Major losses

It's been a bad week for tech. First, Steve Jobs and now Dennis Ritchie. The former made a huge difference in making technology relevant to everyone. The latter was instrumental in making make that possible. RIP.

Cu > BT

This is awesome: BT worth less than the scrap value of the copper it owns. Technology marches on.

Mount an ISO in Windows 7

I needed to mount a .ISO image to run an installer. I'd used Virtual Clone Drive in the past and it worked fine. I'd read good things about Pismo File Mount Audit Package and it worked very well for me. The explorer extension is nice and I like that it puts the mounted drive in a folder instead of a separate drive by default and has a command line option.

Netflix on Nook

A little bit of searching, a .apk download and voila! We have Netflix running on the Nook. I tested it out last night on an episode of Mad Men and it worked perfectly. I'm continually impressed by the flexibility of the NC.

Adobe Flash on Nook

Last night, I tried to install Adobe Flash on my CM7 Nook but when I selected it in the Android Marketplace, there was no option to download. After some searching, I found that it might have something to do with the screen density settings. For some historical reasons that aren't clear to me, the screen density on CM7 for the Nook is set to 161.

Following this thread, I downloaded the LCD Density app and set it to 160 and hit restart all. When everything restarted, I cleared the application data for Android Market and I was able to download and install Flash 10.3. It seems to work fine on the sites that I tested. Neato.

Installing CM7 on SD Card

Although I had rooted my Nook Color a long time ago, I wanted to try something different so I installed CM7 on an SD card and loaded it into my Nook yesterday. Long story short: it works. I haven't had much of a chance to do much with it, but I was pretty impressed in the hour or two I did play with it last night. I did have a chance to install the Nook app and it does work quite well.

I followed the well written instructions by Ana Mardoll for the most part except since I already rooted it, I wanted to revert back to the stock firmware before doing anything else. To do that, I followed the well written instructions at The Unlockr. 

Although the instructions were well written, it did take a few tries to get everything to come together. My SanDisk 16 GB Class 2 microSDHC card was disliked by the process. People recommend class 4 cards for the Nook and I now understand why.

Test Drive

The Amazon Appstore has a cool feature called Test Drive that I just noticed. This allows you to preview the app you are interested in in your browser. Very useful when trying to get a feel for a new app.