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By Raj, April 28, 2010 12:45 am

Well, after lots of research to make sure I understood what I was getting into, making sure I had enough lingo to ask a good question should I run into trouble and most importantly clearing up time in my schedule to do so, I finally took the plunge and rooted my Telus (130) Hero. Why? Well the 2.1 update to Android had been promised by HTC and by extension Telus since I got the phone at New Years and to date, there is nothing official. What’s worse, the dates for the HTC “unbranded” release keep getting pushed back and that means that the branded releases are certainly not on any fast lane out of the compiler.

So what did it take for me to get root and start seeing what Android is about today rather than when it first came out? Well, Telus uses a very up to date firmware build for 1.5. This means that many of the easier (read – less step intensive) processes are not possible. So that means if you want to root this phone, you need to create a gold card. Now before I go any further, I’ll say what every other guide out there says… do this at your own risk… you could brick your phone and I am not going to be able to do anything for you other than say “it worked for me”.

So what’s a gold card? Well, it’s a card that has had part of its file system modified slightly. The process is rather simple and of everything, outside of setting up Apps2SD (which I’m doing tonight before bed), is what takes the most time. it is also the step where you might have to lay out money. I wanted to get a faster card and so I managed a deal on a 4GB Kingston Class4 and I used this guide and created my gold card on my second attempt. What went wrong on the first try? Well, I didn’t read the instructions – I chose the wrong disk to change – Choose Physical Disks! You’ll notice that the guide is one that tells you how to root the same phone, so why am I spending electrons on typing more out? Well, the guide is good, but only as a high level guide, other than the gold card process, it felt weak to me. It also suggest updating the radio, but I didn’t and it work fine. This process could take 20 minutes depending how long it takes for the gold card server to email your disk image back to you.

After the gold card, you have to downgrade the firmware – don’t worry, the 405 version that is suggested works just fine if you chicken out at this point or want to go back to some thing “official”. This took some fiddling for me as I needed to get a virtual machine that would actually let the sync app see my phone. It seems that XP is your best be here. Install the RUU exe and wait out the 5-10 minutes that it takes. The guys at The Unlockr have written up the guides that will take us the rest off the way – and this stage is outlined here. There is also a decent gold card method here, but you can choose the one that you want.

After you’ve downgraded, you have to install a new recovery image. Not hard – follow along – but if you are like me, you’ll have tried to see what the stock recover is and been met with a caution sign on boot. Don’t worry – I think the carriers are trying to keep their phones “protected”. Be sure you adjust your input to reflect the file names/numbers that you are planning to use. You’ll spend about 2 minutes on this stage and after this you can flash the ROM of your choice – I’m a fan of Villain 5.4. Oh yeah, if you are running an unlocked phone, it’s still unlocked.

Once all this is done – maybe an hour later – you’ll have the bigger job of putting together all your screens and logging into all your services, but that should be just as much fun. Mybackup Pro was a wonder agent to allow me to get most of my data back and FYI – reboot the phone a couple times and make sure Google has done its syncing before you pass judgment on the ROM.

I’m certainly happy I went through with this – I was scared at the outset, but I so dearly wanted to be free of Telus that you can not image how it was hurting to be bound to them again even for this little thing. Can I live with a few extra bug and hiccups that were not there before I started – sure, because the trade off is that so much more of what the system is capable off is open to me and in the end, it’s Android – there are at least two ways around every bug, more if you start looking at them as features or challenges.

EAVB_GCMKNBHOHU

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By Raj, November 2, 2009 8:52 am

View from the top

Eventually, this will be the view from the upper level of the new CCIS building on the campus of the U of A. My group is supposed to move into the new building in 2011 and preparations are being made now (we are ordering boxes already). The building is really going to be amazing and even though we might not have the most amazing offices when we “land”, the ability to work throughout the building is certainly going to make up for it. I am thinking it might be like a beach vacation – what does it matter what your room is like, most of your time is going to be at the beach anyway.

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By Raj, October 9, 2009 11:32 am

This was done with a TS lens and a “Hybrid” SLR and without any words tells the story very nicely. Digital storytelling isn’t about the tools that are used, it’s about how the new tools allow more people to tell more stories. Enjoy.

