Skrrp's Android Blog

SwiftKey

skrrp — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:23:07 +0000

Absolutely loving this IME as it takes a lot of pain out of typing on the Nexus.

It also produces some amazing results:

Cyanogen

skrrp — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:31:07 +0000

Upgraded to Cyanogen 6 today and found the make-everything-work rebuild permissions option. Now working great with all my apps, root and busybox. Great bit of software.

Android as a sysadmin

skrrp — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:27:08 +0000

I’ve already got the WordPress application for the Nexus so I can use it as a content creation device while on the move, but yesterday morning I put it through the most comprehensive administration workout so far.

On the train in to work I used the web browser and an SSH session to install a secondary WordPress build on my server.

It was fiddly, tricky and the on-screen keyboard did not help one bit in the SSH session, but I was able to copy and extract the tarball, set up the config file, install it, alter my vhosts setup and reboot Apache all from within Android on the Nexus.

It is a real computer.

Froyo, Ubuntu and Busybox

skrrp — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:59:38 +0000

Tried to boot my Ubuntu build on the Nexus and got the shock of my life when it failed to boot. I initially got 2 error messages, the second of which was complaining about a lack of chroot.

The problem was a lack of BusyBox. Since the Froyo build was a stock + root only it is lacking some of the nice toys we are used to.

BusyBox can be downloaded from here. The busybox-armv6l works fine on my Nexus.

Instructions to install it can be found here and here.

Ubuntu now boots just fine.

Froyo + battery

skrrp — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:39:03 +0000

On my first day out with Froyo it seems to be tanking the battery massively. Down to under 50% charge in half a day and needed a mid-day charge. It’s also getting a lot hotter around the base.

I’m going to keep an eye on it and possibly back the radio firmware down to an earlier release if this continues.

Nexus, Froyo and Flash

skrrp — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:45:16 +0000

Or, why Steve Jobs can kiss my ring.

After many unsuccessful attempts to get a Cyanogen build to remain stable on the Nexus (*cries* so many good features) I have opted for the rooted Froyo build, available from here:

FRF50

Some goods, some bads. beebPlayer and Skype seem to be unavailable from the market for this build for the time being. On the up side, the new release appears to be a lot faster and I now have access to the official Flash app from Adobe. While there are many reasons to hate Flash, Jobs seems to have picked the wrong ones as it works perfectly on the Nexus.

Sound is exceedingly quiet in the video. Video quality is down to use of the G1 as a capture device.

Coming soon (when I can be bothered): Open Office on the Ubuntu build.

Desire user agent

skrrp — Thu, 13 May 2010 13:12:45 +0000

A kind colleague with a new HTC Desire hit up my webserver for me and I captured this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-gb; Desire_A8181 Build/ERE27) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

Nexus One user agent

skrrp — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 17:09:21 +0000

I have seen the question asked about what user agent the Nexus uses. If no one else has already answered it, it is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-gb; Nexus One Build/ERD79) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

Flash on the Nexus

skrrp — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:44:10 +0000

I was put off at first for a long time by trying to get a flash player running on the Gnome build. I eventually stumbled on this thread and found out about Gnash. A simple apt-get install gnash was all that was needed on my build to install it.

Adobe now report:

Sadly, the Nexus went chunky under the load from albinoblacksheep and almost crashed like it did last time. I managed to save the Android by killing the VNC server from the ADB shell. It took a couple of minutes of sitting and thinking to recover but after that the UI was as normal and the VNC server came back up quickly. This is the best I have from that run:

Guessing that the load came from the double whammy of both the JavaScript and the Flash I turned to a lighter weight old favourite:

It worked perfectly, without the sound of course.

A half crash

skrrp — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:03:39 +0000

Nothing major new to report. While I was downloading and extracting a large source archive Android was becoming sluggish and throwing up a lot of Force Close/Wait dialogs for standard services.

I kept hitting Wait but suddenly the Nexus rebooted, going to its shiny graphical X intro. Obviously my VNC died as the wireless rebooted but as soon as it was back up I could re-connect and my session was still live.