Archive for the ‘Operating Systems’ Category
So the Ice Cream Sandwich source code was released a while ago now, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting a port for my Desire Z, or Vision, or G2, or whatchamacall it around the world. By eagerly I of course mean I’ve been constantly refreshing the relevant threads on xda-developers, looking at gibberish git commits, and hex editing keyboardfiles in order to try and help out in any way I can, but still the fickle wench eludes me! I shall now proceed to pull all my hair out of my scalp.
So, why do I so desperately crave this sammich thing? Well, today I’m starting a new tradition: lists: by Bjørn Snoen. Props to any and all who gets the reference.
Why my phone needs a sandwich: a list by Bjørn Snoen
- I’m a flash addict. It’s a real medical condition, usually contracted by visiting the xda forums, and once you start flashing, you just can’t stop. The thrill of flashing a new rom, hoping it won’t fail, and that it won’t seriously harm your device, is amazing. Possibly even more exhilarating than crack, but experts disagree. Sadly, or fortunately, few experts exist, as few flash junkies are crack heads, so it’s more like crack experts disagreeing with flash experts.
- Remember when Honeycomb came out, and android tablets started getting awesome? It’s like that, but for phones. The UI changes are fantastic, from the subtle tweak of scroll bars, to the less subtle tweak done to the graphics of on/off switches, to the radical, and much anticipated, implementation of hardware acceleration in the launcher. Yeah, it’s friggin epic. At least it looks like it on the devices that, you know, have it.
- Tron. That’s right, motherfucking Tron. This entire release looks like something from Tron: Legacy! I know the previous point was kind of about the UI, but this element deserves a point of it’s own. It’s all shades of blue, teal, and black, it has glowy neon edges where it seems appropriate, and it’s matte where it needs to be. This is one geeked out ice cream sandwich, and I love me some geekery. It’s a powerful kind of love. A little inappropriate, actually.
- Okay, don’t get mad now, I lied. There isn’t anything else in specific that I’m looking forward to, however from reading about it I’m sure there are a bunch of kick-ass elements I won’t be expecting.
So today a supposedly “working” port of ICS was posted on the forums, so naturally I downloaded it immediately. Sadly, I’d just ordered pizza, and I had to put off flashing it until it arrived so that the delivery boy could reach me… and he was delayed! Agony! But the hour finally arrived when I could flash this magic ROM, and taste this sandwich for myself! And nothing works.
Well, some things worked, but I couldn’t use the ROM, nope, not at all. The software keyboard wasn’t reachable, because the ROM suffered from the same bug as all other ICS efforts for the old Z, it thinks the hardware keyboard is always out, so the software keyboard never pops up. You’d think that was no problem, the Z has a hardware keyboard, so just use that! Except for the fact that it isn’t working! Only a precious few of the symbol keys work at all, even if they do input the wrong symbol. Sadly this is nowhere near sufficient for inputting my passwords anywhere. And trust me, I tried vnc, I even tried a hacky jnlp script, none of it worked, input is fucked up beyond repair in this ROM. If this is a working ROM, I’d hate to see the broken one.
So I restored my backup after butting my head against this ROM for about an hour. Always remember to backup your data kids! At least I’m getting one good thing out of all of this: I’m getting very motivated to learn about kernel and Android hacking, so in a while you might see some ROMs with BRBcoffee branding popping up on a device near you! Or maybe not, but you never know!
And now for something completely different
With the birth of a new tradition, I’ve decided to change an old one. The song of the blog must die… Yes, I know you’ve loved it very much, but from the ashes shall arise a new and better tradition! Introducing the album of the blog! I know, it’s totally rad. I don’t even know why I didn’t go with album of the blog to begin with, I always paid more attention to albums as entities than songs anyway, and it’s not like I write an entire blogpost while only listening to a single song, I may be productive, but I’m not a robot. Actually… no, Robo-admin will be another post, I don’t need this post turning into a flying circus! Now, without further ado, or bad html, I give you the album!
The album of the blog: A Momentary Lapse of Reason, by Pink Floyd
Insincerely yours
Admin
I know I promised to review my new phone and netbook to ya’ll, but actually this is my first oportunity to sit down, relax with ice cold, nasty coffee, a bad radio show, and the smell of new car, to review at least one of them! (Yes, I’m at work, and there is absolutely nothing to do… And if you didn’t read the title, this entry will be about the HTC Desire Z!) It wont be to long or complicated, so dont worry!
So, what do I have to tell you about this phone? Well, to be honest I’m not very impressed, yet! But again, I love the phone, it’s android that’s bothering me the most… Frankly, I don’t know which version I’ve got, but it sure as hell is buggy and slow! A lot of the programs and apps for the Z is awesome, but yet again even more buggy than the OS itself. Sure I were to expect this, but not to this scale. Lately the whole thing has just been turning itself off once a problem occours, or locking everything up, so that I can’t do shieet. Also Android has a bad file system and using the menues are somewhat rocket science. While I play scientist, not to many programs are running, and the only program allways enabled is the 3G data transfer service, still Ive got to charge this beast every 10th hour. Sure I should expect. This from technology as new as this, and even so I’m happy with my new baby!
