Josh Turmel

Everything You Do Should Be in Version Control

2010-09-06T14:40:00.001-05:00

Excerpt from Theo Schlossnagle's tech talk:

Switch configurations should be in version control.
Router configurations should be in version control.
Firewall configurations should be in version control.
System configurations should be in version control.
Application configurations should be in version control.
Monitoring configurations should be in version control.
Documentation should be in version control.
Application code should be in version control.
Database schema should be in version control.
Everything you do should be in version control.

HTC Evo and its battery

2010-06-09T22:28:00.007-05:00

So there are a lot of conflicting reviews on the HTC Evo's battery life. We all know that battery life gets better after the first few weeks when you get a number of full cycle charges under it's belt but I was experiencing slightly worse than one would expect and some other friends with Evo's were experiencing what I'll translate as "horrible." This post will be how I turned my Evo from probably an 8 to 10 hour battery life device to easily 14 to 18 hr device under what I would call normal usage.

First I'll cover things I've done since day one that wouldn't have affected the change, then I'll cover what I have changed.

I don't use the FriendStream widget
Automatic brightness
No app killers
4 widgets in use, the "control" one that has switches for wifi, bluetooth, gps, etc, the default clock/weather one on my main home screen, the calendar agenda, and the dictionary word of the day widget.
All animations are on
I don't run live wallpapers
4G disabled since I don't have it in my area
2 Gmail accounts setup, 1 Exchange account setup, all three are set to get email as it arrives (push). I use two Twitter clients, HootSuite checks every 15 minutes (two Twitter accounts consisting of 11 total feeds to check), Seesmic installed checks every hour (one Twitter account), other services that are constantly on in the background are Gtalk, Voicemail, SMS, and Google Voice... this doesn't necessarily include apps that may be running in the background

Okay, so now for the changes that have happened since I've started experiencing longer battery life.

Update from HTC for the SD card issue, no word if there was anything for the battery in this fix but wanted to get this out there.
Update PRLs
Screen timeout to 30 seconds instead of 1 minute.
Disable bluetooth if not in my car which is only place I use it, so bluetooth is only on about 1 hour per day, I don't really think this is affecting it too much though because I sometimes forget and it doesn't seem to matter.
Disable "Always-on Mobile data" (under Settings > Wireless & Networks > Mobile Networks)... it says this may cause connectivity problems with some applications but I haven't experienced any issues with it whatsoever.

So how do I use my phone? Well here are, from rough memory, some usage patterns over the last few days and how much life I got out of it.

The first test came starting at 4pm on Saturday, I'll consider this a "light" test since it was the weekend. I unplugged the phone with a full charge and went to a family gathering, I used Pandora for about 1.5 hours that evening (over 3G), checked email a few times and responded to a few, and browsed the web for about 10 minutes and showed the phone off to a few family members, no calls. I believe the phone was still about 60% when we got back home that evening about 10:30pm, since I was testing the phone I didn't hook it up to the charge, I left it on the night stand without charging. The next morning it still had 50%, so it only had dropped 10% over the 10 hours of "inactivity", not bad at all. I lightly used it on Sunday morning, checked email a few times, Twitter a few times, but I was set to leave for out of town about 3:30pm on Sunday so I by 2:30pm the phone still had about 30% charge so I went ahead and charged it up before leaving, so I got roughly 22 hours out of 70% of the battery on light usage.

The first real test came on Monday, I pulled it off the charger at 7:45am, I was in a meeting all day where I didn't pull out my laptop at all. I checked Twitter numerous times, answered quite a few emails, took pictures, checked in at locations (GPS), etc... the phone did not die on me until 10:30pm that evening... that even includes about the first 30 minutes of our flight back where I forgot to put it in airplane mode so that it wouldn't be looking for a connection (this is hard on batteries because the radio is always searching.) So that is 15 hours of what I would consider normal to slightly higher than normal usage...

I've been consistently getting at least 15 hours since then, if not more. Each day my phone does around 1 hour of streaming Pandora over 3G (drive to and from work), with quite a few emails responded to, checking in at places using Foursquare (GPS), very few calls, maybe one or two in a day only lasting a few minutes each at most, usually some web browsing on the phone every day, I'd say on average at least 15 to 30 minutes, and usually at least 30 to 60 minutes of e-book reading every night... yesterday I played a YouTube video for close to an hour and it didn't seem to have a noticeable affect on my now consistently good battery life.

