i have been floated the life and times of stuyvesant parker

on the best Android apps you’ve never heard of

I posted a thread on Reddit asking people "What's one of your fave Android apps that you think other people haven't heard of?" These are some of the best suggestions I got from this thread. Without further ado...

FoxyRing runs in the background and polls your phone's microphone every 6 minutes (user configurable) and adjusts your phones ringer volume based on the ambient noise of your environment. If you've ever been shocked by your phones loud ringtone while lying in bed reading a book, you can understand how useful this is, or if you've ever missed your phone ringing because it was too quiet when there was a lot of noise going on around you. It has extra features, including location based settings, an auto-silent sleep timer, and the best widget ever: Timer based silence, so you can tell it to silence your phone for 2 hours while you're watching a movie and not worry about turning the volume back up afterward. (Free)

Cavedroid is a clone of SFCave, where you're simply steering yourself through a tunnel trying to avoid obstacles and collect little rotating boxes. Runs very well on a G1 and has very responsive tilt controls. The highlight is "Dual Tilt Hard Mode" where not only do you control it by tilting up and down but side to side as well. Easily the best game I've played on my phone. (Free, if you donate your name appears with a link to your website randomly whenever someone crashes.)

XBMC Remote is a remote control for your Xbox Media Center if you have one. (Free?)

Mother TED streams TED talks and lectures to your phone. Very useful if you're the kind of person who sits in your car to eat fast food and wants to be educated while you grub. (Free)

Wheres My Droid is very useful if you're the kind of person who forgets where you put your phone and you often leave it on silent. It runs in the background and when you send your phone a text message with a personalized code, it turns the volume all the way up and starts ringing your phone for a set amount of time. Alternatively a second code will poll GPS (only if it is turned on already) and text message you back with a Google Maps formatted URL with the exact coordinates of your phone. (Free)

3banana is arguably the best note application on the phone. It syncs with the internet, has support for inline images, HTML, and categorizing by inline hashtags. Unlike Evernote it is lightweight and doesn't ask you to pay for premium features. (Free)

Swype is a keyboard replacement that works by dragging your finger around on a regular QWERTY keyboard without letting up. A nifty algorithm accurately predicts what you wanted to type. Works very well and makes typing in portrait mode surprisingly useful. (Not available in market yet, but check this link.)

CameraZoom FX is a full featured camera replacement that includes special effects, various overlay grids for image composition, timer shot, "image stabilization", voice activated shutter and a lot of other things. (£1.29)

Air Control is a clone of an iPhone game where you're dragging lines to create paths for airplanes to fly safely to runways without colliding with each other. Much better and cheaper than all the other similar clones on the market like Flight Director. (£0.60 or Ad supported)

Gmote is a remote control for your computer. Allows you to browse various media and play it through your computer or through your phone over Wifi. As an example, I used to sit outside my house and play my music collection through my phone. Also allows you to use your phone as a touchpad mouse and keyboard. (Free)

RemoteDroid is like Gmote but without the media features, simply a touchpad mouse and keyboard for your PC. (Free)

EvenBetter Keyboard is another keyboard replacement, but the main feature of this one is that it adds proper T9 support in portrait mode. Unlike the T9 support in Better Keyboard, in EvenBetter Keyboard it functions properly and isn't a headache to use. If you like and want proper T9 support on your phone and $4 doesn't seem like too much to pay for it, check this out. I bought this but use Swype instead now. ($3.99)

That's it! There are many more suggestions in the thread, but these are the ones I tried myself and continue to use. Check the thread for even more suggestions.

on quitting my marijuana habit (Day 2 & 3)

Well this entire thing has been decidedly uneventful. I was depressed on Day One due to a lot of factors. I flipped out on my parents, but that was entirely justified and if I can say so myself, marijuana caused me to suppress some things I should have acted on in the first place. On Day Two I felt kind of unhappy, too, but I was letting stuff get to me, like my flaky friend who'd rather hangout with people who still get stoned, which is understandable.

