Off-Topic: Pocket Casts – How I Listen to Podcasts

I am an avid podcast listener, using podcasts as the main source of entertainment on my commute, when I go to gym, go shopping, cook at home, et cetera. In the past, I have used a long line of iPod nano devices  to serve my listening needs (see my review of the 7th and final generation iPod Nano), downloading podcasts to a Windows PC and then syncing them over to the device. This worked well enough, and I kind of liked separating out the battery used for listening from the battery my phone used for calls and data traffic. But nothing lasts, and now that Apple killed off the iPods I had to find a replacement solution before my last iPod broke.

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Android 7.1 Screen Scaling – Keyboard Buttons the Same Size, Text Shrinks :)

After updating my Sony Xperia Z5 Premium from 2016 to Android 7.1, I noticed the settings for screen scaling (known as Display Size). The setting has probably been around since I got Android 7 (Nougat) on the device a while back, but I did not notice it until now.  I tried it out, and it is kind of useful to shrink text a bit to get more onto the rather large screen of the device. But the keyboard behaves in a rather funny way…

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Kindle App on Android: Turning off Annoying Page Curl

kindle-app-curlA recent update to the Amazon Kindle app on my Android devices introduced a severely annoying page curl animation when flipping through pages in a book. This unnecessary animation slows things down and disrupts the reading flow, or at least that is my opinion. It was really hard to find any kind of help on the Amazon pages or elsewhere on the Internet for how to turn it off. I finally figured it out, and here is how I did it so that other people with the same problem can search and find a solution…

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The First 64-bit Phone

apple_A7_image

Apple just released their new iPhone 5s, where the biggest news is really the 64-bit processor core inside the new A7 SoC. Sixty four bits in a phone is a first, and it immediately raises the old question of just what 64 bits gives you. We saw this when AMD launched the Opteron and 64-bit x86 PC computing back in the early 2000’s, and in a less public market the same question was asked as 64-bit MIPS took huge chunks out of the networking processor market in the mid-2000s. It was never questioned in servers, however.

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Qualcomm’s Batteryguru – and Branding

It is quite interesting to see how Qualcomm has emerged as a major player in the “processor market” and is trying to build themselves into a serious consumer brand. I used to think of them as a company doing modems and other chips that made phones talk wirelessly, known to insiders in the business but not anything a user cared about. Today, however, they are working hard on building themselves into a brand to rival Intel and AMD. At the center of this is their own line of ARM-based application processors, the Snapdragon. I can see some thinking quite similar to the old “Intel Inside” classic, and I would not be surprised to see the box or even body of a phone carrying a Snapdragon logo at some point in the future. A part of this branding exercise is the Snapdragon Batteryguru, an application I recently stumbled on in the Google Play store.

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Off-Topic: Moving Bad Piggies Save Games

I am really a great fan of the Rovio games from Angry Birds and on. One of these games is the tricky puzzler Bad Piggies, which I have spent a great deal of time playing to unlock new levels (and as an illustration of deterministic simulation). Playing on my Nexus 7 I have solved level after level… and then I got myself a new Xperia phone. Not that playing on the go is that big an attraction, but if I happened to want to do that, starting over just felt wrong.

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Wind River Blog: Inside the Simics QSP – Additional Notes

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the design and technical contents of the new Simics Quick Start Platforms, more widely known as the QSP. The blog describes the virtual-only hardware that forms part of the QSP, and how it was designed. It is interesting to note that the hardware ended up a bit more complex that I initially thought it would be, since an ideal virtual platform should be very simple. Right? Turns out an OS complicates things.

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C in Danger – and thus Higher-Level Languages (?)

Some recent developments among development environments for mobile phones have made me consider the hereto unthinkable: that C might be on a decline as the universal programming language. Indeed, maybe there is even a chance that we will not have a universal low-level language in the future at all. What is happening is that the hitherto “given” role of C as the base language for a platform is being questioned. The reason appears to be security, which cannot be said to be a bad thing. However, a large-scale move away from C might hurt many of today’s higher-level languages and even model-based engineering.
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