SigSays - All Things Reviewed

I was looking for a good carrying case for the Apple Magic Mouse, and found I actually had one lying around my place. When I bought my MinoHD, Amazon gave me two free accessories. I got a little tripod, and this Case Logic pouch. I never really used it for the Flip camera, but it works great for the mouse. It’s really well padded and cinches closed.

Buy it on Amazon

This will be fun for track season

I just got my Car Dock from google. I haven’t had time to really do a full review, but I can at least share a few pictures and my initial thoughts.

First, same cool packaging as the Nexus One itself. Nice touch.

Second, the build quality seems pretty solid. Some of the universal mounts feel like cheap crap, this one at least feels fairly solid.

The dock uses the same USB connector as the phone, which is a nice touch. This means you can use the adapter to charge the phone, even if you don’t want to dock it.

Windshield suction cup mount appears to be solid, I’ve only had it up there for a few hours though, the next few days of temperature changes will be the real test.

And my first complaint: The voice navigation is so quiet using the built in speaker, it’s utterly worthless, might as well just turn it off and look at the picture unless there’s a fix. Odd, because the speakerphone seems to be fine for phone calls. No idea. I’ll go take some pics of the phone mounted in the dock in a few, charging my camera.

As you might have noticed, I picked up a Nexus One by Google to replace my aging iPhone 3G. I also grabbed a spare battery from google (At $25 for an oem battery, it’s a steal), but the only way to charge the battery was in the phone itself. It was annoying to have to charge your battery, then shut the phone down, remove the case, and swap the dead battery in to charge it.

Google offers a dock, but it doesn’t charge a spare battery, so that does nothing for me. I eventually found this dock on amazon, which includes a space to charge your spare battery and your phone at the same time, so I had to jump on it.

(Image from Boxwave’s Site, since I expertly forgot my camera. I’ll replace it with my own soon)

First the good:

The quality seems solid. It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s not bad.

The plastic supports the phone so there’s no tension on the USB connector. Seems obvious, but a lot of older cradle designs put lots of tension on the connector.

It charges a battery too, duh.

It comes with a wall adapter, so you can charge either via a computer’s USB port or a wall outlet.

It has an indicator light to let you know when your spare battery is charged.

When connected to a computer, you can sync your phone from the cradle, add files via USB, use the SDK for ADB or fastboot (Even *I* just said “What a fucking nerd!”), etc.

And now the bad:

It charges the phone via the USB port, not the docking pins on the bottom of the phone, like the factory cradle does. This means that while a factory cradle will put the phone in “Docked” mode, and let you use it as a nightstand clock, this just acts as if the phone is plugged into a USB cable, which is basically what is going on.

If both your battery and phone are down, it takes a long time to charge both via USB. Not really the fault of the dock, just something to consider.

I use the screebl app to turn my phone off when not in use, and this dock holds it so upright, it will keep the display awake unless I manually hit the screen lock button. This is both is a pro and a con, really.

Overall, I’m happy with the purchase. I wish Google would make an OEM dock that charges a second battery, but for now, this is the best I’ve found.

Buy it on Amazon!

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I wrote this for a forum post, and figured I would share it here too. Hope it helps. Check the XDA Developers forum and http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ for a lot more info. None of these files/roms were written by me, and all credit goes to the people who did the hard work. As usual, I assume no responsibility. Unlocking your bootloader will technically void your warranty. I’m just telling you what worked for me, I’m not a professional. I wouldn’t even listen to me, I’m usually drunk. There’s a solid chance I’m just making all of this up. Also, I did this all on a Mac running OSX Snow Leopard. If Linux/Windows/Whatever is vastly different, you’re boned, and it’s not my fault. Essentially: Don’t come crying to me.

Download the Android SDK:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

This will get you a .zip file. I would extract it to the root of a drive or just one folder down (like to C:/ or ~/ in mac or C:/sdk) You’ll understand why later. After it’s extracted, go find the “tools” folder. Double click the “Android” file. It will pop up a command/terminal window, then a GUI. In the GUI, click on “Available Packages”, select all of them and install. This will take a bit. When it’s done, you can just close the window and the command prompt.

Now you need to add fastboot. You can compile it yourself, but that would be silly. Here’s a windows 32 bit version I found on XDA:

http://files.me.com/mzsigler/v94lxh

Extract the zip to the “tools” folder in the android SDK.

Here’s the Mac version, it’s not compressed, just download it and put it in the “tools” folder of SDK, no need to unzip.

http://files.me.com/mzsigler/29kua4

In all honesty, I don’t remember where I downloaded that file, but it works great. If you compiled it, please let me know and I’ll credit you.

Then you need Amon’s recovery image. Save it in the “tools” folder in your SDK (picking up on a pattern here?).

http://rapidshare.com/files/366400383/recovery-RA-nexus-v1.7.0.img

Then you need a new rom. Download it to your computer, then move it to the SD card on your phone, don’t unzip it or anything. I highly suggest this one from CyanogenMod. His roms are fast and stable, by far the best I’ve found.

http://n0rp.chemlab.org/android/nexus/update-cm-5.0.6-N1-signed.zip

I believe in windows you need to download some drivers, but I’m not sure, as OS X didn’t require any drivers. Windows users should google “Android USB drivers” right about now, and come back when they’ve made sure they have the right ones.

