This page continues to be very popular among readers. The techniques described below rely upon a kernel bug that has long since been patched, but if you are able to downgrade your phone to an earlier version this process remains a very easy way to root your phone.

Amazon Wireless has some great deals on newer android phones (A Samsung Vibrant for as low as $39 is a pretty good deal – that phone hauls butt) – and they are all easily rootable too (well, not quite one-click easy, but still pretty easy). Just about any of the newer phones shipping with 2.1 or 2.2 will blow the doors off of the older phones that can be downgraded to work with this one-click root bug, so I would recommend checking them out at least to see what you can get for cheap these days. If any people actually buy phones from clicking that link, I’ll be motivated to write some more easy-to-follow instructions on how to root the newer phones on the market and possibly even work with Zinx on some more easy-to-use rooting tools.

Now, that being said – while you wait for your new phone to ship, there’s no harm in squeezing a bit more life out of an old phone or one that you just inherited from someone else upgrading to the latest and greatest… and for that – you can read on and use the techniques documented here.

As is customary with these kind of posts, some disclaimers:

1. This could be dangerous.
2. This should only be used if you know what you are doing.
3. Although this technique will work for any currently shipping android phone, this specific APK will works easiest with phones that are compatible with cyanogen’s 1.4 recovery image for the HTC Dream/Magic (32B).. There are instructions posted below for how to download a recovery.img that will work for other phones to your SD card, and how to use this apk to root those phones as well – it’s just not one-click… it’s more like some typing and 1-click so it might take you 30 seconds longer to do)

Now, some credit:

1. Zinx did all the work on this

UPDATE: The “Recovery Flasher” is no longer in the market. This is entirely understandable and we as a community have no real right to be upset about this (their market, their rules – and after inspecting it they determined that the app violates them). So… Consider yourself lucky if you were one of the several thousand people who got it before it was taken down – and if not… there are plenty of mirrors to get it from posted here. (Android by design allows you to install applications from a variety of locations – you aren’t locked down to just one provider like on some fruity phones). So please don’t have a knee-jerk reaction and get mad at Google for this – they are still very much hacker-friendly (just search the market for applications that only work on rooted phones and you’ll realize that they are pretty laissez-faire in the market).

Flashing your recovery image:

Although the exploit itself can be used to execute anything as root, the prepackaged APK is designed to flash your recovery image with an updated one that allows installing modified updates signed with a publicly available key The reason for this is pretty simple: It’s the easiest way to enable you to install some modified image. It also enables you to use nandroid to backup (and restore) your entire phone to your sd card, and basically gives you what you need to be one of the cool kids and install custom android roms at will

Install the APK

The application has been uploaded to the market, and that’s the fastest place to get it from. Open up the Market and search for “Recovery Flasher” and download it from there,

In your settings, under software, tell it to allow untrusted sources. (necessary since the APK isn’t available in the market). Then, from the browser on your phone download the “recovery flasher 0.1 APK” from here: http://g1files.webs.com/Zinx/flashrec-20090815.apk Install it… and open it up.

Download from one of these mirrors

• http://g1files.webs.com/Zinx/flashrec-20090815.apk
• http://zenthought.org/content/project/flashrec

It looks like this:

From here:

1. click on “backup recovery image”
2. click on “Flash Cyanogen Recovery 1.4″

(in mine there is the option to restore my previous one since I already backed that thing up)

Test that it worked

Power your phone down. Reboot into “recovery mode”. On all phones I’m aware of, you do this by holding down “Home” and “Power” when turning it on. When you see something like this:

Original links:

If my blog goes down, these links are the original source for the files:
http://zenthought.org/content/project/flashrec

Mirrors:
http://g1files.webs.com/Zinx/android-root-20090816.tar.gz
http://g1files.webs.com/Zinx/flashrec-20090815.apk
http://g1files.webs.com/Zinx/flashrec-20090815.tar.gz

Update: More detailed instructions

I have personally used this apk on a T-mobile US G1 running stock CRC1, and a T-mobile myTouch 3g running stock software. Both of them worked flawlessly and were done in matter of seconds. I’ve seen a few threads with people making accusations that this is a trojan or that it doesn’t work… etc.

