Bye, Bye NPAPI

I've been talking about this since last year here and here. And now it happened.

Chrome version 37 added 64-bit support to the stable channel. And took away NPAPI.

Currently, the only significant known issue is the lack of 32-bit NPAPI plugin support.

To get to 64-bit, go to the Chrome Windows 64-bit download page.

Update: Mac as well.

Too Far

Now I'm the biggest Google fan there is.

But...

Look at this Google Now card I got recently at my daughter's house.

The "Watching TV?" card says "Sony TV found on Wi-Fi network."

I'm not sure I'm Ok with my Android phone scanning every Wi-Fi network I connect to looking for TVs. What else is it looking for? Nests?

The Wi-Fi network is WPA2-PSK so I had to authenticate to it but I didn't expect the Android phone to scan it.

Not happy.

I Miss Sun

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reminded me of the accomplishments of Sun.

When my group was struggling with processor capacity and availability we came across what became Sun's Enterprise 10000 (E10k). At that time the system didn't even have a name. The development group had just been bought from Cray and was being incorporated into Sun. When we visited their facility it was in San Diego. I have a Cray t-shirt with a dragon on it from that visit. There's a good article on the background of the E10k here.

We bought one for $1,000,000 and it fundamentally changed the way we provided services in our Unix environment.

On one of our visits to Sun Quentin in Menlo Park we saw "Thumper." I fell in love. We never bought any X4500s but I have bought several Drobos which are very similar function.

I was also in Menlo Park when Sun unveiled their "Blackbox". I was standing in the crowd to Schwartz's left in this video.

And we all keep hearing about Oracle's copyright claim against Google's use of the Java API. That's not the whole story. Here's Sun's position at the time Google adopted this. Notice that that's on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine as Oracle took down the original blog.

The good folks are still around. You'll know them when you run into them. Tell them I said hello.

Google Wallet

My Moto X has NFC and supports Google Wallet. I installed the app and connected my debit card to it.

I have been using Google Wallet for various online transactions but I've begun using it for retail transactions. Surprisingly I've found more establishments than I expected supporting NFC. When you check out, look for this symbol on the terminal.

Just a couple of examples of where I've found NFC are McDonalds, OfficeDepot, CVS, Home Depot, PetCo, Walgreens and even Local Express in Hernando.

It seems to require me to unlock the phone and input my Google Wallet PIN. McDonalds was blown away. They had never had anyone else do it. OfficeDepot still wanted me to sign the receipt.

There's still no NFC support on the iPhone but that may be coming.

It's early yet but I'm glad to see progress.

Android Keyboards

Even in my Treo 650 days I preferred using a stroke-based input method over the QWERTY keyboards. On my first Android device I used Graffiti Pro for Android. While that worked great it got kind of embarrassing and it never did support all the special characters.

Pecking away on a touch keyboard made me feel like I was using an iPhone. Then I discovered Swype. Initially it was in "beta" and you had to register for the beta and then sideload it.

Swype is all grown up now and it has been my mainstay keyboard for a while.

Then with recent releases of Android the AOSP and Google Keyboards have incorporated swiping input. So with my Moto X I started off with the Google Keyboard.

But my eyes aren't what they used to be. I experimented with Swype's themes and settled on "Night" but it still didn't have the size or contrast of the alternate characters that I wanted. And since Swype has bought Nuance they don't use Google's speech to text but their own. I don't need to have to manage two different speech to text engines.

Then recently Lifehacker did a poll on Android keyboards, SwiftKey was the runaway winner.

So I took a look. These are from my CyanogenMod 11 Skyrocket.


Obviously the AOSP and Google Keyboard are very similar. The good things are that the speech button is dedicated but the alternate characters are practically impossible to read on the AOSP. The Google Keyboard is worse in that the alternate characters seemed to require selecting the ?123 key first. The speech button is to the left of the Space bar on both.

The Swype "Night" theme gave me the greatest contrast for the alternate characters but they are still grey on grey. It's nice that the ' and - are alternate characters on either side of the Space bar. But the speech button is immediately adjacent to the Return key. And the speech recognition is Nuance.

