One of the features I was really looking forward to with Android 4.2 was lock screen widgets but when I got the update on my Galaxy Nexus that it only had 5 pre-defined stock widgets that could be added to the lock screen.

I headed over to the Android developers site some time later and was pleasantly surprised to see that actually 3rd party widgets can indeed be added to the lock screen. They just need a small change for this. They need to add “android:widgetCategory=“keyguard|home_screen”” parameter to your xml where the appwidget provider element is defined. Simple enough :)

If there are two things that irritate me the most when I go to sleep, they are: Sync notifications going off and battery drained off in the morning (worst case being drained off before alarm time, making me late for work). I used to have a simple profile that turned off auto sync between 11 PM to 7 AM but it didn’t always work well because I work past 11 quite a lot and don’t usually have a fixed sleep time. Similarly I get up at different times. Sometimes I’m not even home and still the profile runs, making me lose sync.

So, I just came across a thread on apple discussion forums and it seems like that Apple has added a new feature in OS X Mountain Lion due to which it redirects a lot of web traffic to a domain called “bogusapple.com” to make sure that it is failing. Now, the problem is that Apple didn’t even register this domain. By design? To make sure that it fails? But if so, it was a very poor design decision because then anyone could have registered it and used it for benefit, like spreading malware or phishing attempts and what not.

So, my Nexus One’s battery finally lost its last legs and I picked up a new Galaxy Nexus to replace it (easy choice, since it’s a nexus device and Google sells it for a bargain at their play store). Anyways, I drift. In the mood to try out the NFC capbilities of my newly acquired gadget I thought of doing something about my car audio setup (previously consisting of a stereo line connecting the aux port of the stereo to the headphone out of Nexus one using tasker to start music when connected).

Came across a neat nugget of historical information today that yet again proves that the software/hardware bug behavior that you may see on the surface might imply something totally opposite to what the problem actually is.

The “bug” existed back in the old times of the floppy drives. These drives seemed to fail very quickly on linux systems compared to MS DOS/Windows. Now, a normal observer would say linux had bad handling of the drives or was doing something messy that made these drives crap out ever so often. But as it turned out, the issue was the complete opposite. The real reason behind this problem was that linux was rock solid and stable compared to MS Dos.