Truth Seeker

Almost Time to Vote!

2011-11-22T09:20:00.001+13:00

It's almost voting day.

I'll be voting Green because they are the only consistently reality-based party with respect for evidence.

I'll be voting to keep MMP because it's the only system that ensures the real majority governs and that I was able to actually elect people I want to represent me.

STV will be my fail-over choice. It's the only proportional alternative.

What will you do?

Copyright, You are Dead to Me.

2011-09-26T23:02:00.004+13:00

As of now I do not give a rat's bleeding arse about copyright. It's obviously become a scam allowing corporations to steal from all of us. It's not for me or anyone like me.

I just tried to upload a video I made that was made up of bits of video shot at the Auckland Lantern Festival in February. Amid the thousand people talking in the background someone, somewhere was singing some very bad karaoke.

My camera's mic picked it up for a few seconds (30?) and braindead YouTube laid a copyright infringement claim against my video before it had even finished uploading. Fair Use is being trampled completely. These corporations are stealing from us all with impunity.

I now officially do not give a flying monkey's toss about copyright. These corporations clearly do not care about my rights.

Let's call that even. It's over.

Copyright, you are dead to me.

YouTube and Fair Use

2011-09-05T09:28:00.003+12:00

A couple of weeks ago I was walking up Queen St in Auckland and came across some young people break dancing in Aotea Square. Some of them were pretty good.

I had my 3D camera with me (Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D W3) and I shot some stills and video. Later, I made a video of the best efforts by the best dancers and uploaded it to YouTube. Two days later they notified me I had infringed copyright because of the music the kids were playing on their sound system. YouTube restricted the ability to see my video on some platforms (mobile, in particular) and in some countries. They advised me I could dispute the claim if I wished.

I definitely wished.

The videos were recordings of a spontaneous, unorganised, non-profit event in a public place. The sound track includes chatter, clapping, cheers and laughter. The segments of the video aren't in chronological order. Parts of several songs are included and not necessarily in the order in which the incidental music was played by the dancers. I have no idea who the artists are or what the names of the songs might be.

If this isn't Fair Use....then YouTube have allowed it to be killed by the RIAA.

I have disputed this claim. I don't know how long the disputes process takes, so will be interested to find out. I'll post more information as it comes to hand.

Here is the disputed video. [Update: I deleted the video off YouTube. You can see it at 3DF33D.TV if you're interested]

(The embedded player doesn't seem to include 3D support. You may wish to click through to YouTube for other 3D modes.)

VIDEO DELETED

The Long Emergency gathers pace....

2011-08-12T11:04:00.004+12:00

Coverage of the "Global Financial Crisis" appears to suffer from a lack of perspective. Most of it is focused on the most obvious and immediate elements and lacks any real attempt to understand the event (if a process can be called an event) in a wider context.

In 2003, James Howard Kunstler correctly anticipated that what he calls “The Long Emergency” was imminent and unavoidable. His perspective was based on the consequences of Peak Oil hitting the global economy and societies everywhere, initially producing a bumpy plateau of recession and recovery as energy prices fluctuate on the event horizon of growing scarcity.

We can add to this the gathering effects (and huge and growing costs) of climate change and the economic and fiscal consequences of a decade of outsourcing jobs to countries with cheaper labour which has destroyed literally millions of manufacturing jobs in the West and / or converted them into lower-paying service jobs….whose workers either pay less tax on lower incomes or have no income and rely on state assistance or family members who still have an income. At the same time, taxes were cut for those on the best incomes, making matters even worse. De-regulation of the banking sector in the late 90s appears to have been a catalyst in exaggerating the consequences of bad debt due to poor (or non-existent) risk assessment. This failure with respect to risk appears to remain unresolved as central banks everywhere continue to use interest rates to manipulate money supplies apparently divorced from any concept of risk.

The fuller picture, very broadly, is one of people on a declining income base (thus shrinking the tax base) being offered cheap credit secured by whatever assets they had on hand to maintain a lifestyle that isn't sustainable by any measure with the global economy on the threshold of a transformation driven by the twin engines of climate change and ever more expensive energy.

So here we are…and this civilisation-changing process is only now getting underway and gathering pace. Our world is on the cusp of huge change and our leaders (and most voters) haven’t got a clue….eyes riveted to the rear-vision mirror in their feeble attempts to chart a viable course into the future.

People need to start paying attention. Sleep walkers everywhere will end up road kill on the highway of life.

Epsom for the Lulz

2011-07-18T22:52:00.003+12:00

So the two main candidates for the National Party nomination in Epsom were:

1. John Bank's biographer, Paul Goldsmith
2. John Bank's mayoral campaign manager, Aaron Bhatnagar

LOL....

...and now John Banks, a newly faithful ACT party member, awaits his rubber stamped destiny from the voters of Epsom.

Anyone need any more proof National took over the ACT party?

Letter to the Herald 2011-06-02

2011-06-03T10:36:00.002+12:00

Wrote this letter to the New Zealand Herald yesterday in relation to their editorial about Minister of Transport, Steven Joyce, rejecting Auckland City's case for the CBD rail tunnel.

ABC report on Peak OIl

2011-05-24T12:47:00.001+12:00

Have you got your head around this yet?

ABC Catalyst Peak Oil Report 28-04-2011

Why is public service TV important?

2011-05-16T22:48:00.001+12:00

Brain Edwards tells Broadcasting Minister, Jonathan Coleman, why public service broadcasting is important.

Not ready to change, thanks. I like MMP.

2011-05-06T23:41:00.001+12:00

Over on "Dark Brightness", Chris Gales says it's "time to change from MMP....to anything".

I read it through and left a comment which I'll post here, too:

MMP gave me a vote that actually lets me elect people I want. Under FPP I managed to reach the age of 30 without *ever* electing someone I had voted for. I always seemed to end up living in a safe seat for the OTHER party. I have no wish to return to any of that.

Interesting you see MMP as dominated by the small parties. This must be a “Princess and the pea” sort of thing. I know the Greens ONLY have Metiria Turai on the South Island – based in Dunedin. How you think one MP can “dominate” the South Island is an interesting perspective. I’d say she was there to represent the people of the South who vote for the Green Party. I’m sure they are happy she’s there for them.

One of the interesting things I notice in discussions about MMP is how concerned some people are about MPs for parties they don’t even vote for. For me, I’m most concerned with the MPs from the party I voted for…and any other MPs can be the “problem” of whoever voted for that party. It’s their business. But there does seem to be this tendency to denigrate MPs from parties people don’t agree with any anyway. I don’t get that.

Then there is the accountability meme you raise….about people not elected locally getting on the list. I don’t see that as a problem either. In my local electorate, pretty much any of the candidates standing from a significant party would be good MPs. Unfortunately FPP only lets one person win…and that’s a shame and a loss to the districts concerned. MMP often allows more than one person from an electorate be elected via the party vote – which is, in effect, used to elect multiple members from a single national electorate. But the benefit to places like Dunedin or Horowhenua or Nelson is that MMP lets these places have Mps from more than one party. I love that. It means if the local MP is a complete drongo who I KNOW won’t listen to a word I have to say, I can go to someone else locally based. First Past the Post *never* let me do that.

On the acountability front, MMP beats FPP by miles. Back in the old days, my one little vote only had any effect at all in just ONE electorate. It had no effect at all in any of the others. The *best* I could hope for – and only once *ever* achieved – was to elect the person I wanted locally. If the MP in the neighbouring electorate was a complete twat….there was nothing at all I could do about it. But with MMP, my party vote has *national* effect. It can help to elect multiple MPs from all over New Zealand. Plus I also get my local vote….just like I always did.

Two ticks is definitely better than one. Especially when the MMP tick is the one that lets me vote nationally…..and not just in my one little electorate.

The funniest thing I can think of is a National Party voter in a safe Labour seat in Dunedin, or a Labour Party voter on Auckland’s North Shore, voting to get rid of MMP ….and thus ensuring their local vote never again is in any way relevant to the future fortunes of the party they support as their local seat will always go the other way.

That’s just silly…yet there appear to be people that muddled. Life is strange.

Hone Harawera's by-election has nothing to do with MMP

2011-05-05T09:02:00.000+12:00

This letter was sent to the NZ Herald on May 5th:

Dear Editor

Can someone please tell letter writer "J Kent of Onerahi" that Hone Harawera was elected by First Past the Post in a local electorate and his election has nothing do with MMP? He wasn't elected as a list MP or by the party vote. Under First Past the Post he would still be right where he is. After 15 years of MMP the apparent ignorance and muddled thinking shown by some MMP critics in your letter columns to date is fascinating to behold.

Steve Withers

Party leader selection has nothing to do with MMP.

2011-05-05T08:58:00.000+12:00

The full text of a letter sent to the NZ Herald on May 2nd. They published a truncated version the following day.

Dear Editor

Letter writer, Ian Gerwin of Orewa (2/5/11) incorrectly blames MMP for Don Brash being made leader of the ACT Party. The ACT Party did that all by themselves and could have done it just as easily, under First Past the Post. In Canada in 1983, Brian Mulroney went straight from being CEO of Iron Ore Corp to being the leader the Conservative Party. He wasn't an MP at the time either. His party arranged for a by-election and got him into the House of Commons. At least under MMP, Dr. Brash has to wait until November, assuming ACT don't entirely disappear. How parties pick their leaders has nothing to do with MMP. Exactly the same thing can happen under First Past the Post and there is no shortage of examples.

Steve Withers

The Manifest Evil of First Past the Post

2011-05-02T13:38:00.005+12:00

A last minute, pre-election EKOS poll in Canada shows that 65.6% of Canadians intend to vote for parties OTHER than the governing Conservative Party of Canada (CPC).

The CPC had been leading a minority government. An election was triggered by the CPC losing a non-confidence vote after the government was found to have been in contempt of Parliament.

Yet the CPC may actually end up winning a majority of all 308 seats with an even smaller share of the vote than they got last time - thanks to the First Past the Post voting system. This is because the two major opposition parties - who together have more than 50% support - may split the anti-CPC vote and allow the CPC to win an outright majority of all seats with as little as 34.5% of the total vote.....less than they got last time. The latest poll shows the usual 3rd-place NDP are running a close second to the CPC and ahead of the Liberal party. In Canadian terms this is a huge shift in voter preference at the federal level. But what hasn't changed is the monster-majority (65%) voter distaste for the Conservatives.....yet FPP has allowed them to win elections due to a split opposition vote.

That could never happen under MMP. In November, I'll be voting to keep MMP.

(Canadians are voting on their May 2nd. So the polls will open in eastern Canada around 11pm NZ time tonight and the last polls will close in the Yokon Territory around 2:30pm tomorrow, NZ time. Canada has seven time time zones.)

Don Brash just bought himself a political party

2011-04-28T13:37:00.000+12:00

Fascinating.

Former National Party leader, Don Brash, appears to have bought himself a political party - ACT - and they made him their leader. That pretty much says it all for me about the ACT Party. I've never understood why anyone would vote for them. After selling themselves off to the highest bidder, I still don't.

In case the original TVNZ story linked to disappears, this is the para that caught my eye:

"Hide joked that he did not pay Don Brash's membership fee, but did say Brash has made a generous donation to the Act party."

What this means for ACT or the coming election will be the subject of much speculation. For day-to-day parliamentary purposes, I'm interested to see who runs ACT in the House. It can't be Don Brash as he doesn't have a seat and wasn't on ACT's list in any position last time around. The earliest he could assume as seat would be following the November elections....assuming ACT is returned at all. Rodney Hide could resign and trigger a by-election in Epsom, to make way for Brash, but being so close to an election there likely isn't time....unless the government decides there is.

That raises the interesting question: If Hide was number 1 on ACT's list and Brash won Epsom....would they get to keep the extra MP? Or would a sitting ACT MP have leave parliament?

Kobo and Kindle - Almost useless at my house

2011-04-26T08:51:00.002+12:00

I embraced ebooks on my Samsung Galaxy S (Android) phone with its 4 inch super AMOLED screen. I bought a couple and found it a very easy way to read in any situation. A big plus was the font size is adjustable, so I don't need to use reading glasses. A lot of book these days use smaller print to save paper. That's great...I just can't see it very well in low light. An ebook reader doesn't have that problem.

But I've struck a BIG problem and it renders these channels almost useless to me: Neither of them have the books I want to buy. Well...not quite true. They - between them - will have perhaps one book in 5 or 6 that I would have bought in a heartbeat. Yes, I can buy all the latest mainstream novels and other pulp fiction, but that isn't what I read.

Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine"? Nope. Bill McKibben's "Eaarth"? Nope. The list goes on and on. Then there are the books they have for sale, but won't let me buy them because I'm in the Asia & Pacific region. So I can be standing in a book store with the book on the shelf in front of me, but neither of these ebook purveyors will sell it to me. They either don't have it or refuse to sell it to me. I'm glad I'm just using the free apps and didn't spend any money on the physical readers.

This is why I was wary of ebooks in the first place (and I was): publisher lock-down. It wrecks ebooks as an option and keeps paper books in the top spot for sheer accessibility - either by me or anyone I lend the book to. Until ebooks are as easy and accessible as paper books, they will burn more people off then they attract.

Gave up on Twitter today.....

2011-04-21T13:45:00.000+12:00

After the 'n'-th iteration of Twitter's 140 character limit resulting in people getting the wrong end of the stick and fluffing their feathers based on what they thought they read....I decided Twitter was a waste of time for purposes other than fast receipt of links to items of interest.

I've been considering it for a while now. Today was the day I finally made up my mind. I will have a Twitter account, but it will be read-only.

Auckland - 07:27 Tuesday

2011-04-19T07:41:00.001+12:00

Looks like an awesome day kicking off.

Thoughts on copyright

2011-04-16T16:44:00.010+12:00

I'll cut to the chase.

The "Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act" is reminiscent of King Canute commanding the tide to stop coming in. That didn't work for him, due to forces beyond his control. At least Canute knew this and this was the point he was trying to make. Our own lawmakers appear to lack this insight.

For any law to be obeyed without going to considerable and expensive enforcement effort, the relevant law must be seen by the vast majority to be required and thus legitimate and necessary.

The underlying problem I see for the "Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act" is the ongoing clash between what I see as human culture itself, which has always been heavily weighted toward sharing for mutual benefit, and the desire by a relative few to define and monopolise culture as property they own for their personal or corporate profit.

For millennia, people have shared information about growing food, making tools and building homes. Socially, they sang songs or performed dances and other people saw and heard them and repeated them if they liked them. Then, after the printing press came along, the idea of copyright arose, allowing someone to claim "own" what they created. The justification was that such ownership allowed the creator to earn a living and keep on creating.

That's not a bad idea if done properly as it does enable a creative space for an author to benefit from their creation. Originally, copyright was usually fairly short. For example, in the US in the 1920s, it was 14 years. After that time, the content passed into the public domain and we all shared it, as we have always done.

But today, in the United States in particular, copyright terms have reached absurd terms. Life plus 95 years for an author and 120 years for a corporation. The US wants this to be the law everywhere, presumably to be extended again as Mickey Mouse is about to pass into the public domain. Their corporations want the content they pay people to create for them to be exclusively their property until our great great grandchildren are old and grey. Copyright terms of such absurdly long duration engender resentment because the law is obviously insensitive to cultural norms. It begs to be subverted.

There is no shortage of irony here. Try as they may, "rights holders" can't be justify this law to the wider public and thus its legitimacy is very much in doubt. So they seek ever more draconian methods of legal coercion to attempt to enforce what they see as their rights. While demanding that we not "steal", the incremental extension of copyright terms from 14 years to 120 years (or more) is defacto theft from all of us and the public domain we share. Thus, copyright is no longer about enabling creativity or innovation. Copyright law becomes hostile to the culture from which it arose and from which it feeds for ideas. There is no public perception of need for this kind of copyright law.

This corporate "rights holder" law will fail, as Canute failed. Larger forces are at work here.

It can't be a mystery why copyright law is now so widely ignored. It's become very bad law.

The additional loss to Kiwis in all this is that the New Zealand government - whichever major party is leading it - has become the defacto agent and advocate for multi-national interests in conflict with our own. This law does nothing to enhance the position of creative Kiwis. Instead, it risks undermining what support exists in the wider public for respecting the rights of local rights holders by associating it with outrageously bad law imported from elsewhere.

New Zealand's existing copyright terms for music, literature and broadcasting are long compared to a human life span, though much shorter than those in the US.

People might be persuaded to respect the law if the terms were reasonable on the scale of a human life span. But the 120 year nonsense the US seeks to impose on the world (any NZ-USA FTA will depend on it) merely encourages people to ignore copyright altogether as a scam in which they are deemed to be the mugs.

One advantage of walking to work....

2011-04-14T07:46:00.002+12:00

At least I'm moving. Unlike these poor people on the Northern Motorway at Sunset Rd this morning.

Is the United States insane?

2011-03-29T13:57:00.003+13:00

Many observers of US politics have in recent years asked themselves if the United States is losing its collective mind. I have to confess I'm frequently puzzled by the claimed "certainties" in US politics that are very often far from certain. One obvious example is the claimed "weapons of mass destruction" then-US President G W Bush asserted were possessed by Iraq. "WMD" drove US foreign policy toward Iraq for a year prior to the 2003 invasion...and proved to be fictional. Whether Bush believed they were there or not doesn't really matter for this discussion. Whether a dreadful mistake or a cynical lie, WMD (certain enough to wage war over) weren't there.

The US is still in Iraq as a consequence of this fiction that "everyone" believed was true. The public largely lapped it up, stoked by a media machine that didn't seriously challenge the many weaknesses in the supporting "evidence". One news story might report the gaps in the evidence and then five more, plus an editorial, would declare a strong case in favour of WMD and support for Bush's invasion plans. It was bizarre to watch at the time.

As further support for a case arguing the existence of false certainties, I suppose I can merely allude to the "birthers" who are convinced President Barak Obama was actually born in Kenya. A belief so strong (as with WMD) that no evidence can threaten it. The evidence doesn't even seem to matter.

Without going off at tedious length, this is the sort of thing that causes many to wonder if the whole country had gone la-la. It's just not rational as we understand rational, which is that conclusions should be based on verifiable evidence - tested and proven.

Without going through them all, I recognise there are many forces at work, cultural and social, in the US. It isn't a monolith. There are "red" states and "blue" states and people of all colours and political persuasions among and between. With all this in view, surely these diverse influences would be expressed (and mitigated) via a properly functioning, transparent and accountable democracy operating in the full glare of the light of day. So is the United States such a democracy? Does its ideological diversity find expression through its representative institutions? I don't think so. Here's why:

It helps understanding what is going on in America if we also understand that democracy there is barely functional and if often operates in form only, with function (meaningful/effective popular representation aligned with diverse public opinion and values) already degraded to the point of dysfunction.

For example, democracy implies some level of accountability to voters. Certainly, this still very much exists in the US Senate (2 per state, regardless of population, for a 6-year term). But there are really only two parties and they are very similar in most respects that matter, so voters can usually change Senate faces but have much more difficulty changing policies in many areas.

The House of Representatives is a different matter altogether. There are 435 representatives (same number since 1911, I think). A few of them can sit in the House, but can't vote, as they are from American territories that are not states: Puerto Rico, for example, with 4.5 million people and one non-voting House rep. They are elected every 2 years (says the US Constitution) from electoral districts the boundaries of which are defined by the relevant state legislatures. These legislatures generally 'cheat'. Legally, of course. They fiddle the district boundaries (gerrymandering) to favour one side or the other. The usual tactic is to split up areas where the other party has strength and tack the bits onto your strong areas. It can make a huge difference to the outcome overall. A good current example is the Republican Party-dominated Ohio state legislature is moving to eradicate the Cleveland district currently held by Democratic Congressman (and past Presidential candidate) Dennis Kucinich. They will be carving his district up and attaching the pieces to neighbouring Republican-held districts and expanding those. The voters won't be voting any differently, but the way their votes are converted into representation will certainly be changed and the Democrats will lose at least this one seat, just by changing the boundaries.

As we can see, if one party (both Republicans and Democrats do this) has the majority in the state legislature and the state has several districts (some have only one - so no cheating is possible). The result of this is your average House rep is elected from a district with an average population of 750,000 (some smaller, many much larger). To do this in every 2 years while spending most time in Washington takes an enormous amount of money to reach your 750,000 constituents. Something has to give...and it does: It's a recipe for pandering to a few wealthy backers....and that is exactly what has happened in many, many cases.

The result? Thanks to state legislature gerrymandering, the percentage of incumbents re-elected each two years now hovers around the 98% mark. That is BY FAR the highest incumbency rate in any Western democracy. Remember also there are only two parties and they are very similar. This environment allows for cronies to be cronies and transparency to be reduced and accountability to, generally, be the exception rather than the rule. I'll note this can vary widely from state to state, particularly at the level of state governments where devices like recall petitions and referenda can mitigate the worst effects of wht I have described to at least some degree.

