The recent weeks I use Twitter far too much. It’s like a car crash and I can’t look away. So I deleted the client now from my phhone

Mein Telefon brauchte gerade Überzeugung, doch @me_netzpolitik fortzusetzen und nicht The Clash abzuspielen

Switched off Jetpack on my blog and activated Piwik #datafleesUS

Manton Reece did a kickstarter for a software project on and a book about independent micro-blogging. I really like the idea since it means I can have a full feed of my (micro-)blogging on my blog and certain posts get cross-posted to Twitter. I do this via a plug-in because IFTTT just didn’t work for me. But I like this even better in the end. 

The process is a bit cumbersome because I have to add a category for the micro-posts and in the WP-app this means going into two different screens. I will see if I will continue using that way. But from my understanding everything should become far more easier when micro.blog gets released 😀

Update: I am now using the iOS-apps Drafts and Workflow to post to Twitter and Wordpress. It is less error prone than the plug-in way. 

So, I noticed that I didn’t blog in quite a while and I need to change this. As always with a re-try in blogging I switched my blog (this time from static to wordpress) for reasons. I think I will never be happy with what is out there and I do not have the time to even think about writing something of my own. This post is quite personal - a bit about my diet and sports, my linux-travellings, retrogaming and pen&paper-RPGs.

What else is up with me recently. Well, after reading a book called “Fettlogik überwinden"[footnote]Conquer fat logics[/footnote] by Nadja Hermann I decided that I have to do something against being overweight. I was still far from adiposity but I never would have wanted to get that far. I didn’t already like that I had to start L-size-t-shirts and that my pants-sizes increased but I didn’t bring up my will to do something against it. After reading that book my mindset changed. I lost 10kg[footnote]ca. 20 pounds[/footnote] in ca. 3 months and build up some muscles as well. Now I officially ended the diet but I still want to get down to a weight that I am jacked. Thus I still have to do something about it but after 3 months I already don’t want to count calories anymore and weigh all the food I eat. I am trying now intermittent fasting in a 16/8-rhythm. 16 hours of fasting a day (from 10pm to 2pm) and 8 hours of feeding. Last week I definitely snacked too much in the feeding time, this week I’ll try to reduce that.

In addition my sports-activities radically changed. A couple of years ago I went up to four times a week to karate-training. But after I got a minor injury in a competition, then my second child was born and so I didn’t went to training at all for ca 2.5 years. In the meantime I tried several bodyweight-programs but nothing for very long. And half a year ago I started going to Karate-training again once a week. Shortly after starting the diet though this completely changed. Now I am going to training twice a week, I go running 2-3 times a week and do bodyweight-training two or three times a week. Thus it is now 5-6 times a week sports for me and sometimes even on every day while one day involves very light training. I kind of have to make now training plans for myself. This whole thing takes up a lot of time even when my running/bodyweight-sessions are only 30-90 minutes[footnote]Karate is always longer: 90 minutes training + the ways to the dojo, changing and showering. So it is more like 3 - 4 hours.[/footnote]. This also means that I do not have that much time doing something else in my leisure time. I am not sure yet how I feel about this. My body likes it and it is better than watching Netflix and reading Twitter all evening.

I also changed operating systems in the meantime. You might remember me posting about Manjaro, Arch and Fedora. In the meantime used Qubes for a couple of months. It was great and probably secure but it had its flaws. For one I couldn’t get my optical drive working in the way I need it to because of technical limitations because of the security features of Qubes. And there was always a bit of a mental overhead where I want/have to do what. So I abandoned it. But I didn’t want to fiddle that much because my amount of free time is limited and so I gave Ubuntu another try. After my pretty bad experiences with 15.10, 16.04 is great. I installed it, the installer supports now even full disk encryption, and everything worked. No fiddling, nothing. It just worked. And it is still working. I am enjoying Unity[footnote]the default desktop environment[/footnote], play around with some other stuff and have so far no problems at all. I am surprised. This is the most Mac-like experience I ever had with Linux.

Podcasting is happening not a lot lately. Japanbezug, a German podcast about Japan I was doing, just needs too much time per episode. I don’t see me doing anything with it in the next months or even years. EMUI, the podcast accompanying this blog, is not doing anything either. I just don’t feel like podcasting at the moment. But I miss doing regular Retrozirkel-episodes. This has more to do with scheduling issues. The next episode will come.

I expanded my retrogames-collection by some nice titles and bought a GB Boy Colour. A Gameboy Color-clone with a backlit-screen. It is really excellent. www.youtube.com/watch

And I found a way to organize my collection better. Gameboy and Gameboy Advance-games are now in binders and I use the sheets used by trading card gamers to put the games in the binder. 9 GB-games per page or 18 GBA-games. For my NDS-games I find nice boxes by Hori which hold 24 games per box.

Right now I am playing Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. A really nice RPG where you play Mario, Luigi and Bowser. But where I liked in the past when games were long, it is now a bit harder. Usually I play now only while commuting and so it is like 20-30 minutes per day. Luckily this game has a lot of save points but after 3-4 weeks playing I am like only half way through the game. I am already thinking about what to play next. Maybe Castlevania 1 or Super Mario Bros. 2 Lost Levels? Or will take the plunge into the Metroidvania-world and start playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon? I also have a lot of Zelda- and Advance Wars games I like to play. Problems I didn’t have a decade ago when I could play several hours a day…sometimes it sucks to be an adult ;)

And now to the last topic: pen&paper-RPGs. Thanks to a very good friend I was part in a short L5R-campaign with some great people. It was really fun. But I had to trade the biweekly RPG-sessions to have another day of karate-training in the week. And I want to get better in karate and go to competitions. Maybe I’ll find the time to play or run a one-shot from time to time. Especially since I found out about a couple of japanese RPGs that were translated to English which have some great concepts. I really want to play those. And I miss playing Shadowrun. At least I can read Shadowrun-novels again since the old ones get re-released as ebooks and from time to time a new one appears. My favorite of the re-released ones is Burning Bright[footnote]The Bug City-novel[/footnote] and from the new ones it is Shaken: No Job to Small. I can recommend both and I think even non-Shadowrun-fans might like them.

This post is now more than long enough and I won’t write about to-do-lists and minimalism. Maybe I post later about those. We will see. Have a nice day.

We all agree probably that DRM[footnote]Digital Rights Management. The stuff that is responsible that you can’t watch content bought from iTunes on your beamer when it is connected with VGA or DVI, that you can’t give your friends your ebooks and that you can’t backup your DVDs or Blurays without breaking the law (at least in Germany).[/footnote] sucks and that we give more and more of our data out of our hands because it is convenient. Just recently I decided again to give Lastpass another try because it is far more convenient and better usable on Linux and in a cross-platform environment than the alternatives Keepass, Pass and 1Password. We also use Google Docs to collaborate, Dropbox to make our data easily available to all our device etc. In addition he says that you should only use free formats for music and video like ogg and only free software[footnote]Free as in freedom.[/footnote].

Richard Stallman (RMS) says that you shouldn’t use DRM or “Software as a Service Substitutes” (SaaSS). SaaSS are services like Lastpass, Dropbox, Google Docs etc. The reason is that they violate your freedom to do anything you like with the software that you use via those services. Thus you do not actually know or check what the software does with your data. Dropbox could potentially just give some government agency access to your data with you not knowing about it. But I hope that they don’t do it.

Even so I find the ideas very good, I always think what it would entail to actually implement them. DRM is nowadays pretty much everywhere when you consume digitally delivered media. All the video streaming platforms like Netflix are using DRM because the media studios demand it. DVDs and Blurays are protected by DRM as well, even though it is nowadays circumventable. Movies in the cinemas are delivered today on encrypted hard disks with DRM on it. Youtube etc use patent-protected media formats, so you can’t use that. So no movies for you. The only way you could watch movies would probably be via TV. But often not in HD because that is nowadays usually encrypted, too.

