Tag Archives: android

Android: Connect to an enterprise LAN via LEAP/802.1X

Posted by on February 18, 2010 4 comments

If you work in an environment where Wifi connectivity is through LEAP/PEAP/802.1X and you have a rooted Android phone, you can use the following mechanism:

Modify the file /data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf and add your Wifi APN as follows:

network={
ssid=”your_ssid”
scan_ssid=1
key_mgmt=IEEE8021X
auth_alg=OPEN SHARED LEAP
eap=LEAP
identity=”your_username”
password=”your_password”
}

This will connect perfectly on my HTC Dream and should work on any other Android platform as well. Only thing missing now is the proxy support (Google – how can you miss this????)



VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 8.0/10 (1 vote cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: +1 (from 1 vote)

NDrive for Android released

Posted by on December 18, 2009 No comments

I was pleasantly surprised to find that NDrive has been released on the Android market today.

NDrive turns your Android phone into a powerful navigation system up to house number accuracy! The download of the navigation-software is free and once you install NDrive you are able to purchase and download maps within the application. The South African map-set (includes South Africa, Mauritius, Swaziland, Malawi, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) weighs in at about 150MB and at least the South African map is up-to-date (Malibongwe instead of Hans Strydom is a safe verification). The South African map costs EUR 70,00 and considering the convenience of having proper navigation on your phone is well worth it.

After a short plug & play installation, turn-by-turn voice instructions and on-screen directions will guide you from your current position to the destination that you have entered. In addition to all this, you can navigate to any of the many points-of-interest like hotels, restaurants and petrol stations. You can even dial them directly to make for example a hotel reservation or inquiry before going there!

The GPS locks in faster than my Garmin nuvi 710 and navigation works very well. The turn-by-turn voice instructions are not as loud as from the Garmin, but I attribute this more to my phone (HTC Dream) than the application.

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Android: 3G Watchdog

Posted by on September 22, 2009 3 comments

I try to avoid 3G usage as much as possible, especially since I am not on a data-bundle. There are the few cases, where I need to hop onto the internet via 3G, but would still like to monitor the bandwidth usage.

A nifty little Android tool called 3G Watchdog is available, which installs as a notification-bar icon and monitors your usage:

You are able to customise tresholds and alerts for your data-plan and monitor your mobile internet traffic usage (3G / Edge / GPRS) and get detailed status of your daily, weekly and monthly usage. The notification icon will only show when connected via mobile internet. In conjunction with APNDroid, probably the two best (small and free) tools for any Android phone.

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: +1 (from 1 vote)

Android: Avoid excessive data usage

Posted by on September 19, 2009 No comments

APNDroid is one of those free, must-have applications (scan the barcode below to download on your Android phone):

A simple, little program which switches mobile data access on/off by just appending/removing “apndroid” to/from your APN-name. If you mainly work off a wireless network and rarely (but sometimes really need to) use a 3G/Edge/GPRS connection, this saves you the hassle of adding/deleting the APN manually.

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Android: Too Many Pattern Attempts. Phone is locked.

Posted by on September 17, 2009 15 comments

There you are, showing off your Android and that funky pattern lock feature. But you didn’t think that some joker would try too many times and lock your phone for good. Not to bad, since you just need to wait 30 seconds to retry – or?

Not quite, if you do it too often, the phone will lock you out for good and you can only unlock by either wiping your phone or by logging into your Google account. The Google account feature sounds reasonable and easy — but wait, your Wifi switch is not on (and you can only turn it on when unlocked).

Not all is lost, provided your phone is rooted and you have the Android toolkit installed (if “adb” means something to you, then read on):

Do the following:

> ./adb shell
# sqlite3 data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db
sqlite> update system set value=0 where name='lock_pattern_autolock';
sqlite> update system set value=0 where name='lockscreen.lockedoutpermanently';
sqlite> .exit
# exit

The above commands will connect to your settings-database and then disable the autolock as well as reset the permanent lock.

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Android: Clear cache before upgrading to a new firmware

Posted by on September 16, 2009 2 comments

I have been using CyanogenMod for a few weeks and am currently running 4.1.9.2 without an issue (no crashes, FCs etc).

Many users complain on the XDA-Developers forum about issues, but I truly believe that if people followed some basics, there would not be so many problems in the first place.

