall papers very often (tm).

Also while I give kudos for being able to select multiple files and actually share them, *cough* save to the photos app, I would not recommend trying to select several hundred at a time and then tap share. You'll just end up swiping the process away a few times.

Android's nature of making defined shared places to stuff shit, and API hooks for Applications to resolve those is pretty intuitive to a nerd like me. Likewise the idea of making an application's private files not usable dickable, rather attractive for many reasons.

iTunes, if you can find the right screen, pretty much lets you explore an what private files an application choose to allow or means of importing/exporting things they (probably) think of as a database. Which owes to the tradition of not having any real concept of shared storage that multiple applications can monitor. But it's better than not being able to touch anything at all.

The only real forgiveness I have for these concepts, is once upon a time the bane of my existence was the amount of people that couldn't double click a file after downloading it from a web page. Countless games were held up for hours because of the challenge of launching a map installer. I had kind of came to grips with the concept of a file somewhere between DOS 3 and Windows 98. So as counter intuitive as something like iTunes feels to me versus a file system, I do recognize if you can't tell the difference between a mouse and a floppy disk, it's probably easier to use iTunes' model.

Or as I like to remember, remove choices, because most of us give up faster than I do 8=).

Google Play Pass bundles 350 Android games and apps for $4.99 per month.

I find it kinda interesting how the trends have been leaning with the subscription concept. The real need for folks to make a profit is usually what drives decisions; most on the other side of the coin want a decent experience, and if you’re lucky would actually pay something.

Right now, we have a reasonably successful subscription model offered on Xbox. Google and Apple are both launching game subscriptions for their platforms. I’d sign up in a heartbeat if Valve offered a good one for Steam.

To me, personally I think its a great idea.

Over in more serious gaming land, most of the revenue model seems to be focused on sales early in the game release cycle. After a while, being in a subscription package is probably a way for publishers to gain more revenue not less. How well that translates into mobile, I do wonder.

Generally I’ve long since stopped caring about Android gaming. There’s good potential there but short of something Android powered and as universally successful as a PlayStation or Xbox, it’ll never become the gaming platform I’d like to see; read enough it to keep a Window license laying around. But more than a few people play games on their phones and tablets, whether or not the games are crappy or spectacular, there’s plenty of players.

Pie sucks at multitasking

Things that Pie has wrought: Google's curse.

Overview now has a more useful grid like view. Aside from the nauseating effect that happens when closing an app makes them all resort but at least it is really fast on the Tab S3's hardware. on the downside multitasking is now chunky and fundamentally broken.

In the previous version the overview screen was a chunky phone centric sliding flipper but apps had a button on the side of their card, so you could open them in the current side of the screen. Now each app has its icon on the top of the card, and you get a menu when you tap the icon. Containing app info (used to be long touch/hold), open in split view, open in pop up (floating window) view, or lock the app. Which is a lot slower but at least flexible.

So instead of very, very quick access to snapping an app to either side of the screen: you get very slow access to deciding if you want it split or floating. The ability to just turn the currently running application into a floating window has been removed. Which is both good and bad: the gesture was easy to trip when you didn't mean to but was also extremely convenient if you wanted something like a calculator floating over a web page. I'm not sure if the UI the device used on Oreo was a Sammy thing or a Google thing, but it was pretty nice.

Now here's why I say fundamentally broken in Pie.

Splitting the screen and hitting overview used to place the overview in the currently active side of the screen. So if you wanted to replace one of the applications, you just tapped it and hit overview. Vola, really fast and simple and obvious. And good if you decided both apps needed to change before you were done.

After updating to pie: the overview ALWAYS opens in the bottom or the right side of the screen, based on whether you're in portrait or landscape orientation. I have yet to find any way to invert the split apps--you used to tap the resize bar in between and have a UI to switch them. 'Cuz that is useful. Now you're stuck with the first app chosen being in the top/left side until you're done. You might think the first app would show up and you could just select it again? Nope, its card gets removed from the overview.

Likewise you can only stuff in apps from the overview grid that were running. I used to be able to hit a button and select apps from a launcher instead of requiring them to be already opened in the background.

But really, whose fault is it for destroying the multitasking functions? Google's. It's Google's fault. Why do I say this? Because my Google Fi phone running Android One and its pure Googely experience has virtually the same broken multitasking UI. The only real difference is my Samsung changes the string "Split view" to "Open in split view" and adds the popup and lock entries to the menu. Likewise on the phone sized screen it's a sliding view of the exact same cards rather than a grid view of them.

