The Galaxy S4 has a very useful feature hidden in the settings. It’s called Adapt Sound and the difference in sound before and after is like night and day. I’m using the old ear phones that came with my Galaxy S2 and they’re fine for podcasts but after enabling this feature music is a lot clearer and richer. It’s quite amazing.
So, go into Settings, My device, Sound, Adapt Sound to run the sound test through your ear phones. Once that’s done and it only takes a minute or two and it will let you play a music clip with Adapt Sound on or off. The difference is quite startling.
The Ordinance Survey in the UK have published a Minecraft map of (most of) Great Britain. It’s a gigantic 224,000 square kilometres map made up of 22b blocks.
You can download it here. Get it quick before the servers melt!
I had read several positive reviews of this beautiful puzzle platformer and picked it up during a sale some time ago but alas haven’t played it for much more than an hour yet.
It’s not a game that will tax your nerves or make your brain ache but it’s beautiful to watch and the puzzles draw you in. Definitely worth buying and experiencing.
If you have a carrier locked Galaxy S4 you can sim or network unlock it using the instructions here but only if you’re using an older modem firmware. You have to downgrade to “ME2” to unlock it as Samsung have removed those menus. You can find older firmware roms here that you can flash using Odin.
It’s scary because you could brick your phone, but use the firmware checker to find the letter code for your phone (my international i9505 is XX) and search that roms page for “me2” to get the right one.
Why the urgency? The latest update from Samsung that came out a few days ago locks things down tighter. Android 4.3 is supposedly coming in October but I have it on my Nexus 7 and the good stuff is in the Play Store apps. It might be worth disabling the automatic update checker (System Settings->More->About Device->Software update) just in case you update by accident. If only I didn’t like the Samsung camera app so much I’d put the Google Edition rom on there..
It can get pretty crazy at live performances can’t it? I’m 100% guilty of taking photos at concerts and I recorded video of my son’s stage performances at school. I even sneaked a camera into the Irish Bruce Springsteen and Take That concerts.
Meanwhile, this is what Louis CK has to say about posting videos of your kids on Facebook. It’s very NSFW obviously so be warned!
Do you wonder if you’ll ever watch any of those videos again? You need to make it easy for your family to do. Grab Plex, install it on your PC and tell it where your family videos are. It will do the hard work of indexing them. You can browse them from a web interface, on your phone in their app, on PS3 or Xbox 360 even. I’ve rediscovered videos taken when my son was only two years old that make me smile and laugh all over again!
I found the video above on fstoppers where Mike Wilkinson mentions a singer named Mayer Hawthorne who told people to get out their phones and cameras and he and his band posed for photos. Apparently everyone put their cameras away afterwards and enjoyed the show. Good idea. Taking that one step further it’d be great if performers put photos and videos of their shows online for fans to download. Put that URL on the ticket. Could schools do something similar? Most schools must have a reasonably competent (or enthusiastic) photographer and videographer as a parent. Delegate the job perhaps?
Finally, keep making memories and recording them but as I’ve been reminded many times, get your face out from behind the viewfinder too!
