My Favorite Android Apps: Phone Edition

A list, in no particular order, of my favorite apps for Android.

z4root (Fast and easy way to root if you are using a Droid X... but a quick internet search should help you find a root application specific to your phone.)
Act 1 Video Player
Adobe Reader (So you can read .pdfs on your phone.)
Angry Birds (And all variations. Note that you can now get the ad-free version as well as Angry Birds:Rio on Amazons Appstore.)
Amazon Appstore (Hey, it's a whole 'nother place to get Android Apps... note that you have to go to the Amazon Website to set this up.)
Astro (Great file manager.)
MLB At Bat 11 (But really only if you're a baseball freak.)
Bloat Freezer (Requires root, let's you freeze all of those built in cr-apps)
 Bubble (Because everyone needs a level every once in a while.)
Carr Matey (If you have a problem forgetting where you parked, like I often do.)
Dial Zero
Digital Clock Widget (If you want a clock that's actually easy to read and includes the date on your home screen.)
DIRECTV (Awesome if you happen to be a customer.)
Evernote (Just a great all around note app. Plus, you can use it to take pictures of all your receipts, tag them, and not worry about the original.)
Facebook (Duh.)
Flashlight (Turns your phone into a flashlight.)
Fruit Ninja (Another incredibly addictive game.)
Funny SMS tones
Gmote (Control your Media Center PC with your phone.)
Goggles
Google Sky Map (Still one of my all time favorite apps.)
Grocery IQ (Best shopping list app ever.)
GroupMe (Turns SMS into a chat room for whoever you want to invite.)
Groupon (I've actually gotten some pretty kick ass deals with this.)
GTasks (Great little To-Do list.)
Handcent SMS (Text messaging the way it was meant to be.)
Homepipe Free (Stream your music from your computer at home to your phone.)
JEFIT (Great app for the gym.)
Kaloer Clock (Turns your phone into a pretty decent alarm clock.)
Listen (Best podcast app ever.)
Lookout (Keep your phone safe.)
Mint.com (Great personal finance site, great app.)
Multicon (Pack a ton of app icons onto your home screen.)
Pandora (Is there anyone who doesn't love this music streaming service?)
PayPal (Easily send money to friends, split checks, all that fun stuff.)
PhoneFlicks (Manage your Netflix Que from your phone.)
Pulse (Best newsreader out there, hands down.)
Ringtone Player (Pretty decent ringtone customization app.)
Rockplayer Lite (Another pretty good video player.)
Seek Droid (For when you loose your phone.)
Shopper/Shop Savvy (Find out if you can buy stuff cheaper from somewhere else-while standing in the store.)
SoundHound (Identifies music for you.)
Square (Sign up for this service, and you can accept credit cards. With your phone. Enough said.)
SwiftKey (My personal favorite of all the available soft keyboards.)
TuneIn Radio (For listening to internet streaming broadcasts.)
WeatherBug Elite (My favorite weather app.)
Yelp

Amazing Cello Version of Michael Jackson Song

Check out this amazing version of Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal. Up until I heard this, I never would have thought that I would watch a cello duet video more than once, or that I would be adding it to my phone's playlist.

