I pushed out a couple of updates to my android app Wi-Fi Keep alive a few weeks ago (mainly related to fixing the resolution and colors of the widget icons) taking the latest version to 1.4.4. This is just to let you know that it will take a while (a few weeks) more to get the pending updates and requests in to the program. I have been pretty ill for the last few weeks and have only just got back up out of the bed and now my development machine has also gone for a toss. I’ve bought a new machine a couple of days ago but still have to recover my data from old machine and set it up on the new one along with linux and my standard development environment. Please do continue to report bugs and ask for requests though and I’ll make sure to keep track of them.
Greetings, Earthling 🖖
I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.
Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.
In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.
Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.
When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.
I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.
Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.
Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.
Caution: Stay away from making your Android app free for a short time
Just read this over at the Android Developers google forum:
My app had a one-day sale on all platforms and app stores. The price went from 2.99 to free for just today, but now that the sale is over, I need to revert the price back to 2.99. The bad news is, the developer console will not let me change it! I have to pull the app until I can get this resolved. What can I do?
Acer TimelineX 4820TG Mini-Review
This is a small review of my Acer TimelineX 4820TG that I purchased a few days ago. Now, I won’t be talking numbers (like CPU/GPU performance etc) because these things are almost same as per the component used and have been covered in various other reviews online. What I’ll concentrate more upon are the things that other reviewers don’t look at, or look at purely from numbers perspective which don’t make sense to an average buyer. Please let me know if I miss something out that you want to know about this laptop.
Solving The Android Permissions And Malware Puzzle
There has been a spate of security reports recently about Android apps being malware or suspicious. Most of these were found baseless but at least one was indeed correct (e.g. The Russian Trojan app). We also know that Android has a very good security model but even then, the rest of the reports also makes one think and focus on why an apps requires the permissions that it states it needs?
Android Dev Tip: App Not Showing on X10 Mini Marketplace
Many Android Developers (and users) get confused that why a certain app isn’t showing up on the new Xperia X10 Mini (and few other) phones. This happens even if they support all android versions and have published their apps for all countries, so that shouldn’t be the issue. I came across this as well when few people mentioned that they couldn’t find my app Wi-Fi Keep Alive in the X10 mini marketplace. On some digging into the android docs and the X10 mini specs, I found the issue.