Android Hacking on the Kindle Fire

I've been working recently on making the new Amazon Kindle Fire do everything that Amazon doesn't want it to do. Among other things, after a few days of tinkering and hacking away on the Android Developer Bridge (ADB) I now have a fully rooted Kindle Fire. In addition I've also been working to get all of the Google Android apps working and here is the progress so far.

1. Rooted the Kindle Fire using the well publicized "SuperOneClick" method.
2. Loaded the Google account manager (required step for the applications to follow).
3. Loaded Gmail, Google+, Android Market and several other applications.

At this point with those three steps I've managed to convert what was intended to be a simple ebook reader into a fully featured Android tablet (now we just need an Android 4 rom). If you have a Kindle Fire and wish to do the same as I've done to yours head over to xda-developers.com and take a peek at kindle forums.

Speaking of Android 4, ICS, I have started playing around with compiling my own Android 4.0 ROM. So far I've not made a lot of progress but I'll definitely update in a post here once I've successfully booted my first ROM.

Diaspora, Coming Soon?

I'll cut to the chase. For those who have not heard of Diaspora, it's a new way of thinking about social networks. While that might be partly (or mostly) my own personal opinion, it's at least partly true. Diaspora is going to allow users to do something that's never been done before in the social network arena, manage their own data. The idea behind Diaspora is that users run their own servers and manage their own data. Think of it like the limewire of social networks (ok maybe a bad analogy). Enough of my idle chit-chat and hyping, check out the project for yourself here at The Diaspora Alpha sign up page.

My reason for bringing this up now is that I just got an email from the development team informing me that I have been chosen to join the beta and would be receiving my invite within the next month or possibly even sooner. Now, not that it's required or anything but I think I may finally jump on the opportunity to also try out one of those Plug Computers based on the ARM processor and running Debian 6 (or Ubuntu if possible).

So, that's all for now. I just wanted to jump in and shout out to the Diaspora team for keeping on top of the project and not letting the incredible amount of work required for this project to keep them from their goals. I also wanted to let those who had not heard of it before or who had forgotten about the project know that they should sign up for the Alpha if they want to try it out, and I think everyone should as it has potentially huge implications in the future of how the world uses social networks.