First off, nobody’s first list of Android apps can be complete without a mention of the device they own. Mine is an HTC Desire Z, currently rooted and running Gingerbread (with this ROM).
Well, now that we’ve got that settled, I think we can start with the list.

Surfing the Interwebs

• The stock Android/HTC browser. Opera Mobile used to be my favourite, but after some time with it I decided I prefer the stock one.  I’m not touching Firefox - not until the Android version works smoothly and the desktop one gets better – and I don’t like Dolphin. Or other browsers.
• BaconReader. I need my dose of Reddit, and this app is happy to provide. It does exhibit some weird bugs sometimes (e.g. finding myself logged out and at a completely different comment thread, because I clicked a link), but they don’t disrupt me too much.

Communication and Sharing

• imo beta. imo is widely regarded as one of the best instant messengers around. That praise is not undeserved. Well, maybe a little. I listed the beta because that’s what I’m using right now – I upgraded one morning after finding out (by being woken up by my best friend from the first lucid dream I’ve had in months) that the main version somehow switched my status to “available” overnight on Yahoo. Temporary glitch? Maybe. The beta didn’t really fix anything, but it comes with a way nicer UI. Nowadays I avoid the situation by keeping it signed out. Kinda defeats the purpose of an always-on network though. Maybe I should write my own IM client.
• AndChat. After some time trying this one and AndroIRC against one another, I lean towards AndChat. It took me a while to figure out that the search key does nickname completion though – the Tab key doesn’t work for me, for some reason. I’ve submitted a “bug report” to the mailing list, let’s hope it gets fixed.
• Bump. I haven’t gotten the chance to actually try this one in practice, but I like the concept.
• imgur for Android. Install, log in, go to image, “share” using this, copy link, paste. It can also delete shared images, something which I find pretty useful.
• Skitch. Already made one girl smile using this, so I can vouch for its utility. Maybe.
• HTC Peep. A decent client for my limited Twitter needs, and has an awesome-looking widget. Here‘s an ugly support page, if you want screenshots (of the app itself, not the widget).

Organization

• GTasks. Does what it says on the tin, and does it well enough. The widgets are horrible, but other than that it’s a great app.
• Notational Acceleration. I’ve recently switched from Evernote to Simplenote as my note taking service. This app lets me type notes and sync them with Simplenote without even thinking about it. It’s simply amazing.

Music

• Subsonic. With a bit of configuration (and an always-on computer at home), this app lets you stream your entire music collection over mobile Internet. I didn’t use it too much for now, but I’ll have plenty of time to do that when school starts. Note that the server part of Subsonic requires a “donation” to be able to use the API after a 30-day trial. You can either donate or go the unethical route and just hack the damn thing.
• Dood’s Music Streamer. Infinite music from Grooveshark. No further comment required.
• 8tracks. Sometimes you just want to listen to some random songs that go well together. This app lets you do just that.
• TuneIn. Think of a radio station. Open TuneIn. Search for it. Listen. I mainly use this one for ah.fm.

Games

Abduction, AirPenguin, Angry Birds, Frozen Bubble, Fruit Ninja, Lane Splitter, Robo Defense and others.

Miscellaneous

• Google Goggles. An app that lets you search for things using your smartphone’s camera – text, products, QR codes…
• ConnectBot. I use it primarily to connect to my laptop over the Internet. Supports pretty much everything you’d need from an SSH client.
• Dropbox.
• FBReader. Sometimes I want to read actual books instead of Reddit comment threads. This app fulfills that need.
• Titanium Backup. Safety first, I guess. This one is pretty useful when ROM-hopping.

Well, I think that would be it. As usual, drop your suggestions in the comment section.

One of the major problems of MIUI is that landscape support is nonexistent in the home screen and, more importantly, the search app. I have a hardware keyboard, dammit, let me search properly!

The obvious solution here is to install a sane search app – like Google Search. However, the search button will still run MIUI’s search app. The fix for this is, as a quick web searching session will reveal, to convert Google Search to a system app.

But how do you do that? The tips you’ll find on the Web will probably suggest using Titanium Backup (which lets you do that in the paid version) or, deities forbid, some Windows app and a hackish 20-step guide. However, there’s a much simpler solution:
1. Get the Apps2ROM app and open it.
2. Scroll down to Google Search, tick the checkbox next to it.
3. Tap the “Save” button.
4. Tap the “Move now” button.
5. Agree to the restarting of your phone.
That’s it. No payments and no PC involved – just an app.

As always, drop a comment if I helped!

Or… maybe not, since other things are way cooler and more useful.

Anyway, that’s what I did, and the result is DesktopSearch. As the post title subtly suggests, it uses the locate tool, part of the mlocate utility set found on most Linux systems, to search for files. So it doesn’t actually do the hard work itself.

