You are no doubt reading this article because you have a new phone Android brilliant, but there’s just one problem: you’re so addicted that the battery is running out on a daily basis. Instead of putting the phone down, we will maximize the battery life.

Saving the life of the battery is not rocket science, the general principle is to get rid of what is draining the battery the most, and attitude to other things that you should use, but maybe you can change a little. Keep reading for the full explanation.

Use the built-in screen using the battery

There is a screen built into Android that most casual users probably do not even know, and can tell you exactly what is killing your battery. Head to Settings -> About Phone -> Using the battery to see what has been killing your battery life.

From this screen, you can usually see what apps are the worst offenders, and you will probably notice that the biggest problem—at least, the biggest one that we can fix—is actually the backlight on the phone. Personally I’d prefer to talk less to other humans, but that isn’t always an option!

Note: on my phone, I’ve already configured the backlight to not be very bright—normally that number would be a lot higher.

Adjust the Backlight to be Less Bright

Since we’ve already determined that the backlight is usually the biggest problem, you should probably adjust the settings. Head into Settings –> Display –> Brightness, where you can choose to automatically adjust, which usually works fairly well, or you can just turn the brightness down to the lowest acceptable level.

You should make sure that the screen timeout value is set to turn off quickly as well.

Disable Your Wi-Fi When You Don’t Need It

Wi-Fi can really speed up accessing data on your phone, but it can also be a big drain on the battery if you don’t need it enabled, especially when you are out and about… The phone will try and scan for a wireless network even though you may not want it to.

To enable Airplane mode, you can head into Settings –> Wireless & networks–> Airplane mode.

You can easily toggle the Wi-Fi on or off with a widget or shortcut—there’s a built-in widget included in Android phones, or you can use the AnyCut or BetterCut utilities to create your own shortcuts to directly turn them on or off without requiring a widget.

Disable Bluetooth if You Don’t Use It

If you aren’t using a wireless headset, there’s no reason to have Bluetooth running all the time, and you should probably cut it off to save the battery life. If you never use it at all, head into Settings –> Wireless & networks–> Bluetooth.

You can also enable or disable the Bluetooth when you do need it, using the power widget.

Use the Power Widget to Easily Toggle GPS, Bluetooth, Wireless, and Screen Brightness

Android includes a built-in Power Widget that can easily toggle these settings on or off—just long press on the background of one of your screens, choose Widget –> Power Control to add it to the screen. You’ll notice in this example screenshot that I’ve got my GPS enabled but I’m not using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth at the moment—the icon all the way on the right lets you easily toggle the screen brightness settings.

This is probably the simplest and easiest thing that you can do to save your battery without having to dig into the settings all the time.

Disable Apps that Sync Constantly

The built-in Email application (not the Gmail one, which uses Push technology) can suck the battery badly, because it syncs on a too-regular basis, especially when you have lots of accounts—each one of them is set to sync every 15 minutes. You’d be better off setting it up to sync manually, but if you want it to sync automatically, you should set it to sync less frequently.

Open up the Email application, head to your account, and choose Account settings –> Email check frequency from the menu. Change this to something more like an hour… or never. You can always hit refresh manually when you want to read your email.

The same thing holds true for other accounts, like Twitter clients, which are even less important to update all the time. For Seesmic, you can head into Settings –> Background Updates from the main screen. For the official Twitter app, the settings are similar.

The Facebook application polls automatically in the background, and you can customize the refresh interval for that as well—if you don’t need Facebook updating all the time, you should set this value as high as possible.

From the main Facebook screen—the one with the icons—head into Settings –> Refresh interval from the menu.

Disable the GPS Location Features

One of the biggest battery sucking features on my droid is the GPS… When I have navigation going, the battery dies far too fast, so I end up having to keep it plugged in the whole time I am driving. This makes sense… but what you might not know is that a lot of other applications use the GPS as well.

