Reports are that Prince has died at the age of 57. Time to resurrect this classic. I love the song, not so much the video..
https://vimeo.com/138482649
The soundtrack Prince created for Batman The Movie (1989) is still my favourite soundtrack, followed in quick succession by the Matrix soundtracks..
From that article above, check out Prince on the guitar in this song, WOW.
So, I’m back in the Samsung TouchWiz fold. I was a fairly happy user of Cyanogenmod for a few months which allowed me to use the latest version of Android on my Galaxy S5. It worked almost the way I wanted it to. There were a few issues related to the notification light, the capacitive button lights and bluetooth. I discussed the lights issues in my previous post but only briefly touched on bluetooth.
This doesn’t happen to everyone, but on my phone, if I was using a bluetooth speaker the audio would break up from time to time. This would happen if the phone was moved, the screen turned on, or if I interacted with it in other ways. It was really annoying as you can imagine.
In the last few weeks Samsung have started rolling out the official Marshmallow update for the S5. Last Friday the update for Sri Lanka appeared online. This is important for me because it’s the same model used in Europe and many other countries, SM-G900F!
It wasn’t long before discussion on XDA started, and a ROM I used before, DevBase, was updated with a 6.0.1 release. I like this rom because it has the core Samsung software but has stripped out other bits to save space.
Installing a new rom or firmware takes a while but basically comes down to these steps:
Flashing a new firmware is never without stress. You can soft brick your phone meaning the device won’t boot properly. That happened to me, but after flashing the bootloader and modem again it worked fine. It also takes an age to get things back the way they were before. That’s the kicker. It’s back the way it was before, for the most part so from a cursory glance it looks much the same as it ever did.
So, what’s better now? Bluetooth is perfect now, charging notification lights behave correctly, as do lights on the capacitive buttons. Battery life is the same as before, excellent for an almost 2 year old device. I replaced the stock Samsung lockscreen, notification system and task switcher with Good Lock, which I find is a lot better and faster. You can find it on the US Galaxy App store, or here if you don’t have access to that.
There was definitely more free space on my internal storage when I was running Cyanogenmod. I haven’t tried moving any apps to the SD card yet but there’s about 2GB of space free now which isn’t bad since Google Photos chews up almost 1GB of space. I also flashed URWSoft Barebone Cleaner to free up more system space, but the rom I used was already fairly light already so it didn’t make much of a difference.
I did have trouble with Quickpic and Syncthing deleting photos from my external SD card, but I’m using a very old version of Quickpic, and I think Syncthing had the same problem with Cyanogenmod. I’ve put them on the internal storage for now. I never leave photos on my phone for long anyway.
Of course I’m not using Samsung’s default launcher. It’s Nova Launcher all the way!
Here’s rather impressive remix of the Xenon 2 Megablast main title tune created by a talented banjo player!
Long time readers may remember I used the original music in a video for a short but fun game of Bad Company 2. We joined a game with nobody on the other side so we had fun with the crates, grenades, bullets and smoke. Looking at the date on the video I can’t believe that was almost six years ago!
Youtube annotations are those sometimes useful but more likely annoying messages that appear over videos on that site. You’ve probably seen them when a video asks you to “Like and Subscribe!” or “Visit here for my merchandise”. They can be annoying.
The good news is you can disable annotations each time by clicking on the video settings through the cog symbol, but there is an easy way to disable them permanently.
Go to https://www.youtube.com/account_playback where you’ll see this page:
Simply click on Show annotations and in-video notifications to unset it and save your settings. Annotations be gone!
A short, but well made video on Ansel Adams. More an introduction than anything else but it’ll help you appreciate the zone system Adams created as well as his great art.
If you ever owned a Commodore 64 and remember playing games on it in the 80s or very early 90s be prepared to be blown away by this demo released in 2016.
So, is it true that Americans don’t, by and large, eat chocolate Easter eggs on Easter Sunday? That’s something I heard this morning and I’m wondering how that could possibly be true. Who wouldn’t want to eat lots of chocolate? This article says yes, but some of the comments say no.
Anyway, I have a yummy Aero Easter egg. Shouldn’t have finished that half though. Too much! More later!
This is a fan cut version of the original trailer and it’s much better. They need to hire him to fix the movie.
Via Reddit
CSS3 C64 is an old school C64 intro created completely in CSS, the technology that is normally used to style web pages. You can read more about it here, and the source code is available in your browser, but also on Github. No need for an Action Replay cartridge to peek under the hood this time!
Thanks Commodore is Awesome for the link.
They don’t look quite as good as they did on the salt and vinegar potatoes recipe page but they were easy to make.
Unfortunately the potatoes were a taste explosion that my taste buds weren’t ready for. The combination of vinegar, salt and a dash of pepper was too much.
I blame my blocked sinuses as I’m just getting over a bad cold. Plus I rarely add extra salt to my food. I should have expected this!
My wife liked them however. Yay!