Perhaps now it is understandable why so many people don't bother voting in the US. The "fix" is in and has been for well over 50 years. America is in dire need of reform of its democratic institutions in a serious and fundamental way. Unfortunately, they have been subjected to a non-stop stream of propaganda from childhood extolling the supposed virtues of their deeply dysfunctional system of government. Most lack the vocabulary and understanding to have a sensible discussion about democratic alternatives and are left tinkering with trivialities like campaign finance reform....as though that would change anything at all that really matters.

If you think America is insane, bear in mind this is the product of a poorly designed system incapable of seeing its problems and usefully addressing them. That must surely drive even good people - and most Americans are very good people - around the twist.

Why New Zealand needs to keep MMP

2011-03-24T17:36:00.005+13:00

This video by Fairvote Canada serves as a useful reminder of why New Zealand voted to get rid of First Past the Post in 1993....and why we should vote to keep MMP in the referendum later this year.

It's worth noting that in the first election for Auckland Council 62.5% of votes cast didn't elect a single Councillor. Or to put it another way, 13 of the 20 Councillors who were elected each received less than 30% of the votes cast in their ward. In Albany Ward, both people elected got less than 10% of the vote each. Over 80% of votes in Albany Ward elected no one at all, thanks to First Past the Post.

Under MMP, every party vote cast for a party that reaches 5% of the vote, or for a party that wins a local seat, counts toward their fair proportion of seats in the House.

MMP is so much better for voters, no wonder (some) of the politicians don't like it.

Big Parties from Fairvote Canada on Vimeo.

NZ Herald shaping public opinion through use of language

2011-03-23T09:31:00.009+13:00

I have an interest in how NZ media - almost completely owned by large foreign private corporations - uses language to shape public opinion. Examples appear almost daily (if not hourly). I thought yesterday I might start recording some of these. They are from my own perspective, of course, which has its own views and values and I will make these as clear as possible.

Today (23/03/2011) the NZ Herald presents us with a story headlined: "Pet projects face cuts, Key warns". As these links have a way of dying, I'll record the first paragraph here:

The Government's coalition partners have been warned their pet projects will not be exempt from the drive for savings in this year's Budget, with funding for the Act Party's taskforce and Maori Party's Whanau Ora scheme under review.

The headline uses the term "pet projects" and the first paragraph emphasises this term through repetition.

To me, the term is deprecating, trivialising the projects referred to. I'm not saying they are trivial or not....but the NZ Herald's use of language and construction of the story unambiguously implies they are. The story does refer to specific projects including a quote from the leader of ACT, Rodney Hide, bagging the Families Commission, a project of Peter Dunne's United Party.

Certainly none of the projects referred to gets any recognition for merit from the Herald story. On the contrary, they are all bundled together in a deprecatory context as "pet projects" ripe for cutting in the next National-lead government budget. As it stands, the Herald could be charged with publishing propaganda if Mr. Key did not, himself, use the term "pet projects". Mr Key also did not construct the story the way it was constructed. The Herald did that all by itself for reasons best known to itself.

The NZ Herald, in my view, has shown in the past it is comfortable shaping news stories to support the agenda of the National Party in government. This would appear to be yet another example, in my humble opinion. It's the first one I have documented in this way, but won't be the last.

My interest engaged, I sent Claire Trevett the following email.

Hi Ms Trevett
Did John Key use the deprecating term "pet projects" or was this something the NZ Herald came up with?
I'd like to know as I have an interest in how media shapes public opinion through use of language that reaches beyond the event being reported.

Thanks.

If I get any response, I'll update this post.

[Update 2011-04-04: Claire Trevett did not respond to my email.]

The biggest risk with nuclear power isn't the reactors. It's the people.

2011-03-16T10:21:00.009+13:00

The New York Times reports major concerns were raised in the early 70's about the General Electric "Mark 1" nuclear reactor containment vessels. This is the sort of containment vessel experiencing severe problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant following the disastrous earthquake in Japan last week.

The NY Times story says*:

"In 1972, Stephen H. Hanauer, then a safety official with the Atomic Energy Commission, recommended in a memo that the sort of “pressure-suppression” system used in G.E.’s Mark 1 plants presented unacceptable safety risks and that it should be discontinued. Among his concerns were that the smaller containment design was more susceptible to explosion and rupture from a buildup in hydrogen — a situation that may have unfolded at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
“What are the safety advantages of pressure suppression, apart from the cost saving?” Mr. Hanauer asked in the 1972 memo. (The regulatory functions of the Atomic Energy Commission were later transferred to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.)"

So what happened?

"A written response came later that same year from Joseph Hendrie, who would later become chairman of the N.R.C. He called the idea of a ban on such systems “attractive” because alternative containment systems have the “notable advantage of brute simplicity in dealing with a primary blowdown.”

"But he added that the technology had been so widely accepted by the industry and regulatory officials that “reversal of this hallowed policy, particularly at this time, could well be the end of nuclear power.”"

OK, so Hanauer and Hendrie both agree there are problems with this container vessel design. Hanhauer wants something done about it, while Hendrie is happy to just talk about it. It's too late to be safe. The industry comes first, above all else. In effect.

Let's now note that the AEC was dis-established two years later in 1974 and replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Joseph Hendrie was a Commissioner on the new body and was Chair of the NRC from 1979 to 1981. Dr Hendrie's bio on the NRC site makes it clear he was a constant player in safety and risk assessment at both the AEC and the NRC.

Reading the NRC web site, their official history says:

"Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
Before the NRC was created, nuclear regulation was the responsibility of the AEC, which Congress first established in the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. Eight years later, Congress replaced that law with the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which for the first time made the development of commercial nuclear power possible. The act assigned the AEC the functions of both encouraging the use of nuclear power and regulating its safety. The AEC's regulatory programs sought to ensure public health and safety from the hazards of nuclear power without imposing excessive requirements that would inhibit the growth of the industry. This was a difficult goal to achieve, especially in a new industry, and within a short time the AEC's programs stirred considerable controversy. An increasing number of critics during the 1960s charged that the AEC's regulations were insufficiently rigorous in several important areas, including radiation protection standards, reactor safety, plant siting, and environmental protection."

The move to the NRC was intended to separate the promotion of nuclear power from the regulation of it.

On the issue of the GE Mark1 container vessel the regulatory change appears to have had no effect. Though Dr. Hendrie agreed with Mr. Hanhauer about his concerns, nothing was done and many of these reactor vessels remain in use today, with no plans to change that situation anywhere in view.

One could be forgiven for speculating that the regulatory change was, at least in part, window dressing and may - as these things often go - have actually been an opportunity for the nuclear inductry to gain more control over their own regulation. Clearly, Dr. Hendrie's "go along to get along" approach (an approach the old AEC had been criticised for), with respect to the safety of the Mark 1, appears to have won the day on the Mark 1 container vessel issue at the very least...and it did so with Dr. Hendrie's active involvement as a Commissioner and then as Chair of the NRC. I'm not blaming him. I'm certain he wasn't alone in his view. That's the problem, really.

This is one of the major reasons I have serious reservations about nuclear power. Never mind the technology itself and whether or not it can be made sound. The most predictable source of risk is the human failing of placing self-interest or corporate interest over the wider community interest. "Capture" of the regulatory body that is supposed to guarantee public safety by the industry being regulated can see risks remain unaddressed with cost being the over-riding concern and public safety - absolute safety - coming second at best.

I have read a fair bit on this topic in the past few days. I'm a long way from being fully informed. So far, most of the words are laudible and cannot be faulted. The values of the companies and regulatory bodies are sound. But if we ignore the fine words and look at what they actually DID....then a somewhat different picture emerges. Economic "pragmatism" won out over concerns about risk to public safety. That isn't good enough. Not when dealing with technologies like nuclear power, that can poison a part of the Earth for generations to come.

* I include extracts from the articles I cite as the articles often disappear from view and the substance supporting any case being made is thus removed.

"Snapper" cards on Auckland buses

2011-03-15T10:58:00.016+13:00

I'm sorry to see NZ Bus and Auckland Transport wasting money on these smart card systems. They are a complete waste of money, imposed by a market ideology that has clearly failed to deliver the public transport services Auckland needs.

If anything they completely undermine any argument that private operators are more efficient or offer better value than a monopoly public transport provider. If we didn't have many private companies with diverse fares and ticketing systems, there would be nothing to "integrate". One transport system (like Toronto's TTC) would allow a more rational way of composing fares across the system, completely eliminating the 'need' to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on systems to "integrate" anything. There would also be no need for profit.

Even worse for Auckland, Auckland Transport have mandated one expensive smart card system while one of the service providers, NZ Bus (Infratil on wheels) is insisting on providing its own, parallel smart card ("Snapper") system. NZ Bus should be told to get with the programme or get lost.

What could be done instead? Toronto use small metal tokens that last literally decades. Dirt cheap. Or you buy a daily "scratch" pass ($10 - for the entire system) or a weekly ($30 - for the entire system) or monthly ($120 for the entire system) plastic pass on a dumb card. It's transferable, so a friend can borrow it for lunch if they are going out and you're not. The full fare schedule is here. Compare this simple, clear list to the impossibly complex dog's breakfast of fares Aucklanders face when working out their bus fares (never mind trains and ferries). To be fair, Auckland also sells weekly and monthly passes......from a very small number of places with very limited hours of operation...and Birkenhead Transport refuse to sell them at all. Again, private operators opting out and imposing inconvenience, waste and cost on users. For example: my daughter has to take a bus ride into Britomart and back on the weekend as it isn't possible for her to buy a bus pass on the North Shore during the week. They aren't sold on the buses she rides and the handful of Northern Busway ticket offices aren't open at times, or on days, when she can get to one.

The ticketing system Toronto use is FAR cheaper than the vast sums mandated for Auckland...and certainly much better than having duplicate systems because one private operator - NZBus / Infratil - want to do it their own way and impose even more cost on the final result.....which users will have to pay for whether via taxes or fares or both. Even better, the TTC ticketing system can't break down as there is no machinery required to eyeball a pass with the day, week or month printed on it.

It's also worth noting that Canadians who buy transport passes are entitled to a tax credit from the Canadian federal government. Their government WANTS them to use public transport. They know it us much cheaper to subsidise a bus or train than to build and maintain a new road.

The state of Auckland's public transport is yet another example of a failed market ideology imposing cost and waste on both users and tax payers. But like any religion or belief system, the market religion ignores all evidence it isn't actually delivering the goods. But for system users, walking 500 metres or a kilometre (often in the rain) between bus stops of various companies, paying princely sums for the privilege, that stands out like dog's balls.

Local politicians may be proud of the mess they have cobbled together, but travellers from around the world attending the Rugby World Cup this year will be shocked by how poor Auckland's public transport system is compared to those they are used to. Kiwis who have travelled overseas will know exactly what I mean.

Can Kiwis afford another imprudent National-lead government?

2011-03-07T23:37:00.011+13:00

In the New Zealand Herald a couple of days ago, John Drinnan said:

The Government is set to abandon digital channel TVNZ 7 and the last remnants of public service television. A well-placed source said that - as expected - the Government would not be extending taxpayer funding for TVNZ 7 past June next year. Beyond that, it is expected the Government will no longer require TVNZ to deliver anything other than profits. The future of TVNZ 7 as a public service channel is dire and TVNZ is increasingly turning its attention to pay TV. TVNZ has made it clear that if taxpayer funding is not forthcoming, TVNZ 7 is toast.

(I include this excerpt because the links have a way of going dead...leaving a post like this unsubstantiated. History needs to be more robust than that.)

The big winner from the gutting of public service broadcasting will be SKY TV, reports Chris Keall in the NBR:

Beyond the anticipated demise of TVNZ7, and NZ on Air funds being made available to Sky TV programme makers, Forsyth Barr's Mr Mercer sees two other recent pieces of news as positives for the long term success of pay TV. One is that NewsCorp has got the nod to increase its bid in its effort to acquire 100% of BSkyB in the UK. The other is that, in Australia, Foxtel's owners (News and Telstra) seem in agreement to buy rural and regional pay TV provider Austar.

"Newscorp" is Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch is Fox News (and much else besides). Arguably, Rupert Murdoch has killed more people by distorting reality than any other media baron in recent times. In my opinion, the man should have been put in jail years ago for damage done to society through using his media to tell lies and half-truths for profit. I don't knowing ly buy anything he owns a share of...and that includes SKY TV here in NZ.

Most puzzling of all is the National-lead government's open hostility to the only major media outlets in New Zealand not owned by foreign corporations: our very own TVNZ and Radio New Zealand. Clearly the National Party has no problems with Mr. Murdoch's media and the damage they have done to life and limb for far too many...and is downgrading our own media assets in favour of Mr. Murdoch's. Why?

Even worse, WE own these media as taxpayers and New Zealand citizens...and the National Party is trashing our public media assets in favour of foreign-owned corporates. It's clear you can't trust them to look after our assets. This is not a prudent party and they are delivering deeply imprudent government - based on this one asset alone.

If you want public broadcasting in New Zealand then one obvious answer is you don’t vote for the National Party. If you think the corporate media campaign (Fairfax and APN) supporting tax cuts and the National Party from 2005 to the present was evidence of WHY we need a public broadcaster then, again, you don’t vote for the National Party.

Looking across a wider public policy front, we're being told there is a huge deficit accumulating. This deficit is being used, along with the recent earthquakes, as a justification for big cuts in spending across the board.

But isn't that big deficit in large part due to the tax cuts the National Party insisted were affordable?

Clearly they were not.

It appears the real agenda was to create the deficit to use as an excuse to cut the spending....and use that as an excuse to shovel money into the pockets of the "private sector". Is this a prudent fiscal strategy? It strongly resembles what George W Bush and the Republican Party have done to the United States: cut the taxes, crash the Treasury....and then use that as an excuse to gut the government and hand it to the (electorally unaccountable) "private sector". It's a strategy that helped deliver us the hugely expensive invasion and occupation of Iraq and the financial crash of 2008.

With respect to prudence, I clearly remember former Minister of Finance (Labour) Michael Cullen saying tax cuts were a very bad idea because one day a rainy day would come and we would need the money. Well….it rained. It rained a LOT. The 2008 financial crash, a pair of devastating earthquakes in Christchurch…and National is still apparently oblivious (at least publicly) to their own role in ENSURING the resources aren’t there to meet the rising need due to their tax cuts.

If you think the tax cuts themselves were imprudent – at the very least – then you don’t want to be voting for the National Party…..

But this imprudence and apparent ongoing blindness to the consequences of their policies and actions goes well beyond the public broadcasting media we all own and our other public assets.

Here's another example. If you want a sane transport policy NOT geared to pouring taxpayer cash into the pockets of road building and bus/truck-owning corporates (Minister of Transport, Steven Joyce's, mates at Infratil do both)….then don’t vote for the National party. They planned 8 highways of "national significance". The problem with that is evidence is mounting daily that the oil won't be there to make or power the cars to drive on them in a decade or two. These roads won't be completed for most of ten years. How much will petrol be by then? $5 / litre? Does this make any sense?

Maybe you're aware 'peak oil' (the year we pump as much oil in one year as we ever will....and ever after pump less each year as time goes on) actually occurred in 2006 (according to the Executive Summary of the International Energy Agency "World Energy Outlook" report of 2010):

"Crude oil production reaches an undulating plateau of around 68-69 million barrels of oil / day around 2020, but never regains it's peak of 70 million barrels / day reached in 2006..."

Meanwhile they forecast significant annual growth in demand. They also make the claim that Saudi Arabia will be pumping 14.6million barrels of oil / day in 2035 when it appears from Wikileaks cables recently released that Saudi can't pump even 12 million barrels / day today...and never will. The IEA urges governments to begin taking steps to conserve oil.

As we can see, there are major, immediate concerns about the future of energy. We need to be planning now. We need to be building the infrastructure for a post-oil world now, while we can still do it relatively cheaply. That would be the prudent thing to do.

Is the National Party moving heaven and earth to build a national public transport infrastructure against the day many, if not most of us, will no longer be able to afford to drive private cars - whether oil or electric or whatever? Um...no. They still refer to KiwiRail as a waste of money. Yet it isn't just transport that will be impacted by declining oil stocks. Everything we use oil for will be affected more and more as time goes on and the jobs that go with all those industries and uses. That includes agirculture, roading, construction, infrastructure....everything. Again, with respect to cars: How will we make cars when all energy and plastics (from oil) becomes expensive?

If you want a sane public transport policy for the oil-poor future (a future as certain as sunrises, whether you favour 2020 or 2035)….then you don’t want to vote for the National Party. They simply aren't prudent about risks. They appear to actively ignore or deny risk....which I suppose removes any need to deal with it. The problem is, reality always wins.

If you think climate change is something every person on this planet should be competing with each other to show leadership on….(instead of lolly-gagging at the back of the Reluctant Bus)….then don’t vote for the National Party. They - collectively - still don't believe there is a problem at all. Former Energy Minister, Gerry Brownlee, (now King of Christchurch, complete with dictatorial powers) has been a gung-ho coal backer for years.

I could go on……but the list is already long enough to make it screamingly obvious that people inform themselves and who appreciate these serious risks can't vote for a party as imprudent as the National Party.

OK. so a lot of people don't know any of this...and as is often the case with people, they won't listen and can't be told.

In this case, ignorance won't be bliss. It will instead mean they and their children will face poverty and confusion as the inevitable bears down on the unwitting like "two moons" on a highway-crossing hedgehog.

If you need an audio meme to get you through......

2011-02-15T10:12:00.002+13:00

"Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats. As catchy a tune as there ever was.

Men Without Hats - Safety Dance download at emp3

Walk to Work. Get Fit. Save Money

2011-02-13T21:19:00.002+13:00

I've been walking the 19.5km round trip to work since mid-November. It's my new "normal".

The advantages are non-trivial.

It takes me the same amount of time to make the trip, rain or shine.
I see pretty things.
I have no problems parking.
There is no such thing as a traffic jam on the footpath.
I get two significant "workouts" each day. I typically listen to "trance" music with a consistently fast beat...and I walk conforming to that beat as much as possible - up hill or down. The route I walk is not flat. There are some hills that really get your heart pounding if you attack them at speed. I've lost about 12kg in the weeks I have been walking. The loss is gradual and I feel lighter and stronger with each passing week.
I save money. About $1,440* / year. It costs me nothing to make the trip. My petrol bill for our 1.3L car is now about $120 / month instead of $240 / month . In other words, I fill the tank every two weeks instead of every week. We still use the car in the evenings and for longer recreational trips on weekends. On this basis, though, I'm still saving about NZ$1,400 / year by walking....plus associated wear and tear on the car that isn't happening because it is being used half as much. (*Petrol at NZ$2 / litre assumed)
I get to experience the joys of weather in all seasons and have the freedom to stop and look at things, take photos, do...whatever...along the way.
A person on foot can go places a car can't go, which helps reduce the distance a wee bit. In my own case, walking saves me about 1.5kms over driving the car, due to being able to take short-cuts not possible in the car.

The disadvantages are more about attitude than any real problems.

The most obvious is the weather. If it rains or is cold - or is cold and raining - then I may get wet. In August last year I walked to work several times and was not at all uncomfortable provided I wore loose, long pants and a couple layers up top. Even if you get a bit wet, you're still warm. I dress to the conditions, carry a light umbrella for defraying the effects of the occasional heavy downpour. I don't even notice drizzel. Everything that needs to stay dry (work clothes, phone, etc.) is either in a plastic grocery bag or a zip-lock plastic bag in my backpack. I carry spare socks and underwear. The weight of it all is no big deal and, if anything, adds to the value of the workout as I walk. If it's hot and sunny or a bit rainy, I wear a broad-brimmed hat for shade or to shelter my headphones from the wet.
Probably the biggest disadvantage is the time. I have to be out the door by 6:45am to arrive at work by 08:00am. I have to leave work by 4:45pm to be home by 6:00pm. A car would be much faster. The bus would be only 5 minutes faster (taking 1:10 mins compared to my walk time of 1:15) as the ones available do a tiki-tour around the North Shore, while I walk a much more direct route. When I get to work, I relax for a few minutes at my desk, checking my email or whatever, while I cool down, then go have a quick wash in the loo and change into my work clothes.
More washing to do. I wear one t-shirt to work and a different (clean / dry) one home. I tend to wear the same pair socks to / from work and wear a second, lighter, pair while at work. I carry a change of underwear.
I can't make any trips from work during lunch hour that can't be made on foot. Fortunately, there is a post office and Kiwibank across the street and several places to buy food or personal necessities nearby. Generally, I carry my breakfast and lunch with me.

In summary, I've found I very much prefer walking to work. The gains far outweigh the losses. It's safer than riding a bicycle.

If you're within 12km of where you work, it might be worth giving walking a try. Age needn't be an issue. I'm over 50. You may even want to think about shifting to somewhere closer to work.....but not too close. :-)

Firmware Update (v1.0 to v1.10) for the Fujifilm FinePix 3D W3

2011-02-04T12:56:00.000+13:00

I was looking for some indication of sales stats for my 3D W3 and found out there is a firmware upgrade available for it. I downloaded the necessary files from here. The necessary instructions are here. You absolutely need to read, and follow, the instructions.

My update went fine and took less than a minute. I did it on Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit). I also had the "MyFinePix" software installed from the CD. This is required so the update program you must use can access the sdcard in the camera.

