Plug Into Plug Computing
Since my last post I’ve continued to use and play with my new Pogoplug. I’ve also run across more resources for “plug computing”. There are 4 main “plug computing” devices available on the market: The Pogoplug (the original which I have, and the new 2.0), the Sheevaplug, and the Tonidoplug. Each of the three address a different user base. (more…)
Playing With the Pogoplug
I purchased a Pogoplug device last week. I have been playing with it for a couple of days. Being a tinkerer, I kept it in it’s out of the box configuration for nearly an hour. I unboxed it (sorry, no unboxing video, although it is packaged quite nicely), plugged it into my router, power, and a spare USB drive sitting on my desk. I logged into my.pogoplug.com, created a username/password and it found my pogoplug and I was able to access the drive and it’s files from my browser. I was expecting to be able to see a mountable drive like a typical NAS device like the Linksys NSLU2 device. But, the Pogoplug requires downloading client software to be able to mount the drives. Not a big deal, but it limits it usefulness in some ways.
But, there is a way to make the Pogoplug play other roles in your home IT infrastructure. OpenPogo is the place to stop to unleash your Pogoplug. The Pogoplug is a small Linux server running a very small OS configuration. It resides on a small partition in flash memory. There is a larger, unused partition on the flash memory. Following the instructions I have made my Pogoplug a bit torrent client, a TOR server, a media server, and a DynDNS update client. I can now offload bit torrent downloads to the Pogoplug, share my iTunes library, and access it by a domain name rather than IP address.
There have been a few hitches, nothing worth describing. It took a little work to set up the Transmission client daemon to add enough security to allow access from outside of my network. The TOR server setup was pretty quick and seems to work well. Firefly install and setup was very quick and seems to work great. There is a danger of overtaxing the small server with too many torrent downloads.
If you have some basic Linux skills and can manage to use Google, there is a lot you can do with this unit. I’m just getting started.
UPDATE: OpenPogo is giving away a Pogoplug go here: http://openpogo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=212. Or follow them on Twitter, @openpogo for more info.
Aerial Photo Slideshow
A slideshow of aerial photographs I took a couple of years ago:
Do You Really Want Me to Buy This?
My kids have been using an old PC I built 4+ years ago. It’s a an AMD Athlon XP 2800, that has a new habit of shutting down randomly. It was originally a Linux desktop and later a server. Now it’s retiring as a Windows XP Pro system. I wanted to replace it with a new off the shelf system. I don’t have the time, or desire to build another box right now. With Windows 7 arriving this last week, there were a number of sales on new systems. So, I did some shopping around to see what was available for $500 or less. I settled on an HP system that was going for about $479. It’s a basic system that will be good for my kids computing needs. I waiting until today, Sunday, to see if there were any new sales. Sure enough, the system I wanted was available at Office Depot and Office Max for $399. At Office Depot, the sale involved a mail in rebate. But, Office Max, which is only a mile away, had an instant “rebate”.
I walked in, located the system and was approached by a salesman. He was typical of the type of technology guru that find employment in the consumer electronics departments of big box retail stores. He assumed I was a technology idiot. I told him what I wanted, and he went off to see if there they had any left in stock. He gave me a sales flyer with additional “deals” if you were buying a new system. He returned a couple of minutes later with the “last” one they had. He asked me if I was interested in a copy of MS Office Home & Student for $70. I told him I would be interested if it were the Mac version. (My wife can use it on her Mac). His response: “No, we can’t do that. Why would you want to, anyway? It won’t work on this PC.”
If you have ever bought any consumer electronics item then you heard the inevitable extended warranty sales pitch. He quickly outlined the benefits of spending 25% of the cost of the system on an extended warranty. I gave him the only sensible answer to the offer, “Thank you, no i’m not interested”. He took another tack on explaining the benefits. I then informed him that in the last 25+ years of owning computers (starting with a VIC-20), I have never needed to use the standard warranty on a new computer, much less an extended warranty. This did not deter him. He brought out his A game argument. “We are losing money on every one of these systems. The only way we make money on them is by selling the extended warranty. I’m not trying to pressure you for my benefit. I’m doing this for the companies benefit.” So, I am supposed to feel guilty that the company has chosen to employ a moronic business model (“We’re losing money on every sale, but we will make it up in volume!”) and spend another $119 to help the company stay afloat. He then passed me off to the register clerk to finish up. He then threw a nice condescending “Good luck!”, as he walk off.
I’m a pretty tolerant person, (my wife would have walked after the response to the Office question) but I was about to tell him where to re-stock the PC, and walk. In this economy it seems to me that when you have a customer in front of you ready to spend money, you treat them with a lot more respect and deference. Apparently, I am just an “old economy” customer who doesn’t understand the “new economy”.
CyanogenMod Wiki
If you like living on the Android edge, there are a number of alternative ROM images to try. I’ve ran the CyanogenMod image for several weeks before switching to “Donut” last week. If you want to give it a try, take a look at the new wiki. Several step-by-step tutorials, reference info, troubleshooting guides. It’s better than a lot of commercial software out there.
Doing Donuts With Android
I had been running with the Cyanogen mod ROM on my T-Mobile G1. And other than an aborted attempt at running one of the experimental versions, it’s been pretty glitch free. But now Android 1.6, or Donut has been released for Android devices. And, Cyanogen had been slapped with a cease and desist from Google for distributing the proprietary Google apps with the open source Android version he had been producing. So, after a few weeks of work, Cyanogen is back with a new version that by backing up your existing apps, it updates the non-proprietary portion of the OS. A very clever solution.
