My Pirate Name

My pirate name is:

Bloody Harry Vane

Every pirate lives for something different. For some, it’s the open sea. For others (the masochists), it’s the food. For you, it’s definitely the fighting. You tend to blend into the background occaisionally, but that’s okay, because it’s much easier to sneak up on people and disembowel them that way. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

Windows + Linux= Each has their place

So a couple months back I repartitioned my desktop to give more drive space to Windows 7, and also to boot first. I’ve also got Ubuntu 12.04 on the secondary partition still in use. I’ve also added a 1TB drive for my media storage.

After much thought I came to the conclusion that Windows made more sense as a daily driver in my house for a few reasons:
I run Xbox 360s on my TVs for gaming and media playback (netflix, youtube, streaming client for my M4Vs, etc). It only makes sense to take advantage of the native compatibility between the two. I’m eventually going set up DVR functionality on my Win7 box so using the 360 as a set top box is natural.
I like to play PC games occasionally. Hooked to my 42″ HDTV makes my PC much more fun, including gaming thats not on the console.

Now, I still use Linux for many uses, including exclusively on my netbook, which lives next to my chair in the living room. I love the ease of updating, raw speed and lack of malware on linux. But I think it’s ridiculous to ignore the advantages of certain platforms for no good reason. Many people will have good reasons. In this case, I don’t anymore.

Huge Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, so I guess I have no credibility. Think what you will.

Droid X VZW Gingerbread updated to .602, solves most problems

So I got the .602 update to my Droid X from Verizon a while back, and it seems to have resolved most of my complaints with Gingerbread on the DX.

All I know is that the phone doesn’t ever lose its data connection anymore, and seems generally mo’ bettah.

Now my next kick is waiting for Wesnoth to come to Android. Pretty please.

Droid X Gingerbread update- VZW blames Google

So I got the Gingerbread OTA update for my DX. In the 10 days I’ve had it, I’ve experienced the following bugs:

2 times: Network data connection dies overnight. In the morning, there is no 3G/1X icon on th phone, at all. Toggling data or wifi on or off does nothing. The only to get the 3G data back is to reboot the phone.
3 times: The phone randomly locking up & rebooting itself.

So, I called Verizon support from my phone (*611) and tell them after getting the GB OTA update I’m losing my 3G. The tech puts me on hold to “look up any alerts for this update.” A minute or so later, she returns, apologizes for the delay, and tells me the following (paraphrased):

*Google* pushed this update prematurely to some devices, including mine. It was not a Verizon update. She assured me it wasn’t anything with my specific hardware, and *Google* is going to push another update in a couple weeks to resolve it.

Yeah.
So now Verizon is saying that Google is pushing updates directly to my phone, instead of Verizon.

Sure.
http://support.vzw.com/system_update/droid_x.html

In any event, I’ll wait for the next OTA, which I’m guessing Verizon is working on. Gee thanks VZW. I understand when patches go sideways or unexpected bugs creep in. But don’t tell me another vendor is patching my OS on your phone. Really.

Official Gingerbread update on the Droid x installed

Right on cue,  Verizon Wireless makes the Gingerbread update available for my DX. It’s downloading now via wifi as I type this post, at 57%. Heading to bed but will post impressions tomorrow at some point. I’m hoping for some speed improvements as well as battey life, since I’m a performance freak. More later.  

CM7 on the Nook Color rocks

So I finally got around to upgrading from Autonooter to a full CM7 rom on th Nook Color. The wife (who owns it) was tired of switching between the BN gui and the sort-of android soft keys & market. So, I loaded cm_encore_full-41.zip on via clockwork and then loaded gapps-gb-20110307-signed.zip on for Market access, and away I went.

Works Beautifully. Huge props to the cyanogenmod folks for this. Now I’m tempted to pick up a 2nd one for my own fun..

For the record, these are the steps to do everything, cuz I can’t ever remember anything:

1. Burn the clockwork image. I’m using the 8GB card version since thats what I have. Use a different one depending on what you have. Don’t dd your hard drive like a fool:
sudo dd if=8gb_clockwork-0.1-ext4.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

this took ages so  I recommend a smaller size.

2. Simply copy the CM7 zip & the google apps .zip to the card.

3. Power off the Nook Color fully, stuff your freshly made micro SD in, and boot up. You’r now in Clockwork Recovery mode. Volume buttons navigate, N button is Select, and Power is “back”

4. Go to “Mounts and Storage” and format the following 3 partitions. DO NOT FORMAT /Boot!
/system
/data
/cache

5. Install the CM7 image using the “from the sd card” option, then do the same with the GoogleApps package

6.Take out the Clockwork sd card, and Select Reboot System Now.

&. you’re now booted into  your newly imaged tablet. I recommend bypassing Add Acct, get your Nook on Wifi, tehn go back, add your gmail acct, then start loading your favorites from the Market, starting with Flash 10.2

yay.

I obviously didn’t come up with this myself. Tutorials are all over the net. I simply combined & reworded everything I used from various sites to come up with these reminders that my own brain can follow.

Hate Unity in Ubuntu 11.04

Just my own opinion of course. Installed it on a box @work. Boy am I glad I can opt for ‘Classic’ mode from GDM and keep compiz and Gnome intact…
And yes I used Unity on the Netbook edition on the Mini 9 previously. Made me switch to Gnome on the small screen as well after being a big fan of the Netbook interface.
Please don’t make me switch to XFCE again, too.

Nook Color rooted

Yeah yeah I’m late to the party I know ..the NC has been rooted today after a couple weeks of weekend distractions. It’s almost not worth mentioning since it was so trivial and well documented.  One thing I will mention is LauncherPro is a great Android launcher app. Props to that. More details as I play with it more.

Maverick Netbook impressions

So I installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 Maverick Meercat on the Mini 9 the other day, and after a bit of adjustment to the new GUI, I think it’s a nice release. Everyrhing worked straight out of the install. With my replacement Intel 3945 wifi card, my system doesn’t need any restricted drivers to work.

Of course, the factory Broadcom wifi card shouldn’t have any driver issues in the future since Broadcom open sourced their drivers.

Boot time is improved, and there are actually 4 work spaces, like gnome. Also, there’s a slick menu on the left side, saving the limited vertical resolution.

The only real tweaks I’ve made include disabling the user list in GDM, so you need to type the user name as well as password. This is a very portable system. Should it be stolen, why would I want to give the thieves half of my login credentials? The code to do this is:

sudo gconftool-2 –direct –config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory –type Boolean –set /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list True

Also, I’m not a fan of Empathy, so I replace it with Pidgin. Gwibber rocks for Twitter, though.

By the way, Wesnoth plays nicely at 1024×600 while mobile.

Battery in place, Maverick incoming

Got the new 8cell battery for the Mini 9, and its great. Full charge reports 10:20 battery time, & I think that’s pretty accurate.

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick is coming tomorrow, and I can’t wait to install & check out the new Unity netbook GUI. I’ve been running the x64 Beta of regular Ubuntu and is pretty slick, so I don’t anticipate many isues with this release.

On that note (and I know I tweeted about it) while we may see the bits already available in some places, its recommended not to grab them until the official release is announced due to last-minute possible  changes. Full details & explanation here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1589308.

I’ll be grabbing the torrent from a local university.