Tag Archive: creativity


Today I and the rest of the world received a very sad news. The founder of Apple, Steve Jobs passed away.

I write this post with mixed emotions. In one hand I always disliked Apple’s policy about the restriction they put on their devices, but I have to admit that Steve Jobs revolutionize the way the end-user deals with gadgets.

As the result of his inventions we have the generalize usage off smartphones, the highly evolving tablet market and even the top of the line systems for graphic design and audio&video editing, the Mac OS.

I would like to say another think about this exceptional man. Pancreas cancer is one of the most painful, and I’ve never saw him complain or with a painful expression. For me that was a lesson in how to live well our suffering.

For all you’ve given to our World and for the lessons you taught us,

Thank you mister Steve Jobs!! May you have the peace you deserve.

A picture someone send me that reflects the genius of this man.

2010 in review

Despite the world economic crisis that affected the World in 2010, I must say, that I can only be happy with myself. The analytics’s results are great for me, if one takes in consideration that: 1 blogging isn’t my prime professional activity; 2 that I had quite some problems with my computers this year; and 3 my main profession is very time consuming (Chinese Medicine Practitioner).

So I want to thanks every visitor of this site for stopping by, and I’ll promise to make more posts this Years, specially because I’ve receiving a Kindle for my Birthday (January 30th) and I intend to buy me a Tablet (still deciding if I’ll go android or spend the extra cash and go for Linux)

So Happy new year to everyone and thanks for stooping by (you could make some comments however)

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,600 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 22 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 30 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was June 15th with 48 views. The most popular post that day was Dropbox portable for Portableapps.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were forum.xda-developers.com, portablefreeware.com, androidandme.com, healthfitnesstherapy.com, and slashingtongue.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for dropbox portable, portable dropbox, youtube ripper for android, dropbox portable apps, and dropboxportable.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Dropbox portable for Portableapps June 2010

2

Youtube ripper for Android May 2010

3

We All Like to Reblog (via WordPress.com News) June 2010
18 comments

4

Droppedboxx for windows mobile June 2010
2 comments

5

[Review] WM6.5 COM3 Rom for HTC Prophet by babak00000 April 2010

After a few month of inactivity, I’m back with some comments on Portable stuff (in terms of technology, of course).

In the last few weeks portals like Android and Me and Engadget (If anyone knows others please share them with us) have been releasing a lot of news about tablets, android based for the most part. While I really think this is quite good, it’s also quite frustrating and limited.

For two years I’ve been a user of portable applications and games. Back in the beginning of 2008  I received my first U3 pen with 16 GB and another one, a DATAFERRY with 16GB. After a few months using, and loving, U3 I got tired off all the good applications where payed, and not that cheap most of them, so I changed to Portableapps.com, a free and opensource platform to take your applications with you. For instance, this post is being written on the portableapps version of Firefox.

Thanks to the possibility of taking all of my favorite applications with me, and having an Asus EEE 901 (20GB SDD) to tag along, I end up realizing that there’s a huge flaw in today’s software. Most software isn’t developed with Portable guys (like me) in mind. When you have a netbook with only 20GB available you start to rely on your pen drive for most stuff. And if you discover that you can carry applications in your pen drive instead of installing them on you pc, them you will understand my reasoning. Also, my EEE 901 has Ubuntu linux on it, being the core of the OS in the 4GB SDD and the HOME partition on the 14 GB SDD. If I went around and installed all the stuff I need I would run out of space in no time (and trust me, my installation of Ubuntu was 6 months ago and I only have 600MB out of 4GB free).

And if I’m going to a place where I know that I’ll have a pc available, I don’t want to carry my netbook with me (the screen is to small for a long term usage). So what’s my “solution”? Portable windows applications. If you go to any kind of torrent site you’ll loads of software, from the MS Office tools, to burning software, media players, games and other software. However, none (or very few) are legal copies of the software you want/need to use.

The way I see it, we are going to have a real battle between OS in the (very) near future. Mostly because they will all want to be the masters of Tablets, in the same way that Windows is the master of personal computers (I know there are a lot of Mac and Linux users around, but let’s face it, most of the computers have windows installed).

