Hacking Knock Off Smartwatches from China

Is it possible? From the very onset I feel like I'm way over my head here. But we'll try to get our own software to run on one of these bad boys. We'll see just what happens.

I have two cheap smartwatches at my disposal. The one that we'll be focusing on for this post is this one. Now, don't let the picture fool you. This smartwatch isn't nearly as good looking as that. The screen resolution is probably 320x240, but it technically does everything that it says it does. The goal is to take it apart, see what it's running on the inside (chipset and whatnot), and see if we can load something back on that isn't stock software.

Easy Parallel Computing with Old Android Phones

I have some relatively old Android phones lying around (including the Nexus 4 with a broken screen I rooted) and I wanted to cluster them together in some way to see what they were capable of. But the problem was that none of them had the same platform. They all had different Android flavors and different permissions. So I made a few crucial design decisions up front to make this method of clustering as compatible with everything as possible. Here's the outline of how this is going to work.