I guess I know more about Android than I thought

Every so often I come across people with so little tact in dealing with things, and so set in their minds that they are right that nothing else is even a possibility.  Today's little snippet is not my story but the developer of a great app for root access users.  A little background on ChainsDD, he is the creator and coder of an app called Superuser.  Basically what this app does is it helps manage what permissions applications that require root get.  It is a well-made app and does its job well.


So well in fact that many coders out there that make custom ROMs use it "baked in" to their ROMs.  Now this places it in the '/system/apps' directory which the system treats as a system file that cannot be deleted.  But now on to the humor:  


It seems ChainDD's client doesn't understand this, and is one of the people that should NEVER EVER EVER be in possession of a rooted device.  My opinion is that he may have purchased these phones from someone who did have them rooted at one point, or perhaps he rooted and un-rooted and thought the app would magically go away.


Regardless here is the transcript from the E-mail back and forth:
http://pastebin.com/4neJc6M0


I like that this person probably American threatens ChainsDD with a class action law suit.  Now I haven’t been following ChainsDD's twitter for too long, but long enough to hypothesize that he lives in The UK, and an American Class action doesn't bother him one bit.


This kept me laughing all morning to the point I had to write about it.


Anyway if your rooted you want his app anyway look it up in the market, it is a 5star app all the way, even with one or two people who gave it 1 star because they couldn't figure out how to uninstall it.


Till next time,
MARPATdroid


Superuser on Androidzoom.com
http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/tools/superuser_jsma.html


My wife's blog on living the sweet life on a budget
http://sweetthriftygirl.blogspot.com/

Android the Other XM/HD Radio Radio

Greeting again fellow Android users,
I wasn't going to post today because I don't want to post just for the sake of posting I want to have quality posts.  But seriously I had something I wanted to share.  It's not a huge secret just something I don't know how many people thought of.

We all know about XM radio, and HD radio being all the craze in car and possibly home audio but how about this.  Use your Android Device, think of all the free radio broadcasting apps there are on the android market.  There has to be something that you would like to listen to.  The best part is you probably already have the equipment to do it.  Most cars now days have an auxiliary in port so all you need is a headphone to headphone jack.  Get the App you want I use Pandora, iHeartRadio, and a police scanner all free.  Hook up your phone to the stereo,  and if you want your car charger and viola you have radio that is the kind of music or media you want to listen to.

One draw back I did find though is sometimes you get a little bit of a whine when I am hooked into the car charger and the stereo at the same time, but it is usually tolerable.  My wife's car doesn't get this whine maybe it's the fact that I have a cheap department store charger.

Now some of you are probably saying "MARPAT!  I don't have an auxiliary port on my car stereo."

Well fear not there are ways to overcome this as well, there are numerous affordable FM transmitters, and if your car is old enough you can probably find  or have a cassette tape adapter like what I used when CD players first came out.  Just mess around see what you can figure out.

Another advantage of this is that you can take your CD's and MP3's, put them on your Android device and look you can play your music from your phone on the radio.  It's probably the coolest thing ever.  I know that I have saved almost $17.00 a month that is $204.00 a year.  Go me!  Also when someone calls I have hands free, no blue tooth, the audio forwards from the phone to my stereo and it's picks up my voice using the speaker phone mic on my phone.

Well that wraps it all up.
Enjoy your Android,

MARPATdroid

PS. check out my wife's blog for more general money saving tips  http://sweetthriftygirl.blogspot.com

The First Post

Good Afternoon Ladies, Gentlemen, and Droids of all ages,

As this is my first post I am going to do a little introduction of myself, I'm 25 I move around a lot and I like to play and find new apps and innovations on the ever expanding Google Android platform.  That about sums this up.  Also included in my future posts may be some computer commentary and some up and coming other technology spots.

But today, down to business, first things first, Rooting while I cannot condone and or say it is for everyone (my wife is a prime example of who I would not recommend rooting too.) it does open up a ton of possibilities on your phone that you could not access any other way.

If you have a basic understanding of how command prompts work or if your lucky and someone made a one click root app for your phone then it should be relatively safe.  However it can be tricky and daunting to a new comer or someone who just has bad luck.  I for one have rooted both my Backflip and my Droid 2 Global and have been very satisfied.

First what is rooting?f
Simply put rooting is to an Android device as the secret administrator profile in Windows is to your common PC.  It lets you change certain setting that normally you can't see or do.  For an anecdotal purposes:
Say you have two rooms and a locked door.  Two different people are in room one, and in this room you have bread, beef jerky, and some water, enough for both people to survive the duration of this experiment.  But in the other room on the other side of the locked door, there is an entire banquet hall fixed with any kind of food you want.  One person is your standard user who is content with the beef jerky an water, but the other has a key and goes through the door, this is your superuser and the key is your root.  Now what a lot of people won't tell you about rooting is that the food on the other side, a lot of it is good, BUT ( and this is a big but) if your not careful some of it can be poisoned.
In this situation if the superuser isn't careful he could die, but if the superuser knows what he is looking for and what he wants to do with the root privileges he can benefit from what is behind the door.  In real life your not going to die if you root your phone and mess it up.  You may have to shell out some cash to someone to get your phone fixed or buy a new one completely.  So sometimes it is good to just stay rooted if you don't know.

