Jennifer's 365 Project

I've been enjoying this cute puzzle game on my phone called Monument Valley. It's a nice way to pass the time when I just really don't want to read another article on something.

I've been itching to change up some things on my phone. It's been getting sluggish and I've just been tired of using a rooted version of the stock Samsung OS that comes on the S5. So on Sunday night I finally took the plunge and loaded Android Marshmallow on my phone.

Marshmallow isn't officially out on the Samsung S5, but it is available so different groups of developers have created different custom ROMs you can load onto you phone. I decided to try VRToxin.

So far my phone is a lot snappier. That could have something to do with only running a 170 or so apps as opposed to the 360+ on the Samsung OS. There were a lot of Samsung services I didn't use, like S Health, S Voice and so on, and they're baked into the Samsung OS (why wouldn't they be?).

There are a few odd things that aren't perfect, such as brightness not auto-dimming and the notification LED doesn't work, but so the snappiness of my phone more than makes up for those minor irritations.

Now I just have to re-learn where the settings are, since they're completely different than Samsung's UI.

I've been enjoying the Pebble Watch so far. It's great to get notifications on it, like the text message forwards when Chris is on his way to pick me up from work, or if I want to pause an audiobook.

But what would really be awesome would be setting up more customer alerts, like say, from the weather.
So I decided to give Tasker for Android a try. It's was a little daunting at first to set up, but I discovered that there are a lot of user created profiles on their wiki that you could download and try. So I decided to snag one that gets and speaks the weather. I figured I could work it backward from there.

I essentially used the information from the example I downloaded and modified it to notify me instead of speaking anything.

Now, in order to get the information passed to the Pebble Watch, I needed to use another application - Pebble Notifier. I've already been using this application to forward notifications that the Pebble application doesn't handle natively, like google talk messages.
Setting up Pebble Notifier is easy, as you can see. Just select what you want and away you go!
Once that was done, the notifications came through without a hitch in both the notification center....
And the watch!

Next will be modifying the script to give me current numbers as opposed to the overall daily forecast. Still, pretty neat.

I really prefer a phone with a physical keyboard. I do a lot of tweeting, texting, and email from my phone and I'm no fan of the software keyboard. Unfortunately phones with physical keyboards are getting more and more difficult to find. Sure, there are keyboard cases like this one available for various phones, but they never work as well as a physical keyboard attached to the phone.

I've been watching the horizon for several months, hoping for a new HTC keyboard phone or something appealing. There hasn't been too much. And, by the looks of things, there wont be. So I decided to settle on the Photon Q LTE that came out last August. It's a Motorola phone, which makes me less than thrilled, but it has a keyboard and a development community behind it.

Anyway, the device arrived today. It's much larger than my Evo Shift - which is another thing I'm not thrilled about. You can't buy a smaller phone these days - at least not a smartphone.

The first thing I did (aside from ensuring the device actually worked - since I'd purchased it off of eBay) was unlock the bootloader and root the phone. It was a pretty painless process and that meant I could delete some bloatware that all carrier phones seem to ship with.

I was running Android Jellybean on my Evo Shift and the Photon Q runs Ice Cream Sandwich, so it's a step back, but not by much. And since I was running a customized version of Jellybean, my Evo Shift was a little sluggish anyway.

The rest of the setup was pretty painless. Having contacts backed up through Google makes it easy to switch from device to device. For now I'm happy to have a device that is more responsive and shouldn't have any issues making phone calls (my Evo Shift was having intermittent speaker issues).

I caught my phone rebooting itself spontaneously again last Friday. I forgot to load a different ROM on it over the weekend so I set to putting Cyanogenmod back on it as soon as I got home.

While I'll miss the look and feel of Mikshifted-G, I'm hoping that Cynaogenmod is a little more stable.

Something I updated at some point on my Android phone was causing an issue with the Mikshifted-G ROM I was running. Basically the phone would reboot at random times. So I decided to try out Cyanogenmod, which is very popular.

It was ok. There wasn't actually anything wrong with it but I hated the UI so much I reflashed back to Mikshifted-G.

