webdevmatt

Last night I was having the most difficult time sleeping. It wasn’t because I wasn’t tired, or was having bad dreams; it was because of the title of a collection of posts I found, “Internet of Things.” While what woke me was the “Connection of Things” there is at least one of my favorite topics in this title and that is things. I am going to chug through this collection and try to supply commentary along the way.

Now for the qualification of my statement above; why are things one of your favorite topics? My answer to you is simple, everything is made up of something and something does not exist without a thing. The thing is the root of everything that we concisely know of, nothing exists without a thing.

I hope the “Internet of Things” fulfills all my expectations, and I look forward to your comments

In the United States, we had a long weekend which, in the business world means some time off. But with our ever need for connection both socially and otherwise, our phones are the ultimate portal to our “existence?”

Ok, so that might be a little over the top, but, at some point in time in the early 21^st century I conceded to the fact that my smartphone was an extension of myself, for good or bad. Now back to the long weekend.

Thursday May, 27:
Two days before Memorial day weekend, I found my Moto Droid to be void of a home key (the part of the touch screen on the Droid that brought me to the home screen was not functional). This being the case I had 2 options for simple navigation on my phone: 1. multiple back button taps(another soft key on the droid that brings you back one step), 2. context sensitive menu button and hope that it had a close or exit option (many applications do not). I promptly engaged the Verizon rep and was informed that, under warranty, they would send me a new device, but being a long weekend it would not arrive until the following Tuesday.

Friday May 28 (the saga continues):
While not so convenient, the back button technique seemed to work well throughout the day. I found myself doing less with my Droid, but basic functions continued with little hitch.

Saturday May 28 (the bomb):
As the flow of the back button was just becoming common place, I hoped into a car headed for Canada to embark on my first Marathon in the lovely city of Ottawa. As my gracious travelling companions handed me a well brewed Starbucks coffee, I attempted to gain access to the home screen of my phone, one handed using the familiar back button, no dice. Oh maybe my thumb is to warm I thought, as I stroked the touchable button with different fingers and other parts of my thumb, still no luck. In fact, the touch screen on the back button was also unusable, and if you are in an application like Handcent (SMS client) there are no options to get out of the program. Being mister smarty pants, I went for the Advanced Task Killer and tried to kill all applications, which works, but only if you kill the app you are in and Advance Task Killer as Advanced Task Killer has no option to exit either. The only option in this scenario was to kill Advance Task Killer as well, finally getting you back to the home scree. What’s the saying go around your … well, you get the picture.

In comes old research revisited. The Moto Droid, when a small magnet is applied to its back, will turn into a car dock exposing simple options including a home button. Bingo, apply money clip to back of Droid and presto, “easy” access to the home screen.

This went on all weekend, and at times those watching me perform the feat of returning to the home screen and or getting out of a program, terms like the McGyver of the Droid where tossed around. While this term of endearment was flattering this morning I did not realize how easy the Droid’s navigation system was when my new Droid came in the mail. I now feel like a Droid trapeze artist flying around applications with the greatest of ease. Thank you Verizon Wireless for your service.

LISTAS was a Microsoft Labs project that really didn’t have many legs. The short of it was a list of stuff, private or shared in the cloud. I had talked about this project a couple times before eventually finding a mild use for it.

Now that I have a “new” tablet, LISTAS had become very valuable, only thing is, it is no longer in existence. Where have my lists gone? I am now left scrounging for the “special” software I was using on my tablet in its heavy use days.

Oh well, I guess. Unless someone recommends something new, I will use one of my new favorite cloud apps for keeping stuff straight and not losing thoughts in my often cluttered brain; Evernote (more on that next time).

Being a bit of a rogue or maybe just a little different, I have been redirecting “My Documents” to a little bit of a different (shhh, secret) place for on the network for one reason or another. So when the network admin notified the company, “I’m retiring server A and migrating it to server B, JUST SO YOU KNOW,” I was ready, or was I?

The manual redirect move is quite straight forward on windows XP, but is it for Windows 7? The answer is Kinda.

In Windows 7, the equivalent to redirection is “adding a location to your document Libraries.” The catch here is that your Document Library location must be indexed, and if this is a network folder and or if there’s a lot of data in that folder, you may have a challenge. When walking through help / troubleshooting, the suggestion is that you make the folder an offline folder and synchronize to produce an indexed location. This was un acceptable for me at the time so I did a little Googling and found an answer in a forum that is straightforward and best of all works, here it is:

1. Create a folder on your hard drive for shares. eg. c:\share
2. Create another folder in the above share. eg. c:\share\username
3. Link the Library to this folder.
4. Delete the folder.
4. Use the mklink in an elevated command prompt to make a symbolic link. Name the link the same as the folder you created above.
i.e - mklink /d c:\share\username\\server \username
5. Done. Now you have non-indexed UNC path as a library.