Finally SwiftKey "Holo" theme provides the highest contrast for the alternate characters as they are blue on grey. The speech button is back to the left of the Space bar away from Return key. Unfortunately it is an alternate so you have to tap and hold to activate it. ,!" are alternate keys over the . to the right of the Space bar. This means that you have to hold down the . key until a little bar pops up with ,!? and then you slide to select one.

So I used SwiftKey for a while.

What I found was that I was so used to the characteristics of Swype that SwiftKey threw me off. Specific examples are 1) When you finish swiping a word and lift your finger, Swype shows you alternative words. SwiftKey shows you possible next words based on your writing style. 2) When you finish swiping a word and lift your finger, if you don't like the word that Swype has given you Backspace erases the entire word. With SwiftKey Backspaces erases it letter by letter. 3) SwiftKey doesn't let you swipe names in the To: field of an e-mail. I can't imagine why and maybe I just haven't found the trick but still ...

So what to do?

I've actually gone back to the Google Keyboard. I discovered quite by accident that if you tap and hold on the . key to the right of the Space bar that a little bar pops up with most of the punctuation on it.

The number keys even do the same kind of thing offering fractions and exponents.

Android L was announced at Google IO. In L is a new keyboard. It has already showed up on Google Play.

It builds on the previous Google Keyboard by adding a , on the main screen and moving the voice icon up to the top where it is less likely to get tapped by accident. You can also hide the voice icon if you don't use it.

Time will tell.

Storm Clouds

During the last week in June, several of Microsoft's cloud services had outages. This is not picking on Microsoft as Google had outages as well. It's just that I found a good discussion about the impact of the Microsoft outages.

---

In outages this week, Microsoft’s online Exchange service was down for nine hours, crippling Office 365 and hosted Outlook accounts across North America and Mexico, just after its unified communications service also crashed.

Aside from the fact that entire businesses were left unable to read or write email in the Office 365 downtime, users were also pretty ticked off with Microsoft’s response. User Trec posted on the Office 365 community page:

Tried to contact support by phone, and after half hour, the call was dropped on both occasions. It seems the support guys are saturated and there are not enough staff for an issue like this one.

While Jim1001 said:

Our entire corporation cannot send or receive emails from Outlook (Office 365 Exchange) or even the OWA web browser as of 8AM MST time this morning June 24, 2014! I have never seen a world-wide email go down like this.

And MacBuffalo said:

Office365 is beginning to look like a very poor choice for mission critical services.

Lync Online, which provides VoIP, corporate IM and video conferencing had also briefly crashed two days before, leaving some customers, like ThomasGallaway, suffering a double whammy:

Down for 3 hours now. When going to Calendar outlook freezes. Send/receive works on iPhone. This sucks as we were hit yesterday by the lync outage. Today email. What's going on M$?

---

Just as in previous cloud services outages the provider (just happened to be Microsoft in this case) couldn't handle responding to customers about the situation. This still makes me worry about putting a corporation's systems in a public cloud where the provider can't provide the same level of accountability as internal services.

Unlike previous cloud services outages Microsoft's Rajesh Jha, Corporate Vice President, Office 365 Engineering has offered an explanation of the outage. The Corporate Vice President of Customer Service has been quiet.

My previous posts on this topic:

     When Clouds Go Bump
     When Clouds Go Thump
     Lessons from the Cloud
     When Clouds Go Bump Revisited
     To Be Fair
     To Be Fair, Again
     To Be Fair, Again and Again

Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS30

My old beloved Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 died recently. No, I didn't drop it into soup. It stopped recognizing the SD card. It was more than 3 years old so I started looking for a replacement.

When I researched point and shoot cameras a couple kept coming up, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS30 the successor the my ZS7 and the Canon PowerShot SX280 HS.

This comparison pretty well sums up what I found. It's a pretty close decision.

A couple of things pushed me to the ZS30.

The ZS30 has a touch screen. It's not as over the top as the my Samsung CL-65 was. The use case for the touch screen that made a difference to me is that while you are recording a video you can simply tap the screen to take a still photo. Now admittedly you have to configure that before you start recording but still...

