So, yeah. I got a Nexus 7.

For a while now I’ve been tempted to get an e-paper Kindle so I could have the current book I’m reading with me at all times without having to carry the /sometimes/ equivalent of a cereal box with me. I kid you not, some of those Stephen King books are huge.

Though perfect for books, that’s all those Kindles are good for..books. There’s no other media consumption available for them. No video, no audio. Just books.

In the meantime, I found myself increasingly watching more and more youtube videos with tutorials/howtos and various other assorted stuff on my phone. Don’t get me wrong, my phone has the perfect size for a phone and I love it. But for videos that thing makes my eyes start to twitch after a while. That got me into the Kindle Fire territory. Books and media consumption.

So, a friend of mine asked me for any piece of mac or windows software that would “glitch” images as he needs it for some artsy thing. I didn’t quite understand what he was after at first, but when the conversation continued and I put my Google Fu to work I realized people were glitching images as an art form. You know when sometimes there’s data corruption on your hard or usb drive? Images get all twisted and/or with a crapton of artifacts in it. Glitching is the art of doing it on purpose! It’s also hella fun to look at the result in some cases. Here’s a ‘glitched’ image so you can have a better perception of what I’m talking about. Non glitched on the left, glitched on the right. Click them to see a bigger picture.

Looks great, doesn’t it? But how exactly does one do this? Well…read on, friend.

The new WordPress app for android entered beta a couple of weeks ago, it’s very different from what it used to be. Has a crapton of improvements over the old app and it actually makes me want to use it. In fact, this whole post will be written in it. If you use WordPress on a regular basis I strongly suggest you give it a test run!

In other news, I’m still quite happy with the SK17i I bought a few weeks ago. The battery though if at first glance might seem a bit underpowered, I haven’t found it needing. The phone never died on me with moderate/intense daily usage before I set it up charging for the night before I go to bed, that’s all I really want on a phone.
ICS should be made available through PC Companion later this month, tough it’ll be a while till I update as I like to read up on reviews and eventual bugs before I make any major jump. In any case, I already have the root procedures for ICS bookmarked and I’ll keep both a nandroid backup as well as GB firmware files in case I decide to downgrade. A performance loss is to be expected but I’m guessing from other Xperia models that already had the update it’ll be a tolerable performance loss. It runs extremely snappy on GB and I guess I don’t mind a choke here and there while running ICS.

In my last post I mentioned I got a SK17i (Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro) Android phone and as usual I like to wait a couple of weeks before I root or alter it in any way just in case something goes wrong and I have to take it back. Those weeks have now come and gone and it was time to root the device and finally install stuff like Titanium Backup on it as well as a decent recovery with Nandroid. I feel like I’m stepping on eggs whenever I’m using something with no backup whatsoever so this is something I really must do to the phone.

The fine folks at XDA had all the information and files I needed. As it turns out .62 firmware cannot be rooted using the zergRush method since the exploit has been patched. But following this thread it’s possible to use zergRush on .58 firmware and then upgrade OTA (Over The Air, the update is pushed through WiFi or 3G to your phone) and keep the phone rooted. But how exactly do we do this? Keep on reading.

I’ve recently begun looking for a new smartphone as my trusty Spica started to feel a bit..uh..old. Odd for a 1 year old phone to start feeling old but hey, it had already been out for quite some time before I got it. Menus and interaction was a bit sluggish at times, couldn’t install as many apps as I wanted because it’s available space was very limited, started missing some calls because it wouldn’t ring (no idea what caused it), had to constantly factory reset/reinstall rom because something would go bork and stop working, etc. While doing so, I remembered how much I loved the qwerty physical keyboard on my former phone, the Nokia E71. With that in mind, I remembered how well regarded Blackberry phones are/used to be in that aspect, so I started checking out some online reviews.

Despite what most OS X users think and say, OS X is in fact as vulnerable to trojans and/or rootkits as any other Operating System. Though it is significantly harder (or not) to do so in a Unix machine, the increase in Apple computer users has turned their operating system a viable target for mass infection and botnet operation.

This time around, a trojan named as Flashback has reportedly infected more than half a million computers worldwide. It earned it’s name due to the nature of the infection, pretending to be an Adobe Flash update and thus being granted administrator privileges by unsuspecting users to download and install it’s payload.

Apparently the trojan takes advantage of flaws within the Java versions found within latest versions of OS X. Although Oracle published a fix for it several weeks ago, Apple is only just now making it available to it’s users generating this way a fair amount of controversy.

An advanced description of the trojan as well as identification and removal methods can be found here, thanks to the folks at F-Secure.

Edit: F-Secure has made a tool available online to remove Flashback from OS X machines here.

The following has to be the best April Fools joke ever pulled off that I’m aware of.

I have no idea how it started and honestly I wasn’t aware of what was going on until it was too late. But I still caught some action on Twitter with people completely puzzled trying to figure out how and why was the hashtag #prayforportugal trending, myself included.

First things first, a hashtag on Twitter if you’re not familiar with it is a word preceded with a “#” symbol that turns that word into a keyword on whatever people post there. Clicking that keyword/hashtag allows you to view a listing of posts with that specific hashtag on a time based priority, recent posts show up first. A trending hashtag is something that has been used quite a lot recently, so much that it made it to the top of hashtags being used. That’s where #prayforportugal started showing up, for some reason it was trending.

I like stuff to be as simple as possible without too much clutter, the layout/theme I’ve been using for the past year or so does that quite well but while browsing on the forums for the theme I found out there was another guy who likes minimal stuff…and that he’s a php/css ninja!

Turns out the made his user.css publicly available and I decided to give it a shot. I love it! Had to make a new banner and I will probably have to make yet another one since I made that one in under a minute and it sort of needs some polishing but whatever, I like how uncluttered everything looks like.

Still have to work on the label position on the comment forms. The labels are showing up on the left of the forms and thus messing up their alignment. I have no idea where to change that, probably on the comments.php file but as soon as I *try* to start reading it and figure out what needs to be changed I’m reminded I’m a total naab when it comes to php. Oh well.

Holy crap!

So I won this dumb online contest and I got a Diablo 3 beta key. I don’t usually win stuff but then again I don’t usually enter that many competitions either. Didn’t have to come up with something funny to say or anything, just insert name and email…then a few days later I got this email with “Congratulations you’re a winner, here’s a beta key.”. Good stuff.

Anyhoo, before I got into the beta I watched a crapton of playthrough videos on youtube and I kinda got into the Monk a lot though I also liked watching the Barbarian doing his stuff. For some reason I tend to favor melee characters on this kind of games. The exception is probably, oddly enough, Diablo 2..where I mostly played a Summoner Necromancer. You know, the guy who goes to the moor to grab a bazillion skeletons and then proceeds to faceroll whatever he wants to while watching a movie on the tv.