Category Archives: Tech

Hack your own phone to prevent corporate surveillance

Posted on 3 December 2011 | Leave a comment

I’ve hacked my phone. I didn’t personally write the computer code which allowed me to do that. Why would I? It is already written. The hackers who worked out how to do it simply published the instructions online for free. Allow me to explain. If you want the really technical details, follow the links. For everyone else, just read on. If you aren’t at all technically minded, there may some passages with jargon you are unfamiliar with but don’t worry, I keep this explanation fairly simple.

Phone hacking has been much in the news recently. The phrase has been coined by journalists to describe other journalists from obtaining access to other people’s voicemail. The technique is remarkably simple. Your mobile phone’s voicemail will activate when it is called by your number. To spy on someone else’s mobile voicemail, all you have to do is phone their number from their number. To do that, specialist software is available online, which allows you to declare what number you are making the call from. The spies just type in their target’s number and bingo! I would have called this activity “spying”. Journalists do not like to use a nice old fashioned word when a more frightening one is available. Over many years the established media has run scare stories about computer hackers. They have distorted the original meaning of the word so much that they have given it a second meaning. Having whipped up a fear of hackers, they now use this word pejoratively whenever they can.

Hacking is actually quite an old word, which has obtained several meanings. Here goes:

  1. Cut with rough or heavy blows.
  2. Ride a horse for pleasure or exercise.
  3. A contentious term used in computing for several types of person

Techies call the person who circumvents a computer security system a cracker. Journalists prefer not to educate their readers so rather than use the word cracker, they just call them hackers even though hackers actually do something different. There are two types of computer hacker. Firstly, there are those who make innovative customizations or combinations of retail electronic and computer equipment and, secondly, there are those who share an anti-authoritarian approach to software development now associated with the free software movement. The established media are terrified of people discovering the last group of people because they help undermine the proprietary systems which make so much money. These vested interests have much in common with the privately owned media. There’s no need to be a conspiracy theorist about this. This is well established fact.

CyanogenMod's logo

My new phone was delivered on Tuesday: a Samsung Galaxy S II (SGS2). It’s a beautiful piece of kit. I followed these instructions from CyanogenMod which taught me how to install a customized aftermarket firmware distribution onto my new phone. In other words a new operating system made by hackers! This operating system is open source which means that anyone can download the computer code, examine it and modify it. Open Source software is always free.

Despite knowing that mobile network companies’ warranties do not allow this sort of carry on, Samsung actually sent one of their first SGS2s to the CyanogenMod hacking crew (there are about 45 of them at the moment, producing open source firmware for dozens of devices). The physical architecture of the SGS2 is impressive. We might need capitalist companies to make these devices but we need socialists to make them work better. Hackers are effectively socialists: they give what they can and share it with anyone who feels the need.

Before and after a hacker changed the operating system (results not from my SGS2)

On Wednesday, after a busy day working for the legal team at Occupy London, I was relaxing in the evening in a City pub. One of my fellow Occupationists had also just obtained the SGS2. His phone was running on the operating system provided via his phone company. This is called a stock rom. We both downloaded the same benchmarking software from the Android Market: Quadrant (the standard edition). A benchmarking app performs a series of technical tests on your phone and produces a score. My phone tore through the tests visibly quicker than my friend’s but the real proof was in the score. My SGS2 now scores 3,314 which was a little over 10% higher than my friend’s. That is proof that the open source operating system I have installed on my phone performs significantly better than the stock roms.

As well as wanting the best operating system for my new phone, I also wanted root access so that I could install apps which allow me extra freedom. Having sold you the phone the mobile network wish to save themselves the hassle of dealing with you after you from mistakenly turn your phone into poor quality paperweight by deleting files that you wouldn’t normally have access to. Root access gives you access to every part of the file system on the phone. I wasn’t entirely sure whether Cyanogen’s instructions gave root access or just changed the operating system so I followed some other instructions to obtain root access first. In particular I use the Titanium Backup, Rom Manager and the incredible SetCPU, all of which are free.

This week a scandal broke in America: 41 million mobile phones were revealed to have embedded software called Carrier IQ. This software was hidden from the user, who does not have root access and cannot see the source code for the operating system used on their phones. The software is apparently used to assist the mobile networks in gathering information about when apps crash on phones. The scandal relates to independent research which says that the software can also record lots of other information about how the phone is used. The most pressing concern is that it can record keystrokes, which means that phone user’s passwords and other confidential information could have been conveyed to the mobile networks. Trevor Eckhart made the discovery.

