Well since my last post was "definitely less than popular", I thought I'd write about something a touch less controversial this time. :) I guess it's my simply getting older, but these days I have a lot less inclination to mess around with things such as operating systems or devices. When I was younger I did like to tinker a bit, for example we had one of the original DirecTIVO units and I modified it with an ethernet card and had TyTools loaded on my PC and would pull shows off of it and encode them to DVD's. I've modified Xbox systems and even Xbox360's with custom firmware's, I've even actually repair several Xbox360's from the dreaded "red ring of death" for myself and others. Enough years ago, before the Internet was what it is now, I ran a WWIV-based BBS, and would spend hours modifying the source code to do this or that. All of that was a lot of fun, but now I seem to just want to get a device and for it to "do what I need/want" without me having to tinker with things. As I said, perhaps it's me getting older, perhaps it's simply a time issue, I don't really know, but it's how things are.
That all being said, I did have a reason to tinker this week and it's been an interesting experience to say the least. I have a laptop, actually several of them - one of my own, two that are actually my employers, and one that is J's, but I tend to only use them when I travel as frankly my desktops do a much better job and a laptop simply can't replicate what I have on my desk at the moment - that's three high end PC's with a total of 5 24in monitors all controlled via EdgeRunner's Multiplicity Pro KVM software. Since laptops don't hold much appeal to me, a table really didn't hold any appeal for the longest time. However, a few weeks ago J and I were out late one night (well actually early one morning). A friend of mine had lost her charging cable for her FitBit One and I happened to have an extra since I had replaced my FitBit a few months ago (I lost my original while at a "show" for work when I was really sick). I offered to send it to her so she didn't have to drop $20 on a new one so we ran out about 1am to Wal-Mart to get a small padded envelope to mail it to her. We were both off the next day so we were just sort of dawdling around and ended up in the electronics section and I was looking at the tablets. They had a HiSense Sero 8 model that was about $120 or so and was running Android KitKat. It looked reasonably nice for the price and I briefly considered getting it, but I just couldn't pull the trigger. I have a nice enough phone (Galaxy S4) that I always have with me and I just couldn't see using the tablet enough to justify it.
But J just loves to buy things for people, especially me and insisted upon doing so. We had a spirited debate, until she pulled the "Mistress" card and did it anyway. Now don't get me wrong, it was a nice thing for her to do, but I really didn't need it. I toyed with it a bit the first few days around the house and it was handy for things like pulling up say Pinterest while I was cooking or something, but it wasn't overly useful as many apps refused to install on it for one reason or another. That agitated me as the specs on the system were good enough to run it, so in most cases there was no technical reason they shouldn't load. Well it got put aside on my desk and I moved on. But then a couple of weeks later J brought home a nice case and bluetooth keyboard for it and I felt obligated to make a go of it again. At this point I researched things and found that it was possible to fudge things so that apps would think it was a different device so I decided to look into that.
I found something called RileyRom that was supposed to work on the device and provide root access as well as instructions on editing a file (build.prop) to fudge the device identification, so I set out to do this. The first issue was that a specific driver needed to be loaded on the PC to make this work and that took a bit of doing as newer versions of Windows either wouldn't run the drivers (Windows 8.1 per what I read - which is what my primary PC runs), it wouldn't work on USB 3.0 ports, and so on. I finally got that loaded, but still couldn't get it to work on any of the three PC's on my desk nor one of the ones downstairs. I finally found a post by someone who mentioned that flash mode on this device required a little different procedure than what I had previously read and lo and behold it connected to the flash program. I tried to flash RileyRom v1.2 multiple times, but it kept hanging on the new splash screen, so I finally gave up about 1am this morning.
However, upon getting up I did some more searching and found someone who said to restore it and try v1.0 of the RileyRom and what do you know it worked like a charm. It came right up for me. From there it was a simple matter of downloading a file explorer tool and modifying that build.prop file to make the tablet look like a Samsung model and suddenly I can load things like USA Today and the DirecTV app will now stream to the tablet as well. Despite it taking far more time and effort than I would have liked, I now have a tablet that's far more functional for me that I did before. I wish it would have not required this effort as truly having "root" on it isn't something I really need/want, but it is what it is I suppose. Now my only gripe is that the speaker is far too quiet, but I have a few options for that: a JBL bluetooth "flip speaker" than M and M2 bought me a while back, my Logitech H800 wireless headphones work with it via bluetooth as well, or simply my iPod earbuds.
Long story short, I know too late, but while I was agitated at the amount of effort this all took, it was nice to actually tinker with something and make it do what I wanted - it's been far too long since I did that kind of thing. :)
- M
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