CyanogenMod - I miss you.

I've had my Samsung Galaxy S2 for a month now, it replaced my beloved HTC Magic as my daily phone. I am suffering buyers remorse.

When I first saw the HTC Magic available in the UK I decided it was the android device I had to have, I told my dad about the phone and Android, he managed to get one before I did. When I took deliver of mine, three of my friends were so impressed the ordered the exact same device. All well and good. Then came CyanogenMod, a replacement Android build which can be flashed (installed) to many devices (current devices list).

Cyanogen kicked my phone up a notch, it was faster than the Android build Vodafone (boo!) had installed, it didn't have any bundled apps which couldn't be removed (spunkware), I could tweak more settings, use features which the Vodafone build would never support (USB tethering, apps2sd etc).

Over the years the device naturally started to show it's age. My friends who had also bought an HTC Magic moved on to other devices (mostly the Galaxy S2). In November 2011 I was close to buying a replacement, Cyanogen had stopped supporting the old war horse, then I found Ginger Yoshi 1.5. Installing this gave my HTC Magic another, albeit not as hard, kick of life.  At this point my friends fancy Galaxy S2s were rocking Android 2.3.3, my trusty HTC Magic was running 2.3.5. 

Ginger Yoshi 1.5 - Squeezing as much into the HTC Magic as possible

For a while I struggled on, last month I took delivery of my Samsung Galaxy S2. As a long time user of 'after market' firmwares I'm less than impressed with the software. The hardware is great, don't get me wrong, O2 (my provider) have installed a lot of spunkware, ditto Samsung.

I'm currently holding off resolving the software stupidity until CyanogenMod 9 is released. I urge you to investigate CyanogenMod as an alternative to the Android build (and software) supplied by your vendor. It's cost free, though donations do go to a fund the ongoing development.

I still use the HTC Magic occasionally when the Samsung UI pissed me off.

I leave you with "The telephone call" From Electric Cafe by Kraftwerk

Welcome to the future

As a child of the 1980s as well as an unhealthy fear of nuclear war I grew up with various things which were constantly on my mind. I've always been interested in technology, it's applications and impact on society as a whole and to individuals.

For a while the shows like 'Tomorrows world', cartoons, the news and mainstream cinema made one thing clear, pretty soon we'll all have a robot in our house to do our bidding, whatever that may be at the time.

So towards the end of last year while browsing ebay I decided to bid on a robot I could have at home. For ~£50 I picked up an iRobot Roomba 530, sold as needing a replacement battery.

The Roomba is a circular robot which vacuums the floor. This is ideal for me, I can switch it on each day before I leave for work and it'll vacuum my flat, return to it's docking bay to recharge and all I have to do is empty it a removable section where the dust is stored into my bin. So while I'm getting paid to cut code and solve problems, the roomba is cleaning my flat.

A good clean (seriously, if you're going to sell stuff on ebay at least clean the items before you post them to someone) and a replacement battery was required before it was up and running.

This is a good start, but I want more from this device. I have a terrible habit of always wanting to modify or hack things I buy, the roomba is no exception.

This blog will start out with me describing my investigations into roomba hacks/mods. My basic research so far shows that with some basic DIY skills it's possible to add functionality to my roomba, some of which exists on newer more advanced (and expensive) models, some of which iRobot don't even support yet.

My next post will contain a breakdown of the roomba, outline the mods I initially plan on implementing,

I feel that a fitting way to end this introductory post is to sign off with a video combining Robots, Tomorrows world and Kraftwerk. So here's Kraftwerk's robots from around about 1991 (the Mix tour) on Tomorrows world: