My Nexus One was rooted the same day I got it. In fact, it was rooted even before I got around to doing much with the phone. It’s something I consider a necessary consequence of owning a phone like the Nexus One. It’s a phone that has become a computer. Like a computer, I want to be able to look under the hood, install a different operating system, build my own operating system, etc. These things have typically not been possible in previous smartphones running Symbian, Windows Mobile, or other proprietary operating systems. Android has made phones work like computers.

Rooting is a simple task on the Nexus One. It might take an hour or so to do some research and gather all the information you need to feel comfortable about the rooting exercise, but executing the actual rooting process takes only a matter of minutes, maybe a little more if you include the time taken to make backups.

Then once you get familiar with the process, it gets quite fun trying out various 3rd party ROMs. There are so many more features that you can get from 3rd part ROMs, things that somehow didn’t make it into the official Google/HTC ROM for the Nexus One. Rooting is also necessary to get some things working properly. For example, to properly configure 802.1x PEAP Wifi, you need to push a custom configuration into the phone because the GUI doesn’t provide you a way to configure the required settings correctly.

But the one thing that I’m particularly keen to do on the Nexus One is to be able to build my own ROM. I’ve been building my own Linux kernel on my PCs for over a decade. I’ve also been building complete Linux distributions for special-purpose applications for half a decade. So, building a ROM for the Nexus One seems like a natural extension of what I’ve been doing with Linux on PCs.

There’s a learning curve, though. Android, the Linux for the phone, isn’t quite the same thing as Linux on the PC. It’s not just about cross-compilation (which I’m somewhat also familiar with). There are also bits of Java (which I’m not familiar with), and a host build environment that is somewhat dated. You need a 32-bit build environment, and you need Java 1.5. The AOSP (Android Open Source Project) assumes a Ubuntu build host. I have Fedora. It’s not that Fedora won’t work. But as a first timer, having a Fedora 12, Java 1.6 and 64-bit-only host seems like giving myself extra hurdles.

I considered the idea of creating a Ubuntu VM just so that I could make my life easier. But in the end, I took the plunge and decided to have a go building the Nexus One ROM from Cyanogen. I’m proud to say I’ve finally got the phone to boot off my own build… even though it was just merely recompiling sources that someone else has hacked. There are some little problems though… but well, I hope to get them sorted out another time.

I’ve been building my own Linux kernel on my PCs for over a decade. I’ve also been building complete Linux appliances for half a decade. Eventually, I want to build a complete ROM for my phone too.

The phone is now a PC.

Related posts:

1. Switching to the Nexus One When Google announced the Nexus One last month, I felt...
2. Nexus One – Web Meets Phone Google has launched their own Android-based phone, the Nexus One....
3. The Nexus One Arrives The Nexus One, Google’s branded Android phone, finally arrives in...

Sounds impossible. But it is. That’s if you have about US$60K to spend on a PC. Yup, just one PC. Patriot built a PC with 40 TorqX SSDs and demonstrated copying a Blu-ray rip in 0.9 seconds. That’s really super fast. This is probably the year that SSD is going to come of age in consumer devices. It has been around, first becoming quite well known with its introduction as an option to the MacBook Air. It was too costly. The price has come down a lot. Perhaps by the end of this year, it might become competitively priced against a traditional rotating hard disk.

Then, rotating hard disks are going to get demoted in the storage hierarchy, to be used for backups, offline storage, external drives, etc. It’s like how hard disks have become so cheap that they are already replacing tape backups in data centres.

SSDs will have the important benefit of being more robust and shock resistant, important features for components used in a mobile device. It should also consume less power, although real world results are somewhat varied at this time. But when they do sort out the power efficiency matters, it will mean longer run time for mobile devices too, without having to be tethered to a power supply. Notebooks, netbooks and whatever-pads are going to get a lot more useful than it has ever been.

The last problem with mobile devices will be power. When will we get wireless power?

Related posts:

1. The Fuss with PC Power Supply Units (Cooler Master eXtreme Power) [photopress:20070923365.jpg,thumb,pp_image]The power supply unit of my home desktop PC started...
2. New Hitachi 1TB Hard Disk My not terribly old 320GB Seagate hard disk thought it...
3. Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus Mini-Review I bought the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus from Comex last...