The only downside I see to not smoking is that I have some minor anger issues, but they are only directed at people who are ridiculously stupid. I almost started yelling at a UPS Store employee who tried to tell me I couldn't park outside the store to unload 6 boxes in 30 seconds into the store because he would "Get in trouble," as if I give a flying fuck. My biggest regret from that situation is all the things I should have said, like, "Get in trouble how? Is someone going to give you a SPANKING?" Really wish I had said that. I am going to have to remember to keep my cool in situations I get very angry in just so that I can say the funniest most apropos thing possible.

That's it really. There have been some benefits to not smoking: I feel more energetic. I kind of like being so clear headed, it makes my writing better, or at least less sloppy. I like the "stream of consciousness" I get going on when I'm stoned but it's hard to self edit and it's full of comma splices. I enjoy going to work more, and the slump I have been in for the last month seems to have cleared up for the most part. I even asked to add my work to my daily regimen here in the warehouse.

All in all... when I pass the drug test and come out of this whole situation with a job, the only time I really want to get stoned is before I eat. My appetite totally blows when I don't get high and I have a hard time enjoying food. I think I'll get a medical card when all is said and done, so I can legally smoke to fix my appetite.

There won't be anymore of these specific 'quitting marijuana' posts because the whole thing is anticlimactic.

on my dislike of The Doors

From reddit:

Lady Gaga = 2 Grammys. Hendrix, Skynrd, The Who, The Doors, Bob Marley, Buddy Holly, and Queen = Zero Grammys.

Me:

Actually thinking that the Grammys mean shit == stupid.

Also The Doors suck and do not belong in a list of such great talent.

bamfb2:

You may not like The Doors, but Jim Morrison is one of the greatest frontmen to ever live. Could be top 5. He's also one of the more poetic front men (not in Dylan's class of course).

Me:

I don't really like to get into this debate but Morrison was a hack who wrote drugged out self-indulgent bullshit while pretending to be possessed by Indian spirits and collapsed under the weight of his own massive ego and drug habit. The band themselves are all talented musicians and the music behind Morrison's asinine antics is all really good, but Morrison himself was just a windbag. I already don't like poetry but to call Morrison a poet is to do a great disservice to the entire genre.

Hendrix was a good front man. Holly was, too (just because of how happy he looked all the time and how sincere he was). Freddy Mercury, definitely. Morrison doesn't belong anywhere near those guys on a list. If you define "good frontman" as "drunk jackass who can't sing" then sure Morrison was fantastic.

bamfb2:

First of all, a front man leads a band. Holly and Hendrix aren't really front men, IMO. They ARE the band. They could just as easily play by themselves. Elvis is another one.

Freddy was the front man of Queen and certainly one of the best. Kurt Kobain. Anthony Kiedis. David Lee Roth. Mick Jagger. Bono. Jim Morrison.

As for the whole drug addled thing, most of them were. That's why Hendrix, Joplin, et al died before they reached thirty. You sound like you have personal issues with JM and are not really assessing his talent. I can understand why you don't like his poetic side, but he was a product of his generation. The man might have been the 'sensual' front man of all time; dude put the 'sex' in being a front man.

Oh and one more thing....a massive ego is damn near essential for all great front men.

Me:

Based on the fact that you misspelled Kurt Cobain's name and then downvoted everyone's confirmation of Morrison's crappiness, I'm not inclined to argue with you any further.

BUT

There's a big difference between Morrison's drug use and everyone else's: Morrison's drug use overwhelmed his creative output and grossly effected it. Hendrix and Joplin (and "et al", whoever they are, since the rest of your list doesn't contain anyone else who is dead aside from Cobain) were extremely talented musicians and drug use never got in the way of that. Morrison on the other hand basically devolved over time due to his drug use and was foolish enough to believe drugs actually elevated his "art". Which it didn't.

