Biker|Geek

So for about a year now I have been playing with ROM’s on my Samsung Captivate. The two most recent were were Atomic Fusion which I loved but was suffering from some instability issues when I received phone calls. The phone would just reboot. As I’m sure you can imagine, this was unacceptable. I will say I loved the other aspects of this ROM and the themes were very cool even though they changed with almost every release. I wanted something else. So I’ve know about Cyanogenmod for quite a while and followed the development over the last year or so. I finally decided to give it a shot since upgrading from another ROM was a piece of cake. I chose the stable release of CM 7.1.0. The customization capabilities of this ROM are almost endless. Themes are prevalent, options are many, and the speed of the ROM is purely awesome. I feel this ROM is almost perfect. The one huge gripe I have with it is the fact that it seems to drain the battery insanely fast. I used to get a full 12 – 16 hour day on one charge of the battery. However, now I can’t get though a 10 hour work day if I use the phone for 1/2 hour on lunch break. Now I must say I keep the phone in Airplane Mode when not in use. I find that this reduces the phone from constantly searching for a 3G signal. My work building doesn’t have great service in the center of the building where I work. Nearer to the outer walls, I get decent service. I have about 137 apps installed and use most all of them regularly. Many are games but about as many more are utilities like ConnectBot, Titanium Backup, ClockworkMod Rom Manager, Root Explorer, SMS Backup & Restore, SuperPower, SwiftFTP, Hacker’s Keyboard, Network Discovery, and many more. I have chosen to replace the stock SMS app with Hancent SMS, Gallery with QuickPic, and the stock browser with Dolphin Browser HD. I am using the stock ADW Launcher at the moment but I also use GoLauncher EX and I have purchased LauncherPro as well. I am searching for a way to extend my battery life to what I saw with the Fusion ROM. I will report more if I find a solution. I just downloaded the Glitch Kernel from the XDA-Developers forums. Supposedly they have better luck with battery life running this Kernel on my phone. We shall see. It can be found here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1109463

About one month ago I purchased the new Samsung Captivate Galaxy S phone from AT&T. Having switched from a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone, I feel like I rose out of the fires of Hell into Heaven’s cloudy embrace. Since I have been a linux user for 12 years, the learning curve was negligible. I promptly rooted the phone after 2 days of playing with it to allow me the freedom Android intended. The high points are an amazing Super AMOLED screen with decent battery life, as long as you don’t browse for 3 hours straight, and the ability to connect to almost every social media outlet you can imagine. It is admittedly thin and light but I don’t find that a negative. I just purchased a Body Glove rubberized case which seems to make all the difference in holding onto it. I love all the apps specifally Seesmic, Mustard, Talking Tom and many many others. Oh yeah I also love the phone too. It is an excellent update from my old WinMo phone which was insanely long in the tooth. Great job Samsung and kudos to AT&T for finally offering a worthy Android competitor to the iPhone.

An excellent site from what I’ve seen thus far. Thanks to “linuxtechie”

http://linuxtechie.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/my-list-of-useful-applications/

My List of Useful Applications

Posted by linuxtechie on January 5, 2008

I’ve decided to make a list of applications that I’ve found to be helpful/handy. Some of them may be little know, some may be well known. So without further ado:

Blueman

This one isn’t in the Ubuntu repos, but there’s a repository on the home page. This has got to be the best Bluetooth manager for GTK. Coupled with many of the other Bluetooth utilities such as gnome-vfs-obexftp, this is a very powerful application. You can inquiry for devices, keep a list of favorites, send files, and even browse your device right through Nautilus.

 

Gcolor2

I’ve found this to come in handy a lot. It’s a little color chooser that lets you pick any color on your screen along with a ton of preset colors you can choose from.

sudo apt-get install gcolor2

 

Grip

More than once I’ve found myself disappointed by Sound Juicer. It doesn’t have a whole lot of options and, for me at least, the resulting audio files came out very poor with lots of pops and click due to scratches. Then I found Grip. Grip is a very light weight yet highly configurable CD ripper. It can rip in many formats and, the best feature in my opinion, it has Paranoia. No it’s not a suspicious application . It will detect and auto-correct any pops or clicks during the encoding process that result from the unavoidable CD scratches. After ripping a few CDs with Grip I was very pleased with the outcome. Not a single pop or click.

sudo apt-get install grip

 

 

Brasero

Brasero is the official Gnome CD burning application. Previously I’ve used Gnomebaker but now I’ve switched to Brasero. Brasero is the up and coming CD burning application. Sadly the Gnomebaker project appears to be dying. It’s capable of multi-session data CDs, auio CDs, copying CDs, burning CD images, and erasing CD-RWs. I’ve seemed to have better luck with Brasero than with Gnomebaker or the Nautilus CD burner.

sudo apt-get install brasero

 

 

Sound Converter

Ever needed to quickly convert an audio file? This is a great application for just that. It can convert the most common audio file types. The application is pretty much straight forward. I’ve found it to come in handy a lot of times.

sudo apt-get install soundconverter

 

 

Gnome Schedule

Gnome Schedule is a little graphical front end to Cron. It’s very useful if you need to run something at a certain time. You can schedule events recurrently or one time only.

sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule

Nautilus Image Converter

This is another very useful little app. Nautilus Image Converter is a little extension for Nautilus that lets you resize and rotate images. A lot of times I’ve needed to resize an image and found opening the Gimp a bit overkill for that. Now I can just right click on an image and resize or rotate it in seconds.

sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter

Htop

This is a great little app. It just like Top only it shows a lot more information. You can sort processes by different categories, kill processes and much more.

sudo apt-get install htop

Conky

Conky is a very light weight, highly configurable system monitor. I’ve found Conky to be extremely handy. I love having all my system stats right on my screen at all times. It’s very easy to catch any run away process. There’s a huge thread in the Ubuntu forums full of people’s conkyrc files. I feel lost without Conky

sudo apt-get install conky

Gmountiso

Gmountiso is very useful for mounting .iso images. Ubuntu can do this natively through the terminal, however if you don’t know the commands this is a very helpful application.

sudo apt-get install gmountiso