A few weeks ago I replaced the front rotors on the truck and the pads I chose where ceramic. My thought process at the time was not to go with metalic pads and thus avoid any squealing. The rotors I got were steel, nothing special, so it was the metal to metal I wanted to stay away from. Needless to say ceramic was not the route to go. After the rotors warmed up any low speed stop would cause squeaking. I lived with it for a while but Friday I needed to do something. I picked up some cheaper semi-metalic pads for about a third less and put them on this morning and wouldn’t you know it, no squeal. Lesson learned high quality is always the best choice.
I’m sure ceramic is good for the right application just not for what I was doing. So for me and regular old steel rotors don’t use ceramic pads go with semi-metalic. I’ll try to remember that next time.
Phones have almost become disposable as technology advances at a speed where what you have is replaced in a month or two by “the new thing”. I like new gadgets but these days at $300 to $600 dollars a pop it’s just not economical. So when I opted for a G1 Dev Phone last year I was hoping for something that might be upgradeable and still have that new feel as the software evolves.
I have not been disappointed.
After the upgrade to 1.6 I was satisfied for a while but then came the next version of Android and that changed things. Better navigation and snappier user interface with screen auto rotation and more. When it didn’t look like there’d be any official version after 1.6 I went looking for a custom ROM, enter cyanogen. I loaded 1.6 just after the first of the year and 2.1 (Eclair) about a month ago, it has been excellent. Checking the site today they have 2.2 (Froyo) available for both the Dream (G1) and the Magic (G2).
It’s been two years since the G1 was released and thanks to folks at cyanogen and other communities like xda developers it has the same software as a Nexus One, HTC Incredible or EVO. Open Source, you gotta love it !!!
