You can get the .ttf files from here: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/

Common to them all is their high quality and utility. I tend to be untolerating towards apps which suck and uninstall them very quickly… (Case in point: the latest Google Music update. Slow, ugly, inconsistent UI, permissions to do just about anything (it’s just a damn music player, or at least should be!) – it didn’t stay many minutes in my phone.)

So check these out, they are free and have no ads. For some apps it’s possible to donate money.

Reading the news

Pulse News is my newsfeed reader. I tried Feedly too, but I liked this one better. The UI is good, you can star interesting articles and access them at pulse.me later.

The only thing missing is easy exporting of the feeds – all “cloud enabled” apps should have the possibility to export data locally. We don’t want lock-in, now do we?

(You can get an account from Read It Later and kind of export through that, though.)

Keeping track of my books

These are actually two different apps which work well together. Load up the Book Catalogue and beep the EAN codes of the books from your bookshelf with the Barcode Scanner – it’s surprisingly fast – the app looks up information about your book and stores it.

If you loan books, just mark them as loaned. No more wondering 8 months afterwards “where the hell is that book”.

The best parts? It just works very well, and, it’s not tied to some cloud service! You can connect it to LibraryThing if you want, but you don’t need to. Your library can be exported to mass storage, so you can access your library on your computer or other devices too. Awesome!

Downsides?

For the Book Catalogue, none really… A wishlist item could be more diverse list/bookshelf viewing possibilities.

For the Barcode Scanner, the only thing I’ve found out so far is that the Barcode Scanner does not understand GS1 DataBar Stacked Omnidirectional barcodes. And so what? Scanning an apple from Chile didn’t work, not exactly a major issue :)

Note taking

The best app I’ve found is ColorNote.

Works perfectly well, supports checklists (for e.g. shopping lists), you can set reminders, a note can be chosen with a widget. No ads, no cloud service required. Local backup possibility (password protected, too)!

Calculator

Sometimes on the go you need a calculator, not just a regular four-function one, but a real scientific calculator.

My choice is RealCalc. It’s free, but if you want, you can donate by buying the version which has a price. Even so, the free version has no ads or nags.

It’s like having my trusted Casio with me, in my phone. (And it might not sound like much, but it is actually very high praise)

TED Air

This app is perfect in making commuting just whizz by. It’s basically a front-end to TED, where you can find a lot of short videoed speeches about many different subjects. The talks are to-the-point and given by experts in their field. No matter what you’re interested in, you’ll find something to watch.

Sometimes it can be even more interesting to watch something you have absolutely no interest in beforehand.

You can browse talks also by tags, speakers and themes. The best feature to me is the ability to download the videos to your device. Then you can watch it even without network coverage – no need to stream it. Pro tip: connect your device at home with WLAN, download the videos you’re going to watch the next day.

Weather

For the current weather, just look out the window. For a prediction of the weather, try Aix Weather. No ads, free app, but like RealCalc you can donate by buying a priced version.

Aix Weather is a widget that draws the (predicted) temperature curve along with rainfall and a symbol of cloudy, sunny, etc. You can set multiple locations and have more instances of the widget at the same time. Handy if you move a lot between two different places.

The weather data comes from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute so the accuracy is probably better inside Europe than outside of Europe. But try it.

RFID tags snooping

The Nexus S phone which I have can read RFID tags with the NFC APIs and hardware. The bundled Tags app from the Big Brother is quite simplistic, and a bit more geekier choice is NFC TagInfo by the good folks from NFC Research Lab at Hagenberg, Austria.

How did he know how to do CPR on a person? According to the CNN article, it all began when Tristan saw the movie Black Hawk Down.

Black Hawk Down is a movie about the war in Somalia, where war is, well, war. People die and all kinds of shit happens.

A picture from the movie Black Hawk Down

Now, Black Hawk Down is rated R (“under 17 requires adult guardian”). In the Scandinavian countries, it has an age limit of 15 to 16 years. If they’d show (or rather when they do/did) this movie in the TV in Scandinavia, the announcer would proclaim before the movie starts: “this movie contains scenes which may be harmful to children”.

Not so this time! This time it was just the opposite – it was in fact not only non-harmful, but truly life-saving.

PS. Thank goodness the movie only details war, violence and death. If Tristan had gotten interested in CPR from a movie where naked female breasts are seen, it surely would have created a massive outrage…

Pietra Arumaga mailed me to say he has a couple of useful Zenburn-related posts for users of MacVim and Komodo.

The first one is “MacVim as IDE with Code Completion and Syntax Highlighting for Python, PyQt4 and Twisted Development on Mac OSX Snow Leopard” and the second is a downloadable Zenburn zip for Komodo Edit/IDE.

If you use a nice white-colored computer with a fruit logo on it, check it out. And thank you to Pietra!

The site is pretty extensive, with background information about each culture, explanation of the language itself and the writing system used, and so on. However, the most surprising part is that the creator of the site isn’t some professor of linguistics, but rather a software engineer by the name of Lawrence Lo, who just does it as a labor of love. Through having a massive interest in a subject, a lot of things are possible.

Have a look at the “Ancient Scripts”.

There are many reasons for my enthusiasm, one of the biggest being that humanity as a race and civilization is 100% certainly doomed if we choose to hole up on the Earth. For example, a cataclysmic asteroid hit is a matter of time – maybe not in my lifetime, nor the 10 following lifetimes, but it is inevitable nevertheless. There are a plethora of other threats as well.

Now, to my delight I saw The Human Mission to Mars – Colonizing the Red Planet in the Journal of Cosmology. If you are interested in space exploration, be sure to bookmark and read that!

Then you can muse, for example, whether you would be willing to go for a one-way mission to Mars. A quick answer of “yes” might turn into “no” once you think of what you’ll be leaving behind. And vice versa, when you think of the new, uncharted territories and a new, free life that awaits you. And once you think what new things and new opportunities you’d attain on Mars, consider this: would it not be easier to attain those here, where the climate outside your dwelling is not yet hostile to human life?

As said, sure to raise thoughts. With this link I wish you a pleasant reading on the wee hours of a happy, new 2011!

PS. For a more (science) fictious approach, I can recommend the Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars book trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Absolutely wonderful stuff. And none of it is real.

If I were a millionnaire I’d live in such a place.

Then, he added a Zenburn editor scheme to jEdit. With this scheme, and Lipstik or Substance Graphite, you get a nice Zenburn editing environment in jEdit.

Thanks to Dale, jEdit now joins the expanding list of editors, environments and tools which contain the eye-friendly Zenburn colours. Well done!

Check out a screenshot of Dale’s jEdit port.

Update: I slightly misread Dale’s email, and now the wrong part is removed.

What I like most is the hexagonal heat-element pattern that adapts to the container size – I think it might save energy and allow the entire area of the stove to be used. And, of course, the detailed heat readout with an integrated timer is quite a nice feature for perfecting the recipes.

I’m slightly suspicious about the touch control. I’ve seen touch activated ovens with touch control for heat levels, and they all had pretty poor responsiveness. I can only imagine it gets worse once you try to reduce the heat by poking your finger at a layer of bechamel sauce which just overboiled over the controls.