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Good Music, 2016

2017-01-04T08:58:00.003-05:00

Hi folks! I'm listening to a bit less music these days, but here are some albums and songs that I really liked in 2016 (though not all released this year):

Albums:

Misty Miller - "The Whole Family is Worried." (Angry British Lady Rock)
Sky Ferreira - "Night Time, My Time" (Great Indie Pop)
Mike Doughty - "The Heart Watches While the Brain Burns" (Mike's best since at least Golden Delicious)
Tokyo Police Club - "Champ" (Just like regular rock n' roll but v. good.)
Moana Soundtrack (OMG please see this movie the music is so good.)

Songs:

Lizzo - "Worship"
Big Data - "Dangerous"
Meghan Trainor - "Me Too"
BØRNS - "10,000 Emerald Pools"
Bahari - "Altar of the Sun"
Mumford & Songs - "Ditmas"

Listen to all of these, please. Google Music Playlist

More Games of my Youth

2016-05-04T20:11:00.000-04:00

Super Solvers Midnight Rescue was another favorite computer game of my early childhood. You can play it on archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Midnight_Rescue_1989

Funny enough, this was a reading comprehension game, but I didn't quite get that part. I just remember taking pictures of all the robots.

And while this is almost passé, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego is surprisingly fun:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Where_in_the_World_is_Carmen_Sandiego_Enhanced_1989

(We actually only had Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego, for our Macintosh LC, but the gameplay is basically identical.)

Think Quick!

2016-05-02T20:12:00.002-04:00

When I was younger my parents had an IBM PC XT, and I was lucky enough to get to mess around with it when they weren't using it.

One of my favorite games was Think Quick! and now you can play it on archive.org.

Please, relive my childhood:
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Think_Quick_1987

Bike ride in the Red Hook/Rhinebeck NY/Bard College Area (20 mi)

2016-04-17T19:10:00.002-04:00

This weekend I was near Bard College accompanying my wife as she attended a conference at Bard College. Since I had nothing to do, I decided to bring my bike along, and on Saturday took a great 20 mile bike rid in the area.

Full credit goes to Ken Roberts and Sharon Marsh Roberts, who found this great route (and have many others in the area on their web site). It can be very difficult finding good routes as a visitor, so I am very grateful to them.

Anyway, the route is pretty much as they describe. Roughly 20 miles with gently rolling hills, never too steep that you get bored of them. In addition to Rhinebeck, where the route starts, and Red Hook, there are some neat sites along the way.

I stopped for a short stroll in Poet's Park:

I saw many farms and even vineyards:

And I had a look at Bard College:

The whole thing took just a bit over two hours, even with a few accidental detours. And Rhinebeck is a great place to get a bite to eat when you're done!

You can check out my ride on Garmin Connect (with full maps, elevation details etc.).

And you can see my full photo album.

Hopefully you can give it a try!

It's true...

2015-08-09T21:56:00.001-04:00

Nerds really do like Subarus.

Previously.

Extracting Base64 Images from Google Keep Archives

2015-05-23T10:25:00.000-04:00

I love Google Keep! It's a nice-looking note-taking app with more features than I ever use.

But once I made the mistake of staring a photo album in Keep. (If you don't know, you can add photos to a note either by taking a picture or finding on on 'disk.') To my chagrin I discovered that there's no way to get these photos out of Keep.

So I was super happy when I saw that Google Takeout now exports Google Keep files. "Great!" I thought, I'll just download my whole archive and grab those files. Again, much to my chagrin, I discovered that the photos were not in the Takeout archive as JPG files, but rather encoded as base64 strings inside the html page. So for example, I have a note called "Dogs" and all the photos are base64 encoded inside that "Dogs.html" note in the Takeout archive.

This is seriously annoying.

So, I wrote a Python script to get these images out. It's called the "Keep Photo Dump."

To use it you have to have Python installed. At the terminal, you would run:
./keep_photo_dump.py Dogs.html

and all the images in the file will be dumped as Dogs1.jpg, Dogs2.jpg, etc.

Hope this helps someone else.

