I was browsing around on the XDA Developer’s forum to see if there were any new ROMs for my ATT Tilt (HTC Kaiser) and stumbled across an Android build. Interestingly, it actually shuts down WinMo6, boots up Linux, and then launches the Android platform. Of course, it doesn’t actually work very well (yet) but it’s a start! Supposedly they got calling and contacts to work, but it basically just freezes on me.

After some digging, I flashed my phone with the L26 Diamond ROM with WinMo6.1 and a few other goodies added. And, in the process, I lost all of my Outlook contacts – of course. (Stupid WinMo – why do you have to try to sync contacts with Outlook and then delete them if they aren’t in the local copy of Outlook!?). I may switch to Android (if I can get it working) just so I don’t lose my contacts randomly throughout the year. Until then, I’ll use NS Contacts Backup to backup everything.

Anyways, so I have this Tilt thingy. I did some serious reading over at XDA Developer’s forum and picked up the ROM used to flash your phone back to the original Windows Mobile setup HTC (the manufacturer) had rather than the messed up garbage AT&T gives you. The HTC ROM has a nice touch-screen graphical homepage that makes it easy to get to the basics that Windows Mobile has to offer.

Since HTC is one of the manufacturers who joined the Google Open Handset Alliance (a joke? We’ll see), I hope to eventually get a ROM that loads and runs Google’s Android phone OS. Windows Mobile works but, eh, it’s Windows and it already erased all of my contacts once.

All in all, a nice set of features in the hardware, but I think I like the Blackberry OS that my wife has on her Blackberry Pearl better. Windows Mobile is very serious/business-like – certainly not aimed at the same market as, say, the iPhone which is very much a “smart consumer” device. But I will say Opera Mobile seems to run pretty darn well on it (though I’m starting to think Opera Mini is going to by-pass Opera Mobile soon).

The idea is that there’s a base unit running Linux+Java with built-in Wifi, etc with modules you can plug in. The modules can be a GPS unit, a camera, a touch LCD screen, pretty much anything. This thing is the ultimate Lego Mindstorm.

Check it out here, at Bug Labs.

The idea is that you can take the base unit and plug in whatever combination of modules you need to create your own special device. Using the Linux OS plus the built-in Wifi, you can then create applications and internet services based off of it. They even have an API Framework that already knows how to talk to all of the devices, so you aren’t doing any special programming for them. For example, you could plug in a motion detector and a camera, and set it up so that it’ll take a picture whenever there is motion and then ftp/post/whatever that picture somewhere.

Just thought it was a cool thing to point out.

(Another cool talk at Defrag was about visualizing data (particularly social networking type data) and how the speaker had worked with data from DARPA based on the America’s Army game; trying to find what a signature for a competent/well coordinated fire team looked like).

http://www.eve-online.com/download/

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It works awesome. 20.1 diagonal inches of widescreen bliss. It’s just a touch more pixelated than my ViewSonic 19″ CRT, but I don’t normally notice it. The extra screen area is awesome in “EVE Online”:http://www.eve-online.com/. Not sure I’d get it if it wasn’t for EVE, but it’d also be handy for those super wide spreadsheets in Excel.

Next toy on the list?

Probably a belt sander and a band saw. I hear those are handy when you start working on the fuselage.