Help Save Your Android's Battery

  This is just gonna be a quick post so let's begin. I'm always looking for ways to save my battery charge on my android. It's a great os but it's loves juice. JUUUIIICE! Ahem, anyways, I recently found a way to really save on the battery usage. Many of you probably know that when chillin at home, your phone will run much faster on your wifi network than on 3g. This mean if I'm home I'm on wifi. Games and websites love it and play much nicer with the connection.

  Recently though I found out that every time your phone goes to sleep it stops using your wifi and starts pinging for the nearest cell tower. So while you think it's doing nothing, really it's wasting your battery. There is a solution though. I guess that's obvious or I wouldn't be writing this. Here's what you do.

1. Make sure you're connected to your wifi network.
2. Bring up your menu screen and go to Settings.
3. Go to Wireless & Networks
4. Go to Wi-Fi Settings.
5. Push your menu button and select Advanced
6. Select Wi-Fi sleep policy and choose the never option.

  That's it. Now whenever your wifi is on, it will actually stay connected and not try to revert to 3g every time it sleeps. I know this sounds easy but it really does make a huge difference. I can usually get through an entire day now with just one charge. 

  Now to make your life a little easier you may want to think about downloading a widget called Wifi OnOff from the android market. This is completely optional but it's free and I highly recommend it. All it does is make switching your wifi on and off from the home screen. Nice and simple, no menu's.

  Hope this helps someone out. It did wonders for my phone and my wife's phone, which I guess I should mention are kyocera/sanyo zio's. Out of all the battery saving tricks I've tried, this one gave me the best results.

Google Plus - It's about damn time!

  I'm in fan boy heaven right now. Over the past year or so, after a shoddy mobile experience and a photo system that's rotten to it's core, I've slowly gotten more an more annoyed with facebook. I wouldn't say I hate it but I'm always waiting for it's replacement. And suddenly, my favorite tech company bursts onto the scene with g+.
  I was thoroughly let down by wave and buzz just became a boring feed of useless and mostly automated data. So let down that when I first heard about plus, I said fuck it, and decided not to even bother trying to get an invite. After that first night I started to hear some of the preliminary reviews and it got my attention. Now I wanted an invite and it didn't seem like I had a good shot at getting one.
  Then something weird happened, I got an email from someone in china. It was all in chinese so I couldn't read it, but there was a hyperlink and the url was in english. plus.google.com/allkindsofcodeystuff. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was either an oops email or I just got an invite from a stranger. My gut screamed scam, but I know how to read a url and this link was clearly to a google site.
  I clicked it and it took me to my new profile page. The only problem is it was all in han, I couldn't read anything but my name. Fortunately google translate came to my rescue. It took me a while to figure out how to change my language settings inside plus. I also had to ditch all my default circles because even after the language switch, they were in han.
  So far I am loving g+. The interface is slick and the concept works. I like how easily the circles work when adding people, and I like that adding people works more like twitter than facebook. It's cool to be able to basically follow people. Pictures are a breeze but the android apps need a little work. It's still early though and google says this is just the beginning. So I have hopes.
  I really can't believe it took google this long to seriously enter the social scene. This is what wave and buzz should have been. I'm glad they got it together but I really hope it's not to late. Facebook is a beast now. It's huge and it's grown outside it's main perimeter and entrenched itself on the web. They have login and their commenting system everywhere. It's going to be very difficult to dominate them.
  As a show of support I've disabled all my fbconnect logins and I've started removing my older fb content. Nothing major yet, but hopefully soon I won't have to straddle two networks at once. I can't wait to see where things go from here.