What does the update give you? Looks like (optionally) better battery life when making long 3D videos.

Detail of the update

The firmware update Ver.1.10 incorporates the following issues.
In [HD][1280] movie recording mode, Economy mode ([HD][1280]E) can be selected.
In this Economy mode, movie quality for long period is optimized.
For long continuous recording of 3D HD movies, Economy mode setting is recommended.
* SD memory card with class 6 (6 MB/s) or better is recommended.

If you have one of these cameras, it's probably worth doing. It took me about 15 minutes all up...though my battery was already fully charged.

My new Fuji FinePix 3D W3 digital camera

2011-01-28T14:28:00.014+13:00

Headline! "I bought a Fuji FinePix 3D W3 digital camera and I'm very happy with it."

It can do stills up to 10MP in 4:3 format, but most of my pics are 16:9 and the max there is 7.2MP.

It does 2D and 3D still and video. I bought it for the 3D capability, so I use that more or less exclusively. Videos support up to 1280x720 HD for both 2D and 3D.

It takes SDHC cards. I have a couple of 16GB SDHC cards and several 8GB MicroSDs with SDHC adaptors I also use with my Android phone(s). They are interchangeable.

The 3D stills are "MPO" files. (The camera optionally saves a 2D jpeg at the same time. Left camera. I do this). Apparently each MPO file contains both the right and left jpeg images shot by the camera's two lenses (77 millimeters apart).

You can view stills or videos on the camera's display without glasses as it uses a lenticular display surface to allow each of your eyes to see the appropriate image...and the 3D effect is very good in my opinion.

But to see it off the camera, you have several options. Probably the best would be a 3D-capable TV or PC monitor and whatever glasses or paraphenalia may be required to see what is being displayed. I'm not quite there yet, so I have found other ways to see - and share - my 3D stills and videos that are both effective and accessible.

For the still images, I can upload them to start3d.com. It's free and supports a wide variety of 3D formats for use with static images, including the old faithful: stereo images and you just cross your eyes.
In many ways, the cross-eyed method is the best, allowing you to see the full, correct colour, properly lit, as well as adjust the parallax as you shift your own focus around within the 3D image. I've found with red/cyan viewing (with glasses) the parallax in the image is locked...and the centre of attention may be in great 3D while other details much closer or further away have a different parallax...and you see red ghosting, as not all parts of the image line up properly due to the simple fact they are at varying depths in the field of view...and don't line up properly in real life either....but our eyes adjust for that and our brains filter it out. You can see some of my albums here. The only real downside to start3d.com is the site aggressively shrinks the hi-res uploads and they can end up looking marginal...certainly compared to what was uploaded. But it works and anyone can access it from anywhere. You can have both public and private albums. You can also pay to have a favourite image printed on lenticular paper and shipped to you so you can put your favourite 3D images up on the wall. :-)

Here are a couple of sample images I uploaded to start3d.com. The site supports several 3D formats, but the embedded display below is "piku-piku" is the default, and is slightly animated:

For videos, I upload them to YouTube, which does a pretty good job of supporting 3D video uploads. But before I can upload them, I have to process them into side-by-side stereo video from the 3D-AVI files the Fuji camera produces. For that, I use the free "Stereomovie Maker" application for Windows. I also downloaded a Free Xvid MPEG4 codec that YouTube also supports, allowing me to produce HiDef HD 3D movies that look great, but aren't so huge they take a week to upload. I've also had good results with the Microsoft MPEG4 codecs. But to import anything at all into Stereomovie Maker, you have to first obtain an MJPEG codec...and the ones I could find and obtain most easily were proprietary. I'm using the Morgan codec, linked to from FourCC.org. I have yet to register it, but it's cheap and I will do that. It expires after 60 days, I think. I'll find out soon enough.

All of the video software mentioned above also runs on Ubuntu 10,10 Linux in WINE without any special tweeking or modding. I just installed it and it ran. The only problem I've had on Linux is that my 3D videos have no sound after I have processed them in WINE. For many of them, this isn't a bad thing as my inane commentary is obliterated probably to good effect. I suspect I haven't installed a required codec (PCM for output and whatever the 3D-AVI outputs for input). In any case, I process the videos as side-by-side with each stream (left and right) being 1280x720...for a total resolution of 2560x720. I've seen hints there is a native Linux equivalent to Stereomovie Maker, but haven't chased it up yet.

You also have to know a couple of tags to get YouTube to process your 3D videos properly, handling left and right. For mine, I use: yt3d:enable=true and yt3d:aspect=16:9.

UPDATE 2011-02-11: There is now a bug on YouTube that screws up 16:9 3D video. There are two work-arounds. You can set the "yt3d:aspect=" tag to either "15.99:9" (that's 15.99 to 9 - *very* close to 16) or use 32:18. That works, too.

Including both these tags results in YouTube supporting 3D display in a variety of formats: red/cyan, yellow/blue, mirrored, half-width and full-width, plus side-by-side stereo for cross-eyed viewing...and several other variations as well.

If you want to have a look at some of my 3D HD videos (Toronto, Auckland Zoo, Auckland) on YouTube, check out my 3D playlist. The most recent videos I've uploaded use the method described above. The first few were rendered by me as red/cyan and uploaded as straight videos. I didn't know how to create ones that YouTube would be happy with at that point. You need red/cyan glasses for those. I got mine on TradeMe for $6 each. Solid ones with plastic frames and good lenses.

This video of seals underwater at Auckland Zoo should display as side-by-side stereo 3D. Cross your eyes and have a look:

Bottom line is I'm able to view my pics and videos full-screen on a large PC monitor, in a variety of 3D formats...and to share them with anyone, anywhere, whether they have 3D glasses or not. It's a big step forward in my view as - and I say this with a straight face - 3D adds a whole new dimension to my photo and video 'life'.

Letter to the NZ Herald on Foreign Ownership

2010-10-19T10:48:00.000+13:00

19 October 2010

Dear NZ Herald

It is being noted in many quarters that there is a clear tendency among foreign-owned media in this country, like APN, Fairfax and CanWest-Global's TV3, to dismiss concerns about economic sovereignty as racism, populism and / or xenophobia.

This pattern may ultimately prove to be self-defeating as more people come to learn your newspaper and other foreign-owned media cannot be trusted to seriously and properly address the very real concerns of New Zealanders about who controls their economic future and the resources it depends on. That may well lead to people thinking more carefully about who owns the media we rely on for information about New Zealand's interests.

That can be avoided if you and others address these very real issues from a New Zealand perspective - what's best for the people who live here - and not that of some corporate board half a world away defending its interests. So far, you're failing. Miserably.

Yours...etc.

Auckland Council Elections 2010 - FPP Won, Voters Lost

2010-10-15T00:08:00.022+13:00

I was talking to people at work about the Auckland Council election and it soon became apparent no one I spoke to had actually voted for George Wood and Ann Hartley, the two people elected from the North Shore Ward many of us live in. The same was true for those from Albany. No one I spoke to had voted for Mr. Goudie or Mr. Walker.

That got me wondering: How many votes were cast in the Council election (distinct from local boards and other bodies) that did not elect anyone at all. It took a couple of hours to put the spreadsheet together, based on the preliminary results at the Auckland City web site.

I know First Past the Post can be terrible at translating votes into representation, but to be honest it was much, much worse than I thought possible.

In the Albany ward, 80.85% of all votes returned elected no one at all. I find that outrageous. It is a clear demonstration of what a truly awful voting system First Past the Post really is. No good system should see over 80% of all votes end up in the rubbish bin. Only a very bad voting system does that.

The North Shore ward fared slightly better, if you call it that, as 69.7% of votes returned there elected no one at all to the Auckland Council.

Whau ward was next on 69.11% of all votes wasted.

Only two wards, Orakei and Manurewa-Papakura, saw less than 50% of all votes being wasted. But even they were between 44% and 49%.

For Auckland as a whole, the share of wasted votes - those electing no one at all - was 62.5%. That's a lot of wasted votes!

Only 37.5% of all votes cast elected any of the 20 Councillors to "our" new Council. How it can be "ours" when almost two-thirds of us didn't vote for anyone on it an interesting question.

Looking at the Council as a whole, 15 of the 20 Councillors received less than 40% voter support. 13 of the 20 received less than 30% support. That means two-thirds of the Council was elected despite more than 70% of voters in their wards not voting for them. Amazing....and terrible in terms of an outcome that accurately reflect what people voted for, thanks to serious failings of First Past the Post.

Here is the overall picture for Auckland Council in pie chart form.

Here's the vote total and the breakdown by ward, in full, in my publicly accessible spreadsheet on Google Docs. You do not need to login to Google to read it. Just click on the link.

Auckland Council - all wards (includes informals and blank)

Total votes returned: 762,152 (100%)
Total votes for elected: 285,980 (37.5%)
Total votes wasted: 476,172 (62.5%)

Votes wasted by Ward (Votes returned that elected no one)

Albany               80.85%

North Shore          69.67% 

Whau                 69.11%

Manukau              65.65%

Waitakere            64.80%

Albert-Eden-Roskill  63.53%

Maungakiekie-Tamaki  59.41%

Waitemata Gulf       57.25%

Rodney               56.98%

Franklin             53.69%

Howick               52.78%

Orakei               48.43% 

Manurewa-Papakura    44.94%      

Auckland Region      62.5%

This election was put to us all as being for "Your Auckland". How can that possibly be true when almost two thirds of us elected no one at all to "our" new Council?

Clearly, the choice of First Past the Post as the voting system was a terrible one. It has meant most people need not have bothered voting all for all the difference it made. None. You could describe FPP as a pillow over the face of Auckland democracy. Smothering it.

Auckland should adopt STV for the next local body elections. Only then, armed with a vote that actually counts, will this city really be "ours".

(Note: The method used was very simple. I counted votes, not voters. In most wards, voters had two votes. I added together all votes for elected candidated and have no way of knowing whether any were cast by one voter or two. It doesn't matter. If we tried to look at individual vote shares by single person elected, the percentages would be MUCH worse, with Michael Goudie in Albany, for exmaple, being elected with less than 10% of the votes. I did include both informal votes - trivial - and blank votes. The blank votes were in the thousands in every ward and can be seen as a vote for "None of the Above" as the ballot was returned, but no one chosen.)

Jailbreaking my iPod Touch running iOS4

2010-08-02T23:30:00.005+12:00

Google Fodder: Tonight I tried to jailbreak my iPod Touch which has been running stock iOS4 for a few weeks now. I was disappointed by iOS4 as the only visible thing it brings to an iPod Touch is folders. No multi-tasking. No wallpapers. No ability to customise anything. I was better off on v3.1.2 jailbroken.

So time to do the nasty to iOS4. Steve Jobs, I need more.

I tried the www.jailbreakme.com web-based jailbreak several times and it failed repeatedly, stuck on the purple background and displaying no error messages.

The only way I know it failed was a message saying the installer had crashed and I should try again. To see that message I had to power off the iPod Touch off and power it back on, then go into Safari and reload the jailbreak.com page.

As it is a web-based solution, I thought it may be something wrong in Safari's settings. So I tried a few things and they didn't work until I did it this way. The pop-up setting may be irrelevant, but the rest seemed to make the difference,as well as powering off and back on BEFORE attempting to jailbreak again.

Go into Settings -> Safari
Under Accept Cookies set it to "Always"
I set Block Pop-ups to OFF
I cleared History, Cache and Cookies.
Press Home and then power the iPod Touch off.
Power it back on and go into Safari
Go to www.jailbreakme.com and "Slide to Jailbreak"

At the point, a "Downloading" window came up and the jailbreak process began and completed successfully. Now I'm working on what I need to download and install to get multi-tasking going and allow me to customise the look of this ugly thing. I've grown used to Android's built-in ability to customise the user interface or replace it completely....as it's just another app.

Setting up (Vodafone) HTC Magic on Telecom XT

2010-07-25T19:48:00.002+12:00

Google fodder: I have a Telecom XT SIM chip and setting the HTC Magic up to use the Telecom XT network for phone and Internet isn't hard if you know what the settings need to be.

Anyone using an HTC Magic sourced from Vodafone should be aware that this phone supports these frequencies: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz and WCDMA/UMTS 900 and 2100MHz.

Telecom XT does not do GSM at all. They have only WDCMA/UMTS 850MHz and 2100MHz. So the *only* frequency Vodafone NZ and Telecom XT have in common is WCDMA/UMTS 2100. Keep this in mind.

The only places this phone will work with Telecom XT are places where they provide coverage using WCDMA/UMTS 2100. Yes, Telecom XT do 2100 in many parts of the big cities, but (so I'm told) for the rest of the country they mainly use WCDMA/UMTS 850MHz. This phone can't do that flavour (WCDMA) of 850MHz at all. So coverage will be poor and this phone would not be a good choice for use with Telecom XT. This point can be confusing as Vodafone do use 850MHz to provide GSM coverage. But GSM isn't WCDMA/UMTS and Vodafone do not do WCDMA/UMTS on 850MHz. They are very different standards.

Having said that, I'm on the North Shore in the Auckland region and have have had no trouble getting on the XT network anywhere that I live, work or play, but then I have been fairly Auckland-centric for the past several months. I have little doubt that were I to head out of the city I would soon find my HTC Magic would not work as it can't see the UMTS 850MHz. I keep repeating that as it can't be debated or argued about. That's just how it is.

Provided that is clear enough, onward...

Obviously, you need to turn your phone off, swap the SIMs and then power on. Once powered up, make sure the Wi-Fi is disabled as this appears to hinder the phone making a network connection to the telco. It will do it with Wi-Fi on, but you might have to try a few times. With WiFi off, it works first time, every time.

To turn Wi-Fi off:

Go to the Home screen, then press the MENU button
Touch the SETTINGS option on the on-screen menu, then...
Touch "Wireless Controls", then...
Touch "WiFi" to remove the green tick mark and turn Wi-Fi off.
Press the HOME button to return to the HOME screen.

To choose a network:

While on the HOME screen, press the MENU button, then tough the SETTINGS option on the on-screen menu.
Touch "Wireless Controls", then...
Touch "Mobile Networks", then...
Touch "Network Operators", then...
Touch "Telecom NZ" in the list. You should then see "Registered on the network" appear.
Press the HOME button to return to home.

You can now make and receive phone calls, but you still need to set up the data side of things. The "APNs". The gateways you need to talk to do data.

Setting up the APNs:

While on the HOME screen, press the MENU button, then tough the SETTINGS option on the on-screen menu.
Touch "Wireless Controls", then...
Touch "Mobile Networks", then...
Touch "Access Point Names"
You'll likely see a blank, black screen. Press the MENU button and and touch "New APN".

The list of APNs is on Geekzone here.

You can add each one. I did, but I set "Telecom Default" as the default.

You don't change most of the items in the basic template list, but you do set the descriptive name and the APN at the very least for the default.

Some translation is required. Where the Geekzone list says "Homepage", put the value into "Server" on your phone. Where it says "Proxy", put the IP address - if any. Where it says "Port", put the port number - usually "80". I did not specify a secure port or use the 8080 port value. The phone doesn't appear to have a field for it.

I'm not sure which of the other values work, but I was able to do internet data and that was all I really wanted to do.

I did try to send a PXT to my Vodafone number, but it didn't go, so I obviously don't have that part set up properly yet. I emailed it instead. No problem. But more fiddling around appears to be required to get MMS going.

[UPDATE: The MMS/PXT message did arrive after all, so that is working too. For that APN (Telecom MMS) I set the MMS proxy and port instead of the other proxy and port.]

Kobo e-Reader app for Android

2010-06-20T20:24:00.000+12:00

I downloaded and installed the free Kobo e-reader app for Android last night. Once installed, I created an account and bought a book "The Shadow Factory". It's a US book, but the price was quoted in NZ$. I thought that was pretty good.

This all took at most 5 minutes from install to completed book download.

There were a couple of apparent glitches. The Kobo app said there had been an error and to restart the app.....but the book download appeared to be proceeding normally, so I let it finish and then opened the book to read it. So I'm not sure what the error message was for.

The table of contents in the book appears to not work....or I don't yet understand how it shuold work. If I touch a link for a location i the book, it presents a blank, white page....but I am able to happily scroll though the book directly. Fonts can be changed to serif, sand serif and monotype. A range of font sizes is available.

The default is very readable.

I'm sure any little glitches seen in v1.0.0 will be sorted out....and as it is right now, the app works.

I can install it, create an account, buy a book and read the book.

Nexus One, 3G reception and CyanogenMod

2010-04-29T13:05:00.002+12:00

Google Fodder: It's known that HTC (who make the Nexus One and Desire and many other Android-based phones) tend to put their antennae in the back of the phone and in the base.

But the back and base is where you tend to hold the phone, usually. In theory, I suppose, this keeps the antennae away from your head when talking, and more like down by your jaw or chin (depending on the head size).

The effect on reception appears to be negligible, unless you're already in an area with very marginal reception. Then it may make a difference.

CyanogenMod v5.0.6 for the Nexus One allows the screen/display content to rotate through 360 degrees....so you can hold the phone completely upside down with the base at the top...and happily use the screen. Yes, the buttons to touch are now at the top of the screen, but the phone isn't huge, so there is no real inconvenience in this.

I've just found that in a location where I get slow "G" throughput, by holding the phone upside down as described above, I was able to get "H"...and much faster throughput.

I'll have to play with it some more, but post this here in case anyone finds it useful.

For what it's worth, I've not seen any of the 3G reception issues with my Nexus One that have been reported in the US. The phone works perfectly for me.

Android running on an Apple iPhone 2G

2010-04-22T18:45:00.005+12:00

It had to come, I suppose. Yet another demonstration of the power of Open Source generally and the flxibility and versatility of the Linux and Android operating systems, in particular.

Android running on an iPhone. Thanks to MobileCrunch.

I'm off to check out OpeniBoot to see if it will work on my iPod Touch. I'll probably make a donation, too, as David Wong is clearly doing some amazing work.(Update: I donated US$20).

OMG! Google's Nexus One

2010-04-10T12:37:00.002+12:00

I've had my Nexus One for several days now. The bottom line is that it's an awesome device. I was going to use the word "phone" but decided not to. The Nexus One is a phone, of course, but it's a lot more than just a phone in the same way a bird is a lot more than its feathers.

I'm honestly not sure what word to use. It's my camera, camcorder, music, video, Internet, information, messaging, communication, location-aware, multi-mediacreation / consumption, personal computing device. Ish.

It's fast. It's light. It feels good. It looks good. You'd have to have one yourself if you used this for a few days and wanted something that was all of these things.

I do. This is it.

It's also the first Android phone I can easily do two-fat-thumb typing on a landscape soft keyboard with something like a 99% accuracy rate. Or I wouldn't even attempt this blog post on it. But it's OK. It works. It's actually easy.

I nave to say, Google's Nexus One and Android v2.1 take the whole android experience to a new level. A good one.

Wow.

Blogging and Time

2010-04-04T13:32:00.001+12:00

I'm a naturally helpful person and I can and do spend many hours exploring and experimenting and reporting what I learn via this blog. I get a fair bit of email from people grateful for my posts here. The downside is the time used is of little benefit to my family unless they read my posts and find them useful.

In an attempt to find some balance, I've added a Donation button to the blog in order to help make it clear to those near and dear to me that this isn't a complete waste of time and that it is worth doing, aside from the caring and sharing that goes into the posts themselves.

I want to spend a lot more time documenting all the things I've been up to the past few weeks that I know many people would benefit from reading. I'll do it anyway, but the odd donation here and there will certainly help me justify the time. Of course no one has to donate anything at all. That's what donating is all about - utterly voluntary. But if you WANT to....now you can. Before, you couldn't.

Acer Liquid: The Verdict (after one week)

2010-03-10T13:09:00.001+13:00

The Acer Liquid is a fast phone. By default its top speed is 768MHz though the CPU is capable of 1GHz. The Liquid's screen is large, auto-senses ambient light, and is very clear. It seems to resist fingerprints. Touch sensitivity is good (IMHO). The 480x800 resolution is a welcome improvement. The OS included is Android v1.6, aka Donut.

The GPS, Wifi and Mobile data (3G, 2G) and Bluetooth (phone and stereo media) all work as intended. Sensitivity to signal appears to be fine. I have not had any coverage issues relative to my other phone (HTC Magic).

The phone's default display has three home screens. Left-most is empty but for a media player widget that allows you to scroll through audio, video or images and select any for display or playback. You can dispose of it or put it back as you would any Android Widget. The centre screen has the Google Search widget up top and the usual Phone, Contacts, Browser, Maps, Messaging and Market apps down below. The right screen has the "Spinlets" widget (like a 'lazy Susan' for web bookmarks) with some Acer web sites preloaded you can scroll through and touch if you wish to go to those web pages.

The Acer software update tools work well. Acer Liquid uses a Windows-based tool for flashing new system images. These are *.BIN files downloadable from the Acer website. They include an entire phone image: recovery, boot, system and radio (baseband). There are different versions of the phone for different markets, the main differences being radio / baseband and language support. I have the UK version, compatible with Vodafone anywhere. There is also US version that would be compatible with Telecom XT and Telstra.

