Samsung Galaxy S4 Keyboard Sucks. The Internet is a blessing. SwiftKey Rocks

Galaxy S4 Keyboard is poor and should be replaced. Had a problem with mine and replaced it with SwiftKey.

It’s early morning and I know I should be hugging the road to work instead of harassing the world with my ranting.

I barely managed S4 inbuilt keyboard and then one day the insane software lost all my learned words and wouldn’t learn any new grammar. Like it suddenly got tired of going to school!  Imagine typing local food names in Yoruba and the crazy keyboard starts suggesting words that ensures my jail time is calculated with a computer.

Anyway I hit my second brain;  The Internet.  Drums roll!

Apparently Sammy has been doing this to a lot of people. After bumbling around for a few minutes, I saw a gazillion good reviews of SwiftKey. Someone even said it saved her marriage, healed her of cellulite, yada yada. Ok, that was a joke.  I have used it for a few minutes now and it works as recommended. I just typed this post on it (and corrected the typos and poor grammar on a keyboard at work).  I dare not do that on a stupid Sammy keyboard, I will probably be tied down from the keyboard-induced insanity by now.

If you use Galaxy S4, this is the keyboard for your phone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.touchtype.swiftkey.phone.trial.
It is a trial but I’m gonna pay for this!

Olowe of Ise

I used to wonder what our older folks were up to like 200 years ago – most often I come up with nothing apart from Oduduwa – Lamurudu stories which obviously are folklore. Not that Oduduwa didn’t exist, I just don’t believe he fell out of the sky. Granted, there were some stories of Benin and their wondrous artifacts which the British stole.

Surely my Pales weren’t living in caves – and it wasn’t all about Ijapa and Yannibo.

But there was some dude, Olowe of Ise. He’s probably one of, if not, the greatest African sculptors who ever lived. He carved some magical doors and lintels; one is still at the British Museum till date. He was from Ise-Ekiti but worked far and wide. I’m not sure if I got my name from his but then, who would mind? You can read more about some of Olowe of Ise Biography on Wikipedia and see some of his doors here.

The only amazing, or do I say sad thing, about him is that the average lad on the street of Lagos, or Ise for that matter, doesn’t even know him. We all know about Lawrence of Arabia, King Arthur, bla bla, yet we don’t know such a great gem of history.

Van Damme Epic Split on Volvo is Inspiring!

I’m generally a positive person. Or so I think. Some of my friends don’t think so but who cares about them anyway?

How has this got to do with this post?

Ok, some random friend shared Volvo’s advert with me. The Jean Claude Van Damme (JCVD) advert is currently trending nicely on the internet but the most important thing for me is the deep message – you can be what you want to be irrespective of time. JCVD has gone through a fair share time of ups and down but at over 50, he’s got an incredible body. If I did that split, I would be paralyzed for life.
By now you would have known that I have the mentality of geezer but a never say die one.


Jean Claude Van Damme doing the famous Epic Split for Volvo
Go one JCVD, inspire us not to give up!

CactusVPN to the Rescue

Every wannabe geek always requires some repertoire of tools – even if all you do is sell cards every day. Top on my list is TeamViewer for working remotely and helping those pesky friends of mine (you know yourselves) but increasingly I find myself having to do quite a lot with services not readily available in Nigeria. Case in point, I can’t pay for my Rebtel services within Nigeria, our IP addresses have the same status as our green passport.

Here comes VPN. VPN has been an enterprise gourmet since a thousand years ago but with availability of free VPN services that allow you to hide your IP, you can securely (without badass guys such as the annoying network admin sniffing at your traffic) reach services restricted by geo-IP. One of such awesome services is CactusVPN – I bumped into them while researching on top notch VPN services. The good thing is that you could start out with a free VPN account, test to see it suits you and then go all the way for it.

Installation of the client is a snap – you are up and running in a minute. But if you try to do torrents, you are warned one and if you happen to be a goat, your service is tossed out like a rancid salad. Although the Dutch guys are very permissive so you can do all the torrents you want via the NL Servers. Why don’t you give them a try?

50,412,559 Nigerians on the Internet

The reality is, I’m not much better than the armchair consultants I ranted about. Some months ago I wrote that Nigeria doesn’t have more than 17M internet users. I did my calculation based on MTN’s year end result and extrapolated that for the whole industry.

Please read paragraph 5 of page 50 of the MTN Group Annual Report for 2012.

Not a bad try but then NCC poked their fat fingers into my eyes and called me a freaking liar.
Based on the current data, as of July 2013, 50,412,559 dudes are watching porn using the internet in Nigeria from mostly their mobile devices.

Well I’m starting to see that around. Not that I can see 50M Nigerians dancing Azonto on the internet. After all, how many users actually come around to read my rants? I’m not that popular. You never know, I could be suffering from a chronic case of megalomania.

I can’t overcome the temptation to rant.
Some years ago, Blackberry was the king of Nigeria’s fondlesmob market. But they were expensive and very bad. Sammy and Lugi boys came around but they were expensive too. Then Ching Chong! The market is now getting driven by extremely cheap, I mean outrageously cheap, Android phones knocked out from X,000 Chinese factories for the world to use. And they work! Some days ago, I heard how the 5 inch Tecno Phantom A+ apparently sold out in Lagos; at N35K a pop, that was a badass bargain :-). Now we even have N14K full Android phones and of course they are all on the internet. The executives of MTN and others must be going through a paroxysm of excitement.

You can read more about the latest NCC internet data here.

By the way only about 114,760,406 lines are active now. That’s more than all the population in the other African countries combined 10 times. OK, that was a joke!