You can also change the GPS to use wireless networks, and uncheck the option for Use GPS satellites—this will make the GPS a little less accurate, but it will save your battery. Note that you probably want the real GPS enabled if you’re using Google Maps Navigation.

Additionally, you should turn off the geolocation features in your Twitter client, weather application, or whatever other apps that you really don’t need them in. If you want to keep it enabled, that’s great, just realize that it does drain the battery, so uncheck this option to help.

Use a Task Manager to See What is Always Running

It is a wise decision to have a copy of Advanced Task Cleaner or a similar application installed on your phone to help you kill applications that don’t need to be running, but more so that you can see what exactly is launching itself repeatedly in the background. You can setup an auto-kill list for applications you don’t use that often—make them cut off when you shut off the screen, or after an interval.

Note: If you’ve configured your application settings to not pull down lots of data or do checking in the background, it’s not quite as important to keep tasks killed all the time—that’s really what kills your battery, not having them sitting idle.

You can also configure advanced task manager to show you CPU usage for each app, which is a more useful meter than memory usage when it comes to battery life.

Disable or Remove Applications That You Aren’t Using

Once you have identified the application that you don’t want running all the time, check in the settings to see if it can be removed from running in the background. Some applications will give you an option for notifications that can be turned off if you don’t need them, making the application not check in the background so often.

It should go without saying, but we’ll say it anyway—you should remove the apps that you don’t need anymore, especially the ones that are draining your battery as determined from the android battery panel or task manager. Head into Settings –> Applications –> Manage Applications and then you can click the Uninstall button for an app.

Disable Home Screen Widgets You Don’t Need

If you’ve got loads of widgets that are pulling data from the web, that means they are likely pulling down data in the background all the time. You should try not to go overboard with these, or remove the ones you don’t actually need.

Disable Animated Wallpaper

Yeah, that sweet animated wallpaper doesn’t help your battery any. Get rid of it for a small extra battery savings.

Use APNDroid to Kill Your Entire Data Connection When You Don’t Need It

If you’re using a phone that’s on the AT&T or T-Mobile networks, you can use the APNDroid utility to kill your data connection entirely with a simple widget. It doesn’t work on Verizon phones in my testing. It’ll disable the data but still allow regular calls and SMS.

Keep the Battery from Getting Too Hot

One of the quickest ways to kill a battery is to leave it out in the sun—try and keep your phone somewhere that isn’t too hot whenever possible. You’ll end up needing to replace the battery a lot quicker if you don’t.

Additional Notes

There’s a number of other things you can do to extend your battery life a bit—one of which is to use a rooted phone and install the Autostarts utility, which you can use to keep applications from launching themselves automatically. Since this isn’t something you can do on a stock phone, we’re not covering how to do it here.

You can also use an application called Tasker to automate certain actions, like turning on or off the GPS or Wi-Fi when you launch a particular application, or scheduling a time of day to make sure that Wi-Fi is disabled. Lifehacker has a great guide to using Tasker to automate your phone, and they also explain how to use a  configuration to scale back data usage at night.

Have any of these tips helped your Android phone’s battery life? What other tips do you have for your fellow readers?

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Everybody knows that Firefox has add-ons for virtually everything, but if you don’t want to bloat your installation you’ve always got the option of Greasemonkey scripts instead. Here’s a quick primer on how to use them.

Getting Started with User Scripts

Once you have Greasemonkey installed, managing the extension is really easy. Left click on the status bar icon to turn the extension on/off and right click to access the context menu shown here.

Whether you use the Options button in the Add-ons Manager Window or the context menu shown above, both will bring up the Manage User Scripts dialog. At the moment you have a nice clean slate to work with… time to get some scripts added in.

The majority of user scripts can be found at two different sites, the first being appropriately named userscripts.org, and you can either browse by tag or search for a script.

As you can see here your search for a particular type of script can be quickly narrowed down based on category. There is definitely a lot to choose from.