Why I Drink Bottled Water

I grew up in a house with well water that tasted like ass. I then went to college in a city where the public water supply was so so nasty that you could actually see lots of stuff floating around in it. It also, perhaps not surprisingly, tasted like ass. It was around this point that I discovered bottled water, and came to the astounding (to me) realization that water could actually taste *good*.
After college, I moved out on my own to yet another city, where (being a bit cash strapped) I tried yet once more to drink tap water. It wasn't particularly good... but with some generic sugar free flavoring added, it wasn't all that bad. Over the years, as various water filtration devices came out, I tried pretty much all of them. And all of them would work... for a while. The filters never seemed to last as long as they should, and they never made the water taste as good as the bottled water did. But hey, I try to be environmentally conscious, so what the heck. At least the filters made me feel a little bit better about the water that I was drinking.
Then I started reading articles like this one. Turns out that those water filters I was using were doing a pretty half assed job at filtering the water, and in the process were also probably stripping out the fluoride. Not to mention that those ridiculously expensive filters I was buying could, if not changed frequently enough, become their own little bacterial breeding grounds. Needless to say, I rarely changed them often enough. Not to mention that a while reading through my cities water quality report one day, I discovered that my municipal water had a particularly high concentration of a very carcinogenic industrial cleaner. From a little research, turns out that this isn't all that uncommon in the US. So, as is so often the case, I turned to the internet to find a solution. Which is where I ran across the ZeroWater ZD-013 Filtration Pitcher with Electronic Tester, Filter Included. Not only does this thing have a pretty dang awesome filter, it also comes with a little gizmo that lets you test the number of particulates in your water, so that you know about how long your filter will last, and so that you can verify the filter is working. It's still getting rid of those essential minerals, but hey, I take a multi-vitamin ever day.
Man, has that little particulate gauge been eye opening. Turns out, my tap water has around 400 ppm of particulates in it. Which means that one of these $15 filters can be expected to last for around 12 gallons of water. While still not necessarily removing all the nasty chemicals from the water. On the plus side, running my water through this filter reduced the particulates to 1 ppm. Pretty impressive. On the other hand, my Culligan FM-15A Level 3 Faucet Filter with the filter I had been using in for around a month reduced this only to about 300 ppm. And with a brand new filter in it reduced the particulate level to a singularly unimpressive 200ppm. Nestle Pure Life Purified Water - 35/.5L, on the other hand, tested at a mere 45 ppm... almost all of which probably come from those essential trace minerals that are added back in after the water is purified.
And it tastes pretty damn good. Good enough that I generally prefer drinking it over any of the other crap that I could be drinking.
As for the fluoride? Turns out we're getting too damn much of the stuff as it is. Brush your teeth with a fluoride  toothpaste, and you're probably getting more than enough. Don't brush your teeth, and it doesn't really matter how much fluoride you drink.

Stop Watching Cable News

I'm a news junkie. I read around 150-200 news articles and blog posts every day. I listen to NPR pretty much all day long. (Except during Baseball season, when I tend to spend quite a bit more time listening to Cubs games and sports radio.) But a few years ago, I made the conscious decision to stop watching cable news. And I have not yet regretted that decision one bit.
Cable news (or any television news, for that matter) is biased in a way that I don't care to be biased. And I'm not necessarily even talking about the rather obvious political bias of Fox on the political right and MSNBC on the political left. I'm talking about the bias towards stories that involve great video clips or huge death counts. Stories that allow commentators (and every news outlet has those non-journalist now) to declaim the excesses of government, or major corporations, or lazy people that buy houses with too many bathrooms. These types of stories and commentaries grab people's attention, and so all of the major outlets play them, over and over again.
The problem with these types of stories is that they are generally negative and generally have little to do with the day to day lives of the people watching them. At the same time time, the constant repetition is a near perfect mechanism for psychological reinforcement. It plays directly into the hands of the various political and corporate spin doctors. And it simply doesn't allow for any investigation into the nuance of a story.
And all of this doesn't even start to take into account what I have started to call the 9/11 effect. Even though I wasn't anywhere near New York at the time, didn't even personally know anyone killed in the 9/11 attacks, I still feel in some way scarred by it. For weeks afterwards, I was glued to cable news. I watched documentaries about the first responders, documentaries about the world trade center, documentaries about the passengers on the various airplanes. And in seeing them, I somehow came to know them. The tragedy became personal.
Sometimes it's good for tragedy to become personal. It allows you to empathize with those effected, drives your desire to do something about it.
The problem arises when the "tragedy", or at least the thing that the 24 news cycle has decided is the latest "tragedy", isn't. Isn't a tragedy, or isn't something that you can actually so anything about. On a personal level, even on a societal level, all that empathy turns into anger, directed at corporations, organizations, religions, whole classes of people... or even, sometimes, members of congress and nine year old girls who happen to be in the way.
Print and radio, on the other hand, can still elicit empathy. But they usually do so in ways that allow real emotional distance. Distance that often allows for more nuance, more detail, and less damage to your own psyche.

Zombie Christmas Books

A bit late, but at least one of these is on sale. If only I had known that these existed a month ago... then all my friends would have hated me for giving them zombie Christmas books. Maybe with a hint that I would be perfectly willing to accept them as a re-gift. Aww, who am I kidding... I'm totally ordering the Christmas Carol one right now.
  