Suddenly I realize why DeX became so popular among users of newer model Tab S's that shipped with it. It's not because DeX mode is that more PC like: it's because Google fucked Android's multitasking experience. And I fear, if I was to dig up the CDD for Pie, it would say OEMs aren't allowed to fix it anymore, lol.

Of course my model being older, DeX is not a feature that was integrated into it. Much like how my model was the first to get USB-C charging but alt modes for driving a monitor didn't show up until the Tab S4, which does have DeX. Reasons to buy an iPad, += 1.

I find it a great shame. Samsung has done multitasking for so many years, I first used it on my Galaxy SIII phone a very long time ago.  In recent years it became a standard piece of Android, which was a really good thing until Google pissed down the feature's throat and crippled its utility for real multitasking.

Some moron at the big G might call this new layout tablet optimized if they're not allowed to question orders from their marketing overlords.

Me? I'd say why the !@#$ are you wasting nearly 2" of my screen real estate to highlight the sections for movies and books? I don't even want to look at my phone's layout after seeing this redesign on my tablet, for fear of what else might be found.

I was really on the wall when hamburger design took over the mobile world but quickly came to like it, when it was done well. Interfaces like this however are just wasteful(tm). But it gives you plenty of space to write out Games, Apps, Movies & TV, and Books in something like 120 languages.

Note to self

Google Photos show up in Blogger's photos UI under "From your phone" regardless of source. Probably. Or at least when I use my tablet.

Chrome Unboxed: Google Assistant Could Arrive On All Chromebooks In Late Summer.

For the most part I've been done with Google Assistant, and lax in using such tools. But I wouldn't mind seeing them in more places as an option.

My relationship with voice tools tend to take two forms: pressing the microphone button on my phone and sighing at Google's failures to handle my reminders and pressing the microphone button on my remote and asking Alexa to launch something I want to resume watching on Fire TV.

It's nice to have options even if most of the options have failings.

Even my desktop is able to use Alexa and Cortana without much effort; Google Assistant not so much. But of course none really do that much that I find useful in that machine.

Rumblings of fhe Future

I find it curious. The last time I updated this blog was noting my journal would be moving to Google+.

With Google giving G+ the Swift kick, one of the things I've had on my mind of late is whether or not I would start using this place again or go all in on Diaspora. I suppose that only time will tell tell.

I have decided to in fact move my journal to Google Plus. I can be found HERE Those using RSS should be minimally impacted.


The address blog.spidey01.com may at sometime be made to link to a custom setup that pretty prints my Google Plus data via API, and perhaps other stuffs. As a side effect of the move over to Google Plus, this means those relying on my RSS news feed should review their feed next week. If you are using RSS, there should be no problem but if in doubt insure your reader is pointing directly to my feedburner.


Sometime after adapting Blogger, I had set things up with Feed Burner. My RSS feed via feed burner for this blog is here. Thus Blogger is setup to redirect spidey01.blogspot.com feed stuff to this address. Making it an alias of the feed burner. I assume that I should be able to keep this and point my feed burner to a new feed, completing the daisy chain. Soon I will try updating my feed burner to point through GPlusRSS pluss to my Google Plus entries. EDIT: Had an issue with GPlusRSS so I've used pluss—and the feed is active on feed burner!

Those who rely on my RSS feed being re-syndicated on my Facebook and Twitter accounts should see business as usual with the exception that it will direct you to Google Plus rather than Blogger, and it still stands that you'll be silently ignored if you comment via Facebook instead of clicking through the link. This is an advantage of dereferencing the pointer's in the right sequence lol.

Content that isn't suitable for G+ will likely reside in cloud storage and be attached to the entry. This is actually an evolution, because in the past, I've usually made a document in text or an HTML'able markup in my ~/Documents/, and then posted it to Live Journal/Blogger as applicable. Now I won't have to manually sync updates, hehehehehe.

Set course, second star to the right, and straight on till morning. Engage.

Well, updates to the previous; and a little numerical data:

G+ posts since my last Blogger post: 16.

In thinking more thoroughly about the subject, G+ has one large-scale lacking: no pre-formatted code blocks. While I can live with the available formatting capabilities otherwise, ahem, I tend to post a lot of formatted examples: source code, program output, etc. A fair bit of semi-formatted output such as quotations and lyrics as well.

The simple fact remains, however that my G+ is apart of my journal.



