I'm starting a new blog about things around the home and technology. This blog got a little out of hand with me posting from other sources. I will no longer be posting to this blog.
The CyanogenMod team has released a second alpha version of Android for the HP TouchPad tablet. Alpha 1 was released less than a week ago, and it was pretty functional — but included a number of bugs that could cause the tablet to crash, the WiFi to disconnect, or other problems.
Alpha 2 is still rough around the edges, but it includes a number of new features and improvements. Here are some of the highlights:
The battery drain issues have been partially fixed so the battery should last longer, especially when the TouchPad is idle.
The Android Market fix has been incorporate so that if you install the gApps package you should see most available apps in the Market.
WiFi should no longer disconnect when you resume from sleep.
The speaker should turn off when you plug in headphones.
The ACMEInstaller app should work better.
There’s now an ACME UnInstaller app if you want to completely remove Android and restore your original webOS media partition to its original size.
You can install CyanogenMod 7.1 Alpha 2 the same way as Alpha 1. Just grab the latest CyanogenMod build from the links in the RootzWiki forum and follow our step-by-step instructions.
The latest ACMEInstaller and Uninstaller are also available from the same RootzWiki thread.
HP may not be selling very many HP TouchPad tablets anymore, but there are somewhere around a million of the discontinued devices in the wild and it looks like HP’s webOS team hasn’t forgotten about us just yet. The company has just released a software update for the TouchPad which brings performance improvements and a few new features.
Among other things, webOS 3.0.4 finally includes a camera application. The HP TouchPad has a 1.3MP front-facing camera, but up until now you had to download a third party app if you wanted to use it to take pictures. Now there’s a built-in app for that. The app only shoots video or takes photos in portrait orientation.
According to webOS head Ari Jaaksi, other changes include improved messaging and the ability to connect over Bluetooth to non-HP phones. The HP App Catalog also now loads more quickly and also allows you to switch between categories and other views more quickly.
WebOS 3.0.4 also brings support for OGG Vorbis music files and the ability to create online and offline status messages in the Messaging app.
HP has also added support for accelerometer events to Adobe Flash Player and improved Skype video calling performance.
The HP TouchPad can automatically download the 53MB update over the air — or you can force the update by going to the Settings panel on your tablet, selecting System Updates and then tapping the download icon once the tablet finds the latest update. Warning: If you’ve installed Android on your HP TouchPad, the webOS 3.0.4 software update will overwrite the boot partition and remove Moboot. This means you won’t be able to boot Android unless you reinstall Moboot first. CyanogenMod 7.1 Android is still on your device, you just can’t access it without the Moboot software.
Fortunately it’s fairly easy to reload Moboot by following some of the instructions Android installation guide. Here’s the short version:
Connect your TouchPad to a PC and tap the icon to enter USB Drive mode.
Create a directory on the TouchPad called “cminstall” (without quotes).
Copy the moboot_0.3.3.zip file to the cminstall directory.
Exit USB drive mode.
Restart your TouchPad from the Device Info app in the Settings panel.
Hold the Volume Up button as your device reboots.
Once you see a big USB icon on the TouchPad, you’re ready for the next step.
Open a terminal and navigate to the folder on your computer where you’ve already installed Palm Novacom (and make sure the ACMEInstaller file is in the same directory).
Type the following (without quotes) and hit enter: “novacom boot mem:// < ACMEInstaller”
Once you’ve done that your device should reboot and you’ll see lines of code run across the screen. Once that’s finished, the Moboot menu should load, giving you the option of booting webOS or Android. via PreCentral
I made the leap and installed Cyanogenmod 7.1 on my HP Touchpad. It's so nice to have my Android apps back. The Android Market fix didn't work for me to install Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps and others from the Android Market.
My Thoughts
The apps don't seem quite as polished as WebOS apps. It looks like some of them just took the phone app and enlarged it, just not as optimized. It's still just worth having because you get so many more apps. Note that the apps below are what worked or didn't work on my Touchpad. This may differ from others.
