Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sponge - Tech, Cosplay, Baking & Podcasts

android

Good Internet, Bad Internet

In which I discuss poor internet connections.

Slow Internet

Today at work I was using a terribly slow internet connection. What interested me was which programs and websites worked on a slow connection and which ones didn't.

These programs/sites worked well:

These didn't:

  • Outlook

  • Outlook web

  • Wunderlist

  • Ctrl-Alt-Delete

Google Mail & Calendar were intermittent.

Why should this be? I'm not sure and would have hazarded a guess that sites and programs which send less data would work better. However, Wunderlist only needs to send short strings of text (calendar events) when Evernote was syncing complete documents. Also with the websites both CAD and Xkcd require images to load. Xkcd managed it easily but I haven't seen today's CAD yet. Maybe the ones which loaded were just better coded/written!?!

Good Wi-Fi

Currently I'm writing this from the comfort of First Class with a complimentary glass of Merlot :-) The free Wi-Fi is excellent and speedy - the upgrade was definitely worth it (£2 to upgrade which gets me the normally £6 Wi-Fi, free wine and dinner). My new Archos G9 101 tablet is working very well and for a quick trip like this it's so much better than a laptop.*

Don’t forget complimentary tea too:-)

So my first post written entirely on a tablet has gone well, also having a 250Gb HDD means I've done so to excellent musical accompaniment (LotR and TMBG among others).

*Although I did need to re-calibrate the screen after a recent update.

Tom Out!

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Android on an old Dell

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Android x86

So my old Dell Inspiron 1525 has had many problems. Not least of which is a hardware fault preventing the battery from charging most of the time :S However it is a very useful tool for testing distros on and generally tinkering.Following a chat with my housemate about his netbook I decided to see if it was possible to install Android on a laptop. Turns out the answer is yes courtesy of the Android-x86 Project: http://www.android-x86.org/

It's working well though I'm currently struggling to transfer pdfs and such across and certain apps (like Angry Birds) keep failing. You need a basic knowledge of linux commands to mount USBs and the like but other than that it is effectively a non-touch screen version of the OS :)

Tom Out!