So i told you things are badly organized, yes? Exactly! Every single freaking program is just put into the main menu, and there aren’t possibilities for sub menues, as far as I’ve figured out. The good thing about it is that 20 seconds of insane scrolling gives you a good overview over what’s installed. Menues brings me to contacts, don’t ask me why, but for me this seemed logic… Contacts, well… WTF? Why the hell would they mess up this critical and important part of a phone? Every single contact gets doubled, tripled, fripled or worse, based on your SIM contacts, phone contacts, facebook contacts, twitter contacts, etc…
so every single freaking time I want to find a contact, i got to scroll through all the dupliicates. Fortunatly, you can link duplicates, sadly this demands more memory from the phone, and every time you use the “phone feature” it wants to know which of the one billion numbers you want to call. This is the only thing bugging me enough to want to chrush my phone against a telephone pole! Still, that would be a waste of the 4100NOK I’ve spent on this thing. Lets just pray this will get better in close future.
Now, maybe you’ll want to know why I still love my phone? Hah! Thats what I thought! You’re dying to read further in this crapppy entry… So, the main thing I love about this baby is the QWERTY flip out keyboard, oh my god how I love it. If It haden’t been there, I would’ve never written this from my phone. Touch keyboards are just annoying, and my chubby fingers don’t work well with’em. Second is the variety of awesome apps, and the bright an nice screen it’s got makes the apps and everything I do even better. Right now, I’m using the Word Press app to write and post this. Gebious little app. The possibility to make my own WIFI and connct my laptop to is great, also using WIFI in general, but that is old news on most cellphones nowadays. Headphone jack is nice, and an USB-charger is genious, saves me at work, since I’ve got an USB plug in the taxi.
All in all, this is a great mobile device with clear sound, good camera and speakers, bright screen with a good resolution, many posibilities, QWERTY and lots of other stuff. Downsides with the battery usage, contact organizing and menues. Still, in 2-3 months this will most likely be improved in the upcoming android updates. If the contacts doesn’t get properly organized by then, I will kick some developers arse. I would not reccomend it to novice users, but rather to those with more than a basic understanding of technology, and with interest or knowledge to program and fix some bugs themselves. Be prepared Bjørn! Don’t get your hopes up, but you’re about to get into a new and exciting era of smartphones, though I suspect you’ve got a feeling on android from your old tattoo.
Finally I got a customer! So this will be the end.
Upcoming: Samsung Galaxy Netpad review.
As you were!
Steinar
Hello world.
So, today I read that Googles Chrome OS will be delayed by several months. As one of the nerds that have been looking forward to this day like children waiting for Christmas day, I got very sad. So after a short google search, I ended up at Hexxeh`s Chrome OS site, which has a bunch of readily compiled Chrome OS images ready for download, with easy-to-follow instructions on how to install it.
Just look at that beautiful logo..
So here I am sitting on a beta-version of Chrome OS. It is by no means bug free, my settings tab does nothing, my keyboard has no Norwegian layout so i have to turn to trickery and deceit to type typical Norwegian letters, and internet seems to only work when it wants to. For orders sake, shall add that my computer is a netbook, of the Acer Aspire One, 532h persuasion.
Despite this, I really look forward to the day when I can use this delicious OS as my main OS. Woo!
Peace out, sauerkraut
Welcome, one and all, to Burnie’s new concept, the bus blog! I’ll write short entries about whatever is on my mind while I translate myself from home to campus! And what’s on my mind today, you inquire? Why, Burnie’s Bus Blog, of course!
Burnie’s Bus Blog will be notoriously void of images, sadly, a consequence of always being written on my delicious phone, the HTC Hero. I just flashed a new ROM on it, actually, so I.guess I’ll.talk.about that.
“But Burnie, what does that even mean?” You cry out, as the mixed excitement at all these new concepts hits your frontal lobe. Flashing a ROM onto a phone is a kind of dark magic, similar to the act of installing a new operating system on your computer, except the process is much more hacky (read: user-unfriendly).
Bloody hell it’s cold outside! The wait between buses is the worst part of my day.
Where was I? Oh, right. Anyway, for the past months I’ve been using team Villain’s ROM Froyd, which was the best 2.2 ROM for a long time, but the main develiper, Ninpo, ceased development, and in this scene you can’t expect to be on top for long. I don’t know for sure who has the best one now, but the one I flashed last night was Floyo, with the flykernel. It is also 2.2, and is based on Cyanogen’s brilliant mod, just like Froyd was. Cyanogen is still going strong, probably because it isn’t confined to the Hero.
Anyway, Cyanogen and Floyo has incorporated some of the stuff you see in the new HTC Sense interface, which I still feel is the finest Android shell out there, although I left it long ago due to a lack of updates. I’m beginning to realise that this topic might not be suited for a bus blog, it is much too large.
There are rumors of an official 2.2 ROM with sense for the legend next week, which will surely be ported to my phone! That will be nice.
I’ve arrived!
See you 🙂
Hey.
Lately, I’ve been closely following the work that Google is doing with their new OS, called Chromium OS (as of now). Rather than explain what it is, I offer you this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QRO3gKj3qw
Now, as you can see this is a pretty cool idea. What got me thinking was, if everything is being done in read-only, so you don’t actually save stuff, obviously downloading will die completely. Since it is way tougher to cheat DRM and copying restrictions when you can’t copy the actual files, but are dependant on separate servers, this could possibly be the change in internet computing that the corporations that deal with games, music, movies etc. are all searching for. Imagine, if all your movies, your music and your games are streamed instead of saved and played, the aera of free stuff on the internet would die. The internet as the communism that it is would cease to exist.
Of course, it could go the other way, not pick up that much notice and slip by us as a pimple on the history of the internet. Personally, I think that Google has got a brilliant idea with their cloud-based OS, and I actually hope it takes off and people start designing stuff for it (Spotify, I’m looking at you to create an in-browser streaming site).
That’s all I want to let out of my head right now. Peace out, yo