JADDOG

Got to fiddle with Honeycomb on the nook again last night. My wife went to the gym with a friend after the kids went to bed, so I commandeered it again. I’m even happier with honeycomb after my second night of working with it than I was the first.

Tonight I came to some conclusions about some of the initial trouble I was having and got adb working properly with Fedora 14. There’s not a whole lot of info about getting adb on Fedora working with the nook so I’ll provide my config files.

I started with a fresh image tonight and worked through the setup I had already done. Here are my conclusions from this experience.
1. Initial performance issues seem related to the dalvik-cache. Once that’s been generated things run much smoother.
In an attempt to get the overclocked kernel working before I started again from scratch I did the rm * on the dalvik-cache referenced in the link from my last post.
This made the nook run very slow again. Then when I booted the fresh image I again got the same horrible performance. In particular the initial boot took a long time. Once booted I would select the “wait” option at “force quit or wait” prompts. These slowly thinned out in frequency. Once I stopped seeing them all together things seemed to run pretty smooth and responsive.
2. the overclocked kernel bombs after I setup my wireless.
While starting from scratch I rebooted the overclocked kernel a couple times. No problems getting the nook booted on it until I setup my wireless.
3. The wireless needs work.
I cat get the nook connected to my router (Apple Airport Extreme), but the speed is slow. I also noticed that when I was trying to initially connect that my AP would jump in and out of the available connections.

adb
There were lots of posts that talked about adding a file in the /etc/udev/rules.d directory. I also needed a file in the ~/.android directory. Here’s my final two config files:

dradez@tirreno:~➤ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules
SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”, ATTRS{idVendor}==”18d1″, MODE=”0666″, OWNER=”dradez”
SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”, ATTRS{idVendor}==”2080″, MODE=”0666″, OWNER=”dradez”

dradez@tirreno:~➤ cat .android/adb_usb.ini
0×2080

after I had those in place and udev bounced adb showed up in the adb devices command and I was able to use all the sdk tools as the docs suggest.

I look forward to the wireless getting more stable. I love the interface and look forward to installing some more apps to work with. Hopefully I can figure out how to contribute to making things better.

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

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.

New version of nushus is available for download.
Couple bug fixes and a couple small features.
New cli plugin added as part of the standard distribution.

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

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

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

This is so funny to me.

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

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”.

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.

I’m listening to Switchfoot today at work. The lyrics of the song The Economy of Mercy on Learning to Breath caught my attention and reminded me of my 3 year old son.

When he’s due discipline we’ve granted mercy enough that he understands what mercy is. He’s since learned to ask for mercy when he’s due discipline.

Here is the Chorus:

In the economy of mercy
I am a poor and begging man
In the currency of Grace
Is where my song begins
In the colors of Your goodness
In the scars that mark your skin
In the currency of Grace
Is where my song begins

This motivates me to start associating Grace with Mercy. Seems like a good opportunity to use a very tangible experience in his life to demonstrate Christ’s work on the cross.