We had to put Gidget to sleep about 8:25 AM on Wednesday, January 4th. What a horribly rough decision and week, but she suffered enough and her organs were shutting down. We’ve cried a lot, now we’re remembering all the good times with her. She so loved to play in the snow. We have great photos of her playing in the snow and on the frozen pond. How she loved to try to chase the squirrels away from the bird feeder. Playing ball with her in the yard… She was such a sweetheart, she loved everybody, and smart too. She knew how to sit, lay down, beg (oh how she loved to beg for popcorn!), stand on her hind legs, walk on her hind legs, spin, shake, and “high-5”. 
The upgrade from Fedora 15 to Fedora 16 was about the smoothest yet. Only major problem was the usual issue with nvidia, had to boot in rescue mode, chroot /mnt/sysimage, then use yum to install kmod-nvidia. Still a lot of leftover fc15 rpms to update. Couldn’t update all at once, still working through the list.
My father’s day gift (to myself) was a Barnes and Noble Nook Color, which I almost immediately rooted to run a href=”https://sites.google.com/site/phiremod/nook-color-roms” title=”Phiremod” target=”_blank”Phiremod/a 6.3. This worked very well after learning that it is necessary to use a USB adapter to write the special boot code to the micro-SDCard. This weekend I updated this to Phiremod 7.1, which should improve battery life and resolved an issue that prevented newer versions of the Adobe Flash player from being loaded.
Late December 2012 I updated to Android 4.1.2. A bit sluggish at times, but many other improvements making the upgrade worthwhile.
All-in-all I am very happy with the Nook Color, much more so than with the Archos. The pocket size of the Archos makes it a decent PDA, if only the battery life were useful.
Kudos to the a href=”https://sites.google.com/site/phiremod/nook-color-roms” title=”Phiremod” target=”_blank”Phiremod/a developer for assembling this much improved ROM!
Following is the best post I’ve found explaining how to make the Viewsonic GTablet useful:
http://urandroid.com/2010/12/29/viewsonic-g-tablet-from-rags-to-riches-%E2%80%93-an-owner%E2%80%99s-guide-to-making-the-best-of-a-great-tablet/
I managed to get market working without installing any alternative ROMs after many, many attempts.
Overall, this seems to be a very usable product, once properly tweaked. The viewing angle on the display is a little bit odd, and it really needs some sort of stand for extended use. We haven’t done much with games. It does make an excellent eReader and works well for viewing movies. We put a Zagg anti-glare screen protector on it. They don’t have the right size yet so we used the iPad version cut down to fit. The screen is too reflective without it, but this particular screen protector makes the screen too grainy.
Yes, that’s an old joke definition for FORD, but sometimes it seems to describe my life. After spending Labor Day weekend repairing my wife’s Grand Prix ignition switch and DRL diode, and my Chevy Colorado (radio bulbs and door speaker replacement), along with other household repairs, the 2 year old 500 GB Seagate hard drive in my Linux PC started developing bad sectors. It went from 224 one day to nearly 500 the next. A pair of WD 750GB drives are on order. The Seagate will go back for warranty replacement as soon as I get the data copied onto the new WD – planning a simple RAID mirror setup. All work, no play…
