Steam Annoyances

So yeah, I’m still a bit undecided about Steam. On the one hand, it’s brilliant in that you can readily get new games and updates and such and everything magically happens in the background – the fact that you don’t have to install stuff is amazing. On the other hand, it’s a closed platform that could use a bit of opening up.

Motorola XOOM: A Third Look

So the big difference between then and now is that I bought a Samsung Galaxy S2 and wow does that purchase ever change things. The SGS2 makes almost every device on the market that isn’t a variant of the SGS2 look bad and this handedly includes the XOOM. Other than some very tablet-specific apps (like those that take advantage of fragments) and for applications where resolution changes everything, there’s almost nothing that the SGS2 can’t do better than my venerable “old” XOOM.

Running Series: Little Tweaks, Tips and Apps (Part 4)

It’s been awhile since the last post, this edition deals with a very simple problem of universally blocking domains. While this is something often handled by ad and popup blockers etc., I prefer the platform-independent and much more direct host-blocking.

Android Diaries, Part 6: Keeping everything safe

I guess I got a bit ahead of myself with the rooting and custom ROMs. I mentioned briefly about how it’s strongly recommended to back everything up, but I guess I didn’t quite talk about how to exactly go about doing this! Never too late, read on.

Android Diaries, Part 5: Custom ROMS

In my last look at SGS2, I overviewed getting root access and getting core utilities installed and in place. Now most people can call it a day and move on with their lives knowing they have proper admin privileges on their phone. For me, the phone was almost perfect… only a few things really outstanding that were bugging me – but they bugged me enough, so the default configuration had to go.

Android Diaries, Part 4: Fixing the SGS2

The Samsung Galaxy S II is a wonderful device out of the box but the one thing that irks me is the TouchWiz UI skin. The plain simple Android experience is damn near perfect, I don’t understand why manufacturers need to add extra bloat and crap (MotoBlur, Sense, TouchWiz, etc.) to the user experience. This guide documents my attempts to get rid of all the excess crap.

Android Diaries, Part 3: Gingerbread

I’ve been pretty happy with my cleaned up Milestone and I was content with running a rooted and slightly modded Android 2.2.1. Then I stumbled upon an article outlining a serious data vulnerability affecting Android versions up to and including 2.3.3. This gave me the final push I needed to take the next step with my phone.

Android Diaries, Part 2: Tools

The nice thing about smartphones, and more so, getting knee deep into the smartphone world is that your experience is exactly how you want it. You can use it plain vanilla out of the box, you can tear it down and rebuild every little detail (depending on the limitations of the device etc.) or you can settle in somewhere in the middle.
This post (which I will update as I discover more wonderful tools etc.) is an attempt to share my experiences with some of Android’s system tool type of applets, widgets and such. For reference sake, I run a Motorola Milestone on Canada’s Telus network. As such, I don’t have access to customized ROMs and such due to the restriction on the Milestone’s boot loader where all ROMs must be signed by Motorola.

Android Diaries, Part 1: Froyo

Welcome to the first of a totally new series about my experiences with Android. My first Android phone, the (at the time) flagship Motorola Milestone (the Canadian/Global interpretation of the Motorola Droid) is a pretty awesome out-of-the-box phone as is. When I bought my phone, it shipped with Éclair (2.0) and was shortly updated (2.1).
While these updates were nice and all, the overall feet dragging and slow time-to-market for the Google updates are a big turnoff. Hopefully Google steps in to take some form of stance for forcing the allowing-of updates to propagate through the market somehow.
Thankfully, Telus just recently released the long overdue update to the Android mobile operating system, finally my Motorola Milestone has Froyo (2.2.1) – and I’ve been knee deep in the sheer awesome that it brings.

Running Series: Little Tweaks, Tips and Apps (Part 3)

Contents

1. The types of tools
2. Issues to know about before jumping in

[Back to series]

I have had the luxury of working with multiple monitors for, well.... forever. The OS support for multiple monitors has come a long way over the last 15 years and even non-geeks can be found running dual-monitors these days. Regardless of whether your background is in graphics design, software development, day-trading, marketing there is a tick about a power user when they are setup with multiple monitors. Their secret is in their stash of shortcuts, tools and hacks. Keep in mind that although the focus for many of these tools is for multi-monitor setups, some of them apply even to single monitor users!

