Outrageous geekery!

Today was a day that I had been sort of looking forward to. The backup system in work was being treated to new tape drives, upgrading it from LTO3 to LTO5, tripling the capacity of each tape. It was not a straightforward upgrade. Due to a misunderstanding, the library had all the new drives fitted alongside the new ones, then it required a huge firmware update, and then the damn thing decided it was NOT going to read the old LTO3 tapes in the new drives, despite them being fully capable of it. The solution turned out to be to set ALL the old tapes to read only, goodness knows why. It's going to take some time to move all the existing data from the old tapes to the new ones, but I had a plan to get it all done.

The stress of the day meant that I had a fat day for the first time in a while at work. The thing was that after I had done it, I felt bloated and unhealthy, which I think is because I've been cutting down on what I eat in work, so perhaps that's a good sign.

Then I came home and had a geeky evening with my Galaxy Note. After wiping it and installing Cyanogenmod on it a couple of months ago, I wasn't too happy with it. It was largely OK, but the graphics were never quite smooth enough, and after a couple of recent updates it started to have artifacts while scrolling and things. I don't think the graphics chip in the Note is fully supported. So I found an image of the official Jelly Bean update and set to work installing it.

It was not simple - took a while to get Odin working again, as the M11x had been rebuilt after having an SSD installed, and then it would simply not write the image. It would fail after a few seconds, leaving the Note in a state where it woudln't even boot, just complaining about the failed update. I was at a loss, until I moved the cable slightly and the phone lost connection. I tried it with another cable and the flash worked fine. Then it got stuck in a boot loop, and had to wipe some more data, but finally, at last it booted.

The Samsung ROM feels instantly better. It has all the gumph that I find a bit annoying, but it's so much more responsive that it's worth it. Also has the multiwindow mode and things, but I haven't had a play with that yet. Just spent some time putting all my usual apps on it.

Ironically, I think if I'd waited a little longer I could have just upgraded it directly to the new ROM without faffing about. It's a bit of a conflict really - I like tinkering, but at the same thing I just want it to work. Perhaps I need a second sacrificial device to satisfy the tinkering urge.

The other thing I was going to do this evening was find a working laptop with a serial port and see if I could get it talking to an old Orgainser II using the Comms link cable, but I ran out of time.

Hapless geek.