Turn off "Say OK Google" voice search feature in KitKat

Problem:

I'd like to turn off the "Say OK Google" always-listening voice search feature in KitKat. How can I do so?

Solution:

One way to turn this feature off on the stock version of Android, is to navigate to Settings -> Language&Input -> Voice Search and then uncheck "Hotword detection".

References:

For more information on turning off this always-listening feature in both voice search as well as Google Now, you can check out the more detailed articles below:

• http://www.talkandroid.com/guides/beginner/how-to-turn-off-okay-google-always-listening-feature-in-the-google-experience-launcher/
• http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-turn-off-ok-google-hotword-detection-in-android-4.4-kitkat/

Fullscreen PhoneGap app with XCode

Problem:

How can I get rid of the status bar on top of my PhoneGap application on my iOS device?

Solution:

There are several ways to do this, and although I won't go into all of the ones I found, one of the easiest ways to do this is to just edit your project's Info.plist file. This is generally named in the form of "YourAppName-Info.plist".

In your plist file, secondary-click and add a row. Name this row UIStatusBarHidden, and change its type to Boolean. Note that if a drop-down menu appears and gives you the option to select "Status bar is initially hidden", pick that. In both cases, set the value to YES.

The next screenshot is an example where the choice is given to initially hide the status bar:

The next time you run your PhoneGap application, you'll now notice that it is fullscreen. This will continue to be the case until your application code does anything to change this, (for instance, if you try to send the user to a different page).

Other thoughts:

This was tested with PhoneGap version 1.5.0 (codename Cordova) on iOS 5.1, using XCode 4.3.2. Your mileage might vary with different versions. Also note that these instructions can be used to initially hide the status bar in any iOS application, not necessarily just PhoneGap applications.

Full Google Calendar in Playbook (or mobile browser)

Back Story:
During the price drop of last year I got a Blackberry Playbook prior to the version 2 update (before it had a decent calendar app). When trying to use Google Calendar in its place, one of the things I ran into was that Google Calendar would default to the mobile site in a browser, whereas some friends and I really liked using the full site at the time. We ran into this issue with some other mobile devices, too.

Solution:
One way to get the full Google Calendar to display in the browser is to use the following URL:

https://www.google.com/calendar/render?gsessionid=ok 

Additional Notes:
Bookmarking this URL allows for easy access to this web app, and this workaround solution still worked as of March 2012.

Incorrect time on received text messages

Ever since Feb 29 (coincidentally), my smartphone had suddenly begun showing weird behavior for received text messages. For instance, if I sent a message at 8pm and immediately got a reply, it would show up as 3pm. Aside from the inconvenience factor, for some phones this can be a problem if "conversation" views are used as replies and sent messages do not appear one after another.

Diagnosis:
It turns out that recently, my service provider had a cell that had its time zone programmed wrong and because my phone was set to automatically update date, time, and time zone from the cell phone company, it updated my phone's time zone to the wrong zone.

Solution:
A quick fix was to manually set my phone's time zone and stop it from automatically updating. This seemed to fix the problem.

Final Thoughts:
This post is not really a definitive solution for all causes of this problem. Rather, it is meant to talk about one possible cause of this problem (and a solution for that cause), just in case someone out there hadn't thought of this cause while trying to debug their own phone or debugging an app for texts.