I love my G1.  Its a fantastic phone with tons of features that make my nerdy side giggle with glee.  I hate my G1s battery life.  If I use my phone throughout the day, it often won’t last without being charged.  Luckily, it charged via a mini-usb port so its easy to keep a cable or 5 around and simply plug into a computer or laptop or any 5v source.  Another easy source of power is a MintyBoost.  They are a cheap and easy source of powering USB devices from batteries.

A useful app to help prolong battery life is called AnyCut.  It allows you to create a shortcut to almost any setting of the phone.  When you fire it up click the “New Shortcut” button, and select the “Activity” option.  After that select “Phone Info” and put the shortcut anywhere you want.  When you click on your new shortcut, hit the menu button, the More option then click “Disable data connection”.  This will turn off your phone’s data radio and will drastically prolong your phone’s battery life.

Another thing that you can do is to TURN OFF the functions that you are not using or immediately have no use for. The GPS feature is a major power hog. If the GPS Icon (satellite icon) is in the status bar then GPS is on, if you are not using the GPS feature then turn it off to save some power. To do this go to: Settings -> Security & Location -> Unmark the Enable GPS satellites option.

Automatic synchronization of email and other data can consume battery life in a hurry.  Email can be retrieved as often as every 5 minutes and will surely deplete your battery in a hurry.  To turn off the Auto-Sync option go to: Settings ->Data Synchronization and unmark the Auto-sync option.  This same principle is applies to other applications that are automatically going out and retrieving data.  If the option applies, try changing the update time to every 30 minutes instead of every 5.

Another option is to reduce the screen brightness.  While on the Home screen press: Menu | Settings | Sound & Display | Brightness – adjust it to something lower than what it is.

All these items are optional setthings that can be used in conjuction with one another to improve the battery life on the T-Mobile G1.

No tags Hide

Anyone who follows my twitter stream knows that I use it utterly frivolously.  If you check it out it is full of ads (from Magpie), random mutterings, links to silly cat photos, and now my listening habits.

After a disasterous beginning attempting to tweet my Pandora listening habits.  This, was a disaster.  My utterly inelegant solution worked infrequently at best, or would seemingly queue up songs and blast twitter with 5 or 6 then be silent for 20 minutes before doing so again.

So, I moved on.  I was ready to give up on the project and simply let it die, but I couldn’t.  It kept spinning around in my head. “You can do this,” my internal monologue said to be in its best Scottish Brogue.  Yes, my inner monologue has a Scottish accent. Don’t mock it, it keeps things interesting.  I sometimes answer in pig latin just to keep things entertaining. “Ayeway, utbay owhay ancay Iway oday itway?  Iway annotcay eesay ethay ayway.” I told my inner monologue.  After a conversation or two with a rubber duck and a troll doll the lightbulb went off.

So, I attacked from a different angle.  Approached the problem from the “use other people’s work and take credit for it kinda” direction.  I discovered Pandora.FM. This great mashup posts what I am listening to on Pandora to Last.fm.  I’ve used Last.fm in the past, a little bit, so this wasn’t foreign to me.

A quick bit of PHP and some cron work, tada..a script that posts what I am listening to on Pandora to Twitter.  It works EVERY time, 100% of the time! But…there is a side benefit by using last.fm.  I can actualy scrobble from many sources, including my personal music library from my PC.  This means, that no matter what I am listening to, if I can get it into Last.fm, I can tell the twitterverse about it!

Now, I know some of you want the script…tough tiddly winks!  Its too spammy (and poorly coded) for mass consumption.  I gave you all the pieces you need to write it yourself if you really want to. If you are interested purely from a scientific standpoint, leave a comment or hit me up via the contact link on the main page and I’ll give you a helping hand and some code snippets.

So, we have a twittering toilet, a twittering office chair, and now a twittering MP3 player.  Anyone got any good ideas on what should twitter next?

No tags Hide

One of the things I loved on my iPhone was the ease of reading eBooks.  Yes, the method of doing so was illegal (via Installer.app and user run repositories), but it was simple and beautiful.  The Books.app was fantastic, allowing quick and easy access to a library of books.

So, after rooting my G1 and aquiring my 4Gb class 6 SD Card to do my Apps2SD (an update on that soon), I decided it was time to see about getting some eBook love running on my new phone.  I lost access to the lovely repository of eBooks on the iPhone, so now I have to rely on my personal library of literature.  Luckily for me I have several gigs of eBooks stored on my PC.  I have collected them over the years from Project Gutenberg, freely-licensed books and (*gasp*) some torrents (shameful I know but the only way for me to get access to some of what I wanted to have).

Most of my eBooks are in .lit format.  This presents a challenge as the best (only?) eBook reader for Android cannot read .lit.  Enter Calibre.  Calibre allows me to manage my library of ebooks and convert them to any number other of formats, inlcuding epub, a format supported by FBReader for Android.

FBReader is still a bit rough around the edges, but it gets the job done.  To use it, create a folder on your sdcard called “Books” and then store your books there.  It will read into subdirectories, so I have gone ahead and sorted my reading material by Genre so I can easily add and remove books as I finish them.  The interface is pretty easy to use and books in epub format load quickly without much hassle.

So there ya go, a “guide” to eBooks on Android.  Who needs a Kindle anyways.

No tags Hide