I would rate the battery as good or better than my HTC Hero, which also had a 1500 mAh battery, which never bothered me at all... it always got through the day fine.

In conclusion, I think some of these reviewers are just pounding the phones during reviews, not necessarily using it like a normal person might, even a more tech person like myself, and then complaining that it "only got 6 hours of battery life." I definitely would not make the battery an issue when trying to determine whether you should get this phone. It's definitely the best phone on the market, no question.

Missing 3D Gallery app on Android phones with HTC Sense

2010-05-28T18:52:00.004-05:00

So I love most of what the HTC Sense interface brings to the Android platform, from the small details of remembering your place in a scrolling list to the way they combine your corporate and Google calendars in their calendar app. However, after having used vanilla Android 2.0+ for a few weeks on the Droid I received for attending Google I/O and loving the way PicasaWeb seamlessly integrates with the 3D Gallery app, I was upset to find out that in the newest versions of Sense UI they were still using their version of Gallery instead of just sticking with 3D Gallery. I could understand why they did it in the Android 1.5/1.6 days since the stock Gallery app left much to be desired.

Luckily, Android is open source as are most of the stock apps, so it's just a matter of downloading the source and building the APK and installing it. I found some links on XDA where some had already built it and provided the APK.

So here it is, all you need to do is install this on your phone: http://josht.com/2v

Where do my favorite eateries in Oklahoma get their food?

2010-02-13T23:06:00.007-06:00

Over the last couple of years I've become more conscious about what I eat. This is mostly thanks to my wife, Savanah, who is a vegetarian and who was (and is) passionate about eating local, organic and healthy. As I've put more effort into actually figuring out what I'm actually eating, I've discovered that if you're not cooking it yourself, it's hard to know.

Tonight I found that on Chipotle's website they give you a map with their locations and tell you what percentage of their 3 meat offerings are naturally raised. I was excited to see that here in Oklahoma, it's 100% across the board for beef, chicken and pork. http://www.chipotle.com/#/flash/fwi_whats-where

My overall mission is to figure out what places that I enjoy eating actually do purchase locally, use organic, and/or buy meat from naturally raised animals. These restaurants will stay on my list, those who don't will be dropped.

This will be hard, but I think it's worth it for the long term sustainability of both my body and the entire food supply.

So if you own/manage a restaurant, especially in the Oklahoma area, I'd love for you to leave this information in the comments.

Short list of some of my favorite spots in OKC area in no particular order:

Tokyo Japanese Restaurant
Iguana Mexican Grill
Carnita's Michoacan
Pink Swirls
Big Truck Tacos
Gopuram Taste of India
Misal of India West
The Wedge
VZD's
Nic's Grill
Iron Starr
Flat Tire Burgers
Cuppies and Joe
Cafe do Brasil

Google Buzz was enabled in my Gmail this morning

2010-02-10T13:21:00.003-06:00

I'll talk more about it later, but I'm mainly posting this to see how fast it gets pushed into the Buzz activity stream.

Going Paperless... Mostly

2010-02-08T23:01:00.002-06:00

So a few people were asking about my process for going paperless, now I don't have this down to a science yet but I think I am probably 90% of the way there, that last 10% will make it heaven, and I'll let you know once I figure that part out.

First I want to say that the single most important thing you can have is a kick-ass scanner. If you're scanner sucks, you're not going to keep up, I promise. My personal choice is a Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M, (Mac model, they also have a PC model) this thing is solid. It's small and portable so easy enough to sit next to you on the side table in the living room if you want to be somewhat entertained and it's really fast and full-duplex. All you do is set the sheets of paper in and hit the scan button, it fires up the software and scans front and back at an amazing rate. It strings all the scans into the right order and allows you to save them off as a PDF.

I then batch process entire sets (usually when I have 20 to 30 PDF files) with Adobe Acrobat and IRIS OCR that comes with the scanner. Once this is done, just grab all the files and drop them on your GDocsUploader shortcut on your desktop.

From here you're fine, once the readable PDF files are in Google Docs they are searchable, but if you're a little more OCD on stuff like this like I am, you'll want to put them in some folder structure. I don't go crazy but I have some general areas and then within each one of those I break it down by year. I might simplify this down to just organizing tax documents into folders and then letting everything else just be found by using the search function, I'm not totally settled on this part of it yet. Would love to get feedback though.

