Technology

Wii U: Teardown

In a new addition of Iwata Asks a pictoral hardware tear down is conducted and discussed. I found the discussion concerning power consumption, performance and design to be very interesting.

I purchased a Wii after it’s launch but due to hardware shortages it took several weeks of searching. In this environment of increaing numbers of iOS and Android gadgets, I wonder what is the outlook for console makers like Nintendo. I find myself wanting to wait and see. As a new father I find I have little time for games and the bit of time I do have is used primarily on my desktop or Andoid phone. I have only broken out my NES and Wii since moving in for a quick test to see that both work… well and a few levels of SMB.

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The WordPress and Debian Experiment

Prior to moving, my wife expressed an interest in having her blog on a simpler platform. I previously had it on a Drupal 6 installation which she often found the admin panel to be over whelming. I was self hosting my blog, her blog and a few other sites on an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS machine prior to the move. The server was in a 12 bay server case with and AMD Processor. I felt the hardware was a little larger and more power hungry than I needed for a home web and file server. Taking that all into account I decided to reinstall on an old Aspire One Netbook that I had.  

I decided this time around that I would use Debian as the Operating System. While Ubuntu LTS had been good to me, I run Ubuntu on my desktop and I wanted to diversify slightly. For the blogging platform I decided to go with WordPress as it has a reputation of meeting my Wife’s requirement of simple. I decided to “eat my own dog food” and I migrated my blog over to WordPress also.  Since WordPress is FLOSS software it also still makes me happy on that end of things.

The move hasn’t been all that simple. First was the hurdle of migrating blog content. Then there were the hurdles of setting up Plugins. I recently had a Google+ Plugin go haywire and repost a bunch of old content to my Google+ stream which I had to clean up. So far my wife seems to like having an Android app she can post from and I think she is happier with her blog.

If you know of any must have WordPress Plugins, please let me know about them in the comments. I would love trying a few things out.

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CyanogenMod 10 On My HTC EVO LTE

Anyone that knows me understands that I can’t sit with a stock Android device for long. So far I have had a Barnes and Noble Nook Color that I rooted the first night of owner ship and installed CM7 as soon as the community ported over the code to it. I later Owned an LG Optimus S and I rooted it and installed a custom recovery and ROM. I went with CM7 on that device as I enjoyed CyanogenMod on my Nook and after trying other ROMs on my Optimus, I found myself longing for the tweaks and style that the CyanogenMod team provides.

Last August I upgraded to an HTC Evo LTE. I decided to go with that as opposed to a Samsung S3 due to my brother having one and the fun of working on the same phone and because I liked the hardware of the EVO. It looked and felt like it was really well built.

After getting my EVO I immediately rooted it using the files and directions at this thread on XDA:

 How to Root/Unroot HTC Evo 4G LTE! [Windows/Mac/Linux][One-Click][<=1.22.651.1]

I then waited until this month to root because most of the mature ROMS available were Sense based. If you are unfamiliar with HTC Sense it really gets in the way of an enjoyable Android experience. The biggest issues being the limited multitasking, app associations defaults being messed up and the camera refocusing constantly while I took videos or pictures. I wanted to get as far away as I could to Sense.

So this morning I prepared my phone for loading a custom ROM by first achieving S-Off with LazyPanda. The information on the Unlimited.IO website made the process very easy. As a note my phone was on Hboot 1.12 (I never upgraded my phones software). Others with an Hboot higher than that will need to use HTC Dev Unlock to install a custom rom. With HTC Dev Unlock a person can do most everything S-Off can but it takes a few more steps.

After achieving S-Off I installed a custom recovery. For this I went the easy route of downloading the GooManager App and installing Team Win Recovery Project (TWRP) through that. More information about TWRP can be found at this XDA thread:

 [RECOVERY][EVO4GLTE] TWRP 2.2.2.0 with on-screen keyboard!

So at that point my bootloader was unlocked and I had a custom recovery installed. I was then ready to install a ROM. At this point I went to the CM10 thread on XDA. Reading the comments it seemed Jelly Bean for the EVO was stable enough for my use. Your opinion or results may differ so please read the thread there. I downloaded the zip file for CM10 along with a separate zip for Google Apps. I then backed up my applications with Titanium Backup. This made some setup later easier. I then rebooted into recovery and another backup in TWRP. You can’t have too many backups! I then did a factory reset, cleared cache and installed the zip. After resetting the phone kept booting into recovery. I ended up flashing the rom three separate times before it loaded properly. I honestly don’t know what made the difference. After successfully loading CM10 I recovered my apps using Titanium. One of the individuals in the Freenode IRC chat for #htc-evo-4g-lte recommended clearing Dalvik Cache after loading my apps so I did that. So far everything has been running great and my phone is looking much happier!

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Like stealing an iPhone from a baby…

A man casually walks up to a child and takes the iPhone out of it’s hands.

While a mother in Ormskirk, northern England was shopping she allowed her child to watch “Barney The Dinosaur” on her iPhone. While the mother was distracted, the predator looked around and then performed the theft. Were are glad to see the child was unharmed but I imagine the experience must have been very disturbing for the mother.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57525705-71/watch-an-iphone-being-stolen-from-a-baby/

Like stealing an iPhone from a baby… Read Post »