UltimateDroid 3.3.0 CDMA Desire download
In followup to my last post, I thought I'd post a link to the ROM I am using on my HTC Desire.
Here is the link.
Sure hope BD comes back someday!
UltimateDroid – Where did you go?
I have an Android phone - an HTC Desire on the US Cellular network. I really like my phone. Shortly after getting it I decided to root my device and give some custom ROMs a shot. It wasn't long before I found my favorite, the UltimateDroid (UD).
There are two big reasons I run UltimateDroid: Performance and Battery Life. After running on UD for a few months, US Cellular finally released the FroYo version of their stock Desire ROM. At this point I was running Gingerbread with UD on my phone, but I thought I'd give the new USCC FroYo update a shot to see if it was comparable (and see if Sense was still worth it). AS soon as I booted the new stock I quickly remembered why I like UD so much. The stock was far less performant. Visual effects were slow and laggy; apps launched much slower; there were more than 40 processes running; and the battery life was a lot less. I quickly returned to UD.
Some of the other smaller things that I liked about UD was the features, and the quick release schedule (I was a nightly build subscriber) that often offered the newest features and performance tweaks.
As the version numbers climbed from 2.4 to eventually 3.3.0, I began to really like UD and its community. I'd visit often, trying out new nightly builds. This is really the reason I like Android so much better than iOS -- the customization that open source offers is unmatched.
But then something sad began to happen. There were no updates for a week; 2 weeks; 3 weeks -- the blackdroid had taken breaks in the past but then -- 1 month; 2 months -- nothing. Not a word from anyone on the site! And then: the site went down. www.udrom.com no longer made a successful connection. And soon after, it no longer showed up in the Google Search results for UltimateDroid.
What happened? I've read rumors on various sites saying that he may have been a victim of extreme weather (maybe a tornado?) and lost his house or something. But nothing was certain.
Is this the end of UltimateDroid ROMs? Is the blackdroid done developing ROMs?
I certainly hope not. If you have any information regarding the state of the UltimateDroid project or blackdroid's plans for the future, please leave a comment. I'd like to help if there is anything that I can do. I am an aspiring developer after all (although I've never done any Android dev).
Patch Panel Upgrade
A few years ago, I installed a patch panel in my (parents) house. All of the phone lines in our house were run with CAT3 cable (pretty much the same as CAT5 but with fewer twists per foot, so the spec support less speed) so I am able to use them to run Ethernet throughout the house. When I first did it, I was new to this kind of thing. I've learned a lot since so I took the time to completely redo it and make everything look a little nicer.
Old Setup
Here is some pictures of the old setup:
Kind of a mess.
and the mess of coax...
Pictured above is a Leviton Media Patch Panel kit that includes a traditional phone line distribution system, CAT5 patch panels and a coax splitter (that I never used). The idea is that you can patch either a phone line or ethernet cord to any jack in the house. All of the jacks in the house should be Ethernet, that way allowing either phone or Ethernet to be plugged in. Just make sure you don't plug an Ethernet device into a jack that is patch to the phone distributor! The phone line has voltage that could potentially damage an Ethernet device.
New Setup
The Leviton panel was great for a while, but as I am getting more and more cables to patch (we put an addition on our house last year and added a lot more Ethernet) it is getting to be more inconvenient. The 6-port patch modules are expensive and kind of tacky if you ask me. I decided I wanted to replace the whole thing with more of a traditional patch panel.
Enter Monoprice.com. Monoprice is an amazing place where you can get any kind of cables, adapters, home theater/home networking/home video supplies for CHEAP! You know that 25 foot HDMI cable you bought for $100 at BestBuy? Same thing on Monoprice for only $15.
I found a new 24-port CAT5e patch panel on Monoprice for about $17. You cannot beat that. After sitting on the shelf for a few months due to lack of time to install it, here it is with a new hole cut in the board:
Jigsaws are awesome, it fit on the first try.
Notice that I added a new board for the coax "tree". I'm very glad I did that, now it's all out of the way. One thing I like a lot more about this style of patch panel is that it hides all of the wires behind the board. Ends up looking a lot cleaner.
Next I have to wire everything up, mount the new wireless router as well as the modem, and install the new phone distributor. I didn't really take any intermediate pictures for this part, so here are some pictures after it is all finished!
Finished product
Another view
Phone "distributor"
The phone "distributor" is simply a splitter that you can buy at Radioshack or Lowes. It's just plugged into the Cable modem (Mediacom's phone service is through the cable modem) and it splits it into 5 ports. If you need more than 5 phone jacks in your house, just daisy chain another splitter. Now honestly, I'd much rather just drop the phone service. Who needs phone service when everyone in the house has cell phones? All it does is give telemarketers a way to reach you. But seeing as this isn't my house I can't make that decision. If a home phone line is necessary, I'd also suggest not buying through Mediacom or your cable company and just getting a cheap VoIP service like Vonage or Skype. Then buy Ethernet phones and you wouldn't have to worry about legacy phone lines at all.
View with Server on bottom, UPS and tools on the shelf, and panel.
You may notice the switches/routers on the right hand side and wonder what they are/why there are three. The black one on the bottom is an 8-port Gigabit switch and the two on top are routers/wifi routers with 4-port switches in them. Ideally I would get a 16-port Gigabit switch and do away with those three individual boxes, but it's just not worth the money when I already have something that works. the two older routers on top are not Gigabit, and I'm only using the switch function of them not the router. The new white wireless-N Gigabit router does all the routing and the rest is just LAN switch ports.
Well that's about it. I'm planning on selling the old Leviton panel, if you're interested let me know. Still works great, I just needed more patch panel ports.
Max
Hot Swapping SATA drives in Windows
Howdy gang. I know I don't write posts very often, and I apologize. I will try to be more engaged with this site.
My Desktop Computer (which hasn't gotten it's own blog post yet 
almost been 1 year) has a "drive toaster" as I call it. basically a piece that fits in a 5.25" cd-drive bay that accepts hard drives, both 2.5" and 3.5". Here's a picture of what I'm talking about.
Sorry for the poor quality. But it's better than no picture at all right!?
Well the biggest problem I've had with this is when I insert a drive while Windows is running, it doesn't mount or see the drive at all. The only way I could get a drive to show up is by rebooting. HUGE pain. But that pain is no longer....
Enter "Hot Swap".
Hot Swap is a piece of software that sits in your system tray. Yeah I know, you have enough things sitting in your system tray don't you? Just be happy that Windows 7 hides them for you rather nicely. Anyway it sits in the tray with an icon much like the "Safely remove hardware" icon but with a RED arrow instead of a green one.
Now all you have to do is insert the drive (or plug it into SATA another way, maybe eSATA) and right click on the new icon. Choose "Scan for Hardware Changes" at the top and BAM your drive shows up just like all your other ones. Isn't that nice? No more rebooting. If you can't tell I'm pretty excited about this one.
Here is the DOWNLOAD LINK for Hot Swap.
I found this from this thread. Apparently most SATA controllers support hotswapping (note I said most, not all. If your SATA controller doesn't, you're SOL) but does not work correctly with Windows Safely Remove Hardware. Thanks to Hot Swap this is no longer an issue.