NFC Tag Differences

January 16th, 2013

I’ve been playing around with NFC tags a lot lately.  I have one with my contact info ready to go to a conference with me, I have one on my gym bag to open Endomondo and Google Play Music.  I have one on my keychain that opens a note for me of things I deem important if I’m going somewhere (the note is in Evernote, so I can change it pretty easily).

I originally bought a pack of tags and a keychain from tagsfordroid.com through Amazon.  These tags are pretty beefy.  In using NFC Task Launcher, I posted a twitter update that ultimately earned me two free tags from tagstand.  I noticed theirs seems much thinner.

The differences are substantial, as illustrated in the image below.

Substantial Difference

 

The tagstand sticker is a normal sticker thickness.  The tagsfordroid.com sticker is much thicker.

The image below shows the entire group – the two tags from tagstand and a stack of tags from tagsfordroid and a set of a dozen decals to apply to the tags so you know what your tags do.

The entire setup

Disclaimers:

While the tags provided by tagstand were free, they do this for anyone that downloads the NFC Task Launcher app and posts a twitter update using the application.  They aren’t aware I’m writing this, the tags were not provided to help write this, and I’ve not been offered any compensation for writing this.

I am not trying to show that one is better than the other.  Both tags work.  There are times one may want a thicker tag, and there are times that one may want a thinner tag.  The purpose of this post is to illustrate a difference between the two.

 

Reloaded Kindle Fire with AOKP… fixed navbar issue

January 9th, 2013

I loaded my old Kindle Fire with AOKP.  This is awesome!

But…

I had a problem in Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook, the application menu made the back, home, and application switch menu so small I had a bit of trouble using them.  On Twitter, there was no application menu button, so I couldn’t switch Twitter accounts (I have three Twitter accounts):

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So I was poking around in the ROM Settings and ultimately stumbled on a solution. The solution is to add a fourth button to the navbar, set it as the menu, and leave well enough alone.

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As illustrated in these screenshots, the problem is solved:

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That’s it!