Connect your phone via usb and put it in bootloader mode by turning it off, then holding the trackball down while you power it back on. It should boot a white screen and say “Fastboot USB” near the top.

On your computer, open Command Prompt or Terminal, depending on your OS, and navigate to the folder the SDK is in and find the “tools” folder. If you listened to me and saved it somewhere easy, like the root of a drive, this is simple. Say you saved it in C:/sdk. You would click the start button, then “run”, then “cmd”. This gives you a command prompt. To get to the proper folder, you would type “cd\” to go to the root of C:, just so we’re all on the same page, then “cd sdk/*android_sdk_orwhatevertheynamedit*/tools”. In my case, on a mac, it’s “cd /android/android-sdk-mac_86/tools” If that still doesn’t make it clear, you might be better off just leaving your phone on the stock rom. Effectively, navigate to the tools folder of the sdk in terminal/command.

Now type “fastboot devices” and hit the enter key (Or “./fastboot-mac devices” for a mac) and see if it recognizes that your phone is connected If so, you’re ready to go.

*When you unlock the bootloader in the next step, it will wipe the phone and erase all of your data. Any pics on the SD card are safe, and you can redownload the apps you’ve paid for, but if you have a text or something you find important, make sure it’s backed up*

First unlock the bootloader. Type “fastboot oem unlock”  then hit enter (Mac: “./fastboot-mac oem unlock”). It should walk you through the unlock process and warn you that your warranty will be void. Just follow the instructions. Once you’re done, boot back into bootloader mode by holding trackball and powering up. You should have an open lock under the multicolored Nexus X now.

It will take you back through setup, but you can just power down, since you’ll have to setup again when you flash the new rom.

Now you’re gonna flash the recovery image. Again, hold the trackball while you boot the phone to put it in bootloader mode, and again, in command prompt, navigate to the /tools folder and type “fastboot flash recovery recovery-RA-nexus-v1.7.0.img” (Mac: “./fastboot-mac flash recovery recovery-RA-nexus-v1.7.0.img”)

It should flash the recovery image. Now reboot into bootloader again. (Hold the trackball while you power your phone on)  This time use the volume and top (screen lock) button to navigate. Press the top button to select “bootloader”.

It will load another screen. Press the volume down button to select “recovery”. At first it will do nothing, this is normal, it’s checking the device. You’ll see a few things flash on the screen in green, again, normal.

It will go back to the menu, and now you can use volume down to select “recovery”.

Highlight it and press the top button to select it. You’ll see the multicolored X as it boots into recovery. At this point, your trackball will be used to select things.

Go to “Wipe” and do a “Factory Reset” wipe first, then go back to the main menu.

Select “Flash zip from sd card”, pick the file I had you download above (the rom file), confirm that you want to flash.

Once it finishes you’re done. Boot up and set up your phone.

Email mobilesig@gmail.com if you spot any mistakes.

Supposed to fix a few minor stability issues, the long rumored 10..6.3 just popped up in my software update.

I’ll report back later today if I notice any differences.

I’m working on getting all the pics and stuff together and writing a rough draft right now, thought I would give you a teaser.

No explanation needed

Since I’ve gotten my Macbook, I’ve been using OS X Snow Leopard as my primary OS. The only problem is that I need to use some old windows only applications from time to time at work, probably 3 or 4 times a day. I installed Windows 7 using Bootcamp, which works very well, but you have to reboot every time you want to switch to Windows or back to OS X. Not exactly an ideal solution.

I’ve used VMware Fusion for Windows before, and it’s cool, but I didn’t really have a need for it then. I decided to try the Mac version, and I’m blown away.

Upon install, it automatically detects your bootcamp installation of Windows, and asks if you want to run it as a virtual machine. Select yes, and it sets everything up automagically. Once it goes through the initial setup and installs VMware Tools, you’re set. Just open VMware and you can boot into your Bootcamp windows installation inside of OSX.

The pictures do a much better job of explaining, so here ya go.

Click the VMware icon in your top bar. BootCamp will automatically be selected, just hit “Start Up”.

You’ll get a new window and your Windows BootCamp installation will begin booting.

It boots to your Windows Desktop, just like you’re booting a physical install.

And you can open IE, go to websites (Including those that require ActiveX), run windows programs, even use the USB and Optical hardware on your Mac.

Absolutely amazing software if you’re a Mac user that occasionally needs Windows. There’s advanced settings to decide how much of the CPU and RAM you’re willing to let the Windows Virtual Machine use, etc, but I figured I would just cover the basics here, as those things will depend heavily on what you intend to do with the virtual machine, and the hardware you install it on.

I would give this 6 stars if I could, it’s easily the most useful software I’ve seen for OS X.

Buy VMware Fusion on Amazon!

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Just checking out automator on the new Macbook, so I thought I would share what I learned. The video is fairly self explainitory, but here’s the gist:

Open Automator.

Pick “Service”

In the right hand pane, at the top, set it so it reads receives (Files or Folders) from (Finder)

Now move to the far left and pick the Mail section.

In the next pane to your right, find “New Mail Message”, and drag it to the right.

Now save as something that makes sense, in my case “Send to mail recipient”

You’re done. Right click any file or folder on your computer, and at the bottom you’ll see “Send to email recipient” or whatever you named it.

Sounds complicated, but it’s really insanely simple, the video does a better job of illustrating how easy it is.