For our example we focused on the “textarea” tag. There were 62 scripts available but we quickly found what we were looking for on the first page.

Installing, Managing, & Using Your Scripts

When you find a script that you want to install visit the script’s homepage and click on the “Install” button.

Note: Link for this script provided below.

Once you have clicked on the Install button, Greasemonkey will open up the following installation window. You will be able to view:

• A summary of what the script does
• A list of websites that the script is supposed to function on (our example is set for all)
• View the script source if desired
• Make a final decision on whether to install the script or cancel the process

Right-clicking on our status bar icon shows our new script listed and active.

Reopening the Manage User Scripts window shows:

• Our new script listed in the column on the left
• The websites/pages included
• An option to disable the script (can also be done in the context menu)
• The ability to edit the script
• The ability to uninstall the script

If you choose to edit the script you will be asked to browse for and select a default text editor of your choice (first time only). Once you have selected a text editor you can make any changes desired to the script.

We decided to test our new user script on the site. Going to the comment box at the bottom we could easily resize the window as desired.

The Comment box definitely got a lot bigger.

Conclusion

If you prefer to keep the number of extensions to a minimum in your Firefox installation then Greasemonkey and the Userscripts website can easily provide that extra functionality without the bloat. For added auto website script detection goodness see our article on Greasefire.

Note: See our article here for specialized How-To Geek User Style Scripts that can be added to Greasemonkey.

Links

Download the Greasemonkey Extension (Mozilla Add-ons)

Install the Textarea & Input Resize User Script

Visit the Userscripts.org Website

Visit the Userstyles.org Website

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Google Contacts needs to get better. Google and Gmail devotees regularly deal with duplicate contacts, sync abnormalities, over-stuffed contact groups, and other problems. Here are our best methods for fixing those annoyances yourself until Google does for real.

Photo by sidewalk flying.

Let’s be clear: We love how Google Contacts functions as a centralized database of email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, mailing addresses, IM handles, and much more for our various Google services. Our readers generally dig it, too, though not without complaints about its sometimes unpredictable nature. What I’m aiming to do in this post is detail how Google Contacts works (it’s probably not how you’d expect), explain some fixes for common Contacts annoyances, help you clean up and organize your Contacts, and point out the proper way to sync Google Contacts to your various devices.

How Google Contacts Works

You don’t actually need a Gmail account to use Google Contacts, but Gmail is normally where most users start using Contacts. If you use nearly any kind of Google service, Google has probably set up a Contacts section for you, which you can visit at google.com/contacts and start tinkering with.

If you’re using Google Apps with a particular domain, your Contacts page can usually be found at google.com/contacts/a/sitename.com/, replacing sitename.com with your own organization’s URL. Google Contacts acts a bit differently inside an Apps account, and can cause some stress when used alongside a “personal” Gmail account—but we’ll get to that in a bit. Take some time to get familiar with the web interface, and learn what you can and can’t do in it. It is always, always the primary place to fix problems and negotiate sync issues with your various apps and devices—make a change here, and it’s the only way to ensure it will (probably) stick.

Google’s Help section for Contacts doesn’t get nearly nitty-gritty enough, but a read-through does provide a few pointers. The most helpful explainer is about Default contact groups, which really explains the five contact groups that you can’t delete, rename, or change, and the one contact group that drives a lot of office app veterans nuts:

• All Contacts: Just what it sounds like—this is a list of everyone you’ve composed an email to, or replied to, from this Google/Gmail account. If you’re using an Android phone or the Google Voice service, you’ll also see people you’ve called (more than once?) show up here. You don’t have a lot of say in the matter as to who goes into All Contacts, but if it ever feels like just too much information stashed away about your email, there are nuclear options, detailed below in “Fixes.”
• My Contacts: Google automatically populates this group, and you can’t delete it or manage who automatically goes into it, though you can manually add or remove individuals from it, as noted below. Contacts in this group tend to rank higher in Gmail’s auto-completing address function, and in other Google apps, whenever you start typing.
• Your Friends, Family, and Coworkers: Default groups, created by Google, and you can’t delete them. If Google Contacts was very, very smart about which contacts it created, which contacts it let into My Contacts, and how it syncs up and eliminates duplications between all your accounts, desktop apps, and devices that can access it, this would be the end of this post. We soldier on, though, because there are many other points to discuss.
• Any group you create on your own: Create your own group, and Google won’t automatically shove people or fake names/numbers into it, and if you’ve got the right kind of phone or syncing app, you can make that your primary “People I Actually Correspond With” list. Highly recommended.

