We’re at the cusp of a new revolution, we’re at the cusp of the old revolution. Sun Microsystems said 10 years ago “the network is the computer”. We saw the tadpole notebook die. “Who would run UNIX on a laptop?”

Who would run Linux on a cellphone?

Solaris and Linux are old news, crushed under the terribly irony of their own success and android is really the dragon risen. Solaris did oracle so well that oracle bought it and made it from a wonderful garden into a toaster. Linux continues on as a desktop, or a server, but Nokia championing a full Linux on a phone never materialized with any success. Google came in the night and hammered it into a legitimate mobile platform by throwing out the trappings of the OS while keeping the enterprise level Java ideas (something lost on Apple) and what do we have now?

We have a mobile app delivery platform. Mark my words, this is huge. It’s so big Ubuntu has been pretending it was their idea and completely missed the boat. Protip guys – your desktop browser doesn’t belong on a tablet. But who’s to say thats not going to change into a mobile browser through theming? Who knows what goes on in their heads at all?

The new internet isn’t going to be made from webpages, it’s going to be made from applications. There’s two particular forces here which caused this: HTML is junk and the OS always got in the way. Cellphones, today, aren’t that different from enthusiast computers of yesteryear. They play games, they capture video, they play music, they take pictures and they do it wirelessly. Think about that for a moment. To make a computer do this, you need a webcam, you need a graphics card, you need fast storage and you need sound. The computers biggest problem was that it didn’t come with these things. Windows always insisted it needed updates, driver disks, etc. The problem was always the OS. Apple ended up going way over the mark and also branded the heck out of an OS. People line up around the block for it, it’s completely bizarre to me. Apple too misses the mark, applications you purchase on your device don’t work on your computer. In a lot of ways apple did these things, but I also think they priced themselves back into the enthusiast market. There’s no reason to use them when only a small minority of people have these features. We were missing the important part of the puzzle – Cheap, Complex Devices.

You get cellphones which do these things for free. Sign a two year contract, pick the carrying case color of your choice and out the door you go. It plays video. It captures video. It’s a camera. Its an audio recorder, a music player, and it surfs the web, all wirelessly.

Why doesn’t it do this on the web? HTML.

HTML has made awesome strides over the years for client side execution, the problem is that the clients have made great strides over the years not to be the executors. Phones are still ARM9, 1ghz (if you’re lucky) devices with processors the size of your thumbnail. While things like terga have gone a long way towards specific work units (nVidia’s GPU, etc), there’s no hardware accelerator for HTML. It just doesn’t exist. Dalvik, of course, is hardware accelerated. See what google did there? Instead of using a presentation language for applications and trying to accelerate that, full well knowing MS was going to stomp them to death with IE, they accelerated the language you can write your presentation layer in. Suddenly, the camera, the audio, the recorder, and the phone don’t require a stack of driver disks. They have very elegantly end-run the presentation problem by making the OS go away. They catered to the idea that no-one cares what their phone runs. A phone is a phone the same way a TV is a TV or a car is a car, except when your TV can play on your phone because of the netflix app and your car gets it’s maps from google via bluetooth. People don’t care, per se. It’s a phone. Netflix is a neat trick. Netflix keeps your eyes on the phone. How many ads does Netflix run? Zero, you pay for it. How many ads does the CNN app run? A lot. You pay for the service with ads like TV, but instead of channels now you have apps.

This is uninspired, insipid horseshit. It doesn’t change how we do things, it merely reassigns TV channels to applications. Instead of tuning to the channel, you click a button. All that’s done is make the phone into the remote control and the TV, or you could think of it as a TV without a remote control. It’s boring. It’s the thing legislation is made of to “protect the rights of consumers” because the MPAA and the RIAA don’t get it, they don’t come up with new ideas.

