Some aspects that seem mildly annoying when you start using it, and gradually increase until you sort of want to fly over to T-Mobile and start smashing skulls:

1) the aforementioned bloatware, including demo versions of games, an unnecessary map tool, an unnecessary photo gallery tool, and a whole bunch of other crapola I never even ran but which kept popping up notifications at random.  I don’t like being forced to view advertisements on my phone.  FIXABLE.

2) having keys on the keyboard for launching Facebook, a browser, email, etc., instead of cursor keys.  Maybe somebody uses these launch buttons, but I only pressed them by accident.  Having them instead of cursors is just cruel.  FIXABLE.

3) lack of an off-screen notification light.  There is an app called No Led or something to alleviate the pain, but it’s a battery drain and not worth the trouble. NOT FIXABLE, but not worth fixing if you would pretty much have notifications all the time anyway, in which case you just learn to pace yourself and let e-mails and SMSes wait a little instead of responding instantaneously.  (Or you can listen for the chimes like a drooling hound in a psych experiment.)  I am currently looking for apps compatible with this phone which will allow me to use the camera flash LED as a notification device (I’ve found two, but Google Market claims they are incompatible with the Samsung Galaxy Smart, so I can’t even install them).

4) Installing a quality SMS program like Handcent winds up giving you TWO text message indicators.  FIXABLE.

5) Lack of storage space.  Honestly, someone was smoking crack when they designed this phone.  For some reason, it is constantly bitching about low disk space, even if you plug in a 8 GB SD card.  FIXABLE.

The solutions to these complaints, other than the LED light problem, are all below.

1) ROOT IT.  I was resistant to rooting my Samsung because I was worried about being able to return it to T-Mobile if it falls apart, which my last two phones did (Motorola CLIQs both, and T-Mobile was kind enough to let me switch since they were out of CLIQs).  There is probably a way to revert your phone back to the original firmware anyway. I got pretty familiar with the process on the CLIQs, but it’s a bit of a pain, so I hope I never need to do that with the Gravity Smart.  Rooting it is a trivial process.  Download the Samsung drivers and the latest version of Super One Click Root.  Install the drivers, then install SOCR.  Plug your phone into your computer via USB, run it, and click Root.  Wait about 30 seconds.  You are now rooted.  That’s right– it’s a simple process, and there’s nothing to fear except voiding your warranty.  Now you can delete the bloatware.  I don’t recommend doing that mindlessly though, as you can make your system unusable (a.k.a. bricked), or at least render it difficult to fix without advanced tricks, or shamefully apologizing to T-Mobile with tears running down your face, feeling like an asshole.  What rooting provides, for the layman, is “Superuser” privileges.  Which you oughta have anyway since you bought the damn thing and own it.  When you’re not a Superuser, it’s like you’re just borrowing your phone.  Once you’re a Superuser you can tell your telco, T-Mobile, to fuck off.  Of course, most people don’t care because they don’t realize they are getting screwed.  You, however, are not content to be a marionette controlled by the telecommunications industry.

Paranoia and misanthropy aside, there’s a fine guide for the rooting process here: http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/root-t-mobile-samsung-gravity-smart-how-to-guide/

2) BACKUP your stuff from the SD card, and repartition it.   The next few sentences may sound arcane; relax, there’s a link to a more complete guide coming up.  Once you’ve rooted the phone you can install Titanium Backup and backup all your data onto the SD card, and copy the SD card contents elsewhere.  Then repartition your SD card into a FAT32 primary partition followed by a smaller ext2 partition (that’s a Linux file system, if you’re curious).  Later you’ll set up LINK2SD which tells apps to use the second partition as additional storage space instead of making you run out of space all the time.  It takes a LOT of SMS messages to fill 512 MB.  I won’t explain this in any more detail this since it’s all very well covered here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1320187&page=4 .  I did everything in the guide, except I used a different firmware.  (I used AMS, which I gather is a fork off the one actually listed.  I used AMS 0.3 since someone in the forum said AMS 0.4 had problems, but I had identical minor problems with AMS 0.3 so you may as well just use AMS 0.4.)

