We have historically been on a family bucket data plan of 3gb. Which has been more than enough. I’m around the house all day, which means that I am on WiFi. Since getting on this plan in April, I think we’ve exceeded 2gb only once (to 2.2gb) before last month.

Then Clancy discovered tethering. Which, due to her present work situation*, she has had to make extensive use of.

Last month, she went right up to the 3gb limit. I was going to have to watch it like a hawk this month. Or not, because it became very apparent very quickly that she was not going to stay underneath the cap. Or was she? I was given a glimmer of hope because we got a free courtesy GB. Maybe. The problem was that the meter kept switching between 3gb and 4gb, and I had visions of getting charged an overage every time it bounced from 4 to 3. So before she got to three (just) before, I went ahead and upgraded to the 10gb plan, which was all of $20/mo more. I told Clancy, whom I had been keeping posted on the situation, that we shouldn’t have to worry about data usage anymore.

I was wrong. Early last week she was approaching the 10/11 limit, and I was back to worrying about the inconsistency of our allotment. I thought that 11 might be okay, but 10 clearly wouldn’t. I found myself, yet again, wondering what use a courtesy GB was if I couldn’t actually rely on it.

Once again, though, this was a non-issue as she rocketed past both 10 and 11. I upgraded to 15/16. The cycle ends tomorrow, so it’s unlikely that we will hit that limit. We’re likely to stay at 15 for next month, when her job duties will return to normal. Then we’ll probably return to 10.

Her mother is looking at getting a smartphone for Christmas. I’ve offered to allow them to piggy-back onto our account. Data usage had, after all, never been an issue. Except it temporarily is, and now I’ve got to say that they’re welcome to join our plan so long as it’s a Christmas thing and doesn’t start until January(ish).

* – Due to her current job situation, she is having to deal with Arapaho-levels of paper work. Since it’s on EMR, she needs Internet access. At the nursing home where she is temporarily stationed, the WiFi is lousy. Since coffee isn’t as big a deal out here as it is out west, there are few “third places” for her to go. It tends to be more complicated for her to work here than elsewhere. So she’s been doing her work while tethered in to her phone.

Is Android’s app store anti-competitive?

The European Union, which is working on finishing up its investigation of Google’s Search business in Europe, may soon look into Google’s Android app store-related business practices, GigaOm reveals. Portugal’s Aptoide, an alternative Android app source that houses more than 200,000 titles and has more than 6 million active users, met with the European Commissions last week in preparation for its complaint submission.

I am not entirely sympathetic to the complaint here. When I first to install “outside” software, I get a notice that I need to change a setting and then directed to the setting I need to change.

I am, obviously, not the typical customer, but I have three different app stores on my phone (Google’s, Amazon’s, and Samsung’s) with very minor inconvenience. More tellingly, I think I could explain what to do with my father, and I could probably walk Mom through it.

I am quasi-sympathetic to the next complaint, which are the requirements of Google apps being installed. The oddest thing about this is the redundancy in some programs. It’s one thing to have redundancy when you download an alternative application, but it’s weird when it comes with the redundancy. Even there, you can sorta say “Well, Google will have one and Samsung will have one”… except that Google itself often has two. Gallery and Photos, Browser and Chrome, and so on.

But that’s less a question of Google abusing its position and more a question of Google being kind of dumb.

With the exception of Google Maps and Google Search, though, almost all of the apps are pretty easy to ignore.

I know that Android isn’t as open as its advocated claim, but I’m pretty sure it’s still the most open of the three. Without rooting or jailbreaking, I can install apps of almost any type. There is no prohibition on dual functionality. I’m not sure that prohibiting you from installing your own video player would be anti-competitive, but installing their own apps doesn’t seem like too much of an imposition.

More than that, in the US (and I suspect in Europe as well), having access to Google’s apps is one of the main reasons to install Official Android to begin with. Samsung may be the kind of android handset makers, but even they have to make concessions to Google because if Google were to pull out their apps, it would undermine Samsung’s phones. Only Amazon has gone its own way with Google-free Android, and their smartphone was a bust. Google doesn’t leverage the OS to force the installation of their apps. It’s the apps (specifically the Google Play app) that keeps makers using Google’s Android instead of forking their own.

When I was growing up, I had a very sturdy build. Mom called me Fatboy way before I was anything approaching overweight. Lain shares my build. Like me at that age, though, she isn’t particularly fat.

Unless you ask some random lady at Walmart, anyway.

Last week I was at Walmart and Lain was reaching for some candy. A woman with her daughter were in the aisle with us. The daughter said that she wanted that candy. The mother said “You don’t want that candy, it will make you fat like her.”

I tried to glance behind me, mortified by whatever overweight lady had to be standing behind us. There was nobody behind us.

I don’t know if the woman herself was simply obese or actually morbidly obese, but she didn’t have a discernable chin either way. The daughter herself (between five and seven, I would guess) was starting to carry some extra baggage and the prognosis did not look good. So I guess I can sort of understand why she might be concerned. And, out of a sense of pride or dignity or something, why she wouldn’t use herself as a cautionary example.

