roots

If you're a city dweller who dreams of moving beyond growing mint on your kitchen windowsill, you can impress your friends with something more: oyster mushrooms.

As UC Berkeley students, the co-founders of "Back to the Roots" discovered they could grow mushrooms using recycled coffee grounds. Now their DIY mushroom kit sells at grocery stores across the country.

The pair developed a "grow it at home" kit where the soil is made from used coffee grounds and mushroom spawn, or seed, gets mixed in. Co-founder Nikhil Arora tells SmartPlanet how the idea grew and about … Read more

As CyanogenMod skates past 1 million active users, making it by far the most popular custom flavor of Android around, one of its main developers has asked the Android community if there's interest in creating an app store for Android modders and their fans.

Koushik Datta suggested a marketplace designed for apps, ROMs, and emulators that Google refuses to host and carriers refuse to allow. Not surprisingly, the answer he got was resoundingly positive.

Dutta, also known as Koush, said in a Google Plus post earlier this month that the time was coming for an app store that specialized in rooted Androids. … Read more

Unlocking the bootloader and rooting an Android device can be a bit intimidating, if not overwhelming, for those who don't feel comfortable with both the jargon and using the command line to carry out the process.

Even with the most thorough of guides, sometimes the easiest thing to do is wait for a streamlined solution to be released.

In the case of the Verizon Galaxy Nexus, an automated method for unlocking the bootloader as well as rooting is now available. Wug's Galaxy Nexus root toolkit was released earlier in the week, affording Galaxy Nexus owners the ability to … Read more

The browser Silk may be native to the Kindle Fire, but one Android developer has discovered a way to transplant it to any rooted Android device, an XDA forum post from the end of December revealed.

If you're an Amazon.com addict but don't have a Fire, Silk could become your go-to browser. Silk is unique because of its "cloud acceleration" ability, which renders Web sites extremely quickly using a combination of the SPDY protocol developed by Google and computing power provided by its own cloud-based servers. Silk is also known for the ability to learn … Read more

BlackBerry PlayBook owners tired of waiting for RIM to support Android apps can root their devices to gain access to the Android Market.

With Research In Motion's PlayBook recently rooted and capable of being customized, the folks at tech site CrackBerry have published a how-to guide for enterprising users who want to root their own units.

Starting with a rooted PlayBook, users will need the latest version of Cyanogen Google Apps, the FTP client WinSCP, and a few other items. CrackBerry then explains step by step how to tweak your tablet to capture and launch Google's Android Market … Read more

We have already told you about Samsung Galaxy Nexus users getting Google Wallet running on their beloved device, despite Verizon's wishes.

The previous methods to getting Google Wallet installed on a Galaxy Nexus were a bit complicated for the average user. The method required unlocking the bootloader, rooting, and then flashing some files onto the Galaxy Nexus before Google Wallet would work.

Thankfully, a much easier solution has surfaced.… Read more

It's our last week of 404 podcasts for 2011! We'll be back in the new year for a round of LIVE CES COVERAGE, but Wilson's not feeling well today so Joseph Kaminski fills in for an update on kid tech.

This year's most-wanted gift is the LeapFrog LeapPad, a junior tablet with games, e-books, and apps that helps kids learn...and also frees up the TV so Dad can watch the game.… Read more

Bloggers have a lot of fun with plays-on-words when it comes to BlackBerry, but at least one such pun has always been off limits. That is until today, now that a few hackers have forced my hand.

So, I'll just lay it all out there (please escort children and the easily offended away from the screen): The BlackBerry PlayBook has finally been rooted using something called DingleBerry.

Now that we have that little bit of nastiness out of the way, on to the cool part. The rooting tool is the, er, fruit of the collective efforts of Chris Wade and two other people known as neuralic and xpvqs who have been working on getting a super user pass to the PlayBook OS for many weeks now.

The lowbrow tool is not yet publicly available, but the hackers did post some video proof. The first one below offers a pretty simple demonstration, while the second one at the bottom shows Hulu re-enabled on the tablet (Hulu had blocked access from the tablet shortly after its launch).… Read more

The first Google Android phone sporting Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has hit store shelves in the U.K. And now every other Android owner is wondering when they'll get to taste this yummy new OS.

Google released the source code for Ice Cream Sandwich earlier this week, which is good news for these Android enthusiasts. This means that device makers and other developers can get to work on porting the software to other devices. Will your Android samrtphone be one of them? If not can you still get Ice Cream Sandwich anyway? In this edition of Ask … Read more