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silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
As you might have guessed at this point, I tend to be a cheapskate when it comes to devices that I can do stuff with. A large amount of being able to be so cheap is that I do research beforehand to know whether a device that I'm considering has my preferred operating system ported for it, and I see what the process is for creating my preferred environment on it. This is a lot of me standing on the shoulders of giants, as I am not a person elbows-deep in the code needed to run on the devices, and I don't build my own variations of the code (even though I probably have the system and the procedure that I could use to build and flash my own customized variation). I trust the community that creates these custom and non-vendor-supplied operating systems to be nice with my device and not defile it with adware or secret crypto miners on the idea that enough of the community hates those things and will audit the code to make sure they don't appear. I trust that the interneicene conflicts and differences of opinion will keep things moving in a direction that stays on track and doesn't bow to forces that do not have the project's interests at heart. And, frankly, I like the product of these communities a lot more than the ones provided officially on the devices in the first place, and I like their willingness to keep those devices above for a lot longer than the official support is, because they want to do it, and because they want to keep their own devices alive for as long as possible. Because of their efforts, I get to buy things used and refurbished and then keep them for a significant amount of time doing the things that I want to do. I appreciate all of this work that gets put into making these systems available for use.
My most current tablet is the first time that I have not used one of the Barnes and Noble Nook line as my primary tablet. Mostly because the hardware division that's creating Nooks shut down, and now their tablets are mostly Samsung tablets that have a customized version of Android running on the Samsung hardware. The types of tablet selected for the Nook line now are no longer ones that it's easy to turn into proper tablets, and so instead, I had to get a refurbished tablet from elsewhere. But I had a really good run with the Nook line for nearly a decade's worth of time. First and foremost, because buying a Nook tablet usually cost about half what all the other tablets on the market cost! Admittedly, those tablets were also often underpowered compared to the Android tablets on the market, but I don't play a lot of high-powered games on my tablet. An awful lot of things have been composed on those tablets over the years, including the entirety of the Pern read commentary. Significant amounts of fic have existed on the tablet and at least partially composed on them as well. And it's nice to be able to watch various programs, sporting events, and to listen to my podcasts on a tablet device, so they're not taking up the space and battery of the phone. So long as I can browse the web, receive and send email, do some amount of composing, and engage in multimedia entertainment, the tablet will do fine. And the Nooks absolutely have done that, even from the very first Nook Tablet 7" that I started with. Like early phones, the Nooks needed to have some exploits done on them to make them suitable for the total conversion away from the Nook-branded material into a less encumbered (and better updated) Android tablet. And because these weren't Pokémon Go machines, the presence of superuser binaries didn't cause any major problems, aside from Netflix refusing to install or update on those tablets through the official procedures, because SafetyNet.
From the original tablet, I ended up going with the Nook HD+, which got stolen when my car was broken into at a work site. The joke was on them, though, because those Nooks took a proprietary 40-pin interface with the charger, and the HD had been around long enough that it could last approximately two minutes before its battery claimed to be empty and it shut down until it was plugged in again to charge. The break-in cost more in damages (and in showing my hand about the worries I had about my ex and whether I needed to flee in a hurry) than the thieves got in hardware. After that, with the Nooks having shifted into letting Samsung produce their line, we ended up getting a Galaxy S2 that we rode all the way to the current refurbished device, despite the S2 definitely starting to get loose in the charger unless the cord was positioned exactly correctly, and the battery capacity of the tablet was to the point where it could last maybe a scant few hours, possibly less, before it, too, believed itself completely discharged and in need of a recharging. (That seems to be my failure mode for so many of the devices I have, was my current smartphone is showing signs that it is losing battery capacity, shutting itself down if there's more battery and the camera is invoked, or if an intensive application is being run at low or approaching low battery. It's too bad that so many smartphones don't have user-replacable batteries any more, because that would probably prolong the life of many devices for a much longer time. (If I could find the correct battery, and the correct charger, I could probably resurrect my Nokia N810 and figure out if Maemo Diablo was worthwhile, and to see how well it would do as an IRC device, or for other things.) The inexpensive Nook Tablet, usually bought with a gift card given for the December holiday, then equipped with CyanogenMod/LineageOS has been a mainstay of my portable computing life, and the way that I experimented and gained confidence in using my Linux systems and in following the directions provided to turn those tablets into better versions of themselves.
