Here's how to install the stock Android KitKat camera app for awesome 360-degree photo spheres, no root required

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This curved iPhone 6 concept borrows the iPod Touch design language, is looking awesome

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Awesome Netflix/Fitbit Hack Detects When You’ve Fallen Asleep, Auto-Pauses Your Movie

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Valve Expects Virtual Reality To Be Awesome Within 2 Years

Virtual Reality is coming. As in, actual, good, user-friendly virtual reality. The stuff sci-fi has promised us for decades.

Don’t take my word for it. Valve — easily one of the most revered and admired companies in gaming — has gone deep on virtual reality R&D, and they believe that amazing, consumer-friendly virtual reality is but a couple of years away.

If you’re looking for an excellent weekend read, check out this slide-by-slide transcript of a Steam Developer Day talk given by Valve’s own Michael Abrash. Abrash, an industry vet with code in everything from Windows to Quake, now works for Valve (after Valve’s Gabe Newell spent years convincing him to join) on their Virtual Reality research team.

No time to read the whole thing? You should still find time — it’s really a great read into the mindset of people who are aiming to change the face of gaming. But if you can’t, Here are but a few of the most interesting bits gleaned from the presentation:

Abrash estimates that “compelling, consumer-priced” Virtual Reality headsets will be on the market within 2 years. (The Oculus Rift is well on its way, but it’s still very much a developer-centric product. Oculus isn’t rushing to get these things to market, and that’s for the better.)The biggest challenges to solve, according to Abrash: display resolution is too low (“1080p works,

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Yahoo Sports Gets iOS 7 Redesign, Awesome Gif Creation Tool For Sharing ‘Big 4′ Sports Moments

Yahoo Sports gets a fantastic looking redesign today for iOS 7, and gains a slick new feature called ‘Loops’. Loops allows you to skim through a game, pick a short segment and create a gif complete with effects, captions and looping to share with friends or networks.

The Loop feature is powered by Yahoo’s IntoNow tech and has one of the best interfaces I’ve ever seen for creating a gif on mobile. Right now it supports NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB, as well as NCAA and NCAAB but may expand to more sports in the future. It’s also iPhone only right now, but other platforms are on the roadmap.

You drop into one of your favorite sports and scrub through a game or pick a play. Once you’ve picked a time, you’re dropped into a scannable timeline that lets you pick your moment. Then you can apply filters like freeze frame or slow motion, add a caption and export your gif to social networks and the Loop feed.

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I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, But T-Mobile Is Awesome

I’ve spent the last week back in my wintry homeland in Canada, and here the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I have seen the light, and I have a message for all of you who live in America, a message of the utmost importance, inscribed in fire on the sacred stone of the Internet. And that message is: holy crap T-Mobile is awesome. If you travel internationally at all, you should switch to T-Mobile now.

Yes, I know I sound like a paid shill. I feel awkward and embarrassed about that. I think my record speaks for itself, though: when it comes to tech companies, usually I’m a crotchety, negative guy. But this is different. This is terrific.

Heck, only six months ago I wrote a post called “America’s Carriers Are Terrible. It’s Probably Your Fault.” But then in October T-Mobile rolled out its free unlimited international global roaming.

Basically, international travellers on a monthly T-Mobile plan no longer have to either deal with rapacious roaming charges or the hassle of getting and activating a new SIM card local to your destination. Instead you just switch data roaming on and let your phone find your provider. To my considerable amazement, that’s all I needed to do; no APN hacking, no mobile-network munging, no service calls; It Just Works. I could even tether.

It’s not perfect, of course. You still have to pay, albeit very reasonable prices, for calls and texts, and your free data is only 2G/128kbps. Needless to say, you can buy 4G roaming from T-Mobile, but I’ve found no need to do so; in Toronto, at least, 2G is plenty good enough to check email and Twitter between the many zones and cafes where you can pick up a cup of wi-fi nowadays — and it’s so much better than the alternatives that any comparison at all is kind of insulting.

I am not accustomed to sounding like an advertisement like this. To be honest it kind of makes my skin crawl. But it’s probably important, on the rare occasions that a company — an American carrier, no less — actually does that right thing, that we praise them to the rafters and sing hosannas in their name.

Oh, I have no illusions that T-Mobile’s boardroom is full of angels. They were only driven to doing the right thing because they were the distant fourth-place competitor in a vicious market; and now that Softbank/Sprint is on the verge of buying them, everything may change. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they canned this initiative the day after the merger closes, on the grounds that it actually improves their users’ lives without desperately inconveniencing them at every possible pretext and then charging them to mitigate those inconveniences — and we can’t have that, can we? It sets a bad precedent.

I half-expect their attitude towards their customers to soon revert to that of a medieval lord towards his serfs. But maybe, in the interim, we travellers can send a message by voting with our feet. Abandon your current carrier, buy an unlocked phone, and flock to T-Mobile and its (currently) almost incomprehensibly user-friendly plans. This golden era probably won’t last; but make the most of it while you can.

Image credit: chrisinplymouth, Flickr.

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