Also, again, big difference between Morrison's ego and everyone else's is that everyone else had or has class. Morrison was totally classless. Though I am pretty sure the Red Hot Chili Peppers stopped being good sometime around 1994 and definitely would have benefited from Kiedis being found bloated in a bathtub. Nothing against Kiedis, though, I'm sure he's a stand up guy. Oh wait, he's actually a childish prick, too. Oh well!

*Also: Holly was not THE BAND. His band was The Crickets, and they were pretty good, too, and he fronted them. That's why it's "Buddy Holly and the Crickets" or sometimes just "The Crickets".

bamfb2:

Well, I for one, am thankful that you deigned to grace us with your insight, in the face of such an egregious error as a misspelled word. We are fortunate. Way to nitpick mate. I'm not trying to win a spelling contest, but if you feel the need to run around correcting everyone's spelling, I'll not stop you.

Second of all, I down voted no one. I rarely use the arrows...and certainly wouldn't for someone's opinion. How you concluded that, I have no idea.

'et al' refers to any other drugged out rock stars who died young...Lane Staley, Sid Vicious, Brad Nowell....maybe I should have used etc? Doesn't matter.

Unlike you, some people think Jim's drug use was the fuel for his creativity. It's your opinion that it didn't....if not, find me proof otherwise. You telling me, doesn't make it so. Drug use screwed up his live performances (and his life) more than anything. I know he wrote a bunch of lyrics high as a kite.

Most front men are dicks. The vast majority don't have 'class'. Some may be able to pull it off as a persona in the media though. Yeah, there are a few good guys, but the list is short imo. 'Class' is a word rarely used to describe rock stars.

On Holly: if you ask the average music lover who was in 'The Crickets', they would not know. Holly was the band in the eyes of the public. In contrast, if you ask who is in the 'Rolling Stones', everyone knows who Keith Richards and Ronny Wood are. Jagger is not the band.

Me:

The truly great artists who used drugs didn't make their best music while on drugs. They did drugs, then when they were off the drugs they tried to replicate the feelings they had while on drugs with the music they made. Morrison got drugged out and wrote nonsense thinking it was genius, but it wasn't. The true greats got drugged out, wrote nonsense, realized it was crap, sobered up, wrote truly great stuff based on their drug experiences, then got drugged out again and/or died. That's the difference between Morrison and everyone else you've listed in this thread. The only drug that begets decent art is meth, and that's almost strictly limited to authors who have great editors (Bret Easton Ellis in his college days being one of them).

~fin

P.S. The point in pointing out that you misspelled Cobain's last name is that some of us actually give enough of a shit about the topic we're discussing to know what we're talking about. If you can misspell the name of a legend who made his music within the last twenty years then how can you say you know so much about rock history?

bamfb2:

I agree on the drug thing somewhat, but it is not an absolute. If you are completely wacked out, it is difficult to be creative at times I imagine. Brad Nowell wrote some of his best stuff on heroin. Also, some of Morrison's best improv was drugged out. His work on 'The End' was drug induced supposedly....and that's one of his most powerful songs. Elliot Smith and Hendrix both were heavy Drug users. Jerry Garcia too. LSD, psyclobin, and heroin are often used by very creative types. In fact, LSD has been shown to enhance cognitive abilities immensely. Several scientists have used it to make astounding break throughs. See Here and Here for starters.

P.S. Anybody can misspell something at ANY time. Not everyone proof reads everything they write on the internet. Whether you misspell a word has nothing to do with whether you know what you are talking about. Harping about it shows that you care more about being pedantic than you do discussing the actual argument. It is a common debating tactic (used quite frequently by Republicans I might add), and a weak one at that. The fact that we are discussing spelling vs discussing music is testament to this fact.

I would argue that if you are hung up on spelling, you are taking yourself entirely too seriously. I am human; I am not perfect.

Me:

Cobain isn't a word, it's a name. I'm done with the spelling thing. If you don't think knowing someone's name is important I don't care enough anymore to make myself look like an ass by trying to convince you that it matters.