The ZS30 charges its battery from a USB cable while the battery is still in the camera. Unfortunately the USB cable has a proprietary connector on the camera end. You can buy an external battery charger.

The Wi-Fi on the ZS30 supports the obligatory web services but what I've found more useful is that it natively supports Windows shares. Without any software installed on a PC the ZS30 can connect via Wi-Fi to a folder on the PC and copy selected images/videos to that folder. That's really nice.

The SX280 has a reputation for a battery problem that is either resolved or not depending on who you listen to. It seems to have to do with a low battery indicator that comes on while recording video. Some users report that this causes the camera to power down. Some users report that it is just a nuisance.

I used the same 8GB SD card that I had in the ZS7. I figured out how to make the file numbering on the ZS30 follow the ZS7.

You'll recall that I did a thorough test of the ZS7's GPS capabilities. That resulted in my falling back to a Blackberry to record GPS information. On my first outing I compared the geotags from the ZS30 to those from my Moto X. I got good clustering from the ZS30. Here's the map of the tags.

I flashed the firmware up to v1.3.

Image capture
Camera type	Point & Shoot, GPS Capable, Wi-Fi Capable
Resolution	18.1 effective megapixels
Image sizes	4:3 Aspect Ratio:  4,896 x 3,672 pixels (18M),  4,000 x 3,000 pixels (12M EZ), 3,264 x 2,448 (8M EZ), 2,560 x 1,920 pixels (5M EZ), 2,048 x 1,536 pixels (3M EZ), 640 x 480 pixels (0.3M EZ) 3:2 Aspect Ratio: 4,896 x 3,264 pixels (16M), 4,000 x 2,672 pixels (10.5M EZ), 3,264 x 2,176 pixels (7M EZ), 2,560 x 1,712 pixels (4.5M EZ), 2,048 x 1,360 pixels (2.5M EZ), 640 x 424 pixels (0.3M EZ) 16:9 Aspect Ratio:  4,896 x 2,752 pixels (13.5M), 4,000 x 2,248 pixels (9M EZ), 3,264 x 1,840 pixels (6M EZ), 2,560 x 1,440 pixels (3.5M EZ), 1,920 x 1,080 pixels (2M EZ), 640 x 360 pixels (0.2M EZ) 1:1 Aspect Ratio: 3,664 x 3664 pixels (10.5M), 2,992 x 2,992 pixels (7.5M EZ), 2,448 x 2,448 pixels (6M EZ), 1,920 x 1,920 pixels (3.5M EZ), 1,536 x 1,536 pixels (2.5M EZ), 480 x 480 pixels (0.2M EZ)
File formats	DCF, JPEG (Exif 2.3), MPO : 3D Image
Image sensor type	1/2.33 inch MOS
Image processor type	not specified
Image stabilization technology	Optical Image Stabilization
Expendable recording media type	SD Card, SDHC Card, SDXC Card
Video capture
File format	AVCHD, MP4
Video size	1280 x 720 pixels, 640 x 480 pixels, 1920 x 1080 pixels
Lens and focus
Lens type	LEICA DC Vario-Elmarit
Lens construction	12 elements; 10 groups; others: 3 aspherical elements, 6 aspherical surfaces, 2 ED elements
Optical Zoom	20 x zoom
Digital zoom	4 x
Lens mount	Fixed
Filters	Not Available
Maximum aperture	F3.3 (W) - F6.4 (T)
Minimum aperture	f3.3 (w) - f6.4 (t) / mutistage Iris Diaphragm - f3.3 - f8 (w), f6.4 - 8 (t)
Focal length	4.3mm - 86.0mm (24 - 480mm in 35mm equiv.) / (28-560mm in 35mm equiv. in video recording)
Focusing area mode(s)	continuous AF, macro AF, Tracking AF, normal AF, Quick AF, Macro Zoom
Focusing distance	0.5m (w) - infinity / 2.0m (tele) - infinity , 0.03m (w) - infinity / 1.0m (t) - infinity
Exposure and imaging
Shooting / Drive modes	continuous, Movie, self-timer (2 and 10 sec delay), still
Exposure / Capture modes	aperture priority, manual, Program AE, shutter priority
Scene modes	3D mode, baby 1, baby 2, food, glass through, handheld night scene, HDR, high sensitivity, night portrait, night scenery, pet, portrait, scene (scenery), soft skin, sports, starry sky, sunset, underwater
Exposure Metering System	center-weighted, intelligent multiple, spot
Exposure compensation	±2 EV (1/3 EV steps)
Sensitivity	Auto / i.ISO / 100 / 200 / 400 / 800 / 1600 High Sensitivity Mode (1600 - 6400)
Shutter type	combined mechanical and electronic
Shutter speed	1/2000 sec to 4 sec
White balance mode	auto, cloudy, daylight, incandescent, shade, white balance adjustment, white set
Picture effects / Color modes	sepia, soft focus, retro, miniature effect, expressive, high dynamic, cross process, toy camera, dynamic monochrome, high key, low key, impressive art, star filter, one point color
Flash and lighting
Flash Type	built-in auto
Flash Mode	auto, auto with red-eye reduction, forced on/off, slow sync + red eye reduction
Flash effective range	0.6m - 6.4m (wide - ISO Auto), 1.0m - 3.3m (tele - ISO Auto)
Maximum flash synchronization speed	adjusted to camera's shutter speed
Physical characteristics
Dimensions	108.3mm x 58.9mm x 27.7mm / 4.26" x 2.32" x 1.09"
Weight	172 grams
Available color(s)	silver, black, white
Connectivity
Interface	USB 2.0 (high-speed), HDMI Mini connector, AV output (NTSC)
Microphone and Speaker	built-in stereo microphone, built-in monaural speaker
Flash connection	Not Available
Tripod socket	standard 1/4 inch
Remote control	Not Available
Cable release capability	Not Available
Viewing features
Display	3.0" / LCD / 460,000 dots
Viewfinder	Not Available
Menu language(s)	Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese
Power
Power source	Li-ion battery pack (3.6V, Minimum: 895mAh) (included)
Camera management
Additional features
Water Resistant Capabilities	Not Available
Underwater capabilities	no
Included "in the box"
Accessories	AC adapter/charger, hand strap, lithium ion battery, USB cable, ■ Supplied accessories may vary by region or country!, Lithium Ion Battery Charger
Software	Adobe Acrobat Reader, PHOTOfunSTUDIO 9.0 SE