Phone's faster CPU makes sdcard access most impressive. Whereas my HTC Magic could read my Class 6 8GB Transcend sdcard at just under 5MB/second (megaBYTES/second)the Liquid was doing 9.6MB/second....almost twice as fast. This has big performance benefits for apps that use the sdcard, like the camera for saving or media playback apps.

The Liquid's 5 megapixel camera is, in my opinion, excellent. The pics are clear and well-focused. The light and other settings are adjustable or automatic. The video are higher resolution and have less "drag" than on a slower phone with a less-capable camera.

Data, MMS and TXT-ing work fine with Vodafone NZ when the APNs are set up exactly the same as for an HTC Magic.

For modders, the phone is easily rooted and there is a maturing set of tools available, mainly through xda-developers and modaco.com with the latest and greatest being at Modaco. The number of alternate ROMs isn't large, but there are half a dozen of so Android v1.6 roms and about 3 (major) android 2.1 ROMs. All the Android 2.1 ROMs are based on a leaked pre-release image from an Acer LiquidE phone. The best of the Android v2.1 alternates are "eVilD" and LCR (Liquid Community Rom). But the basic Acer load is good enough that simply rooting it and installing all the cool extras is good enough. With Android v2.1 on the phone it is possible to install and run Google Earth for Android which supports ARM7 CPUs and Android 2.x only (so far). I'm also able to use all the Live Wallpapers, including the ones that require 3D acceleration.

Android v1.6 *shines* on the faster-than-most Acer Liquid. If you add one of the kernels, clocked to 896MHz or 1GHz from one of the modders, it runs even faster.

The phone has 256MB of RAM and 512MB of ROM. The RAM is half as much as a Nexus One (512MB), but a lot more than an HTC Magic 32B (192MB). Overall, it depends on your expectations. Mine are met.

Cons? A few.

The phone has no trackball or D-pad. This makes fine placements of the cursor difficult on small text. I'm used to getting the cursor close, then scrolling to the exact location with the trackball on an HTC Magic. With no such device, you have to either keep poking away until you get there or at least get on the same line just after, then del txt backward (and re-type it). No trackball can also make selecting text a bit hit or miss. Especially if the text you want is surrounded by other text. My finger tips are too fat sometimes and it gets fiddly.

The phone's internal app storage is - at most - 192MB. That is about 96MB less than an HTC Magic. That means you can install fewer apps before you fill up your phone. The Apps2sd mod, allowing apps to be stored on the sdcard instead of the phone's internal storage (root access required), isn't perfected yet on Liquid, though the devs are *very* close. perhaps this week. It's that close. But until then, my phone is down to about 20MB of free space for more apps, which equates to about 20-30 more apps. Then, if I want to install any more, I'll have to delete some. Having said that, I do already have over 100 apps installed and there are more than a few I don't use every day - or even every week. With the Android Market so easily accessible, I don't really need to have them on my phone when not using them, as I can install them any time, usually in seconds.

Summary

Overall the advantages of the Acer Liquid overwhelm any disadvantages. It's a HUGE step forward as an Android phone. The greater speed, higher screen resolution, more capable camera (still and video), plus 'advanced' video/graphics support...and generally good usability...make it a great phone (but for the reservations noted above). It's easily modded and root access is a 10 minute affair. The modding tools aren't mature yet, but they are close.

It's a good phone, too. The sound is good and the mic is good. Almost forgot about that!

I bought a new Android phone: Acer Liquid A1

2010-02-28T12:44:00.001+13:00

I've just bought a two month old Acer Liquid A1 thru TradeMe for NZ$580 (US$406 today) and I should receive it on Monday or Tuesday (01/03/2010 or 02/03/2010 - for readers months from now). The Acer Liquid A1was released for sale in the UK on December 9th....so this phone is still very fresh.

The Liquid A1 is a perfect match for Vodafone or 2Degrees. It's got a Qualcomm i8250 "SnapDragon" 1GHz processor clocked at 768MHz because "It's nice and fast and gives better battery life".....I'm told. Overclocking it may be straightforward, but not worried if it isn't as this is still 50% faster than my existing phone. There is an active dev / hacker community on MoDaCo who have composed several ROMs abd Acer itself has already provided some updates via their web site.....so it looks like a going concern.

The only possible drawback at this point is the 256MB of RAM (versus 512MB for Nexus One).....but it is a definite step up from the 192MB on my Vodafone HTC Magic phones....and they run absolutely well enough to deserve respect in their own right.

But this phone is being upgraded to Android 2.1 for sure...and I will be able to run Google Earth on it as the i8250 is an ARM7 processor and the 800x480 screen resolution on the Liquid is the same as Droid or Nexus One.

So it's not quite a Nexus One......but it was about half the price if you buy on TradeMe or do the Google two-step and pay the GST/shipping on the import.

I'll write more about it when I get my hands on it. The specs on gsmarena show this is an Android phone that deserves respect.

iTunes Loses the Plot...Again.

2010-02-16T20:31:00.006+13:00

Today I synced my iPod Touch with my Windows Vista PC...as I often do. It was the first time I had used iTunes or synced since my upgrade to iTunes v9.03 a couple of days ago. I accepted the license terms and then synced. Then I downloaded an app update from the Apple Store for an app I had already bought. (Click on the pics for full size)

At this point, the Apple Store demanded I authorise the PC or it would wipe out my songs and 45 apps. I thought this was a bit sad as I have already authorised this same PC twice...and this was to be the third time.

As usual......you have no real choice. You either do it or they screw you.

I have now used 4 of my 5 authorisations.....three of them on the same PC.

I availed my self of the iTunes Feedback option on the Help menu in iTunes. I fully expect to never hear a thing from anyone at Apple...but this is what I said:

Hi

I am now at 4 authorisations out of 5 and 3 of them are for the same computer. iTunes has - twice - after an upgrade required me to re-authorise the same computer.

There are several people on this Windows PC who own iPods and use iTunes, but my account is the only one that anyone can buy anything through. It is only ever used when I login to Windows and only for my iPod Touch.

The other two users never buy anything from Apple Store because one is a child and the other my wife and they only ever use externally-sourced mp3 ripped from CDs.

I all but stopped stopped buying music from the Apple Store when iTunes suddenly decided my $150 worth of songs was no longer mine...and wiped them off the PC and the iPod.

This PC authorisation issue is just one annoyance. The menu on your web page here stops at iTunes v9.01....and I'm v9.03. That's the kind of thing that sees my songs wiped out...and the same PC authorised three times in two years.

I don't know what I expect you to do about it. What do you think you should do?

Your questionnaire below doesn't include the main reason I use iTunes: to backup my iPod and get files on and off it as there is not other way to do it.

Most of my music is ripped from CDs we buy. Buying online comes with too many restrictions about how I use it and too strings attached.

Anyway....that's my latest Apple Atrocity. I never have these issues with Android because Android doesn't impose these kinds of restriction on your in the first place!

Seasoned Apple Survivors are very helpful and offer advice as to how to cope with the havoc this control-freak eco-system can wreak upon a person. I'm grateful to them. It's a big help. I was dumb enough to buy an Apple product, so I should be a big boy and live with the consequences. But I don't really have to. I do have other choices.

On a gut level, software like iTunes is telling me it's all about THEM......while Android on my phone and linux on my PCs does what I want and I make damn sure it's all about me.

Because I can. No one gets in my way the way Apple can. I'd rather thrive than survive.

UPDATE 20100503: I now use the "iSyncr" app for Android to sync my music and playlists from iTunes to my Android phone. The good part here is that if iTunes decides to wipe out my music, I've already copied it from the sync folder on the phone to a music folder, so iTunes *can't* delete it. Again, looks like the best way to use iTunes is avoid using it with an iPhone or iPod.

Overclocking Hack not really....Explained

2010-02-12T21:29:00.000+13:00

Michael Huang ("CoolBho3000"), author of "SetCPU" for Android, explains how and why the "overclocking" hack written by Eugene373 *looks* like its overclocking....but can't possibly be overclocking.

A ripping good yarn well worth reading.

If it is possible to overclock the HTC Magic the practical, stable solution has yet to be found. But it was fun there for a few days!

I've also discovered the "SuperD v1.8" ROM by benbuchacher and "Fasttest v2.3" by htcclay are VERY fast Android v1.6 ROMs. If they can just get the voice to work properly on out-going calls (bit me today - had to dump the ROM over it), these ROMs could be champion of champions.

htcclay has a new ROM out today. I'll check it and see if he's got the phone sorted.

Android / HTC Magic 'Must-Have': Amon_RA's Recovery v1.5.2G

2010-02-12T10:27:00.003+13:00

Google Fodder: Before I rooted my phone the fear of the unknown was powerful.

What if I wrecked it? Could I ever put it back the way it was when I bought it? Could I BRICK my phone and render it dead, useless?

I didn't know anyone locally who had done it, so I took several months and worked out what applied to my phone...and what did not. There is a lot of old information out there. There is a lot of "almost" information out there. It's almost right. This was made even more confusing for me by the fact the HTC G1 / Dream phone most of the relevent ROMs are developed for is almost entirely compatible with the HTC Magic 32B. They are both "32B" phones - but the Dream / G1 comes with an SPL of less capability (smaller system size possible) that matches the much smaller internal storage size of the G1 (96MB vs 295MB for the Magic). These differences require special measures for a G1 owner...but I didn't have to worry about at the SPL or related radio at all an HTC Magic owner. I was already there.

As it turned out, rooting the HTC Magic I got from Vodafone NZ, with an SPL of "Hboot 1.33.0004 (SAPP10000)", was ridiculously easy. It's almost designed to be rooted and doing so takes about 20 seconds once you know what you need to do. You can check the SPL on your phone by starting it in Fastboot mode:

1. Power off
2. Hold down the BACK button
3. While holding down BACK, press the Power / Call end button and release
4. Release the back button

Your phone should boot up into Fastboot mode showing you lots of system firmware details like the version of the Secondary Program Loader (SPL -> Hboot) and the radio.

I also learned it is impossible to brick the phone if you don't flash the radio and SPL. You can always get it going again as long as you have a system ROM to flash onto it.

You can even take a backup of someone else's "Factory Reset" ROM and install it on your phone.......just like the people who made your phone did when they manufactured it. The risk of doing any serious damage is virtually NIL.

You can also UN-do the rooting of your phone in about 60 seconds....putting your phone back to the way it was when you bought it.....or the way it was when you took your last backup of the 'stock' system prior to rooting it.

The most valuable tool for both rooting and UN-rooting your phone is a recovery image packed with very useful backup / restore and other system tools.

A Belgian developer known as "Amon_RA" on XDA has put together (building on the work of others) an almost perfect recovery image in his v1.5.2G for the HTC Magic 32B. Make sure you get the "G" as the "H" is for a Magic 32A and the "R" is for a Magic 32A from Rogers in Canada. Do not use anything but the "G" with an HTC Magic 32B phone.

Using this recovery you can:

- backup the current system system
- restore an entire system (all but the sdcard) from a list of previous backups
- partition your sdcard with scripts prompting you as to size and type.
- repair a damaged partition
- Toggle USB access from a PC on or off while in recovery state: great for getting files on / off your phone if is currently without a functioning system.
...several other, more esoteric things that are useful from time to time.

The basic steps for flashing a ROM or restoring from a backup are:

1. Backup current system.
2. Wipe system / dalvik cache (and ext partition if you're using APPs to SD).
3. Go to Partition SDcard and do a "repair sdcard"
4. Then you either Flash a new from from the sdcard OR do a restore.

Repeat as required. Flash 5 ROMs by lunchtime! What I have NOT covered here is how to get the recovery onto your phone - either temporarily as a kind of 'live' boot - or permanently. My purpose here is to describe how very useful this tool is.

You can get Amon_RA's recovery here. It's 4MB. (Magnet link for a bittorrent client):

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:020fdd92160739c8adb900174ccd7d179b8bc35e&dn=Android%3A+Amon-Ra%5C%5C%5C%27s+Recovery+for+Sapphire+%2832B%29&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.prq.to%2Fannounce

Here are some screenshots (sourced from XDA) of v1.5.1G. Get 1.5.2G as it fixes a bug with the restore of any backed up ext partitions.

Main menu

Backup menu

Video: "Fasttest" v2.3 (a Donut ROM) at 780MHz on my HTC Magic

2010-02-10T17:28:00.005+13:00

2010-02-12 Update: The overclocking hack fooled even Android, but the processor output does not lie: It doesn't work. Here's why. All this showed was that a lean, fast ROM at 528MHz *looks* really fast...and so it is. That isn't so bad after all.

***************************************************************

I tried htcclay's "Fasttest" v2.3 ROM on my testing phone with the Chris Soyars patched kernel allowing to be overclocked to 780MHz. It was so stable over a 24 hour period that I've installed it on my main phone as the primary system. This is a big move for me as my main phone almost always is running either the stock Android load that came with it, it the latest Cyanogen Mod. I need that phone working as perfectly as possible.

The main processor speed is only part of any computing device's overall performance. The Class6 sdcard takes more or less just as long to read and write as it ever did. The network sources of data dish it out as fast as they usually do - more or less....and so on.

The main things I've noticed about running at the higher clock rates are:

- more responsive user-interface
- soft keyboard more responsive
- the display renders more quickly - both on the main screen and in any app presenting a display - like the web browsers or YouTube app.
- the network - LAN or WAN - seems to be able to support faster throughput. This needs more testing.

I've made this video to try to give some sense of what it feels like. At the same time, it shows what a faster clock speed can't address: slow ad sites keeping you waiting. I took a risk going to the NY Times as its servers are on the other side of the planet from New Zealand..but you can see the browser render the content instantly once it has been received.

Have a look. If you have any suggestions for things you'd like to see, let me know. This was what I could think of this afternoon while not thinking about too much. The power went out at work and we were all sent home for rest of the day. Unexpected holiday? Make an android video, of course! :-)

The first Android v2.1 ROM for HTC G1 / Magic 32B is out!

2010-02-09T15:44:00.000+13:00

Kingklick is the first XDA dev to release a full Android v2.1 ROM for HTC G1 / Magic 32B that scales to 780MHz. Read about it and download it here.

I'm downloading it now and when I'm able this evening, I'll start seeding it on bittorrent.

Overclocking your HTC Magic 32B / HTC G1 / MyTouch3G to 550MHz

2010-02-08T22:39:00.009+13:00

Google Fodder: These simple steps let you make the current version of Cayogen Mod (v4.2.14.1) do the normal range of CPU frequencies while making 550MHz the top speed instead of 528MHz.

I'm posting this here, with some admendments and more detail, as stuff tends to get lost in XDA's forums as the volume of activity is high.

From XDA-Developers (Thanks BoomBoomPow!):

How-to for Cyanogen Mod v4.2.14.1:
(These instructions assume you already have this version of CM running on your phone!)

1. Download Pershoot's kernel image (2.5MB - I'm also seeding it on bittorrent: "kernel-2629-dp_mem-xtra.zip"- Thanks Pershoot!) and place it in the root directory of your SD card.

2. Download and Install CoolBHO's SetCPU app (from Android Market)

3. Create a plain text file called setcpu.txt and place it in the root directory of your SD card. This only text in it will be:

128000,245760,384000,550000

(SetCPU looks for a "setcpu.txt" in the root of the sdcard on startup or when you choose "Custom" from the bottom of the device settings menu)

4. Boot your phone into recovery (Home + Power) and flash Pershoot's kernel image. You should already have a decent recovery installed. I recommend Amon-RA's recovery. I'm seeding it here for HTC Magic 32B only. (For G1/Dream, go to the xda-developer forum for that phone).

5. Once you have booted your phone to the Home screen, open SetCPU. Allow the SU Request, and scroll down to Custom Frequency Config at the bottom of the device list if SetCPU hasn't already picked up the setcpu.txt. If it has, the version will be something like "SetCPU v.1.4.6 custom" as in the screenshot here.

6. Have fun!

I've done this on my phone and it works perfectly. Here is a screen shot. This solution allows for the usual set of frequencies to be available, except the top one is 22MHz faster than before, an improvement of 4.16% on the original top speed.

Every little bit helps!

At 550MHz, your phone will now be as fast as a Motorola Droid / Milestone....and you can use SetCPU's profiles to wind the speed back when you're not using your phone (in standby) or charging your battery (keep the heat down).

The additional speed doesn't seem to have any big impact on heat. It's only 4% over normal.

Android Multi-tasking on HTC Magic 32B

2010-02-07T14:33:00.000+13:00

Playing a song, downloading a folder full of songs from my FTP server over 3G, and playing an mp4 video.....at the same time. Plus I'm using the GDE Home user interface to make it happen. It all looks pretty smooth to me. I'll try to think of some better tests. Here is my first cut:

Installing Google Maps 3.4.0 (hacked nav) on my HTC Magic

2010-02-06T00:51:00.005+13:00

My HTC Magic is running Cyanogen Mod v4.2.14.1 (today). I wanted to install the new Google Maps 3.4.0 hacked for navigation outside the US and supporting multi-touch.

I got the file - "maps3.4.0-brut3-MT.apk" via this thread (also includes a different version for non-rooted phones) at xda-developers. I'm seeding it on bittorrent here. They offered several options and i went for Option 3 as this best suited the configuration of my phone (CM v4.2.14.1 on HTC Magic).

To use adb you need to have the Android SDK installed on your PC. The file to be installed on the phone would have to be in [android-sdk-folder]\tools. Then, open a linux terminal on the PC and "cd" to [android-sdk-folder]\tools, then:

The instructions were as follows, but I had problems immediately. Read on.

Instructions for option 3:

adb remount

adb shell find /system /data -name \*google\*maps.apk\* -o -name Maps.apk -delete

adb uninstall com.google.android.apps.maps

adb install maps3.4.0-brut3-MT.apk

The find command didn't work - presumably because it was intended for the file layout of the HTC G1, not the HTC Magic.

Instead, I did (in a linux terminal - would be the same on Windows in a cmd prompt):

adb remount
adb shell find / -name Maps.apk

I found it in /system/app and deleted it.

I backed out to the linux command prompt and tried to again follow the instructions above:

adb remount
adb uninstall com.google.android.apps.maps

...but it came back with "FAILURE".

So I did "adb shell" in the linux terminal again to get a command prompt on the phone and entered:

adb remount
adb shell
# find / -name *maps.*

...and got:

/system/framework/com.google.android.maps.jar
/system/etc/permissions/com.google.android.maps.xml
/system/sd/dalvik-cache/system@framework@com.google.android.maps.jar@class es.dex
/data/dalvik-cache/system@framework@com.google.android.maps.jar@class es.dex

I deleted these one by one (though the last two were the same - in effect).

"rm /system/framework/com.google.android.maps.jar"

...etc..

I then did:

steve@media:~/android-sdk-linux/tools$ adb install maps3.4.0-brut3-MT.apk998 KB/s (2719843 bytes in 2.659s)
pkg: /data/local/tmp/maps3.4.0-brut3-MT.apk
Success
steve@media:~/android-sdk-linux/tools$

...and it installed the hacked maps successfully.

I've just tested it and multi-touch and Navigation (outside US) works fine...though my street is still "unnamed road".

"Earth Rotation" live wallpaper on my HTC Magic

2010-02-01T18:16:00.003+13:00

The latest update to the "Earth Rotation" live wallpaper runs well on OpenEclair v1.0 running on my HTC Magic 32B. Amazingly, these animated wallpapers don't appear to have much, if any, impact on the phone's system performance.

...and I've sorted out how to make a much better quality video. Yay!

My iPod's an iPad

2010-01-31T19:47:00.006+13:00

I've had my iPod Touch 8GB for over a year and I have used it a lot. But I have never had a reason to jailbreak it. I did try once, just for fun, but the instructions were not very good and it didn't work....and I couldn't be bothered.

But the launch of the Apple iPad changed that. I looked at the list of features and they are virtually identical to my iPod Touch 8GB. Ok, the Touch doesn't have 3G data, but my Android phone does and I frequently Wi-Fi tether my iPod Touch to the phone for Internet access from anywhere.

Today, I saw this video showing anyone how to convert their iPod Touch / iPhone into an iPad.

I was entranced. What a cool idea! But I would have to jail break the iPod Touch to install the apps that would enable me to make the needed cosmetic changes. Even better - I get multi-tasking, too, thanks to ProSwitcher and a couple of other apps ....and multi-tasking is something the iPad can't do.

First I downloaded, George Hotz's "BlackRa1n" (RC3) which enables a one-click jailbreak of iPhone OS 3.1.2 and several previous versions.

Blackra1n didn't work the first few times as the instructions erroneously told me to run the app in WinXP compatibility mode on Windows Vista. Each time I tried, it put the iPod Touch into recovery mode...and wiped it....and that was that. Each time that happened, I had to start iTunes and restore the firmware, then restore my iPod Touch from the latest backup. No harm done. Just time wasted.

