A Geek Goes Flying

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...

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...