Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
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.
fastboot devices -lfastboot flash system blobfastboot reboot-bootloader) and get back to fastboot mode.fastboot flash recovery twrp-3.1.0-1-tf201t.imgfastboot rebootThat 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.
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.
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.
One of the stops we made on our trip last week was a stop in Gainesville, FL to meet up with one of our friends who just started a post-doc at the University of Florida. After having lunch together, we all headed off to the Florida Museum of Natural History on the University of Florida campus.
It’s a pretty nifty museum with a lot of neat interactive displays. Great place to take the kids.
Part of the museum is the Butterfly Rainforest, a really cool place to get up close with hundreds of butterflies. Watch them fluttering all around you, landing on flowers, and even you if you stand still long enough.
Then we went for a walk to the Lake Alice Conservation Area where we were treated to some very nice views of the lake, turtles and an alligator.
UF is a pretty big campus, and seems like a pretty nice place to walk around.