As found on the web (March 30th)

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frank published Secure your smartphone.
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frank posted Lamp.
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Brian Eno, 2 Amerikanen en een Japanner

Brian Eno, ge weet wel, de uitvinder van ambient muziek, leerling van Conny Plank, producer van o.a. U2 en Talking Heads en samen met David Byrne verantwoordelijk voor het fantastische “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” uit 1981, wel die Brian Eno is nu zelf het onderwerp van een liedje.
Brian Eno” is een nummertje van de quircky popsters van MGMT, die al een paar jaar bijzonder hip zijn met bijvoorbeeld “Electric Feel“, “Time to pretend” en “Kids“.
Nu laat MGMT z’n liedjes graag remixen en voor “Brian Eno” hebben ze dat dus aan Cornelius, de Japanner van onder andere  Drop, Music en 123456, gevraagd.
En Cornelius’ remix van MGMT’s “Brian Eno”, die staat -dank U Select– nu al een tijd op endless repeat in mijn hoofd, in die mate dat ik afgelopen nacht ongewoon slecht heb geslapen. Daar moet ik iets aan doen, dat spreekt en dus gooi ik het hier online, in de hoop dat die oorworm mijn hoofd voor het uwe verlaat. Enjoy!

Secure your smartphone

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?

As found on the web (March 23rd)

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frank liked 2 videos.
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Four Tet vs Floating Points op de radio met …

Ooit was vrijdag de dag dat het weekend begon en dan waren er sex en drugs en rock&roll techno&house. Dat is gezien mijn ondertussen middelbare leeftijd echt wel verleden tijd, maar het is vrijdagmiddag en ik zit hier op m’n bureaustoel toch maar danig te swingen op de 2 uur durende radioshow die Four Tet en Floating Points afgelopen dinsdag samen presenteerden op Rinse FM.
Maar kom, we zullen eens wild doen, het is immers ook voor U vrijdag! Hieronder kunt ge op “play” klikken om gezellig mee te luisteren:
[audio:http://blog.futtta.be/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/four-tet_floating-points_show.mp3]
Een dienstmededeling voor mensen die iets met Thom Yorke hebben: ergens in die 2 uur worden door Dhr. Four Tet 2 nummertjes gedraaid die hij samen met Burial & Yorke (die blijkbaar nog wat tijd over had tussen de opnames voor King of Limbs door) maakte. Als ge geen geduld hebt; dit is “Ego” op YouTube:

Burial, Four Tet + Thom Yorke - Ego (New 2011 track)

How to buy, upgrade, brick, rescue and generally enjoy a HTC Magic in just 14 days

Step 1: Buy
So you’re not happy with your cheapo rebound phone, pining for your lost HTC Hero and you start checking out bargain-sites for a good 2nd hand Android smartphone. After a week or so you spot an HTC Magic, on sale for €100 and 2 days later go buy that beauty for even €10 less because hey, there’s no SD-card.
Step 2: Upgrade
Your brand new Magic turns out to be that very first Android-phone Proximus started sellinng in May 2009, with Android 1.5, but without HTC Sense and tethering. Not really the smartphone you’d settle for, so you start looking around xda-developers for an upgrade path. You install flashrec, flash a new recovery image and in recovery flash MyHero 2.0.5 and after 1 month without it, you can finally boot into that beautiful HTC Sense UI again.
Step 3: Brick
HTC Sense, great, but still Android 1.5 and no tethering, seriously? No can do Sir, so you head back to xda-developers to figure out your next step. Late at night, after browsing millions of forum posts about perfected SPL’s, goldcards and recovery images, you find a thread with links to official HTC RUU’s. Easy-peasy and you download one of those boot your Windows PC and start flashing. HBOOT updates, radio updates, … all goes well and you doze off for a minute. But when you open your eyes, the upgrade process halted and you have a white screen with “invalid Customer ID” in red and no Android. You reboot, no go. You try to enter recovery mode, no go. Congratulations, you now have a shiny (semi-)bricked HTC Magic and you go to sleep feeling an utter moron for trying to flash an official RUU.
Step 4: Rescue
The next day you start looking for information on the secret craft of goldcard creation. You spend a couple of days trying to get your SD-card’s CID on your PC, but eventually ask a colleague to adb-shell into his device with your SD-card in it to get the job done (thanks Thomas!). You don’t bother downloading crypto-software to reverse the string for all the wrong reason, instead immediately heading over to the goldcard-manufacturing-webstie, write the disk-image to SD and you try to flash the RUU with the goldcard you just created. Damn, no go! You reverse the string manually, no go. You buy a new SD card (4Gb Sandisk), adb-shelling into your own cheapo Acer this time to get the CID and create a new goldcard, no go. Over a week goes by and you decide to have another stab at it and opnly then you see that the string should be hex-reversed, not reversed. You click the link to an online hexreverser, create a goldcard with that string and bingo, the RUU flashes!
cyanogenmodStep 5: Enjoy
It looks like you’re back where you were at step 2; Android 1.5 with HTC Sense UI and no tethering, so you decide to install Cyanogenmod by first downgrading your radio & hboot and then -finally- flashing Cyanogen’s Android mod.
And there you have it, after only 2 weeks you successfully turned that old HTC Magic into a modern, fast and reliable Android smartphone. Android 2.2.1 that is, with ADWlauncher, tethering and Exchange-integration. Time well spent, except … Vodaphone has an official Froyo update for the Magic out as well and there’s already a tweaked ROM for it on xda-developers. You really should try that one out as soon as possible, now shouldn’t you?!

Splitting up a vcard-file

As my Acer e110 doesn’t sync with Google, all of my precious contacts in the cloud did not automagically appear on my handset. That left me little but no choice to go the old-fashioned way; the export/import-dance.
Exporting from Google is easy, but it generates one vcard-file with all you contacts in it, which the contacts app in Android 1.5 can only import the first entry from. To split up the contacts-file, Scroogle pointed me vCard list-file splitter, vcf-split for short, a Perl script from back in the days when Windows linebreaks apparently were sufficient evidence of the end of a vcard. But times and technology have changed and linebreaks have lost their former glory, meaning I had to slightly alter the script to watch out for a cryptic “END:VCARD” line to indicate the end of a vcard.
And the script goes a little something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# vcf-split - split a .list.vcf file into many small .vcf files.
# Copyright (C) 2004  Raphael J. Schmid.
# Tweaked by Frank Goossens ("futtta") in 2011
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option)
# any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
#
# -- raphael.schmid@gmx.de
# -- futtta@gmail.com
use File::Basename;
if ($ARGV[0] eq "") {
  print "Usage: vcard-split <file to split>\n\n";
  exit;
}
$input=$ARGV[0];
$counter=0;
print $input;
open INPUT, $input or die $!;
while (<INPUT>) {
  open OUTPUT, ">> ".$counter."-".basename($input) or die $!;
  if ($_ =~ /END:VCARD/ ) {
    print OUTPUT $_;
    $counter+=1;
    close OUTPUT;
  } else {
    print OUTPUT $_;
  }
}
close OUTPUT;
close INPUT;

Who knows one day Google will send someone this way who has some vcf-splitting to do?

As found on the web (March 2nd)

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frank Frank op de trein op "update to wordpress 3.1" klikken, zou dat wel een goed idee zijn?.
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frank Frank probeert van een SD-kaart een godlcard te brouwen, onsuccesvol tot nu toe … iemand een goldcard om m’n htc magic te un-bricken? :-)..
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