A Geek Goes Flying

Decluttering, I found an old HD 8  (mine’s actually an 8th generation, one year newer than that SKU, but they’re both obsolete and discontinued, so whatever) that I’d apparently never even setup (or if I did, I’d factory reset it). It’s like 7 years old but the screen is immaculate and it seems to have a working battery, albeit not the strongest - as you’d expect. Anyway. It’s running Fire OS 7.3.2.9 with a build date of Decemer 5, 2023, 1:59 p.m., so I guess I did have it online at some point, long enough to update the system software. I’m told this software is a fork of Android Pie (a/k/a Android 9.0), which is getting fairly long in the tooth, but I have apps that will work on the much older Android 5 (Lollipop) (from my Nexus 7 restoration project ), so ...  The hardware isn’t anything to write home about either: 8-inch IPS LCD (1280x800); quad-core MediaTek MT8163B CPU; 1.5 GB RAM; 16GB internal storage (~12GB usable after factory reset); VGA front camera, 2MP rear ...

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...