Apps That Work For Me
Non Games
Evernote
Taptu
Pulse
Movies Pandora
Do It Tomorrow
Linked In
Google +
TweetCaster Dropbox Kindle
IMDB
Newegg
Google Voice
Zinio
Meebo
Mashable
Amazon App Store
Big Oven
YouVersion
Feedly
Solar Planets
Pageonce
Taptu
Pulse
Movies
Games Angry Birds Rio
Angry Birds Season Angry Birds
Air Attack HD Gun Bros
APKs I Installed
Fox News
Google Maps
Facebook
Twitter
Apps That Don't Work
Slacker
Springpad
Google Music
Apps Not Full Screen
Photobucket
Epicurious
Apps The Marketplace Won't Let Me Install
Zaarly
Apps I'm Looking Forward Too
Google Propeller (Flipboard alternative for Android)
The CyanogenMod team has released the first public build of Google Android for the HP TouchPad tablet. Right now the software is still in the alpha phase, which means that not everything works as it should. There are still bugs with the accelerometer, Bluetooth, camera, and other functions, for instance. But for the most part, the operating system is now up and running on HP’s discontinued tablet and anyone can install it.
While the HP TouchPad originally shipped with webOS 3.0 software, the tablet’s hardware is similar to many Android tablets. Since the future of webOS is uncertain — and right now there are hundreds of thousands of apps available for Android and less than 10,000 apps for webOS, many of the people who picked up cheap HP Touchpads when HP discontinued the tablet in a $99 fire-sale have been looking forward to installing Android.
The steps below will help you to do just that. This will create a dual-boot setup, allowing you to switch between Android and webOS. Again, this is alpha software, and things can go wrong. You’ll also lose music or other media stored in webOS when you follow these steps.
The current version of CyanogenMod for the TouchPad is based on Android 2.3.7. Once Google released the source code for Ice Cream Sandwich, developers will start working to port it to the TouchPad, but that work could take several months to complete.
1. Download and install the Palm Novacom software for your computer. You can find grab the latest software for Windows, Mac, or Linux from the HP website.
2. The next step is to download three files from the RootzWiki forum and one more file from the Moboot project.
If you want to install the Google Android Market and Google apps such as Gmail and YouTube (which you probably do), you’ll also want the gApps installer for CyanogenMod. You can download it from goo-inside.me or from the CyanogenMod wiki.
All told, you’re downloading 5 files:
ACMEInstaller.zip
update-cm-7.1.0-tenderloin-a1-fullofbugs.zip
update-cwm_tenderloin-1012.zip
moboot_0.3.3.zip
The latest gApps package for CyanogenMod
3. Unzip the ACMInstaller file to the same directory where Palm Novacom is installed. On my computer that directory is C:\Program Files\Palm, Inc.
4. Connect your HP TouchPad to your computer with a USB cable.
5. On the TouchPad you should see a USB notification. Tap the symbol to mount your tablet as a USB mass storage device on your computer.
6. Open a file browser on your computer and create a new folder on your HP TouchPad called “cminstall”
7. Copy the update-cm-7.1.0-tenderloin-a1-fullofbugs.zip, update-cwm_tenderloin-1012.zip, and moboot_0.3.3.zip files into that directory. If you’re also installing gApps, drag tat file to the cminstall folder as well.
Do not unzip these files first.
8. Now it’s time to reset your HP TouchPad. To do that follow these steps:
Tap the home button and then hit the arrow key to bring up a list of applications.
Navigate to Settings.
Choose Device Info.
Select the red Reset Options button at the bottom.
Tap the Restart option on the following screen.
If you want to install the Google Apps including the Android Market and Gmail apps, scroll down to the bottom of this article for details on how to add those features.
9. As soon as the screen goes dark, start holding the Volume Up button — don’t let go until you see a big USB symbol on your display.
10. Your computer might take a moment to recognize the TouchPad.
11. Once it’s recognized, open a terminal and navigate to the Palm Novacom directory. On a Windows computer you can do this by following these steps:
Click on the Start Menu.
Type “cmd” (without quotes) into the search box.
A terminal window should open up — but you’re in the wrong directory.
Type “cd c:\” and press enter to get to your root directory.
To navigate to the correct directory, type “dir” and press enter to see a list of directories.
On my computer, I next typed “cd Program Files” and hit enter, then “cd Palm, Inc” and hit enter again.