In the end, these instructions, from here, worked perfectly:

Chilos

# 12 Oct 2009 Monday 1:07 pm

IF YOU HAVE PROBLEMS CHECK THIS IT WORKS FOR ME:

1- copy Blackra1n to your hard drive. Run it WITHOUT compability mode, and instead "Run as Administrator".

2- kill iTunesHelper using Task Manager

3- turn off your Iphone / iPod

4- open Blackra1n as administrator (Vista or Win 7) and click "Make it Rain".

5- push HOME button and POWER same time until apple logo appear.- then release power button (actually - connecting the iPod to the USB cable will turn it on).

6- keep push home button until george's face appears

This worked perfectly for me and Blackra1n did its thing. It took about 3 minutes to do the deed and re-boot.

Once the iPod re-booted at the end of the process, I touched the "Blackra1n" icon on the Springboard and away I went, installing the "Cydia" alternative app market onto the iPod Touch. .

After that, I followed the instructions in the video to make the iPod Touch look like an iPad. I did have to buy one app - Shrink - for US$0.99 and paid for via my PayPal account.

Here are a photo and a screenshot of my new mini-"iPad". Click on either or both to see them full size. They aren't identical as they were taken about 2 hours apart.

My iPod Touch and a real iPad aren't quite the same, of course.

Mine can multi-task. ;-)

"Starfield 3D" live wallpaper on my HTC Magic

2010-01-30T15:43:00.001+13:00

[UPDATE 2010-10-07: The Starfield live wallpaper appears to have disappeared from the Android Market at some point. It can still be found via Google on various file download sites. If you need any help locating it, send me an email. TS]

OpenEclair v1.0 (Android v2.1) allows HTC "32B" (G1 and Magic) owners to use the new animated "Live Wallpapers" on their phones. These have become fully functional only in the past 4-5 days on the very latest Eclair ROMs from XDA.

Even better, users can also see and download new Live Wallpapers from the Android market. Below is a video of my first Live Wallpaper download - "Starfield 3D" - running on my HTC Magic seconds after install.

"Open Eclair" version of Android 2.1 appears

2010-01-30T15:38:00.000+13:00

The source code for Android v2.1 ("Eclair") was released in early January and the people who like to play with such things have gone to work in a big way. One of the results has been the "Open Eclair" project.

Based at XDA, this project has now produced it's first major release ROM, v1.0, for the "32B" class of HTC Dream and Sapphire phones. These phones are marketed variously as "T-Mobile G1", "HTC Magic" (Google phone flavour - a 32B), and "T-Mobile MyTouch3G". The HTC Magic 32A, sold by Rogers in Canada and in Hong Kong and Singapore, isn't completely firmware compatible with the 32B class (G1 and Magic/MyTouch) and any ROM for 32B requires some additional modifications in order to run on a 32A phone.

OpenEclair allows "32B" phone owners to access new Android v2.1 features like the "Live Wallpapers". The 3D Gallery is only partially functional due to incompatibitilies between the existing video drivers for 32B phones and the later version of video drivers written for different hardware. The driver source is not Open Source, so users will have to wait for the source to be come available, the drivers to be reverse-engineered, or for an Over the Air (OTA) update to the stock version of their phone systems at some point in the future. The video camera is also not functional, though a solution has been found for the still camera.

Overall, OpenEclair delivers "32B" phone owners an almost-complete set of Android v2.1 functionality on their phones today.

Nexus One Live Wallpaper on my HTC Magic

2010-01-28T22:40:00.003+13:00

The latest modded Android v2.1 ROMs for HTC Magic are showing a lot of promise. This one, known as "xROM", is almost perfect. The video camera isn't working and the 3D Gallery isn't quite there yet - looking great, just no pics! - but it's very close to working.

Looking forward the next one! But here is the Nexus One live wallpaper running on my HTC Magic.

Chromium OS Zero: First Impressions

2010-01-24T16:01:00.000+13:00

I got focused yesterday and installed "ChromiumOS Zero" on a USB stick and booted it up on my (normally Ubuntu 9.10) 64-bit AMD Opteron 3000+ uni-processor system.

(Click on any screenshots to see them in full size).

ChromiumOS Zero is a version of Google's open source Chrome OS. "Chromium" appears to be the the open source project euphemism for a product that will become "Chrome" when its ready to be distributed by Google directly as a 'product'. We've seen this transition with the Chromium / Chrome web browser.

Zero is the result of work by a so-far anonymous developer known only as "Hexxeh". Whoever he is, he's done a pretty good job of making ChromiumOS Zero fairly easy to obtain, install and run.

Following his instructions for Windows, (just happened to be the Vista PC I was on) I was able to create a bootable ChromeOS USB stick in a couple of minutes once the files were downloaded. This amounts to little more than unarchiving (using 7-zip) the ChromeOS image from its compressed tar ball and then using a Windows utility to burn the image to the USB stick.

Done.

The system refused to boot from the USB stick on the system it was made on (Intel Dual-core E6300 with 4GB / RAM, 4 HDs, dual-booting Ubuntu and Vista) but happily booted on my uni-processor AMD system that runs Ubuntu 9.10 alone. Not sure why the first system didn't work. The boot part of the BIOS setup is the same as on the system it did work on. Whatever. On the first system the boot paused very briefly then proceeded to GRUB, ignoring the USB stick waving its hand in the air.

Once booted, I found (as expected) ChromiumOS is basically the Chrome web browser with a couple tabs at left you can't close and couple of tiny status button at top righ for network and....something else. Didn't quite work out what the mini-button on the left at top-right was for.

ChromiumOS runs well enough, though it is a bit jerky. That may be due to data transfer lag from the cheap 4GB USB stick used as the boot source. The more tabs I had open, the slower it seemed to get. This was partly due to some of the tabs having animations running in the background. Closing tabs seemed to perk it up. Despite having 4GB of RAM the system seemed constrained in some way. Speed aside, it did not crash once.

There are a number of web apps predefined on the Home page. You can add more apps via Chrome Extensions. I had the "Chromed Bird" twitter app installed in a couple of monutes and was using that quite happily.

Looks like a very clever strategy at play here with extensions to an existing browser effectively functioning as applications for ChromeOS before it is fully baked as a commerical operating system.

ChromiumOS Zero was on the Internet by default. DHCP clearly works as does my cheapo 100Mbps ethernet card.

At top right, when I clicked on an anonymous little box, the UI displayed the available network interfaces seeing correctly both my ethernet adaptor and my WiFi card....and listing the wifi APs within range just to prove it was actually working.

Youtube video worked, slowly and not at all smoothly, but there was no sound. It may be that it was trying to use the new HTML5 video instead of Flash as I had earlier that day told that YT account to be set for HTML5. I don't know if that is a cookie thing on a given PC or a feature logged against my account no matter where I login from.

The Options menu put me into a page where I could configure the usual browser features. There was also prominent configuration capability for touch-sensitive devices.

Having had a play, I was wondering how to shut it down. There didn't appear to be any way to do it, but I did want to just power off. Consulting the FAQ, I found that the provisional way to shutdown is Cntl+Alt+1 to bring up a fullscreen linux terminal / command prompt...then enter "sudo shutdown -h now" in classic linux style. When it asks for the password, you enter "facepunch"....Hexxeh's root password. Lovely. No security problems here! :-) Presumably anyone running it can give themselves system-wide authority using sudo. Must try it when I have a minute or three.

Overall, ChromiumOS Zero is very much a work in progress. But if ChromeOS ends up being as fast and robust as the Chrome browser is, it will be a powerful and very useful operating system for a wide range of devices ranging from smartphones to desktop computers.

Android App of the Day: iSyncr

2010-01-23T10:14:00.004+13:00

Every app has a pre-amble - the reason I bought it. I cut to the chase below, but here is the pre-amble for iSyncr: I have an iPod Touch and I have a few songs on it that I have bought and can only listen to on my iPod Touch. That gets to be a tiresome....pulling out the iPod to listen to the handful of songs there sourced from iTunes, then pulling out my HTC Magic android phone to listen to the 100-ish songs there ripped from the CDs in my private music collection.

Why not just put them all on the iPod? Well, I guess I could, but then my iPod Touch won't let me delete any of the songs unless I go home and sync with the single PC on the planet that is allowed to host my iTunes library.

Whereas, my android phone lets me delete, on the spot, any song I don't want on the phone right now. Even better, the "AndFTP" app on my android phone let's me access (via FTP over the Intenret) my entire music collection at home. I can upload / download any song I like.

I haven't bought many songs on iTunes lately simply because they are locked in my iPod and I don't always have it with me. My phone caries the vast majority of my music. I'm also a bit down on my iPod since iTunes blew away well over $100 worth of songs two weeks AFTER I had apparently successfully transferred my iTunes to a new PC. One day working / syncing fine....then next, I synced and all paid songs were gone. I went to download them again (worked for apps), but it wouldn't let me and told me I would have to buy them again.

No thanks. Already stung me once. C'ain't trust dat.

Cutting to the chase: Thanks to iSyncr, that's changed.

Now I don't have to trust iTunes because the iSyncr app let's me transfer the songs (or podcasts or videos) in any iTunes playlist from my iTunes onto my android phone. Songs come across as *.mp4 files. Now I can safely buy more music via iTunes and be able to listen to them when I want or do something as simple as just delete them from the device (my phone) anywhere, anytime.

The iSyncr app is two things: a tutorial and a Windows program. You step through the app and connect your phone to your Windows PC. The app places a Windows program called "iSyncr.exe" in the root of your sdcard. When your sdcard is then mounted on Windows, you run this program on your Windows PC from the sdcard. (I haven't tried copying the app to the PC. I'm thinking it won't work if I do that, but will try it.)

iSyncr.exe starts up iTunes and presents you with a window (seen, right, in the screenshot of the tutorial on the phone) allowing you to select which playlist(s) you want to copy to your phone. It also offers you the option of deleting all songs not on the playlist(s) from your phone, so you can use it exactly like iTunes if you want to. I just wanted to add the iTunes songs to the ones already there, so I didn't choose that option.

It worked as advertised. The four songs I have reluctantly bought via iTunes since iTunes ate my music were transferred to my HTC Magic (as *.mp4 files) and they play properly and sound great on my phone. The songs I sync'd over came with the artwork they picked up from iTunes, so that's another plus. You can see that in the first screenshot above of Anna Nalick's "Breathe (2a.m.)".

For anyone with an android phone who has bought music through the Apple Store, iSyncr is a must-have app. Even the smallest, cheapest iPod can now give android owners access to the iTunes music collection.....if you want to think of it that way.

I am. This app might sell a few iPods to owners of Android phones. Win / Win. iSyncr is a paid app, but worth every penny of the $2-$3....I don't remember how little it was. :-)

The iSyncr FAQ is here.

Cheap, Low-spec Android phones out of China

2010-01-23T09:18:00.003+13:00

I saw this "The Robot" android phone on Trademe and Googled it. I found it wholesaling on Chinavasion.com for NZ$250-ish (US$170-ish). That's cheap.

The specs are pretty mediocre, with a slowish processor (Samsung 400Mhz), 2.8" screen, no 3G, and only two GSM frequencies (900/1800). This phone is useless in North America and is targeted for Rest of World (ROW). Almost all web sites talking it up use the same boilerplate text.

The phone will do what it says. In NZ, you can make calls on Vodafone or 2degrees. Telecom's XT network simply will not work as the phone can't even do either UMTS 850 or 2100. On a compatible carrier, you can surf the net via 2G/GPRS only. You can use it like a mini-netbook computer (slowly). I'm tempted to buy one just to see how good (or bad) it really is.

The only mention of an app market urges phone buyers to go to the And App Store. This isn't the Android Market, but if millions of people with cheap phones go there looking for apps, it may well grow quickly.

"The Robot" is just one example. There are others.

Fascinating to see this happening. Feels a bit like the early PC days.....an open platform growing like a weed in every nook and cranny.

Android App of the Day: GDE home app

2010-01-18T21:14:00.002+13:00

Preamble: I've been playing with alternative Android ROMs on the HTC Magic for several months now. In that time I've seen the very good, the adequate, the not-so-good, the bad....and the downright ugly.

One of things i do like is a lean, clean functional user interface. The sort that is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The sort that let's you get stuff done instead of making you do stuff.

Clearly tastes differ as some people love the HTC "Sense UI" found on the HTC Hero and the HTC Magic 32A. That's the Magic with 96MB more (288MB) system RAM than the HTC Magic 32B (192MB) from Vodafone and others. Sense UI on the Magic 32B is a bloated waste of a phone. If you actually use the huge clock and weather and Twitter widgets, your phone runs like a one-legged dog on valium.

There are many alternatives to the default Home app on android. I've tried aHome lite, and Open Home. I liked Open Home enough that I bought the paid version and used it more or less daily for a reasonable time. Like anything on the phone, I turn off the bits I don't use or want or the bits I like, but they use up resources I want for things I like more.....and Open Home offers you scope to tune it significantly. It also has many, many themes, including some very cool ones.

But it still felt slower than the default Home app and, in the end, I returned to Home with my tail between my legs.

I'm sorry I ever doubted you, Default Home.

Until today.

Cutting to the chase: Today I saw on Twitter a random tweet from a random tweeter saying the cube transition in GDE home looked good. "Click"...I went to the Android market and bought it (It's cheap)..and had it running in a couple of minutes. I quickly added a Google Chrome GDE theme from the market.

I'm impressed. GDE is fast, stable, well-designed and enables me rather than getting in my way. At the same time GDE can be very appealing to the eye and just plain fun to look at. The transitions are fast and smooth, unlike some on android. Now I know for certain any flakey, uneven transitions are due to programming, not the phone.

GDE offers three transitions from one screen to another: cube, stretch and fade. The image to the left is the cube transition in action. I very much prefer cube.

Stretch actually makes me fell vaguely queasy, though I'm sure some will love it.

Fade is cool, too, though not as assertive a statement about "Movin' to the next screen now!" as cube is.

Visually, GDE is a very polished app. There is nothing remotely messy or unfinished about it. I've tried several themes - some free and some paid, including this garish but fun Google Chrome one - and they are all very well put together.

The app tray opens to reveal all apps, but it also includes two (configurable) buttons. By default the dialer is invoked from the left and the dialog for adding shortcuts, widgets, folders and wallpapers kicks off from the right. It's quite different in many ways to the way the default Home app works (or even Open Home)...but after a few minutes, I found myself thinking it made a lot of sense to do it the GDE way.

The Menu button brings up a substantially re-designed and streamlined menu with only three options on it: Applications, Finder and Control Panel.

The first is obvious. It's apps. It works like the Apps tray. The second, Finder, kicks off Google Search. The Control Panel is the most powerful of the three, providing access to four sub-options:

General Phone Settings: the wifi, bluetooth and all that good stuff.

Personalise appearance: The cosmetic stuff; transitions and themes.

Desktop settings: The UI behaviour stuff, like how many home screens, which one is the default, rotation / orientation, finger swiping and what things look like when you're in the middle of moving an icon (ghosting the icons - or not).

It would be a waste if any of this was slow.....but it isn't. If anything, on my HTC Magic 32B, it's faster than the default Home app.....and GDE doesn't get in my way. The menus makes sense and the response is uniformly immediate.

Can't ask for anything more than that.

Here's a wee vid of GDE. Sorry about the quality. I'll try to work out how to get the focus stable for any future such vids.

Posts & Updates

2010-01-07T12:51:00.000+13:00

I haven't been posting as many new posts, but I have been updating old ones with new info. I can see from Google Analytics which posts are getting lots of hits from people trying to work out how to do things. Rather than create a new version and re-post and risk creating confusion, I'm going back to those posts and modifying them to be as current and correct as possible.

It isn't obvious I'm doing anything, but hopefully this incremental revision over time will help people get to the answers they are looking for when they search and Google throws up a link to one of my posts as a possible answer.

New Year, New Tech Hotness

2010-01-07T08:53:00.000+13:00

What a great way to usher in 2010....with the sort of tech toy that tells you in unambiguous terms you're now living in the 21st century.

Me want.

Google Nexus One Terms of Sale

2010-01-05T16:15:00.003+13:00

Google link seems to have gone dead. Here is the content, copy / pasted:

Nexus One Phone - Terms of Sale

Print

Terms of Sale for Nexus Device Effective: November 17, 2009

The following Terms of Sale (“Terms”) govern the relationship between you and Google, and once concluded, form a legally binding contract in relation to your purchase of a Nexus wireless handheld device and any associated accessories whether packaged with the handheld device or sold separately (together referred to as the “Device”). “Google” means Google Inc., a Delaware corporation whose principal place of business is at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States.

To place an order for the Device, you must first agree to these Terms by checking the box indicating your acceptance of these Terms. By checking the box, you agree that these Terms apply to your order, so please read these Terms carefully. Your order represents an offer to purchase the Device from Google, which is accepted by Google upon shipment of the Device, as explained below.

You understand that the manufacturer of the Device is HTC Corporation, whose principal place of business is at 23 Xinghua Road, Taoyuan 330, Taiwan, R.O.C. (“HTC”).

Account Creation; Number of Devices Purchased

To place an order for the Device on this site, you must register for a free Google Checkout account if you do not already have one. You agree to abide by the applicable Google Checkout Terms of Service.

You agree that you may place a maximum of five (5) orders for Nexus handheld devices. If you order more than one Nexus handheld device, your order comprises a series of offers for each device individually.

Ordering Devices

By placing an order for a Device, you are making an offer to purchase the Device from Google. After you place an order for a Device, you will receive an email confirming receipt of the order and containing order details. Any email confirmation from Google acknowledging receipt of your order is simply an acknowledgement that your order has been received by Google and does not indicate acceptance of your order. Please note that Google reserves the right to reject your offer to purchase the Device.

Google’s shipment of the Device will constitute Google’s acceptance of your offer to purchase the Device. Any delivery dates provided by Google or a delivery agent in an email confirming shipment are estimates only and are not guaranteed.

You agree that Google will authorize the credit card, debit card or other payment method specified by you in the amount of your order at the time the order is placed. You authorize Google to charge the credit card, debit card or other payment method specified by you in the amount of your order at the time the order is shipped. All prices on the website are displayed in United States dollars. If you are making a purchase with a credit card issued in another currency, you agree that the amount charged to your credit card is subject to change due to currency fluctuations between the time you place your order and the time your credit card is charged. Google will have no liability for any claim arising from such currency fluctuations or any additional fees charged by your credit card issuer.

Product Information

You understand that the Device will only work on GSM networks and that 3G network availability may depend on your mobile carrier. Please contact your mobile carrier to confirm that it offers a GSM network and that the Device’s technical specifications are compatible with 3G coverage in your area.

Google tries to ensure that all Device product information and prices appearing on the website are correct at the time you place your order, however, Google is not responsible for any errors. If an error has been discovered in the price of the Device you have ordered, we will inform you as soon as reasonably possible, and you will be given the option of re-confirming your order at the correct price or cancelling your order.

Sales Tax; Shipping and Handling

If the Device is shipped to you in the United States, you may be charged sales tax depending on the address to which the Device is delivered. There is an additional charge for shipping and handling, unless indicated at the time of ordering that you have qualified for free shipping.

If the Device is shipped to you outside the United States, you may be subject to taxes, customs duties and fees levied by the destination country ("Import Charges"). You agree to be the importer of record in the destination country and that you are responsible for all Import Charges. By placing your order, you authorize Google and/or the Device manufacturer to designate a courier to clear the Device through Customs and pay the Import Charges on your behalf. You agree that the courier will charge you separately for the payment of these Import Charges. You agree that any Customs Declarations will be made in your name and on your behalf by the designated courier. A list of estimated Import Charges that may apply can be found at:http://www.google.com/support/android/bin/answer.py?answer=166585. Please be advised that these are estimated, not exact, fees that are subject to change from time to time, and that your actual Import Charges will be determined and charged to you separately by the courier.

EXPORT RESTRICTIONS. THE DEVICE MAY BE SUBJECT TO UNITED STATES EXPORT LAWS AND REGULATIONS. YOU MUST COMPLY WITH ALL DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL IMPORT AND EXPORT LAWS AND REGULATIONS THAT APPLY TO YOUR USE OF THE DEVICE. THESE LAWS INCLUDE RESTRICTIONS ON DESTINATIONS, USERS AND END USE.

Maintaining Carrier Service

If you choose to enroll in a carrier’s wireless service plan, you must agree to the carrier’s terms and conditions, which will be presented during the enrollment process.

If you do not wish to keep the wireless plan, it is your responsibility to contact the carrier to cancel your wireless plan account. You should contact the carrier directly regarding any activation fees, monthly usage costs, taxes, and/or early termination fees that may be owed.

You agree to pay Google an equipment subsidy recovery fee (the "Equipment Recovery Fee") equal to the difference between the full price of the Nexus handheld device without service plan and the price you paid for the Nexus handheld device if you cancel your wireless plan prior to 120 days of continuous wireless service. For example, if the full price of the Nexus handheld device without service plan was $529 USD and the price you paid for the Nexus handheld device was $179 USD with a service plan, the Equipment Recovery Fee you pay will be $350 USD in the event you cancel within the first 120 days of carrier service. The Equipment Recovery Fee is equal to the line item in your confirmation email setting forth the discount on the full priced Nexus handheld device related to your carrier service plan activiation. You authorize Google to charge the Equipment Recovery Fee directly to your credit card, or other payment method used to purchase the Nexus handheld device, upon cancellation of your wireless plan. You will not be charged the Equipment Recovery Fee if you return your Nexus handheld device to Google within the 14 day Return Policy period as set forth below.

