The Lenovo Y480 is what I feel a great portable gaming notebook with some really troubled component choice. Packing a Core i7 3610QM and Nvidia GT650M in a 14 inch chassis is really a great gaming combo but a notebook doesn’t consist of just the processor and graphic card. Read on to find out more about the problem with this notebook.
Let’s say that you want to listen to songs with bit-rate above 320kbps. You will probably just sort the list as per bit-rate. Now how about you want to filter songs with bit-rate above 320kbps, no Bieber, and songs in the Jazz folder of your hard drive. In iTunes that is impossible to filter songs with so many variable in it but in J River Media Center you can! It can be a bit of a hassle but once it is done, you will love it! Read on to see how I make did it. [Read more...]
Beautiful interface and simple to use
Back before I got into the whole audiophile hobby, I was just like every other non-audiophile people – I used iTunes to organize my song collection and sync it to my iPod touch and iPhone. The interface is clean, simple yet incredibly useful and easy to find and sort your music collection. Then came the time when I got to the whole audio hobby… the Etymotic HF5, Grado SR60i, ER4 etc. Each upgrade seems to bring higher demand for lossless file format such as ape and of course the ever popular flac. I tried dipping into the early version of foobar but the stock version looks ugly and nowhere as easy to use nor beautifully simple to use as the iTunes. Searching in the internet does seems to have lots of plugin to install to get it to look great but it was too much hassle to setup. It was then that I came across J River Media Center 16 and I felt that I have finally found it – a software that is beautiful, simple and useful player and yet is able to play tons of other formats that iTunes just plainly refuses to. This review will be covering the J River Media Center 17 which is a great upgrade over the 16. Hopefully it will give you much insight on this fantastic mp3 player that is overshadowed by Foobar and iTunes. [Read more...]
It craves for Jelly Bean and so do you.
If you lived outside US there is a chance that the Jelly Bean OTA hasn’t been pushed to your area. If you are impatient to get the latest candy goodness from google, you can do some work to get it to accept Jelly Bean. The first step is to root, unlock your Nexus and then flash Jelly Bean. There is a huge variety of custom rom floating in the internet but to make it easier, I only be covering flashing to root Jelly Bean rom and on the Yakju version of Samsung Galaxy Nexus. If you are wondering what Yakju mean, it means that the phone was bought outside the Google Play Store. So if you bought it at a Samsung store (like I did) or some other shop, it is most likely that that version is Yakju.
Before we start we need the following things:
Yakju version Samsung Galaxy Nexus with 90% battery
Notebook (with battery) or Computer with backup power (just in case your house decides to go to stone age when you are upgrading)
Micro USB Cable
Active internet connection. Jelly Bean rom is around 220mb
Google Nexus Toolkit – download page here
So you have gathered all the necessary stuff above and ready to start. First thing is to remove all drivers of previous non Samsung Galaxy Nexus android phones as it may screw up your driver installation. This is not 100% necessary but it may help you with step 1. Also remember to connect your Nexus to the computer when installing the driver and remember to enable USB debugging at settings, developer options on you Samsung Galaxy Nexus. [Read more...]
Simple interface yet does it job nicely
There are times when I need to leave the laptop on to do tasks like processing photos or burning in headphones. Take for example the Swan Hivi M50w that I am currently reviewing. It is weekend and I need to go out for dinner, sadly there is not auto shut down built in to my media player and I don’t want my neighbors to complain about having to listen to Linkin Park at 11pm. Here is where the Auto shutdown comes in. All I need to do is just set how many minutes do I want to let the laptop stay on before hibernating and problem solved! [Read more...]
The second card board box of Swan Hivi M50W.
For the past 2 years I have been resorting to headphone for listening to songs, watch movies and play games but I always been craving for a speaker that can serve better for watching movies and computer games. After scouring the internet, I stumbled upon a speaker that isn’t covered much on popular review site. All there is are bits and pieces of rave reviews from users that took the plunge. That speaker is the 2.1 Swan Hivi M50W.
Don’t let the size fool you. The sub-woofer is heavier than you might think.
After some quick auditioning at the Jakarta distributor at Mangga Dua, I walked away very impressed by the M50W and promptly did the payment rituals. At one point of the audition, I had to check if they had the M60 5.1 speaker switched on because everything in the audition room is shaking. It felt like I was transported to one of those THX equipped theatre in Indonesia and I instantly fell in love with it.
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