Migrating to CyanogenMod – the dragons that I summoned

Disclaimer: Below you will find a “quick” recount of my personal experience in migrating my Samsung Galaxy S GT-i9000 Android phone from the Samsung stock ROM (2.3.5 / XXJVS) to CyanogenMod 7.1.0. Following any of the procedures listed here may wipe your data, kill your apps, destroy phone, eat your dog or cause the end of Life, the Universe and Everything, so consider yourself warned.

It all started harmlessly enough: My phone was already rooted and equipped with the ClockworkMod recovery so I downloaded CM7 off the CyanogenMod website

, made sure I had a backup of all my apps and data on my PC (Titanium Backup is very handy for this), enabled the USB-Debug mode for apps and ensured I could get into Download and Recovery mode using the 3 finger salute. (The last one is actually very important. If you cannot get into Recovery or Download mode, you run the risk of bricking your phone.)

Next, I did as instructed, rebooted into recovery, did a wipe data/factory reset from there and used the ‘update from zip’ function to flash the new ROM. The next reboot went from showing the stock Samsung logo to the modified CM7 boot screen, then spat out some text and promptly caused the phone to reboot… Whoever they said ‘here be dragons’ in the upgrade instructions wasn’t kidding. (more…)

Disclaimer: Below you will find a "quick" recount of my personal experience in migrating my Samsung Galaxy S GT-i9000 Android phone from the Samsung stock ROM (2.3.5 / XXJVS) to CyanogenMod 7.1.0. Following any of the procedures listed here may wipe your data, kill your apps, destroy phone, eat your dog or cause the ...

My boring life on Twitter [2011-12-25] »« My boring life on Twitter [2011-12-18]

HP WakeOnLAN bug versus Open Source – An “It shouldn’t be this hard!”-Odyssey.

This is the story of how I used Open Source to work around a bug in an HP computer’s BIOS.

Background: I administer a small remote office with about 10 computers which need to be backed up regularly. To do this without disrupting the users’ work, I have the backup server wake up all the machines during the night using WakeOnLAN and, once it is done backing up all the data, shut them down via Windows RPC. Since WoL support has become fairly ubiquituous in recent years this works very well for most of their machines. One of them, a brand new Hewlett-Packard Z210 CMT workstation that we recently acquired, just wouldn’t have it though.

(more…)

This is the story of how I used Open Source to work around a bug in an HP computer's BIOS. Background: I administer a small remote office with about 10 computers which need to be backed up regularly. To do this without disrupting the users' work, I have the backup server wake up all the ...

My boring life on Twitter [2011-08-14] »« My boring life on Twitter [2011-08-07]

Using Samsung Mobile Tracker on Galaxy S in any country.

If you’ve tried to activate the Samsung Mobile Tracker on your Samsung Galaxy S I9000, you’ve undoubtedly encountered numerous pointless error messages like ‘SSO_2012′ or ‘For legal reasons, this function not in service in some countries.’. I, for one, am sick and tired of living in a ‘technological 3rd world country’ that always gets the short end of the stick for anything on the World Wide Web and since moving is not an option for me, I decided to figure out a procedure to set up and use Mobile Tracker despite the arbitrary limitations.
(more…)

If you've tried to activate the Samsung Mobile tracker on your Samsung Galaxy S I9000, you've undoubtedly encountered numerous pointless error messages like 'SSO_2012' or 'For legal reasons, this function not in service in some countries.'. I, for one, am sick and tired of living in a technological 3rd world country that always gets ...

My boring life on Twitter [2010-12-12] »« My boring life on Twitter [2010-12-05]

Soldering is not my forte …

… and yet, I managed to get my USB stick to half-working condition again. Not great, but good enough to get my data off of it. Oh yeah, this one also broke during my year long 2008 – Year of the Dead Hardware ‘event’, even before my headset died. Actually, it wasn’t really a hardware failure that caused it to break but my own, dumb self. While at Games Convention 2008, I had stuck it into the front-USB port of one of the recording PCs and while I was messing with said PC, trying to get its capture card to work, which was a pointless adventure as I later uncovered its built-in cinch connector wasn’t for video at all and I was missing a dongle for it to channel the cinch video input to it’s S-Video connector, …. but I disgress. So I had stuck my USB Stick into this PC and as I kept getting under the table, to mess with the video inputs, and back up, I ended up kneeling down on the stick and breaking its connector off. Not a happy moment, but it’s all better now! ;)

... and yet, I managed to get my USB stick to half-working condition again. Not great, but good enough to get my data off of it. Oh yeah, this one also broke during my year long 2008 - Year of the Dead Hardware 'event', even before my headset died. Actually, it wasn't really a ...

More soldering … »« I can’t hear you!

‘Ghorah Khar’ is now ‘Kilrah’

Given the bad omen that the old call sign brought my new PC (its motherboard died about 14 days after I built it), I’ve decided to change its name. Granted, the old name was a troublesome Kilrathi colony, the new one is the Kilrathi homeworld which eventually got blown to bits by the Temblor Bomb. (Yeah, I’m a huge Wing Commander fangeekdork.) Hopefully that won’t happen to my freshly reassembled box. ;)

P.S. Huge thanks to computeruniverse who kindly replaced the defective motherboard for free (incl. shipping and everything). They’re definitely worth their money!

Given the bad omen that the old call sign brought my new PC (its motherboard died about 14 days after I built it), I've decided to change its name. Granted, the old name was a troublesome Kilrathi colony, the new one is the Kilrathi homeworld which eventually got blown to bits by the Temblor ...

Cleaning up mah server »« 2008 – Year of the Dead Hardware