tekHedd – the blog

The current temperature is…

Google Now is a an Android weather widget. With ads.

Oh sure, It shows the current weather at my geographical location, and an icon of today and tomorrow’s forecast. But it’s ugly, very ugly. And as I mentioned, it has ads. Creepy targeted ads.

And yes, I realize that Now is supposed to be a lot more than that. Last year, I opted in to Google Now, enabling all of the history storage, information sharing, and creepy, evil tracking behavior that lets it work its magic and proactively provide me with information I can use. After months of sharing my innermost secrets with Google and its ad partners, what is the payoff? The current weather.

And it sometimes shows advertisements. These advertisements are based on my recent searches. So, it’s like a weather widget paid for by creepy invasive ads. (Never mind that a nicer weather widget comes with Android, and I can find 50 in the Play Store, etc…)

Sometimes it will helpfully display my “distance from home” or “drive time to work”. Except, and this is important, I don’t live at Boot Barn. I guess it has no way to cope with a person who works at home. I mean, yes I love Boot Barn, but this location is right next to Harbor Freight. If I lived there, I’d be forever broke.

Welcome to your new home. Hope you like boots.

I can live at Boot Barn, or I can work at Boot Barn, and that’s that. When I update Now with correct information for where my home is, it will swap and say that I worked there. And vice versa. At some point I stopped trying. Any time I want, I can type Home into the Navigation app, and be directed to Boot Barn.

If I open the full-screen app, Now will frequently ask me if I “Care about distance to this place?” As far as I can tell, that place is a place where I stopped to wait for a red light on my way through town. So far it has not asked me about the distance to any place that I actually regularly go.

This Wendy’s is precious to me

Yes, I admit it, it also shows calendar notifications. Just like all of the parts of Google Now that work, these are a standard feature of the phone. I’m sensing a trend here. Google Now provides… no added value whatsoever! Got it.

I really don’t understand what they were hoping to achieve with Now, but I can only assume it was more than this, in which case they failed. I was planning to give it until the end of March, but I think this may be its two week notice.

Why, Google? Why?

Entitlement Friendly

Here in bike-friendly Fort Collins, we really don’t think much about personal safety when riding.

Progress dialog sexy

Just released the first official version of M3UPorterLarge, an app that copies MP3 files to a single directory, for use in your car, receiver, clock radio, or other slightly dumb USB MP3 player.

• Download From Github
• Local Mirror: porterlarge-1.0.1.zip

The M3UPorter program was created for a single purpose: to copy the files in an M3U playlist to a single directory. This is necessary because some portable devices and a lot of cars need all the audio files to be in one directory. As it turns out, it’s very hard to find a simple program that will just copy all the files from your audio playlist to one directory.

I got involved and created PorterLarge, because I need this copying to work with playlists too large to fit onto a USB stick. (These are generated by the as-yet-unreleased Unnamed Jukebox.) PorterLarge is an unofficial feature-development fork of the M3UPorter project, adding some error handling and support for more possible configurations.

I find that devices that have very good suppot for iPod and iPhone have very poor support for normal USB devices. My Mazda’s BoseTM audio system even displays “iPod” on the screen when you plug in a generic USB stick, and gets very stupid when albums or artists are sorted into subdirectories. I can’t decide whether the companies decide that iPod support is enough and then get lazy, or whether AppleTM contractually obligates them to dumb down their USB support. In either case, this program becomes necessary.