Nexus 7: re-rooting Android 4.3

Tuesday, 30 July, 2013

So Android 4.3 has landed with a slew of minor updates that create more than the sum of the parts. The headline feature is restricted profiles - aka restrict what user profiles can access. I can see this being particularly useful for schools offering limited access out of the box. Whether this can be managed centrally (wait for the 3rd party tools to arrive!) remains to be seen, but its a great feature and adds a good grown up enterprise feature.

Of course, and inevitably, root access is lost and OTA Rootkeeper now no longer works. Those clever people over at Chainfire have updated SuperSU to work on 4.3, however you do need to manually re-root your device. There is a good guide here which includes details on how to manually update your device. In essence, the re-root requires access to the bootloader at which point you can install Chainfire’s updated SuperSU. You can temporarily can bootloader access by installing Goomanager (see this older guide), then reboot to the bootloader and re-root the device.

And my temporary absence of root just reminded what great apps I use that require root:

Stickmount
QuickBoot
ClockSync
AdFree
EsFileExplorer

Styling OS data

Tuesday, 16 July, 2013

Nice entry on styling OS maps - OS are keen to make the “style” recognisable, based upon their data and to make it familiar to viewers. They are widely available, easy to implement and have been converted to other formats (e.g. QGIS). So use them!

OS Terrain 5

Tuesday, 9 July, 2013

As mentioned in an earlier post, the OS has now released, what was somewhat sketchy, Terrain 5. The website and technical specs are both quite scant of detail but looks to be photogrammetrically derived and on a rolling 3-5 year programme of maintained updates however “only required when real-world change has occurred; for example, a new motorway cutting.” Note that this appears to be new photography, infilled with Landform PROFILE for about 16% of the total area. This isn’t good news, but they do envisage this will become a 100% “full coverage” eventually. For changes to the natural environment (e.g. a meandering river), how do they know how often they need to re-survey? Positional accuracy is 1.5-2.5, although I can’t obviously see a statement on vertical accuracy. Height data rounded to the nearest centimetre.

This’ll be interesting to play with!

7” Tablet

Monday, 8 July, 2013

Interseting summary of pricing over at PCPro on the pricing of 7” tablets - this is a really hot market with great competition from Nook, Amazing, HP, Google and Samsung. And, for me, it is the form factor of choice. OK, its not as lush as reading a magazine on an iPad with a Retina display, but its far more portable and so far more useful. And generic Android allows you to do some remarkable things with an amazing price point.

If you havent bought one, buy one as you’ll be surprised at how effective it is for consuming media!

Danny MacAskill 1

Monday, 8 July, 2013

And for those of you that missed his first episode way back in 2009……

Bike world speed record……

Wednesday, 3 July, 2013

186 kph on a bike?? Astonish video clip below and nice write up over at road.cc…… and yes 186 kph, 48 year old frenchman, 1961 and a 130 tooth chainring!!