Cliq: Almost month 8

Wow, almost 8 months with this thing now.

If I think hard enough, I can mostly remember the phone number for it. Usually it’s just easier for me to look it up in my T3.

Now that a few more people seem to have ended up with the number, I’ve discovered another mildly annoying problem with the phone. Sometimes when I make calls or get calls, I can always hear the person on the other end, but they can’t hear me. It’s like the microphone has been muted or something. The only way I’ve found to fix it is to reboot the phone. Sometimes.

Oddly enough, if I switch to speaker phone mode, the person on the other side can hear me. Of course that means I’m broadcasting my call to the world.

A while back I ran into another annoying bug where the speaker would cut out while listening to music or podcasts if I used the camera while something was playing. It’s another thing that requires rebooting to fix. Since I don’t have enough people calling me on a regular basis, I don’t know if this muted mic problem is related to the camera thing as well or if something else is causing the problem.

On another less complain-y note, I’ve been using Swiftkey for a little while and am really enjoying it. Its predictive text actually makes using the screen keyboard a lot less painful. It takes a little bit of getting used to at first, but after a while it becomes pretty good at anticipating what you want to type next. It beats the pants off the built-in predictive text. It’ll be an app worth paying for (once it gets out of beta).

Managing bibliographies

Found out about Mendeley via Twitter today, so grabbed a copy and have been kicking its wheels a little bit.

So far what I like most about it is its ability to look into PDFs, extract the relevant bibliographic info and populate the database. Instant (well, almost) reference management! Kind of like the Picasa or F-Spot for PDFs.

There’s also an on-line component that I haven’t explored yet.

I like what I see about it so far.

Cliq in X-ray

81 kVp, 2.6 mAs, small focal spot

Desktop effects eye candy again

Turns out the problem I was having with the video driver and GLX was caused by badness in an environment variable (LD_LIBRARY_PATH). I had modified it slightly so that I could get MCNP to compile properly and I guess one of the paths I added caused problems with finding the GLX library.

X server restarted, and now I have fancy eye candy on the desktop again. Whee!