Maybe if I continue to have issues I'll give it another go, but I really do like the ROM I've been running for months.

Chris finally let me root his android phone, so I spent the better part of the evening backing up his data, rooting, and then restoring his apps.

Things have changed since I first rooted my phone back last July. The process was easier overall, especially since he wanted to keep the stock ROM (what comes with the phone), but it took much longer than I thought it would thanks to the massive amount of data backup and restore time.

Thanks to internet forum tutorials and previous experience/setup with my computer, the phone was rooted with no issues. Now Chris can finally take screenshots on his phone.

Less than a week ago Chris's Palm Pre died, prompting him to buy an Android phone. He snagged an HTC EVO 4G. Nice phone, but massive. Still, having a smooth working Android phone in the apartment sent my hacking senses tingling.



So I spent the next several days researching phones and determining which would work best for me. Eventually I decided on the HTC EVO Shift, which is similar to the 4G but smaller, missing some bells and whistles (no HDMI out) but with a physical keyboard (which I love).

Hurray for a new phone and better looking cell phone pictures (Leki above).

Complete with virtual joystick! Pac-Man, courtesy of the Amazon android app store and running on my Coby Kyros 7015 tablet.

We arrived back from Chicago yesterday evening and almost immediately went to bed. Getting up this morning was hard - mostly because we both woke up before 7am. Good thing we both had the day off.

I laid around a big chunk of the morning (and evening) reading comics. I read a few comics (X-Men only, really) as a kid but mostly spent my time playing video games and reading books. There's a lot of good stuff out there, I just didn't know about it. Thanks to Chris I do. Fables is an awesome series he introduced me to last year. Completely up my alley. So I decided to play with the ComiXology app a bit on the android tablet and see what free samples and first issues were available. So far I've been reading Y The Last Man.
In the afternoon we took a stroll down Kent Trails. The water is high and flowing fast. Murky looking and probably chilly as well. Still, it's great the weather is getting warmer. That means green is going to start popping up everywhere soon.

Chris has a pretty nice wrap-up post of the weekend (including con and aquarium photos) with a nice quick video I embedded below.

I spent the evening tweaking a second android tablet. Yes. A second. Why? Because I have a problem.

Impressed with Chris's tablet, I ordered a Coby Kyros 7015 myself and it arrived last night. The first thing I did was root, backup, and put the marketplace on it. That was an easy enough.
Next was the debate between loading Froyo via CyaynogenMod (the tablet ships with Eclair, 2.1) or a custom rom. After reading the discussions back and forth on the forums, I opted to load the custom rom instead of Froyo. I'd like Froyo, but since the headphone jack doesn't work that's kind of a problem (since I want to stream anime on this device).

I initially loaded Watery Rom 1.2b, but I ran into the problems several people seemed to be having with the device locking up randomly (despite clearing cache, etc with ClockworkMod). Finally I threw in the towel and loaded Watery 1.2a. A few things aren't supposed to work properly (gallery, music), but I have an ipod touch for music and I don't know that I care too much about a gallery on the tablet either. Plus I honestly haven't verified that these have issues, so who knows...
Once I loaded Watery Rom 1.2a onto the device all my problems seemed to go away. No more freezing. The only minor issue I have is the stock browser needs to be reinstalled on reboot. Since I'm using Skyfire instead of stock browser, it's not a big deal.

I did load FlashLite 9 on the device as well, but didn't have a chance to really test it out. Chris navigated to a few sites and was disappointed that it didn't default to flash. It sounds like you have to do some surfing and what not before flash seems to work properly. "whatismyflash" does correctly identify version 9 in the stock browser (I haven't had a chance to test skyfire yet, but I did confirm Opera doesn't appear to be running it).
So I still have a few things on my plate I'd like to get taken care of before stopping tinkering for a bit.

• permanently kill voice search - I dont use this or want it but it loads when applications launch by default
• overclock the device - it sounds like overclocking might address some speed issues and make this even snappier (mostly just waking issues)
• Crunchyroll - youtube streams beautifully but the crunchyroll application is horrendeous. I'll have to see if its the app or a setting elsewhere on the tablet. 

