Proving the Obviously Untrue

I had noted before that my accelerometer had broken on my Android g1 phone, so that one axis was out by about 40 degrees. Despite lots of "helpful" suggestions from my friends on how to fix it (you know who you are), nothing worked. This did.

Connect to the phone with adb (from the Android SDK), in the following way.

Now it works.

Posted by Colin Turner

I've had my Google development phone, the g1, for some time now. I haven't had the luxury of time to write anything for it, but I mainly wanted it to try out Android anyway. I've reviewed the phone before, and again after some canonical firmware upgrades.

I use the truly excellent K9 application for mail, it has good support for self signed certificates, now has IMAP push support and is generally excellent. However, it stores all the mail on the shockingly limited internal memory on the device. That, and upgrades to things like Google Maps, adding truly excellent new functionality, left me constantly looking for applications to remove.

This is why in the end I decided to try Cyanogen's ROMs. Since I have a development phone, I didn't need to root it, and just followed the relevant instructions (in truth, I couldn't be bothered to downgrade the OS to root it first).

Here are some observations about the new ROM:

• Apps2sd is amazing.
  I have the whole pleasure of trying different apps all over again, without sweating about every byte. I don't have to worry about how much data is in my contacts (whether I assign them icons), my emails, and so on. I have plenty of room. I was delighted to be able to install DocumentsToGo. Which makes the phone much more useful for work emails. Loads of great apps I had to remove have been reinstated, and I can play with others, like the awesome Google Googles.
• Extra workspaces
  There are five workspaces, making for more widget playroom. I now have a calendar app taking up a whole workspace with the events to come. Excellent.
• It fixes several problems I had with MMS functionality.
  
  • It fakes a variety of user agents, meaning that a test video message I sent myself on o2 finally worked, for the first time ever.
  • The stock ROM allows you to prevent data access when roaming, which is good. But it also doesn't fetch MMS when roaming, which is (for me) a nuisance, and these are usually on a different tariff system. So when you receive an MMS on roaming, you end up enabling all data access to quickly receive the MMS, and then turn it off again. The Cyanogen ROM has an option to retrieve MMS on roaming.
• UI feels snappier
• USB tethering
  can be enabled, which JustWorks (TM) with Debian. Excellent.

On the downside, I have had some reset problems, but admittedly I have sometimes been pushing the phone very hard indeed to test it. And the battery life on the g1 is still awful. I know Noodles has solved the problem by not actually using his phone :-), but I want to use mine.

Another minor problem I encountered some weeks ago was the accelerometer suddenly starting serious misreporting on one axis. This problem seems to be becoming less severe, but even reinstalling the stock and then cyanogen ROM did not fix it. However, note I did not wipe the user data.

Cyanogen has made my phone fun to have again. And I will still replace it when a new Android handset comes out that I really like, but a lot of the urgency has gone. I'll certainly buy him a beer for Christmas.

Posted by Colin Turner

The PS3 has an free network application called Vidzone. I downloaded it when it originally came out some time ago, but it never actually worked. It would load, show playlists, adverts, and the seize up the whole console when I tried to actually play videos. It's a shame, because it looked like a nice app for putting on some music.

Since then the PS3 itself has had a big firmware upgrade to 3.0.1 and Vidzone was upgraded to 1.0.4. Worth trying again I figured. Well, initially I couldn't get the application to crash the console anymore (I did later!), but certainly it wouldn't play videos. It did show adverts, even video adverts, playlists, everything but actually play videos. Which is weird to say the least. So to be honest, it looks like the problem is somewhere at the PS3/Vidzone end, since absolutely all other network functionality works on the PS3.

But, as a precaution I thought it was worth checking out that old bugbear, the router firmware, and there are some hints that's an issue. I'm a Virgin Media customer at the moment, for complex reasons I don't really have a choice at the moment, and they supplied a cable modem and router when they connected me (rather late as it happened). When I looked at the router firmware, it's shockingly old. So I clicked on the link for the knowledge base and downloaded the latest firmware. It failed to upload, no explanation of why. I tried every intermediate release, which took quite a while to do. They all failed.

So now I'm suspicious and confirm that, yes... Virgin are specifically blocking updates, even though many, many bugs have been fixed in the new releases. I find this pretty puzzling.

I phoned their tech support to try and confirm this in person. I suggested that I would have to buy my own router if I wanted to get round these problems, and they informed me I wouldn't be supported. I put it to them that I seem to have a choice between being supported with no actual support and no means to help myself, or getting new hardware, being officially unsupported but able to help myself. He put me on hold to check it out, a minute later the line went dead.