The Dead didn't play while on LSD (and I'm pretty sure the documentary I watched where a band talked about how when they tried to play on LSD they sounded like shit, the band was the Dead). LSD encouraged personal breakthroughs that greatly influenced the music they made, but the drug itself isn't what made their music great. Neither of us know whether Brad Nowell actually wrote his material while on heroin (extremely doubtful considering the effect heroin has on a person). I doubt Smith could even play guitar while he was high considering how big of a junkie he was and that most his songs are about the pursuit of drugs and not about being on them. Hendrix, again, some story, doubt the guy could even play guitar while high as a kite. Point is, and always has been: Morrison was the only person foolish enough to believe his output while high was worth a damn without self-editing or censoring the more ridiculous aspects of it. History (as in us, looking at his material now) has shown that his output is largely nonsense more appropriate to be used at the punch line in a Jim Carrey sketch.

*To reiterate: Talent is what makes a band/artist good, not drugs. Morrison didn't have any talent, just drugs. Drugs can fuel breakthroughs in thought that cause an artist to create even better art, but a good artist knows that the material they make on drugs needs to be refined and edited in order to be great art. Morrison never even gave two shits about this fact, and it shows. That is why Morrison sucks and no amount of sexy swagger is going to change the fact that in the annals of rock history, Morrison will always be considered a hack.

"The End" is not powerful songwriting. "The End" benefits greatly from a powerful performance by a talented band. Morrison's words are meaningless druggie drivel, you can read them and see that's true ("weird scenes in the gold mine / ride the king's highway, baby"). It's primary impact in music history comes from how shocking it was at the time (MOTHER I WANT TO FUUUCCKK YOOOOU). If that song came out today most people would just ignore it and brush it off as the attention whoring it was at the time.

*P.S. It's been a pleasure arguing with you. I'm glad we haven't resulted to name calling. You big idiot.

*I like "Riders on the Storm" but it's the same thing as "The End", relatively meaningless drivel elevated to great heights by an awesome atmospheric performance by a talented band that had nothing at all to do with Morrison himself.

Other responses from various people in reply to my comments:

Morrison's poetry is self-indulgent. It really is. And it only got worse as time wore on. Some lyrics are good ol' rock and roll, but a lot of it just Ego worship, total nonsense. Having said all that, I am a Doors fan.

---

Normally, this might be considered trolling but god I hate The Doors. Upvote for the most righteous of causes anti-Doors crusader.

---

In addition, everyone close to him said he was an asshole who wrote shit poetry. There are plenty of stories of him trying to pee on people etc.

---

I went back and listened to the Doors again a few months ago after not listening to them for years. It's gibberish. It's just ... there's nothing there. There are words there, sure, but they're not strung together in any kind of coherent way.

---

Way to further alienate a large percentage of people with the Chili Peppers comments. I agree with everything you've said and it's great to see somebody who knows what they're talking about explain how it is. And Buddy Holly is incredible.

---

dont be a hater

tl;dr: Jim Morrison sucks, stop acting like he was some genius.

on why we hate the iPad

Seems like the iPad is one of those things you either love entirely or you passionately hate, like many things on the internet these days (or in politics these days). I fall on the passionately hate side: I want it to be a giant failure, and I will argue with anyone who claims it isn't a sad gimmick of a piece of hardware, and a lot of this has to do with my perception of what is right and wrong in the world.

"Generations" of Crippled Hardware

I don't think it's acceptable to sell people a piece of hardware that is purposefully crippled so you can sell me later models that are less crippled. Stephen Fry talks about this aspect of the iPad as if it's a feature and not something that you should be angry about. He says that when it has GPS and multiple camera and all sorts of stuff it'll be amazing, but that just leaves me wondering: What's keeping Apple from making it amazing now? If the iPhone has GPS and a camera, why doesn't the bigger phone-less version of it (regardless of arguments that it's "not just a bigger iPod Touch") have these things?

