Da Vinci's Demons – reviewing a tv-show

I came across this show while channel surfing at my parents house. I ended up watching the sixth episode of the first season and found it so good that I decided to watch the whole series. The first season was good enough to raise a few thoughts.

Da Vinci's Demons is set in renaissance Florence – the cradle of enlightenment, democracy and liberty. Whether you really believe that this was the case, Florence was actually quite advanced compared to rest of Europe at that time. Florence had become extremely wealthy from trading with fabrics and , most of all, banking. The city was full of palaces and had quite a few towers, the towers were so numerous that at one point it was forbidden to build towers higher than 19 meters. What made renaissance Florence become a legend was it's ruling family the Medicis. The family Medici is well known as supporters of art and science. Under their protection and patronage worked some of the most brightest renaissance geniuses – most brightest of them all was Leonardo Da Vinci.

The basic plot of the series is as follows: Da Vinci meets a Turk who tells him about a mythical artefact called “Book of Leaves” it is supposed to hold all the knowledge, I mean everything. Being the curios type he is Da Vinci sets out on a quest to find the Book of Leaves and during his quest he find out that the Vatican is also after it and to hide the artefact into Vatican's secret archives since it might bad for their business if people would find out that the church does not hold ultimate truth about the origin of the universe.

Usually some familiar invention made by Leonardo appears in the episodes that he utilizes to solve a problem or challenge he faces. Most of the time the inventions and plots are quite entertaining and funny but there is one episode that is just simply brain dead.

///SPOILER///

In one of the episodes Da Vinci's enemies come up with plot that is sure get him executed. With the help of a bribed victim and judges they accuse Da Vinci of sodomy, a crime punishable by death, even tough no-one has been found guilty in Florence for years (that's because the city is so liberal and civilized, get it). Okay, so Da Vinci gets framed and locked up in prison. Everybody is worried since he seems to be making no effort to get out and escape. This is were it gets fucking retarted. With the help explosions coming from bombs made of bat shit and delivered by bats, Da Vinci and his friend switch places in the prison. Da Vinci now free goes to the corrupted judge responsible for his case and knocks him. When the judge wakes up he finds himself tied to a pig (what?!?) and Da Vinci near by with contraption that can record the judge engaged in activity far worse than sodomy – bestiality. With this rudimentary camera Da Vinci takes a picture of the judge with pig and projects the image to the clouds for the whole Florence to see. After taking the picture Da Vinci returns to his cell and in the next session of the court all charges against him are miraculously dropped and he walks free.

///SPOILER ENDS///

In some cases the show pushes a bit too much Da Vincis innovations, the ideas of liberty and democracy and how the catholic church is totally corrupted and evil. However, the main plot line where Da Vinci and allies of Vatican fight to find “ Book of Leaves” is very entertaining. I also like the characters of the corrupted Pope and the ruthless count Riario. They have also woven in some interesting subplots that slowly unfold during the series.

Despite the brain dead bits this show offers entertaining stories so give it a look.

Bleergh - I am the devil

Canolite D flash unit: Fixing the batterycover using 3D printing

Time to write a few lines to this blog and boy has it been a while. Last time I wrote was in October about rooting my phone.

This time I want to revisit an old topic. Over a year ago I wrote about how I fixed my Canolite D flash units battery compartment. The flash became much better but there was still one problem, the battery cover itself was broken. Two little bits had broken off from the cover that used to lock it in place. Since the cover was broken I had to use a piece of tape to hold it in place. This was not a very elegant solution so I started to thinking about how I could fix it.

I had read and seen videos about 3D printing and was terribly excited about this new technology. I saw an advertisement that Sculpteo offered a free 3D print if you registered to their site. I decided to try it and see if the printing resolution would be enough for my project. I placed my order and after a week I got my android key ring. The key ring had pretty elegant and fine structures which meant that there was a fair chance that my project would be successful.

Then it was time to find the tools that I would need to create a 3D model of the battery cover. As a software tool I chose Autodesks 123d since it was (and still is) free software and it would most likely be enough for my purposes. Of course, I also had to pick up a calibre and start taking measurements. After a while started to get a hang of from what kind of shapes the battery cover was comprised of. Then it was time to start playing around with 123d and start putting together an stl-file. There where a few hurdles in figuring out the best way for doing certain things, but mostly the whole process was quite easy. Of course, I had to be very precise. 

