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rooting a Droid Saturday, May 17 2014
I finally got around to "rooting" my Droid X2 cellphone, which is a plan-less hand-me-down from Gretchen. I use it mostly for its camera, WiFi-web functionality, email, and its excellent GPS capabilities, but for some reason it's suddenly gotten very slow, and my guess is that Verizon has a way to computationally-poison old off-plan phones. (I imagine they would have a business reason to do this, but if they don't, then they're probably not, since they are a sociopathic corporation and not a supervillain.) Rooting a phone grants the user completely control over it, allowing the installation and de-installation of any and all apps or even other operating systems. The process had looked difficult when I'd first researched this matter last summer, but it turns out that there are at least three one-click tools available on the web. The first of these, something called Easy Rooting Toolkit by DoomLord, had a runme.bat file that Google Chrome flagged as suspect, but I looked through the code and it was all completely legit. DoomLord ERT didn't work, and neither did the next thing I tried, something called Motorola Gingerbread One-Click Root. The third attempt was a program called DroidX2_Root_2012.exe, and it put my phone in recovery mode (a picture of a robot next to an ominous triangle-cum-exclamation mark). A simple reboot and the installation of an app called SuperUser allowed me to finally uninstall all the crapware that Verizon phones come pre-loaded with, including (I kid you not) a proprietary navigation system that you have to pay to use (though Google Maps works perfectly fine on the same phone).
The phone wasn't any faster when the crapware removed, but now that it's rooted I should theoretically be able to install a completely new OS onto it (though that will probably have to be a version of Android).
Today I set up the weighing pad of the new 460 pound postal scale on two leveled pieces of pressure-treated wood directly in front of the woodshed. The part of the scale that actually displays a digital representation of the weight is at the end of a coiled cord, and I did some basic origami with aluminum to provide a weather shield for it on the side of the woodshed's watertank tower. I used the scale to take two measurements today, including 90 pounds of wood I brought home with the backpack and 70 pounds of wood that came in the form of a long, narrow trunk I dragged home from just west of the Farm Road. (I had to cut it up before I could weigh it).
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