This week Wikileaks has revealed the full extent of industrial surveillance around the world. It is massive. Julian Assange announced at a press conference two days ago that if you use an Iphone, a blackberry or gmail you are “screwed”. Wikileaks says, “Mass interception of entire populations is not only a reality, it is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries It sounds like something out of Hollywood, but as of today, mass interception systems, built by Western intelligence contractors, including for ’political opponents’ are a reality.” I dare say that they’ve got my number but luckily they do not have my behavioural metrics because CyanongenMod have confirmed that Carrier IQ will never be included in their open source operating system. They can’t lie about this because all of their source code is public. The moral of this story is that we need the hackers to prevent the spies.

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Posted in Android, Android 2.3.7, Blackberry, Corporations, Cyanogen, Iphone, phones, Politics, Politics in the Cave, Privacy, Reflashing, Rooting, Samsung Galaxy S II, Scary Coding, Tech, Tech Outside The Cave, Wikileaks

Old domestic electrical technology

Posted on 11 October 2011 | Leave a comment

The distribution board for my house is tucked away in a cupboard which you can only just get your head into if you lie on the floor. In fact you have to access it through another cupboard, so that your shoulders are in one cupboard and your head in another, hidden behind it. The concealed cupboard with the distribution board is actually at right angles to the first cupboard you have to climb into. This is wrong stuff.

The distribution board itself is antiquated and doesn’t adequately protect human life against electrical faults. For this reason almost any work on the house’s electrical supply requires it to be changed. It is wrong stuff.

In order to change the distribution board it needs to be isolated from the main electrical supply. There is no isolation switch between the meter and the distribution board meaning that it cannot be isolated. I need hardly point out that this situation is utterly wrong stuff too. I’ll be calling the electricity distributor in my area and asking them to put one in. Let’s hope whoever turns up to perform this task isn’t a fatty. That would be utterly wrong stuff.

Apparently electrical distributors can be a bit funny about installing these isolation switches even in the most accessible of locations. More wrong stuff. If they put it above the meter, the customer has to pay for it even though having one is the only way of making an electrical installation in a domestic dwelling properly safe. Know what I call that?

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Posted in Distribution Board, Electrics, Isolation Switch, Tech, Tech Outside The Cave

Jobs: a dirty word made splendid

Posted on 11 October 2011 | 3 Comments

Nowadays it’s the name of a recently ascended deity. I’m surprised that we were not given a public holiday to celebrate Steve Jobs life, so great was the eulogising. The praise was universally gushing, the fervour religious in tone and the fact checking none existent. Let’s look at the facts.

People who invent stuff benefit us all. As the Guardian pointed out, Jobs could at least claim to have invented himself. Beyond that he didn’t actually create anything much. What he did was make dirty things shiny. He was a polisher and a salesman. It also isn’t really true that he made us use computers in our own homes. Bill Gates did that with Windows 95. Jobs was, by all accounts, a complete control freak and a very persuasive man. He got what he wanted. He wanted lots of money. The wealth he amassed sits with his executors right now. If he gave money to charity, it must have been in secret. Compare that to the much maligned Bill Gates who isn’t just spending his wealth on charity, he’s managing the spend and publicising it, thereby encouraging others to do likewise.

What then is Jobs’ legacy? We’ve a generation of people who have been obfuscated from learning anything much about how stuff works, who have lost the use of the other fingers on their hands because only one can be used and who expect everything to be massively overpriced. He fed our collective obsession with status. I was a Mac user for a while. There was a time when it did some stuff much better than other personal computers. Those times are long gone. The Mac is basically an overpriced machine, the ipod an mp3 player and the iphone an exercise in accesorisation. What’s the point of thousands of apps to do stuff when only one browser plugin was required instead? Obviously, I’m talking about Flash here. He didn’t give the consumer what they wanted, he told them what they wanted, he persuaded them what they wanted. Jobs’ real legacy is producing an anti-mugging device. No-one will ever mug me for my phone because it doesn’t come from Shiny Shiny Land.

The computer revolution has had many many players involved and has been a long time coming. It was not dependent on any one individual. Animated films were not going to stay stuck at the pre-War cartoon level forever but for Jobs. Whilst one should not speak ill of the dead, obituaries should include critical analysis. All those Apple employees who now worship at the church of St Jobs are actually just preserving their career portfolios. Here was a man who came along, sold other people’s products, amassed a vast fortune, didn’t appear to care about his factories’ conditions (child labour, environmental poisonings and unusually high suicide rates) and actively dumbed down an industry which should be liberating us all.

Macs are used by two types of people. There are those who have been in the habit of using them ever since the period when they outshone other work tools in certain industries, notably graphics and film. Fair enough. Most users those buy them because of what economists call ostentatious purchasing. Look at me, I’ve got an Apple product, I’m special. Iphones are used because a massive advertising campaign persuades an ignorant public that it is the only tool in town.

Many are now debating whether Apple will continue to flourish or whether it will wilt and die. The more interesting question is whether consumers will allow themselves to continue to be treated as meaningless cash till fillers or whether people will start to learn how stuff works.

