Archive for October, 2010


Cyannogen 6.0 – the android revolution

Filed Under: android, Smartphones by dr3amcast3r — 1 Comment
October 24, 2010

A few weeks ago I decided that I wouldn’t wait any longer for the “masters” at AT&T resolve in gracing us with android 2.2 for MyTouch 3G (my android phone), so I went ahead with the plan of rooting my device and installing CM 6.0.

I had been reading the CM wiki and forum for a few months, in order to be on the safe side and make sure that I would lose the minimal information and data possible.

The tools I used where:

My ride was everything but a smooth one.

My first mistake was to try to backup stuff without root access 🙂 But that was easily solved with Universal Androot and following the site instructions and installing Titanium Backup afterwards with a full backup right after.

Then came my second problem. Making my M$ Vista recognize my phone in fast boot. You need to install the SDK tools, make the full update and only after that connect your phone, already on fast boot to the pc. Then, don’t choose install automatically, choose “Search folders and specificly locations” (or something like that) and target the folder x:sdktoolsdrivers (where “x” is the drive letter) and install. And puff you can now use the command prompt to stream the recovery to your phone.

At this point you should already have on your sd card the following:

  • Rom of choice (for this post CM6.0)
  • The recovery you want to install (Amon_Ra)
  • Google apps at choice

Use the screens to apply the rom and restart the phone. If you, by any chance want to flash a recovery file and after the streaming of amon_ra, adb stops recognizing the phone, don’t worry, you can solve it later. I worried for nothing 🙂 I just applied the rom and make the huge mistake to flash the wrong google apps pack, so I had to reset the device and flash the correct one (some people at Cyannogen forum might remember the thread I made before realizing my mistake).

And whatever you do, you must wipe your phone.  I tried without wipe and the rom didn’t even boot (I actually thought I had bricked my phone). After the rom was up and running it was time for the restoration of my personal data. Contacts, Calender (not that important) and messages (deadly important).

I went back to Titanium Backup and attempted a full restoration, that messed up my phone so badly I just did another wipe. After the 3rd wipe because off bad restorations I decided to make a selective restoration, mainly of sms and some other data.

After this I just use Rom Manager (that comes with the rom) to install Amon_Ra Recovery, reinstall some of my apps, most of them I didn’t reinstall because I didn’t actually used them 🙂

My only two problems right now is that none of my previously installed apk via market where there for me to download again and the market takes a lot of time to download apk, even at wi-fi right next to the router (like half a meter away from it)

At endnotes I want to thanks Cyannogen for the great work he’s done on this rom. Much faster than the stock rom I had, and thanks all the devs behind the tools I used to make my upgrade smooth and possible 🙂

Francisco Ribeiro

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The Portable Manifest

Filed Under: My thoughts, Personal Computer, Uncategorized by dr3amcast3r — Leave a comment
October 3, 2010

After a few month of inactivity, I’m back with some comments on Portable stuff (in terms of technology, of course).

In the last few weeks portals like Android and Me and Engadget (If anyone knows others please share them with us) have been releasing a lot of news about tablets, android based for the most part. While I really think this is quite good, it’s also quite frustrating and limited.

For two years I’ve been a user of portable applications and games. Back in the beginning of 2008  I received my first U3 pen with 16 GB and another one, a DATAFERRY with 16GB. After a few months using, and loving, U3 I got tired off all the good applications where payed, and not that cheap most of them, so I changed to Portableapps.com, a free and opensource platform to take your applications with you. For instance, this post is being written on the portableapps version of Firefox.

Thanks to the possibility of taking all of my favorite applications with me, and having an Asus EEE 901 (20GB SDD) to tag along, I end up realizing that there’s a huge flaw in today’s software. Most software isn’t developed with Portable guys (like me) in mind. When you have a netbook with only 20GB available you start to rely on your pen drive for most stuff. And if you discover that you can carry applications in your pen drive instead of installing them on you pc, them you will understand my reasoning. Also, my EEE 901 has Ubuntu linux on it, being the core of the OS in the 4GB SDD and the HOME partition on the 14 GB SDD. If I went around and installed all the stuff I need I would run out of space in no time (and trust me, my installation of Ubuntu was 6 months ago and I only have 600MB out of 4GB free).

And if I’m going to a place where I know that I’ll have a pc available, I don’t want to carry my netbook with me (the screen is to small for a long term usage). So what’s my “solution”? Portable windows applications. If you go to any kind of torrent site you’ll loads of software, from the MS Office tools, to burning software, media players, games and other software. However, none (or very few) are legal copies of the software you want/need to use.

The way I see it, we are going to have a real battle between OS in the (very) near future. Mostly because they will all want to be the masters of Tablets, in the same way that Windows is the master of personal computers (I know there are a lot of Mac and Linux users around, but let’s face it, most of the computers have windows installed).

And if the event is inevitable, as I think it is, them, in my opinion, developers should start focusing on making their applications portable and able to run from a pen drive.

Just imagine the following situation:
We are a supervisor at a construction site, going around with your Windows tablet pc, taking notes and checking stuff, saving the documents and notes directly to your loyal high-capacity pen drive. You finish your walk-around and it’s time to show the results to your superior. Unless your superior has the programs you use to take the notes, you’ll have to show them on the tablet screen, that might not be the most comfortable screen to see it. But what if the programs you use are portable editions, that can easily run from a pen drive? You just un-plug the pen drive from your tablet, plug it on his computer and voila! You are now showing the result of your work on a comfortable 14″+ screen.

I hope I’ve made my point clear. In the near future we need legal and ready to use portable applications. As for me, I’ll continue to use the not so legal version (I actually own all the “portable” applications I use) but portable applications because I have to think about my health (specially my eyes).

Be well!

Francisco Ribeiro

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