sadevil.org

As a geek, I’ve always been quite the gadget freak. The fact that my father was also interested in the newest toys didn’t help.

A quick list of my gadgets and phones over the years:

PDA history:

Psion Siena

This I got as a gift, from my father. Used it a lot, but outgrew it rather quickly.

Psion Series 3c

I’ve used this device though the majority of my school years, as a note-taker, game device, development device (I actually wrote code on that thing…). Used to also have several Flash SSD’s for it.

Palm m500

This PDA was the first one I bought after starting working. Used it to death. (not really, sold it)

Psion Series 5

This I got from a coworker, who didn’t use it anymore since it no longer charged. I replaced the batteries, and sold it on, feeling that Psion’s OS no longer appealed to me.

Palm Tungsten T3

As an upgrade for the m500, I got myself the T3. Quite a powerful machine for the time.

Palm T|X

This was the last Palm device I owned, which I sold some years back.

Mobile phone history:

Ericsson GA-318

First phone. Came with three replaceable colour covers. Sold it to a friend in the end.

Ericsson SH-888

This one I stupidly forgot on a train (when I was in a rush…)

Philips Savvy DB

This one I got from my parents as a replacement for the SH-888 I lost. Stayed with me for quite some time.

Ericsson T28 World

My first flip-phone, which I bought after starting working. Stayed with me until the hinge system broke, causing the phone to shutdown when opening the flip.

Sony CMD-J70

Bought as a replacement, but returned rather quickly (the next day), completely crappy design and non-intuitive use. The knob (command wheel) on the left was also a total fail.

Nokia 3510i

My first foray into the Nokia world of phones. Nifty phone, worked quite nicely.

Nokia 6100

Replaced the Nokia 3510i, since I wanted something with a bit more memory (for SMS’).

Motorola RAZR V3

The first Motorola phone I bought, which, in retrospect, wasn’t a really well thought through purchase. The Motorola OS on these devices sucks. I still have it, the hinge sometimes fails (keyboard doesn’t react), but sturdy as a rock (once dropped it three floors…).
The only plus points for this phone are that it looks damn good, and that it got me into the modding scene, as the Motorola OS was quite modifiable (flexing, anyone? :P)

Sagem MyX3-2

This phone was purchased as part of a Vodaphone.es kit, since I had gotten to know my spanish girlfriend, and using a Spanish SIM in Belgium was cheaper for her to send me SMS’.
(it is possibly the worst phone I’ve ever used.)

Nokia E65

My first Smartphone (damn that sounds cheesy…). Still have it, use it as my work phone.

HTC Hero

My first foray into the Android world, as my E65 was starting to show its age. Perhaps purchased a bit too early. Got me into Android modding and flashing.

HTC Desire

This phone is my current phone, works wonders with the 3rd party ROMS you can find for it.

Tablet History:
Asus Eee-Pad Transformer TF101

The only tablet I’ve gotten sofar ;)

Last year I installed Debían on my mother in law’s network (an Acer Ferrari One 200). The thing ran fine, but gave some “firmware bug?” warnings. Since no new BIOS’ were available at that time, I left it at that.

When doing my yearly checkup and update round, there still wasn’t any new BIOS to be found. Annoying Acer! So I went around started digging in the ACPI DSDT tables to see if I could fix anything.

To dump them, you can either use the acpidump tool (acpidump -b --table DSDT > /tmp/dsdt.aml) , or just do a cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/DSDT > /tmp/dsdt.aml
Next, and decompile the thing with the iasl (Intel ACPI compiler/decompiler): iasl -d dsdt.aml. This should yield a file called dsdt.dsl, which is human readable. Sortof :p
First thing to fish out is to see whether the syntax is correct. To find out, we can just try to recompile it with the command iasl -tc dsdt.dsl.

In my case this didn’t exactly work:


ASL Input: DSDT.orig.dsl - 10886 lines, 405784 bytes, 4948 keywords
Compilation complete. 21 Errors, 6 Warnings, 18 Remarks, 1759 Optimizations

Amazed that this thing even booted!

(the reason for these mistakes is that many manufacturers use the Microsoft compiler which is a lot less strict when it comes to the DSL syntax. Intel’s compiler is less forgiving.)
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I recently got a Box account with 50 gB of online storage (see this thread on XDA on how to get one).

To get it mounted under linux, install the davfs2 package, add your credentials in /etc/davfs2/secrets with the syntax:

https://www.box.net/dav <email address used in account> <password>

Next, edit the /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf file, to disable locking. It doesn’t really support it, and causes input/output errors when trying to write anything to the filesystem. To this file you should add the entry

use_locks 0

To automatically mount it at boot, you can add the following to /etc/fstab (all in one line):

https://www.box.net/dav /mnt/box.net davfs defaults,uid=<your linux user>,gid=<your linux group> 0 0

Now you just need to create the directory, and mount it:

mkdir /mnt/box.net
mount /mnt/box.net

Et voila, you can now use your Box account as a regular filesystem ;)

I wanted to get Adobe AIR to work on my 64-bit Debian Sid installation, to try out some other twitter clients, more specifically Saezuri. (On a side note: the offering of twitter clients on linux is … mediocre. Bad, even. The (imho) best one is Pino, but it has problems of it’s own).

(Sidenote: Adobe has decided to discontinue AIR for Linux.)