Here’s an idea, take the device and do something with it. Make an Autozone app which lets you pay for a mechanic to connect to your phones camera so you can show him where you’re stuck on the project. They can sell you special phone soap when you’re done because you didn’t wash your filthy hands before touching the display. Make a social network app which lets you define public content you will share with people in an area, then walk around the building with your GPS on to define an area people will exchange info with you. Enjoy the particular vibe of a movie or song? Why not a music player which correlates where people hang out to enjoy the music? People who list their activities as “sports” and listen to upbeat jazz while running a route may have a route which attracts amateur athletes who don’t enjoy complex terrain but want to run for fitness outside.

What we have driving this is association. When we coalesce these different technologies into a single platform, we need to realize that they stop being technologies unto themselves and they can be used in a complimentary fashion. At very least I am surprised that banks haven’t set up internet tellers. Not only do people enjoy talking to tellers, etc face to face but in terms of verifying the security of the account, seeing the customer (and having a picture of them) is worth the security alone. The customer feels like the bank takes a personal stake in them, the queue can be managed by the application instead of standing in line at the bank and the bank has strong identity verification. Phones can scan barcodes too, have them hold their drivers license up to the camera to be scanned for another layer of security just in case they’re some sort of Max Headroom puppet.

The internet presentation is dead, its bones pave the way for the new internet presentation. The future always feels like it’s right around the corner.

Why?

It tastes like port wine.

But that’s not the point, and it’s not what the post is about. The experiments are driven by two factors: No-one really seems to be exploring fermenting non-beery things with beer yeast and the experiments have to be cheap enough that if the product is total junk, I can toss it. The biggest hurdle here is yeast. Good yeast, which is usually $7 a phial, is way to expensive to be tossing on top of apple juice and brown sugar, grape juice and brown sugar, motor oil and other things you might want to experiment with fermenting and drinking.

As usual, we’re using a standard 6.5 stopper, three piece airlock, carlos rossie 4 quart jugs, WLP530 and whatever I feel like feeding the WLP530. Why 530? It’s got a nice flavor profile (it worked really well for the cider) and it seems fairly tolerant of.. me feeding it terrible stuff. The downside – it operates really slowly. Really slowly. Even on it’s own fermenting good old maltose it’s just slow. The cider took a month, and I wasn’t sure if the cider was going to work. In typical fashion it took three days to get started and it will probably take it a month to finish.

The yeast wash was fairly easy and I think I overthought the problem the last time. Take the yeast trub (the slurry on the bottom of the bottle) preferably by pouring your product off from it as gently as possible into a bottle or another jug, then fill the original jug up with water and shake it. The yeast is now suspended in the water. Put some foil or wrap on top and put it in the fridge for a week or until the yeast settles back down. (Note that if you brewed an all grain batch, you’ll see two layers. The bottom layer is proteins from the grains and you don’t want this). Do this until the water runs clear, usually twice or three times.

Once you have it down this far, you want to pour off the water one last time and then stir up the slurry. Pour this into a glass or (ideally) the tube the original yeast was shipped in. Top up with water (or it will mold), seal, save $7.

That being said, to get the yeast to start you either need a stir plate (but this is a post for another time) or you need a bubbler stone. The stir plate is the better option in my opinion because the yeast is going to clump up and sit on the bottom. That’s why you need the bubbler, you need to put air in the product. Lacking either one of these, I just put a cap on the carlos rossi bottle and shook the hell out of it once I had put the yeast in. This worked, but like I said, it’s a slow starting yeast which is made even slower because of the lack of oxygen in the wort.

So hows it coming along? Three days into it, it’s finally to the place I would expect actual wort to be bubbling after 12 hours (a bubble every second or so). I’m thinking the grape juice either has chemical preservatives in it or its way too acidic for this yeast. ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE. If it plays out the way the cider did, it should finish sweet and have enough complexity to satisfy jaded drinkers while being easy (and cheap) enough to make to keep as a table wine.