Ten Years Ago Today

Ten years ago today I began this blog. My first post was a very brief recap of a recent trip we had taken to Canada's Maritime Provinces.

The second post was a technical topic on gmail. I've focused subsequent travel posts here.

I'm now approaching 500 posts over those 10 years.

Thanks for reading.

Here I Go Again

Be forewarned. Here I go again.

There were a couple of announcements at Google I/O 2014 that I think are more connected than they appear at first.

But to set them up, I've got to backtrack a little.

Remember my previous discussion about platforms?

I wonder if Chrome is the alternative. It's certainly a ways out in the future but it's cloud-based and hardware agnostic.

And then my speculation on removing NPAPI from Chrome?

I believe that this is a deliberate effort on Google's part to remove all the NPAPI extensions from Chrome. This goes beyond security though. This is a platform issue.

Now Google has said that Android apps will run on Chromebooks.

Google will soon allow users to install Android apps on their Chromebooks.

Gosh. How will they do that? They'd need a new runtime platform for their apps.

Bingo!

ART replaces Dalvik as the default compiler for the next Android release.

They'd need this compiler to create system-dependent code.

ART, on the other hand, compiles the intermediate language, Dalvik bytecode, into a system-dependent binary.

Do you see the handwriting on the wall? There are going to be 2 (or more) versions of ART. One that runs on ARM processors and one that runs on x86. Remember that Android and Chrome OS are both built on Linux.

This is the platform convergence that was speculated when Sundar Pichai took over Android.

You heard it here first.

Plan B Isn't Good Enough

I subscribe to the Windows Secrets newsletter. Recently they had an article on TrueCrypt. I'm not ready to take a position on that fiasco but Susan Bradley had a quote that got me thinking.

The TrueCrypt saga highlights the importance of having a Plan B for all our important computing services.