We’ll get to the fixes and tweaks first, and then list some syncing tools that might help you connect Google Contacts in a better way to all your communication outlets.

Fixes

Remove contacts from My Contacts: My Contacts should only contain people who you would actually email, on your own, to update, ask something of, or chat real friendly-like. It can, occasionally, get cluttered up with people you might have had one lengthy exchange with, but never plan to email again—a Craigslist buyer, perhaps.

To remove one or more people from My Contacts, scroll or search to find them, select them from the My Contacts list, then hit the Groups button and select the “Remove from: My Contacts” option. No guarantees they won’t go back there if you get into a real discussion by email or phone, but for most users, it’s not all that painful to do an occasional My Contacts purge.

Remove contacts from chat (or add one in): Two solutions. The first is to mouse over their name in your Gmail chat list, click the “Video & More” button in their name box. From that drop-down, you can set their names to always or never appear, block them, or let Google/Gmail decide when you’ve been chatting frequently enough to warrant a prime spot.

If a contact isn’t in your chat list and you want them there, search out their contact name from the search box at the top of the chat list, mouse over the name result, and do the same kind of chat selection from the “Video & More” menu.

Stop new contacts from appearing in Chat: The second, going-forward solution. From Gmail’s Settings panel, head to the Chat section, and to the right of “Auto-add suggested contacts,” select the “Only allow people …” option. (Last two tips via Download Squad)

Remove Contacts from Google Wave: You do so, according to The Complete Guide to Google Wave, by removing them from Google Contacts.

Import Facebook and LinkedIn contacts into Google: It’s sometimes a smart move, since you’ve already invested all that time into building your social networks. The most reliable way we’ve seen Facebook importation happen requires Firefox with Greasemonkey installed, a handy Greasemonkey script to go with it, and Nic Pfost’s helpful instructions. (Original post)

As for LinkedIn, it’s much easier: click the “Export Connections” link at the bottom of your Contacts page, and you’ll be prompted to save a vCard or Outlook CSV file with your contacts, both of which Google Contacts accepts. For a more continuous sync, try LinkedIn’s Outlook Plug-In.

Duplicates

Manually remove all your duplicates at once: From the Contacts’ main startup page, look in the right-hand pane for the “Find duplicates” button. You’ll see every entry in your contacts for which the names are the same, but email addresses, phone numbers, or other statistics are different. Quickly scan the list and un-check false contacts, like Facebook and other automated reply addresses, then hit the “Merge” button in the upper right. All your contacts are merged, with Google making its best guesses as to which email is home or work and so forth. (Original post)

Carefully edit & merge a particular contact: Search their name from your main Contacts page. Click all the results that pop up that relate to the same person, then hit the “Merge these X contacts” link that appears in the right-hand pane. Fix the email assignments and other details in the editing pane that appears, hit the “Save” button up top, and two or more have become one. (Original post)

Mysterious “blank” contacts: This is most often the case with Android phones syncing to Google Contacts, and it’s known to many. It’s suggested that using Google Voice to call or SMS contacts, then not using Google Voice to do the same, creates these empty, name-only contacts, because you are, technically, using a different number. No fix at the moment that we’ve found, but at least you know where the blanks are (likely) coming from.