Answer: Profit! Without withholding features purposefully Apple won't be able to release a new one every year. Next year we'll get one with a camera and maybe a USB port. The year after that we'll get one with GPS. Each new one will come with a new $500 price tag (or maybe they'll cut a few bucks off). The features won't be dribbled out quite like that, but that's the way it's going to be.

And it's not right, not when you do it so blatantly in front of everyones faces. Steve Jobs himself has said it's his goal to make devices where you have to buy a new one every year, the sort of thing you just won't feel good enough about yourself if you don't run out and buy the newest one. This is good business but from a "good will for your fellow man" perspective, it's pretty much evil. Imagine how awesome the iPad would be if they just made it as good as it could possibly be today, and then spent subsequent years making it even better as new technology comes out?

Crippled Software

People keep going back and forth on whether multi-tasking is actually important, and a lot of this comes from "what you haven't had you can't miss" syndrome from people who are currently locked into their iPhones and haven't actively used something else on a daily basis. As an G1 user I know the joys and the pitfalls of multitasking on a mobile device. Since Android is really the only major comparison to iPhone/iPad, I'll use examples from it.

On Android phones you can run apps that adjust your phone's settings on the fly. One is called Locale which updates various settings and can send you alerts and reminders based on your phone location gathered via GPS or by identifying nearby Wifi access points. You can tell it to turn on Wifi when you're at home and turn off Bluetooth. When you leave your house it can turn off Wifi and turn on Bluetooth. You can set it to turn down your screen brightness automatically when it passes a certain time of day, and turn it back up in the morning. In order to do this Locale must run in the background of your phone, always.

The second, which I use these days, is called FoxyRing, and it adjusts your ringer volume automatically based on ambient noise in the environment around you. Every 6 minutes it polls your phone's microphone and then adjusts your phone's volume appropriately. If you're watching a loud television show, it'll turn up your ringer. If you're lying in bed reading a book in silence, it'll turn your volume down. If you've ever been startled by your phone's loud ringtone then you know how useful this can be.

On the iPhone or the iPad both of these simply aren't possible because Apple won't let third party apps run in the background. It's not that the devices are incapable of doing it, because Apple's own apps are allowed to do it, they just don't let anyone else do it. The "Why?" isn't very interesting: allowing multi-tasking will slow down the user experience, making the device seem less "slick", diminishing the initial "wow factor".

Neither of these two examples are big deals, really, but you can extend this into other kind of apps: If you run Skype on your iPhone, opening a different app means you can't receive calls from it anymore, and you can't move between different apps while you're in a call. You can't listen to Pandora online radio and browse the internet at the same time. This limitation extends from the iPhone to the iPad, which is supposed to be more computer-like.

Why doesn't Apple give you the choice to turn on multi-tasking or not? To me, being able to run multiple things is the "wow factor", and a slick polished interface devoid of any lag time isn't my top priority. Maybe it is for you, but it's silly we don't get to choose, and it's silly that we pay for hardware that is capable of something that Apple doesn't allow.

Big Brother

Apple controls everything that gets onto the iPad. This is another thing Stephen Fry talks about like it's a benefit, a feature, and not the horrid thing it actually is. You can't do anything on the iPad without Apple's prior approval. Every app that makes it into the market has to be examined and approved by Apple. Anything that doesn't fit into Apple's vision of what the iPad should be won't make it.

This is OK if you feel like you can trust the company, but Apple has shown now with the rejection of the Google Voice app and the difficult processes other developers have had to go through that Apple is not someone you should trust to make appropriate decisions about what you want to use on your hardware. It's one thing to say, "It's an Apple device, they can control it however they want," but it's you, the user, who is suffering.

It's not right for a company with biases and passive aggressive tendencies (on display in the Flash situation as well) to determine what you can do with hardware you pay for. If you leased the hardware from them, maybe, but we're still living in the world where we can actually own what we buy---unless there's some new user agreement with the iPad that dictates that the purchase price is actually you simply signing a license agreement with terms of use and that the hardware doesn't actually belong to you, but to Apple, and you're merely leasing it with their permission.