The Quest for the Perfect Shower

So I am pretty much on a constant quest to put together the perfect shower, keeping in mind that I have a somewhat limited budget and that I'm dealing with a 60 year old claw foot iron bathtub that I'm pretty much completely unwilling to give up. (Mostly because that would involve moving it, and the thing weighs a fracking ton.) I figured that this years New Years resolution to clean and organize the bathroom and kitchen cabinets certainly included cleaning up and upgrading the shower (a shower is sort of like a cabinet, right? Even one in a claw foot tub?), so I started doing some research and some ordering.
Now I live in an apartment with 80 some year old plumbing (except for the stuff I've replaced myself) and city water with approximately the same chlorine content as a kiddy swimming pool. All this in mind, I decided it might be time to try one of those in-line shower water filters. Specifically the Crystal Quest Chrome Luxury Shower Filter. Mostly because it was chrome and the filter only had to be changed once a year.
Next up was a brand new showerhead. This one was hard for me... I love rain showers, but the shower add on for my claw foot tub insures that water pressure to the showerhead pretty much blows. Thus, anything with a flow restricter that I can't remove or adapt just isn't going to make it. I ended up ordering the  Danze D451279RB Six-Inch Sunflower Brass Showerhead, Oil Rubbed Bronze, except in chrome 'cause it was cheaper. One of the Amazon reviewers specifically mentioned that he had been able to find and remove the flow restricer, which was pretty much the deciding factor for me.  Keeping in mind that the shower filter looked pretty hefty (and I'm pretty dang tall), I also ordered  the Danze D481150 9-Inch Adjustable Shower Arm with High Flow, Chrome.

Installation
Now I already have one of those cool shower diverters (mine is something like this one: Alsons Corporation Brass Shower Flow Diverter BC9600 ) that allows a hand shower add on, and I've decided (for the moment at least) to stick with the hand shower that I already have.
Now putting this together ended up being a bit more of a challenge than I had anticipated. The shower filter is long... a good six inches. Combine that with the three inches or so my diverter was already lowering the shower, and the fact that I had decided to go with a rain type shower head, and it just wasn't tall enough for my 6'3", even with the extension arm. I probably could have gone with something like the Solid Brass, Polished Chrome, Low Profile Shower Filter - Aplpbsf-Pc to pick up a couple of inches, but that still would have left the shower diverter in a pretty awkward location. Luckily, because of the whole claw foot tub situation, I have easy access to the shower riser (the pipe that runs from the bath faucet to the showerhead), and decided to mount both the filter and diverter in line with that about halfway up.

Results
The shower filter has blown me away. I've already noticed a very real difference in my skin and hair, not to mention the smell and taste of the water. For people with crappy water (like me) this is just a must have. The showerhead is also pretty awesome, although I did end up having to remove two different flow restricters to get it up to sufficient pressure. With the 9 inch extension arm, it really is like heavy (warm) rainstorm. If I were going to do it over again, I think that I might just have put out the extra few bucks and gone with the Danze D451159 Eight-Inch Sunflower Showerhead with Nine-Inch Extension Arm, Chrome. Although, considering my water pressure situation, maybe not.

Next
So now that I've replaced every other part of the shower, I'm starting to think that the hand shower is the next to be replaced. If you have any advice for great hand showers, let me know.

Keep Big Brother From Watching You Text

It looks like the California Supreme Court has decided that police do not need a warrant to search you text messages. Now I'm not a criminal or anything, but a quick review of my phone makes it pretty clear that there are a lot of texts that I would rather some random cop not see. Not to mention that I live in a state where it's illegal to text while driving. And yeah, that's probably a good law. Which is why, on those very rare occasions when I feel like I just have to text someone while in the car, I use Androids helpful voice to text ability.
But if you, like me, would prefer that the cops not read through all your pro-marijuana legalization texts (or those texts setting up a date with that cute guy you met on OKCupid), there are a couple of Android Apps that can help you with your, ahem, little problem.

First, if you want to make sure that you still have the messages for future blackmail reference, there's a cool app called Backup to Gmail that will save your SMS, MMS, and even your call log to, you guessed it, your Gmail account. While this might not be the greatest option for any serious criminals, at least one recent court decision would seem to offer some legal protection for email accounts. This app is $1.99, but it's worth it worth it for me just to have a backup of my texts in a place that I go to fairly frequently anyways, and don't have to remember yet another password for.
Once you've got those texts safely backed up, the app that might come in most useful when you see those flashing lights in the rear view mirror is Advanced Android Cleaner. This nifty little app lets you wipe your texts, browser history (are searches for Two Girls, One Cup a crime?) and call history. If you don't want to cough up the $1.50, something like Autowipe combined with actually using a PIN might be just as useful.