Ctrl-down/up in emacs in Mac Terminal

2015-03-28T16:11:00.002-04:00

Finding the answer to this online pretty much drove me nuts. I'm sharing it here for you, future Internet user.

Here's the situation:

I use Emacs
I use Emacs in the Mac Terminal
\C-down was bound to forward-paragraph by default (and \C-up bound to backward-paragraph by default).
I wanted them to actually work, but they didn't.

Through some series of trickery I was able to figure out that the Mac terminal was sending the wrong escape sequences for cltr-up and down. Specifically, it wasn't sending anything at all, beyond just the down key. I fixed it with the following settings:

From the terminal, go to "Preferences" "Settings" "Keyboard"
Look for and modify, or add actions for ctrl-up and ctrl-down:

ctrl-up = \033[1;5A
ctrl-down = \033[1;5B

Jane Bowman Stuckey

2015-03-01T14:08:00.001-05:00

Here's the obituary for Jane Bowman Stuckey, my grandmother. She was an incredibly smart, and funny woman who lived a really interesting life. We will definitely miss her.

Jane Bowman Stuckey passed away peacefully in her home on February 27, 2015 in Austin, Texas at the age of 91.
She is survived by her children Dr. Barbara Beckman and her husband Dr. Edwin Beckman of New Orleans, Louisiana; Holly Brandt, and her husband Dr. Thomas Brandt of Austin, Texas; her son and his wife Jay and Ira Stuckey of Houston, Texas; her 6 grandchildren; and 9 great grandchildren. She is preceded in death by her husband of 65 years, James H. Stuckey.
She was born to the late Esther and Glen Bowman on September 5, 1923 in Highland Park, Illinois. At the age of six, her family moved near Harlingen to help her grandfather with his citrus orchards. In 1940, she graduated from Harlingen High School where she played the piccolo in the marching band. She attended Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans before returning to the Valley where she met and married her late husband, James H. Stuckey in 1942.
At the time of their marriage, Jim Stuckey was a radio operator with Pan American Airlines. When an opportunity to transfer to South Africa came along, Jane talked Jim into it. They spent several years there before moving to Houston in 1951.
After moving to Houston, she became an avid golfer. She remained a voracious reader throughout her life. She especially enjoyed reading the Man Booker selections each year when they were announced. She was always aware of current events, and impressed her grandchildren with her sharp mind and knowledge of the world. Jane considered herself to be a ‘birder’ who traveled the world looking at exotic birds.
There will be a private family celebration of Jane’s life in Houston. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to Austin Hospice at 4107 Spicewood Springs Road, Suite 100, Austin, TX 78759 or a charity of your choice that reflects Jane’s love of birds and nature. The family would like to thank Hospice Austin for their care and support during this difficult time.

Konzentriertsichaufeinigedingetpunterausschlussanderer

2015-02-22T13:17:00.002-05:00

Something occurred to me while I was taking a shower this evening. It was almost a daydream. I was imagining looking for a specific type of service person by emailing some mailing list, and then having to apologize because I didn't know more about this particular industry. This one thought lead my brain off on its own.

We all know that time in life is short. And there is no lack of things that we can learn about, study, research, become an expert (or even amateur) in. And I wish we had a word for describing those particular things I have chosen to be interested in as opposed to all the other, equally valid to be interested in.

"Interests" sort of seems to describe it. But that's not quite what I'm getting at here. Think of the "causes" you care about. For me, it's probably the death penalty (i.e., repealing it in the US) and the environment. Many of my friends care deeply about poverty, and women's rights. Don't I care about poverty?! I certainly believe that I do. But I have not studied them, I do not generally consume all articles about them, and most importantly I often don't know enough to have strong opinions about, say what should be done to help those in need in my city.

A lot of my coworkers have spent a lot of time learning about home repair, or stereos or electronics. I think those are all valid things to be interested in, but I know almost nothing. If I want to buy a new stereo, I just ask one of these people and more or less buy exactly what they tell me. Or decide that the good ones are too expensive, and give up.

This is, I think, totally normal. There's only so many things you can invest yourself in passionately. And there's opportunity cost to everything you choose to do.