Music streaming sites also use DRM because it is demanded from the licensors. Most music players only play mp3s or m4as. Some do ogg but the software on them is probably not free. The only way I could imagine to have portable digital music is by building yourself some music player that can play ogg. And then you buy CDs and rip them to ogg. But I have no idea which platform you could use. A Raspberry Pi uses proprietary firmware.

You could read some ebooks. There are publishers and online stores that sell DRM-free ebooks. It is not a lot but there are ways to get that way of entertainment. But I doubt that there is an ebook reader you could use. So in the end you’d probably could read them only on your laptop.

We do not need to talk about games, do we? Steam is out of the question. But there are open source games available. I just cannot remember any really good ones except maybe Nethack or Dwarf Fortress. Those are an acquired taste though imho. Ah, there is the Battle for Wesnoth which is quite good. If you know more really good F/OSS-games please contact me via the e-mail-address at the top of the site.

When you want to use a computer, you have a very small selection of computers available. There are not a lot of computers available which you can use with a free BIOS like coreboot or Libreboot. If I remember correctly RMS himself uses a Thinkpad X60 which is a laptop released in 2006. And I think you can use some free BIOS on a Thinkpad X200 or T400 which are from 2008. So only old computers for you.

And let’s not talk about smartphones. Essentially you cannot use one. A landline would probably be ok though.

And not using SaaSS takes away a lot of convenience. For e-mail I interpret it that you either have to run your e-mail-server or use only one from someone you trust and who allows you to fiddle with the source code if necessary. Well, actually it means you have to run your own e-mail-server. There are nowadays F/OSS-replacements for Dropbox and Bittorrent Sync. So you could replace that but you would need to run them yourself. There are several SaaSS that have nowadays F/OSS-replacements but they all would end up in you running your own server. And maintaining a server means that you have to know a bit more about computers and need to spend some of your leisure time maintaining it.

The ideas from RMS are great imho. But living them means that you have to give up a lot of convenience and ways of modern entertainment. It feels like setting yourself technology- and entertainment-wise back to the 80s or 90s. Since these ideas are pretty crass in their results voting with your wallet would mean it is only a drop in the ocean since it would be incredible hard to convince other people to do the same. I like to compare RMS’ way of living in terms of computers, DRM and SaaSS to vegans[footnote]It is probably the morally right thing to do but you need to set some limits on your behavior that might take away some of the joys of life. I love steak.[/footnote]. But I can far more easily imagine living vegan than living the technology way of life preached by RMS.

Update: There are apparently ebook readers that use free software.

If you want to run a laptop with Libreboot, have a look at their site which are compatible. nixCraft just released an article about shops that sell computers with Linux preinstalled or even with Libreboot pre-installed.

I don’t understand how you could switch to Windows or OS X from Linux. Let’s start with OS X.

OS X

You actually can use it licensed only when you use hardware created by Apple. This means that you have to buy a high-end-computer even if your needs are satisfied by a computer that is far more on the low end. You have to pay usually a computer that costs at least 1000€. And don’t forget that warranty that costs at least 150€ to extend the warranty to 3 years. Since Apple-computers get more and more integrated, it gets harder to repair anything by yourself. And if stuff breaks, the repair costs are easily in the upper 3-digits area.

Since you bought that high-end-computer it can last you a long time. But if Apple decides that they do not want to support your hardware anymore, you won’t get any updates anymore and the only solution is to buy a new computer. If you also use an iPhone and you keep your computer with your old OS, it can happen that Apple updates iTunes in a way that it doesn’t run anymore on your old OS and you can’t sync your iPhone anymore. Just buy a new computer.

You know the comforts of a docking station? Welcome to a world with laptops that have depending on the model only one USB-port. You will find another solution and it will always involve plugging and unplugging stuff in your laptop. Need an external display? Well, welcome to the world of adapters since Apple laptops usually do not have standard outputs that are supported by the rest of the world outside of Apple. And those adapters aren’t cheap, even if you get one from a third parties.

Sure, you can get software like Photoshop. But Apple encourages the developers to always use the newest APIs which means that when your OS doesn’t update to the newest version, you won’t get updates. Or when you updated your OS, you need might need to get a major update for your software. Since software often costs money on OS X[footnote]>This is perfectly fine. Developers have to make a living. But there are these contraring preferences - devs need money for food, users do not necessarily want to pay money[/footnote], you have to pay an upgrade fee or buy completely new if it got released via the AppStore. And since open source software often uses cross-platform-toolkits and does not get ported natively to OS X, they suck in comparison to native apps and so you do not really want to use them.

If you are in the world of Apple, be ready that money shouldn’t be a constraint. Otherwise you might think about if you are worthy using products by Apple.

And if you install software from the AppStore and Apple does a fuck-up, all your software from the AppStore will break for a couple of days. But who cares?

Ever seen how Apple handles security updates? One time they published the solution for a critical problem for iOS first but everybody knew that it also existed for OSX. Thus your computer was at risk for a couple of days. They often also need some time until they publish updates. Apple prefers to deliver a bunch of updates in one big update instead of small incremental updates.

Windows

You decided to use Windows? It came with your computer and was preinstalled. Great.

Did you know that most malware is nowadays written for Windows? You now use the platform that gets attacked most often. Prepare yourself for defense, by installing Antivirus-software that rarely helps you. If you get malware on your computer, I recommend that you reinstall since you never know, if there aren’t any remains.

I hope you kept your install-DVDs or your recovery partition. If you don’t have any install-DVDs, try to get them from your vendor. And get all the drivers. If you have bad luck, your network driver is missing from a vanilla Windows and you cannot get your internet connection to work. Thus you need another computer to download that network driver for installing it. Depending on the vendor that is more or less cumbersome. That serial number by the way is nowadays fixed in your BIOS or EFI. And if you want to reinstall a vanilla Windows you have to change some text files and is as far as I know an undocumented process.

When you use nowadays Windows, you will get forced by Microsoft to use Windows 10, which is a privacy nightmare. After you set up all the privacy setting, updates can and will quietly reset them. So please check always.

Oh, updates. Microsoft regularly updates your system. Nowadays they even force them on you. That also means that your computer might say that you have to reboot now and that you can’t move that reboot to a later point of time. So save everything, interrupt whatever you are doing. That update right here, right now is more important than any work you do. Or you shut down your laptop instead of suspending/hibernating it for carrying it around. That can mean that you have to wait a couple of minutes or an hour or two until it shuts down while installing updates. Sometimes an installation of an update will also make your system unbearable slow for a couple of hours. And you cannot always tell the system when to update and you do not know how long it will take.

Sometimes those updates fuck up your system. Maybe some Microsoft-software breaks or some hardware doesn’t work anymore or your system gets into a bootloop. Who knows. Just wait until Microsoft releases the fix for the fix or reinstall your system.

If Windows stops to work you can always rely on the system events. Oh wait, you can’t. It seems that nearly nothing logs there and everything that logs stuff in Windows, spams the event logs often with unnecessary crap. So often logs are not usable for debugging your system. So you can google the problem and hope you find some solution. Sometimes it involves fiddling in the registry, a place you don’t want to fiddle because it can break your whole system. And those fixes are often about adding or removing values that are not documented and you have to hope that the people you get the fix from know what they do. Because you cannot read up on it. Or did you try already to reinstall some drivers? Troubleshooting Windows is unfortunately more often than not like walking with a blind fold and hoping no to fall down into a deep hole. Well, in the end you always can reinstall, can’t you?

Both

You do not like the desktop environment you are using with OS X or Win or do not like the looks or the way Apple or Microsoft are going. Fear not, you always have the…oh wait, you do not have any choice. You are dependent on the choices Apple and Microsoft are doing for you. Want to try anything different or new? Tough luck.

Aren’t package-managers nice? Just type yum install package-name[footnote]or apt-get install package-name or pacman -S package-name…[/footnote] and it will install the software and everything you need. Well, not so with Windows or Apple. Often you need to get the software from some website with an installer or in the case of Apple you might get a disk image or an installer. Then install it. Who needs trusted sources? And when you ever need to reinstall your system, you have to get that stuff again if you didn’t save the original install-files. In the world of Apple there is the AppStore but more and more developers withdraw from it since Apple just makes it worth for them to stay there but makes their life harder.