Presto, a non-indexed Document Library ie. Redirected My Documents on Windows 7. The final adjustment you might want to make is to set this location as the “default save location,” if you want this new library to be your default save location. Using the example above as our guide for document library names, follow these steps:

To change the default save location for the Documents Library

1. In Windows Explorer, right-click the Documents Library, and then click Properties.
2. In the Library locations list, click username (C:\share\username), and then click the Set save location button.
3. Click OK.

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted about the DROID but here’s a quick praise of the droids Elegant Simplicity.

Once again, heading out to a new location and running a little behind in time. We type the address into the in car’s GPS, “no location found,” we’re flying blind. Shotgun says, “go 690 East to 481 North, you will be going in the right direction.” At the stop light, I type in the name of the business we are going to visit and presto a little marker comes up on the map of my DROID. Two clicks later the female android voice tells me the next turn to take. 48 minutes later we are at the door step of the business and shotgun is asking how the phone got us there.

THE MAJIC OF THE DROID. I’m Matthew Holt, and this is one of my DROID stories.

I’m actually surprised we have not seen this before, but there appears to be an issue with viewing / opening JPG attachments from Entourage 2004 (Microsoft Mail Client for the Mac). The image will be viewable in the body of the email, but when you open the image, it is blank in Preview(Default image preview application).

It appears this is an undocumented bug with Entourage 2004 and Snow Leopard, who would have thought.

In order to view your JPG’s again you can download a free viewer toyviewer. Install this viewer and then in the preferences of the program make ToyViewer your default program for opening image files.

So, I’m walking out of the office, perfect timing to drive to my next appointment. I get to the parking garage, dammit, I have no clue how to get where I am going.

Droid to the rescue. I open up the meeting request on my phone and sure enough the address is typed in the notes section. As I sigh, figuring I have to figure out how to copy and paste the address into Google Navigation, I double click around the freeform typed message. Voila, a Google map comes up with a bubble echoing the address.

We all know what comes next: click the bubble, select navigate, turn gps on and navigation commences.

Once again, the Droid gets me to my appointment on time.

This is far from a definitive power management post, but I’m sharing with you what I do at a minimum to get a full day of battery life.

1. Put the power widget on one of you home screens. The power widget gives you easy access to your hardware power consumer’s; sync, Bluetooth, WIFI, GPS and display. If you need to conserve power, shut off what you are not using with a touch of the finger. I run lean with just sync on for most of the day. It’s all I need when at work. Put the GPS on when I’m running or need to get somewhere, and almost always leave the backlight off.
2. Download a power management program. I use a free one, “Power Manager”. I have not fooled with the default profile, and it manages how long my screen stays on when in a call or when there is no activity. For some users the screen might go black a little quick, but for me, it’s fantastic. The screen is the biggest drawer of battery and the power manager keeps it off when it doesn’t need to be on.
3. Advanced Task Killer. Download it and use it. Easily close down applications that are running that “don’t need to be running.” I love this application, and it helps manage power by making it easy for the droid to run lean.

Do these 3 things out of the gate and see how it affects your battery life. If it gets you in the right direction, it will be time to get granular on how you use your device, and I’m pretty sure we can get better battery life out of your Droid.

In my first few weeks of using the Droid, I took a couple ~5hr trips along the east coast. As mentioned in this second droid post the streaming of music and podcasts was great, and my girlfriend had downloaded some game apps for some extra shotgun entertainment.

While I’m not one for play games on my computer or my phone for that matter there’s an app that she downloaded that I just can’t put down, especially when I’m on the crapper. It’s called jewels.

It appears to be a version of bejeweled and it is definitely entertaining. The object of the game is to get as many points as you can by putting at least 3 of the same color / shape in a row. There are 2 types of games, “timed mode” and “normal mode.” Timed mode is, as expected, the normal game with a countdown with time added as you score points.

Thank you Erin for downloading this game, it keeps me on the toilet a little longer each day. Droid users out there give it a go or post your favorite bathroom apps.

Anyone who knows me knows my sense of direction needs a little work. When I got the GPS in my car everything was great, as long as I knew where I was going when I started my journey, but what happens when a call comes in for a home visit while you are driving?

1. You or your shotgun can’t enter the address while you are driving, “safety feature”.
2. Odds are, you don’t have the address in your GPS

Droid to the rescue. Once you hang up the phone, 4 clicks on the screen and bingo, Google navigation is talking you to your destination.

This afternoon proved out this scenario to a “T”.

While driving, a call comes in from a client, “Matt, could you stop by and give us a hand with …” I was in the vicinity, so I accepted, but I was on the “wrong side”, geographically, of the client. The first thought that came to mind was, “oh shit, I have to get to where I know.”

Droid to the rescue. At my fingertips, GPS and Google Navigate(beta), and in a form factor that we’re all used to using while driving (I am assuming that the majority of the people reading this post emails and texts while they drive, for the others I could see if it takes a voice command). A few taps of the finger and there’s a friendly voice, if you like female electronic voices, giving you directions with the next turn. The directions were spectacular and the accuracy was amazing. She tells me about my turns 800 feet before they occur and she appears to be dead on.

While this location did not have a street view, there have been times when a picture of the location is available, and the voice tells me which side of the road my destination is cash money.