This reminded me of a discussion at FedEx when we were moving our data center. As I was discussing this with our Vice President he asked about our "Plan B." I told him I had plans all the way down to "Plan Z."

An example was that when we backed up the systems for the move, we made 2 sets of backups. Then when we transported them across town we used 2 completely different routes.

At FedEx we learned to have primary, secondary, and tertiary plans. When loading an airplane 1) run weights and balances, 2) put ballast in the front of the plane, and 3) tie the nose wheel to the ground. And always have a backup plane, e.g. "Plan Z."

Recently a CIO of a local transportation company asked me:

...we have full replication between the two data centers at the disk array level, should we still be making tape backups for off-site storage?

What do you think my answer to him was?

We learned the answer at FedEx: primary, secondary, tertiary.

And remember my backup solutions?

Belt, suspenders, and raincoat.

Plan B isn't good enough.

Battery Usage

I've admitted my OCD tendencies before. Here I go again.

I've been tracking the Android battery usage of my Skyrocket and Moto X. Every evening after 10:00 I navigate to Settings / Battery and screenshot the overall usage and the highest element.

Now that I've got some time under my belt with the Moto X I had the feeling that its battery usage was much better than the Skyrocket. Since the time off battery will vary from day to day I calculated the % of battery usage per hour.

Just as background, the Skyrocket was running Ice Cream Sandwich and the Moto X was running KitKat. I upgraded from 4.4.2 to 4.4.3 in the middle of this period but I can't tell that it made any difference.

While the chart was interesting...

While the Moto X was clearly better than the Skyrocket it was all over the place.

I think the best way to look at it is a simple average.

The Skyrocket was 4.12 % per hour and the Moto X was 3.04 % per hour.

Boundaries, Boundaries, Boundaries

You know the old saying in real estate, the most 3 important things in real estate are Location, Location, Location. Similarly in IT systems the 3 most important things are Boundaries, Boundaries, Boundaries.

Every boundary is an opportunity and not a good kind of opportunity.

This was brought home to me in Brian Krebs' recent post on Complexity as the Enemy of Security. Brian was discussing security and how complexity contributed to security exposures.

This maxim is true in many areas of IT. Recently I was discussing with a VP of a transportation firm on how to horizontally expand application servers for an existing application. He wanted to put an additional box in front of the application servers. I discouraged that because it added an additional boundary to the system. My suggestion was to do "outside in" routing at the remote clients and not introduce that additional boundary.

I used this methodology at a large forest products corporation to consolidate database and application server instances into a large server. While the instances still had their separate identities they were all contained in a single physical box. It made a tremendous improvement in availability.

I explored this phenomenon with the CFO relating how the old mainframe systems were easier to support because they used point-to-point circuits instead of TCP/IP networks. She hadn't considered this. It is incumbent on IT professionals to make sure that executives understand the downside of complexity.

At an international package delivery company we used this methodology to maintain extraordinary high availability. The mathematics of availability show that compounding 99% availability loses 1% for each additional boundary.

And boundaries aren't just physical. This maxim can be applied to changes in status of a system. Every time a system changes status there is an opportunity for it to fail. Simply put, if you don't reboot a server you won't suffer a restart problem.

While a single monolithic system won't meet today's demands, every boundary should be closely examined to determine if it can be eliminated.

Internet Bandwidth

Ok, so I'm OCD. But still some of the details I keep up with are interesting (to me at least).

I've been tracking my Internet bandwidth since mid-2011.

The stacked bars are Comcast cable bandwidth. The yellow line is AT&T wireless bandwidth (scale is on right axis). The units are KB so 100,000 represents 100GB. The blue is the difference in what Comcast reports versus what my router reports.

I switched from AT&T DSL to Comcast in July 2013.

I started using CrashPlan for backups in January 2014.

I pretty much don't stream video other than an occasional YouTube. No Netflix or Hulu.

I attribute the change in May 2014 to uploading and downloading home videos. That's probably worth a post in itself. Stay tuned.

The jump in wireless bandwidth in March and April is tethering while I was traveling.

Conclusions?