I don’t think of myself as an evangelist for open source software but having been balls deep in android the last few days has given me insight into a lot of the problems facing android as an open source project. Recently one of the XDA guys was pinched for piracy in his ROM and it really came to a head.

The background we have to consider is that the ROMs themselves are thoroughly grey market. The phones can run on Linux, but the drivers for the hardware are typically closed source and non-free. Finding the license to them is impossible, as is finding the source to the drivers. We’re put in a situation where it’s not particularly clear what is and is not GPL at this point – the android OS has a monolithic kernel except for the cellular portion which might as well be a preemptive kernel which overrides the running kernel when the phone rings. The problem is the GPL was largely designed to keep the kernel and the drivers free and open, and as an extension of The nVidia Problem (shim loaders) the kernel is no longer free and open on the android. This is a really old argument and has been beaten to death. The android kernel has shim loaders and we have to live with it. The big rub then is how do we legally develop for the android? We are protected by the DMCA and allowed to reverse engineer (clean room) the drivers because no other legal route is provided, but the solution of the day has been to grab the drivers and firmware from other releases of android and pull them into the future. In essence, shimming the shim loaders. Performance, as you can guess, is hit or miss. In the SGH-T959′s case, it’s a real mess when it comes to the GPS. Where it goes from annoying to dangerous is the problem that AOSP ROMs don’t have valid, working call routing. To get the call routing to work, you have to use the samsung proprietary drivers. This is obviously a contention between de facto piracy and public safety as call routing is what makes E911 work.

More recently this whole issue of presentation came to a head with neobuddy’s ROM. Aside of his worst sin of loving anime, he “rebranded” some commercial software in an effort to add spit and polish to the ROM. MIUI has done the same with their ROM but everyone sort of gave it a pass being Chinese. MIUI also occupies a grey market area where they charge (on the chinese side) for enhanced features. It hasn’t made it weirdly enough to the US version of the site but I’m waiting for it to happen. MIUI therefor has been the stalking horse of ROM developers where they pick bits and pieces of it. Better to steal from the Chinese than steal from a company like Samsung. Neobuddy took it one step further and rebranded several apps where (ironically enough) the author installed his ROM and took offense. jrummy not only admonished neobuddy for piracy but posted that the official version from the market had bugfixes people were complaining about.

Now, this is a particularly sticky wicket. On one hand, it’s morally wrong to put your  name on someone elses software. On another hand, jrummy’s application is a ROM flasher which needs those drivers discussed earlier to work if not in some very indirect way. Finally there is no google market in india. Neobuddy lives in Mumbai, he couldn’t have gotten the software legally. (Krishna – correct me if I’m wrong). This is the intersection of aspiration and incompetence. All fine and understandable, except that when XDA asked Neobuddy to show them the sources, he added “kernel rolled by nelson” to his thread instead of linking to a git of the linux kernel. Sigh.

Fast forward a week while XDA discusses what the heck it means to post your sources and finally they just throw their hands up and lock the thread. I don’t blame them. This immediately balkanizes the community. Neo starts a thread on facebook (which as a software git is useless) and the XDA guys get thrown under the bus. 12 hours after getting his thread locked, someone posts a mirror of the ROM and had removed the software he put his name on and posted a link to the git of the kernel sources. Neo eventually makes this particular ROM the official working ROM and removes the other links, which firmly cements us in meta-piracy land.

The commentary on facebook has been really contentious and it’s hard to understand why people would put effort into a pursuit like this. Fortunately it’s easy enough to roll a kernel that the cyanogen assholes don’t have a monopoly on it, but it seems people have a weird opinion that ROMs live above the ecology of software. In reality the OS is subservient to the application, which is one of the reasons why I haven’t jumped onto ice cream sandwich yet. It doesn’t even run facebook, but people seem to want the latest and greatest from google while disregarding the fact that everything has to be done through the browser until the apps catch up. Commentary on facebook was largely “THE XDA GUYS ARE MEANIES YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT”. Nevermind that if this ROM actually went legal (how?), someone else might exercise their moral imperative to change Neo’s name and rebrand the ROM for themselves just as he did with the software. To that end, most of the people posting on the facebook group had no idea that rebranding the software was in fact illegal as was burying the kernel source on some back woods git no-one would have noticed and certainly wasn’t linked to.

