Sunday, October 27, 2013

STRINGS is here!!

In celebration of the release of STRINGS, by Allison M. Dickson (a brilliant lady I know, she lets me fix her appliances), I thought it would be nice to release a little extra promotional material that people could carry with them.

As my latest obsession on my phone was to optimize productivity and minimize any unnecessary clutter, I've been going through a number of apps that allow you to set up your own self-created widgets, since most that I've found don't quite do enough. My first was Minimalistic Text, which is great with all it can do, but a pain to set back up when you flash new ROMs on your phone as much as I do. I believe I've found a happier home now with UCCW (Ultimate Custom Clock Widget), which allows more functionality in a single widget, as well as being able to display graphics. The best thing for all the STRINGS fans though, is that it allows me to take the skin I made for STRINGS and put it on the Google Play Store for you to install and enjoy!!
There are a few things to cover in setting this up on your Android home screen:

  1. You need to install UCCW first before you can expect to do anything with my app.
  2. Simply installing my app won't get you anywhere, as you can't run it and expect something to happen. It's only a skin for UCCW, basically a few images and instructions to tell UCCW how to make a home screen widget the way I want it made.
  3. The first part of UCCW that you will need to concern yourself with in order to get this all up and running is the app portion, where you run it from your App Drawer and configure the weather settings to feed the right weather service data, temperature measurements, and rate of updating the current weather information.
  4. The second part of UCCW to work with, after installing the STRINGS skin is to set up your home screen widget. This can happen any number of ways, depending on your phone or tablet's launcher. Some can be selected from the home screen with a long-press on an open piece of desktop, others let you select them from the home screen by pressing your Menu button, and others allow your to select them from the Widget section of the app drawer. In any case, you need to select UCCW, then UCCW will ask you what size you want the widget to be. A good default is 4x3 (Columns x Rows), but feel free to make it what you have room for on your screen. Once you have selected the size, UCCW will present the list of skins, which is where you will find STRINGS with a BIG picture, waiting for your selection.
  5. Once you have made your selection, you'll be taken back to your home screen and you'll see a hand inviting you to touch the screen to start the widget.
Now, you should have STRINGS on your home screen waiting for you to enjoy both its form, and function. The colors of the 3 red circles and 3 gray circles can all be independently set. Pressing the "hidden button" (in light green below) toward the top of the right-most (darkest) red circle, will open up the UCCW editor, where you can change the colors AND functions of the hotspots to better fit your needs.
I hope you enjoy the skin, and recommend it to your friends to help spread the word about STRINGS!!

Thursday, October 24, 2013

STRINGS in the dark...

Because sometimes you want to help promote a book without ruining your night-vision.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

New Home: New Home Network...

Here's a little bit of home networking history for my household. Somewhere around 1998, I had the opportunity to switch from using a Dial-Up Modem to a Cable Modem, and as with most people, the world became a different place. When I met a nice lady kind enough to consider marrying me, and we bought a house (in 2000), I used the awesome Internet Connection Sharing feature built into Windows (98 and/or 2000) to get the second computer we had onto the internet. This quickly became a problem, so we went and looked for an appliance to manage the internet connection for both computers.

SMC Barricade
We found the SMC Barricade, device for which there is no elegant way to physically arrange (due to its having connections or switches on ALL 4 of it's shorter sides), but was well equipped for the time and I still have in case of emergencies. Not only was it a capable network router for broadband applications, it was also equipped with a parallel port for printer sharing and a serial port that you could configure for a Dial-Up Modem (which we did use for a stretch when our first child was on the way). The Barricade saw us through a brief stint with 802.11a wireless networking, when we bought an SMC access point and PCMCIA wireless card to get our laptop connected from the living room, when we had all of our computers and other devices in the bedroom previously. Sometime around 2003, when these early wireless devices became a little too problematic, and everything seemed to be shifting away from 802.11a, we went looking for a router that not only was faster, but had an 802.11b/g access point built in.

Linksys WRT54GEnter the Linksys WRT54G. Not only was this a very capable router right out of the box, but it ran Linux. There was a growing number of people dedicated to making it better and adding new capabilities. This router saw us through our times with Vonage after we dumped the local POTS, and helped us fool our DirecTivo into thinking it still had a phone connection to connect back to DirecTV. Later it moved with our cable modem from our bedroom/office to the entertainment center in the living room, where it could be directly connected to our Tivo HD ,XBOX 360, Powerline network adapter (for our other PCs in far reaches of the house), and Home Theater PC. The WRT54G served us for many years and still hasn't completely croaked on us (even though it tried to on a few occasions). Currently, it serves most of those same devices, in addition to a number of laptops, Android devices, a network All-in-One printer, a Blu-Ray Player, and occasionally our TV. It has had a long and full life.

TP-Link TL-WDR3600Now (2013), on the verge of us moving to a new (bigger) house we are probably going to need a second access point to fully blanket the house with our WiFi signals. We would also like to be able to take advantage of the HUGE speed increases we have been largely ignorant of in both wired and wireless networking. So we're getting a new router, but one that can run the same custom firmware as the trusty WRT54G, called DD-WRT. The new router is the TP-Link TL-WDR3600, and not only is it bigger/faster/stronger (gigabit Ethernet and dual band 300Mbps wireless), but it adds back some expandibility we've been missing in the form of 2 USB ports, which can be used for printer sharing or storage right out of the box. We'll see what other tricks I can set them up for later on. For now, it will become our main router, and the WRT-54G will retire to a lighter load as auxiliary access point and network switch. We'll be able to have the same interface to administer both, and shouldn't have any issues connecting to WiFi at the end of the house furthest from the router any more.