My poor, long neglected blog. Over the last several months, my web activities have been more and more divided among various social media sites and definitely has leaned more towards consumption instead of creation. I’ve been feeding on the contributions of others without doing my fair share.
Seeing Richard Querin’s new theme and blog reset has inspired me. In fact I copied his great idea to use the Wu Wei blog theme. It looks simple and I was plagued with the same problem as Richard. I had hacked together a theme when I had much more time for such things. Now I need something simpler so I can concentrate what little free time I have for this into creative production and sharing. I hope Richard won’t be mad that I’ve copied him.
I’ve gotten as HTC Desire Android phone and I have to say that there are a small number of things that are holding me back from loving it.
- Poor battery life.
- Podcast playback
- Google Books
I’ve exercised the battery and while it did vastly improve the battery life, it still has a hard time making through the day. I find myself rationing my use of the phone. Part of my problem maybe that I live and travel on the fringes of the cell network. I’ve heard that cell phone batteries drain faster when they have to continually search for a cell signal.
Podcasts are how I tolerate my daily commute. I’ve tried Doubletwist and Winamp both desktop clients but neither are vary satisfying and Google’s client streams the podcast which is a problem when traveling on the fringes of the cell network.
Google books is not yet fully baked. It losses it place from time to time. It will not remember my preference for flowing text and when switching from phone to desktop it will not remember my place. Also I have noticed some weird formatting issues around tables and illustrations.
Mary is getting anxious for some snowshoeing action so we’re off.
Hey Will,
The dark option looks good. I also like the fact that it concentrates on the writing and puts all the other junk down at the bottom. I’ve neglected my blogroll for far too long anyway! 
Hopefully the visual reboot will jump start your writing as I hope it will for me.
Hope you had a good holiday season.
No matter at all about going with the WuWei theme too. It’s a simple attractive theme, what’s not to like.
We’ll see. As always, time will tell..
Podcasts: If you use Google Listen, you can download the episodes using Wifi before going out…
I’ve got a Nexus One and while the Google Listen podcast client isn’t perfect by any means, it works fine for me. It *does* download podcasts automatically when on wifi (and will allow you to download on 3g but only after you give it permission). It also maintains a folder in your Google reader subscriptions but I don’t find it works all that well and I don’t find that aspect very useful for me. But as I said, it does work well. I’m on a 500MB/month plan so streaming isn’t even really an option for me, so trust me, the download option works well for me as I rely on them during my commute as you do.
As far as battery life, I don’t have a problem mostly because I have a charger at work and one at home. But I also heartily recommend the Tasker app (it’s got a free trial but it’s a paid app, and it takes some monkeying to set up properly) but it can do useful things like turn off the GPS when you’re in a specific location (like home), turn down the display brightness at certain times etc.. I get it to read me my text messages aloud when I’m in the car and also I get it to shut down the ringer volume and notification volumes after 10pm every night. You can do a million things with it, many of which might save you considerable battery life (and be super-useful to boot). I haven’t played with it much yet, but even for the couple of useful things it was well worth paying for it IMO.
Richard, hope you and your family are enjoying the holidays. Kids sure do make the holidays a little more special.
Yes, time will tell if simplifying the platform will lead to greater use. I’ve stopped participating in forums and on IRC in an effort at concentrating my efforts.
Thanks for your comments. I’ve trimmed a small number of WP addons in a effort to simplify even more.
Menek & Richard
Thanks for the suggestion about Listen. I had tried it and found that the downloading was problematic and unreliable. I kept finding myself on the road and only a portion of the podcast was downloaded not the whole thing. Then when I later got the whole thing downloaded, it would start from the beginning and I’d struggle finding my place.
My car stereo has USB and it can read the podcasts on the HTC Desire but the Desire and the Listen can’t tell that the podcast has been played nor can it tell that half of a 2 hour podcast has been played and let me pick up listening via the headphones.
Unfortunately the iPod touch I have been using up until last week could do all these things. I really like the ability to be listening via the headphones on my lunchtime walk and then get into the truck, plug in the device and continue listening right where I left off. I’m afraid Android may not be able to do that.
I’ll check out Tasker.