Android App Spotlight #16: CallTrack

Price: Free
AppBrain Link
Website

One of the great things about Google Voice and Gmail is that all of my communications are saved. While it's nice to have a record of every text message, voicemail, and email saved, phone calls themselves are fleeting. Who tried to call me last month? How long was my last conversation with my mother? Why is no one keeping track of these statistics?

CallTrack is a simple program that does one thing well: it logs every call and its duration to a Google Calendar. You can choose to log incoming, outgoing, and missed calls, and you can choose on which of your Google Calendars to save. That's all there is to it, but it serves as a means to fill the gap in your communications records.

Weeds Season 6 Preview

The new season of Weeds begins August 16th, and I was recently able to check out the first episode.

No one I know who likes Weeds speaks highly of seasons four and five, and it's easy to see why: the show began as a suburban comedy about a widowed wife who turns to selling weed to support her family, but at the end of the third season, the show decided to set suburbia literally up in flames and start anew with a bit of Mexican flare. Add some ganglords and a baby, and the lighthearted show many appreciated turned into a pitch black "comedy" about a woman who makes increasingly poor decisions*.

*In this respect, the show reminds me of Breaking Bad, as both main characters begin their stories as seemingly decent people who were forced into selling drugs as means to survive. Over the course of their respective shows, however, after being presented with plenty of opportunities to do the right thing for both themselves and their families, they choose to push forward into situations that bring them increasingly closer to their self-destruction. 


Fortunately, from the teaser trailer released by Showtime a few weeks ago, it looks like the Botwins might be separating themselves from the Mexicans, starting what is sure to be an arc-long chase resolving itself in the finale:



And the first episode seems to start these events in motion, with the family packing up their old life and separating the remaining ties to Ren Mar - essentially Andy breaking up with Alanis Morrisette and the rest of the family coming to terms with Shane's murder of Pilar. While everyone treats it lightheartedly, there wasn't much by way of big laughs throughout the episode, the jokes failing to connect under the dark cloud of Nancy coming to terms with how her life is about to change yet again, and why these things continue to happen to her. It's sad, because the audience can see why, and the it's frustrating to watch just how stupid this woman can be.

Regardless of how good or different seasons four and five may be in comparison to seasons one through three, I can't help but respect the brave decision to change the show's focus three years into a successful sitcom. It's a bit incredible to believe that in five years a nice suburban mother of two has become a drug smuggler on the lam from hitmen with her illegitimate child of a Mexican mob boss, a homicidal son, a different, drug-dealing son, and an infatuated brother-in-law. I partly watch because I'm invested this much time already, and partially because I hope it will get better. There's no way a person in real life would be able to escape this much peril time and time again, but if I wanted to watch real life, I'd turn on Shark Week.

For Dinner: Chinese Short Ribs with Long Beans

Long Beans are in season, and I was surprised to see that my local Dillon's had some on sale (though not cheap, at $4.69 per pound), so I grabbed some while I had the chance, with an epicurious recipe in mind. I wanted to continue the Chinese theme, so I found a Tyler Florence recipe for short ribs to accompany them.

The peanuts worked well with the beans - though given Serious Eats' writeup, I was expecting a significantly different flavor than regular green beans. I don't really like ribs, though - they're typically hard to eat, and these were no different. I managed to cut a few ribs for myself, but there was still a lot of fat remaining that I was not interested in eating, and I dreaded trying to salvage the meat from the remaining half rack for my leftovers, so I ended up just throwing them away. The flavor was nicely complex from the five spice rub and the glaze, though a bit salty - something I take responsibility for, given that I only had full-salt soy sauce, not the low sodium the recipe required.

Android App Spotlight #15: Rdio

Price: Free, with $9.99/month subscription

Website

Back during my freshman year of college I recall getting turned on to this new service called "Rhapsody" which allowed you to play any song you wanted via the desktop client of your computer. It wasn't the only service of its kind at the time, and since then the space has grown further. I stopped using the service within a year (and stopped paying for the service a year or two afterwards, because I completely forgot to cancel my subscription), because I had my ample iTunes music collection to allow me to listen to anything I wanted. The service would be nice for trying new music without having to buy, but because I'm adept at the internet, I can discover most any music to try without paying the $15 a month.