Going back to the title of this article, there's probably a German word to describe what I mean, but no English one. And I truly think that's a shame, since in many ways life is all about choosing which things to focus on at the exclusion of other, equally valid, equally important things.

Tech Videos Worth Watching: DNS

2015-01-15T15:44:00.003-05:00

Here's another one from Defcon 21, which is just like the gift that keeps on giving for me. This guy is doing some really scary stuff with DNS, and as a security noob myself, it's really fun to learn about.

Email Response Time

2014-11-21T17:10:00.001-05:00

Ever since I started a full time job, where I spend nearly all day answering work emails, it seems I am less and less interested in responding (or even reading) personal emails. At some point I realized Iwas being slow to respond, but I wanted to know, just exactly how slow.

So, I graphed it (numbers in days):

This data comes from a Google App Script I wrote. Here's the source. Google App Script is great, it lets you write Javascript that has access to your Google Apps, like email, docs, etc. You can do stuff like send emails as a result of changes in your Docs, or in my case, run a script every day that reads your email and writes to a spreadsheet.

Here's how the script works, although there's definitely room for improvement. Every day it runs, it looks at my last 30 days of email, and for every email where I responded to someone else it adds up the delay between their email and my response. Additionally (and here's the kind of weird part that I think is creating the spikes in the above graph) I wanted to keep track of my outstanding responses and how long they were taking. My normal email workflow is that I keep things that I need to respond to in my inbox, so I decided to include for any email in my inbox, the time between the last email (as long as it wasn't from me) and the current date.

One final caveat was that, after 60 days I put a hard cutoff, since those are typically emails I just never respond to, and finally archive in shame.

So how does it look? For most (median) of my emails I respond in a few hours. But for the 99th%ile email, it is much worse, around 25 days, and even worse if you go back a month or so.

I definitely recommend Google Apps Script. It's easy, but super powerful because all of the useful data (i.e., yours) that the scripts have access to. I could even see it being a pretty good way to learn programming/JavaScript, since from day 1 you can do some pretty interesting things.

Tech video worth watching: SIM Cards

2014-11-21T16:52:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been getting much more into video as a means of self-education. Traditionally when someone shares a link on twitter/facebook that's all video no text I would get pretty annoyed. "I can't watch this thing on the bus, you know." But more recently (and due in no small part to YouTube's Playback Speed setting) I have rediscovered the pleasure that can come from a well-given talk.

The hardest thing now is finding them.

This one is "The Secret Life of SIM Cards." It's a talk from Deccon 21, via Adam Goode. The two speakers set up their own GSM network, and discovered some of the weirdness of on-SIM applications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31D94QOo2gY

Kojima Jeans Street

2014-09-20T13:24:00.000-04:00

After reading this great blog post on the Jeans Street in Kojim, Japan, my wife and I decided to make a day trip there. Now, bear in mind that I am no great jean or raw denim enthusiast, but I am definitely easily swayed by fashion trends that involve technical minutiae. That and I have a couple of friends who are in to denim so I figured it would be worth visiting.

The above blog post really does a great job of covering the Jeans Street, and if you are at all interested you should go there first. But, I did find a few bits of information that were left out of that post, so I thought I'd be helpful and post some of them here.

For a short bit of background, there's some famous Denim brands in Japan, particular famous to those who like 'raw denim.' The city of Okayama, which is otherwise none too notable, is the home more or less of Japanese Denim. But in the small city of Kojima, 20 minutes away by train, a number of these famous Japanese brands have set up a shopping street dedicated to nothing but denim. Like I said, the above blog post does the whole thing much more justice.

Anyway, here are a few things you might want to be aware of if you're heading there:

Getting To Kojima: Despite what I gathered from the above article, the Jeans Street is not in Okayama, it's in Kojima which is a separate town about 20 or so minutes away by train. To get there, first you need to get to Okayama, which has a Bullet Train (Shinkansen) station. Then from Okayama station, take the Seto Ohashi Line south towards Kojima. It goes about every 20 minutes and was very easy for us to find. Get off at Kojima Station.
Getting From Kojima Station to the Jeans Street: Once you are arrive at Kojima Station, you can get to the Jeans Street by Taxi or by Bus.