And don’t let us talk about uninstalling software from OS X. Completely removing software can be a real hastle.

P.s.: I used OS X for over 10 years and I am still supporting several people who use OS X. In addition I administer a Windows-environment with 100+ Windows-clients and have to use Windows daily. Personally I use Linux for 1.5 years now. Everything I wrote here are experiences I made or have seen happening. I also got informed several times from other Apple-users that it is stupid to keep computers for more than 5 years - that’s where that worthiness-thing comes from.

Use what makes you happy, every OS has its up- and downsides. I am just getting tired to explain on a regular basis that I am actually happy with using Linux and the choices I made by using the distribution I am using which needs more fiddling around (Arch).

I just saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens a couple of days ago but from what I read on Twitter I actually expected something like the second coming. Unfortunately I got to see only a good movie (far better than the prequels, worse than expected) and so I thought I write about my thoughts.

Let’s start with Finn and the stormtroopers. I really liked that they showed more of a personal side of the stormtroopers like the two stormstroopers who notice on their round Kylo Ren raging around and decide to turn around. All in all stormtroopers got in this movie moved away from faceless foes to something with character. But as we know stormtroopers aren’t really good with shooting. At least in the old movies. And most of them are now not really that good, too. Except apparently when you work in sanitation. If I understood the movie correctly the battle and massacre on Jakku was his first battle. And before that he worked in sanitation. But he more or less understands pretty much immediately how different ship weapons work and when he uses a blaster, he hits. He is far better than the average stormtrooper displayed in the movie. The First Order really should all of the troopers put into sanitation. They seem to get a far better fighting training than the rest - whatever they fight when they clean.

And what was that scene on Takodana when a stormtrooper recognizes Finn on 30 feet away and throws away his blaster to fight him in close combat? He could have shot him? Were they bunk buddies and he took the traitorship that personal? Speaking about that scene I always thought that the light saber is the delicate weapon of a Jedi and needs a lot of training. But now everybody (except Finn is a force bearer as well who doesn’t really need training) seems to be able to fight with them without any problems…

Yeah for Rey. Finally a female force bearer who can use the force. And that far better than any Jedi. Anakin used it iirc for some precognition in the pod-race but Rey. Well she can read minds (when Kylo Ren tries to read hers), can manipulate minds and knows force levitation intuitively. No training necessary. After a bit of training she must be the master of all Jedi. In Star Wars VIII I expect her to be able to destroys planets with the force, if not Luke sucks as a mentor. In addition she knows all kind of tech as well. She lived her live on a desert planet, my guess is in the beginning as a slave and got through by collecting junk. And now she knows how to repair and handle space ships. Seriously?

And I do not think that she is a stronger lead than Leia or Queen Amidala. Both had more power and more leadership qualities and a head of their own. Rey just chased after the others more of the time. She rocked while doing so (because she is really powerful with the force and knows everything) but all in all I think Leia and Amidala were stronger women. Please convince me that she is progress in comparison to Leia and Amidala.

Kylo Ren is a joke. He is a teenage boy with anger issues…he destroys several times a lot of equipment because of his rage. And when he removed his mask I and others had to laugh because he looked more of a character from Twilight than from Star Wars.

Light sabers have now apparently the properties of a magic wand of Harry Potter because they “choose” to whom they belong. Rey sees visions with Vaders/Lukes light saber and when Kylo Ren and she force pulls the light saber it flies right past Kylo to Rey. Either she is even better than a trained dark side Jedi intuitively or the light saber chose her. The latter one makes more sense in the whole narrative unfortunately. But as we know she is a pretty awesome Jedi already without any training.

Harrison Ford has probably the first time in decades an age appropriate female playing partner (Carrie Fisher). 20 years ago they probably would have kissed at some point. But I guess they didn’t put that in there this time because Disney was afraid because they are just too old. And old people only hug, you know…

And what kind of mentor is Luke? His first trainee goes to the dark side and so he runs away to some place no one can find? Well Anikin was very whiny, too. Maybe it runs in the male side of the family. Oh yeah, and Han apparently ran away as well after Kylo went to the dark side instead of staying with Leia.

The characters were imho just too powerful. In the old Star Wars movie Luke didn’t know anything. He could fly ships but couldn’t fight a lot, doesn’t know anything about tech and needs a lot of training to use the force. Han Solo knows the millenium falcon, knows how to shoot and talk fast and a bit about tech. Chewbacca knows his tech and is strong. Leia is a leader, can fight but she cannot use the force at all but is a force bearer (and apparently never learned it). They were all heroes but not overpowered. In the Force Awakens it seemed to me that at least Finn and Rey are overpowered. Maybe Poe as well but he didn’t get enough screen time for this. He is a hell of a pilot though.

All in all I liked the movie and I cannot wait for Star Wars VIII (Rogue One?) but I cannot understand the hype :/

So, I won the Listserve and my mail went live today. The Listserve is a very interesting mailing list. When you subscribe to it, you enter a daily lottery to write a mail to the listserve. Thus it has very varied content and at least for me the mails are rarely uninteresting. I really recommend you to join it. But here now the content of the mail for you to read, too. The mail is also mirrored here.

Tid Bits about Japanese

You know what is really hard? Cursing in Japanese. There are not a lot of bad words in Japanese. If you want to insult someone, you do it completely by using the wrong politeness levels. Japanese has different levels of politeness built-in and you can measure the social status between people just by listening to them (and even what their status is compared to another person they are talking about). So when you want to insult someone, you use higher status vocabulary for yourself and lower for the other person. You use different words for “I” and “You” and if you are Yakuza-style all the words start to end in “eeeee” ;)

Japanese has two syllable-alphabets and uses Chinese characters (Kanji) as well. Until 2010 the standard set of Kanji to be used in official documents, newspapers etc (the so-called “daily used characters”) were 1945. In 2010 they increased that number by 196 new characters (and removed 5) because all the people are using computers and cell phones to communicate nowadays, thus writing by hand is not so important anymore and adding more characters is therefore not that much of a problem. What reading Japanese makes hard is that one Kanji in Japanese can have up to 12 ways readings - depending on the word it is used in or which syllables follow. In Chinese one character has one reading. The reason is that for one Chinese and Japanese are very different languages with Chinese being a tonal one and Japanese being a language that isn’t tonal, thus characters got several usages. In addition there were several phases words got imported from China and each time another Chinese dialect was the base for the final Japanese reading. The consequence is that its hard to learn to read Japanese. And when you need to use paper dictionaries, you use two dictionaries usually. One character-dictionary and another one which is more like a traditional one. With experience you get pretty good in guessing the readings, but its always a lot of searching if the searched combination of characters isn’t already in the character dictionary.

The origins of Japanese are unclear but it is probably an Altaic language with relations to Turkish and Mongolian. The language closest to Japanese is Korean. You can easily translate one language into the other. What is most interesting is that they are grammatically very similar but the lexic (the words) is totally different. I.e. the word “to eat” is “taberu” but “meogda” in Korean. But when you get to words loan from Chinese, someone who knows Japanese can get a lot of knowing Kanji (Hanja in Korean) and what the Korean reading for the character is. Korean also uses only one reading for a Hanja. But nowadays Hanja are rarely used in Korean. But Korean has with Hangeul the best “alphabet” ever. It’s easier to learn to read and write than any other I’ve seen. Thanks to a king in the 15th century who ordered scientists to develop an alphabet that is easy to learn for increasing alphabetism. In the past there were times when people tried to get rid of Chinese characters in Japanese but it never worked out. There was even a daily newspaper completely in one of the Japanese syllable alphabets. I can understand why. Japanese is far easier to skim when you have Kanji in there. Unfortunately it takes some time to recognize this. That’s enough about Japanese. If you want to talk about Japanese, Japan (especially politics or economics) or old video games (8-/16-bit), drop me a mail.

