Saturday, August 30, 2014

Summer 2014 Roundup

Crikey, I've not posted here for a while.

Since the last post 6 months ago here's what I've been up to, in no particular order:
Apart from that, I have recently become a member of the flock of sheeple using a smartphone/NSA-tracking-device after I purchased a Moto G 4G and hooked it up to a massive 100Mb (count 'em) per month data plan. I checked the previous few months' usage on my 2005-era Nokia phone and it was costing me about 1€ per month in SMS messages, and I only sent 3.

For the same price (1€ per month) I got a pre-paid data plan on Simyo here in Spain, and with internet-based messaging apps I can send all the messages I wanted at no additional cost. I had to pay about 10€ up front for a new micro SIM, but it came with 10€ of pre-paidness anyway. The only bummer is that I could have achieved the same 100Mb deal for free from our ISP, but they only give out a 2nd mobile line to new customers. Apparently if you're an old-time customer and threaten to cancel they'll give you the 2nd line, but I'm worried they'll call my bluff!

The reason I mention all this is that having now used an Android device as a phone daily, rather than just having it at home in WiFi-only mode (I'm looking at you HTC Magic and your 4-hour battery life), has made me think of a couple of things that I could code up.

The first is a native Android application, a boring one with nothing to do with games. There are enough games on Android already, right? The second thing is a tiny Firefox-for-Android addon to disable Javascript, which I think should have been in this mobile Firefox by default anyway. The former needs a bit of polishing still, while the latter is in the queue at Mozilla Towers awaiting review.