Anyway I managed to make an stl-file and uploaded it to Sculpteo. The solidity checker showed that my design was solid enough to survive the printing process intact so I placed my order. 

This is what I got back:

Canolite D: Perfect fit! Success!!

Canolite D: 3D printed battery cover on the left

Canolite D: 3D printed battery cover on the right

As you can see the project was total success. The part fits perfectly to the flash unit. This really proves how cool 3D printing is as a technology. You can manufacture spare parts to stuff have not been in production for a long time and make them usable again. It is not much short of a miracle. 

Now all I need to is load some film to my camera and start taking photos. Yes!!!

Experiences On Rooting My HTC Wildfire

CyanogenMod 7 running on my HTC Wildfire

Couples of posts earlier I wrote about my experiences on rooting and flashing a new ROM to my Samsung Galaxy Tab GT-P100. Since everything went well and relatively without a hassle my hunger grew and I started to consider doing the same thing for my phone. So, I own an old HTC Wildfire and it never has had a very good performance. Having used the phone for couple of years the OS responsiveness of the phone became rather sluggish and prone to crashes. It did not help that the geocaching application had "secretly" hogged space by storing every geocache that I had viewed into a hidden folder on my SD-card. Clearing up all the hidden files from SD-card helped a bit, but I wanted more.

Here is how I rooted my phone:

Backups

First of I had to back all my data. I synced my contacts to my Google account and used some free sms-backup software to take a copy of my messages. There are a tons of free apps that you can use to backup your messages. I did not think I had any that important apps on my phone so I did not bother with backing up my apps with Titanium Backup.

rooting

Rooting

Google Car Home - YES!

First item on the list is rooting. I used Revolutionary to gain root access and s-off. It was a piece of cake. The only problem was that all the rooting guides tell you that you use the volume keyes to navigate when you are using Revolutionary. At one point I was sure that my phone was bricked. This is not the case. In fact you can use the optical track ball navigate inside revolutionary.

The basic flashing procedure was very straight forward. I chose to flash the latest version CyanogenMod7 since the Wildfire doesn't have very powerful processor. So now my Wildfire runs Android 2.3.7. Great!

After rooting I noticed that GPS reception was not working. Crap! Again this was quite easily fixed by reflashing the radio part of the OS. I flashed the version 3.35.20.10 of Wildfires radio software and now my GPS work quite fast.

I think the phone is a little bit faster with the new custom ROM, but the performance increase isn't that big. The slight increase in performance, however, has improved the way how newer navigation apps work. The FM radio app works much better now. Before you had to be very careful with your headphones when you wanted to listen to the radio and each and every little movement of the headphone wire caused crackling. Now you can actually listen radio on the go, while biking or walking it doesn't matter. Second nice new feature is that Google Car Home is included into CM7.

Overall benefits

 

Overall, again, I would say that rooting and flashing a custom ROM to my HTC Wildfire gave it a new lease on life (?!?). I think that I am able to use this a while longer and I am not in a hurry to upgrade my phone SGS3 (drool) or even iPhone. Actually, the fact that I'm able to modify and upgrade my old phone by myself, makes me like my old phone even more. I think this is were the true power of open source/ Linux based systems lies. You control the software of your devices and not some company that may or may not release an update for your device. I know that this sort tinkering is not for everyone but I do feel that if you spend couple of nights familiarising with the basics of rooting and flashing custom ROMs to Android devices anyone can learn to unleash the full potential of their Android devices.

There was one problem, quite a big problem, that emerged after flashing the new custom ROM. The battery of my phone seemed to drain out really fast. I charged the phone up, went to bed and when I woke up the phone had powered off. I had to use terminal emulator to delete the batterystats.bin file and reboot the phone and after few cycles the battery seems to (almost) back to normal. The information on the forums says that this is quite a common problem. Otherwise my HTC now works much better.