Ich habe noch ziemlich exakt zwei Wochen bis ich meine Magisterarbeit abgeben muss. Sie ist noch nicht fertig, aber sie wird es diesmal werden. Natürlich muss sie das auch, aber die Qualität ist auch OK meiner Ansicht nach. Besser als eine reine Qualifikationsarbeit, aber auch keine 1. Den Qualitätsunterschiede zwischen dem recycletem Material aus dem ersten Versuch und dem neu geschriebenem ist deutlich.

Und heute habe ich erfahren, dass das Prüfungsbüro an dem Tag zu ist und ich jetzt per Post abgeben muss. Ich habe ein wenig Sorge, dass ich bei irgendeiner Formalität einen Fehler mache und das mir das Genick bricht. Aber eine persönliche Abgabe wäre nur eine Woche früher möglich. Und bis dahin ist die Arbeit noch nicht fertig. Vor allem hat dann mein “Lektor” noch nicht drüber gelesen. Nun gut, wird schon. Für die letzten zwei Tage habe ich Urlaub genommen. Am Montag drucken, am Dienstag abgeben. Da es jetzt über die Post geht, könnte beides am selben Tag passieren und ich hätte noch einen echten Tag Urlaub. Wenigstens etwas.

Die Arbeit hat mich einen Sommer mit meinen Kindern gekostet. Das schmerzt. Aber bald ist es durch. Und dann heißt es vorbereiten für die Prüfungen. Viel lesen und viel Übersetzen. Aber nicht mehr so viel schreiben. Mal schauen, dass ich den Prüfungstermin vor den Kindergeburtstagen hinbekommen. Dann könnte ich die entspannt angehen.

Nun gut, jetzt heißt es schlafen, um morgen den Tag wieder konzentriert durchackern zu können.

Und mein Blog ist wieder von Octopress zu Wordpress zurückgekehrt. Auch wenn ich das Konzept von statischen Blogs mag, waren die Macken mit denen ich bei Octopress zu tun hatte so lästig, dass ich vom Bloggen zurückgehalten wurde. Sprich: es war nervig genug, dass ich Blogposts gar nicht erst anfing zu schreiben.

Abgesehen davon habe ich wieder Kommentare angeschaltet. Gerade bei dem Artikel zu Podcasts kam so einiges damals via Twitter auf mich zu, warum ich keine Kommentare hätte. Und im Nachhinein muss ich sagen, dass ich die Diskussion lieber gebündelt unter dem Artikel gehabt hätte. Das Hauptargument großer Blogger, dass man nicht jedem eine Plattform auf der eigenen Seite bieten muss stimmt zwar, aber dafür kann man Kommentare auch moderieren.

Zusätzlich habe ich die Jetpack-Statistiken bei Wordpress eingeschaltet. Eigentlich bin ich ja gegen “Ego-Features”, aber an sich will ich ja doch wissen, was auf meiner Seite los ist. In der überarbeiteten Datenschutzerklärung habe ich mir auch die Option offen gelassen Buttons von den gängigen Social Media-Seiten einzubinden. Wenn ihr auf meiner Seite seid, werden also ab jetzt auch Daten außerhalb des Schlandnets geleakt.

Auf dass ich jetzt wieder mehr blogge.

Heute postete @leitmedium folgendes:

Nach Lesen der Stellungnahme der @ubernauten https://t.co/rkW97yDXME und checken der Seite um die es geht, werde ich dort nicht mehr hosten.

— Caspar C. Mierau (@leitmedium) November 13, 2014

Woraufhin ich mich fragte, ob ich bei den Ubernauten noch meine Sachen lassen will. Natürlich las ich auch den Blogpost vom Geschäftsführer von Uberspace. Und nach einem Gespräch mit meiner Frau, deren Fähigkeiten kritisch zu denken meine übersteigen, bin ich zu dem Schluss gekommen, meine Sachen bei Uberspace zu lassen.

Ich halte nichts von einem Verein der die Legalität des Geschlechtsverkehrs zwischen Kindern und Erwachsenen zum Ziel hat. Allerdings sehe ich auch nicht, warum die Ubernauten eine entsprechende Seite sperren sollte. Solang die Inhalte nicht gegen geltendes Recht verstoßen mögen die Inhalte Mist sein, aber sie sind trotzdessen legal. Die AGB der Ubernauten sind auch recht eindeutig: sie hosten alles, so lang es nicht geltendes Recht verstößt. Das heißt, dass dort die Antifa genauso ihre Inhalten platzieren kann, wie autonome Nationale. So lang die Inhalte legal sind. Das bedeutet halt auch, dass sie nicht die Inhalte von Anti-Abtreibungsgegnern sperren, weil irgendwelche reaktionäre Idioten der Meinung sind, dass das eine schlechte Idee sei. Ich muss sagen, dass mir das lieber ist, als ein Provider, der AGB hat, in denen steht, dass er diese und jene Inhalte sperrt. Und wenn ich nicht mit seiner politischen Meinung übereinstimme, ist auf einmal der Kram weg. Ein großer Freund von Willkür bin ich nicht.

Die Aussage das Infrastruktur politisch ist, halte ich übrigens für Unsinn. Außer die Infrastruktur fängt auf einmal an Dingen den Hahn abzudrehen, der ihr nicht passt. Schon mal überprüft, welcher Strom- und Internetanbieter der NPD-Parteizentrale zuliefert und daraufhin gewechselt? Die Frage müsste wohl eher lauten, ob Webhosting Infrastruktur ist oder ob nur das Kabel Infrastruktur ist. Die Ubernauten haben für sich die Frage damit beantwortet, dass sie Infrastruktur sind. Andere Anbieter mögen das anders sehen. Ich persönlich sah Webhoster eher als Infrastruktur an. Aber vielleicht müsste man sie auch eher wie einen Vermieter ansehen. Würde ich umziehen, wenn ich herausfinde, dass mein Vermieter auch eine Wohnung vermietet, die ein entsprechender Verein als Geschäftsräume nutzt und er davon weiß? Ich fänd’s nicht gut, würde aber vermutlich in der Wohnung bleiben. Ich find’s nicht gut, dass so Kram bei den Ubernauten liegt, aber fände ich es besser, wenn sie Dinge sperrten, die ihnen nicht passen? Wenn ich das wollte, müsste ich wohl eher zu einem Provider, der eine politische Richtung verfolgt. Aber da liegen meine Prioritäten anders.

Um aber am Schluss noch ein wenig abzuschweifen, muss ich sagen, dass ich die meisten Aktionen in der Richtung inzwischen meist ziemlich bigott finde. Und ich nehme mich da nicht aus. Accounts, die ich eh nicht nutze, werden schnell mal dicht gemacht, bei Accounts bei denen ich echten Nutzen habe, wird über die Probleme gerne hinweg gesehen und weitergenutzt[footnote]Den Vorwurf könnt ihr mir auch gerne mit Uberspace machen, aber deswegen sprach ich mit meiner Frau drüber, um genau dies auszuschließen. Hätte sie gesagt, dass das Mist ist, was die Ubernauten machen, hätte ich mir was anderes gesucht und ggf. auch erstmal alle Inhalte von mir so lang vom Netz genommen.[/footnote]. Ich frage mich zum Beispiel, warum viele ihren Twitteraccount noch halten, wenn Twitter doch gerade mit sehr problematischen Inhalten noch viel problematischer, nämlich gar nicht, umgeht. Wird der jetzt auch gekündigt? Was ist mit Dropbox, die mit Condoleezza Rice, eine mehr als fragwürdige ehemalige Politikerin in ihren Reihen hat? Facebook, die ihre Kontrolle dazu nutzen Experimente mit den Emotionen von Menschen durchzuführen, ohne dass sie davon wissen? Und wenn wir schon dabei sind, wann habt ihr das letzte Mal ein Produkt von Nestlé gekauft? Die sind vermutlich einer der schlimmsten Konzerne, die es auf diesem Planeten gibt. Bei mir ist es gar nicht so lange her, nachdem ich mir mal die Marken, die zu Nestlé gehören, angesehen habe. Aber ich schweife wirklich ab.

