Stuff
Standing on the shoulders of geek giants
I have spent the last week with my new time sink – a Nook Color. I had seen the excelent work done by the crews at Nookdevs and XDA Developers in rooting and developing for the Nook Color, and decided i was smart enough to follow instructions. I had been considering the purchase of a Galaxy Tab, but was having a hard time justifying the cost to myself but the NC was half the price. After making sure the NC was working properly I applied the “Autonooter” patch for my Nook. In less than ten minutes I had a rooted Nook and i was free to customize away. I installed a new launcher and Angry Birds and some other apps and I was off and running. The NC doesn’t have 3G, GPS or a camera, but for 50% of the outlay I got a device that has 95% of the functionality of a Galaxy Tab. People who have seen this have been impressed about the NCs capabilities, but i feel like I’ve been standing on the shoulders of geek giants here. All I had to do was follow instructions to unlock the full capabilities of my e-reader. And I’m writing this post on the WordPress app from the Android app store.
Shade tree mechanic, without the shade tree
I seem to have spent more time than usual working on my car lately. In cold weaather the power steering pump gets noisy but still works fine and had started to think about replacing it. But there were other ominous noised coming from under the hood. The first turned out the alternator that had a bad bearing. Replacing this was easy, but then it needed a new serpentine belt which necessitated taking the engine mount apart. But the noise was still there. I thought it may be the power steering pump, but after some diagnosis (a rolled up piece of paper made a crude stethoscope that I used to locate the noise) I realized it was the belt tensioner pulley. Normally the pulley turns on a bearing, but it had siezed and was turning on the bolt. Fortunately the bolt wasn’t damaged so a new pulley got things working properly again and the car runs quietly again. Then today the heater blower quit working, but that turned out to be a blown fuse instead of a component failure.