I figure that anyone who uses a smartphone like the Nexus One is going to have a 3G data plan, so being able to hook onto a wireless network isn’t going to be so important. But anyhow, I thought I’d just make a small little community contribution by sharing how to configure the Nexus One phone (I suppose just about any Android 2.0/2.1 phone will work the same) to connect to the NUS wireless network in, well, NUS. But first, credit goes to the information posted in Answers@Comp. The GUI isn’t enough to get the config done.

Ok. What do you need? For folks who have not rooted your phone, you are out of luck. You will have to. As mentioned, the GUI doesn’t do what is needed. We need to get beneath the hood. So, before you go on, check that:

• Your phone is rooted.
• You have the adb tool (from the Android SDK).
• Your phone has USB Debugging turned on (under Settings, Applications, Development).
• You are comfortable with “vi”.

So here goes. It’s really quite simple. (I think the difficult part is really in the above.)

1. Connect to your phone over USB and run the adb shell (adb shell).
2. Edit the file in /data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf and append the text from the block below. Put in your NUSNET userid and password in the identity and password lines. Save the file.
3. Stop and start wifi.

network={
        ssid="NUS"
        scan_ssid=1
        key_mgmt=IEEE8021X
        eap=PEAP
        identity="<nusnetid>"
        password="<password>"
        phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
        priority=2
}

You should be able to connect to the NUS wireless (NUS SSID) network now. This NUS SSID is encrypted so your communication can’t be easily eavesdropped by other wireless users. You have the added benefit of auto-login. (The NUSOPEN SSID requires web-based captive portal logon, and the communication is also unencrypted.)

Related posts:

1. Switching to the Nexus One When Google announced the Nexus One last month, I felt...
2. Nexus One Adventures My Nexus One was rooted the same day I got...
3. Nexus One – Web Meets Phone Google has launched their own Android-based phone, the Nexus One....

I’ve used the Nexus One for a little over a week now. I think the biggest thing I will miss with my previous Nokia N97 is its camera. It’s quite capable of taking some really nice photos, like this shot of the Nexus One (as well as that in the previous post). This is one area that the Nexus One is trumped by the N97. Both phones sport 5 megapixel camera sensors, auto-focus, and LED flash (dual LED on the N97). But the bunch of photos I’ve taken with the Nexus One have been unimpressive, at least in terms of quality. The Nexus One is fast, though.

I guess I’ve had enough of the N97’s slowness. The handful of firmware updates across the months have certainly improved things. But the Nexus One is a whole lot faster, not just in its camera application, but in just about everything. It is like upgrading to a new generation of PC. Nokia made some strategic choices with its hardware specifications which did not pan out well for me. I suppose if anyone wants to label a phone as being a multimedia computer, they ought to make sure it will perform like one.

The other joy about the Nexus One is the size. Finally, after years with a couple of N-series phones from Nokia, I’m now holding something that actually qualifies as sleek and compact. It’s reasonably light too. The Nexus One doesn’t even feel bulky when contained in its neoprene pouch. It feels really solid too, particularly since it has no moving parts at all.

Then, while I had not expected to see improvements in terms of voice call quality, but I think the Nexus One does perform better than the N97. I’d have thought that Nokia would get basic voice call functionality working superbly. However, the Nexus One has the advantage of active noise cancellation from an extra microphone. The benefit of the activate noise cancellation is really at the other end of the call, so I don’t really know myself, but I’ve heard and read a lot about how it works beautifully.

But I think the most fascinating thing is, perhaps, that the Nexus One is more like a PC than any other phone that I ever had. More so than Nokia’s multimedia computers. I rooted the Nexus One within a few hours of receiving it, and I’m still discovering how much like a PC the smart phones have become. (Well, it’s not like I didn’t already know, but when you actually play with it yourself, you experience the things that you could only have read about previously.)

I have other “issues” with the Nexus One, but I’ll save those for another posting some other time.

Related posts:

1. The Nexus One Arrives The Nexus One, Google’s branded Android phone, finally arrives in...
2. Switching to the Nexus One When Google announced the Nexus One last month, I felt...
3. Nexus One – Web Meets Phone Google has launched their own Android-based phone, the Nexus One....