3) INSTALL AMS 0.3 or 0.4 or another custom ROM.  AMS can be downloaded from the links in this forum (via MegaUpload or whatever).  The instructions are the same except you want to rename AMS04.zip to update.zip and put it in the root of your SD card.  DO NOT UNZIP THE FILE.  Installing this pre-made firmware saves a lot of hassle as someone else took the time to remove the bloatware and test it, more or less.  Firmware installation is quick and painless, but be sure you’ve got everything backed up first.  Note one complication here: I get a couple of error messages when I startup the phone (“com.android.phone has stopped unexpectedly”– it sounds much worse than it actually is).  Opera Mini (replacing the built-in browser) did not work initially either, but I re-installed it and then it worked (and later I upgraded to Opera Mobile). I found re-installing some apps to be handy.  The important thing is that the non-software features of the phone all work fine (calls, messaging, sound, etc) and the error messages go away when you click OK and don’t come back, so it’s only something you need to deal with once in a while, when you reboot the phone.  UPDATE: I later installed AMS 0.4 and the results were identical.

4) LINK2SD is now installed on there, if you indeed installed AMS.  You want to launch it and configure it for using the surplus space.  Same story; just use the instructions at that other link.

5) INSTALL HANDCENT SMS and uninstall the built-in Messaging application (you can use Titanium for this).  I was worried that uninstalling the Messaging app would break Handcent as well, but my worries were for naught.  Now I only get one notification; no more double-beeps, and two notifications icons on the notification bar, etc.

6) EDIT THE KEYBOARD LAYOUT FILE.  To be honest, this is the only step that I couldn’t find explained in real detail elsewhere.  Launch the File Expert app.  You’ll find the keyboard layout under “Phone Internal Storage” in /system/usr/keylayout/gt2_keypad0.kl .  This is a pretty human readable file.  File Expert lets you mount the drive “Read Write” which will enable you to change the file using the text editor.  (I actually wound up using the terminal and the vi editor, but I’m not about to write instructions on using vi.)  Find the lines for the following keys (note, they’re not actually bunched together like this):

key 215 ENVELOPE WAKE_DROPPED
key 217 (whatever it used to be)
key 150 (whatever)
key 218 (whatever)

change them to say:

key 215 DPAD_LEFT
key 217 DPAD_DOWN
key 150 DPAD_UP
key 218 DPAD_RIGHT

Save it.  You can leave out the WAKE_DROPPED parts. I assume that means that pressing the key will not light up the screen, and who cares.  When you reboot the phone, you’ll have cursor keys: praise the lord!  Your keyboard just became about 100x more useful.  Based on the physical layout, it looks like the keyboard was designed this way originally and some asshole with a clipboard and a clip-on-tie sabotaged it (odds are he worked for T-Mobile, not Samsung).  If you can’t launch Facebook, the browser, messaging, or whatever the other key did, without popping out the keyboard and pressing the big green buttons, you won’t get anywhere near this step… most likely you aren’t searching for “useful hacks for the Samsung Gravity Smart” to begin with.

By the way, you’ll probably have to edit this file again after any future firmware upgrades, so you might want to make a copy to your SD card or someplace else, so you can just copy-and-paste it instead.

7) YOU MAY NEED (OR WANT) TO CONFIGURE SOME OTHER SETTINGS.  You’ll find that you have a few more of them.  Settings aside, the above steps solved 95% of the issues I’ve had with this phone, the notification thing being a write-off.  It’s also faster (I can’t tell if the No Frills CPU step from the original instructions had any impact, it seemed to be faster right after I flashed AMS).  I do not yet know if there was an impact on the battery life, but I suspect it will be a negligible loss or a slight improvement.  The best way to prolong the battery, in my experience, is to turn the brightness down, disable WiFi, and to turn off the data refresh (the thing that loads your gmail messages and such).  Another thing I restored from T-Mobile is Lookout, which provides some [presumably false] sense of malware security when it isn’t shilling for the premium version.  Probably better than nothing, especially once you start downloading Android apps from Zurblecchistan off MegaUpload…

Oh, one other thing you should know if you want to unlock your phone.  You can always request the unlock code from T-Mobile.  Go on live chat from their website and tell them you’re going overseas (Brazil is where I went) and they’ll e-mail you the code the next day.  I wish I’d done that instead of paying $30 for the identical code from cell unlockers dot net.   And supposedly you can cancel your plan by telling them you’re moving to an area with no T-Mobile coverage.  (Note, I haven’t actually tried that last part, but best of luck.)

