Posts

Running the Android Studio emulator

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Ha! I'm beginning to grok this thing (a Robert Heinlein would have said). When you click on the green run button in Android Studio... ...you need to have run the emulator at least once in that session to get it to appear in the list of available devices. Otherwise you just get a blank list. So if you intend to run your program in the emulator click on AVD manager: On my machine the Tools menu is only built up over the first minute that Studio is run. So initially it only contains Tasks & Contexts and Save File as Template , which is disconcerting. You just have to be patient till al the menu items are loaded. Then hopefully you'll see a list of virtual devices which you have previously set up. Once the emulator is running you can get your app running by pushing the main green button in Android Studio... It did run but I got a scary message that I was trying to use 1500MB in a 512MB emulation. Ah. What now? Mr google and stackoverflow came to the res

Why I tried Android Studio first, and how I got on.

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As I mentioned in my previous post , I have a 3 neuron brain, and I require clarity and simplicity to get anywhere in my thought processes. Android and Android Studio seemed to me a good choice because everything was already set up. I just had to write the program, let Studio create the APK, and count the groats from the Android app store, or play shop or game supermarket or whatever it is called. I was also attracted by the tutorials, there seemed to be a good place, developer.android.com, where I could follow step by step lessons in creating apps. It seemed to me that there was a one stop shop for writing, debugging, delivering and monetizing mobile apps. It was that in the end which decided me. Xamarin lost because of the huge download, and JavaScript + HTML + Cordova lost because the tutorials I found seemed less appetising. Depending on how Android Studio goes I may come back to either or both of these. So I downloaded and installed Android Studio, it took several hours, bu

Can I learn to program mobile devices?

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Not sure how long this will last, but I'm doing these entries because I've heard that the best way to learn is to trying to teach what you are trying to learn. That seems to be have been true when I wrote my book " Candelas Lumens and Lux ". I've learned so much from other blog posts maybe I should join the contributing community. Publicly committing to something makes it more likely that the thing will get done. I was faffing around wondering which platform to use for a few ideas I have for mobile apps. I've already done one WEB app, which has had rather limited success (Ok, zero sales). It is a web site which allows you to create European Energy Labels. I did it because I know about the labels, and I wanted to learn C#/WEB apps and I hoped I'd be able to sell the service...     Despite the commercial failure of EuEnergyLabels.com I did learn about WEB apps and I did learn C# (which must rate as one of the very best computer languages ever i

If the self is an illusion...

If the self is an illusion (as some Buddhists and some pyschologists and some scientists say), then...er...who or what ...er... is "illuded"?   The definition of illusion is " a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses. " So something/one percieves or interprets. I've no doubt  "selves" change and die, but at the moment, now, who or what is having the illusion that the self exists? (And for all those who say the self is an illusion I'd ask them to go and do some painful dental work without an anasthetic, and find out who or what feels the pain.) But my main question remains who or what is illuded?  

You are going to be dust sooner than you think, so...

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I was born before smartphones phones had been invented, (before even mobile phones were around come to that). I won't bore you with my objections to their use. Not objections to the objects themselves, but their use. Anyway. I'll try to stop being a boring old fart. But. But. I was at restaurant with some friends by an Italian lake one evening.  The view was, well... And the Moon was out. I walked ten meters to the shore to look. I took a photo. I said "There's a lovely crescent Moon." (A bit blurred in the photo, wonderful in reality.) Someone else took a photo on their phone. They showed it to a third person seated at the restaurant table (outside, not in the restaurant). This person said: "But Owen, it's a full Moon! Not a crescent Moon!"  "It is a crescent Moon... have a look," I replied. They didn't. The smartphone camera made the Moon look full, on the screen. That is not what I am objec

At Ease.

I listened to a tribute on Pierre Bourdieu. On the BBC Thinking Allowed podcast. According to the podcast, one of his ideas was that the French system of egalitè to some extent does not work because working class people do not feel at ease with middle/upper class people, even though the working class people are as intelligent as the others. That ill at ease is a barrier which few can overcome, (though Bourdieu did). Which reminded me of two meetings I had in the same week some time ago and how I felt ill at ease in one of them (in an art gallery) and totally at ease in another (in a technical design office). Two art professionals (not artists) had finished organising the details of my exhibition and so passed onto a more interesting subject. They tested each other out about the living and relatively famous artists they knew and could count as friends. It was a gentle battle of name dropping. I remember feeling uncomfortable and wandering away to look at the art in the

"Science is Limited" said Dorothy Cross.

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I nearly fell out of my bed as I listened to a podcast of this idiot as she described her latest artwork. Bath tubs with gold at the scum line being watched by a shark's eye which the viewer of the exhibition cannot see but must be told exists. Sorry, she may not be an idiot, maybe she's just in bad faith, or maybe just deluded. And then she said "Science is limited." It's a bit of a cliché but what has science (and technology) ever given us? Everything this imposter has ever used. The building she exhibits in. The cell phone she uses. The lighting in the gallery. The bed where she sleeps. Her credit card. Asprin. Surgery. Brain surgery. Ideas beyond her paltry imagination certainly. Relativity. Knowledge of genes. Super-computers. Shrek. Images from a space beyond imagination, beyond even an artist's imagination. Presumably also the embalming used on the shark's eye.  Maybe she's not be a detail person. Let the mere technician