You agree that the Equipment Recovery Fee is not a penalty but is for liquidated damages Google will incur as a result of such cancellation. These damages may include, but are not limited to, loss of compensation and administrative costs associated with such cancellation or changing of wireless service provider(s), market changes, and changes in ownership. Please note that the Equipment Recovery Fee is imposed by Google and not your chosen carrier and is in addition to any early termination fees that may be charged by your chosen carrier in connection with termination of your wireless plan prior to fulfillment of your chosen carrier’s service agreement term.

Return/Refund Policy; Right of Cancellation

If you are not satisfied with your Device for any reason, you have up to fourteen (14) days from the date the Device is delivered to you to cancel these Terms with Google (Please note that residents of California, USA have up to thirty (30) days from the date the Device is delivered to cancel these Terms). In order to cancel these Terms and return your Device, please follow the detailed instructions on our Return Page athttp://www.google.com/support/android/bin/answer.py?answer=167258 or call the HTC customer care center at the number listed in the Service & Repair section of the HTC website (http://www.htc.com). An HTC customer care agent will provide you with an RMA (Returned Merchandise Authorization) ticket number and provide instructions for returning the Device. If you cancel these Terms, Google will refund the full amount of your initial payment, minus the initial shipping charge and any applicable fees set forth in these Terms. You agree to return the Device in its original packaging and in like-new condition with all of the original included accessories. You agree to pay all costs of return shipping as specified by the Return instructions.

You may not cancel this contract and return a Devices that has been engraved with a personal message of any sort. Due to costs associated with processing the return and refurbishing the returned Device, you will be charged a one-time fee of $45 USD (which will be deducted from your refund) if you decide to cancel this contract and return your Nexus device within the 14 day period. A refurbishing fee of $15 USD will apply to the return of separately-purchased accessories. Additional deductions to your refund may be made for damage to the Device or missing components. You authorize Google to deduct these amounts from your refund in the event you cancel the contract and return your Device within the 14 day period. Please note that you will not be charged any refurbishing fees for the return of Device in its original condition and in unopened packaging within the 14 day period.

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Stuff like this is cool.

2009-12-23T09:25:00.000+13:00

How random is this? You're on a flight from Nassau to Toronto and just happen to witness a space shuttle launch. I love stuff like this. Life can be so cool sometimes.

Google turn-by-turn GPS Navigation working again

2009-12-14T23:24:00.007+13:00

[Update 2009-12-20: if you want simple instructions and links to the hacked maps files that allow Google GPS Navigation outside the US to work now, then go here. I did and on my rooted phone I had it going in 5 minutes....though, with my rooted phone, I had to deal with three errors / ambiguities in the instructions (documented below).

The instructions linked to have a few errors / abiguities - at least with respect to my rooted HTC Magic running Wes Garner's Build 10:

1. The command "adb shell find /system /data -name \*google\*maps.apk\* -o -name Maps.apk -delete" didn't work for me until I changed "\*google\*maps.apk\*" to be "\*google\*Maps.apk\*". Note the change in the capitalisation of the word "maps".

2. The name of the hacked v3.3.1 Maps file you download from the link may not be exactly the same as in the instructions. It wasn't for me. When you execute the "adb -r install" command Just use the name of the file you actually download (or rename it to match the instructions - whatever).

3. The other thing they they don't explicitly tell you - and you may not know - is that you need to put the downloaded hacked maps v3.3.1 file in the android SDK's \tools folder. This is the same folder the "adb" command lives in. If you're going to push the file (any file!) to the phone as in the instructions, you need to have it in the same folder as the adb command.

That all took me about 2 mins to work out in all....but understand these issues will not be obvious to everyone, especially people new to this sort of thing who are still building confidence. ]

Original post follows:

I almost hesitate to say it in case Google hears and turns it off again, but Google Navigation outside the United States appears to working.

This is just one of the good things I discovered after I installed Wes Garner's latest ROM (Build9r1) on my sandpit HTC Magic and gave the GPS Nav a try. It worked!

Other than that, Wes appears to have also produced a very fine ROM. It supports the HTC G1 / Dream set of phones as well as the HTC Magic / MyTouchg3G phones. The g1 users also get Aps2sd, a real necessity as the amount of app space on the G1 is the most limited of all the androind-based phones. Magic users have almost 3 times as much app space, so Aps2sd isn't really required. I've never come close to the limit on my phone, but I have used double the 96MB available on the G1.

I haven't tested everything on Wes Garner's ROM yet, but so far, so good. He's based it on Cyanogen's very solid v4.2.8, so unless he really screwed up it would almost be hard to go wrong with a solid base like that.

One of the best things about Wes Garner's new ROM is he gives you the choice of 4 different kernels you can try. Two are essentially flavours of the BFS (Brain Fuck Scheduler) kernel - with and without the 10MB RAM Hack (stealing some graphics RAM for system use). The other two are version of the CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler) kernel with and without the 10MB RAM hack.

This ROM is based on Android v1.6 with chunks of Android 2.0 thrown in, like the new Contacts. It seems to have all the best stuff! Wifi-tethering, voice-dialing, new Facebook and Facebook syncing, YouTube video downloading, enhanced Home screen, dialer and default web browser with multi-touch. The only really cool thing missing is the Flash plugin that's included in the Android 2.0 web browser.

There isn't much that is original here, but Wes has put together a compelling package combining speed and function at what must be very close to the sweet spot.

I'm seeding this ROM on Bittorrent.

Installing Updates for Google Maps & Voice on Cyanogen Mod

2009-12-11T22:12:00.001+13:00

I've worked out a way that let's me get the latest Google apps and then install them on my HTC Magic running Cyanogen Mod. It's so simple it hurts me that it took me a couple of days to work it out.

I have an image of the original load on one of my two HTC Magic phones. But even if you only have one phone, if I want the latest update of a "problem" app (Google Maps, Google Search by Voice...etc...), all I would (likely) need to do is:

Restore the original un-rooted image to phone, then update the relevant app.
Once updated, I then use "adb pull" from /system/app to grab the apk I want off the official load onto my linux PC.
Then put the phone in fastboot mode and fastboot Cyanogen's recovery image (cm-recovery-1.4.img) and use that to restore Cyanogen Mod onto my phone from a nandroid backup taken previously.
Then boot the phone normally and use "adb push" the push the new app into /system/app of the CM version of the phone.
The app will then crash...as maps did (instant force close - every time)....but I found I could THEN uninstall it (couldn't do that to the real one)...and just install the real Maps.apk from the market, over the top.....on Cyanogen...with no signing issues.

I hadn't expected it to work out that way....but that's what happened. The issue I was trying to get around was obtained a copy of the new Maps.apk to transfer to the other phone.

I'm sure this isn't the easiest, most direct way.....but it is another way...and it worked for me.

Now I just have to work out where the VoiceSearch.apk is located.

Fun with Google Goggles on Android

2009-12-08T12:56:00.000+13:00

Just downloaded the new "Google Goggles" app for android-based smartphones.

It's really easy to use. You take a photo of something and then Google Goggles analyses it and gives you links to web sites and images related to the photo.

It didn't know what an orange sitting on a table was, but it easily handles barcodes, logos. It recognised "Philips" on a light bulb, but didn't get the light bulb as an object. For Moccona coffee, it gave me links to the parent comany's web site.

Along the bottom of the screen, it shows you an augmented reality display of the direction to nearby places and objects, displaying schools, universities, places to eat as well as many other places of business or other interest.

This could be really cool as the app and the cloud behind it learn more and more about what we see, where we are and how we see the things in front of us.

The Latest Verizon / Motorola Droid ad from the US

2009-12-05T02:33:00.002+13:00

Turn-by-turn Google Maps Navigation outside the US

2009-12-05T00:41:00.007+13:00

[UPDATE 2009-12-10: As of Dec 7th / 8th (depending on your time zone), Google disabled access to turn-by-turn GPS navigation at the server end for people not in the US. The software still works, but the back end won't give you the information. It won't work now no matter what you do, unless you're in the US.]

Google released v3.2.1 of Google Maps for Android on November 24th. It's for the US only. This version includes turn-by-turn audio and visual GPS navigation.

But within a few days, there were alternative android ROMs available that included a version of Google Maps with support for Navigation outside the US. I've tried it here in Auckland and it was perfect all the way from the North Shore to Titirangi and back. You want this.

Now, there is an app on the Android Market called "Nav Launcher". It's only purpose is to help you download a modified version of Google Maps v3.2.1 that turns on GPS Navigation in a long list of countries. New Zealand included. Apparently you don't have to have a rooted phone to use it, either. I'd be interested to know how people get on.

So if you want to get over to the market and try this out, here is the QR code. Scan it off the screen with your phone and it will take you to the market and direct to the app. You'll need to have "Barcode Scanner" installed.....but surely everyone already has that installed? If not, get it. It's very useful.

Now I just need a little stand on the dash of my car to rest my phone in when I'm driving so I can hear the instructions, though I think the Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP stereo support in my HTC Magic may come in handy if I wear a headset.

Stability problems with Cyanogen Mod 4.2.7.1 and a possible solution.

2009-12-04T23:46:00.009+13:00

I've been a huge fan of Cyanogen Mod ("CM") android since I first loaded it on one of my HTC Magic "32B" phones ....oh......2 weeks ago. Time flies when you're having fun. :-)

CM is faster than the stock android and for users of rooted phones it offers a full normal function set, all devices working, plus additional function not included in the stock releases - like tehtering via USB, bluetooth and WiFi.

Even better, you can update it over the air using Cyanogen's "CM Updater" app (right). I have been eagerly applying these updates within minutes of them becoming available. It's easy, simple and fast.

Of course nothing is ever perfect and today I ran into a patch of imperfection. I'd put the CM 4.2.7.1 update on last night and found that during the course of the day my phone was crashing and rebooting. Usually when I had been using the camera and then trying to share a photo via Handcent SMS or Gmail. The screen went black....then the CM Android boot logo (above) appeared and the phone had obviously rebooted itself.

I was going to go back to CM 4.2.6 as this had been very stable. But instead I opted to try wiping my phone and re-installing the HTC 1.6 rooted base image, then applying CM 4.2.7.1 over the top. This is what you would do if you were installing CM for the first time. I then downloaded all my apps and reinstalled them. Yeah...it was a pain, but the result seems to be a stable system. I can't reproduce the camera / phone crash.

If you're having trouble with CM 4.2.7.1 you may want to give thisa try.

[Update 2009-12-22: I am now on CM 4.2.9.1 and I don't have as many issues as I used to - which wasn't many - but the phone still re-boots randomly perhaps once every two days. It's below the annoyance level and not much worse than Android as-sold, which also rebooted occassionally. It may be that this isn't a CM issue at all, but an underlying Android issue. My second phone is on Wes Garner's "Build 10.2" and it has randomly re-booted once in 2 days. I mainly use it for broadband data, due to the way my telco packages data and voice.

Vodafone NZ's "Broadband Pro" & my HTC Magic

2009-12-01T21:45:00.003+13:00

My HTC Magic is on a two year "Smart 80" plan. It includes 120 minutes, a swag of txts and pxts and 250MB of data. It costs $80 / month. I'm also part of a family group so usage covered by that doesn't count toward my plan. The result is I get to the end of the month having used virtually no minutes, txts or pxts...but way over my data quota. That has been OK up to now because I've benefited from a promo allowing me to use up to 3GB of data each month. I certainly got used to using 3G data whenever I wanted to. The future didn't look too bright after the promo. I keep finding new ways to blow the roof off my cap.

Friday night, Telecom did some maintenance at the Birkdale exchange and managed to plug my DSL connection into the wrong interface, ending my Internet access for several days. I set my other android phone up so our PCs and other devices could tether to it via wifi and access the Net.

That blew my data quota for the month in a single day. I needed a viable alternative.

The Smart 80 plan won't let me buy more data at any price other than 10 cents / MB once I over my quota. That's $100/Gb. Too dear. Instead, I checked out the Vodafone web site. For $79 / month we could get 3GB of data and another 3GB for only $10 more. I didn't realise at that point an entirely separate SIM chip was involved. It arrived today. I put it my other HTC Magic and it didn't work. After some fiddling around and a call to Vodafone, we worked out the 'live.vodafone.com' didn't work, but 'direct.vodafone.com' worked perfectly. The result is an effective 3GB + 250MB per month, plus a swag of minutes, txts and pxts. For an extra $10 I get another 3GB. Any other formulation would see that amount of 3G data costing me almost $700 / month. Instead it's $168.

Dear, but a lot better than $700!

A 'simple guide' to loading new ROMs on your HTC Magic / MyTouch3G Android phone

2009-11-29T23:11:00.008+13:00

This is my attempt to distill into a short post all the best information and sources I've found while learning how to load different Android ROMs on my phone. I'm not re-writing the work of others, I'm pointing to it and adding some comments / info I learned along the way that is either not in the information pointed to or that I found relevant along the way.

You have an HTC Magic / MyTouch3G Android phone. It came with the software loaded at the factory. If you don't have one of these phones, then these instructions will be mostly correct anyway as far as the infrastructure you need.

The exceptions will be related to the specific model of phone you have if it isn't an HTC Magic / MyToucg3G. For example, the version of "fastboot" will be tied to the phone's hardware, in my case HTC, and you'll need a version written for your phone and the PC's OS (Windows or Linux or Mac) to allow it to talk to your type of phone. Separately, what ROMs you'll be able to load also depends on the type of phone you have. You would not, for example, try to follow specific HTC Magic instructions to load new ROMs on a Motorola Droid or vice versa. But the setting up of Java, Eclipse and the Android SDK will be almost identical in all cases where Ubuntu Linux is used as the PC OS. The exception will be the contents of the udev rules file reporting the vendor ID and device ID. Don't worry about this right now. Deal with it when you get to it.

Having said that, I'm assuming you want to try other versions of Android, but you want a return path to the way your phone was before you messed with it. I'm assuming you do NOT want to "brick" (render dark and useless) your phone.

No problem. Absolutely do-able, provided you can read and follow instructions and don't just skip bits you don't understand.

Here are some simple steps to make it happen. They are based on the assumption you will be using Ubuntu Linux. If you're a Windows person, then this may be doubly interesting for you. Don't stop reading here. Bear with me.

Here are some steps to work your way though. As is often the case, it's best to read it through and then, after, work it through.

1. Install Ubuntu Linux 9.10. It can be 32-bit or 64-bit depending on your PC. Doesn't matter.

2. You need to set up the Android SDK in order to access the phone the way you need to in order to load new ROMs. Follow these instructions, bearing in mind the following notes:

a) If your Ubuntu Linux is 64-bit, the one flaw in the instructions linked to above is it makes no mention of the need to install the ia32libs if they aren't already installed. These libraries let you run 32-bit apps on your 64-bit linux. Without it, you'll get strange crashes in some libs. To install the ia32libs, you open a terminal ('Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal' on Ubuntu) and enter this command (no quotes): "sudo apt-get install ia32-libs". For Windows users: "sudo" means the command is to be run as root (as administrator). You'll be asked for your password to authorise. That is YOUR password. the one you logged in with...not some other password you can't and won't know.

b) As for the rest of the instructions, you can ignore the bits about actually writing your own apps if you don't plan to. But you do need to install the Java SDK, Eclipse and the Android SDK and ADT 0.94 (or the current version). So follow these instructions and make sure you can run these programs successfully.

c) When you get to the point where you're setting up talking to your real phone with adb and ddms, the udev "51-android-rules" file in /etc/udev/rules.d/ is *critical* and the author of those instructions has it nailed for the HTC Magic / MyTouch3G and the HTC G1 / Dream. For any other phone you'll have to use "lsusb" (list usb) command in a terminal, with you phone connected and debug turned on on the phone (it's in the docs), to get the vendor ID and device ID required.

d) You may have to start the adb server task using sudo (eg: "sudo adb start-server" for the linux system to allow you to access the phone using adb commands.

3. Install fastboot for linux. Get it here. Read the instructions. Get it installed in the right directory and practice booting your phone in fastboot mode: power off, then while holding down the BACK key, press the POWER button.

4. Assuming you can successfully see your phone using adb and ddms and "fastboot devices" lists your phone's serial number, you now want to go to Cyanogen's instructions for loading the recovery image and any ROM you like.
Of course, you would ONLY load ROMs that explicitly say they support your model of phone (HTC Magic / MyTouch3G). A ROM for use on some other phone (like HTC G1) probably won't work on a Magic unless it explicitly says will also work on one. For example, Cyanogen and Dwang and ASOP ROMs all work on both the G1 and the Magic / MyTouch3G.

There are often dire warnings about what SPL (Second Program Loader) is required by the ROM. HTC Magic owners with the factory "Hboot 1.33.0004 (SAPP10000)" SPL can almost always ignore these. Our phones already have the capability that the "Danger SPL" provides. The SPL issues are mainly related to the HTC Dream / G1 phones as the default SPL on those phones doesn't allow a system to boot if it is over a certain size. HTC Magic and Hero phones do not have this restriction. In fact, the "Danger SPL" is actually a magic SPL modded to be used on an HTC G1. Bottom line - HTC Magic owners with UK, NZ, NL and (some) AU Magic phones don't need it. I don't mess with the SPL as getting that flash process wrong CAN "brick" your phone. The usual error seems to either fail to first flash the correct version of the radio image related to the SPL, or to flash an SPL that is completely inappropriate for your phone. Academic interest only....we (HTC Magic 32B owners sourcing phones from Vodafone NZ, UK, NL and AU) don't need to do any of it.

That's pretty much it. Be sure to use nandroid (it's in the docs) to back up any ROMs you installed that you want to keep. If you're going to put it back on your phone, it may as well be of an install you've already configured.

I strongly recommend you put these backups in a safe place, clearly labelled and well organised. I also recommend copying the entire /Nandroid/[device name]/[version number] backup set into some other directory with a meaningful name. One backup per path. That way you can easily and simply copy the version you want to restore back on to the phone for a quick restore. Your directory names at the top level should make it obvious which backup it is. Guessing is no fun.

A good site for getting news on the latest ROMs is www.AndroidSpin.com. Once you've loaded a new ROM on a couple of times, it becomes simple and easy. You may load a ROM on that won't boot. Ooops. Not to worry, just start over and put one on that does. If it wiped out the Cyanogen recovery image, DO NOT PANIC! Just follow the instructions to load CM's recovery back on. You haven't messed with your SPL just by loading a ROM and (maybe) a recovery image, so you are almost certainly OK.

Bottom line: Take it one step at a time. No need to hurry. Give your head a chance to get around each step.

Have fun.

Eugene373's Eclair (Android 2.0) on my HTC Magic

2009-11-29T01:44:00.003+13:00

I just loaded the latest ROM from Eugene373 onto my HTC Magic 32B (from Vodafone NZ) sandpit phone. There is a LOT of new stuff in this version of Android. I won't type much, I'll let the screenshots from my phone speak for themselves. As usual, click on any of the images to see the full size.

The biggest surprise for me was Google Navigation is included and actually works for New Zealand. I tried a route from where I am to the centre of Auckland and it provided turn-by-turn instructions in text....and a voice told me to turn in 800 metres at Roberts Road. I nearly fell off my chair!

There is a new multimedia dock included from Motorola Droid.

There is also a "Phone Portal" app that lets you drive some things on the phone from your PC via USB or wifi.

The "Dockrunner" is one place to access a number of multimedia apps on the phone. It's only in landscape mode, clearly designed for the Motorola Droid and similar large-screen phones.

There is also an updated version of the Facebook app for Android. Here is one screenshot of it. It looks pretty good.

The ROM also includes MySpace and support for Microsoft Exchange mail and directories. There is a new media gallery. The browser is clearly the Eclair browser as seen in the Eclair emulator.

I'll just throw a few more screenshots up here. It will be messy, but that's what happens sometimes. :-)

It's not all sweetness and light.

The camera is completely non-functional in this ROM.

Text in the browser and elsewhere tends to be very small at first, perhaps because it is intended for devices with larger screens.....4 inches isn't THAT much bigger than 3.2 inches. The web browser isn't enable for multi-touch (on my phone, anyway), while the browser version included in Cyanogen Mod 4.2.5 does support multi-touch.

Performance is fine. It's actually pretty snappy overall. Probably faster than the Android 1.6 that comes as standard with the HTC Magic as sold.

There is now also a task manager built in located in the Settings. Glad to see this as a multitasking phone needs to give the user some way of controlling what is running at any given time.

I'm looking forward to the 'genuine' Android 2.0. This ROM has certainly whetted my appetite for all the goodies to come. Though I suspect I'll need to stay with a rooted ROM in order to keep all the OTHER stuff that isn't in any standard load from the telcos.

An evening of Android ROM Mods. My favourites so far.

