Following an email sent by my friend penadigital quite some time ago I finally made the jump and installed SpicagenMod Beta 2.1 on my Spica. I had been avoiding it since I had everything working just the way I wanted and most of the time it takes a few hours and a good dose of patience to install a mod and get everything working the way we like it again.

I was actually kind of forced into it, the previous install I had got borked. I was running out of memory and as a consequence getting that annoying little low memory warning that keeps popping up. I uninstalled some apps and cleaned the app cache but I was still low on memory. This is partly because of the way Apps2SD works and I still don’t fully understand it so I thought about booting into recovery and wiping both dalvik cache and regular cache. I was then presented with an endless loop of reboots, lovely. Then I remembered that email and figured this was as good a time as ever to give it a try.

Had the most awesome weekend of all time over at Leiria. Sometimes I wish I lived there, maybe someday I will. Took a few pictures, maybe eventually sometime around this week I’ll find the patience I need to fiddle around with the new gallery software. I brought the old gallery down since I didn’t get it to work with a couple of things I wanted and the new one isn’t “consumer ready” yet. Thing with having the greatest of times is you eventually get thrown back at “real life” and you end up in a state of mind that makes you think you should borrow someone else’s antidepressant pillz. But hey, there’s always next year. Right? :)

Spielberg. The aftermath of an alien invasion. Dude what was in ER. Works for me.

A friend told me about this after I whined about how great Game of Thrones was and now I had nothing to watch. Turns out it’s not bad, not bad at all. I’d like to see more alien tech instead of all the drama going on but I guess they don’t want to shoot all their shells before they know what kind of ground they’re stepping on.

More info at IMDB.

…and I instantly think of Japan. Why is that?

via 9gag

There’s something about old 60′s/70′s movies that makes me love them. I can’t really say why, they just do. I’ve been running this sort of old movie marathon and all I can think of is how most of the time I enjoy them a hell of  a lot more than recent ones.

I remember when I was a kid spending entire weekend afternoons watching movies on TV and for some reason those days seemed to last longer and packed with great stuff on the tube. I can’t really put this into words so I won’t keep trying.

I don’t remember much about my childhood, people usually say this is because I had a happy childhood and I think that’s true. But sitting on my living room’s couch watching movies is a vivid clear memory I have. My parents even bought me a VHS VCR eventually and that was a big deal at the time. Those things were expensive! From then on I became a regular at the local movie rental place. I don’t remember how the ladies at the counter looked like but I do remember they were always nice to me and usually greeted me with a smile every time they saw me.

You know when sometimes you start watching a movie thinking it’s going to be rather cheesy and you’re generally just in it for the fun of watching things explode and monsters cut into pieces and then the movie is actually one of the best you’ve seen lately? Yeah.. That happened to me twice in the past week.

I began watching Priest with a pre-defined notion it was “vampire ass kicking movie” with Paul Bettany and I pretty much like everything he’s in. Turns out there’s so much more to the movie than that. The plot sounds like the cheesiest thing ever but they actually pull it off quite nicely. I was reminded of two movies while watching it, Blade Runner and Equilibrium. The cityscape is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a while and the action isn’t bad either. Granted it’s an action movie, lots of it going on, but this movie has lots of eye candy as well. I really recommend it.

The other one was Stake Land. Nothing in imbd’s page prepared me for the great movie this turned out to be. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s one of the best horror flicks I’ve seen in a long while. The acting is great, the scenery is awesome, the story is compelling with some twists in it that made me go “Whoa.” and I really felt sad when some of the stuff on there happened (no spoilers!). To put it simply, if you’re a horror fan you have to see it. You know that feeling you got when you saw 28 Days Later and thought to yourself that was a damn good movie? Watch this one then :)

No idea what was the exact day I bought the domain/hosting and started working on this site as a hobby, but it’s been roughly a year now. I know this because I had to renew it all, sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it since I end up spending quite some time without paying any attention to it. I guess that’s the nature of such sites :)

Been spending a *lot* of time playing Rift, I’m quite amazed how good something I’ve never heard of till about a couple of months ago can be. Couple of guys I know mentioned the open beta was up and I tried it. A few hours after I found myself buying it. I had recently restarted playing WoW but as soon as the month’s subscription ended I was finding myself really bored with it and Rift was entering it’s head start for pre-order customers. Perfect timing. Dragon Age 2 is supposed to be coming out too, that’s another one to check out.

Haven’t spent much time around my Spica as of lately, which is just as well since development for the Cyanogenmod Spica beta seems to have come to a halt. Probably because everything’s working quite well and it really shouldn’t be called a beta anymore. Been using the 8.3 beta for a few months now and it’s working like a charm.

Also, saw Tron Legacy the other day. Awesome sauce.

So, it seems Cyanogenmod is here to stay on the Spica. Just as long as criminal (one of the developers @ samdroid.net) doesn’t feel like it’s time to call it quits. I’m now running alpha 8.2 and I can say everything pretty much just works. The camera is now in color and I’m yet to find something that doesn’t work like it’s intended. Supposedly hardware acceleration for divx doesn’t work, but I don’t watch divx on the phone anyway, so that’s fine.

There were also some 3D drivers released for the 8.1 ported from the Samsung Intercept ones, they boosted my phone’s score on Quadrant by a ton.  From the mid 400′s to the mid 600′s.  Sadly they don’t work in 8.2 but I’m sure something is being done about it. There has been an update to the drivers, still haven’t installed them but will do it pretty soon. Available here.

Haven’t posted here in a while, no special reason. My grandfather fell down and broke his hip, had to undergo surgery and eventually his age (87) and whatever comes with it caught up with him and he didn’t make it. He passed about a week after surgery. And that was pretty effed up.

The Silent City: an awesome short film by Ruairi Robinson featuring 3 soldiers, Cillian Murphy, Don Wycherly, and Garvan McGrath, trying to survive on a desolate planet. After hitting play, make sure the player is in HD mode, and then, watch it in full screen. Enjoy!

[Via]

I sometimes wonder why has Samsung stated the Spica hardware specs aren’t enough for Froyo since there are at least two roms that I know of that grant us exactly that, running froyo on the Samsung Spica.

A good friend (penadigital) sent me a couple of emails last week mentioning he had installed samdroid‘s alpha froyo package and found it to be pretty good. Some things are still pretty rough around the edges, but it generally works quite well. My curiosity was piqued.

I was kept back from installing it since I have already flashed the phone at least 3-4 times while experimenting different samdroid hacks and quite honestly everything was working fine and I didn’t want to bork it and end up having to reinstall and configure everything again.

Then one day, I found a couple of videos on youtube with folks running the incredibly popular Cyanogenmod on a Spica with links to samdroid’s forums and I just had to go and take a look. From then on I learned that pretty much everything is working with incredible efforts from LeshaK down at the samdroid forums and the Cyanogenmod team. My curiosity could not wait. I downloaded Cyanogenmod 7.2 alpha for the Spica and installed it through the recovery boot I had with samdroid’s root package.