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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Current Projects

In lieu of anything worthwhile or extraordinary to write about, I'm going to regale you all with a long list of things I've accomplished lately.

Signed up for Amazon Cloud Drive
Yet another contender for cloud storage. Seeing as I can't/won't pay for online data storage, I've stuck with free limited accounts with Dropbox, Ubuntu One, Google Docs and another one that I can't remember the name of. Oh well. I'll test them all out to see which reigns supreme for my personal needs. So far, Dropbox is the winner, especially since they have a Chrome web app and an Android app. I'm sure the others are the same, I've just used Dropbox the most.

Amazon is pushing their Cloud Drive storage as a music-centric utility, so the first thing I'm doing is uploading a selection of my, um, legal music collection. I already see a recurring problem with cloud storage: uploading. The sorry state of broadband speed in the US means that I pay upwards of fifty dollars a month for anywhere from two to twelve megabytes downstream and half a megabyte upstream. Pitiful. If I were to try to fill my five gigs of Amazon storage, it would take me almost three hours, and Time Warner would probably disconnect me halfway through the upload for hogging the bandwidth.

Update: Apparently, in order to make use of the Android app, I have to purchase music from Amazon's MP3 store. Oh well, no such thing as a free lunch.

Set up my Android development environment
I reformatted my desktop a few weeks ago so that I could set it up to triple boot Windows 7, Ubuntu and Snow Leopard, and had neglected to reinstall Eclipse and the Android SDK tools. I made a half-hearted attempt to learn Java for Android about a year ago when I got my MyTouch 3G, but didn't get much further than the requisite "Hello World" app. My programming knowledge isn't what you would call extensive, or even existent, really. I took a basic programming course in college, didn't retain any of it, didn't take any follow-up courses, so now I'm left to teach myself.

Rooted and unrooted and rerooted my Nook Color
One of the reasons I love my Nook Color is that it has the potential to be more than just an e-reader. Sure, you can browse the web and play chess and listen to Pandora right out of the box, but not much more than that. Barnes & Noble put their own limited version of Android on the Nook, but Android developers everywhere have made it possible to install pretty much any version of Android you want. I've spent the past few weeks trying all of the different builds, starting with just a regular root of the stock OS, then booting Honeycomb from a microSD card, then dual booting the rooted stock OS and CyanogenMod 7, and many different configurations of those before settling on the CM7 tablet tweaked release candidate. Now I can watch Flash videos, play Angry Birds, add widgets to my homescreens, basically customize the crap out of it. I also overclocked the processor slightly, which has given me vastly improved performance at the expense of battery life, but whatever. I can always revert to the normal kernal and regain battery life if it becomes a problem. Check out the Nook Devs site or XDA forums for more info.

Installed an OS X Virtual Machine
Here's another thing I know virtually (ha) nothing about, but did anyway. After attempting to turn my desktop into a triple-booting Hackintosh and struggling with getting my graphics drivers straightened out, I came to the conclusion that it would probably be easier just to buy an Apple computer. Then I found a guide on Lifehacker on how to create an OS X Virtual Machine in Windows 7, and thought I'd give it a shot. As of right now, all I've done is install it and run it once to make sure it worked, which it appeared to. I'll have to keep tinkering with it.




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