12. Enter the following command (without quotes) and hit return: “novacom boot mem:// < ACMEInstaller”.
That’s pretty much it. For the next few minutes you should see text flying across your screen. When it’s done, the HP TouchPad will boot Google Android.
In order to get back to webOS:
Press and hold the power button.
Choose the reboot option.
Then select “reboot to webOS” from the next menu.
Note that you’ll only be able to reboot to webOS if you’ve installed the “moboot” file as described above.
This method installs the open source CyanogenMod 7.1 version of Android on the tablet. It’s based on Google Android 2.3.7 software.
If you didn’t install the Android Market and other Google apps, it’s not too late to do it at this point. Just follow these steps:
Copy it to the same “cminstall” directory on your TouchPad where you placed the CyanogenMod installers.
Run the ACMEInstaller program again from your computer — or you can try adding gApps during your initial installation.
If you’re familiar with using ClockworkMod Recovery, you can also place any update files in the root of your device’s storage and reboot into recovery from Android and use ClockworkMod to apply updates.
Note that the first time you boot after installing gApps you may want to hit the “cancel” button instead of signing in with your Google account right away. That way you have time to connect to a WiFi network before the Android Market tries to load the list of available Google applications.
App support
Even if you do install the Android Market, you may find that some of your favorite apps aren’t listed. I couldn’t find the Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, or Dolphin HD web browser apps when I searched the Market for them on the TouchPad.
This is likely because the Android Market doesn’t think they’ll be able to run properly on the TouchPad’s hardware. They will.
You just need to install them manually. If you have a rooted Android phone or another device you can use an app such as Titanium Backup or ROM Toolbox to create backup copies of any apps installed on your device. You can then email them to yourself or copy them to your tablet using another method.
I was able to successfully install all four apps listed above. They don’t all look great on the TouchPad’s 9.7 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display, but they do run.
Update: There’s an update that fixes the problem with the Android Market that had prevented certain apps from being listed. There are two ways to install it.
Method 1: Using Android and ClockworkMod Recovery:
Connect your tablet to your computer and mount it as a mass storage device.
Create a folder called “cminstall” on your device.
Copy the update file to that folder.
Reboot your device into recovery mode by restarting the tablet and holding the Volume Up button until a big USB icon appears on the screen.
Follow steps 11 and 12 in the tutorial above to open a terminal, navigate to the Palm Novacom/ACMEInstaller directory, and enter market “novacom boot mem:// < ACMEInstaller” to start the install process.
Once you’ve done that, you should be able to find Google Maps, the Dolphin HD or Opera web browsers, or other apps in the Android Market.
If you’re wondering exactly how the ACMEInstaller works, you can read more about it at the CyanogenMod blog. Basically, the app resizes the webOS media volume to create space for Android system, cache, and data volumes. It then installs CyanogenMod, the Moboot bootloader, and anyother files such as the Google Apps.
This is why using the installer tool will erase any songs, photos, or other media stored in your HP TouchPad webOS media directory.
The good news is that CyanogenMod 7.1 for the TouchPad will then treat the webOS media area as if it were an SD card — so you can access webOS media from Android, or access your Android files from webOS.
You can find out more about how the first alpha release of CyanogenMod for the HP TouchPad works in my hands-on post, or check out this video:
What to do if you can’t reboot to webOS
If you followed the instructions and put Moboot and ClockworkMod Recovery in the cminstall folder when you first flashed Android you should be able to use the “reboot to webOS” option to restart your tablet in webOS. If not, you can only reboot to Android — but don’t worry. There’sa way to fix this.
While in Android, connect your tablet to a computer via a USB cable.
A “USB connected” option will show up in your notification bar. Tap the option that says “Turn on USB storage.”
Your tablet should show up on your computer as a USB disk drive.
Create a folder called “cminstall.”
Place Moboot, Google Apps, or any other file you need to flash into that folder.
Reboot your tablet while holding the Volume Up button to enter recovery mode.
From your computer, follow steps 11 and 12 from the installation tutorial again to open a terminal, navigate to the novacom folder and use the “novacom boot mem:// < ACMEInstaller” command.
