Archive for the 'Just Another Day' Category

Nushus 0.12.8

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011


New version of nushus is available for download.
More bug fixes and a couple more small features.
Have been enjoying the time to spend on it.

https://fedorahosted.org/nushus
Release Notes: https://fedorahosted.org/nushus/wiki/Release

Android Honeycomb on the Nook

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

My wife got a color nook for Christmas. Last week I came across this link: Honeycomb on the Nook Color
That link has a bunch of great links to where all the information came from. You have to register to get them. Registration was painless so I’ll not spend time reposting them. For reference, my laptop runs Fedora 14.

Having a color nook in the house and non-destructive way to boot honeycomb I had to try it. So I commandeered my wife’s nook tonight and plugged in a micro sd chip I had imaged from the link above. This was my first experience with android beyond just poking at someone else’s device for a couple minutes. Here’s a few thoughts from the experience.

I imaged the sd chip with the 04 version of the honeycomb image. I also went ahead and installed the overclocked (er, not underclocked?) kernel on to the chip.
First boot failed, the nook’s os booted after a bit. I though this may have been related to needing to push a button. After this evening’s experience I think it’s just that the boot failed. I rebooted the device and this time it booted into honeycomb. I was hooked as soon as I unlocked the lock screen.

First thing I did was browsed the settings app. It was unstable. I got wireless configured and started to setup my email. The unstableness continued. I was asked often if I wanted to wait or force quit processes because they weren’t responding. I never got email setup, I wanted to reboot to see if the instability gets worse over time. I couldn’t get it to boot again. I would get the text “android” with a blinking underscore behind it. The underscore would stop blinking and the nook wouldn’t even fail back to boot from the internal drive. I later tried clearing the cache like in the overclock instructions. That didn’t help either.

I had to pull the chip out of the nook and plug it back into my laptop to swap back to the 800mhz processor to continue.

I finally got email configured… had some keyboard weirdness where keys that I wasn’t near with my finger would act as they were touched and write to my input lines. Further the next buttons would take a long time. I later figured that the wireless was a bit flakey and I was probably battling with that. I didn’t experience this again either.

Next I investigated installing Market.
I had never downloaded the android sdk, turns out that’s how/where the application abd is installed. The Market instructions referenced this app. I never got adb to work. It kept telling me it couldn’t find the device. So I added a device that pointed to the sd card in my laptop. That still didn’t make adb work, though that showed me the basics of how to build out an android vm on your laptop. The vm wasn’t any faster than the nook, maybe slower. I read a little bit about the sdk and figured that it will be more useful later if I try and debug some of what’s happening instead of just leeching off of other people’s work.

Moving on with the market install, I ended up just finding the directories on the sdcard that the market install references and copying the apk files to the referenced locations. I guess that’s all adb push and pull do… copy the files. I think adb will be more useful if I can figure out how to hook it up to the nook while the nook has honeycomb booted. I took a few mins to look into how to hook adb up to the nook booted off the sd card, but it wasn’t quite as straight forward as I would have hoped.

As the instructions suggested, I had to reboot a couple times to get market to work. I eventually got registered with google and tried to download a couple apps. They queued and never started to download.

By this time my wife was ready to get her nook back. Barnes & Noble is selling them new for $199 on Ebay until tomorrow morning. Too bad I don’t have $200 bucks in my back pocket to grab one. I imagine we’ll battle over nook time in the near future.

Final thoughts,
I like honeycomb on the nook. It seems very promising. With an overclocked stable kernel I think the user experience will be very positive.
I’m not sure what I think about the android SDK yet. I wasn’t really intending to get to involved in it, but I’ve realized I may have to just to do the Nook/Honeycomb thing. This intrigues me. It’s also probably my next step in this adventure if I plan to make any progress beyond sitting and waiting for someone else to spend their evenings stabilizing it all.

I <3 Fedora

Friday, February 11th, 2011

Saw this image on Planet Fedora this morning and liked it.

http://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/b/b8/Artwork_T%282d%29Shirt_love.png

Snow Prayers

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

This is so funny to me.

http://failblog.org/2011/02/01/epic-fail-photo-win-snowpocalypse-prayers/

Scapular Plane Swimming

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

Last September I fractured my humerus and tore a small tare in my rotator cuff and tore a small tare in my labrum. I did this playing indoor soccer. To be fair, I was playing goalie. Long story short. I was on my knees and dove right to try and stop a ball. I landed on my side with my arm above my head and shoulder bone hit my humerus incurring all that damage. The other team scored, but my team won the game! I started PT almost immediately to retain as much health in my shoulder as I could while the bone healed and progressively added range and strengthening back to my shoulder as the bone healed.

Quick props to my PT Ken Easters and Orthopedist Stephen Struble. Both provided top notch care and I’d recommend either of them in a heartbeat.

I spent quite a bit of time in Ken Easter’s PT gym and learned lots of new words related to my shoulder, for instance greater tubercle, that’s the part of my humerus that was fractured, and shoulder impingement, when the parts of your should get pinched in ways they shouldn’t between the bones. During my hour sessions twice a week I got to know Ken pretty well and we discussed all kinds of subjects.

One in particular I’ve gotten to take with me and experience as I’ve gotten back into my swimming training for my next Triathlon. Scapular Plane Swimming. My earlier PT exercises focused on exersicing the scapular plane. My lay man’s understanding of the scapular plane is the motion your shoulder blade makes as you move your arm around.