I have now upgraded from 4.0.4 to 4.1.7 to 4.1.8 and then 4.1.9 without having to do a wipe (and suffering data loss / re-install) by doing the following:

  1. Clear cache before installs: (boot into recovery and drop to terminal)
    mount system
    mount system/sd
    rm -rf system/sd/dalvik-cache
    umount system/sd
    umount system
    reboot recovery
  2. Upgrade to the latest firmware
  3. Reboot (be patient – it will take about 10 minutes. you can always remote attach via ./adb shell logcat to watch progress)
  4. Wait (don’t touch the phone until remote logcat has finished)
  5. Reboot into recovery and drop into terminal
  6. Fix permissions via fix_permissions
  7. Reboot & Enjoy the new firmware
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Android: Partitioning your 16GB card

Posted by on September 15, 2009 2 comments

MAJOR WARNING: The instructions below will wipe your SD-card for good. So make sure that you want to do this. (Follow my backup instructions just in case)

If you are running Cyanogen or a similar firmware which requires 3 partitions (FAT32, EXT3/4 and Swap), then execute the following commands which in short does the following: repartition your SD-card with a FAT32, EXT3 and swap partition and then convert EXT3 to EXT4:

parted /dev/block/mmcblk0
print
rm 1
rm 2 (if you have a 2nd partition)
rm 3 (if you have a 3rd partition)

Then run this for a 16GB SD-card:
mkpartfs primary fat32 0 15416
mkpartfs primary ext2 15416 15916
mkpartfs primary linux-swap 15916 15948

Then run this for a 8GB SD-card:
mkpartfs primary fat32 0 7425
mkpartfs primary ext2 7425 7937
mkpartfs primary linux-swap 7937 7969

Complete the partitioning and convert to EXT4:
upgrade_fs
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/block/mmcblk0p2
e2fsck -fpDC0 /dev/block/mmcblk0p2

The above should be done from the recovery-console (turn off phone and then Home + Power-button). If you use App2SD all your apps will be gone and some of the widgets will fail. The above is the perfect way of starting out fresh. I would recommend doing a Wipe as well as install of the latest firmware afterwards.

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Android: Buy some apps from the Android Market

Posted by on September 9, 2009 2 comments

As South Africans we are always on the tail-end of things. It comes as no surprise, that although we have access to the Android marketplace where we can download tons of free applications, Google has still not allowed us to access paid applications.

It is quite ironic, that Market Enabler is hosted on Google’s servers allow us to access the paid market (provided that you have registered with Google checkout):

(I typically install those apps via ./adb install *.apk. I also noticed that upgrading to the latest version did not work and I had to first uninstall).

The Market Enabler allows you to fake the location, kill any running market processes and once you re-enter the market, you have full access to all paid apps:

At the moment I recommend: Power Manager, Touchdown and MyBackup Pro. Awesome about Google’s market is that is you are not happy with the application, simply uninstall it within 24 hours and your money will be automatically refunded.

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Android: The microSD card

Posted by on September 6, 2009 No comments

There seems to be so much confusion going on about SD cards, and I thought it would be worthwhile to properly explain the use of SD-cards.

The microSD is a format for removable flash memory cards which are commonly used in cellular phones, but also in handheld GPS devices, portable media players, digital audio players, expandable USB flash memory drives, and for Nintendo DS flashcards, along with digital cameras.

It is the smallest memory card available commercially; at 15 mm × 11 mm × 1 mm (about the size of a fingernail). A point of confusion can come from the difference in the microSD and the newer microSDHC format. The SD and SDHC share a similar form factor, but not all devices are compatible with the newer high capacity format.

When you shop for a new microSD-card, you need to be aware, that those cards come in different speed-ratings. A closer look on the packaging will reveal: Class 2 / 4 / 6 as well as 133x / 66x.

The class defines the minimum write speed for a completely empty SD card. That means if you were writing to a new SD card that has never had any data on it how fast would it write.

Class 2 = 2 megabytes/second
Class 4 = 4 megabytes/second
Class 6 = 6 megabytes/second

So in short Class 6 is what you should be buying for fast write speeds. On top of this there is also the speed rating of the card itself. This is based on how fast the microSD card can READ the data off the card. You will see this usually described as 32x, or 66x, or 133x, or something with an x and the end.

These measurements are based on the original CD-ROM drives which could write 150kb/second. So 32x means 32 multiplied by 150kb/second or 4.8MB/second. The following table (sourced from Wikipedia) provides you the detail:

I strongly recommend the Transcend, 16GB, class 6 card which I have been using for a few weeks in my HTC (G1) Dream.

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Android: Push connection to Exchange

Posted by on August 31, 2009 No comments

Once you have been able to root your HTC phone you will be able to enjoy enterprise WIFI connectivity (such as 802.1X / WPA) and with it, you want to obviously connect to your Exchange server.

In my previous post I mentioned that rooting your HTC will result in loosing ActiveSync. But with TouchDown from NitroDesk you get an Exchange client being able to receive push notifications, which worked faster in my tests on the HTC vs. my Entourage and Outlook clients.

TouchDown provides full ActiveSync support, the ability to instantly and automatically synchronize changes made to the Exchange Personal address book into the Android phone book, and support for setting peak hours to specify when to automatically check for changes to Exchange data. A must have for any Android user.

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)