Update – Quickgrapher Has Been Ported To Android
Besides numerous other interesting forks which have come out of the open sourcing of Quick Grapher, I just got wind of a very interesting fork which ports it to Android. Two of my favorite projects coming together for a peanut butter and jelly style open source sandwich. Sharing for the win! Check it out!
What Unlimited Storage Really Means In America – Bandwidth Limitations
So I'm on my lunchbreak, browsing the hot deals forums over at Fatwallet. I stumble upon what appears to be a very solid deal, 24 months of JustCloud unlimited storage backup service for 35 bucks. Can it live up to the hype (EDIT - Nope, it pretty much sucks for me, but their cancellation process is painless...)? Is it even possible to stress test this in the land of bandwidth caps and SOPA hearings? I'm going to find out.
For those of you just finding this blog, I'm a complete media glutton. I've (legally, at least for now) made digital backups of every DVD, audio CD, BLU-Ray, cartridge game, Playstation game or eBook I've ever owned or created. On top of that, I tend to keep a local store repository of my 600+ steam game collection for fast retrieval (and if they decide to later pull any of the games I bought). Add in the couple hundred gigs of personal photos I've taken as well as tons of software projects, virtual machines, disk images, dev environments, half-finished projects, etc and you're looking at about 5 terabytes of data. This is locally spread out over my two Drobo storage bots full of 2tb drives. Unfortunately, some facts about the internet here in America come into play:
Google is my New Cellular Carrier
Yep, I finally made the switch to using Google Voice as my primary number. My cell phone number hasn't changed though, I've simply paid google the 20$ carrier transfer fee and ported my number over to Google Voice. No more bills from Sprint. No more automatic charges. No monthly bill. Ever again. I expect to save 95% of the cost of my cell phone over the next year and lose absolutely none of the functionality.
How is this possible?
Why I’m Hip to Android
This is a short tale of frustration. Upon hearing that GemRB had been ported to iOS and Android, I rushed over to download. This is an awesome reimplementation of the Infinity engine used in the Baldur's Gate series of games. This excited me greatly, as Planescape: torment and Baldur's Gate 2 were two of my favorite RPGs ten years ago. My current Android device of choice is rocking a 1024x600 resolution screen (widescreen) and my iPad 2 is rocking a 1024x768 screen. Wanting to play some Baldur's Gate 2, I set about to install and configure it on both devices. The iPad screen resolution matches my old PC's resolution without a widescreen patch, so I set about to install to that first. It turns out you need to install from iTunes, as apple doesn't allow GPL software on the iPad. I set about to install iTunes. After iTunes finishes, it alerts me that I need to delete all the data from the iPad before I can install RubyGM from my laptop. FINE, I proceed to back up all the data and apps from the iPad and sync to my laptop. Finally, it starts to transfer the RubyGM binary over to my iPad2 and... failure. With a generic error code, my time on iPad came to an end. I'm literally at an impasse, short of buying a mac, signing up as a mac developer, installing XCode, and debugging the install process. A complete black box.
I next set about to install this on my Android device. First I installed it from the App store. This worked great. Then I uninstalled it, and installed from the direct download link on their webpage (so I know my friends with unlicensed devices would be covered). It works fine too. Even if it didn't, there are four separate versions posted up for one to try out, and the android SDK works on all platforms.
End of story: You can find my iPad on eBay here.
Android App – AR Wiki (Augmented Reality Wikipedia)
AR Wiki is an easy to use app designed to allow one to browse Wikipedia while walking. It creates a Wikipedia browser window centered in your Android device, with the rear-facing camera displaying a live feed surround the Wikipedia article. In this way you can browse Wikipedia while you are walking without fear of walking into a tree or a street.
You can buy AR Wiki on the Android Market here. Read more about it on the permalink page here.
Easy Inventory Ad Revenue Increases Upon Open Sourcing?
Hi All,
I thought I'd share an anecdote. After open sourcing Easy Inventory a couple of weeks ago, I figured ad views would slowly die out as more folks downloaded the code, forked the project, made improvements etc etc. On the contrary, AdMob impressions for Easy Inventory have more than doubled in the past two weeks. I've always been one to share code as much as possible, but I never would have thought that releasing the code to a project would increase the viewership for the ad-supported version. Will this trend continue long term? Should I open source all my projects? Should I move from SourceForge to Github? Would folks be interested in the source to any of the games I released?
These are interested questions I'll be wrestling with.
Easy Inventory – Now Open Source on Sourceforge!
Yep that's right. I've had a few requests to open source Easy Inventory (the first Android app I ever wrote) since I released it back at the beginning of June. As I've been insanely busy at my new job (converting iPad apps to Android apps), I've not had much time for feature improvements or bug fixes. Seeing how Easy Inventory is currently making me about 3 bucks a month in Adsense revenue, I see no financial harm in converting it to an open source project. It also jives rather well with my socialist tendencies. Plus it's been a while since I threw a project up on SourceForge, and I'd like to see what folks can come up with.
You can download or checkout the source for the project from https://sourceforge.net/p/easyinventory
If you'd like source code write access to the project (please do contribute 
), just request it and it shall be granted by a project administrator (currently only me but hopefully more in the future)
Want to see more Hacks in Action? Follow me on Google+
I never quite got into Twitter. The value proposition just wasn't there for me and it always seemed like a passing thing. Google+ on the other hand has already given me infinite photo storage, I can put animated gifs in my stream (oh the opportunity for last-frame gif bombs!), and I can choose exactly what messages go out to which subscribers based on circles. So I'm on Google+, and that's where I post a good chunk of my smaller hacks and tidbits of life. Want to know what I've been up to between posts? Curious to see my hacks in action? Want to get a sneak peek at my hacks before they're available to the public? Then you'd better start following me on Google+ hadn't you? Just head over to profiles.google.com/huntergdavis and add me to a circle today! Need an invite to Google+? Just ask!
Step-by-Step How to Publish and Profit from your Android Application
I had a YouTube comment a while back ask me for the source code to one of my games, simply so that he could figure out how to add AdMob ads to his own game. For some programmers out there, the real barrier of entry to market seems to be a lack of knowledge on how to add AdMob and Adsense to your application, and how to publish it on the Android Market. It can be a bit of a pain, but once you've got it down it's a straightforward process. I've written a detailed tutorial for those who'd rather not have to figure all this out from scratch.
Read on for the full 25 step guide to adding ads and publishing your Android app to market.
Android App Updates
I've updated some of my Android Apps with the most requested user features.
Easy Inventory has been updated with a "bulk sale" option.
Easy File Split and Join has been updated with an advanced multi-join feature, which allows you to join any arbitrary number and type of files together.
Easy Pest Control can now set an arbitrary length of playtime.
Easy File Encrypt can now batch encrypt or decrypt any number of files.
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