1. As expected my bandwidth usage (and yours) continues to climb at over 40% per year.
2. Comcast does a pretty good job of measuring it.
3. I can already see Comcast's bandwidth cap of 300GB looming in my future.
4. I love my AT&T MobilShare Value 10GB plan with tethering.

All I Want To Do

All I want to do is to be able to use Google Contacts groups in the Gmail app on my wife's iPhone. That seems so straightforward. But you gotta remember that Steve Jobs was involved.

I searched and researched. What I came up with was a couple of apps from Playa Apps - Contacts Sync for Google Gmail with Auto Sync and A2Z Contacts. They both have really good ratings and reviews and only cost 99¢ each.

I'm using the Google Gmail app on my iPad and have the contacts syncing with CardDAV. It all works perfectly. No thanks to Google for killing the Exchange ActiveSync interface. It wasn't obvious what I had to do to that configuration to coexist with Contacts Sync so I wrote an e-mail to Playa App's support.

Being anxious I just popped for the 99¢ and installed the app. It prompted me to read the user guide inside the app which explained to turn off CardDAV. That worked fine and the contacts synced perfectly

Then I tried to send an e-mail to one of those groups using the Gmail iOS app and couldn't find how to do that. I then came across "A2Z Contacts - Contact Manager." Again it wasn't obvious if it would let me send e-mail to groups using the Gmail iOS app or did it have its own mail interface?

99¢ later I had the installed A2Z Contacts and the user guide inside the app explained it allows you to send group emails from it's own interface and it also allows you to create "email lists" to send group emails directly from the Mail app or the Gmail app.

So off I went to exercise it.

Oh, well.

First, on the iTunes page for "Contacts Sync for Google Gmail with Auto Sync" it says "SYNCS AUTOMATICALLY!"

Nope. Not so much.

When you try to set it to sync automatically you get this:

Maybe I should have known this but the iTunes section on In-App purchases wasn't clear.

The user guide cautions to ensure that there aren't duplicate contacts in Google Contacts so I checked that.

But "Contacts Sync" thinks differently.

And the referenced log didn't help me resolve this.

But I proceeded and tried to use A2Z to create an "e-mail list" the process worked fine. Until I got this screen:

"Periodically update your e-mail lists in A2Z Contacts so that they match the latest data in your groups."

I'm trying to do this so my wife can send e-mails to a group that she maintains in web Gmail. There are just too many manual steps in this process.

I don't fault the developer of these apps at all. He has been prompt and helpful in his responses. I realize the limitations that Apple puts on developers.

The only alternative I see is for me to manually create the same type of "e-mail list" on the web Gmail and let her use it from her iPhone Gmail app.

Simdevil

In my Moto X post, I mentioned that I had gotten a MediaDevil Simdevil 3-in-1 SIM card adapter kit.

I wasn't quite sure how it would work but I tried it the other day to put my nano-SIM in my Skyrocket after I flashed it with KitKat.

It worked perfectly. The Simdevil has a very thin film on the non-contact side of the nano-SIM.

The nano-SIM is a press fit in the Simdevil. I actually put the Simdevil and the nano-SIM on my granite kitchen counter and pressed them together.

MediaDevil is a British company and they included a couple of sticks of Maoam in the package. Nice!

KitKat for Everyone

After I got the Moto X, I got brave about flashing the Skyrocket. As usual I went looking to CyanogenMod.

With my new bravado, I looked at the unofficial CyanogenMod Android 4.4 (CM 11). The TeamChopsticks group hasn't released an Alpha since December 2013 but they keep building nightlies so I went with the latest nightly (cm-11-20140514-NIGHTLY-skyrocket.zip). Why not?

The release notes are here. As is typical Step 1 is an understatement.

1. YOU MUST USE THIS RECOVERY OR YOU WILL SOFT BRICK: Install CWM >6.0.3.7for Skyrocket

Look carefully at that referenced file (recovery-skyrocket-6037.zip). ".zip" is the crucial part.

The reason is that the standard recovery won't let you flash a new recovery so you have to use ODIN. There's the catch. ODIN won't flash .zip files.

Here we go again. It would really be nice if Step 1 discussed the intricacies of that.