BlackBerry duplicate fix: If you’re using the Google Sync app to keep BlackBerry and Gmail account in sync, here’s SudiptiNycteus’ instructions on forcing your phone to stop creating dupes:

1. Click and open contact folder
2. click the berry button and look for Options
3. Click on options
4. Click the General Options Tab
5. Under Actions you will see Allow Duplicate Names:
6. Choose No

Thats it no more duplicates using Google Sync

Make Android syncing selective: By default, your Android phone syncs your entire “My Contacts” group—great if you’ve kept it tidy, annoying if you only want a certain whitelist of friends and contacts to show up. Open the Contacts app, head to the Contacts tab, hit the Menu button, and select “Display options.” From this screen, you can choose which Google or Facebook accounts to sync, and which sub-groups inside those accounts you want shown. A master switch at the top also allows syncing only of those contacts with phone numbers, though that seems like a kind of drastic dead man’s switch for such a Gmail-savvy phone. (via Droidie, which also explains the sync fix procedure for HTC Sense-skinned phones).

The nuclear option—Export/Import to CSV file: Maybe none of the fixes above will do it for you. Maybe they’ll take too much time. You do have an option, if you sincerely want to massively detangle your contacts, or start over with just your Outlook address book, your iPhone/Android list, or whatever you’ve got.

Find the Export link on the far-right side of the main Contacts page—it’s blue on blue, so they definitely don’t want you messing with it as a primary tool. Hit Export, choose to export “Everyone” and do so in “Google CSV” form. You’ll download a file, google.csv, that should open without much trouble in Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice.org, in Google Docs, or other spreadsheet apps.

It is much faster, easier, and, in some cases, formulaic to delete and fix entire rows and columns of data with your contacts inside a spreadsheet—no safety prompts, no buttons to push—just pure data. Of course, you can also mess things up if you move a column left or right, so it’s a good idea to make a copy of your initial contact download, then keep that original copy somewhere safe and backed up—or just email it to yourself.

Once you’re done fixing up your contacts, you can make the call as to whether you’re ready to click on All Contacts, select the “All” link above the list, then hit “Delete” and wipe the slate clean. You’d then re-import your CSV file into Google using the Import link, also on the right-hand side, and if you used the Google format, the contacts you chose to bring back should fit in just fine. It’s not a permanent solution, but for those at their wit’s end, it’s easier than searching out and selectively fixing contacts person by person.

The Gmail/Google Apps Divide

Like Contacts itself, the confusion and division users of both personal Gmail and Google Contacts feel between their different Google-y platforms is something Google’s aware of, and more than one engineer has said a big, serious solution is coming.

In the meantime, Gina has addressed the divide at Smarterware, and noted that she’s had free syncing service Soocial recommended for syncing contacts across Gmail, Google Apps, Outlook, smartphones, and other platforms. You have to hand over your Gmail credentials to a third-party firm, though, and that may kill the deal instantly for some users. For those that would give anything to unite all their address books, it might be quite handy.

Syncing Tools

This isn’t a complete list, by any means, but a primer on some of the tools we’ve run across that keep Google Contacts updated with other platforms. If you’ve got your own favorite app or service for syncing with Google Contacts, tell us about it in the comments, and we’ll try to update this post with more options.

Almost every mobile phone:All of Google’s desktop and phone syncing services

Google Apps to Outlook: Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook

Google Apps Contacts shared to anywhere: Shared Contacts [Google Apps Marketplace; not free]

Thunderbird: Google Contacts add-on or Zindus.

iTunes/iPhone: Through iTunes 7.7 and later.

Mac Address Book: Built-in sync option, with or without an iPhone.

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From: LifeHacker.com

Whether you want to save and watch a Flash video offline, convert a Flash music video for your MP3 player, or do something else entirely, learning how to rip and convert Flash videos is a useful skill. Here’s how it works.

When it comes to ripping Flash videos, there’s more than one way to accomplish the task, and in many cases it depends greatly on where you’re grabbing the video. We’ll cover a number of different options for downloading Flash videos, as well as several ways you can convert them into more useful formats. Once you’ve seen the options, you can choose the one that works best for you and your situation.

