Windows 10 Store apps for everyday things

Last time I wrote about becoming a broadbandless household for a while. Since then I have set up the Nanobridge permanently, in that it is located in a different room of the house, and is cabled back to the main network switch in a very neat and tidy way. This involved a lot of work to put its cable through a wall and the back of the kitchen cabinets. The bonus was being able to aim it properly and get a much stronger, and therefore faster, signal.

For my data plan I got a Vodem set up with a tablet share SIM onto a Windows 10 computer that isn't used for anything else much except playing music videos. The Vodem plugs into a USB port on this computer and I decided to install the Windows 10 apps for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. As compared with the ideas I have had about running Instagram in an Android emulator under Windows, the native app for Windows 10 works very well but doesn't allow posting. Since RemixOS has its share of issues and I haven't been much bothered with attempting to get it working properly, I have just stuck with reading Instagram on the PC and doing posting with a phone or tablet - because you can compose a post in advance using Google Docs and then paste it on the phone or tablet - instead of having to type it on the handheld.

So on Windows 10 everything looks really good on this computer. The best thing about plugging in a Vodem is that everything that uses network traffic in the background on the computer stops when it is connected. So it doesn't suck up my data. Windows 10 is clever enough to realise I don't have a lot of data to play with on a cellular connection. Actually I burned through my phone data allocation without realising it the first time I tethered one of my computers to my phone because Google Drive was running and I didn't know it was going to download a whole lot of stuff onto my computer. So that was 5 GB gone in just a few minutes. The answer to that on Wifi (which is what a tether looks like to a computer, which can't tell the connection is different from regular Wifi) is to set the Wifi connection as a metered network. That works in a similar way to limit unnecessary traffic on the connection.

Broadbandless household

Well how do you have a household without broadband? You skive off free wifi and use your huge 6 GB cellular data on your $50 phone plan is how you do it. Since Vodafone has just upped the data on my plan to 6 GB for no extra cost.

Simply put, I have decided to have my home broadband chopped because of cost at the present time, and I have the ability to get what Vodafone calls a "tablet share" on my cellphone plan. Normally they charge $10/month per tablet but from time to time they have offered this at $0/month which they are doing at the moment. It isn't clear if this is just for the signup or whether it is ongoing after the end of the offer.

I will need to use the cellular data because some free wifi limits access to social media sites. I already have a tablet share for my Samsung tablet, getting a second one will enable me to use a laptop with the vodem that I already have which I used to use with the sim that is now in the Galaxy Tab A. The laptop has obvious advantages over the Galaxy Tab A with a keyboard and screen size etc.

I am connecting to the wifi using a Ubiquiti bridge to allow my regular desktop computers to work over the wireless. I started working with it in Bridge mode. This essentially makes each computer on your network an address on the remote network. Its main disadvantages are that your computer is on that network and therefore subject to the traffic on the rest of that network - and vice versa.

I then had a go at setting it up in Router mode. The Nanobridge needed to be updated to the 6.0 firmware a few days ago when I first started playing with it, and then once I set the router mode it handed out local addresses using its own DHCP server, but it didn't actually work, until I went back through the settings and saw the NAT box needed to be ticked. Once that was sorted it all started working as expected.

RemixOS android emulation

Well about a week ago I was writing about my experiences with Android x86. That particular OS runs reasonably well in a VM on Linux, but on my Windows computer I couldn't achieve anything with it because apparently of the hardware virtualisation limit. So then I upgraded the computer to one that does full virtualisation and I tried again. But I also tried a different Android package - I tried RemixOS, which is far superior to Android x86, being a lot more refined in many aspects.

There are three ways you can run RemixOS:

• In a virtual machine
• As a native install (hard disk or pen drive)
• As an emulator (Remix OS Player)

The native install as a pen drive has been the least successful method so far - giving me the Android startup messages, but then stopping at a black screen with just a mouse pointer visible. In a virtual machine (Virtualbox) on Windows 10, I have only got the Guest mode to work so far (no data saved) while the Resident mode throws error messages and never reaches the home screen. The Player experience has been similar to the virtual machine Guest mode, except that data does persist. Both experiences to date are far superior to Android x86. 

RemixOS isn't just another basic emulation of Android on a desktop - it has adopted some well known GUI elements like a desktop, a taskbar and a start menu as its shell. The result is something that is far easier to use than Android x86. 

That said, Remix is pretty new and there are still a few glitches. Right now with Instagram, I can browse my newsfeed, but can't post anything - selecting an image crashes it. So the Remix people still have a few things to fix on what is actually version 1.0 of their player. The VM run with Resident Mode working is something I am still tweaking to see if I can get that working properly as well, but I would expect it wouldn't be better than the player, so I am going to focus on the player and that means talking to the Remix people about any fixes they can create to address the crashes.