But wait! It does more than that. It actually maintains its own file index (using the updatedb tool), in which only files from your home directory are included – this way, you won’t get some random result from /etc instead of what you’re really looking for. It also hides dotfiles, so that when you search for “ruby” you don’t get stuff from ~/.gem/ instead of ~/Documents/ruby/. Pretty neat, eh?

So, what are you waiting for? (Don’t answer with “something interesting”, please.) Go download it from GitHub and have fun! Well, after you read the README, of course.

Pro tip: follow me on Twitter for more interesting things!

But the title of this post is a bit incorrect. I didn’t go back to Fedora 15, which is the version I was using before I switched to Ubuntu. I installed the beta version of Fedora 16.

So, how did it go? Installing it from the live CD went smoothly, as always. No boot problems after installing, which is only expected from a 2011 distro. Driver installation went well. Chrome (yes, the nonfree browser) installed with only a minor SELinux hiccup, which was easily fixed by following the troubleshooter’s instructions. Configuring everything else (fonts, codecs, zsh, Dropbox…) was easy and trouble-free, at least for me. Fedora just keeps evolving for the better…

As for problems? Well, this is a beta release. For one thing, Dropbox doesn’t have a repository for it, which leads to yum errors. (Chrome apparently does have a repository.) Renaming /etc/yum.repos.d/dropbox.repo to something like dropbox.repo.disabled seems to fix it, though.
That’s the only problem I encountered so far. So although something else is bound to be right around the corner, so far I’m pleased.

The final version of Fedora 16 will be released on the 8th of November, and will be available for download from the Fedora Project website. You can get the beta right now, though. Spread the word!

On an unrelated note: today I also screwed up really badly. Usually, after restoring an OS from a backup, I have to also restore my home folder. And when I do, all the files end up with root set as their owner, instead of andy. And to fix that, I usually run chown --recursive andy /home/andy.
Well, today I ran chmod +x --recursive /home/andy instead of that. Yeah, I am stupid sometimes. The result was a total disaster, as you could imagine.
So, how did I fix it? I first tried with chmod -x --recursive, but that affects directories as well. And, if you didn’t know by now, directories that are not executable can’t be accessed (i.e. not even cd works on them anymore). Enter obvious solution number two, the find command:

find -type f -exec chmod -x {} \;

That recursively lists every single file under the current folder and runs chmod -x on it. Thanks to the helpful folks in the #fedora channel (on freenode) for helping me out with that!

And it didn’t make me want to bang my head against the wall! This is a feat for Ubuntu – only openSUSE had a sane KDE setup until now. I was overjoyed. Maybe this is it, I said. Maybe I can finally use KDE and have the luxury of Ubuntu. It was a dream come true.

For the first 10 minutes, that is. Because after that KDE turned into Windows. I started experiencing annoying glitches, and I had to restart every so often to fix them. But that’s not the most annoying thing – what really makes me mad is the general slowness. Chromium takes eons to render pages. My laptop needs half a minute to become responsive after resuming from standby.

And, to be honest, it’s not worth it.

I use Fedora 15, and it’s a battery waster. It just eats my whole battery in about an hour, whereas I used to get around 3 hours with Ubuntu (I think). And I’ve endured that enough.
After a stroll through ArchWiki and a little ls-ing of my own, I’ve given my /etc/rc.local; file an upgrade:

# cpu scaling
for i in `find /sys/devices/system/cpu/*/cpufreq/scaling_governor`; do echo ondemand > $i; done;
# cpu scheduler
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_savings
# intel hda
echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
# laptop mode
echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
# nmi watchdog off
echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog
# runtime power management
for i in `find /sys/devices/*/power/control`; do echo auto > $i; done;
for i in `find /sys/bus/pci/devices/*/power/control`; do echo auto > $i; done;
# sata alpm
echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy
# usb autosuspend
for i in `find /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/level`; do echo auto > $i; done;
for i in `find /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/autosuspend`; do echo 2 > $i; done;
# vm writeback
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
# disable wake on lan
ethtool -s eth0 wol d

You just need to add that to your /etc/rc.local file as mentioned above (works on Fedora 15 and Arch, apparently), or to whatever file your system runs on boot. I don’t remember what Ubuntu used, so you’ll have to look it up. Actually, these tips don’t apparently work on Ubuntu…
There. Now PowerTOP says every single “tunable” is set to the correct option. Except the WLAN power save one, but I don’t exactly have a power save capable card.

Now I just need to figure out why Bluetooth refuses to properly turn on…

The first thing that I noticed was that Unity decided to get rid of the last bit of consistency it had. That is to say, the Dash button. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to move it to the dock and give it that horrible CRT shape. It’s completely inconsistent, and completely ugly.

