I didn’t know that SwiftKey had arrows at the bottom of the keyboard. You have to enable it in the settings. The arrows allow you to move around the text box with ease. It’s much easier than trying to place the cursor marker with my thumb.
I’m playing with the themes too. The original keyboard is a lot darker so this is quite the change.
And yes, I did start editing this post on my WordPress.com blog but copied it here, all without leaving the comfort of the WordPress app on my phone!
Google now has been updated. You can set reminders by talking to your phone. It understood my Irish voice, but then I haven’t had huge problems with voice apps in a long time. It’s quite amazing how will this tech has come on in the last few years.
It’s funny that the first web result is the apple forum, someone complaining that reminders don’t work…
It’s crazy how many pixels the screen of the Samsung Galaxy S4 has. 1920×1080 pixels. That’s more than many computer users have on the desktop.
Of course, in 5 years time everyone’s going to be marvelling at their 4096 pixel wide screens and this will seem oh so quaint.
These are some of my most used Android apps, including Reddit is fun, Gmail, Feedly, Falcon Pro, WordPress, FBReader, Podkicker Pro, Amazon Kindle and Google Plus. Flipboard looks stunning on it and is one of the pre-installed apps that unfortunately takes up around half the 16GB internal space. The camera is superb. The background image is one I took in my back garden and processed in Pixlr Express. You can find some more photos in my Blarney post I made this morning.
It beats me why manufacturers of Android phones couldn’t make it possible to uninstall those apps I don’t need. I have all the gesture stuff turned off, and the Samsung Keyboard but they still remain on the device sucking up space. There’s still 4GB of free space so I have some breathing space still. Phew.
I really need to set up Folder Sync on this phone to copy stuff off on a daily basis.
My son Adam has taken an interest in Pinocchio after receiving a little wooden toy that looks similar to the well known character. He watched a few videos on Youtube of the Disney classic and since I knew the original would be available as a Kindle download I offered to read him a few chapters before going to bed.
What an eye opener.
I never saw the original Walt Disney cartoon but I’m familiar with the characters and the story. I’ve only got to chapter 6 of the story but so far Geppetto is in gaol for child(puppet) abuse and Pinocchio has killed Jiminy Cricket (Talking Cricket in the story) with a mallet to the head. (Apparently he reappears alive at the end of the story but it’s not explained how)
.. but unfortunately it struck him exactly on the head, so that the poor Cricket had scarcely breath to cry “Cri-cri-cri!” and then he remained dried up and flattened against the wall.
In an awful twist, later on in the novel Pinocchio is caught and hung by the cat and the fox. He dies and “Collodi actually intended that to be the end of his tale, but public outcry from fans got him to return to the story and bring the puppet boy back to life.” (src)
I may read the story for myself, but I’ll track down a book based on the Disney movie instead. It’s not just the much darker imagery and events in the book but also the odd, old fashioned English. It’s difficult going. Reading the story aloud is difficult.
Pinocchio to Talking Cricket: “Take care, you wicked, ill-omened croaker! Woe to you if I fly into a passion!”
The soldier without disturbing himself in the least caught him cleverly by the nose and gave him to Geppetto.
For further reading, you can find the original Pinocchio for free in many places including Amazon. Also take a look at this commentary and this one.
A talking parakeet called Disco. What a superb mimic! (via Reddit)
Finally, a Kerbal stands on the Mun in Kerbal Space Program. Well done Corkin Kerman! Unfortunately the lights go out each night as the rechargeable battery runs out of power around 3am. That upsets poor Corkin as he’s engrossed in David Nicol’s new book, Lament for the Living. He printed out the Kindle version you see..
I would like to say I did it without any help but Mechjeb 2.0 played a part in getting Corkin there. The Smart A.S.S is invaluable for landing and a great help lining up for a manoeuvre node. Thanks TalenTaylor for your asparagus engine layout and moon lander tutorials. With 7 Jumbo fuel tanks I reached orbit with a tank that was almost 75% full! Good thing too as I burned that getting to the Mun and cirularizing my orbit. Efficiency? Bah, I laugh in the face of efficiency!
It wasn’t all plain sailing. Once or twice the moon lander never even reached orbit. Ooops.
Here’s an early level from the demo of Trials Evolution Gold Edition called Beach Head. I wasn’t expecting the war setting with exploding bombs, smoke and flames or the export to Youtube option either!
This was recorded on a PC with an i5 2400 CPU and an Nvidia 560ti GPU. Some people with Nvidia cards are having problems running the game but it worked ok for me.
I was a big fan of the original Xbox 360 game but this is more of the same, just flashier and bigger! It’s a simplistic platformer at heart so don’t go into the game expecting something deep and meaningful. It’s very accessible, with the quick restarts making up for the many inevitable falls.
Having had my fill of the game on Xbox, I think I’ll wait until there’s a deep discount on the Steam Store for this. Try out the demo, it’s fun!
The Commodore 65 was a prototype computer produced by Commodore between 1990 and 1991 to be an improved Commodore 64. I’ve hardly ever come across it online and never heard of it back in the day, but when Commodore was liquidated they sold the prototype machines. If you have one and are willing to part with it you could be in for a nice surprise!
This one on Ebay went for €17,827 last month. It’s not as if much can be done with it as it was never official released but I guess you can run it in C64 mode.
Anyone got one or played with one? (via)
For the last few weeks I’ve noticed unusual floating adverts from superfish.com on amazon.co.uk, focalprice.com and other shopping sites but I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. Turns out I’m not the only one to notice them.
It was an extension I had installed in Google Chrome. I went through each of the extensions I have installed, checking the options for each. Some didn’t have any options page and only one mentioned adverts at all but it wasn’t the Superfish one. With those checked I disabled each extension one by one, reloading Amazon until the advert went away.
I found it. “Flash Video Downloader” version 2.3.5 (id: ggkfikfcbnpfoicfjammigpnakpogebh) was responsible for the adverts. Authors of software want to be paid but this was very underhand. The extension has no options page and doesn’t mention adding Superfish adverts on the extensions page. It’s also a reminder of how much trust we put into the authors of software with access to our personal and private data. Since finding this I found the CNET download page and reviews for the extension. The latest reviews warn of the added malware:
Pros
Flash Video Downloader used to be an easy & safe product to download flash-based videos embedded into various websites.Cons
They’ve secretly slipped Adware/Malware into their product (Superfish “Featured Shopper”). Flash Video Downloader obviously tracks your browsing history (that’s how it know’s when there’s a flash video available to download)… who knows where your browsing data is going now that they’ve got AdWare/Malware involved.Also, Flash Video Downloader recently removed support to download YouTube videos. (I suspect Google/YouTube probably forced that change for copyright purposes.)
Summary
With Adware/Malware added to the product and YouTube support removed removed, I suspect most users will no longer find this product helpful or safe to use.
The extension isn’t on the Chrome Web Store. The last time I went searching I couldn’t find a decent one on there but maybe that has changed since. I don’t want to pirate Youtube videos. Sometimes I just want to watch a gameplay video offline!
You should read about the development of a Ludum Dare entry called Ponk.
It’s a C64 version of Pong, developed on a real C64 with only a C2N datasette to save code. Back in the day I was lucky enough to have a 1541-II disk drive. I can’t imagine how painful it must have been working with a slow and unreliable cassette.
In the end he couldn’t transfer his game to a PC so he had to take screenshots of his game and OCR them, hand checking every byte. I did something similar about 20 years ago when I was tinkering with a C64 to Amiga cable and needed to somehow transfer a C64 programme from the Amiga to the C64 to do the transfer .. Painful.
Wow. Well done Sosowski. (via Indiegames)