Samsung’s designer Serif TV reaches the US for $1,499
How much do you value design over sheer value for money? You’re about to find out. Samsung’s Serif TV is now available for US pre-orders through the Museum of Modern Art at a price of $1,499 — given that this is only a 40-inch set, you’re clearly paying for the typography-inspired body more than you are the electronics. Not that you aren’t getting some decent hardware. The Serif packs a 4K display with high dynamic range color support, and you’re getting perks that include an exclusive remote control, detachable legs and a custom interface with a simple “curtain mode” menu. If you’re at all interested in this conversation piece, the biggest obstacle may simply be having to wait until it ships in August.
Via: The Verge
Source: MoMA
AUKEY Bluetooth 4.1 Audio Receiver: Bluetooth for your car at an affordable price (Review)
Just a few weeks ago my wife and I were discussing cars. More specifically what discussed what we wanted in the next vehicle we purchase. Despite the fact we are a couple years away, it’s never too early to get a headstart on it. One of the things I mentioned that I want is Bluetooth capabilities. We had the chance to have that put in our current vehicle but I was being a cheapskate and didn’t pull the trigger. But it’s really a no-brainer to have this in your car in today’s world of hands free requirements.
Fast forward a few weeks and guess what I ran across? Aukey’s Bluetooth Audio Receiver. Think of it as the old cassette adapters we had for our CD players in cars, if you are old enough to remember them. It makes playing music and making calls from our phones to our car easier.
Let’s learn more.
In the box
- Wireless audio receiver
- microUSB charging cable
- 3.5mm audio cable
- 3.5mm audio connector
- User manual
Design and Functionality
Aukey’s Bluetooth Receiver is a small compact Bluetooth device that measures less than five inches long. It has a built-in microphone, 3.5mm input and a microUSB charging port. Overall it resembles a tiny version of the Amazon Fire TV remote.
The front of the receiver is where the controls reside. There are three buttons that are multi-function controls. The plus and minus buttons control volume and skip tracks, where you short press for volume and long presss for tracks. Your last control button is the multi-function button. This controls the play/pause and answer/hangup portion.
The controls for the volume/skip track seems reversed to me. I find myself wanting to short press to change tracks and long press for volume. While this isn’t a deal-breaker, it should be changed if they decide to build a newer model.
The Audio Receiver’s built-in microphone worked flawlessly. It was placed around two feet away from me, and the person on the other end of the phone call could still hear me talk as if I were in the room. The Bluetooth technology worked without any hiccups. As I walked away from my car, I tried to connect with the Audio Receiver, and it still picked up between 25 and 30 feet away.
It doesn’t have a very long battery life, two hours in fact. So I would use it sparingly away from a power source. When I try to use it while connected to the charger, it doesn’t seem to work. I have to unplug it from the charger before it decides to connect to Bluetooth.
Summary
This is one handy little device for older cars that doesn’t have Bluetooth. In today’s world, it’s almost a necessity. Most of our music is slowly going away from physical form and into digital form. So just jump on board with Aukey’s Bluetooth Audio Receiver for $13 on Amazon. You’ll be glad you did.
Buy AUKEY Bluetooth 4.1 Audio Receiver
How to turn off Facebook Live notifications
We’ve all seen what fireworks look like. This Fourth of July, do yourself a favor and disable Facebook Live notifications.
Good news, everyone! Facebook has made it easier than ever to broadcast what you’re doing, live. Bad news, everyone! Facebook has made it easier than ever to broadcast what you’re doing, live. And the thing about live video is that it’s pointless if nobody’s watching. So Facebook makes sure that you get a notification every damn time one of your friends (or a page that you follow) goes live.
Sometimes that’s great! Especially when it’s the Android Central Facebook page that’s doing the streaming, right?
Other times, it’s downright awful. Holidays such as the Fourth of July here in the U.S. are one of those times. We’ve all seen fireworks before. Many of us will be out watching them, live. (Like, in-person.) So the last thing we need is 200 notifications of other people broadcasting their own fireworks experiences over relatively low resolution.
(Note that this only works from the full Facebook site, not m.facebook.com (which your phone will try to send you to), or from within the Facebook app.)
Here’s how to to turn off Facebook Live notifications:
Go to your Facebook settings. Drill down to Settings>Notifications>On Facebook.
Now choose “Edit.” (Note: This link should take you directly.)
Toggle “Live Videos” to OFF.
Note that this only works from the full Facebook site, not m.facebook.com (which your phone will try to send you to), or from within the Facebook app.
Alternatively, if you just want to kill Facebook Live notifications from a single person or page, you can do so from within the notifications themselves. Just long-press on the person you want to squelch, and then choose whether to dismiss that single notification, or to turn off all notifications of live videos from that person.
Unless you absolutely hate any use of Facebook Live, we might suggest not turning off these notifications permanently. While they might get annoying when you’ve got groups of friends all showing the same thing (and the same thing that you yourself might be doing), you might well miss something interesting other times.
How to back up your Android
Losing your stuff is no fun. Neither is trying to get it all back on a new phone. Here are some tips to make it easier to keep everything important backed up.
