the intel corei5 processor
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Karibe
I am a technologist, love linux and android. I am into physics, embedded systems, and mobile and web technologies.New Build Server
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Frontlit keyboard
I have always wished my tiny Acer netbook has a backlit keyboard so I can type in the dark. Well, that wish came true today when I visited an electronic shop at Nova Lund.
Flexi usb LED light
I found this Flexible USB LED light that I can just plugin, twist to comfortable position and keep typing in the dark. I have really liked the idea, especially because power fluctuates in Kenya. I have an 8hr battery, which means that when power goes, i could only watch a video, listen to music because the screen light isnt enough to light the keyboard for coding/typing. The machine sort of forms the base for the lamp.
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Flashing stable CM10 on Galaxy S i9000 with latest google apps
So after resurrecting the i9000, i thought I would go a step further and once again get the feel of the Jelly beans, the CM love back to the phone (am sure countless CM ROM nightlies changed shifts here).
Root the phone
With froyo its easy, just put a zip update in SDcard (internal) and flash it using stock recovery. It has e2 recovery. With Gingerbread, which is what Heimdall Oneclick flashed into mine, I had e3 recovery. This means that I needed to use Heimdall Suit (not the oneclick) to flash a rooted kernel *with CWM recovery*. That was easy Continue reading “Flashing stable CM10 on Galaxy S i9000 with latest google apps”
Unbrick samsung galaxy S I9000 – hardware bricked
Alan is the founder of project mjanja. He has been developing for several devices, among them some in the Samsung Galaxy family. as usual with devs, he flashed a lot of stuff in the Galaxy S I9000. Eventually something gave up. The phone was hard-bricked. Having known me for a hardware guy, mostly just talks, he handed me his phone. We both thought i’ll probably re-use the screen… i wanted to try and resurrect it to full functionality though. The first thing from googling that I landed on was the Riffbox solution. I couldnt find anyone within Nairobi with a riffbox to borrow from, and since i was travelling in a few days, i thought i might just get it here. So i am in Lund now for like 3 weeks and no one with a riffbox and am so busy. I checked online and was almost ordering one when I stumbled upon yet another interesting video by Adam Outler on his i9000 Development Platform, AKA UnBrickable Mod and Software Based Resurrection post. He actually unbricked a phone in the video so i got interested. I read the thread like twice before fully making up my mind to try the hack. But all the software tools are provided… why not? so today(22nd Nov,2012) I decided it was the day to do it. One of the corrections i thought i was going to make before starting was to rename the whole thing in my mind, software based resurrection to ‘hardware and software based resurrection’.
The exposed Galaxy S i9000 board
This is because the kind of soldering required here is quite incredible for it to be just a software hack. Just a few points yeah, move a resistor from one location to another, or remove it and solder a wire bridge but the resistor is so small and the soldering pads are at a tight location.I looked for a brand new solder tip, some flux and tweezers. I opened up the phone removed the EM shield. I then proceeded to a lab with a solder rework station. I removed the xOM5 resistor and tried to remount it at the lower position using the hot air tool. That didn’t work out, but i had prepared for that with a plan B, the fuse. It was time to break the glass. I got hold of the wire, made a small loop out of it, mine didn’t actually have coating on it so I had to go to the trouble of wrapping it nicely with some thin insulating tape, which also kinda helped with the grabbing in position, a little solder on both ends and used some slim tweezers to hold it in place. I soldered the damn thing carefully. it took quite sometime to get the right position and be able to reach the pads with the tip of the soldering iron. i have never tried anything like it. I couldn’t make it to solder it on the xOM0 so I used the xOM3 pad instead, it was given as an option. Continue reading “Unbrick samsung galaxy S I9000 – hardware bricked”
Setting up Eclipse and the android SDK for mobile development
1. First things first, download the compressed Eclipse. To have an easy time with mobile development, get the Eclipse Pulsar version, as your Eclipse flavor. Use the correct download link for your system, on the right column of that page.
2. Extract the eclipse in your home folder. You can create a desktop link to your Eclipse executable, after this using the following two commands:
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends gnome-panel
gnome-desktop-item-edit ~/Desktop/ --create-new
For the command option in the pop up, browse and load the executable “eclipse” file.
3. Then run Eclipse. Go to help->check for update, and update the eclipse Pulsar installation. This is necessary because if you try to install the plugins without updating, you will get dependency errors. If you are in a proxy network, configure proxy first under window->preferences. Select General->Network and fill in the values.
4. Next, go to Help->Install New Software and on the pop up, type in this URL https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/. You can click Ok and name the entry “Android SDK” then let it load the components, select all and follow through to accept terms and install the plugin components then restart eclipse. Its quite straightforward.
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2d drawing and animation at Khan Academy
The computer science khan academy platform
Last weekend I was indoors, with a bad flu and looking for something a little fun to do with a computer. So I ended up looking at a profile I created at khan academy where I could revisit what I never learnt when I was a little younger, especially in math. I found a surprise: Khan Academy has rolled out a computer science platform where we can all now learn basics of programming.
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Zilog Z80 microcontroller UART serial end
This is the second post in the series “serial port on android”. It is about using platform based design, a micro-controller (zilog z80) system that does nothing more than just communicate with the android phone. Later, we will see how to do sensing and actuation for the interface to the physical world.
The hardware
This is a custom board made for general purposes in embedded applications with sensors, actuators,an LCD screen and serial communication. I haven’t given details of how to develop the circuit here, may be on a later post….
z80 microcontroller board with a serial UART
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Ubuntu keyring password mismatch to login password
I forgot my password for the root account in an Ubuntu Desktop machine. I came across a tutorial that guided me on how to reset the password by booting from the installation disk and mounting the filesystem as RW, then using passwd. Everything went fine but, everytime I login, there has been this warning that the login password and the keyring password are no longer matching. This is what I did to solve this.
- Go to the dash and search for
"passwords and keys" - Run that app and right click on “
Passwords:login"under the “passwords"tab - Click on
delete - logout and then log back in
- Verify: Your keyring password is now replaced with the new password
Thats it, no more password mismatch!! This had given me a headache and the suggestion to delete the file .gnome2/keyrings/default.keyring" left me wondering, coz I dont have such a file…
Hope this helps someone who hates annoying warnings.
A Simple WordPress Theme
I have been using wordpress for about a three weeks now, reading blogs, tutorials, trying out templates and browsing code. What I have realised is that platforms like wordpress give you the go ahead to blog and take away all the struggle you’d have gone through trying to code a website from scratch, particularly the backend.
So I picked on the template am using here and after a close look decided to convert a simple design i had into a wordpress template by borrowing the styling and using Hybrid as the parent theme. I must say, that was way easy… amazing!!
The hybrid Light child theme
Well, I ran into one problem with my design though and broke a few rules on the idea of child themes, which i could be excused of coz i was in a hurry trying things out; I edited the footer and header templates of the parent theme, just a little to allow the header and footer sections be detached. I will correct this and upload when I get time, ready to make some more better themes.
Updated…
Ok I checked the way around this and created custom header and footer templates for the child theme that allowed to use the parent theme as is while detaching the two sections. Also updated the styles for tags, headings and stuff.
I added a script to insert the github ribbon right before my header in the functions.php, created a github-ribbon.js that uses jquery’s insertBefore() . You can fork me on github: Hybrid-Light
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