In my second year as a trainee (nine long years ago) I bought myself a Samsung R50 notebook to replace my aging desktop PC and also take it with me to school (and play games on it – at home of course). At the time this computer was very efficient from a mobile perspective and also well suited to play serious games. Of course, at some point several years later its age became apparent and this year on April 8 the installed operating system, Windows XP, finally became officially obsolete. Since then the computer was sitting at my mother’s house, waiting for… well… a resurrection!Read More »
Category: Technology
Windows Phone: 3 Months Later
What started out as a reasonable decision at the beginning of 2014 now reached its climax with the Surface Pro 3: switching away from Apple, in every regard, and move to the Microsoft platform. First the PC, then the phone and lastly the tablet. Since having a Windows based PC is nothing unusual (although I might be one of the few that actually came to like Windows 8 – just as I was one of the few that liked Vista over XP; what does that say about me?) and the Surface is still too new to write about it in any meaningful way, that only leaves us with the phone.
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Windows Phone 8.1 + Lumia Cyan Firmware
A few days ago Microsoft and Nokia released Windows Phone 8.1 through the Lumia Cyan Firmware update to the public (global availability). Typical nerd that I am, I passed on going to bed but rather installed it immediately.
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Camera Shootout: Nokia Lumia 925 vs iPhone 4s vs. Galaxy S2 (Switch From iOS Pt. 3)
Apart from being a phone, the second most important feature of a smartphone for me is the camera. As I have written previously, the most time I had spent on researching available phones went into reading camera reviews. Since I was committed to about 80% to the Nokia Lumia 925 I was most interested on how this phone compared to my then current iPhone 4S. Unfortunately there haven’t been any reviews comparing those two devices. Most of them used the iPhone 5 or 5s as an opponent, which already had a better camera than my highly praised 4s.
Until now!
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Windows Phone Contacts & Communication (Switch From iOS Pt. 2)
In part 1 I explained what finally made me replace my iPhone with a Nokia Lumia device. This little write-up describes the basic functionality of communicating with contacts, including managing contacts, instant messaging and e-mail.
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Switching From iOS to Windows Phone (Pt. 1)
As I have already mentioned in a previous post (8th paragraph), the Windows Phone platform had me hooked since day one. There was something to it that made it more interesting than iOS or Android. However, at that time the competition had been more mature – not only the OS but also the devices – and therefore I chose a Samsung (from now on called Copyshop) Galaxy S2 as my first smartphone. Android seemed the best fit back then (around 3 years ago), simply because of all the possibilities this platform offered on a technical level (I’m a programmer, that’s how I think). As it turned out, I basically used none of those things I found so interesting (like widgets) but rather tried to get a vanilla Android experience without the Copyshop bloatware – not to mention regular software updates.
Mysterious Case of iPod Shuffle Always Shuffling
Just recently I experienced something odd. My good old iPod Shuffle seemed to ignore the “play in order” setting on the device and instead elected to do as the name implies and shuffle the songs.
What preceded that sudden change of behavior was a failed attempt to sync with iTunes that actually turned into restoring the firmware of the device. For whatever reason, iTunes detected a problem and its only solution was to wipe the iPod. So I did that and afterwards I had that shuffling play-in-order mode.
What actually happened is that with the restore of the firmware the default sorting of tracks on the device changed to be by their track-id. That means it sounded random to me but was in order for the Pod-thing. To solve my problem I opened the “What’s on my iPod” screen and clicked on the “Name” column to sort by artist name.
I “saved” this setting by syncing and then I was done.
Modern Experiences at a Concert
This is a response to a post on Daily Exhaust which itself is inspired by an image from the D11 Conference.
I’ve been to festivals for the past five years and every time I’ve taken lots of photos and even some videos. Especially last year, equipped with the iPhone, I was able to create 1080p video. I have to admit that shooting photos or recording videos takes away part of the experience but, for me at least, it has a big value in retrospect. From all those data I created videos for each of the last three visits to the festival and added some music to it. If available I also chose music of the band that is on the respective photo. Those videos are like a documentary on the whole festival, from getting there, setting up the tent, wandering around, seeing funny things and the actual concerts. I love watching them from time to time and think back at the great time I had. Just last year my sister recorded a “I died for you” from Iced Earth and I used the music from the Alive in Athens live album in the video and it matches so perfectly you could almost think it being the sound of the video (until you realize it’s not Matt Barlow on the stage). Still, a great memory!
I think, as also mentioned in the linked article, that you should be wary of how much you see through your camera and how much you experience by really watching. For me it’s about being there and living it, but also use all that photos and videos as vivid memory to build up a pleasent anticipation for the next gig.
And frankly, who would not want to remember that? (I picked the more catchy ones ;-] )
Project HTPC
Motivation
Not long ago I became quite frustrated with the gaming capabilities of my iMac. It’s not that I didn’t know about the expected performance of the hardware since I bought the cheapest version by design. At that time I did not use the PC I had for what it was built for, which finally led to me selling it. However, recently I felt the urge to play some games other than Diablo 3. For one the iMac just couldn’t deliver the performance to enjoy the visuals of modern games as they were designed to be. Secondly what really frustrated me and this is also the main reason why I never really played anything other than Diablo 3 on the iMac, was the poor cooling management of that machine. I have to crank up the coolers manually (using iStat Menus 3) in order to prevent overheating. Otherwise it’ll just get very hot and reboot eventually. As one can imagine this technique only works reliably on OS X.
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My Preferred Approach to Touch on a Computer
With Windows 8 now finally released, there comes a new generation of hardware with a strong emphasis on the input device – the fingers. Touch as we know and love today has been around in common perception since the release of the first iPhone which was in 2007. The first smartphone like phone was actually released in 1994 by IBM, the IBM Simon. Based on todays standards you can imagine this wasn’t a device one would call “a beauty”. In fact, the Wikipedia page lists the form factor as “brick”. From a current point of view you probably wouldn’t want to use and play around with such a type of touch interface.
(Mountain) Lion automatically wakes from sleep
Since I first got my iMac I always wondered why the machine would suddenly just wake up from Sleep in the middle of the night. I didn’t touch it since at night I prefer to sleep (or else I must be sleepwalking). I initially found a way to fix this but it came up again with the update to Mountain Lion (which just reset the preference).
Go the System Preferences and hit Energy Saver. There you’ll uncheck Wake for Wi-Fi network access (in German: Ruhezustand bei Netzwerkzugriff beenden). I figured that must be the reason because at night my router automatically turns off wireless and just before I get home from work it turns it back on. For me it did the trick.
Here are two images, one from my machine (in German) and one found on Google for an english machine.
The Codeslinger 