And if the event is inevitable, as I think it is, them, in my opinion, developers should start focusing on making their applications portable and able to run from a pen drive.

Just imagine the following situation:
We are a supervisor at a construction site, going around with your Windows tablet pc, taking notes and checking stuff, saving the documents and notes directly to your loyal high-capacity pen drive. You finish your walk-around and it’s time to show the results to your superior. Unless your superior has the programs you use to take the notes, you’ll have to show them on the tablet screen, that might not be the most comfortable screen to see it. But what if the programs you use are portable editions, that can easily run from a pen drive? You just un-plug the pen drive from your tablet, plug it on his computer and voila! You are now showing the result of your work on a comfortable 14″+ screen.

I hope I’ve made my point clear. In the near future we need legal and ready to use portable applications. As for me, I’ll continue to use the not so legal version (I actually own all the “portable” applications I use) but portable applications because I have to think about my health (specially my eyes).

Be well!

Francisco Ribeiro

So I was browsing trough xda looking at some of the news, specially the news app that the guys at the forum are always releasing and I decided to try one out, but I wanted to post some pics of it on the review. That took me on another search, and in this type of cases, google is your friend.

As a result of the search I came across the ilium screen capture tool (first result on google actually). I try it out and decided to share you, my estimated readers, my opinion about the tool itself.

The application is quite simple. You just start it from the start menu or from a shortcut and you are presented with the screen below.

By pressing menu you can choose some options.

The second one allows you to choose the hardware button to press in order to take the shots and the length, in seconds, of the timer.

The timer option, when pressed  will take a screen shot in x seconds (that can be changed in the options menu)

The third option is quite interesting actually. Ilium software produces more applications. via the “More” menu you can download them to you device directly which is quite handy 🙂

Conclusion:
Pros:

  • The software does what the producer say it does. A very simple, low-weight, and straight foward application. It’s ideal for people that want to take screenshots of they are doing.
  • The web-site allows you to download the .cab, meaning you can install it on the fly
  • One single note: when the app is running the chosen hardware button will only perform the screen capture, the default action of the chosen button will be override.

Cons:

  • You can’t choose the destination folder or the base name of the files.

Classification: 9/10

sites:

Ilium Software
Screen Capture

Technical sheet:

  • Application tested on Samsung Omnia 2 I8000
  • Review written on the web application via “Chrome” for linux
  • Computer used: Asus eee pc 901 running eeebuntu nbr 9.10
  • Screen shots of pocket pc action where taken using Ilium Screen Capture for windows mobile
  • Pictures uploaded to dropbox for usage via Droppedboxx for windows mobile

My second review of an Android application, this time thanks to great community of XDA

User Rolle3k has develop a ripper for youtube that I had the honor of try today.

The concept is quite simple. After instalation do the following

  1. You browse youtube with the built-in application and choose the video you want to view and download after;
  2. press menu and chose the “share” option;
  3. from the multiple options presented, choose youtube ripper;
  4. there will be a text box saying the web adress of the video you’re about to rip, ignore it;
  5. press “rip it” wait a little bit (depends on wi-fi/3G speed) and it’s done.

Please note: do not turn your screen or the download we’ll stop. Hope the dev solves this, since it’s only a beta release.

The program saves the files as .mp4 on a folder called “youtube” on your sd card. It’s quite fast, took 12seconds to rip a 2Mb file on my wi-fi and 32seconds on my 3G network.

Tested on a MyTouch 3G 32B, stock Donut 1.6

Originality: 6/10 – there are more apk that attempt to do this
functionality: 8/10 if we could choose the target folder and file name it would be 10/10
usefullness: 10/10 sometimes I see this great video on my android and want to save it, this does the job 🙂
General: 7/10 it’s still a Beta so a lot of work is on the way, but it’s my conviction that Rolle3k will succeed

Bottom line:
It’s a great application and we can only hope to see more of it in the future. I suggest everyone to install it and give it a try. And the price is also good – it’s free, but don’t forget, people have to eat so press the adds and donate if you feel the application is really good.

News page about the application on xda

Application thread on xda

p.s. sorry for not posting any screenshot but since I’m running on a stock rom I can’t take any (hope google solves it in the near future)