A few weeks ago I wrote about how much I enjoyed Papo & Yo. Well, I finally finished it this evening and I can honestly say it was a wonderful experience. I can count on one hand the number of games I’ve finished this year so that’s saying something!
The game isn’t hard, except when the game goes red and then it’s annoying until the puzzle is figured out. I don’t want to let slip any spoilers. All I’ll say is that if you enjoy platform games you owe it to yourself to buy this game and play it. Get it on Steam or on the PS3 store.
Damn. I changed the unlock pattern on my Nexus 7 and stupidly locked it “to test” the code. Unfortunately I got it wrong each time and now my inbox has 20 emails from Cerberus with pictures of the top of my head and occasionally my eyes.
Panic! Luckily there is a way out. Fail enough times and the device asks you to login to your Google account. It’s supposed to appear after 5 or 6 attempts but I have the 20 Cerberus emails and the “Forgot pattern” message did not appear that quickly.
Nothing easier than logging into Google which I try but it says my email or password are incorrect. I try again. No, nothing. Then it hits me. Two step auth. I had to generate a new application specific password. That worked!
A few minutes later and there’s a notification warning me my Google login has failed. After using an application specific password on the lockscreen I had to login again using my real password. Weird.
Phew.
tl;dr If you have two step auth enabled use an application specific password to login to Google if you forget your Android unlock pattern. Breath again.
A few minutes ago I got an email saying I had been accepted into the Steam family sharing beta. There are detailed instructions explaining how to set everything up but in a nutshell:
Sit down at the computer where you want your Steam library to be shared. This is not your own PC and login.
Enable beta participation in the settings.
After restarting Steam go into “Settings->Manage Family Sharing & Devices” on that computer. Not your own PC. Authorize this PC.
Logout and login as your family member’s account.
So, you don’t allow other Steam accounts access to your Steam library. You give access to other machines. Unless you want to give out your Steam login details (which would be against the T&C) you won’t be giving your online friends access to your games.
It was painless to set up. Once I logged in as the second account my games had “shared by donncha” after each title and could be played. It makes the idea of having a Steam machine in the living room all the more attractive.
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!
I used to take the bus to school. I would spend about 2 hours every day on busses or waiting for a bus so there was plenty of what I would now longingly think of as “down time”. Time for talking, fooling around, staring into space, reading, whatever.
Back in the day, bus tickets in Ireland were almost square pieces of paper. I was sorely disappointed when a few years ago I took public transport for the first time again and I was handed a long strip of paper. Once I’d cut off the extra bit of paper to make a square I used to make tiny little Origami waterbombs or cubes or even a flapping bird if the mood suited me.
I still use Origami, I made a cube for my son yesterday but I was shocked when:
I couldn’t remember how to start it after the initial fold.
I hadn’t blogged about it here before!
I made an Origami camera too. It was quite hard to make and in the end not great. I’ll have to try my hand at some more of the the traditional models.
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