Review: Pirates 4: On Stranger Tides

Thanks to a great Groupon, my wife and I were able to go see Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides [IMDB] last Saturday. Unfortunately, Fandango doesn’t let you buy IMAX tickets for anywhere within about a 4 hour drive, so we settled for the regular RealD 3D showing instead. After all, it was all the same price to us. We went to the AMC Livonia 20 location which was decent enough. The screen and quality were nice and the lobby area was nice. The only complaint was the chairs looked very old and were squeaky. The arm rests also were stuck in place.
We got there early in order to get a good seat, something I’ve learned is critical for 3D showings because if you’re anywhere off center, then everything gets blurry and it’s just not very good. I was a little leary about the movie given it’s bad reviews, and I guess so were other people. We were 1 of maybe 4 other groups of people in the theaters and the first ones there despite only being 15 min. early. Perfect seats for the win!

After the obligatory 30 min. of previews, the movie started and we watched about the first 10 or 15 min. of the showing and the fire alarm went off. Free tickets due to some kid pulling the fire alarm meant that our $9 Groupon was really paying off! Back in the theater, they got everything back up and running and we watched the movie without any distractions.
Overall, I found the movie exceeded my (low) expectations. It was pretty much everything you’d expect out of a movie based off of a Disneyland ride: fun, comedic, and action-packed. In the previews they kept talking about the zombies and mermaids, and I was very relieved that the zombies did not play a large role. The story focused on 3 groups of people all trying to find the fountain of youth and went along mostly predictably. There were a few fun “twists” but nothing earth shattering or that relevant to the plot.

Would I have paid full price for the movie? No. Was I happy paying $9 for the movie? Sure; It was a fun movie for a date and the two free additional tickets certainly were a welcome surprise.
Verdict: Go to the theater only if you’ve got a deal or are seeing it with friends. (3 / 4)

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Tuesday Jun 14 11pm  

 
 

Stripping GPS Data from Photos

One of the great features that modern phones and some cameras offer is the ability to geo-tag your photos. This allows you, for example, to see exactly where that amazing sunrise was in that picture you took last year. It also allows you to aggregate all of your photos and see a geographical representation of your vacations, or other adventures. However, if you upload these photos to the web, you aren’t always guaranteed that this information is hidden. And while it’s not really that big of a deal that your friends know exactly where you went on vacation last week, you don’t necessarily want people on twitter (read anyone) knowing that you’re in Paris right now and exactly where that brand new 60” HDTV you tweeted a picture of is.
Fortunately, you can simply remove the GPS exif data from the image, and post your pictures wherever you like! But how do you actually go about doing this? There’s a great little command line utility called ExifTool that allows you to remove all GPS data and much more. Simply install the software and then enter the following command:

$ exiftool -GPSLatitudeRef= -GPSLongitudeRef= -GPSLatitude= -GPSLongitude= -GPSAltitude= -GPSAltitudeRef= -GPSMapDatum= -GPSDateStamp= -GPSTimeStamp= -GPSVersionID= “filename”

This command will overwritethe file and remove most GPS tags, so be sure to make a duplicate if you want to save the data for personal use. If your camera writes more GPS information, you can see all of the supported GPS Tags and change the command as necessary, but this will remove the longitude, latitude, and altitude along with a few other standard bits of information.

For Mac users, I’ve made an extremely simple Automator application that lets you drop any image onto the icon and then creates a copy of the image (_web) without the GPS data leaving the original untouched. Feel free to download it and pass it along. Of course, make sure you test it out first. I assume no liability for any lost photos or data.

Strip_GPS_Data.zip Download this file

Monday Apr 25 6pm  6 notes

 
 

Newegg Customer Service

I recently built an HTPC, and due to the rarity of the parts, went with NewEgg as my go to online retailer. I’ve always been pleased with them in the past, mainly due to their low prices, reputation, and great search utilities. In order to save money, I decided to order parts as they came in stock or went on sale.
Egg Saver Shipping
For smaller items, NewEgg often offers a free shipping option called “Egg Saver Shipping.” If you don’t need your items any time soon, I guess it’s ok, but don’t count on the estimated delivery time (4 to 7 business days) to be very accurate. Egg Saver shipping goes through a method called “UPS Mail Innovations.” Essentially, this allows the company to cut costs by handing the package to UPS, which then hands the package to USPS.

