Month: December 2011

Time Killer For The Evening

In Coleo, you’re a gravity-defying bug that’s pretty adept at climbing walls and make big jumps. Use that power to get through each level.

Reading Material

You’d Never See This In America

Only in India…

Reading Material

Congrats MVHS Football!

Congrats to the Mountain View High School Cougars on bringing home the first football state title to Bend in 71 years (more in-depth story on OregonLive). We were getting scoring updates during our dress rehearsal for our concert tomorrow. As someone who was captain of a state championship team at Mountain View (1995 Cross Country), let me be the first to say you will never forget this day. I will never forget holding that Oregon championship blue trophy in my hands, presenting it to the school and the student body at an assembly, and I know you will not, either. No matter where all your lives go after this, there will always be this day, and you will always share this moment. Congratulations to all of you!

Arnold Schwarzenegger at his Finest

If you remove all the DVD commentary from Total Recall but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, what’s left is absolutely brilliant story telling.

Why The Sudden Fascination and Uproar With Smart Phone Rootkits?

In case you hadn’t heard the news (if you follow tech news at all, it’d be hard to miss), pretty much all the major providers use Carrier IQ software on their smart phones (it’s even a part of iOS on the iPhones, just slightly less sinister and easier to turn off). What is Carrier IQ? It has the potential to track and monitor everything to do on your phone and send it to a third party. Class-action lawsuits are being threatened, and it’s starting to really creep everybody out. There’s an Android Market App to see if you have it on your phone and ways to disable it.

What I find hilarious about all this? Carrier IQ was discovered and disabled by Android hackers at least nine months ago. I know the ACS Syndicate folks released a Samsung Epic 4G ROM back in March with it removed and opened up their tools so others could use them. So obviously this is old news — why the sudden uproar about it now? I’ve been rocking Carrier IQ-free (with SyndicateROM Frozen 1.2) for nearly a year now, and if you’ve been running CyanogenMod, so have you.

Moral of the story here? Root your phone. It’s easy, and your phone will run happier because of it.