A while ago I asked for recommendations for Android Podcast apps. From all over the Internet I got a great number of recommendations, and looked into all of them.
A while ago I asked for recommendations for Android Podcast apps. From all over the Internet I got a great number of recommendations, and looked into all of them.
While diving deeper into my openHAB installation, the need for notifications on mobile phones came up. After some research, I settled with Pushover, which provides Android and iOS apps, as well as Desktop notifications. openHAB Rules have support for Pushover, and everything works well together.
Except when Android decides to kill apps, because they sit idle and do nothing. It so happens on my Huawei phone that notifications are delivered to the device, but no popup shows up. Only when I open the up, suddenly all the messages are there. The Pushover FAQ has an entry for this, even for Huawei phones, but it is outdated.
After another research it turns out, that the battery management in Android is at fault - but it can be disabled.
At home I have two different Wi-Fi networks, both known to all my mobile devices. One is our internal network, password protected. The other one is an open Freifunk network. It’s nice to walk around in the village and automatically connect to other Freifunk Wi-Fi routers, instead of using expensive mobile data.
But when at home I really want my devices connected to our internal network. Makes it easy to copy files between devices, or access services only available in our internal network. Plus the native Wi-Fi connection is much faster than the Freifunk connection, which is limited by the speed of the VPN.
Up until recently I was using an App to clean the the Android cache once in a while. If you don’t, the device over time get’s sluggish, because too many apps store too much data in the cache. Over time this cache can grow to GBs in size.
On the other hand, every single “clean cache App”, over time, started showing more and more aggresive advertising. I get that the developer wants to make some money, that’s fine. But maybe the money is not enough, so more advertising it is.
OpenStreetMap is an awesome project. Contributors constantly improve a online map and add new data, fix items in the map which did change in the real world, or improve the data for a number of projects (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, List) building on top of the map. Being outside a lot, I figured that I can contribute as well. It’s just a question of how to transport the data from “out there” back to the laptop in my office. After probing around and trying a few tools, I came up with 3 different ways, depending on the situation and amount of changes.
Recently I installed CyanogenMod 9 on my mobile. Everything went smooth and I’m happily running a new operating system.
Just that I cold not install Google Maps - could not find it in Google’s Play Store.