Mah animals wish everybody a Happy New Year and hope everybody has a good 2018.
Happy New Year!
Have a very Merry Christmas!
Back to Jelly Bean
While attempting to reinstall an Android 7 ROM (KatKiss) on my tablet, something went kerflooey and the tablet got into a state where it would just stop at the ASUS splash screen during start up. I could get back into recovery mode (TWRP) no problem. Reflashing the KatKiss ROM and OpenGApps seemed to work without any errors, but the boot process just wouldn’t go past the ASUS splash screen.
Finally I decided to see if I could get the stock 4.1.1 ROM back on the tablet.
- Grab the most recent stock firmware from the ASUS website and extract the blob file out of it.
- Grab the Kang TWRP recovery image (look for a download link for 3.1.0-1 on page 12 of the thread).
- Get the tablet into the bootloader (hold the Power+Vol Down down when turning the tablet on).
- Get into fastboot mode. I had to use the Vol Down button to select the USB icon, then press Vol Up.
- Confirm the tablet is connected to the computer with
fastboot devices -l - Flash the stock firmware with
fastboot flash system blob - Reboot back to the bootloader (
fastboot reboot-bootloader) and get back to fastboot mode. - Flash the recovery image with
fastboot flash recovery twrp-3.1.0-1-tf201t.img - Reboot with
fastboot reboot
That got my tablet back up and running with Android 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean). However, attempts to get from there back to Android 7.1 (Nougat) with the KatKiss ROM still resulted in getting stuck at the ASUS splash screen.
I guess I’ll leave it with the stock ROM now. A working tablet is better than a non-working tablet. I just use the tablet for reading ebooks these days, and Android 4.1.1 still does that just fine.
More nativity visitors
The number of visitors at the nativity set this year has gone up.
In addition to the crew from a few years ago, now there’s Paddington Bear, a decrypted pink armored dwagon, Black Duck, Santa Claus mug, and Sock Monkey.
Vintage mammography phantom
Just about every medical physicist has a collection of old test gear, phantoms, test objects ,meters and the like.
A few years ago, while rummaging through the equipment cabinet in our store room/library/lab, I came across a variant of a mammography phantom that I hadn’t seen before. Instead of the normal pink wax insert, this one had 16 wax squares of different colours.
Aside from the curved bit of plastic at one end of the phantom (a test object, not a ghostly apparition), it’s the same size as the conventional ACR accreditation phantom. Reminds me of one of those sliding number/picture puzzles where you have to slide the squares around to reconstruct the image.
I let it sit on my book shelf along with some of the other pieces in the collection. A few months ago, I decided it was time to have a look and see what the inside of the wax blocks looked like.
Looks like at some point in its history, the pieces got a little scrambled and reinserted a bit randomly. I was expecting that each colour block would represent a different density. Instead there are the usual fiber, speck, and mass groups, but not nearly as uniformly placed as in the accreditation phantom.
I don’t know how old this phantom is or what time frame it might have been used at work. The only mammography phantom I was familiar with before this one was the pink one, so possibly before 1996 at least. Definitely pre-1999.
If anybody out there happens to know anything about this style of mammography phantom, let me know.