Today, my music collection is 175GB strong, and I still have no desire to pay to stream a compressed song over my desktop speakers. My phone, on the other hand, is a different story. Music apps like Pandora and Last.fm are popular on both Android and iOS, and while they can provide an easy way to introduce you to new music based on algorithms, you don't have too much say in which song plays next. Given the ubiquity of 3G, and the lack of 175GB microSD cards, I can't carry most of my music with me, so streaming once again becomes an option worth considering.

Rdio is a new social music service currently in invitation-only beta. It offers the music library of streaming services like Rhapsody, but also some social aspects like Last.fm. More importantly, the service offers a way to sync the music on your desktop into the service - similar to the gone-but-not-forgotten Lala, so provided Rdio has the rights to it, it is automatically entered into your collection. Even more importantly, there's a pretty slick Android app, which not only looks better than the stock Android music player, but also offers the ability to sync songs to your phone for offline play.

It's still a new service, so there are some problems - after syncing my desktop music, I have the same album listed sometimes three times in my collection, and others with notes in the song titles - particularly in rap albums - might not match the song title that Rdio has it listed, so I have to search and manually add those tracks. Other albums were added to my collection, despite the fact that Rdio doesn't have the rights to them, so I can't play them - this angers me more than it should. 

I have a 16GB microSD card in my Nexus One now, and about half of that is filled with albums I'm listening to at the moment, but there's been more than one occasion when I'm in my car and want to listen to a song but I forgot to put it on the card. Provided Rdio offers it, I think this will be a useful service, though I'm not sure if it's useful enough to justify the cost of subscription. I think others who aren't as reliant on their offline music collection might find it immediately more useful. Lifehacker has a good rundown of the features if you're interested in learning more.

Android App Spotlight #14: Ratio

Price: $4.99
AppBrain
Website

Michael Ruhlman's book Ratio isn't so much a cookbook as it is a template from which basic foods can be made. Want to make cookie dough? You'll need 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat, and 3 parts flour. Looking for a brine? All you need is 20 parts water and 1 part salt. I'm of the inclination that cookbooks and their recipes are merely starting points from which consumers should expand upon now that they know the backbone of the recipe, and Ratio takes away the crutch of the recipe altogether. It's a more advanced cookbook - you're going to have to use your knowledge of cooking to get the flavors - but you'll at least have the elemental composition, provided you use the correct ratio. I've never read the book - though the Amazon page for it has a positive writeup from Alton Brown, which is good enough for me - but the app serves as a condensed form of all this information, providing the golden ratios for a couple dozen foods, from batters to fat-based sauces, provides a calculator to provide you with the exact amounts needed depending on how many people are being served, as well as a short narrative expanding upon the ratio and sometimes providing suggestions for flavoring.

There's an appeal to recipes - follow them to the letter, and your efforts will be rewarded - but at best, it serves only as a showcase for your manual skills and ability to follow directions. You shouldn't really consider yourself a cook unless you are able to expand or modify recipes, or even make up some of your own from scratch. This app will help you in the latter respect, though you'll have to work at it.

Android App Spotlight #13: Chrome to Phone

(Android 2.2 only)

Price: Free
Website

One of the many Froyo features introduced at Google I/O was the "cloud to device messanging," a way to send information to your phone from your browser. While it's not a highly publicized aspect now that Froyo is beginning its rollout, there is a way to get your browser to talk to your phone (provided you use Chrome) with the Chrome to Phone extension and app.

It's pretty simple to get going - install the extension, and install the app. If you're on an ordinary website, clicking the extension will send the URL to your phone, and the browser will automatically open and navigate to it. If you're getting directions on Google Maps on your browser, when your phone receives the information, it will open the Maps app withe the destination plugged in and ready to go. In the latter case, it unfortunately only sends the destination, and leaves the routing to the app, so you can't alter a route in Maps on the computer, and transfer it to the app. Transfer times seemed a little slow in my testing, taking anywhere from one to ten minutes before the phone got the information, though others haven't had such lag.

Android App Spotlight #12: Fast Web Installer

Price: Free
AppBrain Link

I've already lauded the benefits of using AppBrain over the stock Android Market, but it was a bit inconvenient to have to open the app and sync your installs to the server every time you wanted to install something. The folks at AppBrain have solved this problem with their Fast Web Installer. Once installed, whenever you click "install" on an app while browsing AppBrain's site, the app automatically starts downloading and installing on your phone. It works nearly flawlessly, though you still have to manually install paid apps. And to think, iPhone users have to connect their phones to the computer whenever they want to install apps!