@leitmedium hat einen Artikel geschrieben, dessen Essenz meiner Meinung nach ist, dass das Tor-Projekt erklären sollte, wie man sich gegen Belästigung unter dem Mantel von Tor schützen kann. Meiner Ansicht nach könnte so ein Wegweiser aber zu einem großem Problem für Tor werden. Tor weißt auf seiner Webseite nur auf die positiven Seiten der Anonymität hin. Allerdings ist Tor für mehr als nur ein Tool für Dissidenten, Journalisten und andere die Anonymität im Netz benötigen bzw. dadurch ihren Zugang zum Net vergrößern können. Auch Hater und Stalker nutzen Tor, um ihre Identität zu verschleiern. Man könnte sagen, dass Tor ein Dual Use-Werkzeug ist. Die Frage ist nun, wer hat die Verantwortlichkeit Opfer vor dem Missbrauch durch Tor zu schützen bzw. wer sollte zumindest die notwendige Aufklärungsarbeit leisten. Ich denke nicht, dass das Tor-Projekt dies leisten sollte, weil es dadurch seinen Gegnern nur Munition liefert. Würde das Tor-Projekt auf seine Webseite schreiben, wie man sich gegen den Missbrauch schützt, können wir vermutlich die Tage zählen bis ein Beamter des BKA oder ein CDU-Politiker genau dieses nutzt. Die Argumentation wird sein, dass unter der Maske von Tor soviel Schindluder betrieben wird, dass das Projekt selbst darüber aufklären muss, wie man sich dagegen schützt. Und dann kann man es auch gleich verbieten. Der positive Nutzen Tors ist schließlich ein Dorn im Auge der üblichen Verdächtigen. Und in diesem Spiel werden sie auch jede Möglichkeit nutzen. Eine schönere Vorlage könnte Tor gar nicht bieten. Ich vermute übrigens, dass man im Zuge dessen, dann auch noch gleich VPN-Dienste für Privatpersonen verbieten will. Schließlich kann man solche Dienste auch für Belästigungen nutzen.

Eine Aufklärung für Opfer ist notwendig. Aber das Tor-Projekt sollte dies nicht leisten. Eher müsste es eine unabhängige Seite geben, die diesen Dienst leistet. So eine Seite könnte dann auch gleich noch auf Missbrauchsstellen der sozialen Netzwerke, Beratungsstellen, den Umgang mit Behörden etc. hinweisen und auch Erfahrungsberichte beinhalten.

Aber würde das Tor-Projekt so etwas anbieten, könnte es insgesamt weitaus mehr schaden als nutzen.

Meines Wissens nach haben die Öffentlich-Rechtlichen eine Aussprache-Datenbank für ausländische Begriffe. Podcaster und YouTuber haben aber ähnliche Probleme: Wie spricht man ausländische Namen, Ortsnamen oder auch z.B. Levelnamen aus Videospielen richtig aus? Meistens gibt es dann vergebliche Versuche und man fragt sich: warum haben sie nicht bei jemanden nachgefragt?

Daher schlage ich vor, dass ein Vermittlungsdienst auf die Beine gestellt wird. Für den Anfang habe ich ein Google Sheet aufgemacht, in dem sich bereitwillige Menschen eintragen können mit Name, Sprache und Kontaktmöglichkeit. Zwecks Sortiermöglichkeit bitte eine Zeile pro Sprache, falls jemand mehrere Sprachen anbieten kann.

Podcaster, die Probleme mit Begriffen haben, können den Leuten dann eine Mail schicken und sie bekommen eine mp3 oder ähnliches zurück.

Da Sprachfähigkeiten in der Regel Fähigkeiten sind, die eine langjährige Ausbildung benötigen, vor allem bei Sprachen aus anderen Sprachfamilien, sollte diese Dienstleistung meiner Ansicht nach nicht kostenfrei erfolgen. Das Minimum sollte ein Flattr-Klick pro Begriff sein, aber mehr geht natürlich immer. Aber das können auch Podcaster und Nachfrager ggf. untereinander aushandeln.

Wer Interesse hat beizutragen, trägt sich bitte per Kommentar im Google Sheet ein. Und jeder der denkt, dass das eine praktische Sache wäre, verteilt es bitte im Netz weiter.

Yesterday I had to make the hard decision to switch from OS X to Linux. The reason is mainly of financial nature. One of the laptops in the household broke down and we just cannot afford a laptop by Apple right now. And I do not trust Apple-hardware enough that I would buy it used and therefore with no or nearly no warranty. I am using now Apple-computers for 10 years and had two iBook G4s, one iMac, two MacBook Airs and brought Apple-computers also to my extended family and have seen there in addition a MacBook Pro, a MacBook and two iMacs. The first iBook G4 needed to be repaired like five or six times until I got the second iBook G4 which needed some repair as well and died not long after the three-year warranty. My iMac died once after a firmware-update and the technician said to me that he wouldn’t have believed me the story if he wouldn’t have seen my dead computer with his own eyes. I broke it more or less when I installed an SSD. After that the fans went bonkers. My first MacBook Air was the most terrible Mac I’ve ever had because the HDD was just too slow. And it died at some point because of a RAM-error. The day I got really cautious about Apples strategy to integrate laptops more and more. Usually fixing a RAM-error depends only on the price of RAM. And since the computer was from 2008 and had only 2GB it would have been probably a 20€-fix. But I just could say to my wife: “It’s dead Jim”. The best computer I’ve ever owned though is the machine I am typing this blog post right now. A MacBook Air from 2011. And it is the only Mac I know in my extended family that didn’t have any problems so far[footnote]except one other iMac but I do not want to jinx it.[/footnote]. The MacBook Pro of my wife had always battery problems and Apples service-partners could never really fix it and between slacking and the reoccurence of the problem the warranty was gone without having a final fix. Since then it just won’t work on battery power. And this MacBook Pro is now steadily declining. So my wife gets now this MacBook Air and I will get the computer with Linux since I have less problems with fixing problems and working with it than if my wife would have to.

And those are just the stories of the Macs I owned[footnote]My first iBook had like three logic boards and two or three Super Drives[/footnote]. I’ve seen in my extended family broken cases, power supplies and dead logic boards. Except my iPhones and iPod Touches nearly everything had to be repaired at some point incl. some iPods that broke. I also know a lot of people who had trouble with their iPhones, especially with the home buttons. And yes, I know that there are people with totally different experiences but To be honest, those do not matter to me.

Until I got my current MacBook Air I always said that I would buy immediately a ThinkPad if OS X would officially run on them. I do not know why but I like the black edged design, the keyboard is great and they are really good servicable. I had to remove tons of screws to exchange hard disks with some of my Macs. Yes I know that there were some series were it was easy to change the HDD but current models are moving more and more into being nearly unserviceable. If the SSD in my MBA dies I need a special SSD and it is expensive. 250GB are around 240€. I gave up thinking about exchanging the 128GB-SSD for a 256GB one. It is just too expensive. For the one I just ordered I paid €110 and from my job where I use the 120GB-model I know that they are fast[footnote]Before you ask: Samsung Evo 840.[/footnote], at least fast enough for me.

But let’s go back to the serviceable Thinkpad. I could easily find a 300 page-service manual where they explain how to exchange pretty much everything. And I know that even the spare parts are not that expensive. If something breaks with a used Apple-laptop and I have no warranty, I am not afraid of not being able to fix it by myself even though there are the iFixit-guides. And the spare parts are usually not that cheap in my experience. When I am out of warranty with a Mac-laptop from the last couple of years, I have with most parts a big problem - hard to exchange, expensive parts etc. In addition even used prices are pretty high. But that X201 from 2010 or 2011[footnote]I am not sure.[/footnote] with a Core i5 with 2.53GHz was less than €300 from a dealer and I even have a couple of months of warranty by the dealer.

So now you know my financial reasoning for not buying a Mac. And on the software side most of the stuff I use has equivalents if it is not even the same on Linux. For all my writing I use vim and if it needs to be printed I use XeTeX. When I write correspondence any word processor works for me, so Open Office is fine. My music gets nowadays into Google Play Music where I have an All Access-subscription. Since I switched to Android and Quantus Tasks underdelivered I switched to a todo.txt-based setup. And it works pretty well and has the advantage that I can even use it at work where I have to use Windows. My browsers of choice are Firefox and Chrome and I watch movies with VLC or MPlayer. And the list goes on. I noticed already several months ago that I am in a state where I could switch to Linux because it pretty much didn’t matter anymore. But I always said to me that I actually like OS X and that there is no good enough reason to switch when I am using a MacBook Air. I do not have yet a solution for everything - mainly for doing Let’s Plays like I record them recently but I am confident that I will find a solution. Yes, it will be some work to get every gear running like I want it to but while I said in the past I am willing to pay more, so that it just works my preferences changed and I am more ready to pay in time. In addition I am in a mood in the recent months in which I want to be able to fiddle with my system. I was actually always in the mood and with Linux this works even better. In exchange I won’t have access to software from the OmniGroup or software like Screenflow. But I guess I will survive, there are worse things. And maybe the time comes back when I can afford a Mac without thinking too much about the costs, but right now this is not the time[footnote]And when I am honest this is also one of the reasons why I like retrogames so much. If I wanted to play on a current gen-console I would need a new TV and a new console. And just for being able to play games I would have to pay a high 3-digits or even 4-digits amount of money. And there are so many good games I already own or that I never played which I can get now for cheap that I do not see that much of a reason to get pay that much money.[/footnote].

Be prepared for some blog posts or even one or more podcast-episode about how the switch is working out. If you are an active Linux-user I am happy to get some software-recommendations or general hints via ADN, Twitter or e-mail[footnote]My GPG-key is here[/footnote]

Dank eines neuen Urteils, werde ich Kommentare deaktivieren. Sie kamen eh nicht alzu häufig, von daher tut es nicht allzu sehr weh. Trotzdem doof. In der Seitenleiste, findet ihr diverse Wege, um mich zu kontaktieren.

Thanks to a new court decision, I will switch off comments. On the sidebar, you will find several ways to contact me if you find it necessary

I am using now an Android-phone for three weeks and have now a clearer opinion than in my post from two weeks ago.

Even though I run into some problems with Android which are very annoying, I am still all in all happy with my Moto X. The phone feels great in the hand, has some very interesting features, apps are very good, I still like the customizability etc. I still do not look back at having an iPhone.

The good

If you are into encrypting all the stuff™ Android is probably your way to go on a mobile device. Thanks to The Guardian Project and some other stuff, encrypting mails etc is not that hard.

For mail I use APG with K-9[footnote]Just install APG before K-9, otherwise you will have to re-install K-9[/footnote] which delivers a very good GPG-experience. Far better than anything on iOS and actually even better than most of the stuff, I’ve seen on desktop operating systems.

For chatting/texting I use several apps. One is Threema because I used it already with several people on iOS and it is there far more reliable than Jabber-based solutions. In addition I use ChatSecure as a Jabber- and Hangouts-client[footnote]As long as Hangouts supports XMPP for IM[/footnote] because it allows OTR. If you are coming from iOS then you are in for a surprise. ChatSecure on Android looks and works far better than on iOS. For SMS I use TextSecure but I think I know only one other user of it, so no encrypted SMS so far. But at lest there is the possibility for it.

As a browser I use the mobile Firefox with https everywhere and some proxy-plug in I cannot remember right now to interface with Orbot if I want to. What is Orbot? Orbot is a Tor-client on Android and it can run in the background. And when apps have settings for a proxy, you can let them work together even though, you did not root your device. Thus I can easily start Tor if I want to and when using it for example with ChatSecure it will try to use an hidden tor service[footnote]I hope I use here the right terminology[/footnote] for the jabber-server you are connecting to.

I even had already an encrypted phone call with RedPhone.

The whole crypto-stuff is so easy, that I used more encrypted communication in the last couple of weeks than in several years before. After all most of my communication nowadays works through my smartphone.

I tried now also multiple keyboards and found several good ones. It is nice to try them but trying out keyboards is always a risk as well, since they can read everything you type. But it is nice to have an alternative, and there are some pretty great ones.

I also tried out some launchers and I am actually still in a phase of trying stuff out. Right now I have Terrain Home installed which is nice. The one with the best theming-capabilities and nicest themes but not working for the way I use my smartphone was Themer which I can really recommend to try out for seeing what can be possible. And for most of the time I used Nova Launcher.

The twitter-client I am using is pretty good. Looks good, works well. No Tweetbot 3 but close in my opinion.

There is a Dropbox-client which allows syncing directly with folders of the internal storages called Dropsync and this is pretty cool. Far better than having Dropbox-integration in each app. And if you don’t like Dropbox you can use Bittorrent-Sync. And since 1Password allows for syncing via a local folder, you can sync 1Password outside of Dropbox over the air with BT sync.

Last but not least a comment about Active Display. This is a feature which is only available on the Moto X and it is awesome. You take your phone out of your pocket and you get to see the current time and if there is a notification of an app in a minimalistic style. And only the white pixels are lightened, everything else of the display is switched off. When tapping the notification button, you see on top the current notification and can swipe up to it, to open the app. On the bottom you see the last couple of notifications and can swipe down to unlock the phone. Swiping right dismisses the notification. It works and looks great, saves battery and somehow I think that this is the way notifications should work. But well, as soon as I go the step to a custom rom because updates do not come out any more I probably loose this great feature. I know that there are now alternatives but they do not switch off the black parts of the display afaik.

I think I touched now all the good stuff, maybe there is more[footnote]the better AppStore comes to mind but I already wrote about that in my last post which is linked above[/footnote] but that’s what comes to my mind.

The mediocre

Quantus Tasks didn’t work out for me so far. Thus I switched to todo.txt and use SimpleTask which is better than the official todo.txt-client and there is even a cloudless version available. For reminders I am using Bzzz because it has a persistent notification for easily adding reminders.

I found a client with natural language input for calendar events which is called Quick Add. It works good for English but I didn’t try German yet. It is not as good as Fantastical in terms of design and language parsing but it works.

The bad

I have a phone that is pretty much stock Android and is getting updates to the newest version of Android (4.4.3) in several countries. For whatever reason Motorola decided that Europe shouldn’t get the update yet. I have no idea why. They only write in their blogpost about the US but actually they mention the US only for the Moto G. And their link to the software upgrade page doesn’t tell me anything about when the update will be available in Germany, only that it isn’t available. As if I wouldn’t know that already. And for fun: Motorola just updated the boot-loader-animation today to a worldcup-related theme. Seriously? These are real priorities.

But why is it only in the bad-section? Well, core apps like Google Play are nowadays not part of the OS, so Google updates them outside of the Android-update cycle. It would be nice, if Apple would do that for all the apps on the iPhone as well.

Still when there are security holes, it could take some time until they are fixed. Still the problem is not that ugly to me. I know people with iOS-devices who didn’t update to latest dot-releases because their device doesn’t have sufficient space right now and they don’t know what to delete.

One last bad thing: There are some ok-ish apps for learning Kanji but they are far from fun and design compared to iKanji Touch. At least AnkiDroid looks better than Anki on iOS but it is a little bit worse when using it.

The ugly

Let’s start with the literally ugly: Emojis. The font that is used for emojis is just plain ugly. I hope the designer at Google who is responsible for these crappy looking emojis is wearing sackcloth and ashes for these fugly icons.

Next up: no system-wide undo for text-fields. There is an app[footnote]not tested[/footnote] that will help you out getting deleted text back and there is a third-party-keyboard that has an undo-functionality. Luckily the keyboard is pretty good and it might replace SwiftKey for me. But seriously, no system-wide undo for text-fields? It reminds me a bit on the situation when everybody laughed about iOS that it has no copy+paste.

And then there is the problem of space for apps I constantly run into the last days. It seems that Android-devices have several partitions. One for apps, one for all the other data. I have still a gigabyte of data on my device available and get all the time the notification that there is not sufficient space to install some updates. So I have to delete apps, I do not really use to update apps, even so there is more than sufficient space. The genius at Google who had that idea, should get hit hard with a newspaper on his or her head. Maybe someone could tell me a good reason in the comments why this partitioning still exists. Maybe there was a reason in the past, but I do not see one nowadays.

Update: Apparently the problem with the partitioning for apps is vendor-specific. The Nexus-devices do not have the problem but devices from a lot of vendors. It seems that they think that for working seemlessly with SD-cards it is necessary to have those partitions. With HTC-devices you usually get 1GB of space for apps and it doesn’t matter how much space your device has. And the partition map problem sits deep enough that installing a custom ROM doesn’t help. According to the infos I have so far it might be possible to change the partition map when using custom ROMs but whether unified storage is possible like with the Nexus-devices is possible, I do not know.

Update 2: I might even have unified storage and the problems I am encountering are of a different nature. I am just not understanding it and will have to have another look at it :/

The obligatory blog post. When one switches operating systems, especially on smartphones, it seems that one has to write a blog post about it. I just moved from iOS to Android on my smartphone. I handed over my iPhone 4S to someone whose iPhone 3G was totally broken down and got myself a Moto X.

Before I made the switch I could borrow a Samsung Galaxy SIII Mini[footnote]Somehow the phone-names by Samsung remind me on names of games for the Street Fighter 2-series. Super Street Fighter II X Turbo Revival-style.[/footnote]. The phone was ok but especially the screen was bad. Low resolution pen-tile AMOLED-display which was too bright in the night and too dim in sunlight. But the operating system was fun to use and far from the horrors I heard so far from people who are accustomed to iOS and tried Android. In addition, I didn’t see any stuttering when browsing the web or scrolling or whatever. It’s a phone more on the low-end side and neither in the stock Samsung-taste of Android 4.1 nor on Cyanogenmod 11 (Android 4.4.2) I’ve seen performances issues.

So it didn’t took me long to decide that my next phone won’t be by Apple but some other vendor.

So what are the reasons?

Reasons

Price

When I think about it, then this is probably the main reason. Apple devices are expensive. They are good devices, are probably produced in the most humane way capitalism allows right now but are always pretty much on the high-end side of the spectrum. And the low end-phones aren’t very reasonable priced in my opinion. So usually only the newest phone is a viable choice with Apple. And then you have to pay even for a 16GB-model something like €700. This is a lot of money. And they won’t get cheaper after a couple of months. The whole year the product is the newest available it will cost €700. And buying them used isn’t really cheaper as well. Yes, I know the argument that this is actually a good thing because I can buy an Apple device, sell it a year later and then buy a new one for “cheap”. But I keep my device until they break down or I get a new one and give my old ones away to people who need one[footnote]Like this time. My iPhone 3G was in use until the person who had it got now my 4S because the 3G was just unusable anymore because it had a broken power button, problems with making and receiving calls etc[/footnote].

I bought now a Moto X with 16GB of internal storage. According to benchmarks and that’s the only way to compare Android-phones somehow to iOS-phones it is somewhere between the iPhone 5 and 5S. And I paid €379 for it[footnote]Yes, this is more expensive than a Nexus 5 which has better stats but I wanted the smaller device, the active display and be able to pay in installements[/footnote]. I am buying my devices usually by paying in installements. With my dealer of choice I have to pay €30/month for an iPhone 5S with 16GB and €15 for the Moto X. It is only €15 per month but that’s already noticeable. And I had already once the case that my iPhone got stolen and I paid for two and then it really hurt[footnote]Even so I got a bit of cushion thanks to awesome people who gave me a bit of money, so I was able to buy a new one[/footnote].

And I just bought some Micro-USB-cables. After the cable-tax of Apple where I have to pay €19 per Lightning-cable when switching away from having a dock-connector device, I paid €7,20 for the three cables (€2,40/cable) I wanted to have[footnote]1 for the charger at the bed, 1 for my laptop, 1 for the computer at work and then I have the one that came already with my phone which is for the bag[/footnote].

So after the whole price-argument I come to the parts that I actually like better in Android. Thankfully to the iOS8-announcement I can shorten this a bit because it seems that 80% of the announcement was about stuff they copied from Android and maybe other mobile OSs.

I am talking about the Android-version the Moto X ships with. This is a stock Android 4.4.2 (Kitkat) with some nice additions but nothing like the modified HTC- or Samsung-devices which seems to have some hefty modifications.

Customizability

I like that I can set a different default browser, mail-client and what not. And that browsers can actually be browsers and not yet another wrapper for iOS-webkit. My default browser for example is Firefox because it supports plug-ins like https everywhere and I use usually Firefox on my desktop operating systems these days as well. In addition I can change a lot of stuff. The share sheet which allows me to send stuff from one app to another got replaced by Andmade Share because that allows me to change the order of the apps that appear in the share sheet since I want to share 90% of the time to Instapaper anyways. I can also hide apps from the share sheet. By the way I hope the share sheet in iOS8 works equally well. Each time I tried an app that supports sharing to Instapaper I had to enter my credentials. That can be really annoying. With Android I entered them once and since then I can just share from my browser, my ADN-apps, my twitter-apps etc. I replaced also the launcher (the Springboard) with something else which had some extra functionality I like. An example would be definable gestures like swiping up will open my preferred ADN-client with a window for writing new posts. The stock-stuff works and is nice but being able to replace them is great.

Downloading from the desktop browser and the Play Store

A thing I missed more or less immediately when using Android and having a look again at iOS is the ability to buy on the desktop Play Store and it will immediately download to a device. And I do not need to have iTunes installed for buying apps. I just go there, click install or buy, select my device and it will directly download to my phone. It’s not that it will download to my computer and in addition to my phone. And when an app is free I do not have to enter my google-credentials. Something I do not understand until today why I have to enter my Apple-credentials for free apps.

And since we are on the topic of buying apps, the Play Store beats the App Store hands down. Sorry Apple but except a bit of a refresh on the design side (mainly for the worse imho), the AppStore didn’t change since iOS 2. The Play Store has videos (for all developers), an imho better overview of reviews, developers can respond directly to reviews etc. The whole experience of buying stuff is a lot better. Please Apple: Learn from Google and give at least developers a way to upload a video-demo of their app and let them respond to reviews.

Apropos buying stuff. Every time I listen to podcasts from iOS-users who talk about the Play Store and that everything is free there, I have to say that they are wrong. There are lots of free apps but many of them are trials or offer in-app-purchases. Yes, you read that right: trials. The Play Store has them. Swift Key Free for example works for one month like the normal app and then ceases to work. But you can buy the full app to get it. Other apps have limited functionality and then use some app that I guess work like a plug-in to extend the Pro-functionality. Or the apps are ad-supported and you can pay for removing the apps. Most of the good stuff costs money, like on iOS. Interestingly apps seem to be cheaper though even though there are trials. SquareEnix-games are as expensive like on iOS but the rest feels in general a bit cheaper. Another reason could be that the Play Store doesn’t seem to work in the tier-scheme like iOS but that developers set one price for one region and other prices get directly converted to the local currency and setting prices for all regions is optional. But I guess trials aren’t necessarily the solution to get reasonable prices for software again.