When Google announced the Nexus One last month, I felt it was an interesting development that has begun to change what an Android phone can represent. Some people will know that I have been, until then, rather anti-Android. There were two reasons: unimpressive hardware features (and uninteresting design too), as well as an open source development environment that I felt didn’t quite live up to the spirit of what open source was supposed to stand for. But, the first reason was beginning to fall apart with the launch of the Motorola Droid in end 2009, and now somewhat invalidated by the Nexus One. Finally, this is an Android phone that boasts features and hardware specifications expected of any decent smart phone of 2009 and what will come in 2010.

Despite what many other reviewers have said, I don’t think the Nexus One is the nicest looking phone. But it is certainly the best looking of any Android phone to date. (No, I don’t like how the iPhone looks either.) The fact that it now has really decent hardware, such as a superbly fast CPU, plenty of RAM, GPS, 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, etc, makes it a whole lot more attractive as a serious competition to modern smart phones. Yes, I’m not going to be sold on to any Android phone simply because it is Android powered. The Nexus One also has, finally, a decent 5 megapixel camera that has been sorely lacking in other Android phones (save for the recent Motorola Droid), and although I never believed it would outdo the likes of any modern Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Samsung camera phone, I think it will be “passable”.

So, I became interested to see if the Nexus One will work for me. It helped that there were some real Nexus One at work that I can touch and play with. The Nexus One’s camera is surely a downgrade for me. But I think, overall, it had enough pull factors to turn the decision in its favour. I also like the fact that the phone is branded and sold by Google directly, with “stock” but yet cutting-edge software that hasn’t gotten mutilated and maimed by any phone manufacturer.

I’m still not very trusting of Google. But I think they won’t turn evil in the next couple of years, or at least not for the lifetime of this phone. So I decided to take the plunge to try out living in Google world. I’ve not been much of a Google-citizen before this.

The other day, I wanted to sync my data, and Google was “down” (well, basically the network broke somewhere between my working network and Google’s network). I think this cloud business is rather smokey. But this cloudy business seems to be very popular, so I’ll go along with it for now.

Probably another attraction for me is the fact that the Nexus One was like a computer. Yes, Nokia has been telling us their phones are multimedia computers. But the Nexus One runs really like a Linux PC. This will definitely be interesting to people who like to poke their fingers into operating systems. It’s time for me to catch up on some new recent technology.

Related posts:

1. Nexus One – Web Meets Phone Google has launched their own Android-based phone, the Nexus One....
2. N97 vs Nexus One I’ve used the Nexus One for a little over a...
3. The Nexus One Arrives The Nexus One, Google’s branded Android phone, finally arrives in...

The Linux kernel admits to being dazed and confused, but tries hard to continue. Unsuccessfully. One of our server died. We looked at the screen, and were amused enough that everyone (who had a decent camera phone) took a picture of the screen. The kernel spat out in its logs: “Dazed and confused, but trying to continue;  Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled?” Alright, the server wasn’t really important after all, hence its death was only noticed like over 3  months later.

Related posts:

1. My Mac OS X Kernel Panic’ed I opened the lid of my MacBook, it resumed from...
2. Linux for Newbies I’m sad to say, Linux still isn’t quite ready for...
3. Laptop of the Future The coolest laptop of the future… take a peek at...

I fail to be wowed by Steve Jobs latest product announcement, the all new iPad, which is supposedly so revolutionary that it creates a new product category. I guess it still does deserve its own product category, but it is nowhere so revolutionary that the media had hyped it out to be. The name itself doesn’t even sound interesting. In fact, I’m already reading a bunch of jokes about the name even before I finished watching Steve Job’s keynote video.

It might not have mattered so much if the iPad had some compelling use cases. As it were, the hour odd demonstration of the iPad during the media event yesterday must have been, at least for some significant part, very boring for the attendees. The things that were demonstrated with the iPad were things you’d have expected to be there. It even felt painful watching Steve Jobs and other executives trying to show excitement and enthusiasm about mediocre features.

Are our expectations too high?

