Every proper hacked device needs to boot up with a pirate theme. Fortunately the boot animation is trivial to replace on a Nexus one. I’m currently running CyanogenMod6, but I believe this will work other places. I replaced the boot animation with just a single image of a skull and crossed swords:

There’s plenty of info out there about replacing the boot logo and what the files do. Here’s how to get it up and running through:

  1. Download the pirate boot animation zip file to your system
  2. Remount the system partition read-write: adb shell mount -o rw,remount /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
  3. Push the file across to your device: adb push pirate_bootanimation.zip /system/media/bootanimation.zip

That’s it, reboot and enjoy! If you want to poke around and change it, it should be pretty easy. There’s a writeup of what the contents of the bootanimation.zip are, which is very useful. Supposedly, also, the zip needs to be uncompressed to work. But that just means setting compression level to 0 when you run zip. This is the command I use on my OS X machine: zip -0 pirate_bootanimation.zip desc.txt part0/boot_00003.png”. That should make it easy to swap in any other picture to customize.