Investigating my 1TB drive, 2 months later

Earlier this month I finally got my USB 3.0 ExpressCard... card. I say finally because it took over a month to finally get to me, from the time I ordered it to the time I realized something was wrong, to the eventual inquiry to my post office and what do you know, they had it and didn't notify me. Which is weird, they know who I am, they know my M.O., and it wasn't held at customs, they just... fell asleep I guess.

After plugging it in, setting it up, the big result is what you see below. Here's what the test intended:

Phase 1 Android development complete

Well it took 2 months, but I finally got Android to consistently fully boot on the LG Fathom VS750 phone.

Was a rather bumpy ride actually, not only was I a complete noob, not to mention the ongoing problems with my 1TB drive, but I've got no C programming skills, I don't know jack about Linux, and Android, on a Windows Mobile phone? The last part isn't a surprise but my oh my did I learn quite a bit from this.

My problems started when the source I am using, the only source on the net, was half baked. It was using code from Linux kernel 2.6.32 and 2.6.35. Now I, a complete noob in all things Linux, had some left over mentality from my Windows Mobile cooking days, which dealt with dll's for drivers and registry lines for the rest of the OS. So if say for WM, you wanted to cook an HTC program into a Samsung phone, one thing to keep in mind was dependancies, that is the files a .exe requires to run. It's not like that with Linux. In fact, if I had to sum up Linux kernels as short as possible, I would say a Linux kernel is made up of a whole bunch of text. I'm not kidding, we're not talking about dll's, exe's or large files, it's practically files with a lot of text in them that basically say "this is the power driver" and "it uses this much voltage" and so on. I was rather surprised by this, and the fact that it took me 2 months to get where I'm at now shows that that's a lot of text I had to read, and watching terminal compile my kernels was also important as it spews out errors and warnings which are critical to compiling a working kernel.

It's a fun process though, and, which is actually kind of easy, to be honest. I mean, during the Windows Mobile days, it was very hard to find drivers for a particular chipset, CPU and such, all I have to say is "HTC class action" and old WM'ers would know what I mean. In a way, this is what Android is about, open source, and it makes things quite easy to solve oneself should they require better video drivers, or more CPU customization, etc. I know things would have been a lot better if I learned C, and maybe it wouldn't have taken me 2 months if I wasn't having space problems, and heck, I'm still bitter about Ubuntu's usability, but at least I made progress.

While shunning some other projects. But now that I got the meat of the problems solved, it's back to Photoshop XD (as soon as I do something about this cold I have >__>)

Oktober has to be my strangest month yet...

Since my last post, my life has been a weird ride. Which is rather funny, every month so far has been a typical life for me, overwork myself, then get overrun by anime in my free time, except for this month...

Every other battery I've ripped open has been green except this HP one...

 For the last week and a half, it was half fun, half miserable. On the one hand, my laptop battery finally died, leaving me with no back up power option. The worst part? It was during this time when this country decided to do not one, not two, but 3 blackouts within 3 days, with the third one being a ruinous 3 hours. One of these blackouts occurred when a tropical storm passed by, leaving me on edge for the most of the time, as I lost work, had downloads cut off, to the point where I just said screw it, I had to postpone not only work, but play as well (had to halt Android development as well as really falling behind on the current anime season. I never considered getting a UPS before because hey, which travelling fellow even has one. I don't care if I have to toss it when I leave this country, but I really have to get one now.

This is what happens when I've got nothing else to do... my first time seeing a square donut, by the way. I seriously need to think of something better to do when I am at my utmost boredom.

 Nothing's all bad about it, as I actually managed to convinced myself there's more to my life than anime and work. That's when I spent more time than I usually did at manga sites, hey, if a download ever occurred, it'd be small files right? Good for the phone too, so blackout or what, I don't waste any of my precious bandwidth. And quite some stuff I missed during my Android days, which I post later in my recommendation posts I plan to start doing from now on. Also, I found myself playing games more often than I had hoped, so many I stockpiled over the past few years, it's one of the reasons why I haven't played much (if any) recent games, as I still am trying to control my habit of buying anything that has a cute anime girl in it XD (biggest regret: I couldn't afford Max Payne 3, the game I waited years for. Not like my lappy can play it anyways...)

One of the finest pics I've ever seen of Gym Leader Elesa

 Which brings me to Pokemon Black and White, which I've recently been playing after finding out there's a sequel. Man I gotta say if this series ever has anything going for it, it's the increasing amount of cute girls, and the best part, pixiv is heavily into them. From Elesa(Kamitsure) to Cynthia(Shirona), I especially like B/W's ponytail girl and B/W2's twintail. I tell you there's a lot of great art, and it really actually got me to start getting used to their Japanese names (I thought "Hey, that girl looks like Cynthia, but her name is Shirona?" :P)

999, one of the DS games I should not have put down last year. How dare that guy grab the twin tail cutie...

I've gotten back into other games as well as finally playing the PSP for real this time. Remember how I had to dump fighting games after my wrist injury? Well, I've tried it out again, much to my horror the PSP has quite the badly designed d-pad. I came up with a proper fix that isn't like the one online, which I'll probably post later on. I did find myself modding things as well, anything to get my mind of impending blackouts.

One thing I was fortunate to hold in my hands recently was an iPhone4. It's not mine, it was for a client, but one thing I wanted to talk about was this is the first time I actually really held such a premium-feel phone (in a non-shopping experience). Strange that I didn't want to have anything to do with it back when I did that iPad thing at the mall, but this was the first time that I actually liked what I was holding. I gotta say that phone has a really nice feel to it, it's too bad the rest of the phone didn't like me, to the software, which I absolutely hated due to the inability to actually dig deep into the specs out of the box, to the capacitive screen, which is not really a gripe with the iPhone, but rather all capacitive phones out there, as these screens do not like me at all. I don't know why, I had theorized that the times I was electrocuted prior to using a capacitive screen for the first time might be the culprit. Other than that, I have no idea... sucks too, I've given up on my iPhone 3G, and the HTC HD2. I've not pursued a capacitive screen since (it's really bad, what takes a person one tap, takes me 3-4. Imagine the typing horrors)

I don't fullscreen much, but OniAi is one series this season that I just have to :D

Fun times, tough times. I almost had a second headache the week following my first meltdown. Heck, can you believe someone hijacked my thread at XDA posting a site with warez while claiming the work of another was their own? Strange world we live in....