I recently nabbed myself some NFC tags and I’m having a lovely time setting myself up with some nice automation.

I’ve popped one on my bathroom wall and set an alarm with Puzzle Alarm Clock which will only let me close it by tapping my phone to said tag.  But that’s not all!  I’ve also configured the tag to run a Tasker task which will automatically play a Spotify playlist I’ve created, and then open up reddit is fun for when I sit down.

The thing is, for some reason, it’s really difficult to find any sort of information online on how to get Tasker to open a playlist in Spotify and automatically play it.  So here’s how!

1. Create a new task.
2. Add a Send Intent action. (System > Send Intent)
3. In the Action box, paste the following: android.media.action.MEDIA_PLAY_FROM_SEARCH
4. In the Data box, paste the Spotify URI for your playlist. (You can get this by right clicking the playlist in the desktop Spotify client and clicking on “Copy Spotify URI”
5. Under Target, select Activity.

And… that’s it!  It’s surprisingly straightforward, yet barely documented.  Most tutorials I found seem to encourage the use of something like Media Utilities, but those methods seem convoluted and barely even seem to work.

Flappy Bird is the latest craze on both Android and iOS, and we at inLIFE HQ have been getting a bit competitive.. In fact, my boss is so hooked that he’s even started converting Jehovah’s Witnesses!

Unfortunately though, the developer recently removed it from the app store – but if you’re late to the party and want to try and beat my high score, download the Flappy Bird APK for Android below!

Note: Your productivity will drop by around 100%

The Android ADT Bundle has come a long way since I last used it way back when Android first came about.  It used to be a long-winded process of downloading the Eclipse IDE and then setting up the plugin, emulator and SDK levels manually.

I’ve recently been getting back into Android development, but when I tried to set up the ADT Bundle on my laptop, I encountered an issue with the Android SDK Manager – the issue being that it simply wouldn’t open.

After a quick search around, I found that it’s a common problem caused by having an incorrect PATH defined in the system variables.

On Windows 7, this can be changed by right clicking on Computer, and clicking on “Advanced system settings.”  From there, click on “Environment variables”, and find “Path” in the “System variables” list.

Once you’ve found it, double click on it to edit, and paste in the installation path of your JDK, which should be something like the following:
C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_45\bin

Be sure to separate it from any other paths with a semicolon!

After this is done, save and close, go back to the SDK Manager, and download the SDK versions you require!