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By Raj, September 18, 2009 10:59 am

For those who want to take a look, I’ve posted my Victoria pictures. Banff and Jasper will be up next week (as I’m headed out this weekend.

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By Raj, August 13, 2009 7:58 pm

A little while ago, I wrote about my hashtag, #yegruns and today I’m thinking that it’s about time to retire it. It was more work that it was worth to get it to be used by anyone and for a while, we had a couple of users, but that stopped over the summer. In that previous post, I had mentioned the Nike Sportband. I’ve finally found one and now that I’ve got everything set up, I’m just waiting for my next chance to run. Not only am I pumped to find out “in real time” how my runs are going (metrics make everything fun don’t they), I also get access to the resource that I was trying to build in Twitter. I should have figured that my “free” efforts were not going to go as far (one doesn’t often respect that which is free) as a paid solution that is “backed”. But that being said, it was certainly a way to find others while it lasted and I’m sure that I’ll find others through this system as well and I’ll certainly enjoy the world-wide races, my first being Sept 24th, a 10k.

I’m hoping to get my first run in tomorrow and hopefully it will update the widgets I’ve got installed on both blogs in addition to posting to Twitter and Facebook.

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By Raj, August 7, 2009 8:20 am

Well, now that I’ve had some time to get boora.ca up and running the way that I want with a theme that works, I’ve finally got a place that I can put my more personal content. I will still have some personal stuff here, but unless it impacts my ed/tech interests, I won’t have it here, I’ll put it on boora.ca. That being said, there are things that will rock across my worlds and they will get cross posted, but for the most part I’ll try to keep them separate. I’ve got one more blog, and that one is reserved for Bug – it is where I was hoping to write all the things that never got captured in frame, but it’s enough work just to do one thing (the A/V), to say nothing of the writing. But what I think I’m going to do is to write bits based on the stories around each of the picture groups that I’ve taken. And while the videos capture most of what the context is, I’ll help that out a little bit as well.

With this in mind, EDITing in the Dark will still be my main blog and the personal bits here will serve to help those who have me in their PLNs learn more about me so that they can get a better idea of how I think about the ed/tech topics that I write about. Without these personal bits, all we have is cold content.

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By Raj, July 7, 2009 1:17 pm

This week seemed to be a more of the same from last week. The system showed how amazingly quick memes are now able to travel.

BTW, I’m posting this from my Blackberry.

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By Raj, June 25, 2009 9:37 am

SMB is certainly the easiest way to get media shared out to playback devices. Setting up an SMB share is quite trivial on Windows, Mac and even Linux. This makes it easy to get all your content in one place and then access it where you want to. This is great for most devices, except for the PS3 and the X360 which can access seemingly only access uPnP devices. So if you are using an old Mac as your server, you are almost out of luck. You can download all manner of open source apps that will enable uPnP, but if your time and sanity are valuable, Yazsoft might have a better solution.

Playback (site is being hammered as of posting) is a $15 app that will support both PS3 and X360, which if you have both, or don’t want to be tied down might be a better option than Nullriver’s Medialink or Connect360. Playback seems to have more than just iLife integration, so that might be a deal breaker, especially for $5 less.

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By Raj, June 24, 2009 11:08 am

The popularity of running seems to be increasing again – it seems to go up and down through the decades. One of the things that is likely helping out this time is a little bit of technology from Nike and Apple (or you can get the non iPod version of the sportband). Wired has an interesting look into the Nike+ system, showing how a simple piece of technology has been leveraged to change things around for people. The key part of the Nike+ isn’t the technology, it is the social system in the back. People have started running because they can now all of the sudden track their own stats and share their stats with others. For many, the motivating factor seems to be this social element, something that seems to be key, especially for girls.

This simple widget has taken something that is often an intensely personal activity and made it more public. But I think this can all be done with an even simpler bit of technology… Twitter. I’m certainly not the only one who is posting run times, tracks and other related errata so it occurred to me that I might as well start pushing a hashtag – #yegruns – Edmonton Runs – (archive). Effectively this can do the same thing as the Nike+ system, but you don’t have to have anything more than the watch and the computer that you already have, keeping inline with the theme of running – it’s simple and you don’t really need anything fancy.

So why this post today? Well for the first time in 2 years, I’ve broke 5min/km.