This ‘feature’ has been annoying me for a while and after this has caused some confusion with some of my clients I decided to go and look where to disable this. Why this has been made a system wide default is beyond me.

Rather than in the users Calendar Settings this is actually in the Google Apps Admin Console (https://admin.google.com/)

Console –> Google Apps –> Settings for Calendar –> Sharing Settings

As a Galaxy Nexus Owner I have been waiting for months for an OTA (over the air) upgrade to the factory installed Firmware (4.0.2). I am finally sick of waiting and complaining to Google (an absolute lost cause).

After some research it turns out that (contrary to popular opinion) not every unlocked Google Nexus actually has the ‘official’ Google Firmware. Some of them have a Samsung variant (WTF !?) of the firmware. Now I really don’t want to get off the technical topic, but I personally think that this means Google is misleading their most loyal customer base. The reason I chose a Nexus device over the (from a hardware perspective) superior HTC One X was the fact that they were supposed to have the official Google Firmware and I did not have to wait forever for bugfixes from the manufacturers.

One of the lesser known free Google services in our experience is Google Goggles. Specially in it’s lastest release (Version 1.7) it has received a few enhancements that make it very useful for some mobile learning applications

Scanning of barcodes

Google Googles will scan most standard barcodes and provide information on the product scanned.


Here is an example from the Google Mobile Blog:

I am not generally one for writing blog entries about customer support failures. Thanks to my technical work I have had my fair share of dealing with call queues and help-desk systems over the last 20 years. But compared with my experience with Google AdSense over the last weeks all of these just pale into funny memories. I have never experienced the outright refusal to acknowledge an issue and blanket denial of communications.

Due to a recent absolute Customer Service failure with Google Adsense I have done some research on the alternative to Google Adsense as a content-sensitive mobile and web advertisements.

We are currently reviewing the following services:

• http://www.adbrite.com/
• http://chitika.com
• http://www.admob.com/
• https://pubcenter.microsoft.com/Login
• http://advertisingcentral.yahoo.com/publisher/index
• http://www.clicksor.com/
• http://www.infolinks.com/
• http://adhitz.com/en
• http://buysellads.com/

Once we have some results I will update this post. Please add your comments should you have any (good or bad) experiences with similar services.

Just a quick note on how to configure backups of Google Apps email to a local machine.

Install getmail

apt-get install getmail4

create config directory

Create a subdirectory in users home folder (and change permissions)

mkdir .getmail
touch .getmail

create config file

Create a file such as .getmail/username.gmail

[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = username@domain.tld
password = password
mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/All Mail",)

[destination]
type = Maildir
path = /path/to/storage/directory/

[options]
# print messages about each action (verbose = 2)
# Other options:
# 0 prints only warnings and errors
# 1 prints messages about retrieving and deleting messages only
verbose = 1
message_log = ~/.getmail/gmail.log

create data directories for storage

Create 3 sub-directories in your designated data directory

One of my oldest pieces of hardware is a trusty Nokia SU-8W Bluetooth Keyboard. I have tried to revive it on an Android 1.6 & 2.0 device with not much luck. However I got it working successfully on a Gingerbread (2.3.4) Google Nexus S.

Pre-requisites

• SU-8W Manual (http://nds1.nokia.com/phones/files/guides/Nokia_SU-8W_Wireless_Keyboard_UG_en.pdf)
• BlueKeyboard JP (https://market.android.com/details?id=elbrain.bluekeyboard.ime)

Steps

1. Install the BlueKeyboard JP from the Android Market
2. Go to Settings > Wireless & Networks > Bluetooth Settings
3. Scan for devices and click to pair the Nokia SU-8W
4. Enter a passcode (I used the highly inventive 0000 combinaton) on the phone and click ‘OK’
5. Enter the same on the SU-8W (need to use green ‘fn’ keys for numbers) and hit enter
6. The phone should show the Nokia SU-8W as paired but not connected
7. Go to Settings > Language & keyboard > BlueKeyboard JP Settings
8. Select the Nokia SU-8W as the keyboard and make any other changes you might need
9. Click the ‘Back’ symbol and tick the option box to enable the ‘BlueKeyboard JP’ keyboard
10. In any data entry field (i.e. GMail) hold the finger on the input box and click ‘Input method’ and select BlueKeyboard JP
11. Wait for the keyboard to connect.

Enjoy !