XBMC - Replacing Front Row

For those macusers that skipped Lion and hadn't payed attention to all the changes that were already introduced in Lion it may have been a bit of a surprise that Mountain Lion no longer has Front Row. This also means that Apple Remote becomes a bit useless since you can not use it to remotely control iTunes (well you can, but the controls are very limited).

I was quite happy with Front Row and was totally in the dark regarding when it comes to media center software. I was a bit bummed out when I realised that Front Row was gone from OSX but I thought that I would manage without any media center software. Luckily I am subscribed to Nixie Pixel's Nixie Does Linux -channel on YouTube and in one of her recent videos she covered free open source HTPC software. In the video she presented, among others, XBMC (Xbox Media Center). I immediately decided to check it out and went to the website and found out that XBMC is also available for OSX. Sweet.

XBMC is absolutely amazing piece of software and it is free. Front Row was OK, but XBMC is ten billion times better and is a perfect replacement for the discontinued Front Row. First of all your music, movies, tv-shows and pictures can be synced to XBMC and you can use add-ons to view material from YouTube, TV- and radio-channels. Another great feature of XBMC is that you can use your iPhone or Android device as a remote via wifi and best of all is that the software supports Apple Remotes. When you enable from the settings the option that XBMC can be launched using a remote, XBMC can be launched by pushing the menu button on Apple Remote. This means that you really do not need any 3rd party software to assign a custom command for Apple Remote. Just this feature makes XBMC quite brilliant. 

XBMC, Android Remote and Apple Remote are best of friends!

Bottom line is that XBMC is a perfect replacement for Front Row and on many levels it's much better and customizable than Front Row ever was. After installing XBMC you won't miss Front Row for a millisecond.

The Gaslight Anthem: Handwritten (2012)

The Gaslight Anthem is my new favourite band. Their music hits like million volts. Check out these two songs from their latest album "Handwritten".

45

handwritten

At the moment my favourite song on their album is "Biloxi Parish". If you like rock music, check them out.

Thoughts On Mountain Lion

Oh wow. The new update for OSX is out. I was quite excited about this update since I decided to skip OSX Lion because so many people reported performance issues and other troubles after the release.

First thing to like about Mountain Lion was the price. The update costs only around 16 euros. Nice. Previously Apple has priced upgrades so that if something costs $20 in the U.S. it also costs 20€ in Europe thus making upgrades relatively more expensive in Europe. But that's enough about the pricing.

I'm no power user of Macs. I use my Mac for web browsing, light image editing and other everyday stuff. So these opinions reflect the opinions of a average user after couple weeks of usage.

new features

Mountain Lion introduces quite a bit of changes to gesture controls and one of the biggest changes is so called natural scrolling. I am sorry Apple but how is this natural or intuitive? I disabled this feature right away and reverted back to the old and trusty way of scrolling. However Mountain Lion does have some new nice gestures. When you sweep with two fingers from left to right over the left edge of the touch pad you expose the new notification center. The notification center is a pretty cool feature. I just wish that I could set up Skype and Tweetdeck messages to appear in the notification center but I guess this requires a new versions of those programs. I hope they are released soon. Three finger swipe exposes the dashboard, it's nothing revolutionary, but this feature might become handy if Apple plans to launch an app that allows you to control your Mac with an iPad or other iDevice with touch controls.

One thing that bothers me is that in Mountain Lion swipe gestures have been removed from Finder (indeed they were removed already from Lion). But you can restore them quite easily. All you need to do is press the option key down before you swiping. This trick was first published by Macworld. Second thing that has changed in Finder is the fact that by default it does not show your HD on the devices list. To edit the sidebar and which devices it shows just click Finder/Settings/Sidebar and check the box next to HD.

I haven't figured out any use for the Launchpad. It is supposed to make launching applications easier, but I find the four finger pinches quite cumbersome to use. Usually if I know what app I want to launch I just tap ctrl+space and use the spotlight search. Again, Launchpad might come handy if you use an iPad to control your Mac.