New problems:

- UPDATED: loss of 3G.  I didn’t notice this until doing everything else in this article.  Then I started freaking out.  It turns out you just need to add in your APN settings (Settings -> Wireless Networks -> Mobile Networks -> Access Point Names) and you’ll be good for 3G data and MMS.  I used the second one that some angel posted here.

- The phone app has crashed warning, see above.  Very minor unless you’re rebooting your phone often.  UPDATE: I was able to get rid of this error by using Titanium Backup to remove the system app “CSC 1.0″.  No idea what it does (although CSC has something to do with country-specific codes).  SECOND UPDATE: on second thought, don’t do that.  THIRD UPDATE: final verdict: it seems okay to remove but I wouldn’t do it unless you have witnessed the com.android.phone errors.  I also think this could be resolved by reinstalling “Web 2.2.2″ but I was unable to get Titanium to do that successfully (it kept hanging during the reinstall).

- I also get warning messages from WiFi Tether that seem to be equally meaningless, as WiFi works fine.  UPDATE: I uninstalled Wifi Tether altogether using Titanium, and replaced it with OpenGarden Wifi Tether, which appears to work.  Not sure if this will make any difference, but I doubt it.  So, problem solved.

- AMS includes “GO Launcher”, which seems like a better launch platform than the default that ships with the phone.  But for some reason I found it only worked after being run manually; after a reboot, it was back to the old launcher.  Not a serious issue either, just mildly disconcerting.  I’ve done no additional homework on this since I really don’t care.

- You may need to reconfigure your phone to use the correct ringtones.  I had to, but I think that’s because I used to have an application called “Tone Picker” so I could use MP3s instead of the default Android selection.  I didn’t reinstall Tone Picker, so after the above steps, wherever I’d originally used Tone Picker the ringtones got changed.  This problem may not happen to anyone but me.

- I think GO Launcher might have a few bugs, but it was 4 am when I saw them and now I forget what they were.

Good luck!

I just upgraded to the latest Ubuntu 11.04 on an old laptop with a built-in webcam.  The official kernel driver for the webcam sucks, but you can get a good one here:

git clone http://repo.or.cz/r/microdia.git

You’ll have to make this yourself.  There’s a link to to do that below.  First note, however, that the files reference an include file that no longer ships with Ubuntu.  That is videodef.h — an include file for V4L version 1, which is no longer supported.

So , you’ll need to edit out a line in sn9c20x-queue.c.

Change:

#include <linux/videodev.h>

to

/* #include <linux/videodev.h> */

(i.e. comment it out).

Then follow the rest of these instructions:  http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7456689&postcount=4

You’ll also need to remove the standard-issue sn9c20x driver (gspca_sn9c20x) from /lib/modules/(linux kernel version)/kernel/drivers/media/video/gspca:

sudo rmmod gspca_sn9c20x

I just moved it to my homedir so it wouldn’t be probed:

mv /lib/modules/(whatever)/kernel/drivers/media/video/gspca_sn9c20x.ko  ~

And put the sn9c20x.ko driver in:

cp /(wherever you ran make)/sn9c20x.ko /lib/modules/(whatever)/kernel/drivers/media/video

depmod -ae

Voila.  Webcam works again.  Whatever videodev.h provides has been replaced elsewhere.  For Skype you’ll still want to use compatibility libraries, running it this way:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype

Hope that helps someone!

And if you click from here I get a little bit more money for it. That is why this otherwise invisible blog has suddenly become so shamelessly commercial, not that there are terribly many people coming through to notice. “MONETIZE,” sayeth the Amazon! “ARRGGHGH!” says Hundra!  Buy some other stuff while you’re there!

Meanwhile, enjoy the movie reviews (which are an entertaining way to drive traffic to the site)!  OBEY!

2010 was pretty good. On the whole, 2010 earns a B, because a lot of things went well, but I can imagine things being even better.  And let’s not forget that Republicans retook the House, which they will begin wrecking in a few weeks.  I thought America had learned from 2001-2009?