The greatest difficulty I have is understanding how the iPad is going to be used. If you carry around a notebook, surely, you do not want to be also carrying around an iPad. Would you consider the iPad an alternative to a notebook? Not for me.

When I don’t carry around a notebook (e.g. weekends, not working), I can’t carry an iPad anyway because it is too big to fit into a pocket, and I don’t carry a bag to stuff the iPad into. Perhaps ladies could stuff the iPad into their handbag, although I imagine the iPad would be somewhat oversized. There’s a huge black border around the viewable display on the iPad currently. Maybe in future generations, the frame of the device can be shrunk to the edge of the viewable display. That will make it slightly more compact, look a lot nicer, but I’m still not sure how it helps with portability. Maybe, while riding on the bus, or other tight seating space, it will be easier to interact with a tablet than a notebook with a real physical keyboard. Maybe it will be easier to interact with a tablet while walking around. I don’t know if these are good enough reasons though.

There are also a bunch of things that are “wrong” with the iPad. The biggest thing to me is the lack of multitasking. This is the age of multitasking. The iPhone did not multitask because, so we are to be told, of performance and battery life considerations. The iPad so much more powerful, so much “newer generation”. Yet, here we have gone back to the world of MS-DOS?

iDisappointed.

Related posts:

1. The Long Awaited Apple Tablet In less than 24 hours, at the Yerba Buena Center...
2. New Apple MacBooks Carved Out Of A Brick Yes rumours are circulating about the “Brick”. What is the...
3. Apple Announcements From Macworld 2009 Macworld 2009 is underway right now. This will be the...

I recently bought a D-Link DCS-2121 wireless network camera. It’s a camera that connects to the network directly, records video to a network storage, emails or uploads video/snapshots of detected motion, and provide real-time video monitoring through its embedded web server. As these cameras get smarter and smarter, more functions are integrated into it. It’s pretty handy to implement a simple remote video surveillance system just about anywhere you need.

This isn’t the first such gadget that I’ve had. This DCS-2121 is actually replacing one of my older DCS-950G network cameras. They were basic, simple cameras, but there was one important feature I wanted that led me to zoom in on D-Link products. I couldn’t determine if other brand of IP cameras (at least of those within reasonable price range) supported video recording to a Samba/CIFS network attached storage, but this was an advertised feature of D-Link IP cameras.

This feature is useful to me, because it means I can have video saved directly to my Linux machine that provides a Samba/CIFS share. No need for me to run a Windows machine loaded with some proprietary camera recording software. Clean and simple The recorded video is saved in AVI format, something that is easily viewable in Mac OS X and Linux, again without requiring any special Windows software. Yes, you can tell I want to avoid having to run Windows at all if possible.

This new DCS-2121 records video at up to 1280×800 resolution (15 fps iirc), although honestly I think 1024×768 is more than sufficient. I would have been happy with D1 resolution, but it is not offered. The camera includes an internal microphone too, so it can pick up some audio if it is close enough to the camera.

If you are already familiar with IP cameras, the DCS-2121 does just about everything you’d expect from any decent IP camera. This includes motion detection, configurable detection area and sensitivity, sending of email upon motion, flipping or mirroring of images (in case you mount the camera upside-down), etc. The live camera view is done using a Java applet, which again is something important for me because it means it will work on browsers other than Internet Explorer, and on non-Windows platforms too.

The DCS-2121 is one step higher than their lowest end model. It still doesn’t have PTZ function. But it picks up audio (built-in) and can stream video in 3gpp format. I think it works quite well if you need basic video surveillance using a standalone IP camera.

Related posts:

1. Getting a Better Digital Camera I was just having this chat with my colleague about...
2. N97 vs N95 8GB Camera Images Both the new flagship Nokia N97 and the previous flagship...
3. Apple Launches New iPods At Apple’s special media event yesterday, Apple announced the immediate...

In less than 24 hours, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Apple is expected to unveil a new hardware product category at their special Media Event. It’ll be a product announcement so major that it is being compared to the likes if the iPhone launch in 2007 and Macintoshes moving to Intel processors in 2005. We’re talking about a new product category rather than simply another new product, and it has been reported that Steve Jobs was heard saying the Apple Tablet “will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

McGraw-Hill CEO has also been reported as confirming the Apple Tablet, which will run the iPhone OS. This was in an interview on CNBC, so I imagine this is must be pretty reliable… not that industry watchers needed any further affirmation of the product’s existence.