And, in at least one memorable incident, figuring out how to recover when I soft-bricked a tablet by accident. While the Barnes and Noble Nook division is basically just a skin on top of someone else's tablets, Amazon has been putting out multiple versions and revisions of their Fire tablets (also running Android) for years, offering them inexpensively as a way of trying to get people into the Amazon ecosystem and keep them there. (The biggest grief I have with Amazon Fire tablets is that they don't offer Libby, the library app, in the Amazon store as of now. They offer the previous app, but that just can't seem to get this one approved for no apparent reason. As Android tablets, it's possible to get it in there anyway, but it takes steps that the average user would be uncomfortable with, including things like enabling unknown sources temporarily.) As early Android devices, however, these items are also vulnerable to the occasional exploit script to install an appropriate recovery and from there, a custom ROM. This one was supposed to be routine, like all the other ones were, but the directions were not as clear as they could have been about which of the two items provided to use, and so I flagged the wrong one, the one that was only a bootloader without a recovery alongside it. Once I realized the mistake I'd made, I was unhappy. The good thing was, this Kindle Fire was not a mission critical device, so my messing up the flash wasn't immediately impactful or a cause for greater worry.
Even better for my bruised ego, not all was actually lost, despite the bricking of the device. As luck would have it, this particular revision of the main board of the Kindle had a pad upon it where if that pad were connected to the appropriate place, booting to recovery mode would happen by hard wired jump, at which point the script would be able to intercept everything going on and flash everything correctly. Of course, what that actually meant was having to open the case to the Kindle Fire by removing all the very tiny screws, locate the appropriate pad, find a bit of wire to connect the pad to the correct destination so the hardware path would engage, and then plug in the device so that it would engage the booting to recovery part. It took a lot of finesse that my fumble-fingered self didn't get the first few times, but eventually, I figured out how to do it all with two hands and a running script, which caught the connection and did the flash that I needed to have happen. It was a really good victory for me, because it was managing to recover from a serious error, I'd opened up the internals, I had to create a short without hurting myself, and when all was finished, I had to reconnect a lot of small and finicky cables and bits back to the main board, reassemble everything, and then hope that it turned on and booted to the proper operating system after flashing. Which it did! Admittedly, since it was still a low power device and the person I was doing the flashing for let me have it on the understanding that if I borked it, that was fine, this wasn't like the impressive flash that saved Christmas or anything like that, but I'm still very proud of persevering through this one and exploiting the features that were left for me to use when everything went wrong.
So, yeah, when you're someone who is reasonably confident in your ability to follow directions, there's a lot you can do with last season's models to make them work just fine and save yourself a lot of scratch in the process. (And another reason why people should have inexpensive computers they can break and fix and use, because you don't get that confidence but through the experience of watching it happen, right before your eyes.)
