"Country Boy"

"Country Boy"

Well I grew up down an old dirt road in a town you wouldn't know

My pops picked the place up for 1500 bucks back in 1964

My grandfather was a drinker back in the day he put 'em down

But a war is known to change a man and the whiskey is known to change a man

But, that's not me

I rarely drink from the bottle but I smoke a little weed

I still live in the sticks where you wouldn't go

In a town of 1200 off an old dirt road

And a country boy is all I'll ever be

Now it's been 12 years since I sold my soul to the devil in L.A.

He said "sign your name here on the dotted line and your songs they all will play"

He set up shop on sunset, he put me up at the marquee

He said "you wanna sell a million records boy you better listen to me"

He said "change your style, whiten your smile, you could lose a couple of pounds

And if you want to live this life, you better lose that wife, do you need your friends around?"

I said, no that's not me

Cause the biggest things in life are your friends and family

And I like my jeans and my old t-shirts

And a couple extra pounds never really hurt

Cause a country boy is all I'll ever be

Cause Hank taught me just how to stay alive

You'll never catch me out the house without my 9 or 45

I got a big orange tractor and a diesel truck

And my idea of heaven is chasing whitetail bucks

And as a country boy you know I can survive

Now two flags fly above my land that really sum up how I feel

One is the colors that fly high and proud

The red, the white, the blue

The other ones got a rattlesnake with a simple statement made

"Don't tread on me" is what it says and I'll take that to my grave

Because, this is me

I'm proud to be American and strong in my beliefs

And I've said it before but I'll say it again

Cause I've never needed government to hold my hand

And I've said it before but I'll say it again

Cause my family has always fought and died to save this land

And a country boy is all I'll ever be

I love my country, I love my guns, I love my family

I love the way it is now, and anybody that tries to change it

Has to come through me, that should be all our attitudes

'cause this is America and a country boy is good enough for me son

A Rare Flower Hepatica

A Rare Flower Hepatica 

Golden Tabby Tiger heart emoticon

Golden Tabby Tiger heart emoticon

NASA Snaps The Mother Of All Earth Selfies

NASA Snaps The Mother Of All Earth Selfies

NASA is doing some really amazing stuff lately, including extremely in-depth and vivid photography (in case you missed it, check out its recent Pluto fly-by).

This particular photo, which I feel like is the mother of all Earth photos, was taken from its DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) Satellite from over a million miles away.

Here it is. The entire sunlit side of the Earth and it’s absolutely breathtaking (go check it out in its full resolution glory here):

The photo was taken by a camera appropriately called EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera), which sports a 4 megapixel CCD camera and telescope. Ain’t it pretty?

The goal is to share a photo a day, once NASA streamlines the photo-taking process.

Here are more details from the recent photo shoot from space:

The image was taken July 6, 2015, showing North and Central America. The central turquoise areas are shallow seas around the Caribbean islands. This Earth image shows the effects of sunlight scattered by air molecules, giving the image a characteristic bluish tint. The EPIC team is working to remove this atmospheric effect from subsequent images. Once the instrument begins regular data acquisition, EPIC will provide a daily series of Earth images allowing for the first time study of daily variations over the entire globe. These images, available 12 to 36 hours after they are acquired, will be posted to a dedicated web page by September 2015

Samsung Announces Two Galaxy Tab S2 Tablets Which Are Thinner Than The iPad

Samsung Announces Two Galaxy Tab S2 Tablets Which Are Thinner Than The iPad

Samsung announced its thinnest smartphone to date last week — that’s the Galaxy A8 — and today the Korean firm took the wraps off its thinnest tablet devices so far: the Galaxy Tab S2.

Like last year’s Galaxy Tab S, design is a big focus for these two devices. And, at just 5.6mm, they are more slender than Apple’s sleekest iPad Air (6.1mm). They are available in two new sizes — 8 inch and 9.7 inch — which weigh in at just 265g and 389g, respectively. That combination of thinness and weight could make them pretty portable devices.

The Galaxy Tab S was impressive, and it shone brightest when it came to multimedia, particularly watching videos and films. It looks to be the same story again with these upcoming models. Samsung’s press materials also play up the ease of reading media on the 2048 x 1536 pixel super AMOLED display, though we’ll reserve full judgment until we’ve had a chance to get them into our hands for a deeper test.

On the specs side of things, the Galaxy Tab S2 runs Android 5.0 Lollipop. Under the hood it is powered by an octo-core processor, which pairs four 1.9GHz  cores with four 1.3GHz cores — with 3GB RAM and 32 or 64GB of internal memory. The latter is expandable to 128GB via microSD cards.

Media-wise, the tablets sport an 8-megapixel rear camera and 2.1-megapixel front camera. That’s not bad for a tablet, but we’d still rather see people taking photos and video on their phone or — god forbid — a dedicated camera, rather than bungling around with an oversized a tablet.

Samsung said the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 will go on sale across the world in August. It looks like the models will be available in white and black, but Samsung hasn’t said how much they will cost.

Spotify’s Latest Trick Is A Personalized News Feed-Style “Discover Weekly” Playlist

Spotify’s Latest Trick Is A Personalized News Feed-Style “Discover Weekly” Playlist

Knowing what to play next is the biggest problem with streaming music services, but most solve discovery with clunky

, unfamiliar blog-style tabs you’re supposed to browse. Listeners are accustomed to playlists, so Spotify’s latest attempt to unlock its catalog is an algorithmically personalized playlist called “Discover Weekly”. Users will start seeing it soon, and you can preview mine here.

Delivered to the top of your playlist…list on web and mobile each Monday, Discover Weekly offers up two hours of songs that other users with similar tastes to you are adding to their own mixes. You don’t have to keep browsing for individual tracks to play. Just throw on Discover Weekly and Spotify will keep the beats steady knockin’.

