Tasker also has the ability to turn on GPS when I use Navigation and turn it off when I exit, which is nice.

Locale does that too. Just with a simpler interface.

I think it'll by my Christmas vacation project to convert over to Tasker.

I can't believe TMobile didn't tell me I didn't use voice minutes when I called over WiFi. Except I totally can. But it's a $0 cost plan addition, so I made it. Booyah! I don't expect to make a sizeable dent in my minutes again between that and Google Voice. Nice and tidy.

Wifi in my office is so shitty I don't think about it.

Something I've noticed recently though - a lot of apps block the phone from sleeping. Why? And can I stop that?

I definitely lose minutes on wifi calling. Fey.

Hey, so why are standard task killers bad on Android? And how can you know when you exit an application instead of just moving out of it? Like the difference between when Scrabble will notify you if people make moves or when it won't? Lots of applications don't seem to close, so it seems like a task killer would be necessary.

Android has its own task (management) killer, Liese. Well, it has its own strict application ending rules. When you switch out of an app, it's supposed to suspend to memory anyway, so there's nothing to kill. The OS does a good job of managing how full your RAM is, so killing stuff to save it is pretty pointless.

If you kill processes (which runs all the time), Android usually restarts them anyway, so you don't save anything there, and at worst lose with re-startup overhead. Unless it doesn't, and you break something, because it was a piece of a piece of something that should have been running anyway. It's not as easy as Windows or Unix to tell what should be on or not.

If I have something that feels like it's running in a "bad" state, I restart the phone. Because as noted above, if it's an app, its settings are probably saved anyway, so if something was fucking it up and it looked like it was hanging (but the OS doesn't come back with the Wait/Close/Report option), it generally doesn't make a whit of difference to "kill" it. Because it is effectively the undead.

And, well, uninstalling your task killer (if it's the popular one I used, Advanced Task Killer, anyway) frees up RAM right there, since it's always "running" or actually running--I don't recall which. Still, gets one more app out of your way.

Man, I've been going back and forth with Astrid tech support because of their too many authentication mechanisms and my too many gmail accounts. And also, if you try logging in one way on a device/browser, it gets shirty if you try another one later. I don't like that design. But, help desk was very useful, and I'm back up and running, not just across devices, like before, but also in their web client, which, weirdly, was the troublemaker.

Randomly searching the internet isn't helping me. I want to ditch cable sometime this month and I have a couple shows on my dvr that I'd love to - somehow - save.

My dvd player is both broken and not a recorder. I think my old (like, 20 years old) vcr might still work but that seems an inelegant solution because it hasn't been hooked up in years and so while I might still have the shows, I'd probably never watch them.

Any way to play them from my dvr and ~magically~ capture them onto my MacBook Pro? It's running Lion and I am not totally adverse to paying something for cables or software.

What kind of output does your DVR give you (HDMI, Coax, S-video. something else?). Are you going to have an antenna or something after cable that you might want to record video from?

[link] might do the trick. I haven't used that particular thing, but I've been happy with the Elgato products I have used.

There are also USB and Firewire.

Are you going to have an antenna or something after cable that you might want to record video from?

Nope. Once I snag a few things off of the dvr, I am done.

Hmm, that might work. Looks simple too.

Hm, if you've got firewire out from the DVR, there is probably a software only solution. All the references I can find are kind of old but [link] looks like it would be worth trying for free.

Cass, I would do a Google search on the model number of your DVR and "Firewire Capture." Especially if you have a laptop with a firewire port (most older Macs have them, and I bet your Macbook Pro might to) you can probably capture the video. It'll be real time, like a VCR recording, but it should be possible. I did it once with my old Time Warner PVR, several years ago.