universal car mount with velcro

Today a „Hack“-Report:

I was using iPhone for quite a while, my last Phone was a iPhone4 for last three years. Part of my phone gear is a Navigon cell phone holder which is indeed the same like a Garmin cell phone holder.

As I moved to Samsung Galaxy S5 mini, I wanted to be more flexible, and to use my Phone also on my bike I bought:

SPITZEL – Samsung Galaxy S5 Halterung für das Fahrrad

They are made in Germany.

First impression: very solid!

So as the phone case is now equiped with velcro, I want to use it the same way in the car.

Buying 2 m of velcro is very cheap.

velcroNow use the old cell phone car mount and stick two parts of velcro on the car mount:

velcro stickedAnd now, let’s test it:

test

Very nice, very solid and super flexible, it can still be used with the old iPhone 4 and other cell phones with velcro.

Ergo: universal car mount with velcro for a fair amount of money.

In german: Universal Auto handy halterung mit Klett

XMBMC Remote App adding Hosts problem

Using XMBC Remote App (official one) on your Samsung Galaxy S5 (mini) and you want to add Hosts to be controlled?

The first time you start the app you will slightly get the following problem:

Empty_xmbc_hosts

The Hosts Screen will be empty. No Button to add hosts.

The solution for that is:

Hold down the MultiTask Button

And then you will see the UI to add hosts etc.

XBMC_Hosts_is_working

This issue is also reported in: https://code.google.com/p/android-xbmcremote/issues/detail?id=605

Hopefully they will fix that in the next release to make it more user friendly.

Android Samsung Galaxy S5 mini Osx Mavericks sync

Samsung has recently released a pretty nice Phone, Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini. Water resistent etc etc.

Having that phone after some days I found a serious problem: how can you sync and backup your Samsung Galaxy S5 mini with your Apple Mac running the latest version Apple OSX 10.9 called Mavericks?

Of course you can use File transfer for Android to transfer single files / Folders. But being a iPhone user for quite some time, I was compfortable using Apple iTunes, simple to use, mostly no problems.

So what can you do with your Android Phone? According to Samsung you should use „Kies„. This is also avaliable for Mac.
Starting the Application in latest version:

Kies_error

:-/

So what now?
I found an tutorial: http://www.pavtube.cn/guide/make-kies-work-on-mountain-lion-108.html with a link to an older Version. First I check the linked file if it contains malware, nothing found.
I followed the instructions, started the Application, at least no crash.
Tried to install drivers for the device, but even then, no success for syncing my Android Samsung Galaxy S5 mini.

Last chance: Use Kies for Windows…

Anyone else any suggestions?

Is rooting of the device a possible solution? Maybe a virtual machine within OSX in order to run KIES and then pass USB to the virtual machine?

Is there any software available for syncing your Android device with Linux (Ubuntu, Debian etc.)?