Location: The Jeans Street is HERE on Google Maps.
Taxi: A taxi to the Jeans Street costs about 700 yen, and the drivers will know where to go. Note that it will be very difficult to find a taxi back to the station unless you can call one.
Bus: Here is a map and bus schedule that I scanned. The bus costs about 140 yen, and will take you from the station to the place on Google Maps I linked above. When it finished its loop it will take you back from the same spot.

Shops and Descriptions:

Map of Shops: This PDF has a map of all the shops and their names.
Description of Shops: This PDF has English descriptions of the stores in the above map. This Google Doc contains the same information, but also with Google's Optical Character recognition enabled, to act as better bait for Google's search engine.

Food/Drink: There are plenty of restaurants and cafes, so see the above map of shops for more information.

Hope this helps! If you have any other questions I'm happy to try to answer them in the comments.

The Dissatisfactory Doily, Revisited

2014-08-24T03:16:00.000-04:00

This one dumb post of mine, "The Dissatisfactory Doily" about my 2010 SIGBOVIK paper of the same name gets way more traffic than most of my other posts combined. Here's a graph of the pageviews over the past month:

It comes out way ahead, even compared to how-to articles ("Buy a SIM card in Dublin," "Reading Google Spreadsheets from an Android App") that you think would naturally have Google juice.

And somehow the spammers have figured out as well. This post regularly (1/week?) receives spam posts of the "Dude I love this post, please check out my link" variety. Blogger is smart enough to label these posts as spam and not post them, but I still get an email every time. Thanks Blogger.

I can understand why you would want to leave your spam on the most popular article, but why is this article popular in the first place? Maybe the mention of the Terrible Towel? And I have this unproven suspicion that the traffic itself is fake.

I don't know... what do you think?

Flanders' Fields to Westvleteren

2014-08-15T14:43:00.000-04:00

Today a friend and I planned a biking trip to visit the cemeteries and memorials of WWI around Ypres, Belgium, more or less the home of the legendary "Flanders' Fields." It was a great idea! The perfect, flat biking paths of Flanders. It's the 100th anniversary of WWI. I had the day off of work because of a Belgian holiday (Ascension, if you're curious). They even have a nice, 35k biking route planned out by the office of tourism in Ypres.

But somewhere along the way we realized that Ypres is only 16k from the Westvleteren Abbey/Brewery. Westvleteren is one of the 6 Belgian Trappist breweries, and it is famous for Westvleteren 12, occasionally referred to as The Best Beer in the World. Notoriously hard to buy, etc. etc. I had had this legendary beer once before, but still, it sounded like a great idea to me, since I had not yet visited a single Belgian brewery.

So our historical tour became a beer tour. It was definitely great, and I would do again. Here's the route we took:

It was nice and easy. Here's some advice if you're thinking about taking the trip yourself:

We drove to Ypres, but you could take the train there as well.
We rented bikes from this place. (10 Euros each for the whole day.)
We got a map from the Ypres tourist office, which is right in the center city. The map was the "Westhoek Zuid" cycling map, pictured below. The paths are really well marked in Flandres, and you just match up the numbers on the road with the numbers on the map. (Seriously, they are super well marked.)

A few pictures:

Sadly our trip was not without incident. About 1k from the brewery my friend's back tire blew out. We walked the rest of the way to the brewery, where we had a great meal and some great beer, but then we had to walk 5k to the town of Poperinge to take the train back to Ypres. Could have been worse, but could have been better too.

All in all I rate it 4 beers out of 5.

Announcing "Number 'N Date"

2014-08-03T12:21:00.000-04:00

Hi folks!

Today I'm releasing the first version of Number 'N Date on Google Play. Number 'N Date is both a proof of concept and a useful Android application. It is a very simple way of adding a number and the current date to a Google Docs Spreadsheet. Take a look at the interface, it's pretty simple:

The basic idea is, you add a number and it, plus the current date, will show up as a row in the Google Docs Spreadsheet that you have chosen in the properties menu. I find it useful for keeping track of daily numbers like my weight, money I've spent, miles I've run, etc. But with the added benefit that the information is all in my own Google Docs Spreadsheets. So I've free to do whatever kind of processing I want to do on the data (plus not have to trust one more company with my information).

