Y. Karp? Why Not!

The time had finally come. How could I possibly label myself a geek of any sort if I voluntarily stuck with my old Android Gingerbread 2.3 operating system? My Samsung Galaxy Note needed to be updated and besides, I needed a nice, juicy project. I was waiting for Google to announce Android 5 at Google I/O 2013. When no announcement was forthcoming, it was time to take the bull by the horns and turn Gingerbread into Jelly Bean. I have never upgraded a phone's operating system before. I was mildly afraid of bricking my phone, although I knew that if anything bad happened, I could take it to "a guy I know" to sort it out. But to be truly geeky (and to save the cash), I knew that I had to embark on the Android OS upgrade adventure on my own. The first thing I did was look on-line for some instructions on how to perform an upgrade. There were a number of different flavors of Jelly Bean 4.2.2 available, but I settled on the  ibtimes.co.uk  website, which provided all of th...

I've been using Tim now since Feb 2012. For those of you who missed that blog , Tim is my Samsung Galaxy Note. He has really changed the way I navigate my online life. Email Email is now more or less instantly downloaded to my pocket. In other words, if you send me an email, Gmail picks it up from my ykarp.com email server. My phone then syncs with Gmail and the phone whistles that mail has been received. The delay is inconsequential, but I do notice that my daily Dilbert email reaches my work computer a minute before my phone does. I love Dilbert cartoons, and I'll take 'em wherever I can get 'em. The emails I write from my phone are also shorter than ones I write from a real computer. That's undestandable given that touch-screen typing is slower and less accurate (actually, I'm writing this blog post on my Galaxy Note in portrait view right now!) Perhaps I shouldn't, but I also forgive myself more for grammatical errors, punctuation mistakes and typos...

For the past four weeks or so I've been the owner of a Samsung Galaxy Note. The Galaxy Note is my first Android phone (my first smart-phone being the underwhelming Nokia N86, running a Symbian OS). I really love this phone, which my wife named TIM: That Infernal Machine. I know my new phone is a new and exciting toy, but there is so much I can do with this thing that I find myself using it at every available opportunity. Twitter, Facebook, email, news, games, and the occasional phone call. I use it to check the train schedule, jot down ideas, read books, watch videos and translate words. There isn't time left for old-world activities, like having a face-to-face conversation (unless Skype is involved). I bought the Galaxy Note for a few reasons, but mainly because I wanted a smart-phone and a tablet, but couldn't afford both. The Samsung Galaxy Note provides both the portability of a phone and a 5.3in screen, just big enough to enjoy the web and video. While doing ex...