So if you're out there googling for "vidzone doesn't work", this might be part of the reason, but who knows? It seems it could be fixed at the PS3 end in any case. But it's a cautionary tale that the stock VM hardware might come with lots of problems you can't fix.

Posted by Colin Turner

I recently bought a Roberts WM201 Internet Radio. I've used it for a while now and thought I'd post my thoughts.

First of all, I was looking for a radio meeting certain criteria, it needed wifi, I wanted it to pack a reasonable punch since it would essentially be my main music source, it needed to support upnp media servers. I also wanted it to have an integrated transformer so that it would not have a bulky mains lead since I wanted it for my rather small kitchen. Finally I wanted it to be semi portable, so I could move it from room to room without too much fuss.

The WM201 meets all these criteria, and is based on the Reciva technology that has been well received by a few of my friends, notably Paddy and Noodles. The radio is a pretty good size, not too large and not too small, and feels really solid. It has a wired network port as well as wireless capability which is great. For complex reasons, when it first arrived I had no internet connection (no gasps, I was making do with 3G hookups). That being the case I knew I wouldn't be able to get the internet radio functionality itself working. But I figured I'd set up a local lan and get the mediatomb server on my development machine working. I was able to hook up to the LAN and enter the WPA password, but it just would not play with any functionality whatsoever if it doesn't see the servers it expects to. Now Noodles has suggested my geek privileges should be revoked for not working out how much of the internet I had to fake to get it to work. He may well have a point! In my defense I had plenty of other issues to deal with instead.

About a week later I got my net connection, albeit temporarily since some work was needed on the cable. So while the network was up I was finally able to get into all the functionality, and I was really impressed, the small display and control is really intuitive and the shipped remote control is excellent. When it came time for the external network connection to be severed again, I quickly switched the device over to streaming media from a playlist on mediatomb, but interestingly it still gave that up midway when the external connection went down. Dumb, but forgivable.

So again, what's good? It offers brilliant sound, and more volume than I could wish for. It's easy to browse through the huge array of stations, and for things like the BBC stations, it has a good interface to the "listen again" service. It works seamlessly with mediatomb on my PC. All excellent. A minor grumble is that it's not easy to switch briefly from a radio station to the playlist on mediatomb and back again, you have to go through all the menus every time. The number of stations is so huge, finding them can be a little slow, but you can as you would expect, save them to a preferred list. I hit a problem with that; my saved BBC stations have spontaneously stopped working, just showing endless retrying messages. When I go back through the menus it's all fine. Odd.

The radio becomes better yet when you use the Reciva portal to set up your "stuff", a list of your preferred stations and podcasts. Obviously it's much easier to do this on a web page, and then you simply register your radio. Now (it seemed to require a hard power cycle for me) the radio has an extra "My Stuff" menu which gives really easy access to your favourite stations and allows you to quickly select podcasts, far faster than navigating on the radio. An odd note, if you for example navigate through "listen again" in the normal way, you can fast forward, pause and rewind the playing media. But if the same stream is selected from the podcast menu in "My Stuff", you can't. A slight annoyance.

I'd really recommend the device overall, it's great. Incidentally the cheapest prices I could find were on Amazon by some distance, but time and time again, I would select a seller and only at the final hurdle be told they wouldn't ship to Northern Ireland. I've complained about this before, it would be useful to know rather sooner that I'm wasting my time. Anyway, I found a simple way to work out which sellers ship to Northern Ireland and find the cheapest of those. I selected one from each and every seller on Amazon. Then when I went to checkout I removed all those that caused complaints. It was then easy to find the cheapest remaining seller. Much faster than trying them one at a time.

Posted by Colin Turner

I recently wrote about my experiences with the Google G1 dev phone running the 1.1 Android firmware, and discussed a number of problems.

Last night I obtained the just released 1.5 (cupcake) firmware and performed the upgrade. That all went smoothly, it helped to have done it before and working out the idiosyncrasies of the process. So how does the new firmware measure up?

Initial thoughts and feelings are very good. Picture handling in MMS is hugely improved, although I still had a problem with an old video clip, but I'll see if it was the oldness that was the problem. The optional on-screen keyboard is very useful and surprisingly easy to use, with predictive words hovering just above it. I enabled the options to automatically rotate the screen upon device reorientation, that is a big improvement in general usability, and means you no longer have to flip out the keyboard just to provoke rotation.

Other improvements include the camera - much better, and video capability, although the microphone doesn't pick up sound very well on video. The web browser is also much improved and hugely more usable and readable, the auto rotation helps that too.

One very quirky problem, the one screen I've found that doesn't auto rotate on the device orientation is the home page. That rather surprised me. Overall, this is a very significant set of improvements, and I'd suggest any G1 user upgrades as soon as possible.