Number 'N Date is available on Google Play!

Number 'N Date is also open source! Which may be useful! You might not trust me, some Internet weirdo, not to squirrel away a copy of your data somewhere.

Actually the whole open source thing brings me to the second important feature; Number 'N Date is a proof of concept. Specifically, it's an end-to-end application that does something useful, gets authorization from accounts on an Android device, and reads and writes to Google Docs spreadsheets. Information on doing those latter two things together has been pretty hard to come by on the internet. I've written about reading Google Spreadsheets from an Android App before, but in a sort of limited way. This is a follow-on, an end-to-end example that shows everything together.

I hope you find it useful, either as an app or as a code example. Please, send me feature requests, report bugs, ask me questions, etc.

Known issues:

Spreadsheet must have 'number' and 'date' columns in the first row, or must be completely empty (so the app can add them).

Art Nouveau in our Neighborhood (Brussels, Ixelles/Flagey)

2014-05-25T06:25:00.000-04:00

One of the things I love about living in Brussels is the large number of buildings and homes in the Art Nouveau style. I'm working on a map of just the ones in the two or three blocks around our house, which is already a pretty impressive collection (including one by Horta!). Google Maps Engine makes embedding pretty ugly, so feel free to click through.

Why do nerds love Subaru?

2014-02-18T07:27:00.003-05:00

Something to think about...

Getting the Internet in Brussels: Home & Mobile

2014-02-15T10:52:00.001-05:00

I've now lived in Brussels long enough, and had enough experience with different Internet providers (both home and mobile) that I thought I should share my recommendations.

Cell Phone Plans/Mobile Internet
Recommendation: Buy Proximus "Generation Connect"
You can buy generation connect here.
Summary: A 20€ a month pre-paid SIM card. With it, you get 2GB of data a month, unlimited texting and "20€ of call credit," which is basically 80 minutes of call time.

As a kind of young person, mobile data is my highest priority. Most of the mobile plans from the big three cell phone services in Belgium (Proximus, Base and Mobistar) focus on texting and call time. They'll usually come with some piddling amount of data, like 100MB. Upon moving to Belgium, I was really interested in getting a lot of data, and also interested in getting a pre-paid plan. (Pre-paid plans are relatively rare and crappy in the US, so I was excited about this opportunity.)

When I first got here, I went with Mobile Vikings. For 10-50€ a month you get a ton of data, texting and some call time. Even better, they are a great company. They truly get mobile. They know we want tons of data for mobile. They have nice, helpful employees, and they respond really quickly and helpfully on Twitter/Email etc. The problem? They have terrible coverage in Brussels. Like, really bad. To the point where it was basically useless. So as much as I would have loved to stay with them, I couldn't do it.

Proximus, on the other hand, has great mobile service (reception/data speed/etc.). They are the mobile arm of the national telephony monopoly here in Belgium. Their pre-paid plans are mostly bad! However, so serious was the perceived threat from Mobile Vikings (and similar, data-first mobile providers) that they had to come us with a competitive offer. In their case, that was the "Generation Connect" plan. It's a good plan. You get plenty of data. You get good service, life it good.

Home Internet
Recommendation: Numericable "Duo TV + Internet", if it's available in your area.
You can sign up for this plan here.
Summary: For 40€ a month, you get very fast Internet, without all the peak problems of Belgacom.

When I first moved here, I had Belgacom Internet and TV. Belgacom is the, again, the national telephony monopoly. Our internet service (DSL) was fast enough when it was working, but we had tons of problems with our router. If you had more than a certain number of devices (in our case, 4) they would constantly be dropping off of the WiFi, and losing service, forcing you to disconnect & reconnect. I talked to a bunch of people at work, they all had Belgacom internet, and they all had the same problems. Even worse, at peak Internet times (Sunday evening!) Internet service was really bad. Streaming video basically didn't work, and this was even with our "premium" service (50mbps, or something like that).

