Devices everywhere. With root.
Over the past month, I’ve tackled two root projects…Emma’s Kindle Fire HD, and my Asus Transformer. My motivation was pretty straight forward for each. The Kindle worked perfectly fine but with an awful UI. The main use case is YouTube for a 2 y/o, and the stock launcher doesn’t do that well. Root and a custom launcher gets you there, so I did that. The specific version of Fire I have was supposed to be tricky to root. There were forums of people bricking them, and the general workaround seemed to be reverting to an older firmware and then trying the root exploit…which seemed to be generally available as a windows executable. Not happening. I decided to give rooting a shot by pushing the su binary and Google apk set over via ADB on my Mac, which worked perfectly. Not sure what the issue had been. Play Store achieved…Nova Launcher installed. Happy 2 y/o. The Asus was a different story…and the toughest root project I’ve had to tackle to date. The Transformer was a refurb from Woot, I think. I could look that up but I’m not going to. The combination of JellyBean and my particular firmware made any exploit attempts moot. I could not push via ADB, but the device acted like the files were invalid. Same method as pretty much anything else, but simply failing. I tried several methods I found online, but they all yielded the same outcome…except one really sketchy one. I managed to use a really, really iffy Chinese root manager called 授权管理. The download and exploit were all in Chinese. Awesome. It worked, and I immediately replaced that with su. There was a good 10 minute window running who-knows-what. Sort of disconcerting. Bloatware wiped, and the tablet runs crazy fast finally. I’ve been checking my logs, and nothing fishy has popped up…looks like the hack worked. Anyhow, two devices, each more usable. Go root.
The upgrades to my machines were simple, but significant issues arose in updating from 12.04 to 12.10 and from 12.10 to 13.4. The former was mainly in ’not compiling video card drivers’ and the later was primarily pertaining to neglecting Dell’s primary Wi-Fi drivers. I went manual and had boxes that were mostly functional, but decided to roll the dice on fresh installs…which, predictably, worked well. That gut feeling in doing something of that nature is very Window-y, and I don’t like it one bit. In short, poorly played by Ubuntu. It might be time to get some real QA going on these upgrades…I spent enough time researching this stuff to be upset, and I debug issues similar to this professionally. There was a ton of noise on forums, so it is safe to assume the user base was significantly disheartened by this process. On the flip side, 13.04 is slick…Unity is improved a ton…all of that. The marketing is not cool, and I’d be better off with pure Debian if this wasn’t one of my hobbies. Worst upgrade of all time, but still something I look forward to and will likely do again. D+
Red Bull’s concept was simple and brilliant…the accepted applicants were given custom Arduino shields, a whole bunch of LEDs, and a path to a git repo containing a library with which to make them crank. That, about four weeks, and a nudge to do something awesome with lights. We did this… We used all of the PWM channels at our disposal to handle the colors on our Encabulating Interface, and tossed in some analog stuff for good measure. Our software utilized the Encabulator’s accelerometer values as the interface’s interfacing variables, which is nice. Most of the board’s function was exercised, as was my brain, Emma’s brain, and Emma in general. She liked the feedback in a belly laugh way…so that is that. Pretty sure she and I both came out ahead on this effort. Here’s to 2014…look out for team swan tron.