“Storytelling” is a masterpiece of irony, both within its own constructed universe, and in its secondary role as Todd Solondz’s own defiant statement about his own work, directed at the critics hostile to its predecessors.  Said predecessors, “Welcome to the Dollhouse” and “Happiness” are more unsettling than “Storytelling” but somewhat less intellectual.  The movies have mixed reviews, much to Solondz’s credit.  There seems an army of people who simply don’t get it.  (I’m not sure I “get” the first two either, but I haven’t seen them in years.)  “Storytelling” seems to be even more baffling in the various amateur reviews I’ve read.  Common among all the reviews is a complete failure to read any aspect of the film beyond the relationship of Solondz to his critics, which 10 years later is surely the least relevant aspect of it.  It is his tightest and most interesting film on its own merits.

A few words here about the first “short story” of the two in Storytelling, the segment titled “Fiction”.

MOVIE SPOILERS AHEAD! The story concerns Vi (Selma Blair), a student in an writing workshop (apparently a mix of grads and undergrads). The teacher is an award winning African-American writer (Nobel, Pulitzer, Nat’l Book Award, I forget which and it doesn’t really matter). She winds up being manipulated (or allowing herself to be manipulated) by this writer into somewhat brutal sex, then writes the experience as a story it and shares it with the class. The class responds in a mostly inane, knee-jerk manner, and she is roundly critiqued as a racist, as a shock writer, etc., and finally, at the end of her rope, she cries out that it’s what really happened.

Most of us who have been through many writing workshops have had this experience (the “it really happened” experience, not sex with the prof). It’s always a little frustrating, since what really happened is irrelevant once the story is in someone else’s hands, and Mr. Scott rightly says so, albeit for self-service: “once you start writing, it all becomes fiction.” It may in some cases be cathartic for the writer, but it rarely succeeds in the fiction workshop.  The writer is crippled by his or her inability to overcome the audience’s preconceived critical approaches: stereotypes can’t be true, and unusual events are unbelievable.  (Is it any wonder that MFA fiction is so often criticized for being watered-down?)  Thankfully, critics aren’t the only readers– in a non-workshop environment, readers tend to maintain their suspension of disbelief to a much greater extent, since they won’t be called upon to find a story’s flaws or perceived violations of accepted protocol. …  I touched upon some of this in my own short story “The Power of Fiction” which used to be online and currently seems to have vanished for now.

What is actually more interesting to me in Storytelling is the teacher character, Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom), a shameless cad who uses his lofty position to exploit his students.  They see in him a gatekeeper (“Do you think I have potential as a writer?” “No.” “Thank you for being honest.”) — as if he is the only person capable of making such a judgment.  His one credible act is to dismiss the first student’s story for the shit that it is– his unwillingness to sugar-coat his response for the student with cerebral palsy, as his students do, can be read as cold blood or aesthetic integrity.  In either case, the students seek his approval (particularly his student parrot Catherine, played by Aleksa Palladino) and believe his every word.  How does he command the students?  Simple, by playing the stock character of a writer.  He says very little, but he says it all with authority and finality.  He always has the last word.  He is neatly groomed and dresses in a sport coat.   He does not answer personal questions and does not care about their praise.  There are no chinks in his armor.  He never mentions himself actually writing.  He has deigned to teach college courses by some holy beneficence, one imagines the students must think, not to pay the bills for his mediocre apartment and earthly existence.  Solondz and Wisdom make Mr. Scott a deeply satirical character through his exact personification of what everyone– both the students in the movie and the viewing audience– expects a writer to be.  When Mr. Scott fucks Vi, Vi is still buying into the perception of his importance instead of the reality that he’s no better than any other guy in the bar who might have taken her home.  She allows him to command her not because he has done anything seductive (quite the opposite), and not because she’s horny, but because she has invested so much in the ultimately false belief that a successful writer is privileged to know a higher truth than other individuals know.  (The racial element is beside that point, in my opinion, although not irrelevant to the story on its surface– it’s just another way to reveal the hypocrisy and superficiality of the other students, most of whom have also slept with Mr. Scott.)