To his credit, neo removed the offending rebranded software and has separate download links. The kernel source they’re using is now posted to a git. XDA put the thread back up and most of the people on facebook haven’t figured out how the rest of the internet works so XDA remains safe. It looks like we’re going to get some Nexus S backport of ICS, which is nice. jrunner has not nuked Mumbai.

REQUIRED READING: Rooting Froyo. That also gives you clockwork.

With the release of Ice Cream Sandwich, everyone has been wondering which phones are going to get it. The bottom line is T-Mobile said the 4G Samsung Galaxy S is going to get it, they said it was too slow on the 3G.

This is crap. We all know this is crap. It’s the exact same phone with a different radio chipset. Neither Samsung nor T-Mobile is creative enough to come out with a totally new phone that looks like a totally old phone.

That being said, kernel.org is back up and Ice Cream Sandwich AOSP is out along with the Gingerbread AOSP. Gingerbread, predictably, is hacky crap and we knew that from the HTC releases. AOSP simply confirms it started out as hacky crap and didn’t advance much because of Ice Cream Sandwich.

The guys over at XDA Devs already have the AOSP of Ice Cream Sandwich ported to the SGS-T959. GPS works, radio works, video works, cameras work, but the battery life is abysmal. Its incredibly encouraging to see this much work being done in this short of a time, which means that the original Vibrant clearly didn’t fall far from the mainstream tree. You can follow the thread here. One big caveat – this is active development. Version 7 of the alpha is already out. It’s a real pain in the ass to install. The original post hasn’t been updated despite being the most commented post on XDA devs that I can remember. Handle with care.

At the top of the list for why UBISoft’s excuse is bullshit – The entire success of the XBOX is that it runs Direct X. You write a game that uses pure Direct X calls, your game runs on both the PC and the XBOX with zero effort required on your part. That’s really the bottom line right there and the beginning and end of the argument. If you use Direct X, it works both places. There’s more effort required in doing the PS3 port than there is going from XBOX to PC. To Microsoft’s credit, they’ve done a really good job making this work on both sides of the fence. This means two things – UBISoft must really mean it about the piracy and any other arguments are largely accessory to this.

Part B is they’ve released free versions of the games on PC. Why? You’re going to get them for free anyway, according to UBISoft, because you’re all a bunch of pirates on the PC. Nevermind the vast majority of PC OSes are legal (in the US) or firmly in the gray market (corporate licenses). If we can draw a line from legal OSes to legal games and assume they’re roughly the same level of piracy (people who pirate the OS are likely to pirate the games) then roughly 20% of software is pirated.

What’s the argument against this? PC games have to be pirated individually, and I would venture close to 100% of pirated versions of PC apps contain malware, spyware, viruses and god knows what else. Furthermore unless the company is using bone-stock copy protection, someone has to put the effort into breaking the copy protection for that particular version of that particular application. New version comes out? They have to play cat and mouse again.

The XBOX situation is particularly interesting in this regard because for one, it’s easy and universal and only requires a BIOS flash. For two, since microsoft actively patrols it’s network, getting an XBOX online with a flashed drive results in both the XBOX and the user’s account being banned from XBOX live. The result is that to engage in piracy, an XBOX user only has to do one thing which works for all the games and for two, he or she can never play the game online. UBISoft’s games have only recently had any online content and in the case of Ghost Recons previous to their newest titles, online support has been limited to co-op missions and team deathmatch. It didn’t bring anything to the table that games like battlefield and modern warfare didn’t, and in modern warfare’s case it’s a better ghost recon than ghost recon for having the same play styles and even more modes. I just don’t see a future niche for UBISoft unless they start making games people want to play online.

