Assorted notes

• Public service announcement: earlier this year Google announced optional 2-factor authentication for Google accounts. Please use it: it's one of the least painful ways to make your data safer (most people are toast if their email gets compromised). And the implementation seems fairly well thought out:
• You download an app to your smartphone (or smartphone-like device) that generates one-time passwords (OTPs), to be used in conjunction with your regular password when needed. A single OTP can authenticate one computer for up to 30 days. Yes, the app is open source. It runs on any Android, Blackberry, or iOS device.
• The app works offline, without a data connection, because the method for generating OTPs is specified by RFC 4226 (yes, it's standardized and everything) and is either sequence-based or time-based.
• Failing that, if you don't have a smartphone, or it's busted, you can also receive an OTP via SMS to a designated number (though, obviously, then you need phone reception).
• Failing that, if you don't have a cell phone, or it's busted, you can also receive an OTP via a voice call to a designated landline.
• Failing that... if you know you'll be somewhere where you have no phone at all, you can print a list of OTPs to carry with you that will enable you to log in.
• Apps that authenticate via just a password (e.g. the phone itself, or most desktop apps, like Picasa) get a dedicated automatically generated password. You don't get the benefit of 2-factor auth here, but these passwords are less likely to be phished because you're not typing them in all the time, and you can revoke them individually.
• Good lord, Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) is fast. My laptop (Thinkpad X201 with Intel SSD) boots from disk unlock screen (LUKS full-disk encryption) to a working Openbox desktop in about four seconds.
• I've been playing with Blender (the Free 3D modeling tool) for a personal project to be 3D printed, and it's a lot of fun, and quite rewarding. I'm still a noob at this stuff, but already I get some of these "in the zone" moments that are so rarely attained in software (Emacs being the other exception) where I feel like I'm manipulating a thing directly rather than using a software program. The Blender UI looks like an airplane cockpit, but there is a method to its madness! The other neat thing is that most of the time when you do creative work on the computer you are not rewarded with anything nearly so tangible as a 3D printed piece.
• A clever thing I noticed on Android the other week: when you use voice dictation in a text entry field, and you move the cursor back to previous words, above the keyboard it shows not the nearest alternatives based on the keyboard layout (as it would if you were typing), but the nearest alternatives based on sound— e.g. "wreck" ... "a nice beach" as suggested replacements for "recognize speech".

Some Android tips

I've been using a Nexus One as my primary phone for about a year now. Here are some tips and suggestions I've accumulated. Most of these tips should also apply to the Nexus S and the G2 (which have stock Android builds), as well as to other Android phones (Froyo+) modulo any vendor customizations.

• Press and hold the Search button to activate voice search / voice actions. This is indispensable! I use it a least a couple of times every day. It makes the phone feel like future tech, not least because it's dramatically better than anything I regularly deal with in phone systems or on PCs. The phone recognizes special instructions, including things like the following (for anything it doesn't recognize as an action, it asks you to disambiguate or it falls back to a Google search):
• "Call Phil Sung, mobile"
• "Navigate to Fry's Electronics"
• "Map of gas stations"
• "Note to self, buy more envelopes" (which sends you an email from yourself)
• Press and hold the Home button to easily get a list of recently used apps.
• Press and hold the Menu button to toggle the display of the soft keyboard. Not usually needed, but occasionally useful.
• When using the soft keyboard, you can drag your finger past the top edge of the keyboard for quick access to digits and punctuation.
• If you add your email address to the user dictionary, you can get it in the list of autocompletions when filling out forms in the web browser.
• It's important to control the quantity of notifications so that they're at a level that is actually useful. Depending on how important some event is, you can configure the phone to make noise or merely to show you a notification the next time you turn on the phone. As an example, here's how I'm set up:
• My phone only rings for phone calls, SMS, and IMs.
• GMail generates a notification in the notification area but no noise (configurable in GMail settings). Even so, I implemented an elaborate system of GMail filters to keep all but the most important emails from getting to my inbox and thus generating notifications.
• Calendar events generate neither noise nor notifications (configurable in Calendar settings). Instead, I put the Calendar widget on my home screen, and I just look at it whenever I need to. My calendar time is pretty sparsely scheduled, though. YMMV.

Easy wifi autoconfiguration with barcodes

ZXing's Barcode Scanner Android app (the most popular barcode app for Android; it's available on the Market) can now configure a wifi network based on information encoded in a QR code.

So you can say goodbye to having guests/patrons/visitors ask you how to log in to your wifi network every time someone new visits. Instead of having to select the correct network and type in the password (I thought computers were supposed to relieve us of this kind of drudgery), all they have to do is scan a barcode, and boom, they're online.

ZXing's QR Code Generator will help you make such a barcode (select "Wifi network" in the dropdown), after which you can just print it out and leave it in the living room.

If you wish, you can also create such a barcode yourself just by encoding the SSID and password in the barcode payload. Here are a couple of examples that illustrate the encoding method:

WEP: WIFI:S:mynetwork;T:WEP;P:00deadbeef;; (Example using Google Chart API)

WPA: WIFI:S:mynetwork;T:WPA;P:mypassword;; (Example using Google Chart API)

Hat tip to Vikram Aggarwal who implemented this concept, originally as a standalone app, WyScan, and then later implemented it in the Barcode Scanner app.

Instant messaging on Android

I've been using a Nexus One as my primary phone for the last few months now, and I quite like it! Upon reflection, the thing I most like about it, however, is not something I had anticipated at all when I got the phone.

Being able to search the web, read email, run apps, look at maps, and listen to podcasts are all very convenient. Though, there is not much to say about those things: I use those tools in more or less the same way I would use them if I had a laptop with me.

However, being able to send and receive IMs from my phone has been one of a small number of applications that has led to a qualitative change in the way I do things. I'm using IM a lot more now, at the expense of pretty much every other form of communication. And that's because instant messaging is the only mode of communication that actually feels convenient.

You can write and reply whenever you want, not just when it's convenient for the other person (unlike phone calls). You can have rapid back-and-forth conversations (unlike e-mail and voice mail). You can write messages of whatever length you want (unlike SMS). You can communicate unobtrusively, e.g. in a library (unlike phone calls and voice mail). You can read messages without going through an absurd interface (unlike voice mail). Your messages reach you on whatever device you're using— desktop, laptop, or phone (unlike phone calls and SMS). It doesn't cost an exorbitant amount of money (unlike SMS). (As for video calling, it has pretty much all the disadvantages and restrictions of voice calls, plus some more. It's a cool tech demo, but not something I expect to use on a day-to-day basis.)

If you think about where and when and how you can use each mode of communication, IM matches or surpasses pretty much everything else on most axes. Sometimes you need the phone or email for a high-bandwidth conversation or to deliver a large payload. But those occasions are getting to be few and far between.

Part of it is just the medium— IM is as synchronous or as asynchronous as you want it to be— but a good part of the goodness here is thanks to Android's implementation. You can dictate messages with your voice; for short common messages (e.g. "call me when you get home") it works quite well, so you can dash off quick messages using whatever modality is more convenient, keyboard or voice. And the Android notification system notifies you of new messages and lets you bring up conversations easily— but discreetly, without interrupting whatever else you are doing on the phone.

For me, IM is the killer app for carrying a smartphone in my pocket, ranking significantly above "browsing the web" and a fair amount above "making phone calls".

(Incidentally, the words "phone" and "smartphone" seem so inadequate after you have come to fathom this super-communications capability you have on your hands.)