What are the Pro's to rooting?
Let me preface this with I take no responsibility for what happens to your phone or if your really unlucky if your provider suspends your service (never heard of this happening but I'm sure it could.)
1. Custom recovery images (NANDROID images) this is an exact copy of everything on your phone, all your settings, applications, everything, very convenient in case something goes wrong on you phone, you can back up and try something out if you don't like it just restore the old image.  Also if you decide to run a custom ROM keep a copy of your original  android factory settings just in case you need to go back to stock so it is quick and easy.
2. Custom ROMS, and now some of you are asking "MARPAT what is a ROM and what makes it custom?".  Well my friends the ROM (Read-Only Memory) is essentially where your operating system is stored on your Android device, it ususally has "bloatware" or software the company that made it put on there that serves no purpose to 80% of the people using the device but it can't be uninstalled.  On the Droid 2 Global this included the Blockbuster App, VZ Navigator, VCast, etc.  Most custom ROM makers will get rid of all of this and give you a more stock natural Android experiance.  BTW have you checked the battery mannager and seen how much battery is being hogged by MOTOblur?  but I digress.
3.  Titanium Backup, Here's one of my many plugs for apps that I will be making, this is almost a must have for any Android device, yet you have to be rooted to use it.  Like your recovery images, this backs up your system but while it is running so you don't need to go into the recovery program to use it.  Very nice, and it has saved me from downloading all my apps again, after a factory reset.
4.  I almost don't want to put this on here but I'm going to, "Free Unlimited Tethering"  First off I do not recomend this as it is definitely something that will get your contract voided if you get caught, but we all know about it, and yes I know we pay for unlimited data why do we have to pay extra to use that data on a computer.  And that we will leave at that.  Basically turning your phone into a mobile hotspot less the $20 a month extra fee from Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile.

Now the Con's....
1. Voiding your warranty, yup if anything goes wrong you have a $400+ paperweight, and lets face it that sucks.
2. Voiding your warranty, read above.
3. Soft Bricking your phone, this is most common among new rooters that they will do this, developers do it as well, through the process of developing ROMs and testing out new root methods.  Basically your phone will flash the manufactures logo, maybe even the start up animation and then reboot to do it over again indefinitely, hence this is also known as a boot loop, but not all boot loops are soft bricks, if you were smart and made a back up you can try going into your custom recovery and using the restore feature.  For newer phones you can read numbers 1&2 until....  The SBF file is leaked from your phone manufacture's company, this takes time but if you know what your doing you can unbrick your phone.  Basically what the SBF is, it's the System Boot File, if your phone is softbricked you can go into a bootloader mode using some crazy key combination that is kind unique to each phone and hook it into your computer to reflash the original factory setting and OS on your phone.  Just so you can start over.  Which brings us to number 4.
4. Dead phone, your past the soft bricking, and now your phone is just a brick.  It does nothing won't start up, it's dead, probably because you rooted your phone thought hey there's an overclocking ROM out there for my phone I'm gonna take this 550Mhz processor up to 4.2Ghz and travel through the space time continuum and you fried your phone's processor, well to you unfortunite soul read 1 & 2 as you go on your way to find a new phone.

All and all I think you need to weigh the Pro's and Con's for your situation and decide from there what you want to do with your phone and if you can do it, or not do it without root.  Or maybe you can do it more efficiently with root.  If your risks are minimal in your mind, or you have an endless cash supply then go for it.  I have rooted my phone and reflashed a custom ROM and never once looked back.  Other people have not been so lucky.

Here are some programs that may help you on your quest to root your phone.

z4Root - this is a one click root program that covers a good number of Android devices.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=833953

Fission / Fused ROM from team defuse, this is what I run on my Droid 2 Global and I love it.  (if you like it you should donate and get their full version ROM mannager, it lets you download and install the new versions from your phone along with other goodies and addons.)
http://www.teamdefuse.com/

J_R0dd's Preclair for backflip, very nice ROM I really like it on my backflip allows for a lot of cool things to be done without all the crazy AT&T bloatware.  (You'll also need his custom recovery it's all quite easy to do.)
http://modmymobile.com/forums/566-motorola-backflip-roms/556727-rom-preclair-v1-3-1-netfilter-swap-ext3-ext4-tun-12-17-10-a.html

And Titanium backup...  if your rooted and don't have this your wrong.
http://matrixrewriter.com/android/

Alright everyone have a good evening/next few days, and please leave me questions so I can have topics for my next post.


MARPATdroid