Regarding the possible ‘trojan’ nature

It’s wise to be skeptical. That’s why the source code is provided and has been since this post was first placed. If you want to be skeptical, that’s fine – download the source, inspect it, build it yourself, and apply it… You would be wise to rely on a brave friend to test it out and verify it works, but I would hold off on applying any security updates that come down the pipe if you want to use this method to get on the modified-image train (I’m almost positive the next update will close this hole)

By now there should be enough evidence to support the fact that this is not a malicious app – but you always have the right to remain skeptical

What you get when you are done

When you are done, you just have the tools to flash modified builds. Because it will run on both HTC 32B Sapphires (T-mobile myTouch 3g, Google Ion, etc) and HTC Dreams (G1, ADP1, etc) I recommend using Cyanogen version 3.9.11.2 – which is an experimental build which has some cool donut features like device-wide searching (which is really really cool to use)

Once you get to the recovery console, first backup your phone using nandroid backup. This will help you in case you flash an image that for some reason doesn’t work – at least you can restore to what you have now. (boot back into recovery, and choose “restore from backup”)

To prepare for rooting, download this file: http://n0rp.chemlab.org/android/experimental/update-cm-3.9.11.2-signed.zip and put it on your sdcard at the root level (i.e. the very top of the sdcard – so if you are in a GUI desktop – just drag the zip file and drop it onto the icon of the sdcard and it will be at the root level)

BEFORE booting into recovery mode

• Have a modified ROM ready to load of your choice. (i.e. the update-cm.3.9.11.2-signed.zip) on your SD card
• Be prepared for the awesomeness you are about to unleash
• Actually flash the recovery image using the recovery flasher apk and following the above instructions

To Boot into recovery mode

1. Power down phone
2. Hold down “Home” and “Power” simultaneously for a few seconds (you can release them once it turns on)
3. Verify that the image matches my screenshot above

Portions of this page are modifications based on work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.

The hike up here is strenuous. The last few miles are definitely the hardest part of the hike. My butt hurts worse than a drunken sailor in san Francisco (they have uncomfortable bar stools over there)

There is another peak to the north of here that is slightly higher – up until 1970 this south peak was listed as the highest peak, but by then the trails already went up to here. If we really wanted to prolong this trip by a few hours, we could head over there, but I will save that trip for when I am actually in shape.

I’ll post some pictures later.

Here’s how it changes your life. First – you don’t have to bookmark as many pages anymore. If you are using FireFox or Internet Extorter – all you need to do is right-click on the content you want to save to some kind of notebook – and then tell your computer to “Note This (Google Notebooks)”. It will copy the cliping (pictures and all) and dump them into a convenient notebook for you.

If, at some point, you decide that your collection of web-clippings on the origins of the Sanskrit language is good enough other people might like it – you can make it public. The second way Google Notebook will change your life is it will change the way you search for specific content. Instead of piling on search terms hoping to get some kind of magic result – the Google Notebook may provide you with a way to find a notebook of someone who already scoured the web searching for that same content.

Currently, public notebooks are not searchable… so I can’t provide any examples of this. In a few days, you will be able to search through them and see what kind of Notebook pages people have been making.

Anyone who has ever spent hours searhing the web on a specific topic can understand how useful this is. Just create a new notebook for it – and when you find stuff that is of interest – throw it in there. No need to keep thousands of windows opened any more… and no need to go crazy trying to find some way to organize your links. Note it and forget it – until you want to remember it.

Features I would like to see

• Collaborative Notebooking – It would be nice if you could create your notebook and give access to cetain specific people – so that you could all add interesting web clippings to a notebook related to a project you are working on… It would work like a dumbed-down wiki. Allowing open edits may be problematic due to spammers… but allowing specific other users to edit would be a very nice feature
• Blog Integration – It would be marvelous if you could scour the web – collect text clippings, and then have Google Notebooks easily post the content to your blog for you. The FireFox spin-off Flock currently has some kind of clipping service that does this – but it would be nice to have it ingetraged with Google Pages. (Perhaps Flock could just write the plugins to do the heavy lifting for that feature anyway)
• Multiple Levels of Subcategories Currently you can create your notebook and you can have subcategories – but that’s the limit to the depth of the notebook. More depth = easier organization.
• Better URL Names for Notebook Pages – When you make a notebook page public, the URL for it is gigantic – and impossible to remember. Easy-to-remember URLs would make public notebooks much more useful.
• Safari Plugin – an while you’re at it… an Opera plugin as well… FireFox and Safari are both rather slow browsers (once you load hundreds of windows like I commonly do). Between the two, most Mac users preer Safari – and if a browser is wanting raw speed they will likely use Opera. Supporting Safari and Opera
• Archive Option – If you use Google Notebooks to keep track of some temporary search… like looking for the best place to buy a certain digital camera or something – that notebook becomes mostly useless after you find the place. Still – in the future, you might want to access that notebook as a jumping point for another search. In the meantime- you don’t want to see it in your list of notebooks because it’s not important to you at the moment. Archiving them would be a good solution to the notebook-clutter problem that may arise.

If you want to see an example of what you can do with Google Notebook – you can look at this Google Notebook on Google Notebook that I threw together this morning. I snipped content from some news releases and form some review pages. It was very easy to put together… I can promise you that it reads better inside the Google Notebook viewer on their website – for some reason their public Notebooks look like trash.

Sign up for Google Notebook and have fun building Google’s search index collecting your information easily.

At around 9:00 AM the story made it to the front page of Digg, and millions of people started heading to www.benjerry.com. Ben & Jerry’s may have been ready to serve ice cream to over a million people today, but their web servers weren’t ready to handle the traffic… and they were dead for almost an hour.

Sorry Jerry. I would apologize to Ben, but everybody knows that he doesn’t really do much with the company anymore…

In any case – be sure to enjoy Free Cone Day while it lasts. Their website is back up and running now. We can all be happy now.

It’s Easter time, so the Cadbury Bunny is hard at work cranking out her little eggs.

Every year, before I chomp down on one of her sugar-filled gametes I wonder, “Why don’t they just sell these things all year?” This question quickly goes away as soon as the viscous yolk molests my tounge. I immediately feel the disturbance in the force… It’s like a thousand sugar canes crying out at once, and then… silence…

These are a seasonal product for two reasons. First, they aren’t really that good. Second, if they were eaten on a regular basis – they would kill a small child.

I believe that the sugar inside of the Cadburry egg is a unique kind of sugar. It is a special “designer coctail” of sugar that comes only after a long process of glucose-enrichment mixed with heroine and crystal-meth. (Rumor has it that Iran is jealous of our Cadburry eggs, and is really just enriching sugar, but hiding it under the guise of enriching Uranium so as to avoid instant war).

The aftershock of all of the super-sugar disrups the part of our neural pathway that stores information about how things taste – and effectively erases our memory of these eggs. That way, every year when Easter rolls around we have forgotten what it tasted like the year before.

One man decided to package what many consider to be a lethal dose of the stufff into one ostrich-sized egg.

You can read about his project over at “Pimp My Snack” (yes, that’s a real website) where he documents what he did. (The above image is, of course, only half of the finished product.)

When he got done, he didn’t eat it. Instead,he sold it on eBay.

Too bad the auction is over, this would be the perfect side-dish for the World’s Largest Peep that my sisters recently made in Minnesota.

It would seem to me that this system could be defeated with a few RADAR jammers – (not those lame passive ones that Radar Roy says clearly don’t work – but something of the active variety).

The video includes animations of tanks and RPGs, and even shows the “force field” in action.

Watch the FoxNews video here

Experience has shown, that if you want to get a ton of free cones – get there right around noon. In the evening, it gets very busy.

It has full sound and mouse support (yes, some DOS games used mice) – and you can use it to run your favorite old DOS games. This includes the better-than-any-of-the-countless-copies game Scorched Earth (the classic aim-your-tank and fire-your-weapon at someone else… with lots of weapons and variations…)

Those who grew up in the Gardner household in the days of the Sperry will remember Castle!. You can now get your fix of being a spade symbol walking around an ASCII Castle and pursuing such things as the “@” snake. The game is just as tough as it was then, so don’t get your hopes up.

How to get DOSBox running on your Mac

1. Go download DOSBox
2. Drag the DosBox application from the disk image that will open into your Application folder.
3. In the Finder, Go to your “User Directory”
   • the easiest way for me to tell you how to do this is to say – “Under the ‘Go’ Menu, select ‘Go To Folder’ – and in the Dialog box, type ‘~’ and hit enter” – or to click on the icon with a house next to your login name in the side of your window (if that icon is there.)
4. Create a folder inside your User Directory called “DosGames”
5. Go download a good quality DOS Game (links at end of article.)
   • I suggest you start with Scorched Earth – or perhaps Warcraft I (if you are asked for an install password for Warcraft I – you can get it from this Blizzard support post
6. Move the game you downloaded into your DosGames folder.
   • (You probably downloaded a .zip file, and it expanded itself into a folder. Just click the magnifying glass in Safari and it will find the folder for you and show it to you in the Finder.) Note, if you download Castles – it will expand to “Castles.1984″ – rename the folder to “Castles” to be DOS friendly… Remember – only short file names
7. Start DOSBox. Double click on the application.
8. Mount your Games folder. It’s really easy.
   • In DOSBox – just type “mount c ~/DosGames/” and it will mount the games folder you made as your C drive.
9. Go to your “C” drive and find your game.
   • Type “C:” hit enter, then type “DIR” hit enter – and see what the name of your game folder is. Type “CD ” where is the name of the folder want to go play… Then type “DIR *.exe” and it will show you the things that you can actually run. Type the name of the .exe file (without the .exe) and voila!

Where to find Games

There are plenty of sites online that host Abandonware games. If one site only has a demo of the game you are looking for, dig around and another one may have the full version. These games are so old, nobody cares that they are being given away for free… They are called “AbandonWare” for a reason.

http://www.abandonia.com/
http://www.classicpcgames.com/
http://www.dosgames.com/
http://www.oldgames.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware#Games

These things are very tiny. Scroll down and see the one standing on a dice, and next to a matchstick to get an idea of how small they are.

First person who makes one of these bad boys will get their image (with the little guy) in the banner rotation for my masthead!

Check them out here… If anyone can translate the text to English please feel free to enlighten us on what it is saying on this page…

Update: the original page seems to have gone down. A Flickr photoset has the images still hosted… it can be found here. There is a post on digg.com about the Cat-5 action figures.

Find lost instruction manuals

The Brickfactory is an online repository of TONS of Lego instruction booklet scans. There you can find instructions on Lego projects such as the 1985 Airport (Search for box number 6392… they don’t make it easy to link to specific instruction books)… or the 1988 Emergency Treatment Center (box #6380). Those who grew up in my family will fondly remember both of those. (Did we really get the airport in 1985? I was only 5 when I built that thing? I guess kids grow up faster than I thought. I was planning on at least six or seven years until I could interact with the up-and-coming lego master)

Relive the joy of the Old School catalogs

At The Construction Toy Homepage there is a guy who has a whole lot of images of Lego construction toys – but near the bottom of the page you will see a link to the cover scans of the Lego catalogs and Lego idea books. Yes – I vividly remember staring at each of the books that came out durring my formative years…

Build a friggin harpsichord

If you are really crazy, you can build a harpsichord out of only legos. (well… and string) The guy who built it has tons of pictures and even example Mp3 file – so you can cast the thought “this might sound really good” out of your head… No, plastic is not the new wood for resonating materials, that’s for sure – but if you are crazy and rich, why not build one?

He also has some technical information about harpsichords on his page, and he describes why there will never be a Lego Piano.

Enjoy those retro Lego links. Good thing I don’t have a Tub of legos lying around – or my day would be shot right now.

The British guy on the video claims that this is extremely dangerous and that you shouldn’t try it at home. I make the same claim… try it at a public microwave at school or in the dorms or something and let me know if it ruins the microwave.

I think to make it a bit more interesting you could surround the toothpick with something (not flamable) so that the person watching wouldn’t see the initial flame and just see the plasma balls or whatever they are coming out of it.

I noticed when pasting Pi to the 1000 decimal place on a response to this post that digg wont break a long string of characters automatically – and it wont show the part that runs off of the page.

I then edited my post and pasted in Pi to 100,000 decimal places. When I posted it, look at what I saw:

That’s almost 8 hours. Clearly, digg gives you a longer time to edit based on the number of characters in your post (not the number of words, obviously – because both of those long strings of numbers would only be considered one word.) This should probably be capped so that a reasonable value (say, 10 or 15 minutes) is the maximum value.

If you see something cool in NYC being thrown away

1. Take a picture of it
2. Send a text message with the picture, title, and location to the website (i.e. old TV@7th and broadway)

The rest is history. The website will update with little garbage can icons all over the map of New York. The most recent ones have flames coming out of them to indicate that they are “hot” – not that they are warming homeless people.

This is a healthy outlet for that part of you that – even though you don’t need it – really wants to take home that old computer monitor you see on the street. By submitting it to the GarbageScout – you will effectively have “given” it to someone who wants it without having to actually do anything yourself.

GarbageScout.com

The baby would then be able to spit up all over the video camera, and we could clean it off with an ordinary garden house…

Oh, and a side benefit of this housing would be amazing videos of some cool places in Utah.

If you want to buy it for the baby, here’s the cheapest place I found online:

Sony SPKHCA Sports Pack Digital Camera Accessory

BYU Devotionals & Speeches

Every Tuesday, at 11:05 AM BYU hosts a devotional. The speakers come from either the faculty, or General Authorities of the Church. The tradition of the BYU devotional dates back until the days of Adam – when he gathered his posterity together every Tuesday morning at 11:05 AM to discuss basic doctrine with them.

So what? Well – BYU has been recording these devotionals for a long time. If you are interested in getting access to some of the classic LDS speeches, such as Bruce R. McConkie’s “The Seven Deadly Heresies“, or Truman G. Madsen’s “Souls Aflame” (one of my personal favorites), or Hugh B. Brown’s classic speeches “Profile of a Prophet” or “God is the Gardener” [note that it is "Gardener" not "Gardner"] you can get them all in one place. For free.

BYU doesn’t do a good job of advertising this (so I’m doing it for them right now). Apparently some other people have noticed it, because recently they have added a copyright notice to make it clear that you can’t download all these devotionals and then sell them. (Gee. I wonder what kind of sites that might be aimed at)

The BYU’s Speeches Website has over 804 talks available in MP3 format to download, and about 200 more that you can read in HTML format (but can’t download in MP3 for some reason).

LDS.org Audio section

General authorities speaking to college kids doesn’t cut it for you? What would? Perhaps the entire book Jesus the Christ, by James Talmage would make you happy. More into contemporary church topics? Perhaps the audio copy of this month’s Ensign (conveniently broken into tracks) might be the perfect thing to listen to on your morning commute. (Or if you are really intrested – they have audio versions of ever Ensign, New Era, and Friend dating back to January 2004.)

If you want to get the audio copies of the latest conference talks – they have those too. Oh, and in case you were planning on checking out all 40+ CD’s of the Old Testament from the BYU Library and slowly ripping them (3 at a time is all they let you check out… it takes a while… don’t ask me how I know) – they have the entire Old Testament and every other standard work available for download.

To get there, either click here, or go to the website of the true church and click on “Gospel Library” and then click on “Audio” in the submenu. (DON’T click on “Audio Scriptures” on the side under the “Broadcast” menu – that takes you somewhere else that has streaming audio.)

BYU Broadcasting “Find a Talk”

BYU Broadcasting isn’t goign to sit back and be left in the dust. They also have a website called where you can “Find a talk.” That is – you can find a talk that they felt like putting online. Their collection is rather strange. They pull out some random BYU devotionals ( not nearly as many as the BYU speeches page) – and some other content from sources such as the Sperry Symposium, Women’s Conference, and BYU Education-week.