Last night I did something I was adamant I wasn’t going to do, namely rooting my Android phone and installing CyanogenMod on it. Normally I don’t like messing with (smart)phones - they’re tools in the pipe wrench sense to me, they should hopefully not require much in the way of care & feeding apart from charging and the odd app or OS update. Of course, the odd OS update is can already be a problem as no official updates have been available for this phone (a Motorola Droid) for a while and between the provider-installed bloatware that couldn’t be uninstalled and the usual cruft that seems to accumulate on computers over time, the phone was really sluggish, often unresponsive and pretty much permanently complained about running out of memory. So far it appears that updating the OS and only installing a handful of apps that I actually use as opposed to the ones that I supposedly “need” has resulted in a much better user experience.

I had been thinking about setting myself up with a way to work from home in a disconnected fashion. Most of the places I’ve worked at in the past required me to remote into the work desktop, which is a good idea if both sides have 100% uptime on their network connection and no issues with them being affected by adverse weather. Which in reality means that the connections tended to be unstable if the weather dictated that one really, really wanted to work from home on a particular day because snowfall was horizontal, for example. My current employer is more enlightened in this matter so my suggestion of locking all the necessary tools and source code inside a VM that would allow me to work from home even if the Internet connection was unavailable at either end was given the go ahead. Given that my desktop here is plenty powerful for most development tasks (it’s an older Intel Mac Pro with dual Xeons), this should be an idea solution.