Unfortunately, the upgrade didn’t go smoothly for me. I ended up doing a factory reset and am now running the stock Android 1.6. I’m going to run it for a while, before trying to ‘upgrade’ to the Cyanogen ROM. So far, I miss the small speed bump of the Cyanogen ROM. But, I do like the new market. Otherwise, I haven’t seen much different from 1.5 that impacts day to day usage.
You Can Tell A Programmer’s Age By Counting the Operating Systems He Has Used
I read this article, Old Operating Systems Don’t Die…, and realized by the end, that the Psion Epoc OS is the only one on the list that I haven’t used. And I don’t mean that I tinkered with them for a few hours. Haiku I’ve tinkered with for a few hours using Sun VirtualBox. And, I actually tinkered with BeOS during it’s brief “prime”. No, I actually spent considerable time with each of the featured OS’ doing actual work, and play in the case of the C64 and Amiga. I have used each of them at some point in my career to make a living. And, in several cases, I owned computers that ran one of the OS’.
The list of “dead” OS’ I’ve used during my career is quite a bit longer than the list in the article. In addition to the articles list I’ve used Unix System 7 on the PDP-11, Dynix PTX on the Sequent Symmetry, Mac OS System 6, 7 on Apple hardware, Palm OS on various Palm PDAs, Novell Netware 3.11, Unix SVR4, PrimOS on a Prime mini, Exec 8 on the Univac 1108, and of course the various “dead” versions of Windows.
Currently, I’m using Mac OS X, Windows XP & Vista, Linux, and Android. Someday, several of those will land on the list of the deceased OS’ as well.
Now, the list of “dead” programming languages I’ve used….
My Current Android App Inventory
So, what I’m using lately?
After a brief time using the new Work Email for Exchange email, I went back to K-9 Mail. It does IMAP well, it has a good feature set, It keeps my email in sync with Exchange (which Work Email didn’t do frequently), and it’s free. If you have to do Exchange, do it with K-9.
I keep going back to the Weather Channel app. I’ve tried WeatherBug, Accuweather, etc. But, the Weather Channel app works the best. However, it now features adMob ads at the bottom. It doesn’t help performance.
I still use Greed regularly. I still like it. And the price has gone down, so it’s an even better deal.
Locale still works well for managing my ringer volume, etc. depending on my location. It’s a little funky to set up, but it works well when you figure it out.
I’ve been using AppManager and TasKiller for a few weeks, and I like both. I recommend both apps.
OI Safe still has custody of my passwords, but I’m looking at alternatives.
T-Mobile MyAccount is an app I don’t use a lot, but I like having it.
I’ve been using the new FaceBook app. I’m not much of a FaceBook user, and it works well enough for me. I’ve tried several Twitter clients. Twitdroid and TritterRide were on my phone for a while. But, as little as I use Twitter, I found it was easier to just put a bookmark on my home page and use the web site directly.
And lastly, Mobile Defense by Neevo. I like this app so far. I’m looking forward to the backup option and remote wipe. For free, it’s a start.
Probably the thing I use the most is the Cyanogen ROM image. It brings the MyTouch apps to the G1, including the very nice power control widget. Along with the CM Updater, it was worth the upgrade.
Oh, and I can’t forget the Retro Clock and Retro Date widgets. They bring back that 1978 vintage “digital clock” look. If only I could get that annoying “bleat” alarm sound for my phones alarm…
Cockscomb Macro
Another shot from my wife’s flower bed. It was hard to capture the deep, rich color and the details of the flower. Shot with my Canon EOS-20D, with an EF 100mm f2.8 Macro lens, and a Sigma ring flash, hand held:
My New G1
It’s actually the same T-Mobile G1 i’ve had since last November. But, it acts like a new, better phone.
How?
By rooting it and flashing it with a modded ROM.
Why now?
I’ve been annoyed by how sluggish my phone has been responding. It has been slow to acknowledge touch screen input, and even the hard buttons. This has gotten worse as I have added new apps to the phone. Some of the apps are running background tasks that are sucking up CPU cycles, most are just occupying the limited memory of the G1. Less available memory, less performance.
There are a lot of articles/posts/etc. on the internet with instructions to ‘root’ your G1. This opened up all kinds of hacking opportunities, but doesn’t address many real features. Plus, the process was complex, error prone, and tedious. So, I stuck with my stock phone with the OTA updates.
A couple of days ago I ran across an article on lifehacker: Five Great Reasons to Root Your Android Phone. The number 1 reason? Performance boost. But, the best part was a link to blog post: How to Root a T-Mobile G1 and MyTouch3G Android Phone, which detailed the easy two step root method, as well as the traditional downgrade root method. The instructions were clear, complete, correct, and not written for a Linux kernel hacker.
While looking through the instructions and checking out the links to other posts/sites, I found the 6th great reason to root your G1, App2SD. If you use the right ROM (Cyanogen!), and partition your SD card appropriately, new apps are installed on the SD card keeping your main memory on the phone free, which helps performance.
So, I charged my phone, gathered microSD cards, card reader, card adapter, usb cable, Macbook Pro, charger, Laz-E-Boy, and beverage.
I won’t go through the details. It went fairly smooth and fairly quick. Except for the ring tones. There was one. Apparently, the Cyanogen ROM does not include the original ring tones in the ROM, they have to be loaded separately. A minor issue, easily fixed.
So, the results:
It’s not a speed demon, but it is significantly more responsive. Battery life is similar to the original, so far. I haven’t reloaded all of my apps yet, so we will see how it responds. I am finally able to use the SD card for something useful!