When we moved to a new apartment, we went with Numericable. They are a cable provider (as opposed to a telephone/ADSL provider). So far we've had none of the same problems that we did with Belgacom. Unfortunately, every Commune in Belgium has the right to choose their own cable providers (beyond Belgacom, which is everywhere) so you may not have Numericable in your area. Still, I have heard good reports of the other cable providers, e.g., Voo. Can't be any worse than Belgacom, I say!

Good luck! If you've had any good/bad experiences, please post them below so that others can learn.

Megabudget v0.1

2013-10-13T14:49:00.000-04:00

I finished the very first, somewhat-useful version of the Megabudget Android App. To recap, Megabudget is an Android app that allows you to use your existing Google Docs spreadsheet as a budget, but add expenses on the go from your phone. It does the following:

Authenticates into your Google docs spreadsheet with your Android user account(s)
Reads months & categories from your budget spreadsheet
After you select a category & month, you can add a new expense, updating your spreadsheet

The project itself is meant to be extensible, so that if it seems useful to you, you can contribute an implementation of the BudgetAdapter in order to have it work with your own budget format.

Here's the project again: https://code.google.com/p/nolacoaster/

And the last SVN commit log:

This is the first version of Megabudget that does something useful. It:
- populates the categories & months
- populates the total of the latest month
- you can select a category
- you can add an expense to that category

It has several notable problems
- no idea how it works when disconnected from the internet
- it is very slow, esp. at the beginning where it does multiple pulls from the
spreadsheet
- you can't select a month

Additionally it would be really nice to
- organize the categories by freq of use
- allow for offline expenses

11 mile run (17.5 km run), Wallonia to Brussels

2013-09-08T11:23:00.001-04:00

I've been training for the Brussels Half Marathon this year! It's been fun so far, and it's my first race of any length so wish me luck. Anyway, during training you're always looking for interesting routes to run.

This one is cool because it starts in Wallonia, passes through Flanders, and then ends up in Brussels, in the Bois de la Cambre, already one of our favorite places to run.

View Running route from Wallonia to Ixelles in a larger map

More information:
Distance: ~11 miles (17.7km)
Starting point: La Hulpe train station
Ending point: Bois de la Cambre, by La Bascule
Terrain: Mostly forrest with some farmland type areas. Passes by the Chateau de la Hulpe, which is a very nice bonus. Gentle hills up and down.

A Few Hikes in Ireland (The Burren, Inishmore, Connemara)

2013-08-19T12:00:00.000-04:00

We just got back from a week-long vacation in Ireland. It was great! We spent most of our time in Western and Northwest Ireland. Unlike most of our vacations, where we hit up museums, churches, and cultural sites in cities, this was a more nature-oriented trip, as I think is common in Ireland. We wanted to do some hikes, but were having trouble finding enough information about them online.

So, for future visitors to Ireland, I thought I'd recap the hikes we went on with a bit more information. Good luck!

The Burren (Ballyvaughan Wood Loop)

Distance: 8 km
Difficulty: Easy
Time: 1:26, but we were running for a fair bit...
More information: here and here

Our first 'hike' was actually a run. We needed to run 9 miles as part of half marathon training, and we thought we'd do two loops around this 8km route to get us there. It's "Easy," right? Well, that turned out to not really work. The first ~15 minutes of this hike are though some interesting, but tough woodlands and rocky fields. Good hike. Lots of farmland that you pass through, and some times it was almost tough finding our way, but we did it. Go to Monk's restaurant afterwards!

View The Burren in a larger map

Inis Oirr Island Hike

Distance: 4.73 miles

Difficulty: Easy

Time: 1:44

More information: here, and the ferry

We took a ferry to the smallest of the Aran Islands, Inis Oirr, and while there we did this nice hike. I can highly recommend it! We saw lots of great views of the island, some livestock, and we even had a nice picnic at the rustic castle tower on top of the island.