Two last notes, if you have important information like PIN and account numbers that are really sensitive, I would suggest storing those in a password safe and then omitting them from the documents. Finally, I don't get rid of everything that is on paper, I keep all tax documents for 7 years, and then anything that I might deem as ultra important to have the physical copy, say um, like you're birth certificate go into a filing cabinet/safe.

What does everyone else do?

Tethering your Android phone to OS X via USB

2009-11-07T12:13:00.003-06:00

Much of the credit goes to the article here: http://thinkden.com/index.php/general/admin/75 but there is a thing or two he glosses over which for the average user may make it more difficult to figure out so I figured I'd complete it out.

Download the following: TunTap for Mac OS X, Tunnelblick for Mac OS X, Azilink (both the zip and apk files), and the Android SDK.
Install TunTap and then restart your Mac.
Install Tunnelblick (once the DMG mounts and opens, drag the Tunnelblick icon to your Applications folder).
Unzip (open) the Azilink zip file, now go to your $HOME/Library/ folder and create a new folder called "openvpn", copy the file "azilink.opvn" from the zip file you opened into this newly created folder. After doing this, right click on the "azilink.opvn" file and choose Open With > Other and then choose TextEdit. There is a line that says "socket-flags TCP_NODELAY", you will want to comment this out, so add a "#" to the beginning of it so that the line now looks like "#socket-flags TCP_NODELAY", save and close the file.
Unzip (open) the Android SDK zip file, and copy the adb program to your Desktop, you'll find it in the tools directory of the zip file.
Enable USB debugging on your Android device, this can be found at Settings > Applications > Development > USB debugging.
Now we need to install the Azilink apk file and setup the port forwarding on your Android device. So connect the USB cable from your Mac to your Android device, do not mount the SD card though. Open the terminal app, and cd to your Desktop, and run "adb install /location/you/downloaded/apk/to" after it has completed install, then run "adb forward tcp:41927 tcp:41927".
Start the azilink app on your Android device, and when it comes up, check the "Service active" switch, it should say "Waiting for connection" under status once you do this.
Now start the Tunnelblick app on your Mac, you should see status switch to "Connected to host" on your Android device, now you're ready to share (tether) the active network connection on your Android device with your Mac.

Hope this helps make it a little more simple for the average user out there, let me know if I made any typos or missed something.

Have an Android phone and Google Voice? Want free SMS?

2009-07-05T01:58:00.010-05:00

After completely wrapping my mind around the way Google Voice works (now that I finally got an invite last week), and installing and messing with the GV app on my Android phone, I've realized that one can get completely free SMS.

This is really easy, but I didn't see it on the web already anywhere, so I figure I would post on how to do it. I will preface this by saying that your contacts will need to use your Google Voice number, but you probably already knew that.

Log into Google Voice and go to your Settings page.
Go to the Phones tab, and click "Edit" on your mobile phone, now uncheck "Receive SMS on this phone." (This will prevent the SMS from being passed through and you being charged by your carrier.)
Download and install the GV app on your phone.
Setup your Google Voice account info for the GV app. On the settings screen you will see a "Check for new messages:" drop-down, select the "Every minute" option.

Now when a new SMS arrives, you'll get a notification. Click on the notification and it takes you straight to your conversations, very awesome. The best part is it allows you to drop that $10+/month unlimited SMS plan you might have.

Enjoy!

[UPDATE: July 15, 2009]

Google has released the official Google Voice app on Android and Blackberry devices, the above screen shots for GV app still apply if you're using that, but the new Google Voice app is more simple to use, so they don't apply if you're using the official app.

Michael Kollwitz on the Chapman Stick

2008-01-29T21:00:00.000-06:00

We met Michael while we were in Maui on our honeymoon and were immediately sucked into the sound of this instrument. The Chapman stick is unique in that it's played almost as if you were playing the piano with two hands, but looks like an over-sized guitar/bass standing on end. The sound in person is amazing and hard to describe, you can pick up some of his CD's on Amazon (we picked up a few from him while we were there.) I won't go on and on, he gives better information and a demonstration on Current. Here's the video: