Surviving the limited memory of the Nexus One

I bought the Nexus One pretty much as soon as it became available, and have been loving the pure Google Android nature of the phone since, with one (perhaps 2 - the 1400mAh battery) exceptions. The internal system memory available for applications, and application data is fine for a few apps, but once you start to rely on a suite of applications, and install some of Google’s own memory hogs (Google+, Maps, etc) you rapidly run into issues.

The device has 512MB of flash, of which 190M can be used for application and data storage, plus a microSDHC card slot which can support up to 32GB - however some applications can’t be installed to this SD memory in the native build. 

In this post I describe how I used 1tap cleaner and DiskUsage to find out what was using the space, then initially App2SD to shift most apps over to the SD card. After that I migrated to CyanogenMod and uninstalled a few of the system apps. Then to get even more space I created an ext4 partition on the SD card and moved over the dalvik cache and download folders clearing out around 70MB of space. Finally I used Titanium Backup to move selected apps data folders from internal memory to the new ext4 partition on the SD card.

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Snow chains - Have I found the best?

Snow on the roads is something you have to consider when driving in an alpine region (and the UK from time to time!), even if you don’t do a lot of winter sports. For the last few years I’ve avoided using my car in heavy snow, but this isn’t always convenient, so this winter I’ve decided to address both snow tyres and chains.

I’m a design fanatic, especially where it comes to well designed products that make life simpler, and will often spend the extra required to get the best available, so decided against just picking up the first set of chains I found in Carrefour. Conventional snow chains seem to be functional and effective, yet not loved by anyone due to the hassle of fitting them to the car.

I’ve scoured the internet to come to a conclusion on what I think are the best available, and have compiled my research and related videos into a post on my blog. Let me know what you think - and if I’ve missed any significant categories, or any other innovations in this space.

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CRM, E2.0 & social convergence

As I predicted at the start of the year, we’re beginning to see the start of a movement to tie together social, CRM, and E2.0 - and it’s @loic from Seesmic that’s in the driving seat (with just a little help from salesforce.com).

I just spotted a post on G+ from Robert Scoble with an interview of @loic about Seesmic CRM - their new product focused on the Enterprise providing a mobile interface into SalesForce using a native app on iOS, Android and WP7.

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Alpine Lakes around Grenoble

Since moving to Grenoble I’ve been doing some hiking in the Alps, and occasionally stumbling across some of the georgeous alpine lakes of the area. As I was looking for new potential locations to hike to, a friend from the photoclub at work started doing a lot of alpine lake photography - and I started making a note of some of the places he visited, along with lakes that I’d visited, and a few I’d spotted on Google Earth and Panoramio.

I’ve now captured a Google My Map of >50 of these… Click through to the full post to see the map or grab a copy in Google Earth

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Tour de France - cycling photography

Saturday was my first time shooting cycling, and the first time in 6 years of Grenoble living that I’d decided to go shoot the Tour as it passed through, so I’m interested in any and all feedback on the images via the album on Google+, or in the comments below.

I really had a hard time getting the camera to give me an accurate focus - no doubt because I’m using a micro four-thirds camera - the Panasonic G2 - and it just can’t match some of the more expensive SLRs on focus speed. I had the best luck when I pre-focused on a spot on the ground, then set to manual and waited for the riders to pass. Head-on shots seemed to look the most dramatic, although I had to be careful how close I got to the action…

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What motivates us?

I just finished Tony Hsieh’s book: Delivering Happiness about his journey to through LinkExchange and Zappos. In the book, he shows how creating happiness and record results go hand-in-hand.

I loved the first half where he told the story of the creation of Zappos, but got somewhat less interested in the middle section where he was giving an overview of how Zappos works today. I guess I was just depressed by the challenge of applying some of the Zappos concepts to the place I work. 

As he got towards the end of the book Tony moved into discussing the field of happiness, and I was reminded of the Dan Pink TED talk on the surprising science of motivation. I’ve embedded Dan Pink’s TED talk in the full post, along with a discussion [spoiler alert] of what I think the conclusions are - and why I think they’re both talking about the same 3 points.

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More memory for your mobile?

Updated on 15 Jun 2011 by Andy Bryant

After downloading ViewRanger GPS and a few maps to my phone, I decided it was time to upgrade my microSDHC card. I have a 16G Class 6 at the moment, but with music, videos, and maps, I’m almost completely out of space.

Whilst I usually go for the fastest possible memory cards for my camera, I don’t think my NexusONE is going to be that impacted by dropping to a Class 4 card, and there are no Class 6 or above 32G cards available at the moment. Wikipedia has a good summary of the class rating system for Secure Digital cards.  NexusSteve, the admin and creator of Nexusfourm.net is also of the opinion that Class 6 is overkill for the NexusONE.

Oh - and the image? That’s an 8GB SDHC sitting on 8 bytes of magnetic core memory!

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What do I write about?

@MiaD just turned me onto an excellent new word-cloud tool - Tagxedo - and I couldn’t resist giving it a try on my blog… so if you’d like to understand the sort of stuff I write about here - take a look through my tag-cloud above.

I’ve also just added a link to Tagxedo on my Links page - and you’ll find it next to what was probably the original word-cloud service Wordle. My native SquareSpace blog tag-cloud is also available on my About page.

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Ukraine - Kiev

After a day in Chernobyl, I returned to Kiev and spent a couple of days exploring and shooting a few panoramic photographs. I did a free-tour, visited Independence Square, St. Sophia’s Cathedral, The Caves Monastery (Pecherska Lavra), St. Michael’s Cathedral, St Andrew’s Church, and the Great Patriotic War Museum.

Kiev - Ukraine

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Ukraine - Chernobyl

Some may consider visiting the scene of a nuclear accident to be a strange way to spend a few days off but I felt the need to visit, take photographs, and to tell the story. I’ve always been interested holidays that take me off the beaten track, and so when I discovered that you could take an organized trips to see the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and that I could use up some AirFrance miles to get to Kiev, I booked a trip.

Chernobyl - Ukraine

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