Like most Verizon handsets in the last few years, the early days of the Galaxy Note II were filled with gloom and depression due to the locked bootloader. As always, the developing community stuck it to the man by unlocking the bootloader of the 5.5" Jelly Bean-touting Samsung phone and giving its faithful owners root access. This, of course, is old news. The news at hand is that the beloved CyanogenMod 10.1 has arrived on the handset; if you are ready to get your hands dirty, it can be on yours as well.

I am not at fault if you brick your phone, if it explodes, if it comes to life and eats you, etc, and neither is RootzWiki, XDA, or sbrissen. And now, back to your regularly scheduled phone exploit.

Last night, developer Sbrissen dropped XDA users a little treat, and today that treat has made its way to RootzWiki. The treat, of course, is an alpha of the newest version of CyanogenMod, 10.1. As I've said a couple times (did I mention it's just an Alpha build?), this is an alpha release, so expect things to be broken. From what I can tell, though, nothing is too broken. Sbrissen lists what bugs he has found:

• nfc is flaky
  
• Orientation sensor sometimes needs screen off/on a few times to start
  
• GPS may or may not work

Now, there might be more that he has not found yet, but that's what you get with an alpha and I'm sure he is hard at work fixing the current bugs.

If you have made piece with the the risks inherent in flashing an alpha anything onto your phone, then you are going to need a few things. Namely, root access, an unlocked bootloader, and then a custom recovery. All of which you can find out how to do here. Once all of that is done, head over to sbrissen's thread to get on your way to a CyanogenMod-induced happiness.

Good luck, happy flashing, and let us know how it goes!