I am still dumbfounded that she chose my daughter as some sort of cautionary tale. The best I can think of is that she didn’t really look at Lain and assumed that anybody shopping at Walmart late on a Sunday evening (around nine or so) was probably overweight.

I didn’t have a response. I was too confused to. Not that I would have said anything anyway. (Clancy wishes she was there, because she would have.)

Lain did not eat anything for dinner that night. We are hoping that this is not going to give her an eating disorder.

I had a rough night last night. Or rather, a rough morning. There is only one part of the bedroom where the sun gets directly into the room. Guess whether or not that place was right where I was sleeping? Further, the baby was co-sleeping, making movement more difficult. The biggest problem, though, was the pillows.

We’d been riding too long on our old pillows, and I saw these nice and fluffy ones for cheap at Walmart. Well, you get what you pay for when it comes to pillows. They’re just dreadful, and I am a very pillow-dependent sleeper. I’m going to find the old pancake pillows and double-stack them until I can get some good pillows.

Instead of just ragging on Walmart, though, let me share a secret with you: They make some of the best salsa out there. Ordinarily, I go with Mrs. Renfro’s, which I hardily recommend if you like spicy salsa. In particular, their Green Salsa is quite good and easy to find. Their Hot Salsa and Habanero are also good, though the latter borders on being too hot (and I like it hot). the Ghost Pepper variety is too hot by any standard.

But if you like a milder, more flavorful salsa, it doesn’t get much better than World Table, one of Walmart’s house brands. In particular, their Roasted Salsa Verde and Roasted Tomato Chipotle salsas are exceptionally good. Not just for house brand salsa, or Walmart salsa, but compared to just about any bottled salsa out there.

My Samsung Galaxy Note 4 arrived today. I am officially a phablet user.

This is the first phone that my hand can’t reach the upper-right of the screen. This has proven, thus far, to be less of an inconvenience than I had feared. I have to re-evaluate where I put things on the screen, which fortunately I have the ability to do. The only place it’s turned out to be a problem is that some apps put menu options up there.

I am rootless, which means that this is a problem. However, Google plans on addressing it for the next Android release. I have a workaround in the meantime.

I’m mostly looking forward to having 3GB of RAM. I was really hoping it would be 4,

As is often the case, there have been some compatibility issues with software that I use. I can’t use Astroplayer anymore (my backup all-media player), and neither Nova Launcher nor Holo Launcher work with it yet. So now I use Apex Launcher. All of which are very similar. Which on the one hand makes one think “What use is it to have all of these identical launchers?” and the answer is “Because when one doesn’t work, another does!”

Unfortunately, it didn’t fix some of the Bluetooth problems I had with the previous device. Somewhere in between the S3 and S5 they inserted what I believe is a battery-saving feature (a laudible goal) that turns of AVRCP (the part of a bluetooth that lets you pause and restart media).

In a discussion over at Ordinary Times about banned books, Zic made the following comment:

There is another form of banning: limiting availability. I’ve spent a lot of time searching out out-of-print books; I own several collections; the White Mountains and mountaineering/hiking in general, field guides, gardening, knitting, cooking, science fiction.

When books go out of print, they become rare and elusive, they’re banned from general public access (with the exceptions of inter-library loans, Thanks Maribou!)

While this is obviously not a “ban” in the same sense as banned books, it is a significant hindrance of access that has a larger and deeper effect on availability than actual attempts to ban books in the more traditional sense.

One of Lain’s favorite books is A Big Ball of String. It was written in 1958 and incorporated into Dr Seuss’s “Beginners Series.” The plot involves a young boy who wants to gather a big ball of string, and having gathered it, has an adventure trying to figure out how to do. It’s snappy in the Seussian manner, and I really like it because it prizes childhood imagination and ingenuity.

The book looks like it is long out of print. As you can see if you followed the previous link, it sells from $23 for a heavily used copy, to over $650 for a “new” copy (by which I assume they mean in its original packaging.

Why is this book no longer available? Well, there are two potential reasons. The first is that it simply didn’t sell very well. The second is that one of the subplots involves a toy gun, which may not be kosher with some parents and may garner bad publicity (which starts sounding just a bit like corporate censorship).

On the first count, that used to hold more sway than it currently does. This day in age, between ebooks and print-on-demand, low sales shouldn’t be the barrier that it once was. It’s also noteworthy that this was a book written fifty years ago. The fact that it’s still held in copyright, by a publisher that (assuming it’s not the toy gun) that has no interest in it, represents something aggravating about copyright law. Even if we grant a right to near-perpetuity when it comes to profiting off creative works, in cases like this they seem to actually have no interest in it. But since it’s still under copyright, nobody else can, either.

As Hit Coffee readers know, I am famously against nail polish. And yet, I have recently run across a type of nail polish that I approve of:

It’s a nail polish that doubles as a way to thwart sexual assault – and it’s being developed at N.C. State University: Undercover Colors.

The chemistry startup, developed by undergrads, is creating a nail polish that, when exposed to date rape drugs, changes color.

The nail polish is a scientific attempt to thwart a nationwide problem. A recent Washington Post analysis showed more than 3,900 allegations of forcible sex offenses on college campuses nationwide in 2012, a statistic that rose 50 percent in three years. Fourteen such offenses were reported at N.C. State between 2010 and 2012. During that same time period, 30 were alleged at Duke University and 52 at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Maybe, better yet, they can have one that’s clear that only colorizes when exposed to the chemicals! But even subtracting that, it’s a pretty great idea. Even if Mark Cuban also thinks so.

Charles Hill points out that it doesn’t work with other drugs, like strawberry daiquiries.

A few months ago, I upgraded from the Samsung Galaxy S3 to an S5. I wasn’t expecting a huge difference, but I figured with the increased processing power and bigger screen, those differences I noticed would be in the positive. They were, as far as that went. That paled in comparison to one adaptation that took a new phone and made it actively worse than its two-year-old predecessor.

Specifically, I was suddenly extremely restricted in what I could do with my external SD card. For instance, I could no longer take files off the computer network and copy them directly to the card. The reasoning was that it was a security precaution:

This keeps things “tidy.” Apps aren’t dumping files everywhere on the card — something we’ve all encountered — and instead have one central location to put all their files. There also are some serious security concerns that were addressed by not letting an app write files just anywhere.

This means that Jerry’s Awesome Photo Viewer app can still scan your entire system for images, build a thumbnail database of them all and save it to a folder on the SD card. But it can’t move or save the pictures themselves to folders — including the Pictures folder — on the SD card because it does not “own” those folders. If programmed right, it could save copies of the pictures to Jerry’s Awesome Photo Viewer’s own folders on the SD card. The folder is part of the app, and if you uninstall it, the folder goes, too. The old method of putting anything anywhere you want is gone, forever.

The author asks whether I want it to be “easy” or “secure.” In fact, what I really wanted was the ability to do something that I consider to be unremarkable and not-particularly-risky, without having to take intermediate steps.

Which is to say that I am not hugely invested in the Open vs Closed debate. I am perfectly fine with Closed as long as I can do what I want and have the features that I want. It’s my experience that the more open a system is the more likely I am to be able to do that, but up until this I never (for instance) felt the need to root my phone because I could do what I wanted on it without going to the trouble and voiding my warranty.

This changed that. It could have been avoided with a more intermediate computer step (apps cannot write to the SD card without the users’ express consent each time). More to the point, it could have been avoided by having a capable file management application included with the phone with the appropriate permissions.

Google, though, isn’t particularly interested in that. They are more interested in trying to dictate how we use the device, which is to say that they appear not to want us to be able to sift through the file structure at all.

They have their reasons, of course. The end result to all of this, though, is that they tipped my hand and forced me to finally look into how to root my phone. Which I’ve done, disabled the security feature, and can now get my 2014 phone to do what my 2012 (and 2010, 2008, 2007…) phone could without question.

Of the major mobile operating systems, Android is still the lesser of evils. Unfortunately, a lot of the trust has been lost here. Now instead of wondering what cool thing the next version of Android will do, I am worried about what feature the next version of Android will take away.

Candy. From World Candy Confections. Some observations:

1. The individual “packs” are quite cool. The designs are pretty simple, but with a bit of touching up could be made to look cooler than most real cigarette packs. The brand names are actually better than a lot of the real ones. I’m eating a “Victory” brand now, which makes me think of 1984.
2. Other brand names include Target, Stallion, King, Lucky Lights, and Round-Up. I particularly like Target and King as designs.
3. The “Carton” doesn’t actually say “cigarettes” on there anywhere. I don’t know if that’s a recent development or they never did. I can see why they don’t now.
4. The pieces themselves don’t look nearly as cigarette-y as I remember them. I suspect this was the case before. But in my mouth they look as much like a glorified toothpick as anything.
5. They taste exactly as I remember them.
6. These things used to be relatively ubiquitous. For a time, anyway. It’s not surprising that they mostly went away.

Tod Kelly explains why AT&T is terrible and what it says about capitalism. In the comments, I shared my own experiences with AT&T and commented a bit about Verizon and the industry.

Coincidentally, as this was going, someone on Twitter someone asked:

Who likes Verizon? Who likes ATT?

— Martin Scorsese (@scorsesemartin) July 1, 2014

To which I responded:

@scorsesemartin Verizon is evil, but good. AT&T is better, but worse.

— Will Truman (@trumwill) July 1, 2014

I got a couple retweets, so I assume at least a couple people knew what I meant by that. Anyhow, less than a minute later:

@trumwill I noticed your tweet! Are you experiencing any service issues w/your Verizon Wireless phone? If so, share details, I can help!^AC

— VZW Support (@VZWSupport) July 1, 2014

I was actually complimenting Verizon’s service. I give them points for being on-the-ball, PR-wise.

Still evil.