BOINC on Android!

I will admit after the Raspberry Pi frustrations I was skeptical about feasibly running any projects on any non x86 processor.  Though through all the endless searching for how to get things working properly on the Raspberry Pi I did come across a few groups working hard and getting decent results getting certain BOINC Projects to run on Android Devices.  I did not give it much thought at the time, because I had no Android Devices.

Fast Forward to today, having somewhat recently come into possession of a Nexus 7 through a promotional offer with my TV and Internet Provider, I have been enjoying the wonderfulness of Android devices as my first tablet backed by a good sized and fairly well rounded App store.  (Sorry nook, did you ever think that is why you can't really survive?)  While a few times the thought has crossed my mind that I should look into setting up BOINC on the Nexus 7 mostly I wrote it off as a bit too busy for that distraction right now.

Then I got a wonderful email from World Community Grid. With a Subject line of "World Community Grid: Now on Android!"  You can bet I did a little dance on the inside.  Now it took some time for me to realize WCG does not have their own Android App but rather there is a BOINC app available with a handful of compatible projects available for you to select.  I have not had much time to play with it yet, but some initial positive opinions.

There are two great power conscious options available.  One is the one that I would have been shocked and almost considered removing the app right away if it was not there, and FYI it seems to be preset to not be selected.  That is: "Run while on Battery."   Like I said this one is automatically not checked, meaning it won't run while you do not have it plugged into the wall.  This is a great thing because my Nexus already has enough little things running in the background where if I don't power it off, but simply let it sleep, 4 days later the battery is nearly dead, or completely dead, if it is not plugged in.

The second nice option, and I am sure it has a reason beyond just nice to have it is:  "Do not run when battery is below: XX%."  While this may mostly be aimed at being tied with the above option, this one is automatically set to 90%, which seemed a bit high, but call it suggestion bias, I figured I likely shouldn't bump it lower than 70% in case it actually flirts with that line by drawing so much power.

Either the nexus has a far more powerful processor than I thought, or they have special tasks in either size or crunching needs tailored to ARM processors, as in the time it took me to write this post ( about 20 minutes so far), I downloaded 4 tasks, and 1 is 7.5% complete and another is 5.5% complete.

Tech Can Make it Too Easy!

While I am one of the millions who own an iPhone, I am not an apple fan boy by any stretch of the imagination, in fact I lean more towards the apple hater side of the equation than the apple fan boy, though I wouldn't call myself either.  But now having every single machine I have running Linux apple iTunes is basically out of the question now, not that I bought much from them anyway.

I will say though, I am a huge fan of google, and are far more fond of their google play offering, as its linked to your google account, and basically accessible from any computer with an internet connection.  But the problem was Flash is not supported on the Raspberry Pi, so I couldn't turn that into a google play enabled device to make my TV "smart" and my tower which I use my TV as a monitor did not output sound along the HDMI Cable,  I always figured it was a problem with compatibility with my video card.

When suddenly I spotted the UG802 android enabled device designed to turn any TV into a smart TV.  I almost gave in, but as the special I found ran for 13 ( now 11 more days as of the writing and posting of this), I decided to spend some time trying to trouble shoot my current issues.  Sadly the Raspberry pi, while incredibly fun to play with, I still think its too new of a technology for its use and there is very little support out there for it to function anywhere close to normal as a standard computer device, or even operate at the same level as a tablet.

But I realized sound should be transmittable over HDMI even through a video card so I went to trouble shoot that.  I went through a few steps making sure the card was recognized as an actual device on my computer, which it was.  I then went into the sound settings on my computer and unmuted every single channel.  But sound still would not play, but I about ready to give up clicked on the speaker symbol for the ubuntu operating system and under volume controls it said "Sound Settings... "  about ready to give up, I clicked on it.  Then low and behold right there, it gave the option to switch output device to my HDMI out through my video card, and almost as if it belonged in the bible "and there was sound, and it was good."

Sadly this was likely all I had to do for the whole 2 months I had been trying to think of ways to allow me to watch Google Play movies on my TV.  But I will admit I was outsmarted by something so incredibly simple.