Apps

Because my iPhone did some weird things, I reinstalled it a couple of weeks ago and did a clean install without using my backup. Thus I installed apps when I really needed them. And found out that there aren’t that many apps that I actually use. So I got curious what the Play Store had to offer in that regard and I found out that pretty much everything was there. The only thing missing was OmniFocus but with Quantus Tasks there is an app available that will sync with OmniFocus. It doesn’t have the same functionality as the iOS-app but it is a neat companion-app that works quite well. Otherwise everything is available in some form or another for Android. A client for Anki, a client Instapaper, a client for Fever, the next 1Password-app is in Beta and now a full-fledged 1Password-client, the Kindle-app is available and better because it allows buying directly from the app etc. Even newer games like Monument Valley or Threes are available. And in regards to games I had to find out that thanks to the Humble Bundle I have already a lot of games for Android.

Because the Play Store allows more type of apps, there is even some stuff, that I won’t get on iOS. Like an SFTP-client that allows me to copy stuff from my computer to my phone which can be used in apps, without the need of iTunes or some companion app on the Mac. I can get Dropbox-free because I can just use Owncloud or Bittorrent-Sync since apps usually can access the file system and for example Bittorrent-Sync can do its magic in the background. I have a very good e-mail-client called K-9 which works together with another app to directly provide GPG-support. If you are into encrypting your stuff you are probably better off on Android anyways thanks to the Guardian Project. Even apps that are also available on the iPhone like ChatSecure just work better on Android. Or there is Tasker which allows me to automate my phone by location, events, dates whatever. When I put in my headphones, a pop-up comes up that shows me my main media-player apps and when I leave home Wifi gets disabled and when I reach my workplace it gets automatically enabled again and some other stuff gets turned off automatically.

One comment about the design quality of the apps. Apps are usually equally good designed on Android as on iOS. But on iOS there are some apps which are outstandingly designed and those I have not yet seen so far on Android. So the average might be worse but if you cut off the 5% of best/worst designed apps, Android and iOS are probably on the same level. And if apps are using the default design of Android which is called Holo, then they look usually equally good to apps that use mainly the default design of iOS 7.

Emulators

It should be known by now that I have a thing for retrogames. Even though touch controls aren’t that great, it is awesome that I can officially install emulators from the Play Store. Being able to play some Lucas Arts-adventures on the go or having turn-based strategy games of the big consoles or handheld-consoles without having to carrying around all the time my handhelds with me is nice. Since controllers for Android seem to be quite cheap it might even be a nice replacement for my PSP. But this will have to wait probably a month or two.

Notifications

iOS has the notification center but notifications on Android are better. You can have multiple audio-players in your notifications, you can have persistent notifications, notifications can have buttons so that you can reply immediately to an ADN-message etc. They are plain better. Apple just did enough that it could count as just enough but there is still some work to do. And on the Moto X with Active Display they are even better. When my phone vibrates I can get it from my pocket, hit the lock-symbol and it will show me the newest notification in detail on top and older non-acknowledged notifications on the bottom. Thanks to the AMOLED-display only the text and the graphics are using battery, everything else is black. I read it already in several reviews of the phone but this is the way notifications should work for a locked phone. If only design-wise because not every phone has an AMOLED-display which has some disadvantages to an LCD-display.

After getting into all the advantages without the stuff I like but you will probably see in iOS 8 as well, I will now talk a bit about the disadvantages.

Problems

Backups

On iOS backups are no problem, either you back up your device to iTunes or iCloud. On Android, well not so much. There is backup to Google which apparently backs up settings but that’s it. And then there are some apps on the Play Store that should help but the apparently best app called Helium says that it has problems with Motorola-phones. The settings-part didn’t work so well when I switched from the S3 Mini with Cyanogenmod 11 to the Moto X. So, no backups it seems. Thankfully most of my data is synced nowadays, contacts are in my owncloud, calendars on iCloud[footnote]I will switch to Owncloud for that porbably soon[/footnote], 1Password is synced, Anki is synced, podcast-states are synced because of PocketCasts, photos get uploaded to Flickr automatically and so on. Not a lot of data I would loose except maybe how far I am in some games but because of my gaming habits that doesn’t hurt that much. And setting up the settings didn’t took long. The one thing that got saved was which apps are installed on my phone and as soon as I entered my google-credentials all the apps that were installed before got downloaded to the phone.

OmniFocus

As written above Quantus Tasks is nice but it is no OmniFocus 2 like on the iPhone. But I am thinking about switching to Todo.txt or some other plain text-solution plus an app for reminders for my todo-needs. The reason is that I am not sure if I want to pay the $40-upgrade fee and I can’t use OmniFocus with my computer at work. And there are some nice apps for Todo.txt now available and in the end at least the shell script and the file itself will always work. And on Android there is Simpletask available which is a great todo.txt-client. Looks better, has more features and works better than the official todo.txt-app. And there is even a cloudless-version that I can sync via local storage which means I can sync it via Bittorrent Sync.

Gestures

Modern iOS-apps are heavily gestures-based. In Android pushing buttons is usually the way to go. While using gestures might be faster and sometimes more comfortable, they have also the problem that you have to learn them and that developers have to put a tutorial into the app. I like gesture-based interfaces that’s why I put this part into the disadvantage-section but you could also argue that interfaces that need a tutorial are majorly flawed.

No Spotlight

In iOS I often used Spotlight to open my apps. Pull the springboard down, start typing the app-name, tap it, start. It is simple search and it doesn’t seem to exist in the Android-universe. Seriously? The layer were all installed apps are presented are sorted by alphabet, so one finds an app reasonably fast but it is still way slower than Spotlight. I really miss it.

I was wrong. There is a way to search for apps. Thanks @evs.

So, these are the main disadvantages I have seen so far. Otherwise I honestly found no problems. Nothing in the consistency-department, even the by iOS-users often dreaded back-button was a thing I grew accustomed to. It took a couple of days until my finger accepted that there is no back-gesture but a back-button. And unlike from what I heard so far its behavior is usually not inconsistent. In my scenarios it worked always as I was thinking of it and only when I really tried to get it to behave inconsistently, I broke it. Yes even that shouldn’t be the case but in general it works. Just an example:

Navigation-steps:

• I open my twitter-client
• from there I open the details of a tweet
• tap a link and get moved Firefox
• and navigate there one page.

• Back 1: one page back in Firefox
• Back 2: back to the details-view in the twitter-app
• Back 3: back to my main timeline
• Back 4: back to the homescreen
• Back 5: nothing happens

I know that I will never see Carcassonne by The Coding Monkeys or Omni-products but I am not sure if the overall price difference is it worth. After all I change my phone every two to three years[footnote]Maybe I should change this habit as well since I am using a prepaid-card anyway but this is really hard like I noticed this year with the iPhone 4S.[/footnote] and getting a €700-€800-device is really a lot of money.

After I bought the phone I had a short while a tiny bit of buyer’s remorse, and while I am writing this I am thinking whether I am a case of post-purchase rationalization because the whole thing just works too good for me. Especially when I am thinking about what loads of other iOS-users who have used an Android-phone told me about their experience. But maybe it is just good enough for me and the advantages[footnote]Yeah, a real Terminal without jailbreaking the device for stuff like pings and ssh[/footnote] weigh heavier than the disadvantages. All in all I am happy with the phone I am having now and that’s good. I don’t know if I want to switch back, right now I think that iOS8 got some real neat features but Apple would still have to release a far cheaper phone that I would consider buying one again. And then I wouldn’t have stuff like emulators, tasker or the customizability. But like I explained to an Android-user who would never use iOS because he thinks that it puts you under tutelage, you pay Apple for making decisions for you and for that you get a cleaner looking, probably more secure OS that lets you make less errors. But that’s not for everyone. And sometimes it is nice to have to think a bit less by having less choice in some areas. Right now, I prefer the way of having more choice and having to pay less.

I felt the need to track my old video games and I wanted to be able to do it from my smartphone and my computer. After a bit of search, I had the idea to do it with a wordpress-blog. I know that at least one other person (Hi @streakmachine) wants to do something similar, I thought it might be a good idea to explain what I am doing.

I am using a recent Wordpress. The theme I am using is called Market. The plugins I have installed are: