Make your picks, and think as little as possible please.

Every year on Black Friday “Santa” flies in and lands at the mall. Here he is on approach. (I posted a few more images of the helicopter on flikr, and will post more when I get a chance)

Ahhhh, cozy.

You don’t see big barrettes much anymore. At least not since 1989. I like how adding knitting to a barrette takes it from an overlooked accessory that holds back hair to, “Oh my gosh, what is on your head? Is that a muppet?”

Rhett's first Jack-o-Lantern

I’m not quite sure why we never carved a pumpkin with him in the past, but it’s probably because of his short attention span. He had fun (helping) carve it, and I had fun freezing my butt of taking a few pictures of it.

Happy Halloween!

(After three clicks and you get to see the big picture).

Remember when you were little and went to those creepy haunted houses where you got to feel monster brains (cold cooked spaghetti) and eyeballs (peeled grapes)? Those grapes were so darn sticky. Ick. What you needed was a bowl full of these. Ahhhh, feels just like a bowl full of scarves and mittens.

Because Survivor doesn't even bother making up exotic names for where it is anymore

It’s time once more to pick the winner of the upcoming season of Survivor based only upon your gut instinct and their bio picture.

In addition to picking the ultimate winner – something our readers have proven very capable of doing – you can also make some wild predictions.

Here was one prediction that came true last season:

JT will win! Coach will slay a physical dragon and eat its heart on live TV at the finale.

Ok… well… maybe only part of that one came true – but you get the idea.

Here is the link for the CBS Survivor Season 19 Bio Pictures to get you started. Enjoy!

If you want two chances to win, you can also go over to Pace’s blog and vote there. (I guess he got sick of waiting for me to put this post up)

Note: Actually thinking about this, reading bios, or doing anything more than looking at pictures and picking the winner with the kind of thought that a pigeon puts into picking a french fry to eat is considered cheating.

@markshurtleff nah, saw it in half and split it between me and @ScottDimmick in reply to ScottDimmick #

@MarkShurtleff ok. Justice is served in reply to MarkShurtleff #

I hope when Rhett awakes from his nap, he doesn't cry for too long when he learns all his aunts bailed, so no hiking tonight #guilt-trip #

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@therealriley That's enough – I can get the URL from that I think. THANKs! in reply to therealriley #

Regrets not submitting the one-click root app for ADC2 #

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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.

@morrildl sweet. Thanks for all the tips! He does love swords, but he would be pissed he couldn’t wield it himself. in reply to morrildl #

@GarthDB probably b/c it doesn’t have a hardware keyboard! ZING! in reply to GarthDB #

None of the halfway decent places in winnemucca have rooms #

@jbqueru to be fair, even the results on google for “robot porn” are fairly sparse (j/k… I agree… bing sucks) in reply to jbqueru #

@morrildl normal people don’t usually customize dns entries on their home lan dd-wrt / openwrt on a wireless router is another option. in reply to morrildl #

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