I shipped two items using this method: a copy of Windows 7 OEM and some RAM. The Win7 disc took 10 business days to arrive, and was stuck somewhere in Michigan for about a week with no updates to the tracking. I finally submitted a lost / delayed package ticket to NewEgg and the shipment promptly arrived 2 days later. The RAM arrived much more quickly - about 5 or 6 business days.
Would I use EggSaver again? Well, it’s free, and so I could see it a good idea for gifts if you have enough advance time, but generally you’ll want the stuff a little sooner. $6 or so for 3 day shipping isn’t that bad and I’ll strongly consider paying for shipping next time.

RMA Process
Eventually, I had all the parts to my HTPC. The full list of items is as follows:

For my hard drive, I used an old (6+ years) 350 GB drive. I’ll be writing reviews of the individual components later on, but for now I’m going to talk about the RAM. I had never used Geil RAM before, but I chose it because it got good reviews and had heatsinks. Given the small footprint of my computer, I wanted to ensure that everything would stay cool.
Unfortuantely, this did not work out very well. I set up the computer and within a few minutes, the computer would crash, giving me a memory error. Running the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool also showed that there were errors with the RAM. I opened up the case and found the sticks to be extremely hot. I let them cool off a bit, and put the case in an area with greater airflow and the computer worked fine. For about a day. Then the memory errors started crashing the system again. I opened up the case and sure enough, the RAM sticks (and only the RAM sticks) were very hot to the touch. I had put in some other RAM earlier and hadn’t seen any of these issues, so I began the process of submitting an RMA to newegg to get the sticks replaced.

Submitting an RMA on Newegg was pretty easy. You simply say why you want it replaced and click submit. Unfortunately, it then appears that they want you to pay return shipping! As soon as I was able, I contacted customer service chat, and while they were very helpful and immediately generated me a pre-paid return label, I was still disappointed this wasn’t the norm. 
So I shipped out the RAM, which arrived 5 business days later. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to expedite shipping. Once it got there however, Newegg was very fast at recognizing the RAM and shipped out a replacement the following morning with free 3 day shipping. I eventually got the replacement RAM about 2 weeks after submitting the RMA. I put the new RAM in my computer, and so far, it has been working great. I guess it was just some bad RAM.

Summary
One of the main disadvantages of ordering things online is that if something arrives broken, it’s going to take a while to get it replaced regardless of the customer service. Newegg was extremely fast at everything that they had control over, and getting the replacement was relatively painless. I think a free shipping label for all RMAs should be standard practice though. Amazon actually prints one on the outgoing receipt and I’ve had a few other online retailers do the same. I understand not offering faster shipping, although I think having simultaneous shipping could cut the time at least in half. They’ve already got your credit card number so there should be no problem with preventing people from not returning the original. Even if they shipped the replacement part out once the return part was logged in the shipping tracker, you would get your item at least a week earlier.

Will I shop Newegg again? Of course. Will I buy GeIL RAM again? Probably not unless it’s significantly cheaper.
Pros: Newegg customer service representatives are friendly and generally helpful.

Cons: Shipping times, no pre-paid shipping labels, confusing invoices.
Newegg Customer Service (Replacement RMA): 4 / 5

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Saturday Apr 2 5am  1 note

 
 

