Back in December, 2011 when I first got my ASUS Transformer TF101 it came loaded with android 3.2 (Honeycomb). The OS was pretty slick, though Honeycomb was only the first tablet-ready android so there wasn’t a lot of polish to it. Over time I accepted the various ASUS-vetted updates to the tablet and eventually got one that upgraded it to version 4.0 (ICS, or Ice Cream Sandwich). Suddenly this awesome little device became a nightmare of reboots, freezes, and crashing apps. To add to the pain, the upgrade introduced a little bug which was also present in various distributions of linux that made it impossible to connect to a specific kind of VPN (which just happened to be the one I need to use). Since then, subsequent updates (coming through ASUS) to 4.0.3 and 4.0.4 made the device more stable, but didn’t solve the problems entirely and this despite my wiping the device clean, reinstalling the latest firmware and manually installing all my apps. I was hoping that eventually ASUS would release 4.1 (Jelly Bean) which might fix all my issues, but rumours of a release in October, 2012 got pushed out to November, and more recently folks were speculating it might not come at all. ASUS has a bunch of faster transformers out now – why would they waste time supporting my old model?

This weekend I got tired of waiting and decided to install Cyanogenmod (CM). Doing so is a risk. It certainly will void the warranty (no longer a concern to me since that has expired in my case), but it also can render the device non-functional. This might not be a permanent condition, but some folks are less interested in diagnosing this kind of thing than I am and recovery might take a considerable amount of time and investigation you might not want to be bothered with. You have been warned.

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Ive got a small and very underpowered System76 meerkat hooked up to my LCD TV.  The meerkat is the first “net top” they released in 2009 which you can think of as the desktop equivalent of a netbook (remember those?) and shipped with an Atom processor, one GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive.  It came in with Ubuntu 8.10, but has been upgraded many times over the last three years and currently runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.  Although its integrated Intel video makes it feel slow, it boots up pretty quick.  It won’t do full screen HD without choppiness so its definitely on the list to be replaced at some point, especially since pushing video to my TV is this things only job in life, but I can run video in a standard quality which looks pretty good on the big screen anyway. Mostly I use the thing to stream YouTube or TED Talk videos, but sometimes I’ll stream music from another machine on the network and run a slideshow, or the kids can play some silly online games on it.  I never bothered to upgrade the hard drive in the thing which might make it more useful as a storage device, so with its little 80GB drive I end up storing nothing on it at all.  Once in a while I might copy a bunch of MP4s or other ripped video to it, but not often.  With my old Logitech S 510 cordless keyboard and mouse connected to it, theoretically I could lean back on the couch and control the action in comfort.  What actually happens is that I end up putting the keyboard on the coffee table and hunching over it because I can’t see the text on the screen.  I could probably solve this problem easily by just getting a pair of glasses but I hate wearing glasses unless I really have to.

Youtube promised to make it possible for me to control whats playing on the TV from a handheld or tablet device with their new YouTube TV service. The idea here is that most of you now have a handheld device and are hanging out on the couch with it while the TV is on, hitting up IMDB when you see an actor you recognize, or looking up some obscure factoid on Wikipedia inspired by the educational program you’re watching… well, thats what I’m doing. The media execs think I’m rushing off to Amazon to buy whatever crap they’re hawking in the commercials I don’t see since I use noscript and adblock. Whatever.
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I originally posted this to the G+ app on the tablet, but have rewritten large parts of it here.

I was reading an article linked below on the tablet when I clicked a little “sharing” icon in my browser which passed the link to another application (G+). According to a recent ruling, you won’t be able to buy an HTC android device that can do that after April, 2012 (unless HTC figures out another way to do it) because Apple says they patented the technique in 1996. Apple was making Newtons and Power PCs running MacOS in 1996. The patent diagram even includes a floppy drive!. How ludicrous is it to try to apply a technique developed for an operating system long since abandoned (in favor of a open source unix OS) to shut down the use of a “similar” technique in an open source unix OS (android) developed 15 years later? Ironic because you have one company (Apple) which has built its last 10 years of success on top of an open source OS (OSX from BSD Unix) and is claiming another company can’t use some little piece of open source code because its similar to something they got rid of because it sucked?

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A few weeks back I got an ASUS transformer which is ostensibly an android (3.2) tablet, but with the “optional” docking keyboard its more like a netbook running android.  It was shortly after testing an Acer Iconia A500 for work that I decided I couldn’t live without one of these things and ran over to Best Buy and let them pry some cold hard cash out of my hands.  I had some vague idea that it would be great for reading online mags, checking email, and the occasional game but beyond that I really just wanted to become more familiar with Android.  Its been a couple weeks now and I have a much better idea of what it can do, and more importantly what it can’t.

If you’re not interested in my typical blathering just scroll to the end of the story for my android app recommendations.

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