Java Thinking

If you've forgotten the PIN for your android device, you can reset it at  https://www.google.com/android/devicemanager . This page lets you choose from your registered devices (if you have more than one). From here you can see when it was last used, and where. You have the option of 'Ring', 'Erase', and 'Lock'. Choosing 'Lock' lets you provide a new pin - so next time you access it the new pin should be active.

Since I got my Android phone, I've been using Google Listen to listen to podcasts. I really liked this solution since adding another podcast to my collection was as simple as adding it to my 'Listen subscriptions' folder in Google Reader. All from within my browser, all at the click of a button. Awesome. Listen may not have been the best podcast player - it didn't let you speed the playback up and didn't have a sleep timer. But it was simple and worked. Pity it was discontinued last year. Now Reader is on its way out I've had to find a new solution to consume my podcasts. And I've found it in Pocket Casts . This does allow you to speed up playback and set a sleep timer - something particularly useful since I've found podcasts distract me so much I can fall asleep very quickly. I've imported my Reader OMPL file by doing the following: Read how to export Google Reader feeds here http://lifehacker.com/5990456/google-reader-is-getting-...

My wife has had a Samsung Galaxy S1 Android phone for over a year now and its been great. Recently though, she'd been having terrible battery performance and had noticed that after charging the phone overnight, it was only at 50% in the morning. My first thought was to buy a new battery, but then I figured I'd try updating the firmware first. Thats when I discovered that windows couldn't recognise the device!! This was a big issue - how could I get all of her photos off the phone? Solutions: Quite by accident, she plugged her phone into an iCoustic USB charger that we got with an iPod accessory pack - this fully charged the battery and now there are no battery issues. She'd been using my iPad USB charger previously and for some reason, this makes a difference. I realized that when syncing the phone with Kies I wasn't using the original USB cable that came with the phone. We'd been using a third party cable we'd bought after losing the original one. Sinc...

I've just started playing with the  Android platform , getting going by writing a very simple timer application - the kind thats useful when you are exercising, for example when you want to hold the plank for 60 seconds. Why Android? Well, its all so familiar - Eclipse development environment, Java language,  and zero entry cost. I don't have an Android phone itself yet, so I'm just running on the emulator that comes with the  SDK . It only took an hour or so to put together the application, after working through the hello world tutorial.