Review: Samsung UN55C6500

Having owned Samsung’s 55” LED LCD C6500 series for a few months now, I’d like to share what my impressions are. First off, this is a great TV with a ton of great features, but there are a few negatives that I’ll get to in a bit. I’ll divide my review up into five sections: Picture Quality, Features, Settings, Ease of Use, and Samsung Apps. Since I use external speakers, I won’t go in-depth to the sound, but from what little I did heard the speakers sounded fine. The SRS surround sound worked about as good as I expected and overall, there was nothing extraordinary about the internal speakers.
Picture Quality
We should all know by now that the picture quality of TVs in the store look nothing like they should in a real viewing environment. They’re turned to what’s commonly known as “torch” mode which wastes energy, blasts light, and is generally used to catch your attention and stand out from the other sets. And hey, it worked on me. I felt that the Samsung’s colors looked the best out of all of the TVs we looked at. None of the colors seemed to be over-saturated (relatively speaking) and the blacks (the few there were) were good and the whites were good. So we got it home and set it up, calibrating it using the wonderful AVS HD 709 calibration disc and learned some great tips from Revision3’s HD Calibration series. Once we got everything set up correctly, we were able to fully enjoy all of our content.

That is, except for one flaw that the TV has that was impossible to tell in the stores. During very black scenes (and realistically only when the entire screen is black) you notice some white clouding in the corners, probably from the LED lighting. It’s a small annoyance and so far only affects the darkest of scenes, but it’s still an annoyance. Fortunately, just about any color on the screen will cause it to mostly go away.
Features
The Samsung 6500 series in the highest end Samsung TV you can get without getting 3D. Without the content, I feel 3D is going nowhere, and by the time it finally catches on, there’ll be a new technology in which to invest. The TV has a handful of HDMI ports on the side, optical out (supporting Dolby Digital), 2 USB ports, a VGA port for your computer, an Ethernet jack for Samsung Apps and software updates, and a TV Tuner.

The ports work as expected and the TV Tuner works fine with my $15 passive antenna bringing in crystal clear HD stations for free. The only oddity I noticed was that when connecting a Mac computer via HDMI, you’ll need to name the input “DVI PC.” I have no idea why this makes a difference, but it’s the only way I could get a full 1080p picture from my Mac. Ubuntu 10.10 on the same Macbook seemed to work fine without the strange naming convention.
Settings
One of the areas the TV really excels at is the number of settings they allow you to mess with. The average user won’t use most of them, and I probably didn’t even use half of them, but they’re there if you want. Of special note is the built-in color filter (blue, green, and red) for tuning the color of your TV. There are also settings to enable various degrees of blackness, motion control, colors, tints, backlight, and a slew of other items I didn’t know much about.

Ease of Use
The remote control is very well laid out, and has a full backlight which is great when watching in the dark. The TV is relatively easy to use, with the only major difficulty in entering text such as for usernames and passwords in the Samsung Apps. For those of you with iPod touches or iPhones, there is a free iPhone App that lets you use that keyboard to enter in information.
Samsung Apps
The Internet is coming to the TV again, and this time, it’s here to stay. When I bought the TV, Samsung Apps only had a few applications. Thankfully, Samsung has continued to support the platform and now there is a decently sized library with just about anything you’d actually want to do on your TV and more. The Netflix app works well, as does the Pandora app. The TV also includes Yahoo! widgets and ESPN ScoreCenter which are overlays so you can watch your show and keep up to date on other things. One of the nice features of the Samsung apps is that they update automatically, so you know that you always have the latest version.

Summary
Overall, the Samsung UN55C6500 is a great TV with great picture quality that really has only one minor flaw: clouding when the screen is dark. The apps work great, and the remote is well thought-out and has a great backlight. 
Rating: 4 / 5 Stars

Pros: Great picture, good remote, Samsung App platform is off to a great start.
Cons: Clouding on dark images, no hdmi video out.

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Saturday Mar 19 4pm  

 
 

Review: HDHomeRun Dual

The HDHomeRun Dual tuner by SiliconDust is a small white device that allows you to record live tv video at up to 1080i resolution. One of the key differences between the HDHomeRun and other computer tv tuners such as the El Gato One or the Happauge tv tuner is that this device connects directly to your local network, not a specific computer. That means that any computer on the network can access your tv!

