kerravonsen | Entries tagged with geek

Note to self: TinyWebGallery is crap. I just downloaded and tried out version 2.4. From the evidence that I had the archive for TWG 2.3 in my downloads, I must have come across it before and intended to try it out. Well, self, don't do that again!

Why is it crap? Because the skins don't work. They are supposed to work out of the box and they do not. No matter what skin I select, the gallery is white and unstyled. Am I going to waste my time debugging it? No. I'd rather waste my time writing my own. (sigh)

Yes, I have a Flickr account, to which many pictures have been recently uploaded. But the Flickr app uploads EVERY SINGLE PICTURE from my Droid, not just photos I've taken. It uploads wallpapers and album covers and... is really dumb. I had to spend a lot of time deleting all those, and naturally I've turned off auto-upload from the Flickr app. Now I'm using Dropbox to auto-sync my photos. That seems to work nice and simply.

So why not keep using Flickr? Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't. I just don't fancy uploading pictures one-single-photo-at-a-time, having to use a GUI interface to upload them, no. Give me rsync any day! Of course, they usually won't give me rsync at all.

I'm using ZenPhoto on my katspaces.org site, and it is pretty good... but I need to upgrade it to a newer version, and that means I have to do a lot of messing around... and I'm not so sure I really want a gallery that requires a MySQL database backend, even though most of the more sophisticated ones do. It makes upgrading twice as messy. (sigh)

And why am I messing around with online galleries anyway? Because I am re-thinking how to share My Work with the Internet. Because of Other Things about which I have not spoken. Yet.

Current Mood: discontent
Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/1079976.html

App folders are a way of de-cluttering your Android home page, and organising your apps into categories to make them easier to find. Now, some people prefer organising their app-drawer (the thing that comes up when you click on the Apps button) but I prefer to access my apps from the home page, because there are a lot of (pre-installed) apps in the app drawer that I'm just not interested in using; I just consider the app-drawer as a drawer that I only occasionally rummage in. Now, initially when I was organising my Droid, I would just put all the app-icons on different pages, loosely clustered by type. And while that has worked for some apps (the music, audiobook and verse-of-the-day widgets are all together on one page), usually the groups are either too small or too big to all fit together on one page, and there would end up being too many pages to easily navigate. So, app folders.

There are two styles of app folder: the single-icon type, and the scrolling type. The single-icon type takes up a 1x1 space on the page, and you click on it, and a window pops up which contains the icons in that folder. Then you can click on the desired icon to start that app. The scrolling type of folder takes up a larger amount of space -- anything from 2x1 to 4x4 -- and it becomes a scrollable window with the icons in it; to access the desired icon, you scroll up and down (or left to right, depending on the implementation, but it's usually up-and-down) until you find the icon and then click on it. There are advantages and disadvantages to both styles, and there are different implementations which have their own quirks. And I'm trying to decide which one(s) to use.

( cut for lots of comparisons )

And after all that, I still can't decide which I prefer. It isn't that none of them do exactly what I want... it's that I can't figure out exactly what I do want! Well, guess I'll just have to play around some more...

Current Mood: tired
Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/1079412.html

Launchers are basically the Android equivalent to a "desktop environment" on a PC. The stock launcher on my device is TouchWiz. I've been switching between it and the Nova Launcher, which is a popular launcher. I tried out Nova not because I really want all the fancy fancy features of it, but because there are a couple of the features I like, which are lacking in TouchWiz. Unfortunately, there are a couple of features that I like which TouchWiz has, which Nova does not. So both of them irritate me a little.

( cut for long length )

Since finding how much worse all the other launchers are, I may go back to Nova. Or TouchWiz. Which leaves me in the same position that I started in! Except that now at least I know that everything else is worse.

Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/1079143.html

Hello everyone!

So now I'm back from holidays and my family have scattered. I did stuff... played games - must get hold of a copy of Splendor, great game, simple rules but somehow rather addictive. Made things with resin - I have a rather large backlog of items I need to photograph.

( And I got myself a smartphone. )

So there you have it.

Who of you has an Android smartphone, and what do you use it for? What are your favourite apps?

