Lock Picking is hard

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I have long wanted to learn to lock pick.  It fascinates me.  A visit to the Science Museum with my 5 year old daughter found me inspecting old locks in the basement.  A few days later a conversation with my nephew turned up that he was fascinated too.  At last an excuse to splash out on a few cheap picks and a practise lock.  How difficult can it be?

Extremely f****** mega difficult, that is how difficult it can be.

I understand how the lock works and the theory behind picking.  I know my lock back to front but can I feel the little ticks and clicks I am supposed to?  Can I tell when I am near? Not a chance.

I have learned a huge amount about the inside of the lock and can tell pretty much what I am doing but the elusive skills are so hard to learn.

Tonight, for the first time I managed to open the full 5-pin lock, but I know that it was chance.  When I can pick it three times in 5 minutes I will be a believer.

Stock ROM HTC Complete!

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I managed it.  I got the gold card working by

  • making a new one (which did not work at first);
  • formatting it using the phone itself (not the card reader);
  • rebooting by taking out the battery for a few seconds;
  • switching on USB debugging in Menu > Settings > Applications > Development.  I have no idea which of these was the critical one.

I now have a working phone on the latest HTC build and am checking that everything is operating properly.  It is OK so far and google immediately reinstalled all the apps I had downloaded.  I have hooked up various accounts and it is now just a question of remembering which icons went where.

Now I have managed this trick, I wonder about whether I will ever need the gold card again?  Has the phone now fully escaped from its orange branding or is the Carrier ID still an Orange one?  There is so little information about gold cards on the internet.

Later:  Found out from android forums that the phone has not escaped from Orange at all, and I should make my standard sd card in to a gold card.  I will try that, but I won’t know if it is working until I try to do an Over The Air (OTA) update…

Plucking up courage… Changing Desire HD ROM

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I am happy with my phone, but with my wife getting a non-branded one I realise that it is sub-optimal.  It has all sorts of extra services that I probably don’t need and it starts pretty slowly.  I suspect that if I can get a standard HTC ROM on it, it might be better.

But this is a one-way path.  I could brick the phone or render it useless.  I’d need to set it up from scratch (it is the ultimate factory reset), but that is not too bad.  I need a gold card (created last night) though I am clueless at the moment as to what that is other than something that makes the phone appear to not belong to orange.

As I type I have clicked the button.  Hold on to your horses.  Could be expensive.

Later: FAILED, just like this one.

Maybe another day I will come back and try the steps from the androidforums – but they require the same goldcard 🙁