A lot of people these days are talking about “cutting the cord” and instead getting all of their shows from sites such as Hulu, iTunes, or “over the air” (OTA). But not many of them actually follow through. Reasons for this include losing the DVR capabilities and inability to watch some shows that aren’t posted to Hulu (I’m looking at you Big Bang Theory). The HDHomeRun gives you the ability to do both of those.
Now, I’m not going to review the various software and it should be noted that this functionality does not come with the device. I’ll save that for a later date, but for Windows users, you can use Windows Media Center, which is included in Windows 7 Home Premium and above; for Mac users, you can purchase El Gato’s EyeTV software. Mac, Linux, and Windows users can all use the MythTV software for free, although be warned: it’s not the easiest software to setup.

The HDHomeRun does have a free testing application you can download and works well enough to show you the capabilities of the device and ensure that you are receiving a signal. One of the great things about the device, is that it doesn’t need any computer specific drivers and you can play the video through any normal player such as VLC.
But where it really shines is when connected to DVR software such as MythTV or Windows Media Center. Once set up, you can watch live tv just like you would with that expensive cable box. Except the recordings you make are DRM free. If you want to transfer them to your iPod, no problem! If you want to watch them on your computer during your 3 hour flight, just copy the file!


The HDHomeRun comes in two main varieties: single tuner and dual tuner. Both are identical except that the dual tuner lets you record two shows at once. If you’re using the old style bunny ears antenna, you can use the same one and just use a splitter like this $4 one from monoprice. There’s also a CableCard version coming out later if you’re into that.

Pros
  • Connects straight to your network.
  • No drivers to load. Platform independent.
  • Full 1080i streaming with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.
  • Comes with 2 coax cables and an ethernet cable!
Cons
  • No included DVR software.

Other Thoughts
  • I bought mine used from Newegg recertified and saved about $40. The used version works great and even still came with all the cables!

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Sunday Jan 23 2pm  3 notes

 
 

Building My First Computer

Those of you that have been following recent computer news know that Intel recently released their latest generation of processors, “Sandy Bridge.” Those of you that know me know that I’ve had the same desktop for the past 6+ years. Clearly, it was time for an upgrade and when MicroCenter was offering great discounts I decided to drive down there and buy the parts to build a new Sandy Bridge computer. Since this was my first full computer build, I decided I’d share my experiences so that if you ever decide to build your own computer, you can avoid some of the issues I’ve had. After much discussion before the store, and while in the store, I finally came home with the following parts list.
components.png

Motherboard: Asus P8P67
Power Supply: Kingwin 650 W
First, I unwrapped everything and inspected the parts to make sure everything was in place. Then, I glanced through both the motherboard and processor manuals to see if there was anything super important. I was a little disappointed in the lack of instructions of the processor. In fact, I found the processor installation instructions from the motherboard to be much more helpful.

For the processor, one of the things that wasn’t clear to me the first time, was that you need to push pretty hard on the heatsink to get it to stick in the motherboard. Also, the little arrows on the screws are for unmounting it. This part took me a while to figure out. The first time I plugged everything in, the processor started running really hot really quickly. Since I wasn’t planning on overclocking, I figured I had done something wrong. Eventually, I got the heatsink properly mounted, and continued on. Be sure to connect the fan to the CPU Fan port.
Next was the RAM. This part was easy, but it was still good to look at the motherboard instructions to figure out what slots to put 2 sticks of RAM. Having done this before, I realize that now would be a great time to connect the graphics card and power supply and the Power Switch cable and test everything first. Let’s pretend I did that and didn’t load everything up and find out it wasn’t working. I think that’s what the guy at the store meant and I just misunderstood him.

So now you know everything is working properly. The next step is to load it all into the case. First, you want to put in the backplate to the motherboard. I found that I had to loosen the lower screws of the fan in order for it to fit properly. Then, load in the motherboard before putting in the power supply. This was another thing I didn’t do and would have given me a lot more room to work around.
Once you’ve got the motherboard and power supply in place and screwed in (I found I had to remove a small metal holder to get the power supply in place and it didn’t quite fit back), you can go ahead and put in the graphics card. This was another area for referencing the motherboard manual to make sure I was using the PCIe x16 slot and not a slower one. The PCI plates came off pretty easily and everything fit into place.