We keep a lot of things on our phones. We have pictures and videos, details about the people we know, schedules and important dates and more. Many of us depend on our phones to help keep track of a good part of our daily lives. With all this stuff stored in one portable place, it can be a disaster if we lose it all. Some of us have been there — our phones were lost or stolen or broken. It’s not fun to try and sort it all out on a new phone, Not fun at all. That’s why it’s important to try and copy everything in another place and keep a backup of your important data.
Android is a cloud-based operating system. It was designed to be connected and keep everything synchronized with a computer in a cold building somewhere electricity is cheap. Seriously, data centers are huge banks of machines that mostly exist to store things and have them ready when someone wants to see them. And Google knows all about setting up and maintaining data centers. It makes sense for Google to support and develop a cloud-based system because they are the cloud.
Android was designed from the ground up to be a cloud-based OS.
Google has built-in synchronization for your email, your contacts, your notes and just about every other service they offer. If you move to another phone, just sign in with your Google account and all your stuff is there — except not really.
We don’t just use Google’s app on our phones, and that’s where things get a bit funky. Any app published on Google Play has the ability to store your data (whether its recipes or game progress or anything else) for free inside your Google account. The problem is that many developers don’t bother to use it. I’ve heard from some app devs that it’s a trivial thing to include, while others say it’s a big mess. I’ll assume it depends on just what you;re trying to back up. For whatever reason, one thing to look for when choosing which apps you want to install is if they keep your data safe in case you have to move to another phone — either through Google or their own method. We covered how to set up backup through Google, so be sure to have a look if you have any questions.
How to back up through Android settings
For a lot of us, though, the shift from keeping the second copy of all our stuff on a remote computer instead of the computer in our home isn’t easy. If you’re coming from an iPhone or a BlackBerry you’re used to plugging your phone in and copying stuff to your computer, with a piece of software installed that makes it fairly simple. That makes sense, too, because Apple and BlackBerry aren’t cloud-first companies (though they are moving in that direction.) Some of the companies who make our Androids recognize this and offer a program suite you can install and connect your phone to copy your stuff locally. It’s important to them to try and offer what we want and what we’re used to doing. We’ve covered LG Bridge and Samsung Smart Switch to get you started if this is how you would rather do things.
How to use Samsung Smart Switch to back up your Galaxy phone
How to use LG Bridge with your LG phone
When it comes to our media — the things we like to see and hear, like pictures or video and music — most of us want to keep it safe somewhere in a cloud or on our own storage system as well as be able to enjoy it on all our things with a screen or speakers. It makes sense to have these types of files in multiple places, one where it stays safe and others where we can use them. A lot of companies realize this, and there are plenty of ways to store your media files and share them easily with any connected device.
Two of the easiest solutions are from Google and Dropbox. Google Drive — the free storage you get from Google when you sign up for an account — and Dropbox make it easy to sync across devices and platforms and also have built-in media playing capabilities. With Google Drive, the Google Photos app ties in and offers editing and other fun tools for working with pictures and video. Dropbox is a little less feature-packed, but both ways can automatically back up the memories you create with your camera. We had a look at how easy it is, so check it out if you need help getting started.
How to back up your music files to your computer or online storage
How to back up photos and video to your computer or the cloud
There is no one-click solution
As you can tell, there is no do-it-all program you can install on your computer to make a 1:1 copy of everything on your Android. There never will be because Google is all about the cloud. Their business model depends on users being connected — Google doesn’t make money from selling phones. Android is a cloud ecosystem, and that means it’s not right for everyone. And that’s OK. And app developers not using Google’s way of backing up data for their apps can be frustrating, but with an open system, there’s not much that can be done about it. Google doesn’t force developers to use cloud saves to publish an app. Support developers who make it easy on you by delivering a way to keep your data, and know that Google is working on ways to back things up without developers doing anything differently. It’s getting better and will continue to improve.
But it’s not difficult to keep all of your stuff in place, and get it all back when you move to a new phone. It just requires a bit of know-how and a few settings.
Critical security flaw found in Lenovo PCs… again
If you are sick of hearing about how Lenovo Machines are riddled with security flaws, then this ain’t the story for you. Security researcher Dymtro “Cr4sh” Oleksiuk claims to have uncovered a flaw in Lenovo machines that could let attackers circumvent Windows’ basic security protocols. According to his post on Github, the vulnerable firmware driver was copy-and-pasted from data supplied by Intel. His concern was that other manufacturers might have adopted the same code — with at least one HP Pavillion laptop from 2010 already identified as packing the flaw.
Lenovo issued a public response, saying that it tried to speak to Oleksiuk before he published the flaw to no avail. It corroborated the suggestion that the code was supplied by a third party working from common code that came from Intel. The firm doesn’t go so far as to assign blame to the chipmaker, but there’s enough to imply that there’s a whole heap of fault going that way. Lenovo added that it’s investigating the issue and will work with its partners to develop a fix as soon as possible.
There’s also a theory that the compromising piece of code might not have been created in error, but placed there as a backdoor. Oleksiuk mentions this just once, in passing, but the Register points out that Lenovo’s public statement leaves a few questions. For instance, the manufacturer says that it is “determining the identity of the original author,” because it “does not know its originally intended purpose.” Although we’d like to think that if the CIA (or its brethren) did write it, it had the sense not to leave any evidence of its involvement.
Source: The Register, Github, Lenovo
AIVAnet 