A little Google searching and I turned up this that describes how to install CWM (ClockWorkMod Recovery) on the Skyrocket. That works like a charm and it takes longer to read it twice as it demands than it does to perform the flashing of the recovery.

But there's a catch. The recoveries referenced in that post aren't the ones that are referenced in the Release Notes.

I wasn't the only one lost in the wilderness. I found this post that asked the question and got a good answer.

You can only flash the zip in a custom recovery. If you don't have a custom recovery you need to install it with Odin. You'll need a .tar.md5 recovery file to flash in Odin.

Nothing is ever simple. So I used ODIN to flash twrp_2.7.0.0_skyrocket_vincom.tar.md5. I used TWRP to take a nandroid backup of the Skyrocket's 4.1.2 and copied it to my laptop via USB. That was the longest step in the whole process, about 20 minutes. While connected I copied the recovery-skyrocket-6037.zip, the CM 11 ROM and the gapps package to the root of my internal SD card.

Then I used TWRP to flash recovery-skyrocket-6037.zip.

I already had the required radio so I restarted in CWM recovery did the wipe as instructed. Then I just flashed the the ROM and gapps in sequence and rebooted.

BINGO! KitKat. My boot only took a few seconds.

While this isn't hard, there has to be a more direct way to get there.

Anyway, now I'm off!

Since I use Google Backup and Restore, all my apps started downloading and installing. I sat back and watched them for an hour or so and began playing with it.

I have to say that it is awesome.

So now, Google Now Launcher, Google Camera, ...

Now all my Android devices are KitKat.

But what do I do with the Moto X?

Moto X

My Skyrocket is getting long in the tooth. And slow. I think that the slowness is due to the lack of TRIM. And we know what the cure for that is don't we? Android 4.3. But wait, AT&T hasn't pushed 4.3 to the Skyrocket and never will. I can't complain. AT&T has upgraded the Skyrocket twice since I've had it.

So I turned to my favorite ROM, CyanogenMod. Hmmm, they haven't released Android 4.4 (KitKat) for the Skyrocket. There is a stable version of Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean) for the Skyrocket but it hasn't been updated since December 2013. I don't want to go to an old Android.

Sounds like a good enough reason to purchase a new phone!

You'll remember that I'm sensitive to size. That's why I chose the Skyrocket (Galaxy S2) over the Galaxy S3. So I went looking for a Galaxy S4 Mini. AT&T hasn't offered that yet so I was going to have to get it unlocked. That's already a generation back compared to the S5 and Samsung hasn't pushed KitKat to it. That didn't sound like a good place to land so I kept looking.

What I found was that newer phones than my Skyrocket have actually gotten smaller while increasing the screen size due to the smaller bezels. I could have my cake and eat it too!

I ended up with the Google Moto X.

Motorola was having a May Day sale for $325 for the unlocked GSM model with 32GB so I went for it. It's marginally smaller than the Skyrocket with higher resolution.

Do you think I have enough frequencies?

I used Moto Maker to build my own Moto X. I chose "Woven Black" (looks like carbon fiber) for the back, a black front, "Metallic Silver" for an accent color, and a personalized signature.

I found a carbon fiber wallpaper to match the back.

An amazingly quick trip to the local AT&T store got me a free nano-SIM with no activation charge and I was up and going.

	Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket	Motorola Moto X
DESIGN
Device type	Smart phone	Smart phone
OS	Android (4.1.2, 2.3.6, 2.3.5) TouchWiz UI	Android (4.4.2, 4.4, 4.3, 4.2.2)
Dimensions	5.15 x 2.75 x 0.37 inches (131 x 70 x 9 mm)	5.09 x 2.57 x 0.41 inches (129.3 x 65.3 x 10.4 mm)
Weight	4.66 oz (132 g)	4.59 oz (130 g)
DISPLAY
Physical size	4.5 inches	4.7 inches
Resolution	480 x 800 pixels	720 x 1280 pixels
Pixel density	207 ppi	316 ppi
Technology	Super AMOLED Plus	AMOLED
Colors	16 777 216	16 777 216
Touchscreen	Multi-touch	Multi-touch
Features	Light sensor, Proximity sensor, Scratch-resistant glass	Light sensor, Proximity sensor, Scratch-resistant glass
CAMERA
Camera	8 megapixels	10 megapixels
Flash	LED	LED
Aperture size	F2.6	F2.4
Focal length (35mm equivalent)		30 mm
Camera sensor size	1/3.2"	1/2.6"
Features	Autofocus, Smile detection, Geo tagging, Panorama	Autofocus, Touch to focus, Digital zoom, Geo tagging, High Dynamic Range mode (HDR), Panorama
Camcorder	1920x1080 (1080p HD) (30 fps), 1280x720 (720p HD)	1920x1080 (1080p HD) (60 fps)
Features	Video light, Video calling
Front-facing camera	2 megapixels	2 megapixels
HARDWARE
System chip		Motorola X8 (Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro MSM8960)
Processor	Dual core, 1500 MHz	Dual core, 1700 MHz, Krait
Graphics processor	Yes	Adreno 320
System memory	1024 MB RAM	2048 MB RAM
Built-in storage	16 GB	32 GB
Maximum User Storage		28 GB
Storage expansion	microSD, microSDHC up to 32 GB
BATTERY
Talk time	7.00 hours	12.00 hours
Stand-by time	10.4 days (250 hours)	10.0 days (240 hours)
Capacity	1850 mAh	2200 mAh
Not user replaceable		Yes
MULTIMEDIA
Music player
Filter by	Album, Artist, Playlists	Album, Artist, Playlists
Features	Album art cover, Background playback	Album art cover, Background playback
Speakers		Earpiece, Loudspeaker
YouTube player	Yes	Yes
INTERNET BROWSING
Built-in online services support	Facebook, Picasa/Google+, Twitter	YouTube (upload), Picasa/Google+
TECHNOLOGY
GSM	850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz	850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz
UMTS	850, 1900 MHz	850, 900, 1700/2100, 1900, 2100 MHz
FDD LTE	700 (band 17), 1700/2100 (band 4) MHz	700 (band 13), 850 (band 5), 1700/2100 (band 4), 1900 (band 2) MHz
Data	LTE, HSDPA+ (4G) 21.1 Mbit/s, HSUPA 5.76 Mbit/s, UMTS, EDGE	LTE, HSDPA+ (4G) 42.2 Mbit/s, HSUPA 5.76 Mbit/s, UMTS, EDGE, GPRS
nano-SIM		Yes
Positioning	A-GPS	GPS, A-GPS, S-GPS, Glonass
Navigation	Yes	Turn-by-turn navigation
CONNECTIVITY
Bluetooth	3.0	4.0 LE, EDR
Wi-Fi	802.11 a, b, g, n	802.11 a, b, g, n, n 5GHz, ac
Mobile hotspot	Yes	Yes
USB	USB 2.0	USB 2.0
Connector	microUSB	microUSB
Features	Mass storage device, USB charging	Mass storage device, USB charging
HDMI	via microUSB
Other	NFC, DLNA, Computer sync, OTA sync, SyncML	NFC, Tethering, Computer sync, OTA sync
OTHER FEATURES
Notifications	Haptic feedback, Music ringtones (MP3), Polyphonic ringtones, Vibration, Flight mode, Silent mode, Speakerphone	Haptic feedback, Music ringtones (MP3), Polyphonic ringtones, Vibration, Flight mode, Silent mode, Speakerphone
Sensors	Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Compass	Accelerometer, Compass
Hearing aid compatibility	M3	M3, T3
Other	Voice dialing, Voice commands, Voice recording	Voice dialing, Voice commands, Voice recording
AVAILABILITY
Officially announced	31 Oct 2011	01 Aug 2013

Source: phoneArena.com

According to Steve Jobs that would be a "retina" display.

The Moto X is smaller than the Skyrocket in every dimension other than thickness (0.04 inches). And it's lighter.

I got the Seidio Spring-Clip Holster (HLMTXPAS). I used to buy cheap holsters but then one broke and cost me a new screen on the Captivate.

And just in case I wanted to play with a different phone using that nano-SIM I got a MediaDevil Simdevil 3-in-1 SIM card adapter kit.

Now I'll go flash my Skyrocket anyway.