Running Series: Little Tweaks, Tips and Apps (Part 2)

Contents

1. Automated System Cleaning

[Back to series]

Automated System Cleaning
So I do a lot of ASP.NET development on my personal system. I have bursts of going through online videos. This results in a lot of garbage showing up on my system, both in the system's Temp folder as well as the Temporary Internet folder (my primary/only browser is IE). There are guides out there to show you how to Clear IE's cache and even to clear the cache for a specific domain (i.e., site) but there are a bunch of drawbacks and concerns:

• It takes damn near forever (depending on how much junk you have accumulated)
• Does it really clear your temporary browsing cache? (after all, your browser is still open and as a general principle, you cant delete files while applications using them are open...)
• What if you use multiple browsers?
• There's no easy convenient way to empty you system's temporary folders

This is where a neat little free application call CCleaner ('C' for 'crap) comes in. It's handles the deletion of temporary files, browsing cache (of multiple browsers) and general removal of "crap". It has a built in whitelist system to let you mark certain cookies you want to keep (say, your Facebook login cookie). It's pretty straightforward to run too - you just click 'analyze' then 'clean' and wait (depending on how much crap you've accumulated) and poof it's done!

It's pretty easy: double-click (to launch), click (analyze) and click (clean) and click (to close) and you're done! Normally this is something I run every so often manually (i.e., during development, when I really want to wipe cookies etc or after a particularly long session of Youtubing, or 'just because'). Being the lazy old fart I am, I figured there's got to be a better way to do things with less work. Turns out there is.

A quick little investigation yielded command line parameters for CCleaner. Turns out '/AUTO' (without the quotes) runs CCleaner in the tray with the current settings and exits when finished. Brilliant! Now just make a shortcut with the auto parameter and double-click and you're done!

There are two issues still outstanding:

1. It still takes damn near forever (depending on the amount of crap accumulated) and
2. What about all the cookies I do want to save? (i.e., login cookies and such)

Well there's not a whole lot you can do about the latter (you have to manually fire up CCleaner and whitelist the cookies yourself... so you'll still have to do work every so often). As for the former, common sense suggests that if you run CCleaner more often, the individual cleanings should be a relative breeze. So I thought: why not have the automated cleaning happen on a regular basis .. sure it would 'accidentally' wipe out cookies every so often, but in time, my cookie whitelist would get longer and longer and it would be less of a hassle. Worth a shot!

Here's how to make your life simpler and cleaner:

1. Fire up Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) .. you can find it under Administrative Tools
2. On the right hand side, click 'Create Task'. A window pops up [sample]
3. Setup your trigger to determine how often you want to clean your system [sample]. When you're done, it will list all your triggers [sample]
4. Now setup what your want this automated event to actually do [sample]. When you're done it will list all the actions [sample]. For my system, I have the cleaning done every two hours.
5. Determine the scenarios you want the cleaning to run [sample]. This will realistically only affect notebook users and those who put their system to sleep often.
6. Set the various misc settings for the automated task [sample]. For my case, I have the system force-close if there is a crash/lock.

And that's it!

You can test the task simply by right clicking on the task in the task scheduler and selecting 'Run'. You'll see a little CCleaner icon in your system tray as it runs and it'll automagically go away when it's done it's thing. I would suggest, while you're in the Task Scheduler window, to export the task so that you dont have to do all this if you decide to format the system!

Running Series: Little Tweaks, Tips and Apps (Part 1)

Welcome to the first of a new series of mine where I talk about various tweaks, optimizations for Windows power users. I can't stress enough that this is targeted at power users. For the benefit of random Googlers that get to this blog who may not be full out power users, I'll try to keep the description, instructions or whatnot as complete as possible (which is my style anyways). In this opener, I'll share one very useful app I've built out and a couple nifty tricks.

Running Series: Win 7/Vista Aggravations (Part 2)

Welcome back, this is the second edition of my running series on Windows 7/Vista aggravations. In this segment, I'll address the nagging automagic updates and excessive collection of crash dumps.

Running Series: Win 7/Vista Aggravations (Part 1)

Welcome to the first part of a running series where I rant about problems specific to high-performance Windows 7 installations and provide some insight into addressing them (and ultimately, the solution). Due to the close similarities, the problems encountered here and the solutions provided wiill almost certainly be extendable to Windows Vista and possibly, other Microsoft technologies.