That should send the new components over to your TouchPad and the next time you boot you should have the missing features such as the ability to enter ClockworkMod Recovery to select your boot options.
What do to is ClockworkMod Recovery fails to install
It’s possible that Android may install properly, while the ClockworkMod Recovery installation fails. One theory is that this happens sometimes if you have a custom webOS kernel in the /boot partition. Here’s what you can do manually install the Recovery:
Unzip the update-cwm_ternerloin-1012.zip file to the same director where Novacom and your ACMEInstaller files are located.
Connect your TouchPad to your computer and reboot into Recovery by holding the Up Volume button while you reboot.
Open a terminal and navigate to the Novacom directory.
Type the following (without the quotes): “novacom boot mem:// < uImage.ClockworkMod”
What to do if you’re pretty sure your tablet is frozen
First, make sure your device is really frozen. The install process can take a while, so it might look like nothing is happening even when there’s activity. But if five or six minutes pass and you find yourself looking at blank screen, try pressing and holding the power button and home button at the same time for about 30 seconds. This should cause your tablet to reboot.
Restoring webOS with the webOS Doctor
If you royally mess things up you can also try to restore your system to factory default condition using the webOS doctor. The folks at webOS Internals have put together a nice set of instructions for doing that.
Bonus round: If Android isn’t your thing, you can also install Ubuntu Linux on the TouchPad.
Note that while it’s pretty hard to completely “brick” the tablet and leave it entirely unusable, it is possible to do so. Installing Android may void your warranty — especially if you’re unable to restore the tablet to its factory default settings. So please proceed at your own risk, and understand that neither Liliputing nor the developers at CyanogenMod can be held responsible if something you do to your tablet causes it to stop working properly.
You've been hearing a lot about it both from us here at Tecca and practically every other tech news site on the internet — it's the new Facebook profile feature called Timeline, and today it begins its slow but steady rollout to the masses. The Timeline is essentially the evolution of what used to be your profile. If you've come to love your traditional Facebook home page, you may be a bit miffed to learn that it is in the process of being slowly eradicated.
The social network is gradually replacing the profile page format of every one of its hundreds of millions of users with the new Timeline. You can find out if your account has been converted simply by clicking on your name on the very top bar of your Facebook account. The new feature will showcase a plethora of your activity going all the way back to your very first Facebook post — meaning your entire social network identity needs to be spotless.
So what can you do about those pesky college party pics that you've been tagged in (or maybe even posted yourself)? Or how about those check-ins that you might not want a future employer to know about? Here's how to clean up your Timeline before you publish it, so the whole world will only see what you want it to see.
Ready or not, here comes the Timeline
Find out what you've got It will take time, but thankfully Facebook's records only go back a few years, even for the earliest users. The first thing you'll need to do to clean up your Timeline is review what's already in there. Depending how active you've been and how long you've been on the social network, this may take a while. But it's better to do it now than do damage control after someone else finds out about your dubious activities, right?
There are several ways to review your Timeline. You can simply scroll down and go backwards in time, reviewing each item displayed. However, this will not show everything that is available to visitors to your profile. You'll need to click on each year — and in some cases, each month — in order to get the full accounting of all the activities and items on your Timeline. Once you've drilled down and identified the items you want to remove, it's as easy as pie. It's just a lot more tedious (yes, even if you're making the pie from scratch).
Removing Timeline items is easy
Out with the old, in with the new Think of this process as a digital version of spring cleaning. You'll finally get a chance to go back through all of your stuff on Facebook, even the things you've forgotten about, and remove content that makes you seem silly or immature or is otherwise embarrassing in some way.
Let's take the example of a photograph. Once you come to the photograph in question, you'll see an option below the photo on the right-hand side to remove it from your Timeline. See, we told you it was easy!
It's just as easy to get rid of check-ins and other status updates that you prefer others not stumble upon. With events, locate what looks like a pencil near the top right of the status update. Click on that (it's Facebook's version of an edit icon), and you'll be able to remove the status update from your Timeline. You can also determine if you want an app to continue posting stuff to your timeline or remove its publishing privileges altogether.