Probably the second most time consuming parts of this was connecting all of the case wires and power cables. It involved a lot of going back and forth between the motherboard manual, which was very nice, and the case manual, which wasn’t very good. Fortunately, it wasn’t actually too difficult and I eventually got everything plugged in.
Finally, I plugged in the rest of the connectors and added in the hard drive. Then, after connecting the monitor, I booted it to see what happened. Nothing happened. Make sure to have the power supply switched on. I booted it again, and it turned on! I found the Asus new Graphical BIOS to be pretty easy and easy to use. I chose the “optimized” setup and everything seemed to work great. The guy at the store had said I would need to adjust the voltage for the RAM, but the motherboard already recognized the correct voltage and set it appropriately.

success.png
Eventually I got the heatsink properly connected and was able to install Linux Mint 10 on the hard drive. Most everything worked pretty well right away. I had some screen tearing issues with full-screen video, but I seem to have gotten rid of them by installing the graphics driver from the “Additional Drivers” section (not the latest one from support.amd.com) and disabling Catalyst AI and turning vsync to always on. And wow, is it fast! My previous computer took over 10 hours to encode a 1 hour mpeg2 HD video to m4v where this only took 30 minutes! With plenty of upgradeability, “Gideon” is sure to be around for a while.

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Wednesday Jan 12 10pm  

 
 

NaNoWrimo 2010: My Journey to 50k Words

In case you haven’t heard, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. It challenges anybody who is up to the task to write a novel in 30 days. A novel, in this sense, is defined as any fictional work at least 50,000 words in length. This year, over 100,000 people have committed to writing, and while many will not “win,” those who do will be able to tell their friends that they wrote a novel. And that’s pretty neat. 
So why 30 days; why 50k words? According to the official website, they chose a month because it gives everybody a solid goal. They call novel writing a “one day” activity, as in “I’ll write a novel one day.” But most never actually do. This allows all of those people to sit down and get through it together. The word count requirement was chosen to allow anybody, even those with full-time jobs or kids to be able to win, while still being challenging and creating something that could be called a novel. Some may think we’re crazy for writing so much in so little time, but so far, it’s been a blast.

I decided to start NaNoWriMo on Nov. 2. That probably wasn’t the best idea, as I started 1,667 words behind. (By now you should have figured out that the focus of NaNoWriMo is word-count, and not necessarily content or quality. You can work on those after November. This is strictly to get a very rough first draft.) My main reason was to motivate my wife, who had started on time, but was having difficulty being motivated. I figured if she had someone right there to go through it with her, it would be better. Fortunately, that proved to be true. I also wanted to do it because it was something unique, fun, and completely outside of my comfort zone. I’m an engineer, and while I may be better than some, writing is clearly not one of my major strengths. It’s possible I didn’t write 50,000 words in my entire college career!
Ironically, the fact that writing is not my career has proven useful at times. One of the most powerful distractions to my wife is her “inner editor.” She constantly feels the need to go back and re-write everything so it looks good. I, on the other hand, don’t have any kind of inner editor and could care less if what I write is horrible, although lately I’ve been having a series of mini-crises where I keep on having to come up with reasons why my plot is plausible or realizing just how bad my novel is. But that’s not what this month is about. Even if I never touch the document again (which is more likely than not), at the end of the month, I’ll be able to say I wrote a novel. Of course, that’s never going to happen if I keep getting distracted from writing by doing other things like this blog post (which just wasted 522 words). So it’s back to writing. Good luck to all the writers - we’re already 1/3 of the way there!

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Thursday Nov 11 6pm  

 
 

Back to the Mac Comments

Last Wednesday, Apple hosted a “Back to the Mac” event. After a year or two of focusing entirely on iOS and mobile devices, it was great to finally hear some information on the future direction of Apple’s computers and desktop software.


iLife ‘11

Every one to two years, Apple releases an update to their multimedia suite, iLife. This release seemed smaller than the others, but still provides some useful features. Are the updates worth $50? That’s up to you, but I think this update is fairly minor.


iMovie

Like all of the new iLife applications, iMovie provides a new full-screen interface. The interface is very reminiscent of something you might find on an iPad, and I was a bit surprised not to hear of an iPad release of iLife. With this update, we also get improved audio editing.


iPhoto

Moving along, iPhoto ‘11 received UI improvements including a full-screen mode that seems well-polished. Perhaps the biggest feature was the greatly improved Facebook integration that allows you to view and comment on photos right within iPhoto. There are also some new books and letter-pressed cards.