So, the event will be 2am Singapore time tomorrow morning, which I’m sure enough news sites will provide up-to-the-minute coverage of the Media Event, particularly the unveiling of the new product.

I’m interested to find out how this new product category will change things. Personally, I rather work off a notebook. I can’t imagine a tablet (at least not of the size that the Apple Tablet has been rumoured to be) being sufficiently comfortable to do productive work. So I suppose this new tablet will target a new kind of market, different from how other tablets have done.

Related posts:

1. iPad – iDisappointed I fail to be wowed by Steve Jobs latest product...
2. Something’s Up At The Apple Store Something’s brewing at the Apple Store. A new product update....
3. Apple Announcements From Macworld 2009 Macworld 2009 is underway right now. This will be the...

One of the best things that Apple had introduced with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is Time Machine. It’s a no-brainer backup utility that “just works”, and furthermore, one that people will actually use. While Time Machine works great with a direct attached storage disk (internal or external firewire/USB) or Time Capsule, it wouldn’t readily work with other network attached storage. If you want to backup “over the network”, Apple wants you to buy their Time Capsule hardware. But there are fixes to get around that.

Honestly, the Time Capsule is quite a fine piece of hardware too. It is basically a simultaneous dual band 802.11n wireless broadband router, gigabit ethernet switch, print server and includes massive internal disk storage. The problem is that what if you already have all these capabilities in one or several deviecs… there’s not much reason to buy a Time Capsule.

So… here’s the thing. You can trick Time Machine to use some other type of network attached storage. You don’t even need to run any new fancy thing like Apple’s own networking protocol. Just a few setup steps.

1. First, make sure that your network folder is already setup and working. Particularly, make sure that your Mac can connect to it, read and write files to it. How to setup this network folder is beyond the scope of this post.
2. Next, you need to tweak a setting in Mac OS X. Run this in a terminal:
   defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
3. Then, you need to create a “disk image” on your Mac locally. In a terminal, run:
   hdiutil create -library SPUD -size $SIZE -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname “Backup of $MACNAME” $MACNAME_$MACADDRESS.sparsebundle
   where $SIZE is the size of the Time Machine backup storage to create (e.g. “320G” for a 320GB size storage), $MACNAME is the computer name of your Mac (find it in System Preferences → Sharing), and $MACADDRESS is the ethernet ID of your LAN interface (just the 12 hexademical digits, e.g. d49a20122334). Note that the “sparsebundle” created is not actually the size that you specify, but it can grow to accommodate the size that you set.
4. Use the Finder, locate the image you created above ($MACNAME_$MACADDRESS.sparsebundle) and copy it into the network folder.
5. Now open Time Machine Preferences, click Select Disk, and then select your network folder.
6. You’re almost done. Just wait for the first backup to start. Or you can just tell Time Machine to Back Up Now.

The initial backup does take some time, like it also does on a directly connected USB or Firewire disk. I had 93GB of data to backup initially, and over my 802.11n wireless network, it took almost 7 hours to complete.

A nice thing I like about this solution is the ability to “limit” the amount of space consumed by Time Machine. Ordinarily, Time Machine uses up the entire disk that it is offered, which is inconvenient when you want to share that disk with other data, or use it for multiple Time Machines (i.e. different Macs). How do you tell Time Machine play nice and not to gobble up all the space it can lay its hands on? Well, now the sparsebundle image lets you determine the maximum amount of space that Time Machine will use.

Note: If you are going to copy-and-paste the hdutil command line above, be wary that when displayed by WordPress in here, the quotes are replaced with nice curly quotes. Remember to swap it back for a normal quote character.

Related posts:

1. D-Link DCS-2121 Wireless Network Camera I recently bought a D-Link DCS-2121 wireless network camera. It’s...
2. Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus Mini-Review I bought the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus from Comex last...
3. Setting Up Your Mac For NUS The new school year at NUS has started. Many people...