One possible solution:

• Program blog.spidey01.com to point to a "Special" page.
• Display posts from G+ and link to the entry for commenting/etc.
• Display posts from Blogger and link to the entry for commenting/etc.
• Similar technology could be used (and maybe marketed, hehe) for Twitter/Facebook crap, if people wanted to pay or write it.
• Update spidey01.blogspot.com with a note to such effect.
• Redirect tech might even be leveragable for this, given the domain stuff already in use.
• Write a custom client for updating Blogger, with an automated reshare to G+ or a demon that auto-shares my blog posts.

That would achieve the same end goal, more or less.

Contemplating mutiny from Amazon to Google

Back in August, I rambled a bit about my thoughts on electronic books. Later on I acquired an Android tablet; about 4 x as much as a Kindle for the make/model tablet I purchased, but a hell of a lot more useful than a kindle or my netbook.

Since then, I have more or less established myself with getting books via Amazon. In fact, it's the only setup I've been using these past few months. I like it and my only complaint is I find wish-list issues more useful from a real web browser. Since then the Cloud Reader has become widely available, so Linux/BSD issues are even pretty moot now. I like Amazon and use it for plenty but they may have just lost a customer.

Today I clicked through references to Amazon and Google Play and became angry.

Now Amazon rarely makes me angry, the worst they've ever done is hook me up with a seller that bungles tracking data, but hey, packages still got there and it was small stuff. So far as long as I don't have to work for Amazon, it's a good enough thing in my books. Up to now, if a competitor would offer a lower price: I would still buy the Kindle version, in order to keep consistency and not have to remember which app/platform I bought it from.  It also sometimes pisses me off that books I want are not always available in a Kindle edition, but that makes me upset with publishers, not Amazon! The price difference of $58.28@Amazon versus $69.42@Google isn't /THAT/ bad, seriously. Although I will admit I usually find Amazon has much better deals on books that _I_ want, I have never seen this issue with Kindle books before.

Real Time Rendering is available in a Kindle edition but, I can only view it using the PC/Mac clients or the iPad client. You cannot tell me that dinky ass XGA screen on the iPad can display books better than my 22"/1080hd monitor using the Cloud Reader client, or my Android tablet with hit's 10.1"/720hd screen. OK, I can understand it might not look sexy on my phones 3.8"/WVGA screen but still, wtf? Total steaming pile of stupidity right there. 

I want my content and I want it on all of my able bodied devices!

That discovery inspires me to jump ship and change my purchasing habits: to Google Play by way of Play Books. Once upon a time I thought about just going with whichever resource gave the best price, Amazon, B&N, or Google; Kobo I won't trust with my $data after poking 'round there site. In practice though I found that having consisency like all my books either via Amazon, or physical books, was much more convienant than maybe saving $2 here or $5 there. Even for price differences between used real books and electronic books, because my shelf space is at a premium in the real world.

Looking at other books of interest, here's a little break down:

`

Title	Amazon Kindle Price	Google Play Price	List Price @Amazon	Amazon Availability	Google Availability
Real-Time Rendering	$58.28	$69.42	$89.00	PC, Mac, iPad	Web, iOS, Android, eReader
OpenGL SuperBible: Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference	$28.59	$37.67	$59.99	Kindle, iOS, Android, Blackberry, PC, Mac	Web, iOS, Android, eReader
Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications, Second Edition: A Programmer's Guide	N/A	$47.36	$59.95	N/A	Web, iOS, Android, eReader
3D Game Engine Design: A Practical Approach To Real-Time Computer Graphics	N/A	$66.36	$82.95	N/A	Web, iOS, Android, eReader
Linux Kernel Development	$17.69	$31.19	$39.99	PC*	Web, iOS, Android, eReader
Understanding The Linux Kernel	$29.79	$37.67	$59.99	PC*	Web, iOS, Android, eReader

eReader in the above table is defined as what is described here. Amazon Availability is what's listed on the web page, although I assume the OpenGL SuperBible would work with WP7 and the Cloud Reader clients too. Ones marked with a * say what is listed but e.g. can have a sample sent to my tablet, so I'd assume they work anywhere.

Loss of dedicated applications for Windows Phone and Blackberry don't bother me, I don't use either, and should have other means of accessing my content off these devices if I ever need to change. I'm also inclined to think that Google's published policy on removals beats the shit out of Amazon's track record. From the look of the help pages, Google also offers more natural syncing between devices, as long as you don't have to resort to pushing files over Adobe/USB. So really the only gripe I can have is the when the price tag may be more drastic (like for LKD).

My summery of Android versions

• 1.0.
• September of 2008.
• 1.1.
• February of 2009.
• General software refinements, which I'll usually omit below.
• 1.5 Cupcake.
• April of 2009.
• Third party (custom) keyboards are now possible.
• We got widgets!
• Bluetooth A2DP and AVRCP profiles (think stereo).
• 1.6 Donut.
• September 2009.
• Voice I/O.
• Voice input (Speach to Text).
• Multi-lingual voice output (Text to Speech)
• Apps can make their data available to search results.
• Better support for gestures.
• 2.0 - 2.1 Eclair.
• 2.0 in October of 2009, 2.0.1 in December of 2009, and 2.1 in January of 2010.
• Support for multiple accounts in sync.
• Exchange account support for email.
• Camera app sucks much less.
• 2.2 - 2.2.3 Froyo.
• 2.2 in May of 2010, 2.2.1 and 2.2. in January of 2011, 2.2.3 in November of 2011.
• Dalvik VM gains Just In Time (JIT) compilation.
• Exchange support becomes USEFUL.
• USB and WiFi tethering. (Use your phone as a bridge between your laptop and your data plan.)
• Now have the option to DISABLE mobile data.
• Apps can now be installed to external memory (e.g. MicroSD card).
• 2.3 - 2.3.7 Gingerbread.
• 2.3 in December of 2010, 2.3.3 in February of 2011, 2.3.4 in ???, 2.5 in July of 2011, 2.3.6 in September of 2011, and 2.3.7 in ???.
• Native support for SIP VoIP.
• Selecting text to cut/copy/paste actually works.
• Text input cursor can now be precisely positioned.
• Ext4 replaces YAFFS(2) as standard file system.
• Native support for more sensors; gyroscopes, barometers, etc.
• NFC support.
• 3.0 - 3.2.2 Honeycomb
• 3.0 in February of 2011, 3.1 in May of 2011, 3.2 in July of 2011, 3.2.1 in September of 2011, 3.2.2 in August of 2011.
• Notification bar moved from top of screen to bottom corner.
• On screen software buttons (back, home, multi-task, menu, ...) and the action bar.
• View of recent apps can be snap shots (multi-task button) or existing icon view (long press physical home button).
• Browser UI becomes more like Google Chrome.
• Browser can now sync bookmarks with Google Chrome.
• Apps are now commonly multi-pane, e.g. message list and message body on one screen.
• More hardware acceleration.
• Support for multi-core CPUs.
• Encrypting user data.
• USB devices now work as expected, e.g. flash drives, game pads.
• Proper support for Bluetooth keyboards, gamepads, etc.
• Stock launcher now allows widgets to be resized.
• WiFi performance can be maintained when screen is off (WiFi locking).
• Apps designed for small screens can be zoomed or stretched to fit.
• this Android 2.2 feature is a really good thing and makes many reviewer's complaints about Honeycomb less of a big deal for normal people.
• Screenshots (or was this just a TF101 thang?).
• Previously required a custom ROM like Cyanogen Mod.
• Pasting integrated with 2.3.x selection UI.
• 4.0.1 - Ice Cream Sandwich.
• 4.0.1 in October of 2011, 4.0.2 in November of 2011, 4.0.3 in December of 2011.
• Small screens get traditional (1.0-2.3.x) UI, large screens get tablet style (3.x) UI from Honeycomb.
• On screen software buttons (from 3.x) now work on phones.
• Stock launcher catches up to common features of custom launchers.
• Access apps from lock screen.
• Previously required custom ROM/UI (e.g. Sense; Cyanogen Mod).
• Unlock your phone by taking a picture of your face.
• New Roboto font.
• Can now monitor data usage without requiring third party apps (or custom ROMs).
• Camera app sucks less.
• Basic photo-editing.
• Much stronger NFC integration, alternative to Bluetooth data transfer.
• Yet more work on hardware acceleration.
• WiFi Direct, a form of Ad-hoc WiFi networking and bridging.

In the future, journal entries should now be syndicated via RSS, Facebook, and Twitter. Commentators using Facebook rather than Blogger, will be LARTed. 






When Google+ integrates better with Blogger, we'll see what happens, hehe. It is rapidly becoming my preferred media but Blogger is better suited for longer stuff. Give us more API Googlers, more API!

Google just made my day

Was trying to look up a word I had stumbled across too far ago to remember, so I typed the definition into Google in the hopes of finding a clue to it. I didn't expect my chuckle of the day!

How Google shapes history

I seriously hope that is some Google Engineer's idea of a joke about sex shaping history.....lol



This is from a real screen shot, not a photoshop!

Clear mailboxes ftw!

You know, after so many years of watching space usage rise, it's so odd to be down to ~150MB of email, coming from well over 2GB lol.

I am currently using 148 MB (1%) of my 7451 MB.