Android

The Need: Every Verse Cost Me My Place I prepare short talks for a Bible study. My routine is simple. I read a passage in my Bible app, add the verses I want to my notes, and write a few lines under them. Then I go back to read the next verse. That last step was the problem. The app has one screen at a time. To read the next verse, I left the notes, opened the viewer, and found my place again. Sometimes the next verse was in a completely different book, so there was no place to go back to. Finding it again took longer than writing the note. ...

Let me tell you about the bug that made me doubt myself more than any other in this series. I’d fix something — say, a misheard word in a transcript. I’d save the corrected file to the server. I’d open the app on my phone to admire the fix. And the old, wrong word would still be sitting there. So I’d fix it again. Save again. Still wrong. I started to wonder if I’d forgotten how to edit a text file. ...

Here’s a question that sounds odd at first. Could the cheapest, smallest, quietest computer in your house be your home server? Not a Raspberry Pi. Not a NAS. Not an old laptop on a shelf, fan going, getting warm. I mean an ordinary Android tablet — the kind you’d hand a three-year-old to watch cartoons. It turns out it can, and I’ve been running one this way for a while. A $100 tablet sits in my home right now, plugged into the wall. It runs a real Linux server that serves audio to a web app, over its own secure web address. It’s silent, about the size of a paperback, and it uses very little power. I’m as comfortable leaving it on as I am leaving my phone on. ...