htc — hero downgrade and root access
just got an htc hero smartphone…well actually it is from t-mobile and they call it a g2 touch. runs android 1.5. see here for a review.
after getting a replacement battery (the first one only lasted 12 hours at a time) i was liking it very much. wasn’t too happy about the t-mobile stuff bolted on to it though…
the solution? create a ‘gold card’ that enables you to downgrade the phone and replace the t-mobile ruu with the official one from htc.
follow these instructions very carefully and you too can have a t-mobile-free htc hero. you’ll need a microsd card that can be formatted, your usb lead and a decent charge in the phone. the whole process takes around 20 minutes. well worth it.
great phone with loads of free (and high quality) applications from the android market.
browser benchmark — test yours with peacekeeper
futuremark (the people behind the famous graphics card benchmarks) have a browser test available on their site peacekeeper.
you can check out other browsers results or test your own.
i only have three installed at the moment on ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 and my paltry results can be seen in this screenshot…
sansa fuze — replace firmware with rockbox
just replaced the firmware (think operating system) on my sansa fuze v1 (8gb model) with the open source rockbox. when using the sansa’s original software i was getting jumpy playback and i wasn’t terribly fond of the interface.
rockbox has a vast array of features and can be customised and fine tuned to suit the user’s needs and tastes.
the firmware, currently, only works with the first generation of the sansa fuze (v1) not the second generation (v2) so check your players version before attempting anything. it also supports various other mp3 players so see if yours is supported…
there’s an automatic installer available but i chose the manual method.
really enjoy using it so far. lots of features to tinker with and last.fm scrobbling support!
a couple of screen shots of available themes…
Cabbie-enhanced-info by Bernd Fischer
FuzeRock by Terry Dale
running ps3 media server on linux
the hard disk on the ps3 has quite a limited capacity…especially after a few games have been installed that require a few gigabytes of storage. so instead of using the local disk i like to stream media from my laptop runing linux (currently ubuntu 9.10).
one solution is to use ps3 media server. grab the compressed files here and extract them to a directory of your choice.
firstly you may need to change the permissions on PMS.sh so that your non root user may execute it ‘sudo chmod 777 PMS.sh’. then run ./PMS.sh as a regular user to fire up the server. if your ps3 doesn’t appear like the screenshot here 
then go to the ‘General Configuration’ tab and enter the IP address of your linux box (NOT THE PS3) and restart the server…hopefully the ps3 should now be detected correctly. next step is to add your media shares. i edited PMS.conf manually with gedit (you could try browsing for your directories directly from the server interface but that didn’t work for me). after ‘folders =’ add the path to the media you want to share…for example if you want to add your music folder add this ‘\/home\/user\/Music,’. repeat this for all the folders you’d like to share with the ps3, save the file and then restart the server.
if you now go to the music section of the ps3 and scroll down the ps3 media server icon should appear and you can drill down the directories to find the music you want. i’ve shared music (mp3 & flac), video (various formats) and images. all have played back flawlessly. a great little solution to the problem of streaming to your ps3 from linux. i’m sure there are many other methods but this worked well for me.
opera mobile 10 beta 2 — nokia e63
just installed the latest version of opera mobile on my nokia e63 (10.0 beta 2) and so far it seems like a great improvement on the last version i tried.
it now features ‘opera link’ that lets you synchronise bookmarks with desktops and other mobile devices. that coupled with tabbed browsing makes for a powerful little application. you can also use opera turbo if your connection’s slow. also a revamped speed dial enables quick access to your most used sites and you can enable full screen mode to maximise your screen real-estate.
now all we need is support for flash :)
cdn tools 0.93 update — working
i’ve been keen to get the cdn tools plugin working with wordpress for quite some time but ran into some issues that made it incompatible with my install. cdn tools allows images to be side-loaded to cloud storage along with various other features.
the creator has been very helpful diagnosing the problems with some feedback that i provided and has released an updated version so thanks for all your hard work paul…a very useful tool.
**edit**19/10/09 cdn tools has now been upgraded to version v0.94 which fixes some issues with google ajax cdn.
opera mini 5 beta — testing
just installed opera mini 5 beta on my nokia e63. i’ve always preferred opera mini to nokia’s version of safari and new version looks like it’s shaping up to improve the mobile browsing experience even further…two words…tabbed browsing!
been waiting on a mobile browser to manage this for quite some time and opera’s implementation of it seems to work well. it also features a new gui, a password manager, improved speed dial and seems to load pages more quickly (all through opera’s proxy servers). the ‘sync bookmarks’ feature seems to be missing though and i hope that’ll reappear in a future version of the application.
all in all a nice update that works well despite being an early beta.
get a zen micro 4gb working under ubuntu 9.04
bought a rather ancient 4gb creative zen micro from a guy at work…not really sure why as i already have 2 mp3 players but buy it i did.
one problem. as its an mtp device it isn’t detected in the usual ‘mass storage’ way by ubuntu (or windows for that matter) so i had to find a work around. first stop was the rather clever gnomad2 which can be installed easily with
apt-get install gnomad2
this will install the app along with a couple of dependencies. after this has finished gnomad2 can be found in the ‘sound & video’ menu.
i plugged in the micro and started the program but was met with the error ‘usb_set_configuration: operation not permitted’.
the fix requires you to copy this file (right-click and ‘save as’) to /etc/udev/rules.d/ as root…like so…
sudo cp 99-nomad.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
after copying the file udev must be restarted by issuing
sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart
finally add your username to the ‘plugdev’ group
sudo gpasswd –a username plugdev
gnomad2 should now detect the zen micro and tunes can be happily copied across to it. lot of effort for a mediocre media player. might end up sticking with my sony nwz-b135 which works with linux out of the box (terrible shuffle mode though!). source
