Huck's Journal of Sorts

EDIT: If you have any inquiries or are getting stuck with updating the ROM, kindly let me know either on the LeapFrog Epic Guy page on Facebook, or on my personal Facebook account . So I got my hands on a pair of these units from a friend of mine who was generous enough to donate for free. While getting these in-store demo units to work as a retail device is a pain and a half to do (more on that in a later post), I've had fun modding and poking into the internals to see what can be done with it. There are actually a LOT of hidden and/or dummied out features in the tablet, most of which can be accessed through the open-source Activity Launcher . For instance, LeapFrog dummied out access to the lock screen settings by removing menu references to said options in Settings. They disabled the AOSP lock screen presumably to save children the (supposed) frustration of having to unlock their device upon using it. It is however possible to re-enable it and add a lock pattern or a sim...

Felt like sharing this as most of them South Asian GSM bloggers are, suffice it to say, being scrooges or something, asking for $$$ to have the firmware package's password to be unlocked as a rather low-brow way to earn money. Not that I have anything against them, mind you, but as I said on my previous post, this business model of theirs only serves to inconvenience both clients and technicians alike.     I dumped this off my Galaxy S7 clone, a few weeks or so after I got the phone off the service centre when they repaired it as I made the unfortunate mistake of flashing the wrong ROM. It should work with certain Galaxy S7 replicas using preloader_gxq6580_weg_l.bin as the preloader; mine's the one with the plastic frame and the microphone pin on the wrong side of the device. Firmware info: CPU: MT6580 SW:0000 Ver: CA00 Downloading Boot8 ... EMMC Size: 0x01C3000000 Flash Type: EMMC INT/EXT RAM  Size: 0x0+0x0 Reading infr(EMMC)... id:Z6U030HA_V105En ...

OK, this isn't to say that I have anything against those who maintain "GSM" repair sites and such, nor am I going to be too sour at them either. It's that if there's anything that truly grinds my gears when it comes to smart device servicing, it's the practise of locking down most if not all firmware RAR/ZIP files with a password, and charging people a fee to have that particular SP Flash Tool package unlocked. Let's say you, or your client, has an obscure Xperia clone bought off some flea market stall or on DHGate (assuming you managed to troll the Customs bureau or DHL). You, or that client of yours, forgot to back up the stock firmware, and out of haste managed to mess it up royally and ended up with a non-functional device. In the case of a name-brand, legitimate handset, it's only the matter of googling for "Lenovo A369i stock ROM" or something like that. Some lesser-known phones or tabs would understandably be harder to find firmwa...

Let me say first that while I've been into the Hackintosh scene for like seven or eight years, I am still learning the ropes with some aspects such as DSDT and a few other things. But let me share this install guide for you lads and lasses who are interested in cobbling up a Hackintosh of your own. This guide is mostly based on Elad Nava's El Capitan installation guide, albeit with a few tweaks to account for the new OS and system to be installed on, assuming that you're on a G3258-based system. In my case, I am using a PC with the following specs: ASUS H81M-D (BIOS revision 2204) Pentium G3258 @ 3.2Ghz Kingston ValueRAM 8GB DDR3 GeForce GTX 750 2GB GDDR5 Western Digital WD10EZEX 1TB You'll also need an existing Mac or PC to prepare the USB stick to be used for installation. There are guides and/or tools out there that allow for a doing so without a Mac, but I'm not sure about that myself. If you don't have an existing Mac, I recommend using a ...

So a friend of mine gave me a copy of American Girls Dress Designer for the PC, and while it seems fine and dandy for the most part, it has this one major flaw, something which accounts for why it fails to run properly on Windows systems post-98/ME: As you can see, using anything that invokes a pop-up window, such as Print, Quit or Select Dress, leads to this error. At first I thought it had something to do with DirectDraw as what some of the lads over at Vogons suggested , but none of the hacks at hand were of any use. Neither does Wine despite my expectations with it being able to run older games with ease. :/ So what I did next was I fired up OllyDbg and got an INVALID_WINDOW_HANDLE error upon reproducing the bug. To further clarify things I used this API debugger and ended up with this: As you can see, the debugger says the application is calling an invalid menu handle - the CreateWindowEx API call allows programmers to define a menu to a window. But since there a...

The Filipino mainstream sure aren't the only ones known for ad-hominems and brash mud-slinging. I may not be close friends with the Chrisman couple, i.e. Sarah and Gabriel, but I can somehow relate to how people with dissenting views are being put down by the status quo. Sure enough, they have some points as to how the Victorian era isn't the best time period ever, but as some would rebut, is the present any ideal either? And while the couple's hobby of theirs may sound like serious business , what's with all the fuss and arguments against them? They may have made a mistake or two along the way, but it isn't in their goals to get in any person's way or be like those swag/yolo/whatever freaks who care more about superficiality and childish hedonism. Free speech sure is a double-edged sword, as they say. You'd rally for stuff like LGBT rights and whatnot, and yet when it comes to stuff like what Sarah and her husband happily does, or in my case, adul...

Well, it's been a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong while since I updated this blog, and as per a suggestion from a friend of mine, I thought maybe I could at least breathe in some new life into this. Just recently an online book store has leaked what appears to be covers for the BeForever'd versions of American Girl's historical mystery books, plus new ones to go along with it. Some of it is more or less OK, but the way they pulled it off just goes to show how messed up AG has become, and how it's a stark contrast to what we know and love about the company. TBH I'm a relative newcomer to the franchise compared to veteran collectors out there, but I can see the effort Pleasant Rowland and her crew pulled off. Sure enough, you can tell that the reason for this rabid girlish-ness has to do with trends and their ways to appeal to the target market, but for starters it's just plain wrong for Kit to have a Gymboree dress or two, and as a subtle nitpick of mine...