futtta's blog

Jailbreaking is not a crime, but we shouldn’t take that for granted, because as Bunnie (XBox hacker) writes;

Three years ago, the [U.S.] Copyright Office agreed to create an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act so that folks could jailbreak their smartphones. But that exemption is about to expire.

Given the fact that the U.S. jailbreaking-scene is an important contributor, I signed the EFF petition which asks the Copyright Office for continued support for jailbreakers;

Being an avid Android-user, jailbreaking permits me to replace heavily customized (and in some ways crippled, think CarrierIQ) vendor-specific versions of Android with clean, crisp, fast and secure after-market “mods” such as CyanogenMod.

You should really sign this as well!

Stel dat ge een nieuwe GSM hebt, een heuse SmartPhone misschien zelfs. Dan wilt ge dat toestel natuurlijk personaliseren, er uw eigen stempel op drukken als het ware. Want ge kunt U toch niet belachelijk maken met pakweg de default wallpaper of een standaard ringtone?

“Fietsbellen!”, riep ik onlangs dan ook in het midden van de nacht tegen m’n schone slapende vrouw. “Ik wil fietsbellen als ringtone vrouwtje” en m’n echtgenote stemde, nadat ik het oorstopje een beetje wild uit haar liefelijke rechteroor pulkte,  enthousiast in met deze briljante vondst. “Ik ben wel nog erreugh moe liefje” pruilde ik geslepen en nog voor ik m’n zin kon afmaken sprong mijn supervrouw fluks uit bed. “Geen probleem”, zei ze, “laat mij maar doen!” Toen ik voor de formaliteit nog wat protesteerde, snoerde ze me de mond met “Wat Chloe O’Brian kan, kan ik ook”! “Doe maar die van Queen” probeerde ik nog te roepen, maar zalig slapen de simpelen van geest en ik droomde psychedelische taferelen van fietsbellen, naakte vrouwen en luide gitaren:

Enkele uren later werd ik wakker, met Veerle die geduldig naast het bed op de grond zat te wachten. “Luister”, beval ze me en ik luisterde;

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“Prachtig!” riep ik en ik gaf haar een beschaafd schouderklopje, “Hoe heb je dat klaargespeeld dan?”. M’n ûberVeerleken keek me aan alsof ik een kleuter was die voor de 100ste keer “Waarom?” vroeg en antwoordde toen zuchtend met een perfecte bulleted list, die ik hier trouw copy/paste:

• Je wilde Queen, die hun “Bicycle Race” staat natuurlijk op YouTube, dat als mp4 rippen kan het kleinste kind.
• VLC wilde die mp4 niet naar een mp3 audio-bestand omzetten, ik heb er dan maar Ogg Vorbis van gemaakt.
• Maar Ogg Vorbis is voor freaks, dus ik heb er met mp321 een mp3 van gemaakt
• Die mp3 heb ik op de SD-kaart van je nieuw speelgoed gekopieerd
• Ik installeerde Ringdroid van op de Android Market en knipte die magistrale fietsbellen tenslotte uit de mp3

“Je bent geniaal schat” riep ik, “laat ons nog eens uit de bol gaan op die ultieme fietshymne van Freddie en Brian!”. We sprongen recht en begonnen stevig te rocken en te rollen op het echtelijke bed. M’n liefde voor het leven danste haar prachtige borsten bloot en ik maakte me klaar om de solo van Brian May op m’n kleine ukelele te spelen toen plots de fietsbellen weerklonken. Ik nam verbaasd op en een grijze man van SABAM kwam -telefoon in de hand- de kamer binnen om ons erop te wijzen dat het rippen van audio om een ringtone te maken, zelfs al gaat het maar over 12 seconden, onderhevig is aan de wetgeving op het auteursrecht en dat we de leden van SABAM dan ook een billijke vergoeding verschuldigd waren die hij -en terwijl hij dat zei kleedde hij zich uit- nu kwam innen. Zo werd ik deze nacht badend in het zweet wakker, m’n Veerleken zacht snurkend naast me. Ik wilde haar nog even wakker maken om haar te vertellen over de fietsbellen en vooral over Brian May op ukelele, maar de gedachte aan die man van SABAM was er te veel aan. Ik denk dat ik de fietsbel-samples op FreeSound maar eens ga beluisteren.

I  didn’t really like the look & feel of my Galaxy S II’s GUI, so I decided to customize my experience to feel a bit more at home on my “personal digital assistant”. One of the first things I did (after installing some apps) was extracting my old wallpaper from the Cyanogenmod 6 zip-file to replace the ugly Samsung wallpaper.

Next on my hitlist: getting rid of Samsung’s iPhoney TouchWiz. I was very fond of the simple elegance of the open source ADW launcher on my Cyanogenmod-ized HTC Magic  (which is for sale by the way), so I installed ADW.Launcher from the Android Market. I then configured ADW to display 5 instead of the default 4 rows to better use that incredible screen resolution.

A small inconvenience of ADW.Launcher is that you don’t get notification-bubbles that display the number of new mails, messages or missed calls on the icons of those applications. ADWNotifier, an ADW.Launcher plugin, solves that problem just fine.

What’s next? Rooting that fabulous GT9100, I guess. And maybe try this early Cyanogenmod 7 build for it?

Two years ago I bought a HTC Hero, my first Android handset. I lost that great device about half a year ago and -after trying a very basic Acer e110- replaced it with a 2nd hand Belgacom HTC Magic which I upgraded to Cyanogenmod 6.

