The Top 30 Android Apps And Games Of 2011 | TechCrunch

Nice selection from TechCrunch...

The Top 30 Android Apps And Games Of 2011 | TechCrunch: The best Android apps are thus the ones that can both push the technological envelope while also remaining accessible to the vast majority of users. This is no easy feat.

Not necessarily my view with every app, but a good starting point for all you new Android owners...

It definitely shows that in 2011 the Android ecosystem - while it did not fully catch up - narrowed that gap to iOS. And apps are increasingly becoming tablet ready or compatible as we go into 2012.

iPad Video App Freeze

Since I updated my iPad[1] to iOS 5, I frequently had the problem that the video app that comes with iOS is simply frozen, when you open it.

Even closing the app does not help.
A reboot of the iPad did not help either.

My idea was to somehow not start the video app, but launch a video directly, but for lack of a file manager on iOS, this is not easy.
Turns out it is... simply do a spotlight search for a known video name, wait for it to appear in the search results and tap on it there. Next best thing to a file manager :)

Voila, the video app should start and not freeze...
Works everytime for me know... a bit cumbersome, but still.

Hope that Apple will fix this.

--
[1] first gen iPad, that is

Letters to Steve

Nice easy reading for the holidays...  a collection of Steve Job's email responses...
and no, it's not just a book full of "Nope" and "Yep"... :)

Maybe a little bit too close to the Steve Jobs Bio by Walter Isaacson which I finished only a couple of weeks ago.

Dropbox app for Android update

There's a new version of the Dropbox app for Android. Among several UI and usability improvements, the most important to me is that you can now upload text files from the share/send menu.

I was really craving for this, because quite often in order to get real-life logs of my own app, I'm using the Log Collector app to gather log files and send them to my PC. Dropbox did not support he upload then, so I was using gmail for this (not wanting to bother with Bluetooth and the likes).
Tried it just now with the 2.0 version of the Dropbox app and it really works like a charm. Click - and just some seconds later I have it in my local Dropbox folder on the PC...

So thanks, Dropbox team, for getting this fixed.

A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7 • The Register

WTF ?
A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7 • The Register:

An unpatched critical flaw in 64-bit Windows 7 leaves computers vulnerable to a full 'blue screen of death' system crash.
[...]

the simple HTML script, when opened in Apple's Safari web browser, quickly leads to the kernel triggering a page fault in an unmapped area of memory, which halts the machine at a blue screen of death.

What weird architecture is this, that allows a usermode application (browser) to crash the kernel?
And this is through Safara (not Internet Explorer, which I'd understand to be more closely tied to the kernel)

Strange, strange.

Dropbox auto-updates

I just happened to hover over my dropbox taskbar icon (well not I personally, my mouse pointer) I noticed that it said

Dropbox 1.2.49
All files up to date

I was pretty sure that last version I installed was 1.2.48 - see here.
So I googled for "dropbox auto update" and found the following:
Dropbox - How do I upgrade to the latest version of the Dropbox application 

So yes, it does auto-update... good. thanks.

More on the Firefox Sessionstore

After I cleaned the Firefox session store about 2 weeks ago by manually deleting the sessionstore.js file, I decided to watch its growth.
I did so by simply doing a copy of the sessionstore.js file with a task scheduled daily.

Here's the results

You can see that there is no constant (monotonic) growth. The sessionstore.js file grows a bit, then shrinks again, then grows a bit...
But it stays at about just under 1MB...

Should this change significantly, I'll report here again.

Google+ page

I'm testing a Google+ page for this blog... find it here and follow me, if you want.
Or try the badge to the right (--> somewhere over there, right beneath my book recommendations).
I mainly want to find out if and how Google+ (brand) pages work...

Of course I will post update there.