Frankenphone Project (Motorola Atrix 2)

So my Atrix 2 ended up breaking.  Very oddly in fact.  One day I woke up and my phone was turned off, also noticing that my alarm went off, and luckily my wife's alarm went off.  I couldn't do anything to get my phone to turn back on, So i took the battery out, and it all went downhill from there.

I noticed I had to re-login to everything including my Google account on the phone itself, but nothing was erased.   I could Login to Facebook, and then I was automatically logged out, and it wanted me to sign back in.

Everything was messed up, and then the phone restarted by itself.  When the phone re-started got the same notifications that I got from that morning.  This happened

After about 5 soft-resets, 7 hard-resets, 3 resets done by the ATT store rep, and Motorola Customer service not doing anything for me besides telling me my phone was out of warranty, I then resorted to trying to flash the stock ICS rom hoping it might get rid of the problem.

I then resorted to trying to Root it, about 5 different ways, because the only way I could flash any rom at all was to have it rooted to that I could install a custom recovery so that I can load something besides the stock rom (which had failed)

NOTHING AT ALL WORKED.

So my next choice was to get a new motherboard or a broken phone with a good motherboard.  So I searched on Ebay on found an Atrix 2 that was listed wrong (was listed as an atrix, so it didn't have nearly as many views) and got it for about 35 bucks, and then I swapped the motherboard.

My original phone on the left with a broken brain, and a pretty face, and the new(ish) phone on the right with brains, but no pretty face. 

Starting the teardown

I started with taking out the good motherboard out of phone 2.  You first have to take the plastic backing off with 8 or so t5 screws, and then another 8 or so t5 screws to detach the motherboard from everything else.  

Remember to detach the wiring for the camera, LCD screen and digitizer. It will be 3 separate connections to the motherboard. 

Full view,  sorry the picture is dark

 then you have to do everything to the other phone, and then put it back together putting the pretty face back together with the working brain. 

And you are finished after putting the screws all back in, and making sure everything is attached correctly.  Put the plastic backing back in, slap in the battery, sd card, and sim card. 

And she lives!!! again!!  (this is the second time I have torn this thing apart. 

Educating myself about Biology

So I never took a biology class in high school, or even a chemistry class, but I have always been interested in it.   I have learned independent of the standard learning model, and done all the research myself with the help of the internet.
Turns out that today I found myself watching hours of YouTube Videos learning about biology.  Things that would have taken me weeks or months to find out, and study in school, I learned in one day.  Of course, I will need review and further study of the topics, but overall this way of learning was much more effective than anything else I have done in the past.

This is the first video, and I ended up watching the following 9 after that.

A little quirky, and silly, but the guys attitude really helped me learn and remember this stuff.   Oh and any of you who haven't seen this video, you will want to see it. 

WELL WORTH your time. 

Happy learning

Batman may get rid of your cell phone service

Remember that one time when you couldn't connect to WiFi, and you didn't have a cell signal?  Remember also the feeling that your phone is useless to you and you might as well use it a a door-stop at this point?Good.  The future is being designed so that none of us have to deal with that anymore.  That is, as long as you stay around other people and don't desert into the mountains by yourself somewhere...

Good ole' Batman is known for a lot of things, but one thing he is not known for is getting rid of your hefty cell phone bill, until now....

Code-named Batman (Better-Approach-To-Mobile-Adhoc-Network) basically connects smart phones together directly to the phones themselves using WiFi.  This completely gets rid of your carrier, and would make it so that as long as one person was connected to the internet, that anybody connected to that phone could also be connected to the internet. 

I had always wondered when this was going to happen, and technically as of now the ability is limited to about 100 feet. 

Think of NO MORE cell phone bill, no cell towers, no more getting locked into a cell phone plan for 2 years just to get a nice phone.  

For more info look into this or this.