It didn’t really go all that smooth, so here’s the process:

First, download the Adobe AIR 2.6 runtime from http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/853/cpsid_85304.html. Save it somewhere (like /tmp).
Next, open a terminal and make it executable: chmod +x /tmp/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Normally, now, you can try to install it: /tmp/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin. This should popup a dialog, telling you it’s going to install it. Unfortunatly at this point, I ran into a problem: it didn’t find either Gnome Keyring or KDE Kwallet, even though I have both installed on my system. After some digging, I recalled that AIR is a 32-bit framework, so I would need the 32-bit libraries for it to work.
While leaving the installer open, I went to look for the extracted directory, which was found under /tmp/air.w9qZiT, where, in one of the subdirectories I found a bunch of binaries which ended looking for libraries like libkwallet.so.1.
I found the needed libraries in the i386 packages kdelibs4c2a and libqt3-mt (which are for Debian Squeeze…), extracted them and put them in /usr/lib32:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Aug 8 2010 libDCOP.so.4 -> libDCOP.so.4.2.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 213988 Aug 8 2010 libDCOP.so.4.2.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 Aug 8 2010 libkdecore.so.4 -> libkdecore.so.4.2.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2465476 Aug 8 2010 libkdecore.so.4.2.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Aug 8 2010 libkdefx.so.4 -> libkdefx.so.4.2.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 172488 Aug 8 2010 libkdefx.so.4.2.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Aug 8 2010 libkwalletclient.so.1 -> libkwalletclient.so.1.0.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 61452 Aug 8 2010 libkwalletclient.so.1.0.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Sep 5 2010 libqt-mt.so.3 -> libqt-mt.so.3.3.8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Sep 5 2010 libqt-mt.so.3.3 -> libqt-mt.so.3.3.8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7515480 Sep 5 2010 libqt-mt.so.3.3.8

(I’ve made a tarball with those libraries, which you can find here. You can install it by extracting it with cd /usr/lib32; tar xvfz ia32-libs.tar.gz.)

Retry the installer, still didn’t go further. After some more digging, I found an article detailing the use of AIR on non-KDE and non-Gnome systems on the Adobe Knowledge base. (I use a mix of Gnome, GTK and KDE apps, with XFCE as desktop environment)

What I had to do was run the following commands before launching the installer:
export KDE_FULL_SESSION=1
export KDE_SESSION_VERSION=4
(for Gnome, see the article)

After this, the installer went ahead and dumped AIR in /opt/Adobe AIR. (spaces in a directory? Really, Adobe????)

Next hurdle: after installing Saezuri, I noticed it had a hideous black border:

… completely not acceptable. Luckely, this was easily fixed by enabling display compositing in the XFCE settings. Another problem fixed:

The last problem I ran into is that AIR seems to default to firefox as the default browser. Since I’m not a firefox user (I do have it installed for those special occasions), that didn’t do. After some more digging I found a blog post detailing how to change this: apparently Adobe decided that hardcoding firefox as a browser was a good idea. I fixed this by hex-editing the libCore.so file under /opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0, changing the hardcoded ‘firefox’ by ‘browser’, and adding a symlink under /usr/bin pointing browser to x-www-browser:
ln -s /usr/bin/x-www-browser /usr/bin/browser
(x-www-browser is part of the Debian alternatives system, which allows for easy selection of default browsers and what not.)

You can download the patched libCore.so here.

Now AIR seems to behave the way I want it to, so I’m a happy camper :)

As some of you might (not) know, I’ve recently joined a choir, called Furiant, which is part of the Arte Musicale group. (I already play in a pipe band (the Flemish Caledonian Pipes & Drums))

On the 26th of december, we’re giving a christmas concert in the OLV Sint Pieterschurch on the Sint Pietersplein in Ghent.

Here’s a handy google maps thingy to help you find us :)

I’ve always been a fan of the 3rd party roms that are available for the different Android based phones.
Unfortunately, it seems mine has developed a bit of a quirk: sometimes, when unplugging the USB cable, it will reboot. Or it no longer detects it as ‘external storage’ when putting it in USB-drive mode.

Seems I’ll have to return it to HTC for fixing within warranty. But to prevent HTC from being all bitchy about my custom ROM, I decided to RUU (RUU stands for Rom Update Utility) it – basically returning it to it’s pristine state, the state in which it came out of the box. No custom HBOOT’s, no custom radio’s, and no custom ROM’s.

Unfortunately the RUU utility for my Desire didn’t want to cooperate – it didn’t find the signatures it expected, so – no RUU for you!

Fortunately, I found an alternative way to RUU it. It does require a windows pc, but here’s the procedure:

First, download the correct RUU from Shipped-Roms.com. In my case, I downloaded the RUU_Bravo_Froyo_HTC_WWE_2.29.405.5_Radio_32.49.00.32U_5.11.05.27_release_159811_signed.exe file.

Next, download Procmon, from the Microsoft Technet Site. We’ll use this to find out where the RUU extracts it’s files.

Now, launch procmon, and add a filter on “Path” for “rom.zip”. Now you can launch the RUU updater, and click next until you get to the point where it wants the phone.
Look back in procmon, and you should have some lines there linking to rom.zip. Rightclick and pick “Jump To”. This should open the directory where the rom.zip file is.

Now, copy this file on your phone’s SD card (in the root), and rename it to PB99IMG.ZIP.

Now it’s time to power off your phone. Press and hold the Volume-Down button and power it back on. After a few seconds you should be dumped in the HBOOT, and it will scan your SD card for zipfiles, and when it finds the PB99IMG.ZIP, it’ll start loading it.

You’ll then get:

Parsing………………….[SD zip]
1. BOOTLOADER
2. RADIO_V2
3. RADIO_CUST
4. BOOT
5. RECOVERY
6. SYSTEM
7. USERDATA
8. SPLASH1
9. SPLASH2

Do you want to reboot device?
Yes
No


Here, you can press Volume-Up, and the flashing will commence.

It will reboot a few times, and then you should get:

Update complete
So you want to reboot device?
Yes
No


Press Volume-Up again, and you should be greeted by a pristine out-of-the-box Desire :)