Garage Band

This extremely basic audio packs in a few more features in this version. Most notable of which, is an automatic rhythm correction engine. There’s also a keyboard “game” to help you practice, that looks intriguing, although probably not as fun as Rock Band or Guitar Hero.


Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

When the invitations were sent out, we all knew that one of the topics was going to be about the next version of the Mac operating system and that it was going to be called Lion. I really hope Apple has some crazy features hidden in this version, because what they showed was mostly uninteresting and unoriginal.


Full-Screen Apps

Ok. Seriously? This is one of the four features Apple talks about in their new OS? So are awesome apps like Hulu Desktop and any computer game not full screen? And I can switch between apps normally. This is just lazy.


Launch Pad

Ooooh! A grid of applications. May I direct you to Quicksilver? It’s faster, less obtrusive, and more complete. If you really want the grid effect, go to your applications folder (cmd-shift-a), press the yellow button in the title bar (full-screen), and click on icon view (cmd-1). You can even sort or arrange the icons how you like!


Mission Control

This is Exposé with a fancier name. Nothing new here.


Mac App Store

Clearly the Mac App Store was the big announcement of the Mac OS. While it still isn’t revolutionary (Ubuntu has had one for years), it marks a turning point in the deployment of Mac apps. People are already very familiar with the iPhone App Store, so it is only logical to bring it to the Mac. I’m sure consumers will love having one place to discover new exciting apps for their computer, but will developers want to be restricted by Apple’s guidelines?


I think there’s a good chance many developers, especially smaller ones will jump on board with Apple’s Mac Store. While the 70/30 split is a lot worse than 100/0, You can easily spend that money on advertising elsewhere that probably won’t be as good. Unfortunately, Apple’s tight restrictions will prevent a lot of application from being able to be approved and there’s no word on how to do trials, refunds, or paid upgrades.


MacBook Air

This was Steve Jobs’ “one more thing.” The Air was updated to include better processors, a thinner profile, less weight, better graphics, and is now only available with flash memory. People still seem fairly divided on this computer calling it overpriced and underpowered while others saying it has plenty of power, especially for its size. I can see the air replacing the Macbook lineup over time.


One of the more interesting things about the computer is that the restore “cd” is now a usb flash drive. This in combination with the Mac App Store seems fairly significant and marks the beginning of the end of the compact disc, at least for software. I can easily see OS X 10.7 being released in this format. It will install faster, is more portable, and more compatible.


Summary

Overall, I was hoping for greater focus on Lion. I wanted to see some truly innovative features and know Apple is capable of producing them. For now though, let’s hope that they are saving those until they are finished in Summer 2011. It will be interesting to see how OS X and iOS are merged, given the fairly different use cases for computers (trucks) and tablets (cars).

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Friday Oct 22 5pm  1 note

 
 

Updating to Froyo

I guess when Motorola said “late” summer, they really meant it. On the last day of summer, Android 2.2 has finally arrived for the Droid X. The process is fairly painless and I was able to initiate the upgrade by going to Settings > About phone > System updates. The download took maybe 10-15min. over 3G and then prompted me to install (although there was a space missing in their dialog: “upto” should have been “up to”). Obviously, you can’t make phone calls or use your phone at all while the update is taking place. The actual update took about 10 min. including restart time. After that, it takes a little while for everything to speed up due to all the background updates that are being done.
Here are some impressions after a few weeks of use:

