Hardware Acceleration on some aging Motorola devices has been a long time coming. My Motorola Defy is one of those aging devices. Last week, Quarx2k and Epsylon3, our wonderful Defy developers, released builds for the Defy and Defy+ with full HWA support. However, this wouldn’t have been possible without the work of Kabaldan, who discovered a method that could bring full HWA to any locked down Motorola device, such as my Defy and the Motorola Milestone.
Hardware acceleration for Android is (in the most basic of terms) the use of the GPU to aid in the drawing operations done by a given application or view. Aside from allowing the CPU and GPU to work simultaneously, this also allows the drawing operations to be done on much more specialized and efficient hardware for the task. This results in a better overall user experience.
Quarx2k released his first full HWA build on July 6. There’s since been another build for both Defy and Defy+. You can find all builds by Quarx2k here.
The best part of having HWA for me, is having a fully functioning Chrome in Android now. Something I’ve been waiting to have on my Defy for quite some time.
I use some software called ushare to stream video from my pc to my Xbox 360. I won’t go into the details on how to set that up, it’s pretty straight forward. Chances are good that your linux distribution already has a package for ushare built.
If you find yourself with a video encoded in H.264/x264 (it’ll probably have a .mp4 file extension) you will be frustrated to find out that the Xbox 360 won’t play it. There is an incredibly easy workaround to this. Just change the .mp4 filename extension to .avi.
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Not sure exactly why this works, but I have a feeling it’s simply due to the .mp4 filename extension. The Xbox 360 must assume it doesn’t know how to play mp4 files, without actually checking to see what codec the video file needs. But that’s total speculation on my part.
I’ve been using Dropbox for a very long time. I would totally replace Dropbox with Minus if Minus supported adding a “local” folder to your system like Dropbox does. Unfortunately Minus does not offer that yet, but I hear they’re working on it.
Dropbox has released new beta versions of the Dropbox client. This beta client adds a new feature for auto-uploading photos and videos from your phone to Dropbox. For every 500MB you upload through this auto-upload feature, Dropbox will give you an additional 500MB of storage, for up to 5GB of additional storage.
I had a few GB worth of photos and videos on my phone to upload, so getting that extra 5GB was really easy for me. If you don’t have enough photos or videos to upload, just grab some online and put them into your phone’s picture/video folder. When I started, I had 2.5GB of free storage, I now have 7.5GB.
You can also get this 5GB of additional storage with the beta Windows client. You can download the beta Windows client from this post on the Dropbox forum. There’s builds for OS X and Linux as well, but the auto upload feature only works in Windows currently.