Compare this to the wii, where games are easy to pirate and the online service has no protection at all, and the piracy argument rings pretty hollow. While I think they’re avoiding the PC market where piracy is easier than the XBOX market, I think they’re doing it more because they’re shooting even lower than the consoles. I personally think they’re looking to enter the android/apple space on the tablets. Not only does that dovetail nicely with the play-for-free space (Android being java makes ports easier, but not as easy as Direct X) but it means the advertising revenue can be generated across all sizes of PCs from commodity laptops on up and in the cellphone space. There probably will be a market for more serious titles on the XBOX/PS, but it looks to me like UBI is more interested in the play for free space and was just looking for some excuse to avoid the “gamer” PC game space.

Thank god they didn’t go subscription like World of Warcraft.

Gnome is steadily improving, in a direction I am not interested in going. The UI continues to be unappealing, the lack of themes and configuration for keybindings (which continually have my hacks reset) makes Gnome worthless trash for a serious Linux user. The theming community produces the most hilarious amounts of bitching with comments similar to “Oh killer theme, how do I downgrade GNOME so I can use it?” Even the hacks don’t carry over. This continues on with GNOME into FC16 and it’s clearly GNOME’s problem.

KDE on the other hand, seems to get broken somewhere between FC16 and FC16′s upgrade to the newer 3.1 kernel. (3.1.0 versus 3.1.1). At least part of this is due to the intel graphics chipset in my laptop taking a huge crap on the kernel upgrade, so X didn’t come up correctly the first few times. The fix follows to be run as root:

1. init 1
2. rm -rf /tmp/*
3. rm -rf /home/knarrj/.kde.*
4. yum update intel\*
5. yum reinstall kdebase

Reboot.

Start KDE in safe mode, disable compositing, let it settle. The stupid neopumk or whatever it’s called semantic desktop service will cause the machine to chug. Disable that trash since it can’t be uninstalled and your desktop will be a lot faster.

Post configuration crap – all your network settings will be gone. Your desktop theme will most likely be gone. However, if you got bit by the KDE not working correctly after upgrade bug where KIO kills itself, then your fix is here!

Battlefield 3 – This is a must buy if you like tactical shooters. The graphics are awesome. The movement through the environment is fluid and you rarely get hung up on the levels or on dynamic debris from blown out buildings. The guns are really nice.

Lets start with what everyone likes to discuss – the guns. The guns are enough to a player flashbacks. The irons are right on, the tritium sights (little white dots) are nice and the sights move correctly. The laser pointer suffers from not being a real laser projected from the gun, but it’s not jarring if you’re not looking for it. The holo sight moves proportionally to the front sight in real life, but again, it’s “close enough” where it just wanders a bit. The guns feel real – the recoil is projected back and up instead of just blossoming the sights – and the sound is awesome. I set it to wartapes with extra stereo and it’s like a theatre. The downsides: Some guns shoot Hollywood style beach ball flames out the front. The tac light is stupidly bright and needs to be toned down, you can be standing in broad daylight and still get flared.

Graphics – Fantastic. The biggest thing which makes this game shine is the field effects. The rolling clouds on the battlefield and the dirt on the windshield makes this an awesome experience. It’s really hard to put into text, but the grit-factor makes this game awesome. What will blow my mind is a map where there’s wind which blows smoke grenade clouds across the battlefield. If I see that I’m going to call this game perfect.

