Darwin Mach

So I picked up a new Lexar Jump Drive Secure II Plus (32GB to be exact)… And ran into some serious problems with it.

First, lets have a look at its design:

Do you see that indicator on the front? Yes, that’s right… It’s a meter that shows the disk usage. The problem is that this meter must function in order for the flash drive to initialize and be readable to the operating system. Through some trial and major error, I found out it reads the first available FAT32 or NTFS partition. If one doesn’t exist, the flash drive simply keeps rebooting itself, rendering it completely unusable unless you can get it to create partition before it shuts itself down again. So if you plan on reformatting this drive, make sure you don’t delete partitions! Or, if you do, make sure you immediately create one afterwards.

Bad bad! Shame on you, Lexar…

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It’s official! This is 1 day late for USA users (2 days for UK), but the much anticipated Nokia n900 firmware update PR 1.2 has been released! If you’ve waited to get the n900 because of some unsupported features, bugs, etc, wait no longer! PR 1.2 literally brings tons of bug fixes and enhancements.

Personally, the most significant improvement is freeing up rootfs space and the responsiveness of the system. It’s become much more of the phone it was meant to be.

Nokia’s also update their Ovi store for the n900, so expect to see more 3D games like Zen bind and Jurassic roller coaster come out this Thursday.

I highly recommend you flash the ROM using the ROM images here: http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/nokia_N900.php. I also suggest you flash the eMMC partition as well (MyDocs), thus doing a full hard reset. The two ROMs you want are…

RX-51_2009SE_10.2010.19-1.002_PR_COMBINED_002_ARM.bin (pick the one for your region)
RX-51_2009SE_10.2010.13-2.VANILLA_PR_EMMC_MR0_ARM.bin

Flash them in that order… the firmware comes first, then the eMMC flash. Must be done using the provided command line utilities!

If you can’t sacrifice your rig’s configuration, you can always use the App Manager to perform an Over-The-Air (OTA) update. It’s not as clean and you’re likely not to see too much of a performance difference, but does the job quickly & simply.

Enjoy your “new” phone! Stay tuned & I’ll show you how to overclock the n900 using a PR 1.2 compatible kernel.

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I’m back, for a really brief update… This time to give a shoutout to a new applet for the N900. If you run SSH on your device, this one is a great one for improving security.

It’s called SSH Status and Switcher that allows you to toggle SSHD directly from the status area menu.

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