imissmyjuno/dmitry kichenko

Roundup of note taking software for Android

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:18:03 -0500

Now that school’s back, I’ve been looking for a good Android note taking app. I thought my criteria is fairly common and obvious, but so far I haven’t been a 100% satisfied with what I’ve found on the market (ha!). The criteria is as follows:

Stable: this one’s pretty obvious, as I’d hate to lose lecture notes for no good reason
Combines text input and drawings: maybe the Touchpad screen sucks, but hand writing notes with a stylus on it is painful and slow. I’d prefer to type out notes and switch over to a stylus for diagrams and formulas when necessary.
Export. To sensible formats: PNG or a JPEG is an odd and useless choice, as no one wants to OCR what they just typed out on the soft keyboard, but you’d be surprised how many apps only offer those two.

Software I’ve found so far, in the order of matching the criteria:

Evernote + Skitch. So far best match. Evernote lets you jump into Skitch to draw a quick diagram, and is rather good for taking notes. It has text formatting, ordered and unordered lists, to-do items, tagging etc. The app has so far been quite stable, and has a gorgeous UI. All the notes sync to the cloud, and the app itself saves everything as regular HTML, so once you get to a desktop with a standalone or web-based Evernote client, it’s trivial to export notes into any format you want, print them, or even edit the HTML and CSS to reformat the notes into something nicer looking. The downside of the app duo is that images from Skitch are not added to the body of a note, and are instead added as image “attachments” at the top, so you’re stuck with whatever order you’ve initially created your drawings in. It’s therefore necessary to label all the drawings, which isn’t the end of the world given how nice everything else is; I’d pay $5 if this was a paid app, but it’s free!
Handrite. Great app! Very convenient, snappy handwritten and diagram modes. Brushes are very customizable, but a bit tedious to switch. For some bizarre reason, spell-checking and auto-capitalization are off during keyboard input, which means you have to be that much more attentive when you type notes out. I’ve left a comment about this in the app review on the Market, I’m sure it’s a bug that’ll get fixed. There is also no exporting to PDF, but the author is promising it’ll happen.
Freenote. Lots of very useful functionality, wrapped in the some of the ugliest GUI you’ll lay your eyes and hands on. Feature-wise, this app has everything I want, minus exporting. Handwriting and drawing modes are quite good and fast. The UI does take patience to get used to as it feels a bit like a 90s VisualBasic school project.
TabNotes. I’ve tried the trial version, which is supposedly no different from the paid version. The UI is a bit hard to guess at sometimes; there is no keyboard input mode, nor any good exporting options; the handwritten mode is very noticeably laggy (at least on the Touchpad). Unless you have a fast tablet and plan to handwrite all your notes, I wouldn’t recommend this.
MaplePaint. Reminds me of Xournal, with all the associated problems of directly porting a desktop app to a touch device: toolbar icons are small to the point of being unclickable; there is no zoom-in mode for handwriting entry, only a global page zoom in/out; text entry is floating OneNote-style and isn’t reflown with the handwritten text, nor are there automatic line breaks. To add to those pains, clicking the colour selection button presents one with a colour wheel. I do wonder if some app makers realize that too much choice is bad: I can guarantee you I’ll never pick the same colour twice ever, which will certainly hurt consistency of notes, e.g. if I want all the headings in the same shade of blue. There’s also no exporting options I’ve found whatsoever (?), which makes MaplePaint a rather puzzling app. Good thing it’s free.
Genial Writing. Does one thing and does it well: the app has the smoothest handwritten note input I’ve seen, but sadly, no soft keyboard or even diagram input modes are present. I’m not sure who would want to only ever enter handwritten text in the age of teenage blind typing and texting, without being able to sketch a diagram, but if you’re one of these people this one should be at #1 for you.
MobileNoter. A Microsoft OneNote client for Android. Doesn’t let you create new OneNote notes, so only really useful if you already use OneNote. I don’t, so I didn’t give this more than 5 minutes.
Catch. Very pretty and minimalistic UI, but text notes are completely separate from drawings and can’t be mixed together. Next…
Springpad. Same problems as Catch.
ColorNote. Todo notes with no drawing ability. Included for completeness sake because the Market search kept bringing it up in the search results for anything note related.

And there you have it. I’ll keep an eye out for new offerings and will update the post accordingly.