I'm sure there are lots of new features (like AirDrop and iCloud, or Gatekeeper) that I haven't even touched but these were the ones that caught my eye. 

front row

The problem with Mountain Lion is that it gets rid of Front Row. Even though I did not use it that much it still was a great way to use iRemote to control Mac when you wanted to listen music or watch movies. What do I do with iRemote anymore? It is in fact now a useless piece of kit unless you are very enthusiastic on giving pp presentations. I think it is a bit of counter intuitive that you can buy and rent movies from iTunes but app that makes it easy to watch those movies has been removed from the OS.

performance

I haven't noticed any performance issues on my Macbook Pro (mid 2010). There are slight hiccups when you switch to full screen mode on QuickTime. The transition just isn't as smooth as it could be. Other wise my old Mac seems to work just fine.

update

There have been rumours that Apple is preparing a larger update for Mountain Lion, but no release date has been published. We just have to see if the update brings any improvements to already good piece of software.

Upgrading Galaxy Tab GT-P1000 to Ice Cream Sandwich using Mobile Odin

In this post I'd like to share some of my experiences on upgrading my Galaxy Tab GT-P1000 to ICS 4.0.4. These instructions are mainly aimed at explaining some of the concepts related to flashing custom roms and give instructions on how I was able to successfully upgrade my device.

REMEMBER, I AM AN IDIOT AND I DO NOT REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT I AM DOING. THEREFORE DON'T PROCEED IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE DOING. DO SOME RESEARCH ON OTHER SOURCES BEFORE YOU START FLASHING CUSTOM ROMS.

THERE IS A VERY REAL POSSIBILITY THAT YOUR DEVICE MIGHT BE DAMAGED.

Okay, now that you have been warned it is time start. Here are the steps that I took:

1. Rooting
2. Installing Mobile Odin
3. Installing CWM Recovery (flashing a custom kernel)
4. Downloading back up files (just in case)
5. Choosing a custom ROM
6. Backing up, Flashing ROM and Google Apps

1. Rooting

The first thing you need to do is gain superuser rights to your tab. That is what rooting does. I was able to root my device using SuperOneClick. There are very good guides on how to do this so follow them. It is easy and quite convenient way to root your device but you will need a Windows PC for this step.

2. Installing Mobile Odin

Then you should install Mobile Odin on your tab. If you do not have access to a Windows machine there is no other (easy) way to flash kernels  Buy the pro version so you do not have to worry about downloading the correct configuration files. You can find Mobile Odin on Google Play.

3. Installing CWM Recovery (flashing a custom kernel)

CWM recovery is the best tool for flashing custom ROMs that are in zip-format. Here is the catch, the current version of CWM that is on Google Play doesn't support Galaxy Tab GT-P1000. What can you do? Well, some smart people have created custom versions of CWM Recovery that are integrated to custom kernel. One custom kernel that includes CWM is the custom kernel by Team Overcome. Use Mobile Odin to flash the kernel to your tab.

For me this was the biggest hurdle, because I do not have a Windows or Linux computer. Once I got CWM on my tab I was able to follow the normal guides for for flashing custom ROMs.

4. Downloading back up files (just in case)

Before you start flashing custom ROMs it might be a great idea to download the original firmware for your galaxy tab. You can find them at sammobile.com. You need to create an account before you can download any firmwares.

5. Choosing a custom ROM

There are two major developers of Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.4 (ICS) for GT-P1000. Cyanogen Mod and AOKP seem to be the most reliable developers at the moment. You can find their custom ROMs at the website of xda-developers. Remember to download Google Apps, as well.

6. Backing up, Flashing ROM and Google Apps

From this point onwards I was able proceed by carefully following other online guides that are available. The entire flashing process was fairly easy and didn't take that long. Have fun but be careful. And remember to backup your data.

*************************************************
DO NOT JUST TRUST ME. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.
************************************************* 

My Galaxy Tab GT-P1000 running Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.4 =)

After flashing my tab got so much better. Biggest surprise was that now the GPS works just fine. Before it was totally unable to get a GPS lock. ICS is generally much better than GB. Now I can use my tab much longer than I expected so for some reason the battery life has improved. I just hope that the devs will also roll out Jelly Bean to Galaxy Tab. I would be ecstatic if Linaro would find it's way to Galaxy Tab. Can you imagine how much faster the tab would be?