Growing up I had always heard of people messing up their shoulder swimming. I spend 6 days a week for 2+ hours at a time swimming from ages 11-15 and continued less intense regimes until I was 18. I never had a good understanding of the damage swimming caused until we started to discuss this scapular plane swimming. So glad I fractured my shoulder so I could finally understand it  ::sarcasm::

Scapular plane swimming is a method that Ken heard about from a guy named Kipp Dye. I’ve googled it a bit and had luke warm success on understanding it fully. Though, I can say that I’ve experienced the benefits of adjusting my freestyle stroke to keep it within the scapular plane, or at least closer to within the scapular plane.

When I got back in the water I tried to swim as I had been taught growing up. When your arm comes over your head your hand enters the water index finger first. This hurt! Further it’s exactly what causes the should problems I had heard about people having. The rotation that your shoulder goes through to put your index finger in first impinges the tissue between the arm and shoulder bone slightly and over time damages it.

I was experiencing this impingement pretty intensely having just been injured in the exact spot it happens when you swim index finger in first. Solution, place my hand in the water pinky first. It did seem a little unnatural at first. The more I did it the more natural it felt and best of all the pain was bearable at that point.

I visited Ken one more time to have him look at my stroke and he suggested the remaining pain was related to the muscles being tight and requiring more strengthening. So glad he was right, residual pain could have been related to the labrum tear not healing and requiring shoulder surgery.

It’s been a month now since I’ve gotten back in the water. I’m getting into more normal workout distances and even pulled out some hand paddles the other week. The injured shoulder is feeling better with each workout in the pool. The shoulder is sore, but workout sore. Not injured sore.

I’ve continued to use the pinky first method and am really growing accustomed to it. If anyone ever reads this that knows more about scapular plane swimming and would like to make more recommendations I’d be happy to hear them. Maybe I should just give a call to Mr Kipp Dye and ask him about it.

I’m not so sure if the “pinky first method” completely accomplishes the scapular plane method. On the other hand, if it does then maybe I’ve contributed a lay man’s name to something that up until now only had a medical name. You know like Dextromethorphan really means “cough medicine”.


White Lake 2011

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

Just signed up for the White Lake Sprint Triathlon. They have a half Ironman too, but I decided to sign up for the sprint. Maybe next year half Ironman. <grin>

Anyways, looking forward to being back on the bike and getting back in the water. I’ve been exclusively running since my last triathlon this past April. My heart sinks a little when I see other cyclist from the driver’s seat of my car.

Getting back into swimming will be good for my shoulder’s recovery too.

Loki 0.9.0

Monday, August 30th, 2010

There’s some documentation I’m working on to upgrade. The ConfigParam’s storage was updated. Make sure you read the release docs for the link.
Builder imported was added.

https://fedorahosted.org/loki

Porchry – Wrap, Drywall, Old Pantry

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted about porchry, though I’ve been working hard to get it done. Current state: We moved in! There’s a little but of paint to touch up an the kick molding adn door molding need to be painted. But the shelving is up and stuff that needs to be stored is on the shelves.

Even though I haven’t been posting I have been taking a picture as things get completed, Here’s a catch-up on the progress.

This is where the old pantry was, new pantry is to the left.

In the above picture you can see some pipes and wires hanging down on the left side of the old pantry. These were in the wall of the pantry that I tore out. I had a plumber look at putting the pipes in the load bearing wall. Couldn’t be done as I  have a large laminate beam along the floor right there that he didn’t want to cut. You can see in the picture below that I ended up building a small chase down the wall. The fridge will go there eventually, so the chase will run up the side of the fridge when it’s all said and done.

Here’s pics of the exterior

This is how I got my Vinyl siding home, I drive it to work like this then home from work. It sat in the parking deck through the afternoon like this.

Here most of the drywall is done in the new pantry and in the picture following the drywall is completed and painted.

I don’t have pictures of the shelving up yet. I’ll get a couple when the wall where the fridge is going is finished and post one more porchry post. Maybe a video is a good way to finish off the series.

Some Humor for the Day

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Porchry – Inspection and Insulation

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Inspection
Had the inspection yesterday. More props to Town of Apex. Inspector came about 10am, I halfway didn’t expect to see him until the afternoon. I passed! He had two things for me.

  1. attach the ground wire to the electrical housing.
  2. make sure to insulate under the floor

I got to the office around lunch time. Nice.

Insulation
On the way home from work I stopped and picked up the insulation. If you can build your frame 16″ on center you will save yourself a whole lot of heartache! The floor was 16″ on center and the walls were 12″ The floor insulation when in to place with little effort. I had to cut each and every one of the other strips (batts?) of insulation to get them into the wall frame. Insulation only comes 15″ wide and the wall needed 11″.

Oh well, a little more time, I’m learning right? Here’s what we look like now:

Already called and ordered the insulation inspection. I’m working on getting some house wrap from a guy on craigslist and I already have the drywall. So hopefully will get to hang the drywall after the inspection tomorrow and will probably try and get the house wrap hung as soon as we dry out around here(been. It’s been raining quite a bit around here, in the time it takes to let the osb dry out a bit I can get that house wrap from the guy on craigslist.