Netgear N600 vs. Linksys/Cisco E3200

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:49:31 -0500

We got a CIsco E3200 dual-band router for Christmas and decided to test it out. To improve the test machines a bit, I picked up a 5GHz friendly dual-band wifi card for Marko’s Windows 7 laptop. With only the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks enabled at a time and a fixed channel, the following are roughly the figures we got for shooting a file over the LAN with the computers

E3200:

2.4 GHz: 4-5 MB/s
5 GHz: 9-10MB/s

N600:

2.4GHz: 7-8 MB/s
5 GHz: ~15 MB/s

To be honest, I expected higher speeds given the theoretical maximum of 300 mbps/37.5 MB/s, but Internet tells me I shouldn’t complain and this isn’t that bad still. Nevertheless, since the Netgear has a much more extensive list of configuration interface options and features (HTTP and HTTPS serving of the connected USB drives via a built-in web server, guest wifi mode, fairly detailed bandwidth usage stats etc.), is currently cheaper at Future Shop and is subjectively much prettier in a sexy geeky kind of way, I think the choice is obvious. Now, how to exchange the gift…

Greg Smith's Note Magnet: A Linux write cache mystery

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:12:15 -0500

Greg Smith's Note Magnet: A Linux write cache mystery

Touchpad Cyanogenmod sleep of death: what worked for me

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:09:00 -0500

Things got a bit ridiculous with my HP Touchpad: it would fall asleep and not wake up after as few as 10 minutes, even after the Alpha 2 update, requiring a hard restart every time. What resolved it for me:

Backup all apps with Titanium Backup, without backing up system data. Copy the backup over somewhere just in case.
Uninstall Cyanogenmod using ACMEUninstaller (see the official Alpha 2 thread for a download link and the instructions). This will wipe out CM7 but shouldn’t touch any of the app data, including the backup.
Re-install moboot and CM7 using ACMEInstaller.
Reload all the apps back on using Titanium Backup.

So far I haven’t had sleep of death even after 8+ hours of the Touchpad sitting idle without being plugged in.

Novacom complaining "failed to connect to server"

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:03:00 -0400

While trying to install Android on the HP Touchpad (the Cyanogenmod alpha, to be precise) I kept getting an error when trying to run novacom boot mem:// < ACMEInstaller:

failed to connect to server

Turns out the novacomd daemon wasn’t running. If you’re on OS X and have already installed QuickInstall to load up Preware on your Touchpad you should already have novacom and its daemon installed. To run it execute:

sudo /opt/nova/bin/novacomd

And off you go! You should be able to boot into USB mode (restart while holding the volume up) and run the ACMEInstaller.

Stoner chickpea curry

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:00:05 -0400

This is a fairly simple and delicious curry that’s pretty fantastic even without any drugs, and it’s guaranteed to work for everyone invited as it happens to be vegan and gluten free. That wasn’t actually intentional now that I think about it, but you really don’t need any meat in this one.

There is a lot of leeway in making the dish. If you don’t have certain spices read the section at the end.

Rice

2 cups rice or more if that’s not enough
2 cups water, or more. Should be the same amount as rice.
1 bouillon cube per 2 cups of liquid

NOTE: if you’ve got a rice cooker just use that. The instructions are for those who don’t have one. I personally hate having a dedicated device for every little thing in the kitchen.

Bring the water to a boil (I usually do it in a kettle).
Add rice, boiling water and the bouillon cube to a saucepan or pot. Bring it all to a boil on high heat.
Set heat to low, put a tight lid on and simmer for about 15 mins. If your lid is pretty loose put a paper towel or a thin clean towel under the lid to seal it and prevent the steam from escaping. Don’t open the lid. The idea is to cook the rice through using steam.
Turn off the heat without opening the lid, and let the rice sit for another 10-15 minutes. If all went well you should have perfectly cooked fluffy non-sticky rice. If you prefer yours stickier look up a recipe for cooking with the lid off. In the meantime, move onto the…

Curry

1 medium+ onion
1 can of coconut milk
2 cups of cooked chickpeas (out of a can will do)
2 tomatoes
4-5 cloves of garlic or more to taste
2 red or green chili peppers or more to taste
5 teaspoons of soy sauce
2-3 teaspoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon each of cumin, paprika, turmeric, and red chili powder
salt and pepper to taste
something green to garnish with, preferably cilantro
3 tbsp of oil

Chop up the onion, garlic, tomato and chili peppers keeping the seeds if you want it hotter. Keep the vegetables separated. Ideally, you should blend the tomatoes together with the chili peppers but that’s dangerous advice keeping in mind my audiences.
Bring oil to medium-high in a larger pot or saucepan, and throw one cumin seed when you think the oil is at the right temperature. If the seed pops or jumps around immediately, the oil’s ready.
Fry the onion until it’s translucent. Then add the dry spices and garlic. Fry for 2-3 minutes constantly stirring, or the spices will get stuck to the bottom and burn.
Add the chopped tomatoes, chili pepper and the soy sauce. Fry for 3-4 minutes or until tomatoes separate from the oil. If you’ve been frying on medium-high the tomatoes will splash the oil a bit when first thrown in so make sure you don’t burn yourself.
Add in the chickpeas and the coconut milk. Bring the pot to a boil and let the curry simmer on lower heat with the lid closed for about 25-30 minutes. Right about now is a good time to chill ;)
When that’s done, give it a taste. If the chickpeas are still pretty tough mash them a bit with a potato masher or fork. If the soy sauce didn’t make the curry salty enough add salt to taste (I added about 1.5 tsp more but my soy sauce was low-sodium). If the curry is too thick to your liking add a little bit of water. Grind some black pepper into that thing.
Stir in cilantro or whatever you’ve got for garnish, along with lemon juice. Serve over the rice along with some fresh tomato slices.

