2012 Nexus 7 Discussion Forums (1st Generation) > Nexus 7 User Tips

Bird's optimized N7

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birdastrompgman:
I have my N7 working about as well as I ever imagined a tablet could work, so I thought I'd share what I've done with all of you.  If this spurs some of you on to share what you've done with your N7s, then we'll all be richer for the experience.

First, here's my setup on July 18, shortly after I received my 8gb N7.  The home screen wallpaper is my photo of a Black-browed Albatross, taken in Australia.  See the first attached photo.

Next capture shows my current setup, with the wallpaper being my astrophoto of the Great Orion Nebula.  I took the photo from my back yard in the light-polluted metropolitan San Francisco Bay Area of California, stacking about fifty 90 second exposures taken through a Meade Schmidt-Newtonian telescope. 

Notice the red navigation bar buttons.  They're red to preserve my night vision when I use my N7 as a star chart at night.  I'm running the Paranoid Android 2.50 ROM, which lets me customize the navigation bar background, button, and glow colors.

I rooted my N7 as soon as the forum guide to rooting the N7 came out.  i'm keeping about 6gb of Nandroid backups, and 2.5gb of astronomy and birding app data files on a $20 USD 32gb USB flash drive (plus ~$4 for the USB-0TG cable, shipped), and I'm running those data-intensive apps while they're reading the data from the flash drive.  Obviously, I can't do that without being rooted.

birdastrompgman:
Paranoid Android has some really neat features.  Notice the day of the week is shown on the status bar in the second screen capture above.  I don't know if you can customize that with the stock 4.1.2, but I can do it in Paranoid Android.

Here's something I know isn't available in stock 4.1.2.  The capture below shows my USB storage stats in Paranoid Android's Settings > Storage function.  I started with 28gb total space, and still have 16gb available - not bad for the $200 base model 8gb N7.  I have a 40gb N7 for $225.  In case you're wondering, I set aside 1.5gb in a second primary partition for future experimentation with moving apps themselves to the second partition.

birdastrompgman:
I put a lot of work into optimizing my N7.  I use the Screendim app to drop screen brightness well below the minimum stock brightness.  i switch from my bread and butter Swiftkey 3 Tablet keyboard app to the Omegacentauri GB Keyboard app, because it has a red layout that's best for inputting in search target names to Sky Safari Pro, my astronomy app.  See the attached screen capture below.  If I could only change the white magnifying glass icon to red...

I use the Directory Bind app to redirect my app's data queries from the N7's "external" 8gb storage to my 32gb USB flash drive.

birdastrompgman:
So, here's how Sky Safari portrays the location of Messier 42, the Great Orion Nebula (my current wallpaper), in daytime viewing mode.

birdastrompgman:
And here's how my night-optimized  8) N7 shows the naked eye view of Orion in red light. Actually, this view is much brighter than I use under dark skies.  It's set this way so you can see it without going dark-adapted.

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