Long story short: it's just not right for you to pay for something and have the company tell you, after the fact, that you can't use it for a certain thing because it's against their interests. It's akin to Frigidaire coming into your house, telling you that they're not happy with Farmer John so you can no longer store your eggs and sausage in your Frigidaire refrigerator. You wouldn't accept that. Why accept it with your mobile computing?

Kindle No More?

The iPad can't be a Kindle killer, it just can't. Why? Because the Kindle was built with love. The guy who invented E-Ink (whoever he is) probably didn't invent it because he wanted to make millions of dollars off e-readers, but because he wanted a screen that would be comfortable to read a book on. He knew that reading a book on a backlit LCD screen was uncomfortable and difficult, and that there had to be a better way.

I won't apply the same angelic properties to Amazon, that they made the Kindle as a heavenly gift to book lovers everywhere, but they, and Jeff Bezos who's already shown that he likes to believe in things that take a while to come to fruition, seem to genuinely like reading and the Kindle is tailored to that need. The love of reading is at the heart of the Kindle.

This is in sharp contrast to Steve Jobs, who said that the Kindle was doomed because, "No one reads anymore." The iPad features nothing that makes it tailor made to read books. The LCD screen will be uncomfortable to read novels on, and definitely be impossible to read in direct sunlight, and I doubt this thing is going to revitalize the newspaper and magazine industry. (Why is someone who already doesn't read newspapers and magazines going to pay $500+ for a device so that they can then pay to read the newspaper and magazine they could have just bought in the first place?)

It's obvious the written word is not Jobs' priority, but I think it dawned on him that "Here's a dying market I can profit off of for a while before it fizzles out and is replaced with something else," and boom, the iPad now has an ebook reader in it that has a lot of flash and pizazz while not actually being that great for reading.

There's no love for reading in the iPad, and it just seems wrong that a product made out of devotion to replicating the experience of reading an actual book could be replaced by something where book reading is obviously an afterthought.

Summary

It's hard to avoid the hyperbole about this thing, with people saying things like, "This is going to kill the photo frame industry," (obviously because people want to pay $500 for a picture frame, people never print out photos anymore, and people never want to permanently display those photos behind glass in their homes anymore) and that it's made of magic and is going to save the world.

Maybe it will, but by letting it we're going to give the world over to Apple. Apple will control what is magic and what isn't. You're not going to be able to decide what you think is magic. If you want to do something magical that isn't what Apple thinks is magic, you can't do it. There's no arguing, because Apple is all there is. What if you want to read a book someday Apple decides it doesn't want that book on the iPad? What if you buy a book and then later, Apple decides you can't have it anymore and yanks it off your iPad? Do you really want to give all control over the objects you buy over to Apple?

It's wrong that there are tablets out there in the same price range that have four times the space, built in cameras, multitasking, support for Flash, and they even let you download whatever you want by whoever you want, and the iPad will probably obliterate them all, and why? Because it's made of magic. Not because it's a better product, does more, or is more useful, but because people perceive it as being different from everything else they've ever used, which is what makes it magical. It doesn't do anything special, and in fact it does much less than our computers today, but it looks real pretty.

If it doesn't seem wrong to you that this is where the future of computing might be heading, then why the iPad is offensive to so many people like me is going to definitely be over your head. I look forward to a future of computing where we have a single device that can do everything we want it to, and more. The iPad is not this device. It's actually a step away from this device.

The iPad isn't a replacement for your laptop. It isn't a replacement for your cellphone. It isn't a replacement for your desktop computer. It isn't a replacement for your television.  It isn't a replacement for your Nintendo DS, your Wii, or your Xbox. It isn't even really a replacement for your Kindle or simple paper. The iPad does part of what each of these things does, but... how does that saying go?

Jack of all trades, master of none? Is that what magic really is? I hope not. I really don't want this to be what magic is.