Zit Seng's Superwall

My Nexus One was rooted the same day I got it. In fact, it was rooted even before I got around to doing much with the phone. It’s something I consider a necessary consequence of owning a phone like the Nexus One. It’s a phone that has become a computer. Like a computer, I want to be able to look under the hood, install a different operating system, build my own operating system, etc. These things have typically not been possible in previous smartphones running Symbian, Windows Mobile, or other proprietary operating systems. Android has made phones work like computers.

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Sounds impossible. But it is. That’s if you have about US$60K to spend on a PC. Yup, just one PC. Patriot built a PC with 40 TorqX SSDs and demonstrated copying a Blu-ray rip in 0.9 seconds. That’s really super fast. This is probably the year that SSD is going to come of age in consumer devices. It has been around, first becoming quite well known with its introduction as an option to the MacBook Air. It was too costly. The price has come down a lot. Perhaps by the end of this year, it might become competitively priced against a traditional rotating hard disk.

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I figure that anyone who uses a smartphone like the Nexus One is going to have a 3G data plan, so being able to hook onto a wireless network isn’t going to be so important. But anyhow, I thought I’d just make a small little community contribution by sharing how to configure the Nexus One phone (I suppose just about any Android 2.0/2.1 phone will work the same) to connect to the NUS wireless network in, well, NUS. But first, credit goes to the information posted in Answers@Comp. The GUI isn’t enough to get the config done.

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I’ve used the Nexus One for a little over a week now. I think the biggest thing I will miss with my previous Nokia N97 is its camera. It’s quite capable of taking some really nice photos, like this shot of the Nexus One (as well as that in the previous post). This is one area that the Nexus One is trumped by the N97. Both phones sport 5 megapixel camera sensors, auto-focus, and LED flash (dual LED on the N97). But the bunch of photos I’ve taken with the Nexus One have been unimpressive, at least in terms of quality. The Nexus One is fast, though.

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When Google announced the Nexus One last month, I felt it was an interesting development that has begun to change what an Android phone can represent. Some people will know that I have been, until then, rather anti-Android. There were two reasons: unimpressive hardware features (and uninteresting design too), as well as an open source development environment that I felt didn’t quite live up to the spirit of what open source was supposed to stand for. But, the first reason was beginning to fall apart with the launch of the Motorola Droid in end 2009, and now somewhat invalidated by the Nexus One. Finally, this is an Android phone that boasts features and hardware specifications expected of any decent smart phone of 2009 and what will come in 2010.

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The Linux kernel admits to being dazed and confused, but tries hard to continue. Unsuccessfully. One of our server died. We looked at the screen, and were amused enough that everyone (who had a decent camera phone) took a picture of the screen. The kernel spat out in its logs: “Dazed and confused, but trying to continue;  Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled?” Alright, the server wasn’t really important after all, hence its death was only noticed like over 3  months later.

I fail to be wowed by Steve Jobs latest product announcement, the all new iPad, which is supposedly so revolutionary that it creates a new product category. I guess it still does deserve its own product category, but it is nowhere so revolutionary that the media had hyped it out to be. The name itself doesn’t even sound interesting. In fact, I’m already reading a bunch of jokes about the name even before I finished watching Steve Job’s keynote video.

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I recently bought a D-Link DCS-2121 wireless network camera. It’s a camera that connects to the network directly, records video to a network storage, emails or uploads video/snapshots of detected motion, and provide real-time video monitoring through its embedded web server. As these cameras get smarter and smarter, more functions are integrated into it. It’s pretty handy to implement a simple remote video surveillance system just about anywhere you need.

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In less than 24 hours, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Apple is expected to unveil a new hardware product category at their special Media Event. It’ll be a product announcement so major that it is being compared to the likes if the iPhone launch in 2007 and Macintoshes moving to Intel processors in 2005. We’re talking about a new product category rather than simply another new product, and it has been reported that Steve Jobs was heard saying the Apple Tablet “will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

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One of the best things that Apple had introduced with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Time Machine. It’s a no-brainer backup utility that “just works”, and furthermore, one that people will actually use. While Time Machine works great with a direct attached storage disk (internal or external firewire/USB) or Time Capsule, it wouldn’t readily work with other network attached storage. If you want to backup “over the network”, Apple wants you to buy their Time Capsule hardware. But there are fixes to get around that.

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