You can keep new things from hitting your Timeline
Timeline is like a time machine In some ways, the new Timeline feature is like a time machine. You'll get to go back and become all nostalgic over things you posted years ago (if you've been on Facebook since the college days). You'll get the grand picture of just how much you post each day. You might even run into some old friends you've forgotten all about (again).
But the most beautiful part of the process is that the Timeline can be edited. Without this feature, we're sure Timeline would cause many a headache in the business world. We're not even sure we could survive a Timeline-induced trip down memory lane without being able to edit the past.
While you're at it, this is probably a good time to review Facebook's privacy settings and decide who exactly you want to be able to view your Timeline. After that, it should all be peaches and cream. [Editor's note: Less Pollyanna-esque types are welcome to make comparison to 1984's "memory holes," where information deemed unfit for the public good is summarily burned.]
Finally, remember that just because it's not on Facebook, that doesn't mean it never happened. Just remember that what you post tomorrow can end up on your Timeline as well.
The CyanogenMod
team has posted a new video showing the progress developers have been
making in porting Google Android to run on the 9.7 inch tablet. We’ve
already seen the benchmarks
to show that Android performance is pretty good on the tablet, but now
we can also see that CyanogenMod has come a long way since the team’s last video — when Android already looked pretty good on the TouchPad.
Major updates include support for WiFi, basic audio support, and
limited support for the Google Android Market (although it looks a
little funky on a 1024 x 768 pixel display).
The accelerometer is also now working, which means you can
automatically rotate the screen simply by changing the position of the
tablet from portrait to landscape or vice versa. You can also play video
games that use the tablet’s motion-sensing hardware.
Not everything is working perfectly just yet though.
While the HP TouchPad has a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon dual core
processor, it’s only using one of those cores in this latest demo — and
there’s a mediaserver app which is using most of the CPU cycles. The
CyanogenMod team is working on those problems.
There are also still some applications that don’t work. For instance,
the official YouTube app doesn’t work, but you can use a web browser to
watch videos from the online video site — but playback is still a
little choppy.
CyanogenMod 7 is a custom Android distribution based on Google’s
source code for Android 2.3 Gingerbread. It includes some tweaks for
tablets, but the team won’t be upgrading to Android 3.2 Honeycomb
anytime soon, since the source code isn’t available. Instead they’re
waiting for Google to release the code for Ice Cream Sandwich, the first
version of Android designed to run on both phones and tablets.
In the meantime, Gingerbread has a few key advantages over the webOS
3.0 software that originally shipped on HP’s tablet. First, there are
hundreds of thousands of third party apps that can run on Gingerbread,
compared with about 6,000 apps for webOS — and that includes high
quality eBook readers and other apps that are sorely missing for webOS.
When running webOS, the TouchPad can also feel a little sluggish at
times. When surfing the web, the tablet seems to fly. But I’ve spent a
fair amount of time waiting while launching applications or flipping
between apps that are already open.
HP has also discontinued production of webOS hardware, and while the
company has promised to keep the operating system alive by looking for
partners to license webOS for their phones, tablets, or other devices,
it’s not really clear at this point how frequently we’ll see new
software updates or third party apps for the platform. So installing
Android (even an unofficial version without support form HP) could help
make the tablet more useful and provide some hope of future (and equally
unofficial) software updates and improvements.
The CyanogenMod 7 team won’t be releasing their Android port for the
HP TouchPad to the public until some more of the kinks are worked out.
But progress the team is making is pretty remarkable.
It is estimated nearly a million TouchPads have been sold by HP, making it one of the top-selling tablets behind the iPad. True they were sold at ridiculously low prices, but there are a lot of buyers happily using a darn good tablet as a result.
One of the strengths of the webOS platform is the homebrew development community building patches to the system to improve operation. Many of these are designed to give better performance by altering things behind the scenes, while others improve core apps to make them better serve the user’s needs. The letter patches (available through the PreWare system) add features that become part of the core app once applied. Here are some good patches that make the apps work better.
UberCalendar HD. The Calendar app on the TouchPad is a decent application, but missing some functionality that this patch adds. UberCalendar adds a wonderful agenda view in the left pane of the display that displays all events collected from the view on the right-hand pane. The patch also adds a host of settings that can be enabled through the Calendar app preferences. While the standard Calendar app defaults to Day view only, this patch lets you choose the one you prefer (day, week, month). It is a primary example of one of the major advantages to webOS over other platforms: the ability to patch core apps instead of writing whole new apps to replace them.