[+] There is a “bounce-back” on the home screen.
[+] The Applications screen is much for fluid.
[+] I love the new “Update All” button.
[+] The new lock screen looks a bit nicer.
[+] Haptic feedback is more subtle.
[+] Auto-updating apps.
[+] Gallery app looks much nicer (and faster).
[+] Search seems a bit better, but still not super great.
[+] Swype looks nicer.
[+] Contact photos look a little better (but still not great - esp. from Facebook).
[+] The new voice actions are great, but lacking some obvious functionality. (music app and directions 
[-] I’ve had several instances where trying to switch home screens launched an app instead.
[-] This also happened on the Applications screen.
[-] There still doesn’t seem to be a way to always show pictures in email.
[-] Emails are not shrunk to fit the screen like on the iPhone (no pinch to zoom in email).
[-] Still no landscape home screen (I have no idea why not - it’s there if you boot with your phone in landscape mode).
[-] Misread taps are getting REALLY annoying. Apps are launching when they shouldn’t.
[-] Contact photos have a weird border.
[-] Home button always goes to the center home screen, instead of just backing out of the app.
[-] Bug prevents the battery usage preference from being opened all the time.
[-] Bug prevents usage of custom ringtones (esp. in AAC format) all the time. (A restart fixes this, but it’s very annoying.)

Overall, it’s a decent update, but given the number of delays it should have been so much more.

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Monday Oct 4 7pm  2 notes

 
 

Camping!

Besides God, music, and technology, one of my other interests is nature. Growing up, I was actively involved in scouts (I’m an Eagle Scout w/ bronze palm) and went camping at least once a month. They are some of my best memories from my childhood. Setting up tents in the rain at night, the smell after the rain the next morning, cooking meals in the campfire, going on hikes where the only thing around you is God’s creation. Looking outside at all the fascinating plants and animals, I only get a glimpse at the glory of God. He created humans with a desire to explore, but also gave us the ultimate place to go exploring.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time in the last few years to do many outdoor activities. I feel like a lot of us have some hobby or interest that due to time or money, we haven’t been able to keep going throughout our lives like we did when we were younger. So when I finished college and got married, I made it a point to take my wife, Hillary, camping this summer. This past weekend, we traveled the short distance to Proud Lake State Recreation Area to go camping overnight. Since Hillary had only been camping once and that was almost 15 years prior, I wanted to keep it easy. One night at somewhere close by with a standard dinner that is impossible to mess up, but still tastes great.

Hillary’s grandmother gave us a tent (Kelty Gunnison 4.1) for our wedding present Hillary bought me a double sleeping bag and we was excited to try them out. When we got there, the workers were friendly and we were able to find a site on the super soft grass with a camp fire ring and picnic table. A lot of the other campers were using RVs and trailers, but there were a few other tent people around. We got the tent set up quickly and began hiking around for some wood for the fire.


Of course, not everything can go smoothly on a camping trip, and starting the fire was the main issue we had on this trip. I’m not sure if the wood was just too wet, or the fire ring was messing up the wind, or  what it was, but I don’t think I’ve had a harder time starting a fire. Every time I did finally get some of the kindling to catch, it would go out in a few seconds. Finally, out of desperation I had Hillary go get some lighter fluid to try that. Fortunately, after dousing the fire twice, the fire finally started going, and we were able to prepare our hobo dinners.

For those of you who aren’t aware, hobo dinners are ridiculously easy to make. You take any of the following: beef, potatoes, carrots, onions, peppers, and put them in aluminum foil. You then season to taste and wrap it up twice. Throw it in the fire and wait until it’s done. You don’t need to worry about getting a cooking fire, or really about burning and all of the ingredients are optional. Ours took about 30-40min. to cook and came out very tasty. While we were waiting, we had some s’mores with Hershey’s special dark.
After dinner, we went for a walk hoping to see some meteors from the Perseid’s meteor shower, but didn’t see any. Our tent kept us warm and dry throughout the night and the grass underneath made a very soft mattress. The next morning, we headed back home. Overall it was an excellent trip. Hopefully, we’ll be able to go more frequently and camp during some vacations too - super cheap and fun!

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Saturday Aug 21 1am  1 note

 
 
 
 
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