I've been slowly becoming aware that Google Maps is eating up a lot of the power on my phone (an HTC One X with Android 4.1). Yesterday as my battery was near death I saw it was up to 25% of total usage on a day when I hadn't even run the app. Something had to give. I'd already turned off Google Latitude a few months ago so the culprit had to be whatever secret-squirrel location sniffing the phone does behind my back.
Android has about a million different incomprehensible weasily location options. At least in 4.1, I've seen some evidence that 4.2 is a bit better. The bargain with 'Google's location service' seems to be that if you don't send your data to them they won't send it to you. At least I think so, the description changes when you check or uncheck the option. I've had this off for today and my battery has a lot more juice. It means that Google Now doesn't work, but so far that doesn't seem to be a loss. It might hurt other apps as well, but so far I care more about not having a dead phone at the end of the day.
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
5/5
Epic Murakami, set in a maybe-alternate-universe version of 1984. There is a definite change in tone in the third book, hard to tell if this is the story of the change in translator but the story sags slightly before picking up the pace again at the end. Even without this it's a long and sprawling book which you'll love if you like Murakami's tone and unique characterization. I'm in the love camp.
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I’ve just released Catfood Earth for Android. It’s my second app created with Xamarin’s excellent toolkit. Being able to develop in C# allowed me to reuse a lot of code from the Windows version of Catfood Earth. The Android version doesn’t include all the same layers (yet) but it’s got the main ones – daytime (twelve different satellite images included, based on NASA’s Blue Marble Next Generation but with some special processing to make them look better), nighttime (city lights, shaded to show nighttime and the terminator between day and night) and a clouds layer that is downloaded every three hours.
My main worry had been that this would suck the phone battery dry, but after a fair amount of optimization it doesn’t even register on the battery consumption list. Grab it now from Google Play ($3.99, Android 2.2 or better).
The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters
5/5
Stonking police procedural set in the months leading up to a global catastrophe.
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When jarsigner says "Key Associated with [alias] not a private key" it almost certainly meant to say that you got your password wrong.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
4/5
A personal anti-adventure, gripping and poignant and pedestrian.
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Reamde by Neal Stephenson
5/5
Intelligent and humorous if highly contrived thriller set loosely around an MMORPG. Loved it.
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Oh no:
My phone keeps running out of space. A little sleuthing under Manage Applications shows that Contacts Storage is using over 32MB. Can’t move it to the SD Card – I guess this makes sense, although it would be nice to cache some of the non-essential data there. I’ve no idea if this is a HTC problem or an Android problem (I have a HTC Aria), but some Googling would seem to indicate that it’s not uncommon.
In the People app choosing View from the menu allows you to pick which sources to use to display contacts. I had 5,854 contacts from Twitter, despite having configured the Twitter app to only sync with existing contacts. I also had a bunch of Facebook contacts, with the same configuration (existing contacts).
I tried deleting Twitter from Accounts & Sync. This warned that it would remove contacts (great!) but after blowing it away Contacts Storage had more than doubled to over 70MB.
Time to go nuclear. I backed up existing contacts and then deleted all data from Contacts Storage. My phone is happy again.
Contacts and sync in general is the worst part of the Android experience. HTC Sync is a contact-duplicating, pop-up-and-wave-my-arms-in-the-air-every-time-I-do-anything piece of Adobe Air uselessness. Google really needs a better answer for people who live in Outlook on the desktop. Or maybe they’ll eventually grind me down into GMail…