The vehicles: Oh god this is where it shines. The tanks feel appropriately chunky. I don’t understand the turbo-boost on tanks and similar vehicles but whatever. Click one of the control sticks to use it. The tanks will get over any terrain – slowly. Tanks now kill people appropriately violently, no more shooting the main cannon at infantry and doing pitifully low splash damage. The tank cannon can be loaded with a variety of shells and each vehicle gets three perk slots. The gunner is now more than a “bonus ticket” for when someone kills a tank, they have their own vehicle perks, loadout, etc specific to whatever weapon system they’re using. Case in point, the pilot of the jets gets rockets or a cannon, but the backseat gets the guided JDAM bombs, countermeasures and heat seeking missiles. It’s now critically important flyers have a second seat. Moving whatever you’re riding in now also affects reticle blossom for all guns on the platform, which is awesome. Note that any open seat on any vehicle is a spawn point, so attackers aren’t just limited to spawning at the carrier, they can spawn directly in vehicles. However, where this really sucks is on a public game where people spawn in and immediately bail out. Case in point last night we had a cobra pilot using it as a spawn taxi instead of shooting people. Points are shared among the crew and I believe increase in relation to how many people are in the vehicle. Party wagons (APCs) can rack up a lot of points really quickly. Base point values are doubled from previous games, but kill points with PDWs are halved.

Destruction 2.MILLION – This is awesome. I’m still finding crap to blow up. The way the first game worked was they had a series of premade buildings and after you knew where to blow them up you could simply drop them in three C4 or so. This new engine assigns a texture and destructibility to a surface, so a wall you might have assumed is sold is not. The downside is that some walls are a LOT more solid than others and require tanks to kill them to open up new routes. Brink players will be at home with this although the walls which are destructible aren’t highlighted.

The good, the bad, and now the ugly – Hit detection is crap. You used to be able to make murder holes in things and now a wall you can see through is actually not open. Generally this happens when you see rebar, the area under the rebar still counts as the wall. It’s really annoying and I suspect this will be used by snipers or vex them terribly. People still use vehicles as personal devices. The last game I played with a carrier in it (battlefield vietnam for wake island) had jetskis just for this purpose. I don’t think jetskis were really in vietnam, but it fixed the problem. The spawn system works to fix this. People dolphin dive pretty much whenever you shoot at them (jump to prone), they need to really fix this because while they don’t appear prone in mid-air like MW2, the hit detection seems to miss more often than not when they do this. Grenades (and explosives in general) behave really oddly where a grenade you think you’re far enough from will kill you, but sometimes a grenade right next to you won’t. It largely depends on if the grenade is above or below you, small variances in terrain seem to cause big variances in damage.

Online – EA servers are down constantly. This is how every battlefield game to ever come out has been. What’s really annoying is PC servers show up in the server browser but if EA central is down, you can’t join them. It’s not clear to me if you can join PC games or not, but it’s really annoying to see them in the browser and get the error “Could not contact EA online” when trying to play multi. I’m sure this will be fixed shortly.

My LHBS got their apple cider buckets in and I had to make cider. The recipe (I am working from a recipe since I have little cider experience) calls for diluting the cider to 10 gallons and throwing in two yeast packets. The tasting room at the homebrew store had some really good stuff. I am confident in this recipe. However, before we got into the recipe at the homebrew store, I had to do test runs. Test runs are like most other homebrew things where I take cheap glass jars (1 gallon) and put whatever I want in there. In this case, I prefer carlos rossi wines. My wife likes their blush and their sangria, and I like to ferment things in them. 1 gallon is also a good size since 1 gallon will scale to 5 easily. (There are scaling issues with some recipes, but generally unless you’re working with spices it’s mostly immaterial).

I got one gallon of standard issue apple juice, and 1 lbs of brown sugar. I heated the apple juice just enough to get the sugar to dissolve and put that in my carlos rossi jar. The carlos rossi wine jugs accept 6 or 6.5 bungs, I prefer 6.5 because it’s harder to push them into the neck. In one jug of delicious fortified apple juice I put in WLP001 (Cali Common) and in the other jug I put in WLP530 (Abbey Ale). Then I let them sit. The WLP001 sort of poked along (it’s known for this), but the WLP530 went off like a rocket. The WLP530 took a month to stop bubbling, the WLP001 was done in two weeks or so.

