Calendar

July 2010
S M T W T F S
« Mar    
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Links

My Favorite Sites
Digg.com

Archive

Categories

Follow me on...

  • 17Mar

    ph3Time to put the phone addictions on hold for a bit, this one’s gonna be interesting!  I have been searching for the perfect networked media player for many years now.  It all started with XBMC running on my modded XBOX.  I then graduated to my first Media PC, SageTV and a ton of HDD space, the combination created what was undoubtedly the best media center experience I could ask for.  It had all the geek factor associated with running a computer on your TV, all the ease of access to my networked digital media and it was the best DVR I could ask for, it was just perfect!

    Along came HDTV.  all of a sudden I found myself needing a whole new computer if I wanted to keep SageTV going as a DVR.  After doing some quick pricing of parts I decided I didn’t want to put out that kind of money for another media center PC and settled for the piece of crap Rogers HD PVR, it sucks but it works.  I was still using SageTV at that point but all it did was play local digital media and the occasional stream of an episode of Diggnation.  The final blow to that media PC came when I moved into a bigger place, the PC was perfect for the new “home office” leaving the TV sans media player.  The PS3 did a good job of playing my digital media so I left it at that for a while but something about it just didn’t feel right as I began to considered granting it a permanent media player status.  The Office PC still remained on all the time so that my RSS feeds would auto download new content as it became available, just seemed like a waste of electricity and total overkill to have that thing running all the time just for that.

    ph

    Popcorn Hour C-200

    Last January I was on a Server 2008 course and during some downtime one of my classmates started talking about his Popcorn Hour media player.  I remember thinking “what is this device that this guy is making sound so magical?”.  I started researching it and found that sure enough, I was able to put a check mark beside every one of my media player requirements and it also seemed to meet all my geek factor requirements and even had a torrent app built in so it would do my downloading for me.  It was a match made in heaven (I know, I’m a weirdo :) ).  Only decision I had to make at that point was did I want the top of the line C-200 with the option of adding a Blu-ray drive or did I want the similarly capable A-200 that could still take a hard drive but no option for Blu-ray.  The C-200 has the looks but was almost twice as much.  The C-200 also comes with an RF remote (cool!) but I want it to work with my Harmony so I would need to get the optional IR adapter adding another $12 to the price.  I decided in the end to go with the more expensive C-200.  I didn’t do this because I wanted to put a Blu-ray drive in it, I had the PS3 for that.  I went with the C-200 mainly because the thing was gonna look slick under my TV and you know what, it does!

    I can already tell that I’m going to geek out with this thing for quite a while.  I have already started developing a script to make it scan my podcasts folder for new downloads and display it on the screen so that I don’t have to check each folder manually, (this can be done because its running Linux in the background) and I may even post some of my apps here if I feel like any are good enough to release to the world.

    So, is this toy right for you?  This is not a “plug and play” solution for your TV, You have to play with it, massage it, add both hardware and software to it if you want to take full advantage of it.  You may run into a lot of bugs and flaws along the way and you may need to wait patiently for firmware updates to fix said bugs.  You may need to spend a few hours at a time figuring out how to install a new app that in the end will be worth the fight.  If all that sounds acceptable to you then this may be the media player for you, if not, look elsewhere :).  If it does sound okay then you need to pick between the A-200 and the C-200.  If you need Blu-ray go “C”, if you love the way it looks and don’t care about paying more go “C”.  Other than that your probably going to be quite happy with the less expensive A-200.  Regardless of what you get you will be joining an amazing community of both users and developers not to mention years of fun playing with your TV’s new best friend.

    Later all,
    Ed.

    pixelstats trackingpixel
  • 23Jan

    rogers_htcI’m totally freaking out!  I got a text message from Rogers tonight saying that there was an update available to fix the 911 issue on my Magic. It went on to say that if not installed by the 24th of January that they would disable the devices data connection.  The thought of that made me a little queezy so I downloaded and installed it as soon as I got home.  On the first boot post install I hear a new sound coming from the phone and I look down to see a little animation of an android waving at me and thought “huh, could they have put Sense in this update”?  I wait in anticipation and holy crap, It’s all Sensed out!

    Not only is it all the prettiness of Sense but get this, it’s got f’n multi touch in the gallery app as well as in the browser!  All that and it works super smooth so far.  Like I said in the beginning, I’m totally freaking out man…lol.