- CPU: Dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4 @ 1 GHz
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: Unknown chipset, max resolution 1024x600
- Sound: Stereo output sound through 3.5" jack, monaural speakers
- Inputs/Peripherals: Multitouch capacitive touch screen, hardware "n" button, usually mapped to Home, IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, internal microphone,
- Storage: 8 GB internal storage, up to 32GB storage from microSD card
- OS: Android 2.3.7 "Gingerbread" → CyanogenMod 11 (Android 4.4 "KitKat") → CyanogenMod 12.1 (Android 5.0 "Lollipop")
- CPU: ARM Cortex-A53 @ 1.3 GHz on a MediaTek MT8163V/B System on a Chip
- Memory: 1.5 GB RAM
- Graphics: ARM Mali-T720 MP2, max resolution 1280 x 800
- Sound: Stereo output sound through 3.5" jack, stereo speakers
- Inputs/Peripherals: Multitouch capacitive touch screen, IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1 Low Energy, internal microphone, 2 MP rear camera, 0.3 MP front camera,
- Storage: 16 GB internal storage, up to 192 GB from microSDXC card slot
- OS: Fire OS 5 (Android 5.1 "Lollipop" ) → LineageOS 14.1 (Android 7.1(.x) "Nougat")
As you might have guessed at this point, I tend to be a cheapskate when it comes to devices that I can do stuff with. A large amount of being able to be so cheap is that I do research beforehand to know whether a device that I'm considering has my preferred operating system ported for it, and I see what the process is for creating my preferred environment on it. This is a lot of me standing on the shoulders of giants, as I am not a person elbows-deep in the code needed to run on the devices, and I don't build my own variations of the code (even though I probably have the system and the procedure that I could use to build and flash my own customized variation). I trust the community that creates these custom and non-vendor-supplied operating systems to be nice with my device and not defile it with adware or secret crypto miners on the idea that enough of the community hates those things and will audit the code to make sure they don't appear. I trust that the interneicene conflicts and differences of opinion will keep things moving in a direction that stays on track and doesn't bow to forces that do not have the project's interests at heart. And, frankly, I like the product of these communities a lot more than the ones provided officially on the devices in the first place, and I like their willingness to keep those devices above for a lot longer than the official support is, because they want to do it, and because they want to keep their own devices alive for as long as possible. Because of their efforts, I get to buy things used and refurbished and then keep them for a significant amount of time doing the things that I want to do. I appreciate all of this work that gets put into making these systems available for use.
My most current tablet is the first time that I have not used one of the Barnes and Noble Nook line as my primary tablet. Mostly because the hardware division that's creating Nooks shut down, and now their tablets are mostly Samsung tablets that have a customized version of Android running on the Samsung hardware. The types of tablet selected for the Nook line now are no longer ones that it's easy to turn into proper tablets, and so instead, I had to get a refurbished tablet from elsewhere. But I had a really good run with the Nook line for nearly a decade's worth of time. First and foremost, because buying a Nook tablet usually cost about half what all the other tablets on the market cost! Admittedly, those tablets were also often underpowered compared to the Android tablets on the market, but I don't play a lot of high-powered games on my tablet. An awful lot of things have been composed on those tablets over the years, including the entirety of the Pern read commentary. Significant amounts of fic have existed on the tablet and at least partially composed on them as well. And it's nice to be able to watch various programs, sporting events, and to listen to my podcasts on a tablet device, so they're not taking up the space and battery of the phone. So long as I can browse the web, receive and send email, do some amount of composing, and engage in multimedia entertainment, the tablet will do fine. And the Nooks absolutely have done that, even from the very first Nook Tablet 7" that I started with. Like early phones, the Nooks needed to have some exploits done on them to make them suitable for the total conversion away from the Nook-branded material into a less encumbered (and better updated) Android tablet. And because these weren't Pokémon Go machines, the presence of superuser binaries didn't cause any major problems, aside from Netflix refusing to install or update on those tablets through the official procedures, because SafetyNet.
From the original tablet, I ended up going with the Nook HD+, which got stolen when my car was broken into at a work site. The joke was on them, though, because those Nooks took a proprietary 40-pin interface with the charger, and the HD had been around long enough that it could last approximately two minutes before its battery claimed to be empty and it shut down until it was plugged in again to charge. The break-in cost more in damages (and in showing my hand about the worries I had about my ex and whether I needed to flee in a hurry) than the thieves got in hardware. After that, with the Nooks having shifted into letting Samsung produce their line, we ended up getting a Galaxy S2 that we rode all the way to the current refurbished device, despite the S2 definitely starting to get loose in the charger unless the cord was positioned exactly correctly, and the battery capacity of the tablet was to the point where it could last maybe a scant few hours, possibly less, before it, too, believed itself completely discharged and in need of a recharging. (That seems to be my failure mode for so many of the devices I have, was my current smartphone is showing signs that it is losing battery capacity, shutting itself down if there's more battery and the camera is invoked, or if an intensive application is being run at low or approaching low battery. It's too bad that so many smartphones don't have user-replacable batteries any more, because that would probably prolong the life of many devices for a much longer time. (If I could find the correct battery, and the correct charger, I could probably resurrect my Nokia N810 and figure out if Maemo Diablo was worthwhile, and to see how well it would do as an IRC device, or for other things.) The inexpensive Nook Tablet, usually bought with a gift card given for the December holiday, then equipped with CyanogenMod/LineageOS has been a mainstay of my portable computing life, and the way that I experimented and gained confidence in using my Linux systems and in following the directions provided to turn those tablets into better versions of themselves.
And, in at least one memorable incident, figuring out how to recover when I soft-bricked a tablet by accident. While the Barnes and Noble Nook division is basically just a skin on top of someone else's tablets, Amazon has been putting out multiple versions and revisions of their Fire tablets (also running Android) for years, offering them inexpensively as a way of trying to get people into the Amazon ecosystem and keep them there. (The biggest grief I have with Amazon Fire tablets is that they don't offer Libby, the library app, in the Amazon store as of now. They offer the previous app, but that just can't seem to get this one approved for no apparent reason. As Android tablets, it's possible to get it in there anyway, but it takes steps that the average user would be uncomfortable with, including things like enabling unknown sources temporarily.) As early Android devices, however, these items are also vulnerable to the occasional exploit script to install an appropriate recovery and from there, a custom ROM. This one was supposed to be routine, like all the other ones were, but the directions were not as clear as they could have been about which of the two items provided to use, and so I flagged the wrong one, the one that was only a bootloader without a recovery alongside it. Once I realized the mistake I'd made, I was unhappy. The good thing was, this Kindle Fire was not a mission critical device, so my messing up the flash wasn't immediately impactful or a cause for greater worry.
Even better for my bruised ego, not all was actually lost, despite the bricking of the device. As luck would have it, this particular revision of the main board of the Kindle had a pad upon it where if that pad were connected to the appropriate place, booting to recovery mode would happen by hard wired jump, at which point the script would be able to intercept everything going on and flash everything correctly. Of course, what that actually meant was having to open the case to the Kindle Fire by removing all the very tiny screws, locate the appropriate pad, find a bit of wire to connect the pad to the correct destination so the hardware path would engage, and then plug in the device so that it would engage the booting to recovery part. It took a lot of finesse that my fumble-fingered self didn't get the first few times, but eventually, I figured out how to do it all with two hands and a running script, which caught the connection and did the flash that I needed to have happen. It was a really good victory for me, because it was managing to recover from a serious error, I'd opened up the internals, I had to create a short without hurting myself, and when all was finished, I had to reconnect a lot of small and finicky cables and bits back to the main board, reassemble everything, and then hope that it turned on and booted to the proper operating system after flashing. Which it did! Admittedly, since it was still a low power device and the person I was doing the flashing for let me have it on the understanding that if I borked it, that was fine, this wasn't like the impressive flash that saved Christmas or anything like that, but I'm still very proud of persevering through this one and exploiting the features that were left for me to use when everything went wrong.
So, yeah, when you're someone who is reasonably confident in your ability to follow directions, there's a lot you can do with last season's models to make them work just fine and save yourself a lot of scratch in the process. (And another reason why people should have inexpensive computers they can break and fix and use, because you don't get that confidence but through the experience of watching it happen, right before your eyes.)
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