Current Mood: busy
Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/1078489.html

Defining Gravity and Entropic Time by AcapellaScience.

Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/1076982.html

$kerravonsen: (fractal2)$

I stumbled across this chart showing the relationships between various polyhedrons (polyhedra?), a useful and interesting chart. It got me thinking about which ones were my favourite.

* dodecahedron
* icosahedron
* truncated icosahedron
* icosadodecahedron (say that three times fast!)
* cuboctahedron

With a soft spot for the tetrahedron and the octahedron.

What are your favourite polyhedra?

Current Mood: frivolous
Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/1073717.html

Self-siphoning beads and The Royal Society Explains The Physics Behind It.

And, on a lighter note: Bohemian Gravity and The Surface of Light.

Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/1051870.html

Relatively recently I signed up for Pinterest, because they had changed their interface such that one couldn't look at pins unless one was signed in (there was a Stylish workaround, but it no longer worked). Perhaps I should have gone off in a huff, and refused to join such a non-open site, but I missed being able to look at people's pins. Because there's an awful lot of good craft stuff there. And I really like looking at craft tutorials and examples of other people's work for inspiration. So, I joined. But I was sufficiently in a huff that I didn't join as Kerr Avonsen, but used another handle.

I joined and started pinning things as well as looking at pins. But I wasn't pinning tutorials (those I was bookmarking and/or saving offline with Scrapbook). I was pinning inspirations. Because images is where Pinterest has its strength. And I wanted to be able to look at pictures of fantastic wire-work, and freeform crochet, and clever jewellery ideas and so on. Before I knew it, I had four boards with over three hundred pins between them.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: frustrated
Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/1028575.html

Hey

astrogirl2! I think you will like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64Q1EE6EHwE#t=43

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/1014012.html

Ah, Padawan, there you are. Been programming you have? Listen to me you will.

1. He who thinks he will never make a mistake is a fool.
10. The art is not just in avoiding mistakes, but in knowing how to fix them.
11. All mistakes are stupid mistakes. Get over it.
100. Your eyes see what they expect to see. If you cannot find the cause of a problem, fresh eyes can see what you do not. It is not that the other person is cleverer, it is just that they did not have expectations to blind them. You can render them similar assistance in return.
101. Do not be afraid to state the obvious; it is the best way to avoid erroneous assumptions. Precision in communication is more important than trying to save face.
110. If you don't have time to do it right, you don't have time to do it. Do not let your superiors convince you otherwise. There is a reason why hasty solutions are called "quick and dirty".
111. Temporary solutions tend to become permanent ones. Keep this in mind when you are tempted to do a crap job "because it's only temporary".
1000. He who says he will come back later to document his code is lying to himself.
1001. If you cannot reproduce the problem, you cannot fix the problem: any solution you produce is just wild flailing and guesswork, because you cannot check whether the symptoms have vanished.
1010. In your haste to implement a solution, do not forget that the "why" comes before the "what".

Current Mood: thoughtful
Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/975369.html

A song from "My Fair Lady" came up on the randomplay. Professor Higgins, male chauvinist, is one of those fictional characters that I would like to give a good talking to about his sexism. But the problem with time travel, is that one doesn't have the same context; I started pondering how one could explain "Computer Programmer" to someone from before computers were invented... or whether it wasn't worth trying.

First attempt:

Computers are machines that weave numbers. You might think that's pretty useless, but you can use numbers to represent anything. Words. Pictures. Sounds. The machine can translate back and forth between the numbers and what they represent. Which means that you can manipulate them: store them, retrieve them, change them, transmit them over telegraph wires.

... and at this point my brain fails me.

Current Mood: geeky
Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/947653.html

If you've been trying to email me, or access my website (http://www.katspace.org) don't be surprised if it bounced or vanished... because I recently changed plans with my ISP, but they didn't inform me that changing plans meant that I lost my static IP... which meant that my mailserver and webserver could no longer be found.

I've now changed to a different plan, with a new static IP, so I have to (a) wait until the change of IP goes through (b) update all my DNS records to the new IP and (c) wait until that change percolates through the internet.

In the meantime, my LJ, DW and twitter are still working fine, I'm just not getting any notifications.