    I wish I could play with it some more but I gotta wake up early tomorrow morning to do a little overtime, the servers are calling.  So ya, if you’re on the Magic then go get the update now!  There was also an update released for the Dream, That one won’t have the Sense UI but I’ll still install it first chance I get and report back to you with the results of that install.

    Later all,
    Ed.

    pixelstats trackingpixel
  • 15Jan

    rogers_htcHello all,

    HTC and Rogers have recently announced that do to memory limitations they will no longer update the HTC Dream after one more update to the 1.5 android firmware.  They have also announced that the HTC magic will continue to be developed at least as far as version 2.1 that will include HTC Sense UI, scheduled for release later this year.  I was one of the people disappointed by this being an early adopter of the platform with my purchase of a Dream handset the day it was released on June 2nd of 09 but it looks like there is some good news after all.

    Looks like Rogers is going to do us all a solid and offer a free upgrade from the Dream to the Magic.  Yup, you read that right, there offering a free upgrade and they are letting you keep your Dream.  Only catch is that you will need to renew your contract out to 3 years again so this will cost you up to 7 months worth of contract.  I called in 2 days ago now and the process was super easy, I just asked to take advantage of the promotion and they said “okay, we only have the black model in stock but you should receive it in 4 to 6 days”, fine with me as the black is what I wanted.

    The offer is valid from Jan 12th to Jan 26th.  To take advantage of it you can call Customer Care at 1-888-Rogers1 or online at Rogers.com, retail stores will not be able to help you with this.

    Later all,
    Ed.

    pixelstats trackingpixel
  • 31Dec

    Hello all.

    I just wanted to take a minute to wish you all a very happy New Year!  I cant believe how long it’s been since I’ve posted.  It’s been a crazy few months and I now find myself unable to think of a good way to get this place going again…  I know, I’ll post a video from youtube…

    Later all,
    Ed.

    pixelstats trackingpixel
  • 22Oct

    THIS IS STRICTLY A PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK KIND OF POST.  IT’S MEANT PURELY FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES AND OF COURSE, I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT HAPPENS TO YOU OR YOUR PHONE AS A RESULT OF ATTEMPTING ANYTHING YOU READ IN THIS POST OR ANYWHERE ELSE ON THIS BLOG.  YOU’VE BEEN WARNED, NOW PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

    androidWas up all!  I have been playing around with rooting my Android phone and installing a custom ROM for quite a while now.  In the beginning it was quite intimidating but I feel like I have come a long way, learned a lot, made some observations  and have now gotten to a point where I’m quite comfortable throwing commands at this thing.  It all started a few months ago, I spent the required 5 hours or so doing my homework, reading forums, considering my options and deciding if the mod was worth the effort.   Here is why I initially decided to do it.

    • The thought of running a Hero ROM (Pretty but ya, don’t bother :P as performance is horrible)
    • I wanted to tether my phone to my MacBook so that I could take advantage of that 6 gig data plan.
    • I wanted to play with apps like “Market Enabler” and maybe some system over clocker.
    • Move installed apps to the SD card to save on system space.  (Actually not doing this yet, just the custom ROM alone gave me a 4x boost on available space)
    • Overall performance enhancements.  Seriously, I love this OS but man can it be laggy at times, the custom ROM is nice and snappy.
    • Multi Touch in the browser is cool I guess but was not really a reason for me.
    • Geek factor involved.  So I could talk about the mods with friends at work :)

    So let me take a second to say that yes, the countless hours spent flashing, some of them spent wondering if my beloved phone will ever work again, all of it, was 100% worth it!  Every painful second!  The phone nice and snappy now and there was like 80 megs free out of the gate!  The tethering alone makes this all worth it for me.  The difference in the phone from then to now is simply amazing!

    I’m think I’m going to try and break this up into 3 steps, Backing up your phone’s current state (seriously, don’t skip this step), rooting the phone and finally installing the custom ROM.  I’m not going to write a guide here, that’s already been done so I honestly don’t see the point.  What I want to do is write down my observations and maybe a tip or two, things that may not be so clear in the guides I will link you to.  Read this post first from start to finish and you should have all the background and info you need to run a successful mod.

    So first off, a little bit about the phone.  A lot of again this is based only on my opinion and observation and may not be 100% true, take it with a grain of salt and if I have something totally wrong please do leave a comment and I’ll correct it.

    The phone’s memory seems to be split into the following different partitions.