Playlists are Spotify’s best bet for keeping its 75 million listeners and 20 million paying subscribers loyal in the face of Apple Music’s invasion of the market. No one wants to abandon their playlists or the listening history that fuels Spotify’s personalization to switch services. My mixes are what keep dragging me back while I test Apple Music. The independent Spotify needs all the help it can get to fend of Apple, with its industry connections and massive pre-install base on hundreds of millions of iPhones.

Ears-On With Discover Weekly

I got a chance to preview my Discover Weekly playlist, and was pleasantly surprised by how well it fit into the Spotify experience. Until now, the app’s discovery flow has been about its Browse tab, full of new releases, mood and activity-based playlists, charts, and editor-made mixes.

The issue is that you can’t just hit play on the Browse tab. You have to dig in and find something specific, then pop back out and try again. That’s a lot of work, especially if you’re trying to work, work out, commute, or rest. But a playlist can be easily turned on to let your ears do the diciphering of what you like, not your eyes.

Spotify's Browse tab can't just be played like Discover Weekly

Spotify’s Browse tab can’t just be played like Discover Weekly

That’s why about a year ago, I recommended that Spotify build a “Playfeed”. I imagined it combining editors’ picks, new releases, and personalized suggestions in a constantly updated playlist.

Discover Weekly is similar, though it’s just algorithmic recommendations, and only updated weekly. The company looks at what songs you listen to, finds users who added those tracks to their playlists, and then populates Discovery Weekly with more jams from those same playlists.

For better or worse, Spotify’s product doesn’t just keep growing your Discover Weekly playlist. Instead, it replaces it entirely each week. This makes it urgent (or a chore) to save what you like before it disappears. Personally, I’d prefer just one playlist that keeps getting added to, or that’s archived somewhere.

At least Discovery Weekly is easily accessible, unlike than the Friends Top Tracks playlist Spotify launched last year but unfortunately buried in the Browse tab’s Charts section.

Overall, I found the Discovery Week;y playlist quite adventurous. Mine mostly featured indie bands on the rise — the kind of artists that’d be lucky to score a spot on one of Coachella’s smallest stages. Spotify could have made it a bit more comfortable to slip into by including more artists I’d already listened to but tracks I hadn’t. And it certainly felt like it was made by a computer, not a person. The first song was exceedingly slow, which a human would know to place later in a playlist, not up front.

With growing competition from Apple Music, Google Music, YouTube, Tidal, and others, Spotify is relying on personalization to win streaming. While others try to make mainstream services that appeal to casual listeners, Spotify’s always been aimed at hardcore music fans. In some ways, Discover Weekly is the exact opposite of Apple Music’s one-size-fits-all, human-DJ’d radio station Beats 1.

The question will be whether Spotify can blossom into a service for the average person who’s upgrading from buying or stealing MP3s. Discovery mechanics that don’t require your constant attention will help, but they can’t just be a little better if it’s going to survive alongside Apple.

Spotify needs more ways to get its app out there. Discover Weekly ought to keep loyal users listening, but a more viral feature might be in order. What might really move the needle is if Spotify could get users to build playlists for their friends who haven’t signed up yet.

SimplePrints Launches “Photo Magic,” A Photo Book Publishing Service That Works Over SMS

SimplePrints Launches “Photo Magic,” A Photo Book Publishing Service That Works Over SMS

The growth in shopping-by-SMS services knows no bounds, apparently. The latest entrant into the field is now Photo Magic – no relation to on-demand delivery service Magic.
(Or perhaps the company is aiming for brand confusion?). The new service is an offshoot of the photo book publishing company SimplePrints, which currently offers mobile apps that allow consumers to build books by uploading photos from their smartphone. With Photo Magic, however, the process of building a photo book is even easier – users can now just text in their requests to SimplePrints instead.

While there are already a number of alternatives to Magic, including Operator, GoButler, Fetch, and more recently, Scratch, Photo Magic is among the first among this new cadre of services to exploit the idea of shopping by way of text messaging for a dedicated niche – in its case, photo books.

Like the others in this space, the process of “shopping” begins by SMS. On the one side, you have the consumer, who starts by sending a text to the company which is then handled by a “photo curation specialist,” who responds by asking a few questions and providing a secure link for uploading the photos to SimplePrints. (Apparently you can’t just text in your photos to the service, which would have been clever, if potentially less secure.)

That being said, the process is still quicker and far less painless than downloading a standalone mobile application and then customizing your photo book yourself
According to SimplePrints CEO Matt Sullivan, the idea to expand into the realm of SMS-based ordering was prompted by activity his team witnessed within the app’s user base. A number of customers would begin building a book on their smartphone, but then not make it to checkout.

“With SimplePrints we’ve tried to make the photo book creation process super simple and streamlined, but we still see a high percentage of users getting through the install, sign-up, and even adding a bunch of photos, only to stop there,” Sullivan explains. “When we ask them what happened, the answer is usually that they ran out of time or it was ‘too much work’ to layout the photos,” he says.

In addition, the app-less service also works to address a problem a number of startups are today facing: that despite the fact that consumers today are spending 85 percent of their time on smartphones using apps, only around five third-party apps (non-native apps) are regularly used. Niche apps like photo book builders can have trouble gaining traction in this kind of environment.

To its credit, SimplePrints has done fairly well, in spite of these challenges. The company is today doing $4 million to $5 million in revenues and is profitable, says Sullivan. In addition, two-thirds of its customers had never purchased a photo book before using SimplePrints, and it’s also managing to attract high-value customers who are spending more than $40 per order on average.