View Inis Oirr Hike in a larger map

The Connemara (Diamond Hill Hike)

Distance:

Difficulty: Medium

Time: 2:22

More information: here and here

A short distance from the Connemara National Park visitor center is a hike to the top of Diamond Hill. In fact, there are a few hikes around the hill, but we took the one that went to the top. It was a nice, strenuous climb for me, although some of us didn't like the views from steep heights! The scenery makes one think of the Scottish Highlands. We took the hike pretty seriously, but there were plenty of families with small children doing it (in fact, it was a little crowded) so probably just about anyone could make it to the top.

View Diamond Hill Hike in a larger map

Buying a SIM Card in Ireland (from the Dublin airport)

2013-08-18T12:50:00.002-04:00

I recently got back from a one week vacation in Ireland. It was amazing. We mostly went to the west and northwest of Ireland (Galway, Sligo, Donegal, Derry). And we had a car, so it was easy to get around and see whatever we wanted whenever we wanted to. I highly recommend it!

I also highly recommend buying a SIM card at the airport. It was really easy and we took full advantage of it.

Buying a SIM card allows you to:

Call hotels & restaurants in Ireland
Check your email, etc. at the many places where WiFi is spotty or non-existent
And my favorite, allows you to use your phone's GPS to navigate while driving. This was a huge help for us, as driving is a great way to get around Ireland, and it's much less expensive than renting a GPS unit from the rental place.

First, as always, you need to make sure your phone is unlocked. If you've been with your carrier for a while, they'll usually do this for you with no problems when you call them up and tell them you are visiting another country. Or you can be like me and buy an unlocked phone like the Nexus 4.

In the Dublin airport, there are at least two places to buy a SIM card.

Terminal 2: This is the International terminal, where you probably arrived from. Once you exit the baggage claim there is a convenience store (Spar, I believe) where they sell many things including SIM cards from several different vendors. While the prices were good (€20-30) I couldn't figure out whether and how much data my money would get me, and I cared much more about data than calls/texts. The employee I asked, though friendly, was not helpful.
Terminal 1: This is the budget terminal. If you took Ryanair you probably arrived here, otherwise you may have to walk. On the ground floor is a small store that sells nothing but SIM cards. This is, I believe, the place to go. The employee was quite knowledgable. There we purchased a Vodaphone SIM for €20. For that price, we got 250MB of data, which was good enough for our one week entire trip, checking email, Facebook, and daily use for navigational purposes.

Good luck!

How to find out when your T-Mobile contract is expiring?

2013-08-06T07:36:00.002-04:00

Sometimes you want to know when your T-Mobile contract is expiring, either because you want a new phone, want to switch providers, or just because you think they screwed up. And if you asks this completely reasonable question to T-Mobile, they will tell you that you need to call them up to learn this information, and also, "Is there anything wrong? Why are you curious?" Annoying.

To find out when you contract ends do the following:

Go to t-mobile.com
Go to the "My Account" section and log in.
Look for "My account activity" and select "More account activity" and go back far enough in history to find the most recent "Change in contract" event. Expanding this event will tell you what date you contract was extended to.
(The list only keeps 24 months of activity, but if there were no "Change in contract" events during this time, you almost certainly have finished your contract.)

Reading Google Spreadsheets from an Android App

2013-07-28T19:05:00.000-04:00

Well, I've done it. It took me two serious days of wading through the mess that is the gdata APIs (myths and outdated versions abound) and the OAuth2 APIs (same caveats apply) and I was finally able to read the list of my own personal spreadsheets in Google Docs, and print their names out from an Android application.

It was very important to me to be able to use Android's own build-in account mechanism, which took a fair bit of time to figure out, and then on top of that the build/class-path requirements for the Google Spreadsheets API is completely messed up.

But anyway, here's a short description of how I did it, notes, and the full code for the main activity.

1 - I am using a Nexus 4, so I set up my app to use the latest APIs possible (Android 4.2.2 on my system).

2 - The list of required JARs is crazy, and quite picky. Here's the screenshots of the ones I am using:

3 - I had to add the following permissions to my manifest file:

4 - And finally, here is the code itself to run the main activity. The basic application structure was just the one that is created by default when you create a new Android Application. The basic steps for listing the Spreadsheets I got from the Spreadsheets API Tutorial. I can't really remember where I learned the OAuth2.0 steps, but needless to say, I cobbled it together from several online sources.