Then, ignoring that minor issue since I planned to replace Unity with Gnome Shell anyway, I tried installing it. Whoops. After two tries I ditched the USB drive, burned a CD and installed Ubuntu from that. It was really just an annoyance for me, but I think a newbie might not have the same reaction upon seeing “Hard Disk Error” on boot…

After installing, I explored it for a bit, took a look around the completely disorganized (it has magazines grouped with apps?!) Software Center, upgraded the system, decided Unity wasn’t for me, and proceeded to install Gnome Shell…
It was a pain. Obviously, the Ubuntu developers are so caught up with Unity that Shell was completely overlooked. It looked horrific (a mix of Adwaita and Ambiance), it used ugly fonts, Chromium didn’t integrate at all, it… well, let’s say it wasn’t a pleasant experience, and I’m happy to be back to Fedora. It might be a pain sometimes, and it might downright refuse to let my battery last more than one hour, but it works well. And it looks awesome.

Yes, Google Chrome. I am actually going to blog about installing a non-free browser on my Fedora 15 laptop.
Now don’t get me wrong, I still like Firefox and I’ll probably keep using it on the Windows desktop, but I’m tired of all those small glitches I come across (like YouTube videos not wanting to expand anymore) and I sure could use some Chrome-specific functionality (like the notifications). To hell with RAM usage, I have 2 gigabytes of it and I hardly ever use half, with any browser.

But why the non-free Chrome and not the open-source Chromium, you ask? Well, Chrome has some goodies like an integrated, always-up-to-date Flash plugin, and a PDF reader plugin that I intend to use (more on that later).

First step: disable SELinux. Seriously, that thing causes more problems than it solves. Chrome won’t run without a special policy, and even with that policy I, for one, couldn’t install extensions. I completely disabled it, but setting it to “permissive” mode should work too.
Update: I re-enabled SELinux after installing Chrome, and it didn’t complain. Flash still works, the PDF reader still works, installing extensions works, and so on. I have no idea why, but I’m not complaining.

Second step: install Chrome. Self-explainable.

Third step: set Chrome as your default PDF viewer. These instructions were written with GNOME 3 in mind, but I think they also work with GNOME 2. Just download some random PDF file, open its folder, right click it, select Properties, go to the “Open With” tab, click the “Show other applications” button, find Chrome, click it and then click the “Set as Default” button. You might also want to set PDF files to automatically open in Chrome (click the arrow next to the download, check “Always Open Files of This Type”).

Fourth step: fix all those nasty font problems. You see, some PDFs (including the first one I downloaded) will render incorrectly without the Microsoft core fonts. That’s easily fixed by installing them, here’s how to do it on Fedora (there’s an .rpm right there).

Fifth step: fix all those nasty font problems, part two. The core fonts do solve a problem, but they cause others, including the “pages are rendered with ugly fonts” issue. However, there’s a quick fix. First, go to Chrome’s Preferences -> the Under the Bonnet tab (or Hood, depends on your locale; I prefer UK since it uses the metric system) -> Customise Fonts and pick some sane fonts (the Liberation family works quite well; Cantarell doesn’t, really).
Then, install this extension, go to its options (menu -> Tools -> Extensions -> you’ll figure it out) and type “sans-serif” in the text box there and hit Save. Done! Also, unlike Firefox’s settings, this extension doesn’t affect pages that use CSS @font-face, which pretty much means that everyone wins. Update: well, not really. It breaks a) Google Docs b) monospace fonts c) the look of some websites.

Done! Now you have a nice non-free browser with incorporated proprietary plugins for all your web needs.
It also happens to be pretty damn fast, good-looking and integrates well. And now it’s not just your default browser, it’s your default PDF viewer too!

WM6.5 has a nice lockscreen built-in, which can be set to lock the screen every time you put your device to sleep using Schap’s Advanced Config (the option can be found under the “Screen” section).
However, on most ROMs, the lockscreen has a bug: you have to tap the clock in the bottom portion of the screen before you can unlock it using the slider. That’s quite annoying, but you could live with it, right?
Well, it gets worse. When someone calls you, you won’t be able to answer or reject using the touchscreen. And the hardware buttons on the Diamond aren’t exactly easy to reach, particularly the reject button.

But fear not, for there is a solution! Some fellow called “veisen” posted a fix here. You just have to download the attached .zip, copy the buried touch.dll file somewhere on your device, and then, on your device, copy it to the \Windows folder using Total Commander (here‘s the .cab, for the impatient). After you do that, just soft reset your device and you should be experiencing the lockscreen in its entire glory.

Please drop a comment if I helped! It’s not that hard, you know.