Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

After setting up a Buy Me A Coffee page for onetime support, I’m experimenting with a membership plan for recurring contributions. Buy Me A Coffee is a creator support and crowdfunding platform similar to Patreon. I use it for allowing the readers of my blog and newsletter to support me if they like my work. The membership plan on my Buy Me A Coffee page. When visiting a creator’s Buy Me A Coffee page, membership is now the default payment option if both are present, so I needed one. I’m starting with these rewards: a coupon for a discount on the purchase of 1, 10, or 50 copies of my book Space Apps for Android members-only posts featuring my Google and tech reading list (see a sample post ) The main motivation is I can provide these rewards right now with not much additional effort . I generated the discount coupon with Leanpub , the self-publishing platform I use. It’s a link I include in the Buy Me A Coffee thank-you message automatically emailed to new members....

Five years ago these days I bought my first Chromebook, an Acer C720. It was an impulse buy I planned for months. My first Chromebook, an Acer C720. Chrome OS had always intrigued me. Back then, I felt the need for a secondary computer besides my primary desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux. I was living in Chrome and the Google ecosystem anyway most of the time, so getting a Chromebook was an easy decision. Chrome OS immediately felt natural. That humble device, the Acer C720, had enough performance for my typical needs. There’s another reason I wanted to give Chrome OS a go: I had had enough with maintaining Linux . When I got the Chromebook, I had been using Linux only for the previous decade and a half. After trying several distributions, I settled on Ubuntu. I dreaded the Russian roulette of system updates. All went well most of the time but, once every few weeks, a version mismatch between the kernel and some device drivers or kernel modules would dump me into a text...

The March 1, 2020 update of my book Space Apps for Android: Discover the Best Astronomy and Space Apps is out. If you purchased the book, the latest version is available for free download in ePub, Mobi, and PDF format in your Leanpub library . The cover of Space Apps for Android in the Google Play Books app on my Lenovo Tab E7 tablet. In chapter Introduction , I moved the description of my blog to the new subsection Learn more and mentioned my newsletter there, too. Chapter Ephemeris and Astronomical Phenomena has a new entry for the app Nightshift: Stargazing & Astronomy . Finally, the new appendix Release Notes lists the changes in all the versions of the book. I updated the book because I’m self-publishing it as a work in-progress with the Lean Publishing process. Therefore, I constantly revise and expand it.

If you own an Internet domain, you can create subdomains for your properties such as a blog, a newsletter, and books. The URL of my blog starts with the blog subdomain of my domain. For example, my domain is paoloamoroso.com and my personal website is www.paoloamoroso.com  I set up the subdomains blog.paoloamoroso.com for my blog , newsletter.paoloamoroso.com for my newsletter , and books.paoloamoroso.com for a list of my books . blog points to my Blogger-hosted blog. newsletter and books are redirects. The former to my page on the Revue newsletter publishing platform, the latter to a page on my personal site. These URLs are good mnemonics and a branding opportunity . They are easy to remember and say when talking in person or in phone conversations. And you can include the URLs in business cards or promotional material. blog.paoloamoroso.com has another benefit as it allows to rename the blog without changing the domain, should I ever need to. The specifics o...

Pixlr E is a photo editing web app. Along with the basic image editing features, it provides advanced tools for retouching, applying effects, drawing, filtering, and adjusting photos. Pixlr E also supports layers and a versatile command history, which lets you undo back to a specific state or change. Pixlr E with the light theme on my ASUS Chromebox. The workspace is configurable and you can minimize or remove the right sidebar to get a larger editing area. There are keyboard shortcuts, too. The app feels intuitive and easy to master. Although I use Pixlr E mostly on Chrome OS, it works well and is fast on all platforms and devices . Pixlr E is surprisingly fast and usable also on Android, even on my low-end Lenovo Tab E7 tablet . However, on the tablet, tapping the confirmation button in dialogs doesn’t seem to do anything. There’s another quirk on Android. The editing dialogs can’t apparently be moved, so they cover most of the image and you can’t see the effects of th...

New bloggers are advised not to use website builders like Wix and Weebly because they aren’t good for SEO. And bloggers at all experience levels try to optimize for SEO every bit of content and layout. But does it matter? The Google home page. Let’s set outliers aside. For the rest of us, when starting a blog or an online presence with no prior audience or visibility, everything happens at a snail’s pace. For the first year or more, traffic grows slowly if at all. No matter what SEO trick or tweaks you do. Nothing seems to make a difference. Years later, when the blog gets decent traffic, gains visibility, and acquires brand recognition, people recommend and link to it anyway despite its warts. Assuming the content is valuable. Therefore, even at the other end of the growth curve, SEO doesn’t seem to matter much as the blog is past critical mass and self-sustaining. Improving the scannability and readability of content is always useful, a prerequisite. For example, struc...

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...