CyanogenMOD rocks my old G-1
<p>I spent some time today rooting and reflashing my old G-1 so it&#8217;s jumped from stock Android 1.6 to Android 2.2.  CyanogenMod is a truly impressive piece of work, with both snazzy surface polish and a lot of nice little hackerly touches like including a root console in the standard apps panel and easy access to the recovery loader. I really feel like I have control of the device now.</p>
<p>Which is nice, but doesn&#8217;t have a lot of practical relevance yet. My main use for the G-1 is as a fallback in case my Nexus One gets lost or stolen.  Still, there was some enjoyment in learning that, yes, I <em>can</em> do stuff like reflashing a phone without bricking it, and swapping around SIM cards without perpetrating some egregious blunder that wipes them. Alas, I&#8217;m still not very comfortable doing risky things with hardware &#8211; I retain some emotional reflexes from  thirty years ago, when zorching anything computerlike meant you&#8217;d just incurred a five-figure bill and were in deep, <em>deep</em> shit.</p>
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<p>As usual in such exercises, the hard part was interpreting the instructions.  The hackers who wrote them were trying very hard to be clear, but the result was a thicket of poorly-organized details. I could follow the procedure, but I had to do it almost blind; there was nothing that gave me a high-level view of the process so that I could grasp clearly why each step was necessary and why they had to happen in the order they did.  As a result, for troubleshooting I absolutely had to have live help on an IRC channel.</p>
<p>I wish someone would write a bird&#8217;s-eye view of the smart-phone modding process.  It can&#8217;t be that complicated, and I know what&#8217;s involved in writing boot loaders for general-purpose computers.  Shout to my readers: has anyone done this already, or do I need to put it on my over-full to-do list?</p>
