Crazy Taxi is a free online car racing game for small kids. The car can be controlled using the Arrow keys on the keyboard. You need to race the car against other cars in the game. The Up and down arrows control the speed of the car and the Left and Right arrow keys can change the lanes. Pressing the Spacebar makes the car jumps. You can jump over other car ahead of you. It is a simple and fun game to play. You can watch the demonstration of this game in the video below.
A few days ago an antivirus company found out that several Chinese made android smartphones were carrying trojan virus as part of their pre-installed system software. Which I have reported in the last video I posted on my Youtube channel. If you haven't seen it, you can watch it now above. So even if an antivirus program detects them, it can not remove or delete them.
I found one program on my Micromax Canvas 2.2 A114 smartphone, an App called GameHub which was detected by Avast as well as Malwarebytes as a Trojan
However neither the antivirus programs could delete it, nor could I uninstall it from the phone. Because it was part of the system files preinstalled on the phone, and removing it needed root access. For that I needed to gain root access on my smartphone. It is called Rooting your smartphone in popular terms.
I could not find any help on official Android forums or on Google's. Several search queries that came up searching for "root your android phone" pointed out to some apk files that needed to be installed on the smartphone to root it. But when I tried to download it, my chrome browser refused to download them deeming them as harmful. So I avoided them.
I did come across a program called Kingo Root that you can install on your Windows computer and then connect your smartphone using a USB cable. You also need to enable USB Debugging in Developer options on your smartphone.
The Developer Options are not enabled by Default. To activate them you need to open System Settings > About Phone > Build Number.
Now you need to touch the location where Build Number is written 7 times successively. In the end you will see a message that "You are now a developer". Then you can open the "Developer Options" and select the "USB Debugging". That's all.
This program then detects your smartphone and then it installs and runs necessary scripts on your phone to Root it. Once you see that your phone is correctly detected then you can press the "ROOT" button, and wait patiently for a few minutes, till your android smartphone reboots a couple of times and you get a message on Kingo Root screen that the "Rooting" was successful.
It did work on my phone and I could get root access on my phone.
However, this was not enough to remove the offending App, or its APK file. I had to install an uninstaller on my smartphone, which I selected randomly from the several uninstallers in the Google Play Store. I think most of the uninstallers should do the trick.
When you run the Uninstaller, you are asked if you would grant Root Access or Deny. After you grant it root access, you can then select the Apps that you want to uninstall. I did remove several Apps that were pre-installed, some of them were detected as malware, some were not useful for me. So it was a good thing to get rid of them and make space on the phone's memory.
The last thing I did was to uninstall the Uninstaller itself.
The Kingo Root program can also "Remove the Root", but for time being I would like to keep root access on my smartphone so that I can try and install some programs that require root access.
Update: It seems that This Kingo Root program installs an App called Super SU on the smartphone which does the root permissions. However there are some issues with the Super SU App itself, regarding updates. Currently I am stuck in figuring it out.
Warning: This is just my experience so far. I would not recommend anyone trying to root their phone. Because on thing leads to another, and you end up resetting your phone to Factory settings.
In this post we will learn how to create a focus over a certain portion of an image and blur the surrounding image. We will use the free image editing App Pixlr express for that. If you haven't already installed it, you can read more about it on this link
I will update this post to add similar information using other photo editing Apps as well. So if you select the focal menu, your image will be opened in the focal edit mode as seen in the image below.
We see two concentric circles in the middle of the image. If you touch in the middle white spot you can drag it over other parts of the photo. Whereas the two circles can be stretched or shrinked separately by touching the periphery of the circles. There are two focus options displayed in the menu. Circular and linear. The linear option will create a focused area from left to the right across the image. You can also choose to make the surrounding portion more or less blurred by selecting the amount of blur from the "blurring" menu.
Let us look at the Vibrance option in Pixlr Express. Pixlr Express is a free image editing App for Smartphones. If you haven't installed it already, you can read more about it on this link.
This is the edit mode of Vibrance. With the slider pointing at 0. You can move it to left or to right to decrease or increase the value.
In this post we will look at the stylize menu of Pixlr Express. Pixlr Express is a free photo editing App for Smartphones. If you are new to Pixlr Express, please read the earlier posts form this link We can see the stylize menu in the above image. If you select it, the image will open in the stylize edit mode. Here is a screenshot of different options that are available in the stylize mode. There are more options visible if you scroll the menu .
Creating a Splash effect in a photo on your smartphone can be a enthusiasm booster to those who like to post their selfies or snapshots often online. This effect allows you to select a portion of your photo and then process the image to keep only that color and remove other colors from different portions of the photo. This effect can be quite amusing if you have a photo with patches of distinct colors.