Pros

• snappier than 1.6 (cupcake) tablet. Not as fast as the iPod touch, but pretty good.
• access to Android marketplace
• Android has a good hacking/modifying community
• 7" form factor makes it more portable (I prefer this over 10")
• came with plenty of accessories (built in stylus, hard-cover case, two USB cords)

Cons

• Eclair is a phone OS, so some things are optimized for a phone (default orientation is landscape, not portrait, there is a phone app) like Honeycomb would be
• Resistive screen; it doesn't always register my finger so sometimes I need to use the sylus around the corners.
• thicker/heavier than more recent tablets. The size isn't off-putting to me, but I think it would be to a lot of people.

It was an early night for me. I came home and just didn't really feel like doing much besides reading. So I settled in on the bed to do some reading. Chris came over and read some RSS articles on this tablet (which has a pretty amazing battery life too, 4 to 5 hours easy which is leaps and bounds over his other tablet).
Even Leki came by after a bit. He usually has to have his people within sight, so no surprise he'd migrate from the hallway to the bed after a bit.

I fell asleep pretty early on.

With a 3-day weekend ahead of me before starting a new job on Monday I decided to get some things done. First and foremost Chris and I went shopping for a father's day gift (better late than never).

After that I headed over to my first physical therapy appointment and was given a fancy giant battery-powered (apparently) band-aid and some homework. Bleh.

Chris also hooked up an extra pen tablet to my computer. I'm really not that comfortable with the controls but imagine it would be easier to adapt to than a trackball was. 

I'll have to brainstorm uses for it. For now I can just write goofy messages for this blog.

Today the second EKEN Android tablet arrived.  The first one was officially adopted by Chris pretty early on, so that meant I was free to do what I wanted with this second one.  The first thing I did? Installed a custom ROM.

The original tablet arrived with Android 1.6, firmware version 1.7.1.  I snagged a copy of ECOTOX's custom ROM and upgrade to firmware 1.7.2.  It doesn't seem like much, but is an improvement.
It came with the youtube player already installed, and a ton of extra crap the original Chinese version had removed.  I have more internal storage now, should I choose to put files on that as opposed to the SD card I'm using now.

Overall, I'm just happy to have it to play with and test.  Chris has his official comic viewer and I now have the luxury of taking subbed animes and watching them where ever (this plays them very well once converted to mp4) and to flash ever few weeks or so.

It's not an iPad, and it won't react like one. It has a resistive touch screen as opposed to capacitive, but that's ok. It doesn't have all the thousand of apps that apple offers.

It's running Android, which is open, and I can do what I want when I want to the device when I want AND it has access to applications that run on Android.  And there are a lot. This is in stark contrast to apple products in general, and the iPhone OS specifically.  So for me, and my uses - that is reading an ebook or comic book or watching an anime - this is sufficient.  It has wi-fi so I'm able to use a web browser, gmail, youtube, twitter and so on. 

And we have two, all for less than 1/2 the price of the wi-fi 16GB iPad.

If you're interested in a more in-depth review of the tablet, Chris has one here.

In the morning I baked some mini-cheesecakes to take to Kati & John's for their annual Memorial BBQ.

Then I spent a pretty large chunk of the day hanging out in the apartment, playing Lord of the Rings Online and waiting for the mail to arrive. 

It seemed like the wait took forever..and the mail didn't arrive until around 4pm. And then - the Android tablet (Eken M001) arrived, straight from China.  There's a decent mod community forums we've both been reading and it will be exciting to do some of the tweaks and modifications others are having success with.

Now I have to admit - Chris had originally pointed this thing out to me, and ordered it first.  And somehow mine shipped and made it to the states before his even left China.
He got to spend some time playing around with the tablet, loading applications and checking out comic readers that are available. Honestly, he has an easier time reading things it than I do - must be that whole vision impaired thing.

After that we rode our bikes down to Palmer Park and enjoyed some tasty Jimmy Johns. There were more ups and downs than riding straight along on Kent Trails, but that's ok.  The nice sub for dinner and just being out and about makes up for it.

All in all this has been a fantastic Saturday - packed full of all sorts of little awesomeness.