• Google Listen: it isn’t the perfect podcast listener, but, as with most Google products, the difference between it and perfect is small enough to tolerate.
• Astrid Task/Todo List: a great to-do list with a nice, simple widget. I’ve recently starting using its synchronization with Remember the Milk and it works well. My list is in the cloud and available to me from anywhere.
• ConnectBot: still the best ssh client I’ve found.
• RealCalc Scientific Calculator: I know, there’s one installed, but it doesn’t do RPN or binary/hexadecimal; this one does.
• RingDroid: my favorite application for getting audio files (or parts of them) to ringtones.
• Google Voice: now everyone can afford the power of a software PBX.
• My Tracks: fun for mapping favorite bike routes and sharing them via Google Maps
• Google Sky Map: simple, amazing, and tons of fun for people who are new to the power of a smartphone
• Voice Recorder or Droid Record: turns your phone into a basic audio recorder. Handy for meetings, notes in the car, etc. Both work very well, just with different interfaces.
• Google Goggles: I used to recommend Barcode Scanner (which is still handy), but this is a bit more sophisticated; awfully handy when shopping and making notes. Take a picture of a price tag (barcode), object, building, text in a foreign language, etc., and Google will work its magic.
• Contact Owner, by Paranoid Android: changes your lock / wake-up screen to include a little message on how to contact you (in case you lose your phone).
• Astro File Manager: a decent file manager (think Dolphin / Nautilus / Explorer) that also has a process manager.
• Pintail: if you ever lose your phone, you can send a specially-formatted SMS (with a PIN) to it and it will respond with its GPS location
• BeamReader PDF Viewer: It’s the only PDF viewer I’ve found that can reliably (and quickly) handle very large PDFs, like data sheets for electronic parts. There’s a free version with limited capabilities and then a “key” version you can purchase which will unlock the remaining features. The only pay-for application I have installed at the moment.
• KeePassDroid: a password manager based on the open-source KeePass. Does what it says.
• Google Buzz widget: if you use Buzz, it does what you expect it to do.
• Android Terminal Emulator: rarely used, but fun for poking around or the occasional hack.
• Compass: again, does what you’d expect. Works with GPS off, which is nice for battery savings.

And the games / silly applications:

• Jewels: a Bejeweled clone.
• Magic 8-Ball: “the outlook is amusing.”
• Coin Flip: I almost never carry change; this helps settle who drives to lunch.
• Ethereal Dialpad: a neat little “touch to make music” app, good for demonstrating the interface to others. I wish it supported multi-touch.
• Tricorder: silly fun watching the raw accelerometer data, etc.
• Barrage Lite: a Scorched Earth clone.

From scouring the web, it turns out that the “sub”-model number and build date are important. My three drives were WD15EADS-00P8B0, built Nov 2009, firmware 01.00A01. There are reports that older build-date drives can be made to work; true or not, mine could not. Western Digital’s customer service is of zero help, blaming the problem on everything but the drive.

No more Western Digital drives for me. I’m returning these three as defective. I’ve put WD drives in my last three builds because they’re inexpensive and reliable. No longer. Back to Seagate drives (yes, even after their ST31500341AS firmware debacle).

1. cd ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks
2. vboxmanage createhd –filename new.vdi –size 24000
3. vboxmanage clonehd old.vdi new.vdi –existing
4. Open VirtualBox, select the virtual machine, and click on Hard Disks.
5. In the Attachments section, click on the existing image file name (old.vdi) and click the Select Hard Disk button to its right. This will open the Virtual Media Manager dialog.
6. Select the old image file and click Release. Remove the old image file (old.vdi).
7. Click Add and browse to the new image file (new.vdi). It will now appear in the Hard Disks list.
8. Click the Select button at the bottom of the Virtual Media Manager dialog.
9. Go download a gparted LiveCD .iso file. Click on the virtual machine’s CD/DVD-ROM settings. Make sure “Mount CD/DVD Drive” is checked, pick “ISO Image File”, and browse to the gparted ISO file you just downloaded.
10. Click the OK button at the bottom of the Settings dialog to close it.
11. Start up your virtual machine. Click in the window and press F12 to bring up the boot devices menu. Pick “c” for CD/DVD-ROM.
12. Run gparted, click on your partition, and resize it to occupy the whole disk.
13. Shut down gparted, reboot, and wait for Windows to check your new hard disk.
14. Celebrate!

sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion m4
svn checkout http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk gears-trunk
cd gears-trunk
wget http://gkovacs.xvm.mit.edu/google-gears/gears-gcc433.diff
patch -p0 -i gears-gcc433.diff
chmod +x third_party/gecko_1.9/linux/gecko_sdk/bin/xpidl
cd gears
make -s

The installable file will end up in ./bin-dbg/installers/ (that is, something like /home/foo/gears-trunk/gears/bin-dbg/installers), with a name like gears-linux-x86_64-dbg-0.5.34.0.xpi. In Firefox, pick “Open File” from the File menu and browse to that directory; pick the XPI file and you should be good to go. I’ve only tested it with offline gmail, but that seems to work fine.

svndiff ()
{
  svn diff $* | colordiff | less -r
}

Pass it anything you’d pass to “svn diff”: e.g., “.” for the current directory, a list of filenames, or options like –no-diff-deleted.

• lime
• lemon
• mango
• cherry
• indigo – not a fruit, but replaced “indulgence”
• oreo – my wife has convinced me that Oreos are definitely a fruit

All machines run Ubuntu server or Kubuntu, and several dual-boot and/or virtualize XP.

1. For an article the widget will provide a “title” attribute that contains the whole content from the article. Since this site implements a tooltip-like hover box for links with a title element, that can get really ugly. The fix is trivial, and involves truncating post content at 500 characters.
2. When given a feed from my Google Reader “shared items” list, the title of the blog is mashed against the end of the article title. I’ll get things like “Cat Stuck Up TreeRoanoke Times”, which is also really ugly. The fix is somewhat more complicated, and involves not including the “source” element in the article title.

Wordpress 2.6 also finally integrated the ability to log in and administer your blog over HTTPS, so that’s one less patch/plugin I need to track.

Happy hacking!

If you find your control, shift, alt, and caps lock keys suddenly stop working outside the guest OS, run setxkbmap to get them back. The bug report indicates uninstalling VMware Tools from the guest will solve the problem, too, but I haven’t had to take so drastic a step.

In case you missed it, yesterday brought us a new release of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and family. The version is called “Hardy Heron”, version 8.04. New features of interest are desktop 3D effects (compiz), the ability to use a KDE4 desktop (which I’ve tried from the LiveCD and it’s shiny), and some bug fixes to packages like kpdf.