How I Got Here

Some time ago, a friend gave me a Kindle Touch.  I have been reading fiction for pleasure for the first time in a long time -- Thanks, Harvey!  I wanted to put a basic spreadsheet on it to use when I am at work and for managing shopping lists, but there was no App for that!

I did a little research, and saw that the Nook Simple Touch runs Android! I saw that it would have to be rooted to get apps from the Google Market.  No problem.

What I did not know was that the NST comes with a modified version of Android, and doesn't just work with just any App once it is rooted.

Kingsoft Office installed without any problem.  It has the spreadsheet I was looking for.  I have been completely distracted from that onto other issues, as I have become more informed, though.

This trip down the rabbit hole really got started when I tried to install Firefox for Android.  I am a Firefox fanatic for one reason:  NoScript.  If you don't know, NoScript is a plugin that creates a whitelist of whom you allow to run scripts in your browser.  Most browsers only let you turn scripts on and off completely, but with this add-on you get much more control over how that all works.  I also use FlashBlock, but other browsers offer the ability to get some control over Flash.

After much hacking around, I discovered that the latest release of Firefox for Android that will run on my rooted nook is 4.0.b2.  (There are a couple of nightly builds that will run on it after that, also.)  Through talking with people at Mozilla, I discovered that builds after that point require armeabi-v7.  Now I still don't really understand why they wont run; since, the NST has an ARM7 processor.  I assume it has something to do with the way the OS was built.

My first plan was to rebuild Firefox for Android for armeabi and see if I could find a build that would work with one of the alphas from NoScript Anwhere.  That is still my fallback plan.

I also discovered that although it installs and browses pages as expected, Firefox's sync feature did not work.  At first I thought it was just because it was a buggy old beta.  What I have since learned, though is that B&N modified the OS and how it interacts with Android's built in AccountAndSyncSettings. (Thank you straygecko -- developer of GSAppsAttack!)

That and the strong suggestion from the guys over at Mozilla that I should upgrade my OS to Android 2.2, have set me on this journey.