Just as I left the office this evening and got on my bike to head home, the sun was taking its last gasps, making its way down behind the hills. I didn't know this until I turned out of the parking lot, and saw the sky positively on fire, with tantalizingly brilliant hues of pink and orange and gold descending behind the recycling plant, and into the trees; I skidded my back tire briefly while deciding whether to take a photo then, and then figured I'd grab it when I had an unobstructed view around the corner.

I pedaled down the road, waiting for the opportunity to see it in its full glory, but there was always something in the way. I turned facing down the foothills, but by now, just a few minutes later, it had faded to just a dull glow. I took the picture anyway.

By the time I was nearly home, I stopped at a red light, and the sky betrayed no sign at all that anything had happened between me and it, now cold, grey, and unfeeling. "As is its nature", I thought.

But I knew, too, that even as it turned to black now, it would surely awaken again in all its radiant warmth, even if only for moments at a time.

A few months ago, I wrote a little review of the Wahoo ELEMNT BOLT, and a miniature teardown of the software on it. I was surprised to find that it, in fact, ran Android, but that the license compliance story on it was not great. Over the intervening time, though, I've been exchanging some mail with Chip Hawkins, the CEO at Wahoo, and it sounds like they're working on getting the licensing story all fixed up there -- and, to my surprise, that engaging with the enthusiast community is something that they are interested in! So, this post has a short update on some of those discussions, and my experiments so far in modifying the thing.

My initial post led off with this arguably clickbait-like statement that the device was in violation of its myriad licenses, so I think it is only fair to the Wahoo team to give an update on where that stands. As of the time I write this, source isn't available for the GPL components, and attribution isn't in place for the Apache components, but as far as I can tell, Chip and his team are pretty serious about getting this squared away. They have a release pending that has been occupying basically all of their engineering time, which also will have some UI changes; so, for the attribution components, they plan to include those in the new UI, rather than running a fire-drill to retrofit that a branch that is unlikely to see another release again. This makes sense to me. My impression is that the next release will have attributions included, then, and kernel source for that release will go out with it, too. They seem to understand what components they need to release source for, and where to look for other licenses that they need to include. So, my claim is that anyone who wishes to be mad about there not being source available yet, should wait for the next release -- it does sound like they are trying, and have a plan to get into compliance! The Android app already has an attributions tab, which is a good start, and I hope that they get the on-device software squared away soon too.

Chip also gave me some information on doing some hacking on the device, which is exciting. They plan to release a recovery image (for Android people, this is a full update.zip, including boot, /system, and userdata images) along with the next release, but until that is ready, one caveat to all of the following is that would-be hackers must be extremely careful, because there is currently no image available to restore a device from unless you create one, and further, that if you modify the root filesystem, then the device will no longer be able to take over-the-air updates until you restore it from backup.

With all those warnings said, here are some tricks to get you started messing with the device. I mentioned in my previous post that the device had an ADB daemon running, but it wasn't accessible; as it turns out, there is a key shortcut to get access to it! If you press the power button and the up button on the right side at the same time, the ADB daemon should unlock. Chip notes that it's best to press them a few times in a row in order to ensure that the event actually happens; after you do that, unplug the device from your computer, then plug it back in, and you should be able to adb shell in. For me, the ADB daemon was already running as root, but if this wasn't the case for you, I am told that adb root should work.

Since there isn't a recovery image available yet, I recommend that the first thing that you do is to make your own. To get a bare minimum backup of the system image on your device, you might want to run something like for i in boot system recovery nvdata ; do adb pull /dev/block/platform/mtk-msdc.0/by-name/$i elemnt-backup-$i.img; done, which will grab a backup of, at least, everything you need to reflash a known-good bootable configuration onto your device.

Once you have boot and system partition images, you are now in a much safer position to explore the device. The other step that you might want to take is to unlock the bootloader on the device, so that you can flash those images again if you need to. The ELEMNT devices run Fastboot, but they have a very finicky version of Fastboot running on them; as far as I can tell, after every command, you need to unplug and plug the device back in, or else it will not respond to you again. Unlocking the bootloader will wipe any data that you have on the device, so make sure to back up anything that you want (either using ADB, or over MTP with Android File Transfer) before you do it!

To boot the device into Fastboot, turn it all the way off, then hold the "down" button on the right side while pressing the power button. If everything goes well, it will give you a black screen, and present a Fastboot interface over USB. Run fastboot oem unlock on your computer side; you'll get a message like "waiting for user" or something of that nature. When you do, press the power button once, and wait; you'll eventually get a message like "erasing user data...", and then the device will be unlocked. To be sure of that, you can unplug and plug the USB connection back in, and then run fastboot getvar all; in there, you'll see the message "unlocked: yes". When you're ready, you can then run fastboot continue, and your device will continue to boot. If you get yourself into trouble later, you can restore your backup with something like fastboot flash:raw boot elemnt-backup-boot.img, and similarly, fastboot flash system elemnt-backup-system.img.

I had been putting this post off for a while, since I had planned to try to modify the .apk that runs the thing. Sadly, I never really got time to do that. But I did get mail from Chip saying that he didn't have objections to people redistributing modified system ROMs -- and modified BoltApp.apks. So what I'm hearing is that, for the enterprising hacker with spare time, this could be a fun toy! He notes that the launcher is pretty careful about monitoring the main app for crashes, and that there are intents that you can send the launcher to make it happier; I tried decompiling the launcher, but found that the version of Android that runs on the device is not compatible with any of the de-odex tools that are out there. So that also sounds like future work.