All of this goes a long way to making the G1 a good day to day phone for me, although I'm still having to limp from one charging source to another, I don't think I can get through a day of my normal use without charging in the car and at my desk - and yes, I'm frequently trimming back all the features to extend battery life, when I remember.

Update

Here are a few more comments after a little while of using cupcake. Of little problems and whether or not I've resolved them.

• Bluetooth pairing
  After Cupcake, the phone no longer automatically paired with my in car gadgetry. In the end I found that going through the settings and clicking connect explicitly for each device connected it that time, and next time it did so automatically.
• MMS issues
  There are still some of these, I get some images from some people that are much smaller than I remember getting from the same people with the same phone when I had the N95. It's not clear if this is because the G1 is just not allowing the same level of zoom, or what else may be to blame, but still rather small. Also, video clips are simply not playing. When I receive one I still get another text from my provider (O2) telling me I can't receive them. But now there is an icon suggesting they can be played. When you try, you simply get a number of seconds of a blank screen and silence. Suggesting possibly a codec problem, but I can find no mention in the oracle of google as to how to fix it if so, or whether I should expect it to work.
• Fast switcher apps
  The API that allowed apps to turn off and on some features has been deliberately disabled. Not a huge issue, but it means many apps that helped you turn on and off wifi, for example, no longer work. Unhelpful in a phone that still has profound battery life issues.

Posted by Colin Turner

I obtained an HTC Android G1 dev phone to play with. I've been working with it for almost a week now, and so can post my initial thoughts. And they are quite seriously mixed. There are things about this phone that are just unbelievably good, but with some shockingly unbelievable flaws too, enough to possibly render the phone unusable for me to be honest. You'll probably see as you go on that shocking, and unbelievable are two buzzwords I use a lot in this review. It's more polite than rearranging this acronym FTW into its more usual order and expanding.

First, some caveats. The phone I received was a dev phone, it had the 1.0 firmware revision, and that might have been the cause of my initial problems. It's now on 1.1 (and update was irritatingly problematic too). The dev phone comes with the phone, headphones, a US charger, a USB cable, and about two post cards worth of docs. Mostly these discussed set up of APNs. That wasn't trivial, and O2, my provider were frankly as helpful as a chocolate teapot. It didn't help that their systems showed, at least with the 1.0 firmware, that the phone was missing key capabilities.

Thanks to Noodles, I got some working access, and initially getting things synced with Google, and wifi was easy. I actually had some problems with bluetooth pairing, but it could have been the other end. I spent a lot of time trying to find the most elegant way or exporting my evolution contacts to Google, and eventually found the magic command line to produce the CSV on Debian Sid your paths may vary.

First of all lets summarise the stunning features of this phone.

• Big clear screen
  Mostly the interface is crisp and clean and the touch interface is very intuitive and easy to use.
• QWERTY goodness
  The G1 screen slides out to reveal a full qwerty keyboard that is really easy to type on.
• Shell goodness
  You can download applications that allow a local shell, and for me much more usefully an SSH client. Coupled with the keyboard and connectivity this is excellent.
• Calendaring
  This is just superb, intuitive, easy to navigate, cosmetically pleasing, automatic sync.
• Email
  Almost belongs in grumbles since the built in client does not, under any circumstances, accept self signed certs. But the K9 market app does it all, it seems to be a fork, or more likely set of patches maintained on the original email client.
• Messaging
  This is really in both lists. The nice way in which the G1 threads correspondence is very helpful, but there are problems. See below.

And now, the reprehensible clangers.

