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I must say, I love my Android tablet. While I use it every day, it's not yet a replacement for my desktop. And I must also admit, most of what I use it for is pretty much what everyone uses theirs for: web browsing, listening to music, watching videos, playing games, and so on. I try to justify it by having apps that deal with grocery and todo lists, finding cheap gas, fun things for our grandson, etc. It's really a toy for me right now. Why use a fancy touch-screen tablet to do your grocery list? Let's face it… it's the cool looks of envy that people give me in the store when they see me rolling the cart down the aisle and I tap my tablet to mark items off the list. Ahh— the geek factor RULES! Of course, I can use the back of an old envelope to hold my list. But that wouldn't be cool and geeky, now, would it?
Like 99% of geeky married men in the world, I am married to a non-geek woman. A wonderful loving woman, to be sure, but a non-geek who, when I start drooling at the latest gadget, sighs, and says something like “Well, if you REALLY think we need that…”. Then she gives me the same look I give her as she is lovingly fondles the 50th pair of shoes at the store. In all honesty, it wasn't hard to get the first tablet into our house. I bought it for my wife while she was going through chemotherapy. She tried to use a laptop for a while, but the heat and weight on her lap was too much after a while. E-books on a laptop for her wasn't an option, so when she tried to read, she had to juggle the book, and the laptop, and the mp3 player. All while being tied to a recliner with tubes running into her arm filling her with nasty chemicals. When I got her the tablet, it was the best of all worlds. She could read an e-book, listen to music, watch a TV show, browse the web, check her E-mail, update her cancer blog, follow her friends on facebook, and play games - all on a device that was light and cool. If she got tired, she could just slip it off to the side between her and the recliner (or bed when she was home trying to regain strength). MUCH better than a bulky laptop, and book, mp3 player, remote control, and more.
As she was getting pumped full of noxious chemicals, I would commandeer a table and chair in the corner of the treatment room, near a power outlet, and try to work on my six-year old laptop. In between projects, I would do research on Android programming. I found out that most programming for Android is done in Java. I had almost resigned myself to re-learning Java when I stumbled across a few tools that allow Python programming for the Android Operating system. One of these tools is called “SL4A”. SL4A stands for Scripting Layer for Android. That's what we will concentrate on in the next couple of articles. We'll really focus on getting SL4A set up on Android in this one.
You might ask, why in the world I would be talking about Android programming in a magazine designed for Linux. Well, the simple reason is that the core of Android is Linux. Everything that Android is, sits on top of Linux!
Many web pages show how to load SL4A into the Android Emulator for Desktops. We'll look at doing that another time, but for now we'll deal with the Android device itself. To install SL4A on your Android device, go to http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/; you'll find the installation file for SL4A. Don't be absolutely confused here. There's a square High Density barcode that you tap to download the APK. Be sure that you have the “Unknown Sources” option enabled in the Application settings. It's a quick download. Once you have it downloaded and installed, go ahead and find the icon, and tap it. What you will see is a rather disappointing black screen saying “Scripts…No matches found”. That's OK. Hit the menu button and select View. You'll see a menu. Select Interpreters. Then select menu again, and select Add. From the next menu, select Python 2.6.2. This should ask you to start a browser session to download Python for Android. Once this is installed, select Open. You'll get a screen menu with the options to Install, Import Modules, Browse Modules, and Uninstall modules. Select Install. Now Python will download and install along with other extra modules. In addition, you'll get some sample scripts. Finally, tap the back button and you'll see Python 2.6.2 installed in the interpreters screen. Tap again on the back button and you'll see a list of some sample python scripts.
That's all we are going to do this time. All I wanted to do is whet your appetite. Explore Python on Android. You might also want to visit http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html to get the Android SDK (Software Development Kit) for your desktop. It includes an Android Emulator so you can play along. Setting up the SDK is really pretty easy on Linux, so you shouldn't have too much trouble.
How to Include Accents from the Keyboard by Barry Smith
If your Linux system is in French, German, or Spanish, and, therefore, requiring accents, or if, occasionally, you need to use accents which do not appear in English words, many users do not know that there is a very easy way to do this from the keyboard. The following applies to only the UK keyboard.
Acute accent Press Alt Gr + ; (semi-colon) Lift hand then press the desired vowel é
Circumflex Press Alt Gr + ' (apostrophe) Lift hand then press the desired vowel î
Grave accent Press Alt Gr + # (hache) Lift hand then press the desired vowel è
Umlaut Press Alt Gr + [ Lift hand then press u ü
ñ - Press Alt Gr + ] Lift hand then press n ñ
œ - Press Shift + Alt Gr Lift hand then press o then press e œ The œ will not appear until after the e is keyed.
To get ¿ and ¡ (inverted exclamation mark) which I use all the time in Spanish before questions, and exclamations, press Alt Gr + Shift, keeping both keys pressed, then hit _ (underscore) for ¿ or hit ! (exclamation mark) for ¡.
If you want any of these in capitals, just press Shift before keying in the letter.