A Geek Goes Flying

I’ve dabbled in retro gaming a couple of times. I have a Raspberry Pi 3B (I’m pretty sure?) (in a bitchin’ case ) running RetroPi somewhere, and this past holiday season I setup an RPi 5 8GB , again with RetroPi, to host some Castlevania sessions and to play old school classics like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Xevious and Raiden . But now ... A random news article about the impact of Trump’s tariffs bumbling on retro gaming hardware vendors prompted my idle investigation and adding some $60 or so RG35XX devices to my Eternal Shopping Cart™, and then a chance encounter with a friend at a bar where he was raving about a similar device, and I decided to get serious and pull the trigger. Research led me to seriously consider the Retroid 5 , which can boot into Linux and has a full Android stack as well. (It’s probably overkill for the games I want to play on it today, but it leaves open the door for newer stuff down the road.) So that’s what I picked up, apparently in ...

Nexus 7 [2012] running CyanogenMod 12.1 (Android 5.1.1) I’ve had this thing for more than a decade. Stopped using it when it updated from Android 4.x to 5.x and became unusably sluggish. At one point, I evidently unlocked it and installed Linux (LineageOS probably) onto it, but that wasn’t really usable on the 7" screen either, so it sat. I tried a couple of times half-heartedly to restore it using the built-in utilities, but never got anywhere and wasn’t honestly that interested, so it sat in a pile ready to be e-waste recycled. (The Fire tablets I’ve picked up over the years are going that route though, except for the one I’ve used semi-regularly with its “waterproof” housing, as they don’t seem to recharge and won’t turn on. Meh. OTOH they were disposable-cheap. But I digress.) I was stuck waiting to be called via remote court this morning (75 minutes) and, inspired by a Facebook conversation I’d had with a friend who’s also a bit of a geek, I decided to see if I could breath s...

NOOKcolor showing Android home screen Holy cow, this thing still works!(?!) Picked up this O.G. Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor ($249) in 2010 (IIRC) when I coudln’t afford an iPad ($499), because “ they” had figured out how to load an unrestricted Android build onto it ( CyanogenMod ; this thing reports it’s running Android version 2.3.7, kernel 2.6.32.9,  CyanogenMod-7.2.0-RC2-encore, on an ARMv7 CPU with 480MB reported RAM... ). This thing has been sitting without a charge for probably a couple of years at least, but a few minutes on its charger and it fired right up. (Compare with a couple of Kindle Fire tablets I had, that are much newer and totally dead, and headed to e-waste recycling.) This was a device designed and shipped when USB charging beyond the 5V 500ma standard was still in its infancy , so it came with a "proprietary" cable that ends in a weirdly long USB Mini B plug that illuminates to show charging state (I don’t recall if it will charge at all on the stan...

Tried out the ultra-crappy Android tablet I had handy on the MOFT Folding Laptop Stand Lap Desk in the 60° configuration on the POÄNG Lap Desk Workstation (might try it in the 45° configuration ). Worked well enough with light weight “distraction-free writing” tools and my Keychron Q60 Max. An iPad will probably work even better. MOFT stand holding a tablet

OUZRS M15 Tablet I have a piece of hardware that requires an Android device, and the cheapest one I could find new was the OUZRS Android Tablet 10 Inch, Android 12 Tablet with 8GB RAM 64GB ROM(1TB Expand), Dual Camera, WiFi Tablet, Bluetooth, GMS Certified, Computer Tablets-M15(Pink) , $149 but with a 50% off coupon that brought it down to $75. It’s ... fine, I guess. The specs seem to be a lie, at least according to the devcheck tool (see the screenshots below). Manufacturer. Not the widely respected OUZRS who took such great pains to add their “brand” to the unnecessary and generic startup video, but Incar; this tablet is an Incar M15, using an rk30sdk board (a relatively  ubiquitous OEM/reference logic board). CPU. It uses the Rockchip RK3326, which, according to the manufacturer , features a “Quad-core Cortex-A35 up to 1.5GHz.” The devcheck utility jives with this, reporting each of the four cores will run somewhere between 408 MHz and 1512 MHz. (Amazon listing: “ octa-core 64...

Wow. “Google, the worlds biggest and most well known search company, has recently teamed up with Andy Rubin, the creator of the Sidekick, to create an operating system for many mobile platforms, called Project Android. ... Android also has a SDK that has already been released for developers to play with. Using Java, developers can make applications from scratch that do anything from enable you to check your email, to playing the hottest new game. Along with its operating system, Android relies on Linux 2.6 to run its core services such a security, memory, and any other behind the scenes work a computers operating system would normally do.” (There are times when I’d kill for the keyboard on my old BlackBerry devices ... But then I realize how much better the iPhone UX is and it passes.) https://theilife.com/2008/07/the-phone-to-beat-the-iphone-meet-googles-android/

Long story. I bought a cheap (IIRC it was a Black Friday-ish sale for like $39) Fire HD 8 tablet to have a cheap e-reader, and got a waterproof case to go with it. The case was misidentified and only fit a different generation, which I found on eBay. (Works fine, but of course now the complex hot tub is closed due to COVID-19. But I digress.) I ended up with an “extra” cheap Fire HD 8, apparently a generation 6. It’s been floating around as I haven’t really found a use for it until now, it’s just not in my normal (iPad, iPhone, Mac) workflow, and let’s face it, Android File Transfer is a kludge. Anyway. Found myself with some spare cycles while I was waiting for a long task to complete, so I dug into things a bit. With FolderSync I was able to get it talking to my WebDAV server, and automatically syncing a directory of files. (First, add an “Account,” then, add a “Folderpair.”) But in order to get that installed and running, I had to install the Google Play store. Simple instructions...

ForeFlight rocks. ForeFlight doesn't exist for Android . Probably won't. (December 2023 edit: Nope .) Maybe on April 1st, next year . (Keep checking back.) In theory, I should  be more of an Android guy. I love Linux/UNIX. (Since 1993! Root since 1995.) I write my own code. I don't run Windows anywhere. Love a good POSIX shell. Like open architecture. Etc. But iOS devices are too damned slick, the UX is too polished, the level of integration (Apple TV, tablet, phone, Mac devices...) is too perfect ... And there's no ForeFlight for Android. End of analysis. (Or, for more:  Why Android is losing in aviation .) However, WingX just announced it will run on the Amazon Fire tablets . That's potentially huge . A new Fire tablet can be had for $50 ! (Don't think that model has GPS though. In fact, looking at the tech specs for all the Fire tablets, no - they all provide location services via WiFi. No idea if a Bluetooth GPS module will work... The Dual I use has a ...