• Battery
  The battery life on the N95 is shockingly bad, but actually the G1 is on a par with that, you seem to need to constantly trim all the features that consume power to get through a day reasonably (all be it, the battery life is stretching now I think, and less day-to-day fiddling helps).
• Video Capabilities 1/2
  This is the first 3G device I've ever had that didn't have a forward facing camera for video calls. I know some other smart phones are similar, but the N95 I have does have this capability. A non issue for many, but something to note for some.
• Video Capabilities 2/2
  Even now, quite a while after release, the G1 is incapable of using its camera for video clips. I find this extraordinary, I think it's the only phone I've ever owned with a camera that can't do this.
• Media Messaging
  This is quite frankly, shockingly bad. It's a complete pain in the ass to configure MMS, and even then it often simply doesn't work. There are long delays and repeated failures in sending and receiving MMS, and yet other times it does it. I can't yet work out the pattern. The way in which the phone shows attached images is really appalling, and difficult to manipulate.
  Rather than showing the image when clicked on till you click again, it annoyingly shows it for a number of seconds of its choosing and then goes back. You can't zoom, rotate, download, or otherwise manipulate the image that doesn't even fill the screen size available.
  Even more extraordinary is that while the phone can't take video clips (see above) it also fails to be able to receive them. That's an unbelievable flaw in a phone this high end. Instead my provider sends me an SMS telling me I'm a third class citizen and invites me to download the file using a browser. When you try to do this you will find you can't actually save the damn attachment anywhere to bring the market apps (no inbuilt video viewer) to bear on this thing. I just can't get over this stupidity. I have to wait to get home to a real PC to view these.
• The contacts section in Google seems to allow no space for birthdays. Since for me that's a pretty critical aspect of calendaring and I'd like the data hooked to the calendar, that's annoying.
• Headphones
  The headphones plug into a mini USB socket on the bottom, but as such they are custom. The N95 has a much better system of having an adapter that provides functionality to tweak music playing with a plain ordinary headphone jack in case you have better headphones.
• Memory Management
  Another shockingly bad aspect of the phone. It's onboard memory is quite limited, but so what? I put an 8 Gig micro SD in it. Well, almost nothing can actually be stored on the extra card apart from music and some other files. All applications, text messages, and so on take up the main memory as far as I know.
• No automatic rotation
  The device certainly appears to have the accelerometers to allow automatic rotation of the screen, but simply, it doesn't. You have to pop out the keyboard to do so whether you want to or not. Stupid.

Every new phone you acquire seems to have new features you don't know how you did with out, and problems that irritate you from previous good experiences, but seriously, the MMS problems this phone has, has caused me to have both phones on my person and swapping SIM cards this last week. That's just ridiculous. It's quite likely the G1 will end up in a drawer until someone gets their act together and deals with that astonishing flaw. That or I'll sell it on. It's a shame, so much else in the phone is excellent, but the problems are often simply inexcusable in a smartphone well into the 21st century.

Update

I was pleased to read that a firmware update is to be released Real Soon Now, that will resolve most of the serious issues on my list, or at least I hope the MMS handling will be improved given what is on the list, otherwise this would be even more braindead.

Oh, and by the way, I know the iPhone shares some of these problems. There's a reason I don't have one.

Posted by Colin Turner

Today, the BBC News website reported on a Which? Computing magazine article that claims that the physical destruction of a hard drive is essential to protect the data on it, citing that they had retrieved deleted files from second hand drives.

For most folks in computing, the ability to retrieve deleted files is not surprising, nor is the possible survival of data even after repartitioning and reformatting a disk. Nevertheless, the idea that is is impossible to reliably and easily erase a disk has been contested by The Great Zero Challenge. Quite simply, their challenge is to a data recovery company to retrieve data from a drive after the unix command dd has been used to overwrite the whole drive using /dev/zero as a source.

Given no-one has accepted the challenge, it seems you might not have to reach for the hammer after all.

Posted by Colin Turner

Previously, I wrote about installing Debian GNU/Linux on the Toshiba Portege R500. Most of the information is still current, but I'm writing a follow up to address other things I got working and questions people have posed me.

Bluetooth Support

I still need to patch the kernel to get bluetooth support working. At the moment I am patching toshiba_acpi which then allows the various commands (see the previous article) such as the one for enabling bluetooth. Glibly talking about patching the kernel is of very little help for those that don't know how, so for Pere who requested that, here's a set of commands, executed as root which should make that simpler. Note, you might want to edit the file mentioned below for SD support too if you need it before doing this.


Headphones

Headphones can work with the main sound muted. If you double click on the mixer icon in Gnome, and go to edit -> preferences you will see a number of controls that can be turned on. You will see a switch for "Headphones". Enable that. This switch now appears in a tab, and you can select it. When you mute the "Front" you should still get sound in the headphones, and indeed, the rotary control on the side still works. If you're a command line kind of person, alsamixer will be your friend.

SD Card Support

SD card support didn't work out of the box for me. I had to patch yet another file. I say patch, but I just directly edited a file as per instructions I found elsewhere. Essentially I just edited drivers/mmc/core/core.c



Suspend to RAM

Pere, who comments on the previous article, wrote that changing the contents (in my case creating) /etc/pm/config.d/config and entering
SUSPEND_MODULES="ehci_hcd"
makes it all work. I agree! Thanks Pere.

Fingerprint Reader

These packages are still experimental, so if you don't know how to install them, well you probably shouldn't. I have installed them, but found their enclosed documentation to be inaccurate. I have tried various ways to configure PAM to support it, but none of them work really as I want them to. I might play with this again sometime.

That's it. My initial good feelings have been more than confirmed. It's a great laptop, and great with Debian. I did have to poke with some BIOS settings with toshset to solve the problems of the grub screen not appearing and xrandr working with a second display. Unfortunately I can't remember what I changed.

Posted by Colin Turner