Cherry Mobile Fusion Bolt

I bought Cherry Mobile's Fusion Bolt tablet last May. I wasn't expecting it to be a great slate and I was right. After a few months of using it, the device seemed really slow and sometimes non-responsive. After a lot of reading on the web, I found out a couple of information that shed some light on why this tablet is not performing very well. It has a Quad processor but it performs like a dual core or maybe even a single core.

CM Fusion Bolt is actually a rebranded Novo 7 Venus from Ainol, a chinese brand. So FuBo owners got to thinking that maybe the firmware that came with FuBo is not optimized and replacing it with the firmware from Ainol would make it better. And they were half right. I said half right because, from further reading, Venus users say that Ainol firmwares have a reputation of being unstable and unoptimized too. The tablet's performance is still better compared to the stock firmware that came with my tablet.

I don't play games on the tablet that much but I ran into some problems with the few games that I do play. Temple Run 2 hangs after a long period of play. Zenonia 5 force closes when you're already far out in the game. Epic Defense II lags when there are too many monsters on the screen and to many towers spitting HD particles. The SD card gets removed unexpectedly almost too many times. If it continues like this, the card will be corrupted. These problems don't bother me that much but after some time that these keep happening, you get fed up and you begin to wish you had a better tablet.

Alas! After a couple of months of searching, Ainol released a few more firmwares for the Venus, and as before, FuBo users jumped in and flashed the new firmware to there tablets. (...And they lived happily ever after. :) Kidding aside, the feedback for the new firmwares was mostly positive. Some even say they feel like there tablet was reborn. So I read some more and got more and more interested in flashing my tablet as well. And I did, and it went very well. :D


Here are of the sites I've read from:

• Nico's Mobile Blog
• Pinoy Screencast

 If you want to flash your FuBo as well, I'll be posting a guide/tutorial so stay tuned. :)  

Is your USB Flash drive 'real'?

You may have a 32GB USB Flash drive but is it really 32GB? We all hope so...

Last night, I was copying a movie file over 1GB in size to my flash drive and Teracopy always fails to complete the operation. It's an 8GB flash drive so I was pretty sure space issues was not any concern. The copy finishes but the file, when read back, does not match the original file. I then tried to reformat the drive and tried copying the file again but I still can't copy the file.

After a few minutes of googling, I found out that some USB flash drives being sold nowadays are fake. Windows reports that the drive is, say 8GB, but in reality, it's not.

 

How to tell if your USB drive is counterfeit and has fake oversize capacity?
A fake drive will deceive you by displaying the 'false/oversize' capacity when you connect it to your PC, however it will NOT be able to store the data to the stated capacity.

Symptoms:
You copy a big file to your drive. Later when you try to open the file, it's corrupted.

Why?
Because the file was not really completely copied due to the drive's 'REAL' size limitation.

A few things you can do after purchasing:
1. Check the serial # of the drive online.
2. Copy big files and try to open them on the drive after copying. Do it one at a time for each big file. If you have 32GB drive, start with a 30GB file and work your way down.

You may be surprised that your 32GB is actually just a poser 4GB drive. But don't worry, you are not alone.

Windows 8 on Samsung NC110 Netbook

Windows 8 Box

My aunt recently bought a Samsung NC110 netbook. I have a history of trashing(breaking) my aunt's laptops before so I really tried to resist the urge of diving in and tinkering on the new netbook. The netbook came with Windows 7 Home Basic installed and I find it not fast enough, so a bright idea came to me.

What if I installed Windows 8 on this netbook? Would it run faster? Windows 8 is aimed at mobility right?

So I immediately made a backup of everything on the netbook and then installed Windows 8 Release Preview on a VHD. I chose to install it on a VHD so I don't have to mess with partitions and to preserve the original OS. I had the Win8 installer on a bootable USB drive and to my frustration, I had trouble booting to a USB device. After a few hours of googling for help, I found out that I had to press and HOLD F2 to get to the boot menu. Hurray! One problem solved.

I went on and installed Win8. The installation went smooth and fast. It took only a few minutes and I'm already on the home screen. I was very excited. Win8 is indeed faster that Win7 on a netbook. The response is great, albeit not slightly noticeable. All the devices that came with the netbook were recognized so I didn't have to scour the internet for device drivers. That was a great relief.

After checking whether everything is running smoothly, I decided to check out the Win8 apps and set them up. So I launched the Photo app first. The app didn't launch. Instead, it told me that the app cannot launch because my screen resolution was too low. So I went ahead and tried to change my screen resolution and found out that it's on the highest setting already(1024 x 600). Turns out, apps have a minimum resolution requirement of 1024 x 768, and in my case, I'm 168 pixels short on the vertical. After googling a bit for some info, I confirmed that if you don't have a minimum 1024 x 768 resolution, Windows 8 apps ain't for you. If I can't use the apps on my netbook, then this Win8 is nothing but a slightly faster, start-menu-less Windows 7. Annoying!

Despite this resolution issue, I'll still be using Win 8. Until some genius coder/programmer makes a patch or workaround.

Flash PageFlip dream

A few years ago, I came across this nifty Flash application called PageFlip. It's a Flash based application that allows you to present images in a book-styled manner. I instantly became curious about it and went straight to google for some searches. I found a similar applications but sadly, all of them were not free, even for educational purposes. Yes, there may be one out there that's open source or free but I wasn't able to find it at that time. The paid ones have a free but limited version so I just compared the versions I found and chose the one which offers the most - albeit limited - functionality. I downloaded the one from FlashPageFlip.com and started tinkering with it. It was fairly easy to configure if you have your images at the right size. It gets tedious when you have a lot of images of different sizes. You'll have to resize each of them so that the book pages are uniform in size. It gets even harder if you have to convert your book content from text documents to images.

Regardless of the few difficulties I encountered, I put quite a lot of time and effort in learning how it works and how to make it easier to set up and configure. I've also searched for ways to get online. For so long, I've tried and failed to publish one in the past. After a few long years, at long last, I have finally found a way! Check out the flipbooks (amacall them flipbooks) I've made here.

Images, settings, and stuff...

To keep the momentum going, I took some time to fix some of the blogs settings. I've also added a couple of images. I'm not really sure if I should be posting this at all but as I said, I need to keep the momentum. :)