Tech, life and everything else
I’m generally not a gamer, playing computer games has never really fascinated me, I find programming more exciting. But sometimes I don’t feel like programming or I don’t have the possibility to do it. Of course it’s important to be bored sometimes, because then you can think about things for a while. But a little entertainment in a free minute is sometimes not bad as well.
Last year I wrote about how I check the battery health of my smartphone. The app I used for that shows a notification when a certain charge level is reached that you can unplug the smartphone so it doesn’t charge to 100%.
My smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite, which has been my daily driver for a year and a few months, has a 4500mAh Li-Po battery ("lithium-ion polymer" – like lithium-ion, but with solid or gel-like electrolytes that allow a thinner design). My smartphone can be charged with a maximum of 45 watts. The included charger, which I always use for charging, delivers a maximum of 25 watts.
After I put my new SIM card in my phone today (yes, the one with the unlimited mobidata volume - thanks for all the replies to my recent post!), I noticed that there suddenly appeared a new app that wanted to offer me additional services via SMS, of course for a fee. An app with no benefit for me, even annoying me by the presence of the app icon in the app drawer and the missing possibility to deactivate the app!
When I used to run back in the days, I used Runtastic to record my runs. When I tried running again last year, my app of choice was Strava. For recording hikes, I mostly use Komoot. But today for recording a bike ride, I tried FitoTrack.
I found this little open source app to wake up or even shut down my new code server using my smartphone: BootBoi. The whole thing even works via Tailscale, if I use a device from my home network as exit node. To wake up a Wake-on-LAN packet is sent and to shut down a SSH command is executed.
Over three years after I mused about what it is like to still use a Holo Design app in 2018, the final version of K-9 Mail has now been released with a revamped user interface.
I don’t like Twitter and I’m a fan of Nitter as an alternative frontend. Whenever there’s a link to Twitter, I use Nitter to read it. Especially the mobile web version of Twitter is terrible, even more with a slow network connection. Not to mention the bad user experience when reading threads. Nitter gives a much better experience because it’s lightweight and fast.
Although I no longer use Instagram, I still have an account there, and from time to time I like to see what people I know post there. To do that I always used the website in the browser. However, their website is not fast and has some bugs. Recently, I came across the alternative Instagram client “InstaGrabber”. While it sounds like a simple Instagram image downloader, it has a lot more functionality. It allows viewing your feed and stories of people you follow. To enable this, you can also login.
Reply to: A question by a reader
Answer to a comment by a reader on my last post: I know that there’s an active modding community for the Xiaomi Mi A1. However, I don’t want to use any custom ROM as long as possible, because it usually makes using banking apps etc. a lot harder and I don’t have any alternative to them. And Android 9 is still recent enough that all apps (I need) work fine. I used LineageOS on my Moto G 3rd Gen. and the Moto E 1 Gen. I had before.
Is it just my feeling or is there way less talk about custom ROMs these days? I already thought about this in 2018.