ThumbNav Browser Controls. The TouchPad browser is very good, but the simple menu this patch adds makes it even better. With a simple swipe in from either the left or right edge of the display, a little menu pops up on the side of the screen presenting common tasks such as Next, Previous, and Add Bookmark. You can also fire off another instance of the browser to do other things. The ability to do these common tasks without moving you hand to the top of the screen is far more useful than you might think.
Browser Power Swipe. For those wanting an easy method for moving back and forward in the browser, this patch adds simple gestures to perform that function. Just swipe back to return to the previous web page or forward to go to the next page in the sequence.
Launch with Folder View Minimized. The email app in webOS is very good, but this little patch suits my preferences better. The Folder View normally displays on the left, showing email folders (Inbox, Starred, etc.). Since I almost always work in the Inbox folder, I was always collapsing this Folder View pane to devote more screen to the actual email. This patch does that by default.
Always Show Previous and Next Buttons. This patch adds buttons facilitating moving back and forth between individual email messages in the email app. They appear at the bottom of each email to make it a simple tap to move up or down in the messages list.
There are other patches available in the PreWare homebrew system and it is worth scanning through them to see if there are others you might find useful. The patches I have listed here are easy to use yet add a lot of functionality to my daily TouchPad usage.
Those of you interested in taking the current flavor of Windows 8 for a spin can now download and install the Developer Preview edition.
Being demoed at Microsoft's Build conference this week, the Developer Preview is a prebeta version showing off the operating system at its current stage. Though technically designed for developers, no registration is required, so anyone can download and install it.
The Windows 8 Preview is being offered in three different packages--a 64-bit version with various developer tools, a 64-bit version of just the operating system, and a 32-bit version of the OS.
All three come as ISO files--image files of the contents of a CD or DVD. Since each of the packages is several gigabytes in size, you'll need a DVD if you want to burn the files to a disc.
In Windows 7, you can burn the ISO file to a DVD by double-clicking it to open the Windows Disc Image Burner. For older operating systems, you can use a tool such as ISO Recorder to burn the file. Alternatively, you can use such utilities as Virtual CloneDrive or Daemon Tools to "mount" the ISO file as a drive, eliminating the need to burn it onto a disc.
Since this is a prebeta version, you'll want to install the OS on a spare PC or in a virtual environment so that it doesn't interfere with your production or work machine.
Those of you who want to know what you're getting into before you attempt to install the Developer Preview can check out a hands-on early look at Windows 8 from CNET's Seth Rosenblatt.
What's next after the Developer Preview?
Speaking at the Build conference yesterday, Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows division, confirmed earlier reports that Windows 8 will next segue into one beta version, followed by one Release Candidate. Assuming all goes well, we can then expect the final RTM (release to manufacturing) edition sometime after that.
Sinofsky didn't reveal a specific timeframe for the beta or Release Candidate. However, the company has been expected to launch the beta at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in January, according to WinRumors.
Many customers have complained that their HP TouchPad tablet will not charge and get a message stating the connected charger isn’t supplying enough power to charge the device.
The TouchPad charger is two pieces which twist apart. If they are not fastened correctly and tight, the tablet will not charge and/or you may get the error message.
Simply unscrew the top off, and then screw it back on snug making sure writing on the side of the connector are aligned correctly.
Most of the time this is a simple fix and you’ll have your TouchPad back up and playing. If not, you may need to contact HP.
This is for the people that requested it. I didn't right this so I won't be able to answer any questions about it. As I posted befor...
Welcome to my blog.
This is a place to display all of my hobbies and interest that I think would also interest other people like me. Feel free to leave comments and enjoy some music while your here. Be sure to rate the post.
About Me
-Live in North Carolina -Served 4 years in the Air Force
Hobbies -Computers -HTPC Computers -Photo editing -Playing guitar -Family Tree Research
Many customers have complained that their HP TouchPad tablet will not charge and get a message stating the connected charger isn’t supplying enough power to charge the device.
