Observations of a Student: Adrian Corscadden

I was back at school yesterday after a 4 month hiatus, and I noticed something about firefox today because of it. I have been using Google’s Chrome on my computer at home, and haven’t touched Firefox in several months. The computers at school use Firefox, so I was forced to use Firefox for the first time in a few months today.

For the previous few years before chrome, I was exclusively a Firefox user. I noticed a difference between the two browsers today that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been using chrome exlusively.

The open new tab option is in a different spot in the two browser’s right click menus. This might seem like a pretty insignificant difference, but it is actually pretty annoying to accidentally open links in new windows when I mean to open them in new tabs.

I really should take this a cue to use the CTRL key more to open new links.

Remember Google Wave? I was super excited when I got my invite. Actually, I still have invites left if anyone wants one..haha. I started several waves my first day, and did interact with a few people. Within a week of signing up and using it, I don’t think I’ve ever used it again. It’s not even in my bookmarks anymore, since I did some spring cleaning on those a few days ago.

Does anyone out there still use Google Wave?

[via DogHouseDiaries]

After roughly 30 hours on the xda-developers.com forums, I successfully installed Android onto my Bell HTC Touch, also know as the HTC Vogue. It really didn’t need to take that long, as I made a mistake on the first step which unlocks the phone. If I had done that correctly, I would have been up and running in about 20 minutes.

So far, Android has been a great improvement over Windows Mobile 6.1. Despite being a newer operating system, I am finding it to be a lot faster than WM 6.1. I am also a gmail use. Gmail on Android is awesome. It is way better than on WM 6.1, and it is probably even better than gmail on the iPhone or blackberry. As expected, Android plays very nicely with all of google’s other apps. My calendar, contacts and even my youtube account all synced after entering my google login info once.

…can’t see myself ever going back to Windows Mobile now..

Check out the video of it booting below:

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to this article on wired.com about installing Android on the HTC Touch. The article was about a great thread in the xda-developers forum that contains instructions on how to install Android on the HTC Touch. For those of you who don’t know, Android is Google’s mobile phone OS that competes with the iPhone OS and Windows Mobile, among others. I have had my HTC Touch for over 2 years, and Windows Mobile is starting to feel pretty dated.

The instructions seemed easy enough, so I started through the steps at around noon yesterday. I made it through them without too much difficulty, and then trying booting up my device for the first time. I was happy to be greeted by Tux, the linux penguin. Wow, did he look good on the screen of my phone. Sadly I experienced a kernel panic shortly after this. This is what the picture to the left is of. Ultimately, after trying several builds, kernels and unlockers, I wouldn’t make it past this stage.

At around 6pm, I had a fully functional brick. At that time, I decided to give up on my dreams of running Android, and just revert back to Windows Mobile 6.1. Unfortunately, I was unable to flash either of the stock roms provided by Bell or HTC. After spending about an hour trying to get WM 6.1 on my phone again, I decided that I would give WM 6.5 a shot. While WM 6.5 is no Android or iPhone OS, it’s still quite an improvement over WM 6.1.

I headed back over to the xda-developers forums and looked up instructions for installing WM 6.5. It was a pretty similar process to installing Android, so I was up and running with WM 6.5 fairly quickly. WM 6.5 didn’t boot the first time due to my radio ROM being out of date, so a quick flash of a newer radio version fixed that. At first WM 6.5 looked to be pretty good. My phone, sms, and 1X data connections all worked, and I was having fun playing with the new OS. My excitement about my new OS was unfortunately short lived, as I discovered a fatal flaw of my newly installed OS. It only worked while plugged into a wall outlet! It would immediately reboot as soon as I unplugged it, and then go into an infinite boot-reboot cycle. From breifly searching the forums, I think that my WM 6.5 rebooting problems is due to the unlocker that I used. I am currently stuck at this stage, trying to install a new unlocker.

…stay tuned for my progress, hopefully I’ll have it working by tomorrow..

My phone problems are summarized by XKCD #722: