Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

Buying an affordable Wi-Fi Android tablet with no cellular data option is a way of getting it for even cheaper. It’s what I did with my Lenovo Tab E7 . The few times I need to use the device on the go, tethering to my Pixel 2 XL is straightforward to set up and use. But Android devices exchange a lot of data even when sitting idle. How to keep data usage under control? By tweaking the tablet’s account synchronization settings I can cut down on cellular data usage by two-thirds . Measuring data usage The first step is to get an idea of how much cellular traffic tethering generates, and how much I can save by playing with the system settings. I did two simple tests to estimate the amount of data usage to expect from the tablet while tethered to the Pixel 2 XL, which has a 4G Vodafone cellular data plan. In the Android settings of the phone, under Settings > Network & internet > Mobile network , a chart tracks how many MB of data have been used. In the tests I compar...

I launched my newsletter on Product Hunt . A few weeks earlier I had announced the newsletter , Practicing Google , and later sent the first three issues. How did launch day go on Product Hunt? It was a dud. Practicing Google on launch day in Product Hunt’s list of the newest submissions. Early results These data summarize the outcome of the launch, which added 2 subscribers to the 30 I had: 3 upvotes on Product Hunt (including the default upvote) 1 user comment on Product Hunt (including the maker’s comment) 0 reviews on Product Hunt 53 Twitter interactions 2 new newsletter subscribers This is not unexpected. Why? Because of an inescapable Catch-22: it takes a platform to build a platform . I don’t have a platform. Twitter is the only social network I use ( Facebook is a deal breaker ) and my over 2700 followers are just not enough. Such an audience generates an average of a few interactions per tweet, not enough for any substantial promotion. This blog is 7 month...

A few weeks ago I announced my newsletter Practicing Google: Weekly practical resources on Google products and related tech . Now that it’s picking up subscribers and engagement, I’m ready for the next step. I’ve launched Practicing Google on Product Hunt . The Practicing Google page on Product Hunt. Product Hunt has a community of tech-savvy makers, creators, and entrepreneurs. Many likely use Google products, so there’s a good overlap with the audience my newsletter addresses. I hope they will find the newsletter interesting and relevant enough to subscribe and share it. I have been thinking about, researching, and tweaking the newsletter for the past year . While I always wanted to publish a newsletter, I started working on it in early 2019. Deciding on a format and picking a topic I know well and I could consistently write about took months. But the hardest part was coming up with concise and descriptive text for the name and tagline . My brain remained empty for mo...

In January 2020 Leanpub announced the cancelation of the Conference Purchase Program . The program allowed conference and event organizers to buy at steep discounts multiple copies of ebooks to give away to attendees. Were eligible the ebooks for sale at the Leanpub self-publishing platform the authors enrolled in the program. It seemed like a good idea, especially considering the growing interest in swagless conferences. But it didn’t work well in practice. The announcement of the discontinuation of the Conference Purchase Program in the Leanpub Author Update newsletter. The program provided a self-serve tool. But it turns out conference organizers were looking for a different process . They wanted direct negotiations with authors and more extensive records, such as invoices, additional payment options, and transaction tracking. Given the accountability and transparency requirements of many organizations, this is understandable. The Conference Purchase Program wasn’...

If you blog about Google or cover the company in the news, you likely need quality images to illustrate your posts and stories. A collection of high-resolution Google stock photos is available in the press area of the company’s official blog The Keyword . The page with the photos is a bit hidden. To navigate to the page, click the 3-dot icon on the blog’s home and then click Press Corner. Android figurines in an official Google stock photo . Source: Google. You can filter the photos by type, such as Headshots for portraits of company executives like CEO Sundar Pichai , Senior VP of Hardware Rick Osterloh , and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki . Select type Logos for, well, product logos. You’ll find most of them like Chrome, Gmail, Drive, and many more. Finally, Life at Google features photos of facilities, Googlers, and work scenes. The images are 2800x2800 PNG files except for Life at Google, where they are 2800x1867 JPEG files. You may use the photos for publication with credi...

Lunescope Moon Viewer (formerly Moon Phase Pro) is an Android app for simulating the appearance of the Moon. It combines visualizations of the phases and eclipses with a lunar globe. Lunescope Moon Viewer on my Pixel 2 XL phone. The app shows the phases and their calendar, presents the lunar topography in an interactive 3D globe, simulates eclipses, and provides orbital data, local rising and setting times, and other numerical information. The globe is a realistic representation of the surface and has hires textures from space images. The eclipse screen summarizes the event’s circumstances at a glance and illustrates what to expect , which is helpful for planning observations. These summaries aggregate the times of the various stages, their durations, the appearance of the Moon, and its position in the sky above or below the horizon. Lunescope is not just a good astronomy tool, it stands out among Android apps for its integration with the Google ecosystem . It’s a lightwe...

Whenever I can, I try to support bloggers and creators by buying their books or paying contributions. Hoping someone appreciates my writings and work, I set up a Buy Me A Coffee donation button on my blog and a link in my newsletter. Buy Me A Coffee is a creator support and crowdfunding platform similar to Patreon. The Buy Me A Coffee home page. Although it’s a smaller and younger startup, Buy Me A Coffee has some interesting advantages over Patreon . For example, it accepts one-time payments, not just membership subscriptions, and it doesn’t require an account for supporters. As a Google user there are a couple more Buy Me A Coffee features I like such as signing up with Google and supporting Google Pay via Stripe . I connected both supported payment processors, PayPal and Stripe. Creating a Buy Me A Coffee account is straightforward. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes, even to someone like me who obsesses over tweaking and playing with settings. Connecting Buy Me A...