Android Market Spyware Scare.. let’s not get excited

TalkAndroid is reporting today that a Tip Calculator app in the android market is really a nasty little piece of spyware. Allegedly, this app will intercept all of your text messages and forward them to someone else via email.

So, which app is it? We don’t know. The source for this story is a press release from Chinese Android developer NetQin Mobile. In the release, they remind readers that they have conveniently released their mobile Anti Virus app to combat this and other mobile threats.

So, lets think about this. This unknown developer is warning us that the sky is falling unless we download their antivirus suite on our phones. Doesn’t this sound like something we’ve all seen before? Think about it. Think harder. Continue reading

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The Inqy on your Kindle for Cheapskates [mashup]

After purchasing my Kindle yesterday, I began looking into ways to use it beyond the obvious ones. One feature that appeals to me is the chance to comfortably browse and read newspapers away from the computer and without fumbling with .. well,.. a newspaper.

Now, before I go any further let me tell you that I do not read the paper everyday, so I’m not willing to shell out even the paltry 12 bucks a month for digital subscriptions to the Inquirer and Daily News. Rather, I devised a mashup that grabs all the news from Philly.com in the past 24 hours and gets it on your Kindle easily and quickly.

The first tool I used was Calibre, a tool for managing ebooks and performing exactly what I was looking for: using a website to generate something of a “text podcast” for a site you want to read frequently. Unfortunately, Philly.com’s rss feed and website presented a few issues. For one, there’s no standard “print view” link, so the examples given on Calibre’s website would not work for obtaining a clutter free version of the article.

To overcome this, I used Instapaper‘s text viewing ability, which formats any webpage as text only. But there was another issue.. the rss feed had redirects and Instapaper wouldn’t render the articles from them. The links also only lead to the first page of each article, out of possibly many. Luckily, the final URLs were part of the false ones in the RSS feed, and the site allows for a viewAll URL flag which presents the entire article on one page.

The final solution: I wrote an ASP script to parse out those final links and rewrite the RSS feed in order to point each article at Instapaper’s viewer. Now by simply setting Calibre up to generate the news from http://www.brabbler.com/brabbler/customfeeds/philly.asp (see image below), you get (more or less) clean, full articles that are ready to drop onto your Kindle(or Nook or any other eReader) as you run out the door. Of course the content doesn’t exactly match the paper- this feed is based only on news as opposed to classifieds and such, but it should work well for the majority of people who just want the main bits.

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Suddenly I own a Kindle.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, and after having my phone battery die away from home after reading for a couple hours straight the other day, I guess the notion of owning an e-ink based reader popped into my head. For those who don’t know, e-ink is a pretty amazing technology. It looks like printed paper, doesn’t catch glare, and only consumes power while it’s changing.. making it perfect for a book reader. These devices seriously last for weeks on end.

This morning as I logged onto Amazon to see the daily deals, they pulled off their brilliant mind-reading stunt that they so often do, and presented me with a link to refurbished Kindles. Much to my surprise, the U.S. Wireless Kindle was listed for only $110. Seriously.. 110 bucks! The price was better than I’d seen for even used Kindles and I haven’t been out of the US in over 15 years, so I bit the bullet.

So now I sit and wait patiently while Amazon readies my order for shipment. I guess the one downside to buying refurbed is that they don’t offer the free 2-day shipping that they do for the new ones.

Oh well, I’m reading a paper book at the moment anyway.

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GlovePIE for P.B. Winterbottom

In the past week, I’ve been buying a ton of sub-$3 games from Steam’s summer sale. A few of them, as expected, were primarily designed for consoles so they don’t control as well as you might hope on a keyboard.

So,.. I finally got my old bluetooth dongle working in Win7 and got to toying with GlovePIE. The first game I wanted to set up was The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. This is a puzzle game at heart, but being that it’s presented in the form of a 2d platformer, using a Wiimote was a natural control solution.

This scheme uses the Wiimote on it’s side like an NES controller. Movement is handled by the d-pad, jump with 2, swing your umbrella with 1, record clones with the b-button, and pause with the + button.

GlovePIE script for the Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom

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Reverse Lookup v1.9.9

Today I pushed out a fairly significant update to both Reverse Lookup and Reverse Lookup+. I think this is the biggest single update since I’ve been working on them, and it represents a turning point for the app.

Among the changes are code optimizations that improve performance and which will ease future development and maintenance. Probably the most notable change to the end user, is that I’ve added the first unofficial call data source to the search. What this means for users is that you should see fewer “Unlisted Toll Free” results. We still can’t get verified data for these numbers, but now there’s a good shot that the app will be able to return a good approximation on who’s calling. It won’t work all the time, of course, but I believe it will work often enough that most users should benefit.

There were a few other changes as well that I won’t get into here. For more information head over to the esMobile site or search for “Reverse Lookup” on the Android Market.

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New Android Market Feature

One thing that quickly became apparant to me when I started developing for Android is that the userbase is largely – how can I put this? – immature.

Of course this doesn’t apply to everyone, but nonetheless the market comments can quickly become overrun by useless conversation, spam, and for some reason, lies.