But, how does it taste?

The WLP001 is basically a bitch drink, it tastes like sweet cider, which is still very drinkable with no discernible alcohol taste. For something which is firmly session beer (4%), it’s quite drinkable. We also found mixing it with mead gives it really interesting notes. The Abbey Ale yeast managed to get it’s cider up to 8%, but it’s wonderfully dry, sharp stuff without being offensive. The abbey ale yeast managed to be fruity with just a touch of ester, it had a wonderful warm nose and a sharp taste on the tongue. Even for being still, it really came out well, and I would love to carbonate it.

That being said, the 10 gallons from the main batch is going to consume both my kegs if I keg it, but I plan on bottling as much as I can and possibly force carbing the rest. The main batch is fermented with wine yeast, but I almost wish I had done a five gallon batch with the abbey ale yeast and 5lbs brown sugar. Well, there’s always next year…

The current state of the kegerator: Orange soda, ginger beer, two ciders

From Drop Box

Blackberry included for scale. The blackberry did not go through the grinder. As you can see, this isn’t a huge system. That’s good though, it still needs to be hand cranked. For reference, it has three settings (small flake, large flake, flower) but these settings have a stop between them for giving us six total settings. To further make this hilarious, there’s really nothing stopping you from having stops in between there so long as you keep your hand on the adjustment knob.

How do we get more grain in there?

Make a funnel!

It comes with a wooden box which protects the plastic funnel for shipping, so I didn’t see a problem using that for something else. I was already at walmart for the dog food bin (air tight, 50lbs, or one grain bag) so what else could I do but buy a cheap bowl?

I took my vibratory cutter and plunge cut the bottom of the bowl. To get the right shape, take the wood it shipped in and trace it on the bottom of the bowl. Cut on the inside of these lines so that there’s a tight fit.

From Drop Box

Happy Halloween! Now all I need is to buy bulk grain and roast it myself and I am set! Special thanks to my awesome wife for getting me MOAR BEER TOYS.

The problem: KB5 is rootable via SuperOneClick BUT you can’t use clockwork. I suspect it’s because T-Mobile got seriously burned with the voodoo kernel and it’s Samsungs fault for not sticking to EXT3/4. On the other hand, it’s the users fault for not disabling voodoo before upgrading. That being said, if you’re reading this it’s because you didn’t send your phone in because you bricked it with voodoo.

BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING: In the root of the internal sd card, make a folder called Voodoo (capitol V), and make a subfolder in there called disable-lagfix (all lowercase).

Step 1: Verify you can boot into download mode. To do this, hold VOL UP and VOL DOWN. Plug in the USB or the charger. If you get the shit shoveling android, you’re doing it right. If you don’t enter download mode, STOP. Figure out why.

Step 2: Grab Heimdall. Odin is crap. Thats the windows version.

Step 3: Grab any clockwork enabled kernel. I suggest overstock, which also works with Cyanogen. Its the de-facto kernel for voodoo and flashing, but most importantly it includes the clockwork recovery.

Step 4: Enter download mode, connect the phone and wait for the driver installation to fail. Now run zadig.exe from the heimdall drivers folder. Click “install drivers”. Windows will bitch. Install it anyway.

Step 5: With the phone connected and in download mode, open heimdall. Select the kernel I told you to download earlier. In the kernel field in heimdall, select the kernel. Click flash. The phone will reboot when this is done. Don’t panic, the phone will be slow and junky when it first starts. Don’t touch it for 10 minutes or so. I have no idea what the fuck it’s doing.

Step 6: Power off the phone. Disconnect the USB/Charger. Press and hold VOL UP and VOL DOWN and POWER until you see the word “vibrant”. You will be in red clockwork. Choose “backup” and let it do it’s thing. Once you choose backup you can plug the charger back in.

The end. You can now use clockwork to flash whatever ROM you want and you can use your old ROM to restore if you don’t like it.