2009-11-26T23:45:00.004+13:00

Last night I downloaded every Android 1.6-based ROM image compatible with my HTC Magic 32B phone and gave them all a spin on my second phone. I was having a HUGE time!

AndroidSpin.com maintain an excellent, detailed and very current table of all the android mods currently circulating. They are listed in date order, with the most recent on the left. There is also a more concise summary list with the most recent mod releases at the top.

In 5 hours I loaded, configured, played with and backed up five different ROMs. All but one ran faster than the preloaded Android build that came on my Vodafone NZ phone. This is mainly because they have been tweaked to run the processor at the full 528MHz and also hacked to make more memory available for the system and running apps. In some cases the system scheduler has been tweaked. Beyond that, they also generally offer very cool features like WiFi, bluetooth and USB tethering allowing you to connect almost anything to the Internet through your phone's 3G connection. They also generally come with Voice dialing, which is really cool as that is a feature I was very much looking for. Some of the ROMs also support access to Microsoft Exchange, a biggie for people who work in places that use Exchange / Outlook. I've also noticed some of the new Contacts features an functions have been ported down from Eclair (Android 2.0). For example, you can create a "Contacts Folder" on a Home screen...and when you open it, you scroll through the list of people in that sync group - including any photos / images associated with them on Gmail. Lots of stuff, all good and mostly not in the standard builds on phones you can buy now.

I started the night with Cyanogen Mod 4.2.5 installed. I backed that up and then loaded the "The Official AOSP-1.6_r1.4 DRD20 (Donut) v2.2.1" ROMs. This person or team take the basic ROM of each major vendor, root it, then make an image. Then they create an "ExpansionPack" that adds in all the good stuff to the basic version. It loaded easily and booted to the Android welcome screen where you set up your gmail account.

Next, I tried the Soulife ADP Remix ROM. This also loaded easy, booted properly to the Android welcome screen and then ran fast and stable after being configured for gmail. I liked this ROM. I had a play, backed it up and moved on.

The next on the list was the JesterBlur v1.2.5 ROM. This is based on Android v1.5 (Cupcake) and includes the Motorola "MotoBlur" user interface. It's large at 78MB. It did install OK, though I had not followed all the steps suggested. It booted, though it took about 5 minutes or more - it felt like closer to 10. When it came up, there was MotoBlur in all its glory and it worked, though it was quite slow. The screenshots are all from my phone. I've included them as MotoBlur is strikingly different to all the other ROMs. Most of them load up and look more or less exactly like the same Android you get on your phone when you buy it.

JesterBlur could access the internet via 3G data, but WiFi didn't start. The docs warned I needed "the latest radio" - unhelpfully vague and imprecise. The Bluetooth didn't work, either, a known problem. It certainly was pretty, but the MotoBlur UI seemed to me to be all about form rather than function. Things I'd do in a motion or two usually, could take several more on MotoBlur. You don't slide the apps tray out. It's been added to the Menu key or the "+" button (IIRC). The notifications bar can't be slid down. It does very nicely allow you to create and define custom formulations of the user interface mad up of components you are offered. To me, that's too much effort and expense in development just for eye candy. But once you managed to find an app and run it, it ran well enough.

I'm a fan of leaner, lighter interfaces. MotoBlur felt, to me, like I had to watch 20 episodes of "Project Runway"...and take it seriously. I'm sure lots of people love it to bits.

Being based on Android 1.5, the Android Market in JesterBlur 1.2.5 is the old, black and plain Market that prevailed until a month or so ago. How quickly we move on! I didn't bother to back this one up. I just wiped it.....and moved on. Maybe the next version will be faster. I would certainly take a look at a new release if / when one appears.

Last ROM of the evening was Dwang Donut v1.13. Of the ROMs I tried last evening, this was the only one not based in some way on a version of Cyanogen Mod. David Wang has composed his own kernel build from the stock android v1.6. This ROM was recommended to me as a very fast one and it certainly nice and snappy on my phone. It isn't as feature rich as Cyanogen, but if you had this ROM on your phone you'd find lots to like about it. I backed it up.

Of the ROMs I've tried so far, my favourite would be Cyanogen 4.2.5. Next and not very far behind CM, it would be very close race between Soulife and Dwang, with Soulife taking it by a nose. Half a length behind - because these are all good - would the AOSP Donut builds. Bringing the rear in flamboyant leasurely style would be JesterBlur....which isn't really fair as it is Android v1.5....and v1.6 is faster - modded or not.

Google Maps 3.2.1 with Cyanogen Mod 4.2.5

2009-11-25T13:25:00.008+13:00

[UPDATE 2010-02-06: We're now up to Google Maps 3.4.0 and hacked by brut.all for global GPS nav support and it also includes multi-touch support from the Nexus One OTA of a couple of days ago. Look here for how I got it installed on my HTC Magic running Cyanogen Mod 4.2.14.1]

[UPDATE 2009-12-10: As of Dec 7th / 8th (depending on your time zone), Google disabled access to turn-by-turn GPS navigation at the server end for people not in the US. The software still works, but the back end won't give you the information. It won't work now no matter what you do, unless you're in the US. The instructions below are still valid for dealing with signing problems on this and other versions of Maps. ]

[Update: You should also check out this more recent post on this subject.]

Google Fodder: I'm posting this here because xda-developers forums was producing a "502 bad gateway" error and Google cache didn't hold a copy....and the only place on the net it appeared to be was on xda.

Originally Posted by mrandroid

Download and copy the new Google Maps 3.2.1 APK to your sdcard.
Can be found at: http://www.myhangoutonline.com/downloads/

open a terminal window:

(For Cyanogen Builds)

type: su
type: mount /system -o remount,rw
type: rm /system/app/Maps.apk
type: cp /sdcard/Maps.apk /system/app

TA RA! lol welcome to Google Maps 3.2.1 w/ Nav.

*** UPDATE *** If for any reason it's not 3.2.1 after installing, you'll be able to just download 3.2.1 from the market now and it'll install perfectly... Either way, The file should be fixed and it should be 3.2.1 now.

I rooted my Android phone and it was easy.

2009-11-23T22:24:00.013+13:00

Over the past several months, since I bought my HTC Magic android phone, I've been watching the progress of others as they gained root (administrator / supervisor) access to their phones and loaded alternative versions of Android. Some made a real mess of it and I could almost hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth through the texts of the miserable accounts of cellular OS devastation.

A lot of the information on a wide variety of web sites was written by people who were clearly technically competent but who, at the same time, couldn't clearly explain paint to a brush. Or worse, said it was paint while they described some of the elements of paint, leaving out critical details others soon discovered were missing.

Scary stuff! I wasn't going to risk my reasonably expensive new HTC Magic ("Sapphire") phone without having a clear path from the present config to a new one...and back again. That last part is critical. I wanted to be certain I could restore my phone to the factory-based build in order to ensure I would receive the "official" updates to my particular android phone as they are released by Vodafone here in NZ and around the world. I did not want to go out on an alternative version branch and be left stranded there.

So I waited. In the meantime, I installed the Android SDK on my 64-bit Ubuntu Linux system as well as my Windows Vista Home Premium system (Ubuntu was easier - for the record) and became familiar with the tools you use to access / alter the phone's system from your PC: "adb", "ddms" and I installed "fastboot" as well. In addition to the SDK instructions, you may find the alternative view at xda-developers helpful. I've also documented my own efforts here on my blog.

Finally, with the release of 'Cyanogen Mod v4.2.5, stable', I found the very clear and straightforward instructions provided by its source: Cyanogen (a.k.a. Steve Kondin).

The key, for me to Cyanogen's ROMs (Read Only Memory - essentially a system image copy) is they come pre-rooted. All I need to do is load it on the phone using Cyanogen's very useful 'recovery image' (cm-recovery-1.4.img) and activate it. The new system image from Cyanogen has been rooted for me already. This removes a HUGE technical hurdle for the know-a-fair-bit kind of guy who'd like to give this try.

As to why you would want to root your phone, there are several very practical reasons. You get access to features and functions not available in the standard ROMs from the telcos. For example, with my rooted phone, I can "tether" my iPod Touch to my phone via WiFi and allow the iPod to access the Internet through the phone's 3G connection. Or I can use the "SetCPU" apps to set the clock speed of the processor in my phone: faster for more speed, or slower for better battery life. As it is, without changing the CPU speed myself, Cyanogen Mod, by default, runs much faster than the stock version of Android. There are many other reasons, these were more than enough for me.

Jargon, jargon.

Half the battle is understanding the terminology used. At first I was bewildered by all the strange terms related to the components of the operating system on the phone. But after a while, it became clear there were only really a couple of things I absolutely needed to understand:

Fastboot: This has two meanings in the context of messing with your phone.

You boot your HTC Magic in "Fastboot mode" by holding down the BACK button and then pressing the power button. In this context (rooting your phone) this program lets me load a basic, temporary system on my phone and run it. Once booted, you see a white screen with essential details about your phone's hardware and what firmware is currently loaded onto it.

"Fastboot" is also a program that you can use on your PC, when you phone is connected in Fastboot mode (see image), to 'live boot' a temporary operating system. When you power your phone off and re-boot, you go back to the usual system.

Recovery mode and recovery image: You access the recovery mode of your phone by powering off, then holding down the HOME button and pressing the power button. On a standard HTC Magic/ MyTouch3G phone, you'd probably then see something like a white triangle on a black background with a yellow exclamation mark in it and a small phone image beside. This is what the default recovery image provides. You can't do much with the default. So you need to load one that is more useful and that is is what you typically use fastboot to load. In the case of Cyanogen's (latest as of writing) "cm-recovery-1.4.img", it boots up a text-based menu (click on image for full size) of options that allow you to perform some essential tasks like re-boot; backup the existing system ROM (critical! - but easy) to your sdcard using a program called "Nandroid"; or use Nandroid to restore from a previous backup. Or you can wipe the system area and then, separately, load an entirely new ROM from the root directory of your sdcard.

Once you've loaded the new ROM and booted from it successfully, you can us "su" at a command prompt to get root powers...and then flash the recovery image so that it is permanent, not temporary: "flash_image recovery /sdcard/cm-recovery-1.4.img"......and you're done.

At this point, the only thing to remember is that if you do restore the original, factory image, you will also restore the default recovery and you won't have root access anymore.

How Nandroid works is pretty straightforward. Each new backup goes into the "Nandroid" directory on the sdcard. The device ID of the phone is the next level, then comes the version of the individual backup. It will make a new subdirectory below the device ID for each new backup.

For restoring, it will only restore the last backup made. If you don't want that one, you have to ensure the one you do want is the most recent one that Nandroid can see. That means moving the others out of the way to some other location.

Make sure you make copies elsewhere of any images you want to keep.....and don't mess with the naming of the folders. Nandroid needs those names just as they are. But I need to know what each one is, so I have a tree of folders with "AndroidBackups" at the top, then something like "01-backup-20091121-2340-first-CM-install" and then the next level will be "Nandroid"...and so on, as on the sdcard. This way, I can just drag / drop from the "Nandroid" level to the sdcard, knowing I have exactly the backup I want and no other.

The most important thing to me is not losing the backup of the original factory load. That is my key to returning to he vendor world of Android if I choose to. I've tested it and it works fine. Just remember that when you restore the original ROM, you're also restoring the original (not very useful) recovery, too. To get the Cyanogen recovery back, you'll have to fastboot it for temporary use, or install a new ROM and then make it permanent (or at least for the life of the task you have in mind, until you again restore the original.

This isn't a step-by-step guide, but I hope it does make clear some of things that baffled me and helps provide you with the confidence you need, through knowing you can mod your phone and you can put it back the way it was to begin with.

Thanks to Cyanogen / Steve Kondin for providing the simple, step-by-step instructions that finally gave me the certainty I required to have a go. they got me quickly to the point where it was easy if you know how by helping know how.

Apple or Android? You don't have to choose. You can have both.

2009-11-20T18:59:00.003+13:00

You don't have to choose between Apple and Android. Android's open-ness makes it possible for you to have both at the same time. A relatively cheap iPod Touch 8GB, combined with an Android phone on a data plan acting as your WiFi access point, is a cheap way to have simultaneous access to the best both Apple and Android have to offer wherever you go.

I got my Apple iPod Touch (2nd gen) last December and very quickly saw iPod Touch / iPhone would change the face of not just mobile telephony but also personal computing. I got right into it - installing loads of apps (free and paid), buying a few songs, and generally replacing most of the functions I used to use my laptop for.

But, as I have already blogged, iTunes annoyed me. I can't even delete a song or video without without using iTunes. In the end, Apple's restrictions were enough to make me think twice, three (and the rest) times about "upgrading" to an iPhone. That isn't to say Apple doesn't offer a lot that is good and useful and fun.

At the same time, I had been watching the progress of Google's Android OS for mobile phones. It looked to me like Android's more open platform had the potential to give me most, if not all, the advantages of the Apple-verse while avoiding the annoyances implicit in using iTunes. Maybe I would even have the ability to actually use my iPod Touch together with an Android phone. Something Apple would never allow in reverse.

If such a thing were possible, then I would not have to choose at all. I could use both side-by-side.

With this in mind, I bought my android-based HTC Magic from Vodafone NZ back in July....and today I finally made it.

Yesterday, I rooted my 'spare' HTC Magic phone (I have two), loaded Cyanogen android, and then installed tetherWiFi. This app only works if you have gained root access to your phone.

I now have my Apple iPod Touch talking to the Internet, tethered via WiFi to my Android phone, sharing the phone's 3G connection. My HTC Magic is now an ad hoc WiFi access point, protected by MAC filtering so only those systems / devices I choose to allow to connect are able to.

It took me a few months to collect the pieces together. Once I had them (iPod Touch and spare "sandobx" HTC Magic phone) in hand, within 2 days I was able to set this up. It was worth the wait. Now I've done it once, I realise how easy it is, thanks to guys like Steve Kondin / "Cyanogen".

Trying Cyanogen Mod android on my HTC Magic

2009-11-20T16:51:00.004+13:00

I've been using Android daily since July 23rd. I came to it from a background of being a daily iPod Touch user with a cheapo Huawei 3G ("Vodafone 715") as my phone. I'm conservative when it comes to messing with expensive phones, so I left my first phone unmolested by alternative builds of Android. This week, I bought my second HTC Magic (used - via Trademe) and - that evening - the fun began. By midnight, I had the new phone running Steve Kondik's "Cyanogen" 4.2.5 android instead of the Vodafone / HTC build that had been on it when it arrived.

It took me a while because there there is a lot of information out there and it is frequently fragmented and often months old. Not everyone had the same problem. Some people who had a problem found a way to work around it that didn't work for others.

The first hurdle is getting a working "adb" or "fastboot" connection to the phone that will let you load the files you need onto it and run them with root authority to kick things off. I was almost there with 64-bit Ubuntu, but in the end wasn't able to complete the task due to some permissions issues with UDEV. I could read whatever I liked....but no way was Ubuntu going to let me write to anything on the phone as root.

After a couple of hours of that, I gave Windows Vista a try. Previously, I had no luck at all getting Vista to see the phone. But the system had been re-booted several times since the last attempts and I also made a fresh attempt at installing the USB drivers for the adb interface. I also added a fresh win32 version of fastboot, made sure it was all on the PATH....and suddenly everything worked!

At this point I found I was using an old recovery.img file that wouldn't boot on my phone. I went to Cyanogenmod.com and checked out the instructions there as this was the ROM I wanted to install anyway. What I found was nothing short of awesome.....a set of well-packaged files supported by some clear, simple steps plainly and unambiguously presented.

Following these steps, in a few minutes I had the phone rooted, the original ROM backed up via "Nandroid", the HTC base ROM installed (to get the Google apps) and then a new Cyanogen ROM installed (v4.2.3.1) over the top. I didn't need to do that. I thought I was downloading the latest version - d'oh! Realised today, I had installed an earlier one, working from the instructions.

After re-booting into the brave new world, I flashed the enhanced recovery image v1.4 onto my phone (as suggested) to make any / all future updates easy.

Today, to get to the latest version, I downloaded CMUpdater from the Android market and updated Cyanogen, over the air and on-demand - to v4.5.2. That process took download time (27MB at 180KB/sec over 3G - not long).

I now have voice dialing and USB tethering for Internet and the ability to backup and restore and and all android ROMs I care to install on my phone.

Coolness was unleashed today.

HTC Magic, Android and the Sony DR-BT21G stereo bluetooth headphones.

2009-11-18T14:28:00.009+13:00

Google fodder: Last week, I bought the Sony DR-BT21G stereo headset to use with my HTC Magic because the phone uses the same port for the wired headphones and USB data connection and power adaptor. I could either listen to the phone or charge the battery, but not both. A Bluetooth media (as opposed to just the phone) headset seemed the obvious solution.

No matter what I did, I couldn't get the headphones to play any music. They worked fine with the phone, but that was it.

So instead, as of yesterday, I decided to use them to listen to music on my iPod Touch because v3.0 of the iPhone / iPod Touch OS added support for stereo bluetooth. They worked fine. The main difference was the Apple device asked for the "0000" PIN number, while the HTC Magic / android had not.

That got me thinking and I wonder if....having been initialised at least once....the headset might now work with my HTC Magic. So I tried it this morning.

Yes. They work perfectly.

Even better, though the default music app doesn't respect the AVRCP remote controls on the headset, the "Meridian" media player app does, provided it is in the foreground. I can either skip to the next song, the previous song or job the centre and then FF or REW the current song.

If you're looking for a stereo Bluetooth headset to use with the HTC Magic, the Sony DR-BT21G is a great choice. Just be aware you may have to use them the first time on some other device before they will work with the HTC Magic.

Android App of the Day: Magic Marker

2009-11-16T21:06:00.003+13:00

If you want a fun app that can make cool stuff in seconds, the "Magic Marker" is probably an app you should check out. Magic marker lets you create new images or enhance existing ones with neon-bright colours you paint onto the screen with your finger tip.

You can pick one of 7 pre-set colours or run your finger tip around a colour wheel to create a more subtle set of shades in between. To confirm the colour of your choice, you push the button in the middle of the wheel. You're then placed back in the main screen and you can begin painting.

If you aren't happy with each finger stroke - or all of them - there are un-do and re-do buttons that appear to be able to handle a very large number of amendments.

You can paint on the default black canvas or choose any image on your phone to add your magic touch to.

Magic Marker allows to you choose from 5 brush sizes from pin point to about 3mm.

When you have completed your masterpiece, you can save it to your phone or share it via whatever apps you have installed that allow sharing.

My list included Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, Picasa, Picsay Pro (for further editing), Printershare (for printing locally or over the Internet)...and several others. The idea here is that you can do pretty much whatever you want with your image once you're done.

It would be great if you could magnify the image and be more precise, but as it is, Magic Marker lets you create or add some quick, impressionistic and colourful highlights with the swipe of a finger.

I like this one. See what you think. I think this app is free. On my phone it just says "installed". :-)

Android and A2DP bluetooth support

2009-11-16T14:07:00.010+13:00

I've been watching "Mad Men", right from season one, episode one, via Jetflicks on my HTC Magic android phone and really enjoying it. The only problem I have is my phone uses the same USB port for the headphones as it uses to charge the battery. I can either listen to the phone via headset OR charge it. If I want to do both, I have to use the phone's external speaker and annoy other people nearby who may not share my taste in TV programs enough to want to listen to it without seeing it.

The HTC Magic supports A2DP bluetooth and there is no physical reason why I can't listen to whatever I want over a set of stereo bluetooth headphones. It seemed to be the ideal solution. I went out and bought a pair of Sony DR-BT21 headphones. They work fine with the phone, but I can't get them to play any music / video via any media player. If the phone's Bluetooth is set to media-only mode (the support to enable this is partially there), I can't connect the phone to the headset. But re-enabling the phone audio allows the headset to connect to the phone.

A bit of Googling revealed why. Android in v1.6 (Donut) only supports HFP (Hands Free Profile) and HSP and doesn't support the A2DP bluetooth profile required to use this stereo bluetooth device. The HTC Magic phone supports it, the headset can do it......but the stock Android ROM loaded on vendor phones can't do it and won't until they are updated with software than can support it.

It is possible to load alternative versions of Android (Like Cyanogen) that do include A2DP support, but then you risk cutting yourself off from the standard support path for future software updates and at the same time expose yourself to Android without the default Google 'love' included with almost all Android phones. You'd have to add that yourself, which can be done, but it's more messing around. Besides, future updates will almost certainly include the missing A2DP support.

At this point, I'm not sure "Mad Men" is the compelling event to drive me off the standard path. Even adding the ability to make my phone a Wi-Fi access point (Cyanogen again) isn't enough. If I had a second phone to play with.....I'd be in like a robber's dog. Maybe that's the way to go.

UPDATE - 2009-11-18: After several more attempts, I gave up trying to get the Sony headset to do media audio with my HTC Magic, so I tried it with my iPod Touch. The headphones worked and sounded great. I was asked to enter the PIN number. The next day (today) I tried them again with the HTC Magic....and they now work! It's full stereo, too. NO IDEA why they now work....but they now work. Maybe activating them with the iPod Touch was enough to enable them to work with my android phone.
UPDATE 2 - 2009-11-18: I've just discovered the Meridian media player app respects the (AVRCP) jog, FF and REW buttons on the Sony bluetooth headset provided the app is in the foreground. I have 100% functionality now! Awesome.