That should be it! I’d serve this in bowls to make it look less pukey. Not that it’s ever going to cross anyone’s mind: it’s smells fucking fantastic. The sweetness of the coconut milk, the spiciness of the chili peppers, the tomato-soy sauce mixture and the other tasty things in the curry should all combine to produce some pretty freaking amazing flavours in your mouth. Enjoy!

WTF’s turmeric

It’s alright if you don’t have the spices on hand though they’re highly recommended. If you’ve got the bare basics you can probably get away with about a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, assuming you haven’t got chili peppers either. Probably half a teaspoon otherwise. Also, if you’ve only got one can of chickpeas and want to make enough for 2-3 people, half everything and use a single small to medium onion. Or just use a large one anyway, can never have too much onion or garlic.

Symphonious » contentEditable in Mobile WebKit Update

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:36:13 -0400

Symphonious » contentEditable in Mobile WebKit Update

A mostly RFC822 compatible email address regex

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:42:04 -0400

A mostly RFC822 compatible email address regex:

Something that bizarrely nobody seems to write regex for. Accepts addresses like “Jimi Hendrix” , John Lennon , and “”

Once you set up all the colours right (in iTerm2, in this case),...

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:04:29 -0400

Once you set up all the colours right (in iTerm2, in this case), ordinary terminal Vim really doesn’t look half bad.

VIM pain resolved: yank buffer overwritten after changing and pasting

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:08:00 -0400

Often I yank a line, change something in the area I’d like to paste into, and then realize that my changes and deletes overwrote what was yanked. Yanking into a special register takes longer and is rather annoying, but there’s a workaround:

From the VIM help, we know about the unnamed register:

Vim fills this register with text deleted with the “d”, “c”, “s”, “x” commands or copied with the yank “y” command, regardless of whether or not a specific register was used (e.g. ”xdd).

So, the unnamed register contains whatever was yanked, changed or deleted most recently, and its contents get pasted when we hit “p”. That explains what happens but does nothing to solve the problem. Luckily,

Numbered register 0 contains the text from the most recent yank command, unless the command specified another register with [“x].

That means a simple "0p in normal mode will paste what was yanked regardless of any deletes that took place after yanking. Not obvious but glad it’s there!

Current Git Branch Listed in Bash Prompt

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:50:20 -0400

Current Git Branch Listed in Bash Prompt:

I’ll finally remember which branch I’m on!

Pushing SynthCam’s limits (by Dmitry Kichenko)

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:14:19 -0400

Pushing SynthCam’s limits (by Dmitry Kichenko)

Motorola SB5102 on TekSavvy

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:13:11 -0400

…works just fine. Bought one off CraigsList, after checking the serial number and MAC address with the online Rogers tech support rep to make sure it isn’t a blocked stolen rental. TekSavvy had no problem setting it up although the Rogers tech that came by the house for the ‘installation’ remarked he’s never seen a modem like this. Shock?

Growl notifications for Beanstalk commits using App Engine and Notify.io

Sat, 14 May 2011 18:36:51 -0400

Growl notifications for Beanstalk commits using App Engine and Notify.io

Keyboard layout not changing after waking Mac OS up from sleep

Thu, 05 May 2011 13:10:00 -0400

I’m most certain this is a bug, but in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, if you have multiple keyboard layouts set up, you cannot change them at the login dialogue that shows up when waking up the computer from sleep or the screensaver.

That means, if you had a non-English layout selected before the computer locked up and you’ve got a password that uses English characters, you will not be able to log into the computer (restarting won’t work as the OS is smart enough to present you with the same login window once it loads).

I’ve looked online and haven’t found any suggestions, and the only solution I’ve come up with is the one the Apple support rep also suggested: booting from your OS X disc (put disc in, restart, hold Option when booting, select disc), and going to Utilities>Reset Password once loaded to reset the password for the user account.

Spring 2011 CSC263 notes

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 13:20:00 -0400

This semester I made thorough use of the Wacom Bamboo tablet received for Christmas, particularly for note taking in most of the computer science courses. Here are the almost complete notes for the Spring 2011 CSC263 course with Sam Toueg (missing amortized analysis notes):

http://d.pr/8MZs

futurebones: OMGOMGOMG

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:34:10 -0400

futurebones:

OMGOMGOMG

Activate the most recent versions of MacPorts

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 21:46:00 -0500

sudo port outdated | awk 'NR > 1 {print $1" @"$4}' | xargs -L 1 sudo port activate

Sometimes, things don’t go quite as expected with MacPorts, and you end up having to rollback to previous versions of libraries using port activate [portname] @[version] Then, after a while, you realize it didn’t really help, and you’d like to update all the ports back to the most recent versions. I didn’t find a built-in command to do that, and the above awk-ward piece should do the trick.

a new series about my neighbourhood.

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 17:59:14 -0500

a new series about my neighbourhood.

the house of god — a new series about my neighbourhood

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 17:58:22 -0500

the house of god — a new series about my neighbourhood