• Software problem: Music players on Android

    One might thing that making a program that plays music stored locally on a computer shouldn’t be that difficult. It must be able to find music files, to play them correctly, to play songs in the correct order, and provide a decent user interface, with some search capabilities. Considering that the most difficult tasks can […]

  • Back to Vanilla Music

    I have found out that I was mistaken, Odyssey Android music player cannot always play the tracks in the right order. Additionally, it has sometimes problems (as many Android music players have) with non-ASCII characters in file tags. So I’m returning back to using Vanilla Music. I abandoned it when it was incapable to play […]

  • A usable music player for Android

    It’s surprisingly difficult to find a music player that works. I have the following minimum requirements on a usable music player for Android: It is free software. It can play music. It can play album tracks in the correct order. It can search by artist and by album. It can recognize music library updates. There […]

  • Fairphone owner

    I own a Fairphone now. When I first heard about the Fairphone project it looked interesting to me, but I haven’t thought about it seriously for two reasons: 1. price, 2. I wanted the phone to be fair not only in the production chain but also to its users. When I recently started looking for […]

  • Debian GNU/Linux on Android

    Android tablets are useful portable devices. Unfortunately Android makes them less useful than they could be. There are several problems with Android, one of them being lack of applications. While there are free Android applications for many common tasks, they are typically not suitable for serious work and many applications are completely missing, most notably […]

  • Liberating your Android device

    Some interesting starting points: https://lwn.net/Articles/602521/ https://fsfe.org/campaigns/android/liberate.en.html

  • Installing an alternative ROM on Google Nexus 10

    Enough is enough. I don’t like how the stock Android installation treats its users and I finally decided to replace it on my Google Nexus 10 with something else. The reasonable choices were CyanogenMod, AOKP and OmniROM. I decided to install AOKP. Installation instructions looked like installing an alternative ROM on Nexus is a completely […]

  • CyanogenMod user

    Enough is enough. I got sufficiently annoyed by Samsung Android to install an unofficial port of CyanogenMod (no better alternative) on my phone. What are the first impressions? The system installed without problems and has been running reasonably well. The user restrictions are gone: I got rid of many useless proprietary applications wasting the very […]

  • Fairphone

    This smartphone project looks interesting.

  • CyanogenMod removed from Google Play Store

    CyanogenMod installer application was removed from Google Play Store on Google’s request. Not much issue itself as it can be installed from elsewhere and without using the proprietary Play Store application. The more interesting part is the reasoning about the issue. According to Google the installer encourages users to void their warranty and thus is […]