If you find this post useful, please consider a small donation in NZ$ via PayPal in recognition of the effort that went into this post and others. Thanks! :-)

Android App of the Day: 3G Watchdog

2009-11-15T21:57:00.001+13:00

Some people in the US are lucky enough to be on unlimited data plans, but most phone-based Internet users pay for the data they use. "3G Watchdog" is perfect for helping anyone with a data quota track how much of their 3G data they are chewing up as the days go by.

My data plan with Vodafone NZ is 250MB / month and each additional MB is 10 cents. That means the second 250MB (and each subsequent 250MB) is $25. I'm happy to use roughly double my data quota before I start to get sweaty palms. That's about 20MB / day and usually more than adequate for Google sync and all the web browsing I do away from the home or office Wi-Fi.

3G Watchdog is most useful when I'm over my quota. Vodafone's BAL query via txt to 777 will tell me how much of my data quota I have left, but makes no attempt to count the data once I'm over. It might be 1MB or 100GB....without 3G Watchdog, I'd be left guessing.

The most recent versions allow you to set the amount of data for your quota, the period of the quota - a day, a week, a month - and the day of the month the period starts. It then counts how much data you have sent and received since the start of the latest period. It won't be aware of data you used prior to the first time you ran the app, but it does seem to be able to add up increments after the first run even if you don't run 3G Watchdog all the time.

You can set it to only appear in the notifications bar when you aren't on a Wi-Fi connection. It doesn't count data used over anything other than 2G/3G.

You can also set the threshold for 3G Watchdog to begin warning you about how much data you have been using. My threshold is set to 75%. After that, I get regular warnings about the progress of my usage. When you hit your threshold, a pop-up appears letting you know you're now paying extra for any network usage.

3G Watchdog is free. At that price, I don't see how anyone on a data quota can afford to be without it.

Ubuntu 9.10 and ADT 0.94 tangle

2009-11-04T08:55:00.017+13:00

[2010-02-03 Update: The permissions issues are due to changes in the policykit support and the move to udev. The details are here. Go straight to Section 10. It's actually now very easy to set this up. You can add the GROUP="plugdev" parameter to the end of of the SUBSYSTEMS statements....then add your user to the plugdev group. You then do not need to run adb as root.

[2009-11-26 Update: My permissions problems talking to my real HTC Magic phone inexplicably returned after a couple of reboots. I had not changed a thing. Annoyed, I search again for possible solutions. I found these excellent docs, which included the section below. I already have the rules file, but these statements were different to those suggested elsewhere for Ubuntu and different to the single line I had been using. This part fixed my problem with not being able to talk to my phones, allowing me to access them via adb and / or fastboot provided I run the adb server and fastboot using sudo. DDMS is fine, provided adb server was started using sudo.

10d) In Ubuntu, create a new rules file for these vendor:device IDs.

Type this command to create the file.

$ sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

Add the following blue lines (rules) to it and save the file. If your lsusb command reports other, newer product IDs for vendor 0bb4, add them also to the file.

SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0c01", MODE="0666"

SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0c02", MODE="0666"

If this helps anyone, please let me know in the comments.]

[2009-11-22 Update: I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) again today. This time I did NOT remove the packages the upgrade notified as no longer supported. Last time, I had said OK to their removal. This time, everything works fine: adb and ddms can see my phone. Fastboot (run using sudo) is able to load and boot a temporary image. The key - for me - seems to have been to avoid letting the upgrade / update process remove the pre-existing policykit package.]

[2009-11-15 Update: I wiped the drive and reloaded Ubuntu 9.04. I installed the Java SDK, the Android SDK 2.0, ADT 0.94 and Eclipse 3.5. I followed all of my own advice, and that I had gleened from others....and ONLY after I had adjusted the permissions settings using polkit-gnome-authorizations was I finally able to access my phone again via ddms and adb. Given they (Ubuntu) appear to have removed this security configuration app (polkit-gnome-authorizations) from Ubuntu 9.10, I don't recommend upgrading to that unless you are handy with the back end of the permissions policy side of Gnome / polkit and can write your own API-compliant, policy files in XML from scratch. I'm not...and don't want to be. I'm trying to fry other fish.

But I got it going again....

(Original post resumes below) ]

Last night I had a bright idea and upgraded my Android SDK 2.0 system from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackelope) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

Everything went (almost) perfectly. The Eclipse 3.5 dev environment runs fine. I can create and run Android 2.0 emulators with no issues. But ddms (the Dalvik VM tool in Android SDK Tools) is no longer able to identify my real android cell phone. It sees the device, but doesn't pick up any information from it. Instead, I get a string of "???????" where the device ID should be.

I'm assuming it is a security / permissions issue post-Ubuntu upgrade....and hope to sort it out later. I'll update this post if I work it out.....or not.

Be warned that any such upgrade as the one above isn't likely to be seamless.

2009-11-04 - Update: This is definitely a permissions problem. Trying to list the device with adb gives:

List of devices attached 
???????????? no permissions

Now...How to set the permissions? I've set up the policy files. They don't appear to be working. I've seem some bugs listed on Launchpad for Policykit. Not sure how to interpret what I'm reading.

This bug on Launchpad seems to explain things. They appear to have made some changes without regard to usabililty.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/checkbox/+bug/435714

Trying to access the phone with ddms give me more permissions errors:

55:16 W/ddms: Unable to get frame buffer: device (????????????) request rejected: insufficient permissions for device

55:18 W/ddms: Unable to get frame buffer: device (????????????) request rejected: insufficient permissions for device

I have also tried running it as sudo:

steve@media:~/android-sdk-linux_x86-1.6_r1/tools$ sudo ./adb devices
List of devices attached
???????????? no permissions

No good.

Android App of the Day: Feedr

2009-11-03T17:43:00.005+13:00

Feedr is a greet app for collecting all your RSS / news feeds together in one place. I used to have the Gizmodo app, the Slashdot app and other bits and pieces for keeping track of news and articles from a variety of tech and general news sites. Feedr's ability to gather them all together in one easy-to-use, appealing app let me uninstall most of them.

Feedr presents your feeds in a list with each entry telling you how many articles there and how many of those remain unread. You touch the feed you want and it moves to the list of articles. You can scroll up and down the list using your finger or the trackball or D-button and arrows if your phone has either one.

If you touch an article, Feedr gets the content, text and images, and presents it in the app. If you want to read more, you can touch "Open" and go to the site. Or you can "Share" it. The "Mobilize" button presents the web content in the browser in a form more suitable for mobile devices.

Feedr's main menu lets you update your feeds, search feeds, add / delete feeds, import / export from Google Reader, organise feeds, clear the cache , search history, display the status and mark all as read.

Within a feed, the menu provides access to feed-specific functions, including; mark all as read, update the feed, search the feed and flip orientation. You can also make shortcuts. These are Feedr icons placed on the Home screen and bearing the name of whichever feed you wanted the shortcut to take you to.

I like this app. It's feature rich, simple to use and doesn't get in the way of the content. It's easy to use, read and manage.

Top marks to Feedr. It's on my (constantly changing) "must-have" list.

Android App of the Day: Mobile C64

2009-11-02T13:26:00.004+13:00

Definitely a niche app, "Mobile C64" is an emulator that lets you run a virtual Commodore 64 console on your android phone. It's one of a number of C64 emulators (Android C64, Frodo C64). They are all worth looking at if you're interested. Some are better than others. I have not tried them all.

Commodore 64 systems were the PlayStation of the 1980s and very early 90s. Millions of people wrote their first programs in BASIC on systems like this before moving on to larger, more capable systems that came later. But these devices were relatively cheap, a huge proportion of young boys had them.

Image files for games and other apps can be downloaded for free from C64.com. Some games don't work well on phones that don't have a 'hard' keyboard as, so far, emulator developers have not included support for phones that only have soft keyboards.

Software is still being written for the platform. There is a twitter client (Breadbox) you can run in your C64 emulator if it supports networking. If you want to discover the dawn of cheap home computing, brush up on your BASIC programming or re-live your past, load this app (or one like it) on your phone. Or maybe you were a Sinclair ZX80 fan.

Android App of the Day: Color Pop!

2009-10-31T16:38:00.007+13:00

"Color Pop!" for android is one those cool wee apps that more or less does one thing and does it well. Color Pop! lets you take any image and it will remove all colour from it. (Click on the screenshots for full size).

You can then put back whatever pieces of colour you think would be best. Or you can start with all the colours and remove just the pieces you want to remove.

You can create some striking effects with not too much effort. My own efforts so far have been fairly pedestrian, but I'm sure with a little experience the imagination will kick in and anyone using this app will making some seriously cool images for phone or PC backgrounds or maybe as illustrations for web sites, home made cards - whatever. In the smaller image below, I took a pic of a rose in our garden and swiped the colour back into the flower in a few seconds. Far from finished, but you get the idea.

Color Pop provides you with several basic controls and the brush tool. You can make the brush large for the wide open spaces you want to sort out quickly.

For finer work, you can magnify the image and decrease the size of the brush - right down to pixel level. To help you avoid making mistakes, the "Move" button turns off the Pop (removing colour) and unpopping (putting it back) so you can move the brush tool safely. You quickly get into the habit of using "Move" once you've dragged the brusch accidentally across an area you just painstakingly perfected!

You can also set the level of saturation. You may not want all the colour back at the same level....or yo might want to pour it on and over-saturate the image.

It's a fun app. More productive than playing a game...and you end up with some cool images. Here is one my own efforts of some flowers in our garden. This image isn't as large as the original Color Pop! produced. I right-click-saved this one from my twitpic uploaded image, so it's the default twitpic.com size.

Close-up with the Android 2.0 Emulator

2009-10-30T22:39:00.033+13:00

Just upgraded my Android SDK from v1.6 to v2.0. The upgrade process was flawless and the documentation up to the job. On my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 Linux system, it's all running like a dream.

The Android 2.0 in the emulator is a bare-bones system, but many of the new features are there, including the new hardware support. I picked one of the larger screen resolutions for the second AVD I created. It fills most of the screen on the PC.

As you can see from the screenshot, the new Contacts app allows you to kick off apps related to the pieces of contact information you have for each contact. For example, if you have an email address for the person concerned, you'll be able to touch the email icon and send them an email. The Contact entries for each person are many, including phone, email, IM, Postal address and several others. This could be quite powerful.

I'm focusing on actually writing something (learner level) to run on the phone, so will get back to that.

[2009-11-03 Update: Some additional screenshots]

The Settings now include Quick Launch and Running services. This fills a gap in managing running applications.

Some new icons for the usual basic services. As mentioned above in the main post, the contacts have been enhanced.

The app tray contents.

The browser has been enhanced. Looks better IMHO.

National want to privatise water

2009-10-30T21:04:00.005+13:00

Why is it the only business model National's mates in the business community seem to know is to seek a monopoly on an essential resource, courtesy of their political agents and clients, and then clip the ticket?

They're at it again.

This time, the government plan to privatise our water, handing it over to private operators. We've been here before with TranzRail, Telecom and Air New Zealand. This will see us all paying more for water and workers in the water services paid less. The difference will be the "profit".

Same old story. Are people really dumb enough to let them get away with it? Again?

Guess we'll find out.

Android App of the Day: Better Terminal Emulator Pro

2009-10-30T13:42:00.005+13:00

This app won't be for everyone, but I like it a lot.

"Better Terminal Emulator Pro" (paid app -US$3.99) gives you a full Linux terminal, with "Almquist" (ash) shell on your Android phone. There are free versions, but they don't include all the functionality of the Pro version and they aren't always the latest releases.

You don't need root access to your phone to install and use this app as a user on the phone's system. There will be files and directories that are read-only to you unless you do "root" your phone to gain read-write access to them as the root (Administrator) user.

Better Terminal Emulator Pro has a lot great features. You can define special keys to perform tasks otherwise not possible on a phone keyboard, like Cntl+anything or ESC. You can define shortcuts to perform commands using the various buttons on your phone that aren't part of the keyboard, like volume, back and camera. You can email the contents of the screen buffer to email address (or addresses).

Preferences lets you choose font size, colour and column format. You can enable full screen mode and decide whether or not the screen will sleep or not. You can turn the shell off and on, set the shell's command line, or specify an initial command to be executed when the shell starts. you may want to run "top" each time you open the emulator, so you can quickly see what's eating your processor. You can define the height of the soft keyboard in both portrait and landscape modes. You can define a "control" key - separate from the special keys functions already mentioned. You can set the phone to vibrate on arrow keys.

It also serves as a quick file manager for those adapt at using the command line to perform routine file management jobs like copying, renaming and deleting. For deleting groups of unwanted files (rm -ir unwanted.txt, for example - wiping out all files, intereactively and recursively, called "unwanted.txt", in a directory tree), there is no better alternative

If you're a command line person, then turning your phone into a real linux box with Better Terminal Emulator Pro will be irresistible. If you want to root your phone, then this app will be indispensible.

Android App of the day: SwiFTP v1.11

2009-10-29T17:00:00.005+13:00

SwiFTP is an FTP server app you can run on your Android phone. It only works on Wifi. I'm assuming the telco firewalls would make access over 3G problematic. I like it because it's simple and it's one more way you can get data on and off your phone with simple tools. In this case, you're making data available to anyone on your IP subnet with an FTP client.

SwiFTP seems to run fine in the background, so you can carry on doing other things with your phone while it's busy serving data to whatever clients may be accessing it or uploading files to it.

With a web browser, you'd go to the URL the app presents. Mine was "ftp://192.168.2.101:2121/". But uploading using a web browser can be problematic. Instead, I used "ncftp" (free FTP client app for most OSes) and that was the best of all. I was able to connect to the phone and upload / download what I wanted. The ncftp command that worked for me was:

ncftp -P 2121 -u userid -p password 192.168.2.101

Used once, ncftp let me save it as a 'bookmark' called "Magic"...and I can now access my phone's files on the sdcard via the SwiFTP server by simply typing in "ncftp Magic" and pressing enter. SwiFTP supports passive mode data transfer by default.

As all data on the sdcard is accessible by any app on the phone, any file uploaded to your phone is immediately available for whatever purpose was intended. SwiFTP provides a quick way to copy files to your phone from any local PC on your network without having to connect it to a computer with the USB cable. It also appears to support multiple logins from the same user, though I have not tested simultaneous data transfer from two clients. I'll have to test it to see. :-)

Changed appearance

2009-10-29T13:02:00.000+13:00

I was thinking about how much I like the lighter, brighter aesthetics of the new Android software....and sitting there looking at my (formerly) dark, dreary looking blog....and decided to make a few changes.

Hope you like the new look. I do.

Android App of the Day: WiFinder

2009-10-28T19:04:00.002+13:00

Android already had several reasonably good WiFi apps. I've used WiFi Analyzer and WiFi Buddy for the past several months. They were good at detecting WiFi, but limited, at best, in their ability to connect to the WiFi they found.

Then a couple of weeks ago, an upgrade for WiFinder (from pgmsoft.com, based in Poland) became available and set a whole new standard, in my view, for WiFi apps on Android. It does everything I want it to do.

If you start it and WiFi isn't on, it asks you if you want it on. If you close it using the Back button, it asks if you want to stop your WiFi. No need for a WiFi widget, then.

WiFinder can connect to anything using any common form of encryption (WEP, WPA/WPA2).

WiFinder has a very fresh, clean look that I like very much. It doesn't Force Close. In short, it looks great, does all it needs to do and does it very well.

Even better, it's one of the many very good free aps available on the Android Market. This one is on my "must-have" app list.

Android App of the Day: Jetflicks

2009-10-27T21:35:00.007+13:00

Jetflicks is a company who offer hardware, software and content to airlines for on-board entertainment. "Jetflicks" appears to be their app for streaming video content to your Android phone. It features early and recent seasons (not usually the latest, newest) of a reasonably large number of the most popular, mainly US, TV shows. They are streamed to your phone over WiFi or 3G.

Right now the app costs US$14.95 and that allows you to watch anything you like until the end of 2009. After that they say they will be charging US$4 / month. That seems like a fair price for the content they are offering.

If you've seen all of the episodes of all these shows you probably don't have a life and this app is probably a waste of money. But I have never seen the vast majority of them, or I was busy and missed several seasons on the trot. I liked Heroes, but got too busy after Season 2 to keep up with it.

I bought Jetflicks and it works very well. Unlike apps on various other platforms, this one doesn't seem to care I'm in New Zealand. It lets me see whatever is listed. You must create an account through the app in order to use it.

Android v1.6 New Features: Android Market Upgrade

2009-10-27T20:06:00.011+13:00

Another thing I'm really enjoying about Android v1.6 / Donut is the upgraded Android Market. It's a huge improvement in every way.

The appearance has improved enormously by making it brighter with white background, black text and green highlights. Some of the best ideas of the iPhone apps market have been adopted here and to good effect. Displaying the most popular paid apps and free apps in separate lists is a good move. A third list of all the latest stuff is another. That list reveals a huge number of new apps is coming to the Android Market every day.

On October 15th New Zealand also gained access to the paid apps. All you need is a Google Checkout account connected to a credit or debit card account and you can buy whatever you like. I use my Kiwibank debit VISA.

Apps for sale show are presented in a variety of currencies. Apps from the UK are in "£" pounds. Japanese apps are in "¥" Yen....and so on, For each app, it will display an approximate NZ$ amount..

I've bought 50 apps in the 11 days since the 15th. Fortunately, most apps are about US$1 each. The most expensive app I bought was "RepliGo Reader" for US$7.95. It handles PDF files better than anything else I've seen on Android.

The other big improvement is the ability for vendors to display screenshots of their apps. You have a much better idea of what you're actually buying.

If you do download an app and find it isn't what you wanted, it looked like you can get a no-questions-asked refund within 24 hours just by going to the market and clicking "Refund" on the app. I haven't used it, but I'm guessing it uninstalls the app at the same time.

Discovered "Doodledroid" this evening. Lets you import images and then draw on them and edit them. Bought it.

Touch, touch, touch.....download.....installed. I'm loving this.

Android v1.6 New Features: Battery use

2009-10-27T18:49:00.002+13:00

One of the new features on the Android v1.6 update that I like very much is the battery usage monitor. It tells you which apps have been using your battery since the last time you were plugged in.....and how much.

You can find this feature via Menu > Settings > About Phone > Battery use.

Click on the image to see the full size screenshot from my phone.

Yay! Upgraded to Android v1.6

2009-10-26T17:41:00.008+13:00

I was at the Westfield WestCity mall in Henderson just after noon on Saturday. I was sitting near the food court (and how sad is this....) wondering if / when I would be seeing the "Over the Air" upgrade of my Android phone anytime soon.

I looked at the phone...and there it was: a message on the screen telling me that updates were available and giving me the choice to go ahead, do it later or cancel. Hell yeah! I touched "Install" and away it went.

The upgrade process took about 10-15 minutes, if i recall correctly. The phone re-booted once or maybe twice (by then we were wandering around looking for a place to have a coffee, so I was distracted).

When it was done, the system seemed awfully slow and unresponsive. I listed the apps running and it was close to 20. Pretty much anything and everything that needs to update itself at some point during a day was open, running and trying to update its data via 3G. I killed most of them off and the system began to function normally....nice and quick. The Home screenshot here is the Android default (more or less). I used it until a week or so ago when I adopted Open Home as the default, but restored the default for this screenshot. In the one on the left, you can see the smaller Google search widget with the microphone to turn on voice searching.

I kicked off Open Home (instead of the default Home app) to see if there were any compatibility issues....and everything was fine.

The new Android is better and faster on my HTC Magic. Combined with the growing number of mature apps with rich, reliable function like Open Home, Camera ZOOM FX, Picsay Pro, Twidroid and Handcent SMS and my phone is now far more than a phone. I don't need a laptop any more.

Rather than try to cover all the new stuff in one post, I'll do a short post on each, including screenshots from my phone.

Android v1.6 - Google searches by voice

2009-10-26T17:24:00.006+13:00

One of the new features in Android v1.6 is the ability to search Google by voice. I've used this feature more than all the others combined. Instead of having to type the words in, I just touch the Google search widget on the left side of the Open Home screen. That brings up the Google Search widget and the keyboard. Ignoring the keyboard, I tough the microphone icon on the right of the widget. It tells me to "Speak now" (as in the screenshot I took -> click for full -size). It then puts the words I spoke into the search field and does the search. Results appear, as usual. Even better, it rarely gets the words wrong. This has been a huge typing saver.

It's not ideal for every situation, of course. If other people are talking near you, or the place you're in requires you to be quiet...though I have found it handles mumbles close to the mic fairly well.

Some other apps are able to make use of this function. This evening I discovered that Handcent SMS lets me speak a txt message and it inserts what I say into the message field for editing / sending. It works well provided you say each word clearly and don't use unusual pronunciation. For example, "Stephen Colbert" should be pronounced "Stephen coal-burt". Then it gets it.

A great addition to Android.