In order to combat this, Google added comment flagging early on in the life of the market, and today I noticed another feature taking aim at these types of posts.(It’s entirely possible this has been going on for a while.. I’m not on the market enough to where I would have caught it immediately)

It appears that users can no longer leave a comment on an application that they have uninstalled. In these cases, Google now replaces their review with a message that they’ve uninstalled the application and their reason why.

This might be a good way to stop people from downloading apps just to make comments such as “first”, advertise their contact info, or otherwise to sabotage an apps ratings.

As a developer, I definitely see the advantage, though it’s possible to get stuck with “defective” ratings from users who just don’t understand the app. I guess with the good comes the bad.. but in this case I believe the positive results will outweigh the bad.

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Google Voice is awesome

In case you haven’t heard, Google Voice is now open to the public. You should go sign up. I guarantee there’s something here that you can take advantage of.

To start off, Google gives you a new phone number which seamlessly integrates with your existing one. Callers who use the GV number are blindly forwarded to your real phone number(or any combination of several real numbers, depending how you set it up.)

Maybe your boss has a bad habit of calling you when you’re off the clock – no problem… route any of those 5pm or later calls from him straight back to your office number!

To cut down on mobile minutes, you may want to talk to your friends on your home phone when you aren’t on the go. You can schedule Google Voice to forward to that line during the hours when you know you’ll be home. Your friends won’t know the difference except that they dialed your Google Voice number to contact you.

You also get SMS service. Using the Google Voice Android app(or their web app for other , more.. ahem.. “tightly controlled experience” phones) you can send limitless texts without blowing through your plan’s quota. Heck, with the Google Voice Chrome extension, you can text back and forth from your web browser. How great is that?

FInally(but not really.. there’s a ton of other features that I’m not going to get to).. you get a great voicemail service. When callers leave you a voicemail(and you can use this service with your existing cell #), you can view the message on the web, as if it was an email. Google uses their excellent voice translation technology to deliver near-perfect transcriptions of any messages you receive. These messages can also be emailed to you if you wish. As mentioned before, I opted for the Google Voice Android App, which expectedly pops up a status bar notification when new VM or SMS messages arrive.

If you’re interested at all, I highly recommend giving it a shot. There’s a ton of ways to make Google Voice do exactly what you want and I haven’t covered even a fraction of them.

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Format AllRecipes for Kindle

If you’re a fan of cooking and a Kindle owner, you might appreciate this little utility that I wrote for my girlfriend today.

It takes a recipe from AllRecipes.com and formats it so that it can be easily read on a Kindle without pesky horizontal scrolling. The output it produces looks great with the Kindle(software version 2.5) set to “actual size”. There’s even a bookmarklet that will let you convert to Kindle format instantly with 1 click when you’re browsing AllRecipes.

Just use the bookmarklet on your favorite recipes and then use a utility to “print” to a PDF file, and drop it on your Kindle. I think it’s fairly straightforward. Any questions? Please leave a comment.

Also, I’m interested in how these PDFs work out on other devices. Feel free to post your experience and screenshots.

Format AllRecipes recipe for Kindle

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Uncable yourself!

CNN has an article today about ditching your cable service without much sacrifice. It’s a great read for anyone considering cutting themselves free , but the writer didn’t research much into some technologies that can make internet tv even more convenient.

In addition to watching Netflix through a game console and Hulu on a laptop, consider the following:

Continue reading

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Thoughts on Time Travel

A random topic, I know. But I often sit and think about random things, so you get the pleasure of reading it.

All of us grow up watching movies and tv shows about time travel and thinking about how cool it will be to someday have the ability to fling ourselves years away in just an instant. Some are intrigued by the future and what type of advances it might hold for us, while others would like to experience an age long before our time.

A nice bonus is that movie based time travel also has the ability to put you in a different location.. seemingly anywhere on earth. There’s never fear that you will emerge inside of a wall or a hundred feet above the natural ground line, not yet developed by a hundred years of city development. In fact, movie based time travel easily plops you down precisely where you want to be.

But all of this is just a pipe dream. It will never happen. None of it. Ever. You don’t have to be a rocket science to come to this conclusion. Just think about it logically. If time travel were possible, people from some time in the future would have access to it. It’s irrelevant how near or far we are to it today, humanity has a nearly limitless amount of time to develop it, and we would be seeing the results of it already. Barring the extinction of humanity or the destruction of the planet, there could be tens of thousands, perhaps a million years left to develop this technology. And yet.. no time travelers have surfaced(unless you believe John Titor).

I know, I know,.. “but scientists know that altering the past would affect the future, so they would be careful not to expose themselves”. This is true, but again the limitless timeframe presents a problem. Just like it used to be that only the government had access to the internet, air travel, and nearly every other technology, these types of things start out in the hands of officials and then filter down to the public years or decades later. Surely there’d be plenty of lackey’s traveling around on their family vacations, ignorant to the repercussions of altering our current time.

So, sad as it may be for the science fiction hopeful, time travel just isn’t in the cards for us. Hopefully it’s not linked as tightly into fast space travel as scientists believe, because it would be ashame if we never find a way to make it to the edges of the solar system(or beyond?)

I’ll sit and think about that some other day.

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