    • recovery (code for recovery mode that will be used in the rooting process)
    • radio (Used by the phone’s radio)
    • boot (the boot partition, pretty self explanatory)
    • system (the system software)
    • userdata (your data, installed apps etc)
    • cache (note sure how important this is but I’m assuming it holds the phone’s cache)

    The phone has the two following special boot modes that you will use while modding it.

    • Recovery mode (start the phone while holding the home button, this is used to create your nandroid backups and to flash zip packages to the phone).
    • fastboot mode (start the phone while holding the camera button, this mode is used to issue commands to the phone from a computer).  Fastboot requires that the android SDK usb driver be installed on your PC, you can get that here and simply point the found new driver wizard at the drivers folder when you plug in your phone.

    The files you will be using throughout this process will be either image (img) files or they will be zip files.  The image files (img) are pushed to the phone via PC with the phone in fastboot mode and the zip files are placed in the root of you SD card, renamed to update.zip and flashed to the phone while in recovery mode.

    The modding process will basically go as follows…

    1. *1st guide* Flash a custom recovery image onto the phone.
    2. *not in guide but do it!* Boot into recovery mode and create a nandroid backup (this is not in the guides I link to but trust me, do it!)
    3. *not in guide but do it!* Bootup back into the phone and move the new nandroid folder from the SD card to the PC for safe keeping, if something goes wrong or if you want to revert back to the stock OS you’ll be happy you did this!
    4. *1st guide* Boot into recovery mode and flash a radio update to the phone .
    5. *2nd guide* Place a custom ROM on the root of your SD card and name it update.zip.
    6. *2nd guide* Boot into fastboot mode and erase all the data on the phone then flash the radio, boot and recovery images that are required for the custom ROM’s to work.
    7. *2nd guide* Boot into recovery mode again and flash the ROM (update.zip) file to the phone.
    8. After this, rebooting should boot it right into the newly installed OS.

    One last quick not before we get started, this is probably going to take you at least an hour to do (if all goes well) and will probably take way longer than that if your not happy with the ROM you choose.  Be patient, take your time and don’t do this when you’ve got other things going on, you’ll be fine.

    Step 1 and 2:  Backing up and rooting
    Open this link and follow the directions listed there…  The only thing I would change there is that after step 8 and just before flashing update.zip, I would make a nandroid backup of my phone (nandriod backup is just one of the selections in the recovery mode menu) then bootup the phone normally again, copy the nandroid folder from the sd card onto the PC for safe keeping and then continue with the guide.  You’ll appreciate the backup if anything goes wrong or if you ever want to revert back to your phones current state.

    Step 3: Flashing a custom ROM
    Follow the directions at this link.  Pay close attention to the part where it says to put an update.zip file in the root of your SD card, if you don’t and start the process before placing it there you will not be able to boot the phone again, you will not actually be bricked but you will be switching to an oops kind of mode where you will probably be best off recovering with your nandroid backups and starting all over again.

    As for ROM’s, there are lots of places that list custom ROM’s and google is your friend here but I’ll give you one of the many I have found here.

    If the fastboot commands don’t work then you probably dont have the correct usb driver installed, see the link I posted above about getting the SDK driver.  Also make sure your running these commands from the SDK’s “tools” folder, that is where the “fastboot” app lives.  I would copy all of the .img files in the tools folder too, you would actually have to do this to use the commands that are in the guide.  If you need help with using command prompt this probably is not something you should be doing at all. :P

    So the phone wont boot, what now…  No worries, do the following to get it back.

    1. In guide 2, download the files that are in the “revert back to Rogers” section and place the two files “rogersradio.img” and “rogersrecovery.img” into the SDK Tools folder you have been working in.
    2. Place all the files that are in teh nandroid folder you created durring the first guide into the SDK Tools folder (you did do a nandroid backup right?).
    3. Boot the phone into fastboot mode (hold the camera button while you power on the phone)
    4. Type the following commands…
      fastboot flash radio rogersradio.img
      fastboot flash recovery rogersrecovery.img
      fastboot erase system -w
      fastboot flash system system.img
      fastboot flash userdata data.img
      fastboot flash cache cache.img
      fastboot flash boot boot.img

    Huh, I think I got it all.  So what are you waiting for, go mod that Dream/G1 already!  Once your modded install Wireless Tether, awesome app!  Drop me a line if you need help setting it up or if you have any questions about the modding process.

    Later all,
    Ed.

    So those links once again are…
    Android SDK: Here
    Guide 1: Here
    Guide2: Here
    Some ROM’s: Here

    pixelstats trackingpixel

« Previous Entries