Anyway, I'm still using mine. I still wish it would boot faster, and especially that it would restore a paused ride faster. I also wish that it would show me sunset times. But I've put a few hundred miles on mine by now, and it hasn't eaten a ride yet. And that makes it better than my Edge 510.

This post has been a long time in the works. I've had it on my disk for five or so months, and I never really got it into a state where I liked it enough to post. Oddly enough, five months ago, when I wrote the first draft of this, #DeleteFacebook was trending, and I originally wrote:

"I had been planning another post for a while, with the thesis being an answer to the question: if we #DeleteFacebook, then what? I have been meaning to sit down and write that for a while, but I either haven't had the time to do it or I just didn't want to. It might not be coincidence that this post feels more pressing and urgent at this second at my fingertips; the two are inextricably linked in my head. (T.C. Sottek's piece from 2016 in The Verge, offers a different perspective on this.)"

I didn't "#DeleteFacebook" then, and I haven't now, but when Facebook was compromised and logged me out a few weeks ago, I never bothered to log back in. I was having a rough time around then, and the escapist urges to disconnect ran high.

I've dug this out because it seems apropos for this hashtag-holiday that's trending this week. As much as I above describe a coherent structure for a post that I wanted to write at some point, this post continues in the recent trend of having no such; instead, I offer, perhaps, a collection of vignettes on mental health -- in general, and mine in specific.

After nearly seven enjoyable and stimulating years, July 2nd was my last day at NVIDIA; I learned an enormous amount from all of my wonderful colleagues there, and I'm very grateful for the opportunities that I was given there. Some highlights of my time at NVIDIA include: assisting in or facilitating the bringup of eight (!) chips; designing a ground-up new architecture for Tegra's video input engine; visiting a customer site with a logic analyzer that was worth a few times more than the car I drove there in; laying out the concept of the image processing pipeline for the zFAS platform in this year's Audi A8; prototyping a machine learning-based image signal processor; spending an hour or two with a soldering iron attaching probes to a 3GT/s MIPI link; and guiding the NVDLA open source project from concept to initial release. Perhaps more strikingly, I was lucky to have worked with a great number of people with at least as diverse experience as I, and to have had the chance to benefit from their expertise! So it is with nontrivial sadness that I depart, but that is how things go, I suppose.

On the other hand, it is my joy and excitement to announce that, as of last week, I am now Senior Engineer and Vice President at Accelerated Tech! Accelerated Tech is the combination of me and Jamey Hicks working together to provide hardware and low-level software design and engineering services. I first worked with Jamey over 15 years ago, when I had an HP iPAQ h3765, and his project at HP Labs -- handhelds.org (sadly, now defunct) -- existed to run Linux on those devices. Jamey was a powerful mentor for me during my early days of systems programming, and so I am proud and excited (and, perhaps, a little nervous!) to be working alongside him again in this new role.

When I worked with Jamey last, it was not immediately obvious at the time that what his lab was doing was "the future", but in retrospect, it is very clear to me that the handhelds.org work was the direct predecessor of, and the enabling technology for, modern smartphones. I don't think that it's possible to try to predict future results from past performance, and the kind of impact that handhelds.org had seems like the kind of thing that happens at most once in a lifetime. At the same time, the parallels of stage of development of some of the technology at play are striking: programmable logic has only recently hit a price point that ordinary hobbyists can experiment with, and that it can start to show up in consumer devices. Development for programmable logic is still quite difficult, especially as designs become nontrivial, and it it's still very unusual to build hardware with 'modern' programming techniques (i.e., with higher-order typed languages, or 'correct-by-construction' design methodologies). It's hard to believe that we could have the kind of impact a second time that we did the first time, but there sure is a lot of space in the hardware design world to improve.

I am excited. I think that I'll be doing a lot of different and interesting work soon. I am also a little nervous, for myriad reasons. But that's a good thing, maybe: if the outcome of something is guaranteed, is it really worth doing? No matter what, I hope to learn and grow.

Yes, it's that time of year again: a little late, but it's the musical year in review for 2017. There was a handful of really good stuff this year, and a few albums that I was really excited about! This year, I made some changes: I've added a relative and subjective rating system, from one to five stars. A one star album is not, necessarily, bad (unless I say it is...) -- think of it, really, as how much I am excited about listening to something, so one star just might mean that I haven't really found a place for it in my regular listening habits. The more stars, the more I think other people will want to listen to it too; to that end, this year, I had only one five-star album, but that means that yinz had better go and listen to it!

Got it? Okay, well, let's get started! This year, I bought 18 albums, saw 5 live shows, and recommended another additional 18 pieces of "extra credit", and here they are:

So that was 2017. What did I miss?

(click for full writeup)

There is, truly, no kill like overkill. This is a story of how I spent untold tens of hours of engineering time designing and retrofitting an upgrade for the headphones amp that I keep at my desk to support a microphone input, and all for no real good reason. I jumped through contortions at every stage to get there. But, it was fun -- and that's what matters.

On Saturday (that is to say, July 15th), Josiah, Liz, and I went for an attempt on the Matthes Crest traverse from south to north. It was a total mess; in my book, it falls just barely short of an epic, but it certainly crosses the line over into being a total cluster. We got in a decent ways over our heads, made a mess of basically the whole route, and had a really long day. Remarkably, almost the entire day was still fun. Here is, more or less, how it happened.