Writers do spend a lot of time thinking.  It’s a commonplace in composition instruction that “writing is thinking”, and I think that saying is valid, though excessively reductive.  But writers being thinkers does not mean that their thinking takes them anyplace important.  The thoughts may strip away some illusions (I’m sort of trying to do that here, as a matter of fact), but it won’t create answers to deep questions.  In reality, writing is accomplished by sitting and working and reworking, using a computer, typewriter, pen, dictaphone, whatever.  Writing, however successfully (and regardless of the aesthetic quality), does not make the writer more privileged to some higher truth.  A reader can believe, reject, overlook, or ignore the message of what is written.  The dramatic and aesthetic elements of the story are the most outwardly significant, and those things are a mix of innate creativity, teachable technical skills, observation, and practice.  Good fiction engrosses us with its drama and captures our emotions with human love for characters.  What makes fiction good is also what makes much of life very interesting (fiction is rarely more interesting than life itself, but it’s a relief to witness a character’s problems without having to deal with them personally).  The writer is an illusionist, which is to say, a practitioner of tricks.

Notice that none of that has anything to do with a writer’s image or personal life.  Writing is not accomplished by wearing a sport coat and saying everything like it is the most important thing ever said. It always annoys me to see the genius writer trope, so common in movies (and also in a great “Seinfeld”), acted out in real life.  I know a few fiction writers and poets, some famous, some not.  They are very fun people with terrific wit and a lust for life and they eat and drink and screw and take shits.  But many of them are also guilty of perpetuating the writer trope to strangers (e.g. reading and panel audiences, interviewers, even Facebook friends, etc.): the religious pronouncements about writing, the quiet monkish behavior, the tweed sportcoat with the leather patches. Essentially, in these situations, these vivacious people downplay their vivacity and play the part of writers.  They stand on stage and read slowly in front of their adoring fans. They show only signs of taking themselves and their work extremely seriously. Fair enough, writing is hard work, but once you’ve been backstage, so to speak, it’s hard to see the show the same way.  Is the authority of the writer really contingent on how well they can act?  Obviously the answer is yes, and if the writer stood up there in a bikini and started juggling before reading he or she would lose all credibility– but that’s sad.  Mr. Scott’s behavior perfectly reveals the layers of bullshit that hold up this concept of writerly authority.  (And my friends wonder why I have such an abiding respect for Thomas Pynchon as both a writer and a secretive individual.)  I see these behaviors as self-parody, but apparently the spell works, because so many people buy in.

(Publishing/marketing has a hand in this too, of course.  Ever wondered why author photos are always black-and-white on color-printed book jackets?  Or for that matter, why there’s ever an author photo at all?  Ever seen an author photo that looks anything like a candid shot?  The perception you’re granted of the writer is tightly controlled.  I don’t believe that’s a deep insight– it is what marketing is about.  But it is curious.  Jump cut to Salieri in “Amadeus”, so disgusted by the disparity of Mozart’s genius and Mozart’s complete lack of self control.)

I look good in a sportcoat…  Everyone does.  I shouldn’t single them out (or blazers or whatever).  That’s not the point.

What the point is is that I don’t have access to any magical truth that’s unavailable to laypersons, and neither does any other writer.  This form of authority is illusory– or should I say, a collective delusion.

Bringing it back to “Storytelling”, and this is important: at Mr. Scott’s apartment, Vi finds nude photos of various other girls her age (including Catherine and, I think, some of the other girls in her class, even the prissy ones).  Vi’s disgusted, but she still does what Mr. Scott commands.  And it’s not because she’s worried about grade blackmail– he’s already said she has no potential as a writer.  She does it because she has bought into what she believes he represents.  That’s the net effect of the delusion.  “Fiction” is superficially about writing and critics (and Todd Solondz), but for me it’s about authority, and how we collectively suspend our own sensibilities in its apparent presence.

Solondz gets it…  You might even say he’s an authority on it.

(As a side note, Robert Wisdom plays badass cop “Bunny” Colvin, founder of Hamsterdam, in “The Wire”.  I think he’s a terrific actor.  As another side note, my favorite professors and writers have never been guilty of the above sins…  I hope that reluctance isn’t holding back their careers.)