Android app – Page 2

Retroarch for Android – The Complete Guide

For years Retroarch has been the indomitable platform of choice for discerning emulation connoisseurs on PC. The all-in-one package designed to load up all your favorite consoles and games from one place is available for Android, too, though the intricacies of setting it up are much less talked about. So if you’ve downloaded Retroarch and don’t know your core from your content, or just want to know which cores are best for running your favorite console games, read on. Note: as usual, you should consider the somewhat hazy legalities surrounding game emulation before proceeding. The following guide doesn’t offer advice on getting your hands on… Read more

How to Personalize the New Gmail App

The improvements that you’re currently seeing in the new Gmail app are something that you could have seen coming. A while back Google announced they were going to discard the Inbox app yet improve the Gmail app. The new Gmail app is still easy to use, but now it has a different look. You might not find what you need in the places where you might typically find them. Let’s see how you can give the app your personal touch. Related: How to Move Emails from One Gmail Account to Another How to Add or Remove Categories Just like with the desktop version, you can… Read more

How to Block Notifications When Taking a Picture in Android

With how powerful smartphone cameras have gotten, it is so easy to take pictures. But notifications can appear at the wrong time, such as when you’re about to take a picture. Since there is an app for just about everything, there is also an app to prevent notifications from bothering you when you’re taking that perfect picture. It’s a free app and also easy to use. Related: How to Disable and Customize Notifications in Android Oreo How to Block Notifications When Using the Camera App It can be very annoying when you finally get all your friends in the same spot for a picture, and… Read more

Blockada ad blocker Android app review

REVIEW – Let me say first that I understand that many sites use ads as a means for additional funding for their site (including The Gadgeteer). I mean TANSTAAFL (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch). That being said I’m probably a marketer’s nightmare; my clickthrough rate on ads I do see is probably less than 1% and I actually don’t pay much attention to ads in any media. I see a kewl ad on television and within an hour I know the ad but have no idea what the actual advertised product or brand is.

Blocking ads on your device can give you a much cleaner screen, protects your privacy and reduces your bandwidth usage. Blockada is a free, open source ad blocker for your Android device which works without root. How good is it? Read on…..

Blockada is a DNS-based ad blocker that (and I’m not going to get too technical here) that redirects all your network traffic to a local VPN interface and only allows queries to hosts that are not blacklisted in your chosen filters. The filters contain hosts there are known to serve ads, tracking, spam, malware and other “nasties” like that.

You don’t need to have a rooted device to make this work however it’s not available from the Google Play Store as it “interferes with Google’s business model”, so you’ll have to go to Blockada, download the APK, make sure your device allows you to install from unknown sources and install the APK manually.

Once installed and turned on it works on both WiFI and mobile networks and also across all apps, not just the browser (like some ad blockers).

Once you’ve installed it here’s the main interface. You can see that it’s blocked a fair few ads. To turn Blockada on or off you just open the app and just hit the on/off button. You can tell it’s on by the little key in the top right-hand side of my system tray.

Here’s where you can choose what host blacklist files you want. Each one has strengths and weakness (which are described for each), and you can choose more than one. Currently, there are 14 available, I use 2. There is also a whitelist for sites you don’t want to apply Blockada to as well.

For further ad, phishing and other bad thing filtering you can also change your DNS provider away from your ISP’s. I tend to use OpenDNS on all my devices. They can often be faster than your ISP’s and give you an additional level of protection.

There are various other options in the settings tab like how often you want your list updated or if you want Blockada to start on boot.

As mentioned to turn it on or off you can just open the app, but there’s also a toggle in your pull down drawer (2nd from the right) to do this much more easily than having to open the app.

And here’s a typical page rendered on my Chrome Browser without Blockada active (see no key in the top right hand). Note the annoying self-playing ad in the middle of my screen and the small ad bar in the bottom.

Once ad blocker is turned on, no more ads, video or static. OK, the grey boxes probably aren’t the prettiest but to me, it’s better than the ads. It’s worth noting that in Firefox I just get a grey box with no graphics. You can see because the ad domain is in one of the blacklists, the actual IP address of the site can’t be resolved from the address, so it can’t load the site.

An here’s the effects in an app. Nope, I’m not looking at refinancing my home. Ads begone!

Summary

For me, Blockada has a number of advantages as it allows me to block ads and other nasty things from known nasty sites. This also means less bandwidth used (especially for video ads) and faster loading times. Additionally, it easily allows me to change my DNS away from whatever ISP I’m connected to a more “secure” and fast one if I want to. Of course, there are some disadvantages, sometimes it actually blocks sites that you do want to get to, especially where the site link you hit redirects first via an ad site to get to the requested site, but that being said you can easily turn Blockada off temporarily to get there. Additionally, you don’t see ads, don’t click on them and hence the sites you visit may be missing out on click revenue but as I say I don’t click through much anyway. Well worth a try if you really don’t like flashy, horrible, irrelevant ads “shoved in your face”

Filed in categories: Reviews

Tagged: Android app

Blockada ad blocker Android app review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on March 2, 2019 at 10:00 am.

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Nebo by MyScript makes my iPad feel like my long-lost Newton

I’ve written quite a few articles for various publications in the last 30 years or so. All of them were typed on some sort of keyboard, until this one. I am writing this on my iPad Pro 12.9″ with an Apple Pencil using a software app called Nebo from a company called MyScript.

Twenty years ago, I had a Newton from Apple. It was larger than the iPhone 8 plus I carry now, but the handwriting recognition was quite good. Sure, the first generation text translation made a lot of goofs, but with the second generation, they learned not to only translate from a dictionary. This reduced the incidence of “Egg Freckles” translations to a statical zero.

Now that I have a replacement for that technology, I am eager to see Apple add pencil support to the iPhone! I think as an option, pencil enhanced text input would catapult the handwriting desires of a few into high gear.

Those using digital ink technology today still are hampered with two things: transcribing the ink to an editable format, and then making sure what is deciphered actually is what the original writer meant. You’ll notice above the hand-written text in the screenshots, the text is being translated and spell-checked in real time. This allows the writer to pause and be sure of the spelling, intent, and word choice. Or, after full conversion to text, to edit traditionally with a keyboard.

This section is added using my Mac keyboard as I’m posting the screenshots and text pulled in from Nebo:

The Nebo software is available for $5.99 on the Windows 10 Store, GooglePlay store, as well as the Apple AppStore for iOS. Check the stylus requirements. I know the iOS version requires Apple Pencil, the other two have similar limits. If you have the hardware, though, this thing is a treat!

The post Nebo by MyScript makes my iPad feel like my long-lost Newton appeared first on The Gadgeteer.

Filed in categories: News

Tagged: Android app, Apps, Styluses

Nebo by MyScript makes my iPad feel like my long-lost Newton originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on May 14, 2018 at 9:00 am.

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