Downloading the Flash Video

Most online videos these days use the FLV format to store the actual video files, so our first task is to get a copy of that file. Some sites, like YouTube, will offer an MP4 download in certain cases, but if not, the FLV file can be converted in the next step to a more usable format, so let’s concentrate on getting the file downloaded.

The easiest way to download any video from the majority of online video sites is with the Video DownloadHelper extension for Firefox. Once you’ve installed the extension, head to any video page, and then click the DownloadHelper button button (see screenshot below) to see a list of the available media to download on that page. The extension provides a built-in method for converting video files, but they will end up watermarked, so just download the files in MP4 if possible, or FLV if not.

If the Video DownloadHelper extension doesn’t detect the video on the page, you can sometimes head into Tools -> Page Info -> Media, find the video file in the list of resources, and then click the Save As button. If you are a Linux user, you can also just wait until a Flash video is entirely loaded, and then grab the file from your /tmp folder.

Alternatively, you can use Orbit Downloader, which seems to work best in Internet Explorer—just move your mouse over the video until the GetIt button shows up, and then select the video to download. In our testing, this method worked in an instance or two where the Firefox extension did not. Another solid choice is TubeMaster++, which actually scans network traffic to grab videos, works on Windows or Linux, and can convert to any format—but it doesn’t really work with a wireless network card.

Downloading YouTube Videos

You can’t talk about ripping Flash videos from the web without giving special attention to YouTube, since much more specialized tools are available for easily downloading and converting video from YouTube in a single step.

The single easiest Windows tool I’ve found for downloading and ripping YouTube videos is the YouTube Downloader application, which is as simple to use as pasting in the URL and clicking the OK button. Once it downloads the video, you can switch the radio button and convert the video into almost any format—in fact, you can use this tiny application to convert almost any video (YouTube or not) into almost any popular format.

If you’d rather not use a separate piece of software, you can use the Get YouTube Video bookmarklet, or any number of specialized sites like KickYouTube, KeepVid, deturl, or Vixy to download and rip videos from YouTube or some other sites. The problem with most of these types of sites is that they go up and down, and often end up covered in sleazy ads that trick you into clicking the wrong thing—though Vixy seems to be a solid option, for now.

Converting Flash Video to Other Formats (Video or Music)

Once you’ve got the Flash video downloaded, you’ll probably want to convert it into a format that’s easier to use on other devices (like, say, your iPod). If you’re using the YouTube Downloader or one of the video ripping sites you can download and convert in one step, but if you downloaded from elsewhere you will probably want to convert them.

To convert almost any video into almost any format, I like using the free Format Factory utility; it easily handles every video conversion task you can throw at it, including bulk conversion, which comes in very handy if you want to convert a bunch of YouTube music videos into MP3 files. Just open up the utility, choose your desired format on the left, add the files or folders you want to convert, and then click the Start button. It’s got many advanced formatting options available if you want them, but in our testing the defaults usually work fairly well.

On the other hand, instead of installing a conversion utility, you can always grab yourself a copy of the command-line ffmpeg utility, which is what most video conversion applications use behind the scenes. To convert FLV to another video format like MP4, just use a command line similar to this one:

ffmpeg -i filename.FLV -qmin 2 -qmax 5 -ar 22050 filename.MP4

The qmin and qmax parameters are important for making sure the quality of video is good—the lower the parameters, the better the quality. The -ar parameter is the quality of the audio, and the extension of the filename on the last parameter tells ffmpeg what format to convert the file into. For instance, to convert a flash video to MP3, you could use something like the following:

ffmpeg -i filename.FLV -ar 44100 filename.MP3

If all the command-line options are too much for you to deal with, you can always grab a graphical front-end for ffmpeg, like WinFF or Super.

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From: LifeHacker.com