Now don’t get me wrong; me and my Magic, we got along real fine. But my employer likes the smell of a fresh smartphone in the morning and subsidizes to make that happen and when I saw a colleague with a Samsung Galaxy S II, I knew me and my Magic HTC had to part ways.

The Galaxy S II sports a huge, bright screen with vivid colors (Samsung’s super AMOLED screens are simply stunning), a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor and 16Gb of internal storage (with an microSD-slot to be able to add up to 32Gb). There’s no hardware keyboard like on the HTC Desire Z I once was planning on buying, but the Galaxy does come with Swype, the virtual keyboard that takes most of the pain out of … not having a keyboard. I’ve installed all of the favorite apps from my HTC-days and as a bonus I can now finally also use Firefox Mobile (which is great, by the way).

So what’s not to like about it? Well, it’s huge, for starters. Big hands come in handy when using the S II, so I wouldn’t want to market it in China, except as a mini-tablet maybe. I’m not too thrilled about Samsung’s TouchWiz as seen on the homescreen. And battery-life isn’t that great, but that’s to be expected, with that humongous screen real estate I guess.

All in all my S II is a great smartphone. One probably doesn’t really need a dual-core handset with 16Gb of memory and a 800X480 screen, but it sure is nice little gadget to play around with for the next 2 years or so …

Just a couple of small updates on previous stories to keep you posted really.

We’ll start of with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal; beta 2 has been released earlier today. I’ve downloaded a lot of updated packages over the last few days, so I guess I’m on the second beta as well. The Unity launcher now comes out of hiding perfectly and it scrolls down automatically to show items at the bottom as well. There also was a bug with the menu-items of some applications (e.g. Firefox 4) disappearing which seems fixed. Hope they can get the launcher to behave with Java apps (e.g. my favorite mindmapping application) soon.

On another note: Lookout, the Android app that allows you to locate your handset and -if you have the paying version- remotely wipe it, seems to be getting some serious competition from …. Google. Enterprises who have Google Apps for Business can now locate, encrypt and wipe their Android devices. Especially the encryption is important news, but it really should be available and configurable in the Android OS itself

To finish off with some news about WordPress Stats secretive inclusion of Quantcast behavioral tracking: it seems like WordPress Stats plugin will be replaced by Automattics Jetpack, which according to the site:

supercharges your self‑hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com

Jetpack actually is a “super-plugin” that offers functionality from Stats, Sharedaddy, After the deadline and other previously separately available Automattic plugins. The Jetpack WordPress.com stats module does still include the Quantcast “spyware”, doesn’t disclose this feature and doesn’t provide functionality that warrants Quantcast inclusion (in spite of Matt Mullenweg claiming “We’ve been using Quantcast to get some additional information on uniques that it’s hard for us to calculate”). But there is (some) good news in the Jetpack Stats source code though, because on line 145 it reads:

‘do_not_track’ => true, // @todo

This could mean that blog-owners will one day be able to opt out of 3rd party tracking or it might be that Stats will take e.g. Firefox DNT-header into account for your blog’s visitors. Having both would off course be what I will be rooting for!

Although Linux 0.1 got released on August 26th 1991, Mashable already ran an anniversary-story yesterday. According to Wikipedia’s entry on the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds did start coding in April 1991, so one could argue today is as good a day as any to celebrate our favorite kernel’s conception!

My first memories of Linux date from 1995, when a friend introduced me to mp3′s, the Internet and Linux in one session of what seemed ûber-geekiness at that time. Although I bought the Infomagic 5-CD Linux Developer Resource some time after that, I didn’t do a lot of Linux (probably because I was too busy discovering the Internet) until 1996. That year, while working at a PC shop, I started co-administrating the belgonet.be Linux-server for the ISP-service the owner offered his customers. I learned a lot on that box, especially when “rm -rf”-ing /bin instead of ~/bin and later when the server got hacked because it was running an old vulnerable version of sshd. Good times!

In the late nineties I switched to Linux-based distributions for my personal desktop-pleasure, running Knoppix at first and installing Suse and Red Hat later on. When the Belgonet-server got decommissioned, I installed Gentoo on a spare desktop-machine at work and hooked it onto the internet as srv-ict-lxfgo.reference.be, hosting a couple of personal sites.

Nowadays I use Ubuntu on my netbook and Debian on my VPS-server. I’m not a hardcore sysadmin by any measure, but I know my way around a Linux-based system well enough to keep it up to date, secure and stable. And although Linux for the masses did not become a reality on the desktop (yet), Linux is a part of almost everyone’s life, with smartphones, wifi-routers and televisions running on the Linux kernel. So I guess 20 years of Linux does call for a celebration, even if “it is just a kernel“, no?

Your smartphone probably contains a wealth of information of personal and professional nature, which you would not want others to have access to. This is why (after losing my HTC Hero a couple of months ago) I now try to follow 2 out of these 3 simple rules:

1. don’t lose your smartphone.
2. if you lose your smartphone, make sure you have something in place to locate it
3. if you lose your smartphone and you can’t locate it, make sure you can wipe it remotely

There are multiple solutions to locate & wipe smartphones (including HTC’s Sense online offering), but for my Sense-less HTC Magic I installed “Lookout“. Lookout is a free application that provides device location, contacts backup & restore and apparently also malware protection. If you’re willing to pay $3/month, you also get remote wipe, remote lock and backup/ restore of pictures and call log. If you lose your Android-phone, you just log in to the Lookout-website to locate and optionally lock or wipe your handset.

I’m happy using the free version for now; I activated Android’s pattern lock-screen to avoid anyone from accessing my handset and deactivating Lookout. Remote wipe is great, but I guess I can activate my Lookout Premium account if ever I need that feature?