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Posted in Steve Jobs, Tech, Tech Outside The Cave

Computer memory revolution on way – feTRAM: faster and less power hungry memory

Posted on 4 October 2011 | Leave a comment

This is the layout for a new type of computer memory. Promising to be faster than the memory currently commercially available, it also uses far less power than flash memory devices. This new technology is called feTRAM. It combines silicon nanowires with a ferroelectric polymer. That’s a material which switches polarity when electric fields are applied. The benefit of that phenomenom is that a new type a transistor is possible.

Still with me? No, okay, I’ll take a step back. The transistor is the key device at the heart of all computing technology. The purpose of a transistor is to be able to amplify and/or switch electronic signals. The proof of the concept of the transistor was introduced as long ago as the early 1950s. It immediately revolutionised electronic engineering. If you’re my age, you’ll remember your parents using the expression, “transistor radios”. They picked up this expression when radios were being made much smaller by the use of transistors. They also made them much more durable because they did not blow out like valves did. Previously, radios were made with valves. Okay, back to the future! We dropped the prefix transistor because every word would begin with transistor. That would make for a particularly rubbish language, wouldn’t it? Perhaps I should say an irubbish ilanguage iwouldn’t iit? Hm.

This new technology is still in its early stages according to doctoral student Saptarshi Das, who works with Joerg Appenzeller, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and scientific director of nanoelectronics at Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center. The new transistor’s changing polarity is read as either a 0 or a 1. Electronic circuits require one of these two numbers to store information in the binary code which runs our computers. It’s a shame we don’t think in binary because it would make the world so much simpler. Since everything can be done with machines these days, it beggars the question as to what all the other numbers are really for? The answer lies in poetry… anyway, back to the present. The new transistor is called FeTRAM, which stands for ferroelectric transistor random access memory. Early experiments are detailed in a research paper which appeared last month in Nano Letters, published by the American Chemical Society. FeTRAM technology has non-volatile storage, meaning it stays in memory after the computer is turned off. The devices have the potential to use 99 percent less energy than flash memory, a non-volatile computer storage chip and the predominant form of memory in the commercial market. This memory can be written to, read from and hold data for a long period of time. These are the three basic functions of computer memory. You want to be hold data for ten or twenty years. You want to be able to read and write to the memory many times. You want low power consumption to prevent mobile devices from using too much power or becoming too hot, which slows the processors down. The new technology is compatible with current industry manufacturing processes for complementary metal oxide semiconductors (also known as CMOS), which is used to produce computer chips. Patent applications have been filed.

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Posted in FeTRAM, Tech, Tech Outside The Cave

With technology this fast, why wait for events before writing the news?

Posted on 4 October 2011 | Leave a comment

The Daily Mail has inadvertently revealed its secret to capturing the moment so quickly. Within a second of the Italian judge pronouncing Amanda Knox guilty of slander, it published a story online about her lost appeal against her conviction for murder! Unfortunately for the Mail, the actual result of the murder appeal came later. When Amanda Knox was found not guilty of that heinous crime, the Daily Mail was caught committing another: being liars. Writing obituaries in advance does make a certain amount of logistical sense but creating juicy details, such as reporting that the prosecutors were “delighted”, before their time was positive proof of what we lefties have been saying for years – that the Daily Mail doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Shame on them.

Shame also on the established media as a whole. Why hasn’t our press weilded its apparently legendary powers of investigation? Clearly the Italian police and prosecuting authorities were not up to the job. They’ve probably ruined a perfectly easily obtainable conviction against someone, with their bungling which will have to be investigated, as John Cooper QC tweeted yesterday. However, as with all the recent miscarriages of justice, its the family of the deceased I feel most sorry for. The Kerchers seem to have been largely forgotten in the fiasco. I hope that neither them nor their friends drew any false comfort from the Mail’s cynical manipulation of reality.

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Posted in Daily Mail, Tech, Tech Outside The Cave

Technology we haven’t dreamt of

Posted on 27 September 2011 | Leave a comment

No longer will anyone will be able wake up in the morning and say, “I had the weirdest dream last night”, because some boffins are close to being able to record your dreams and replay them on a monitor. If I my wife says that to me, I say, “Well, all dreams are weird. If you told me you had a humdrum dream, that would be remarkable.” Then the rest of the day goes badly. Yes, I’m a morning pedant. I like accuracy. When one of these machines comes along, I’ll be more charitable. I’ll just say, “Oh great, I’m really into other people’s weird dreams right now, rather than my own. I’ll just make your breakfast and pack you off to work before I settle down to watch your dream.” Then I’ll get to watch my wife make various excuses whilst she fumbles for the emergency delete dream switch and says something like, “Oh, it looks like I hadn’t switched it on.”

Don’t believe me? By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) software, the brainy end of Berkeley have cracked the problem. Hm. Actually, they have cracked the beginning of the problem. They have begun to be able to recreate what our brains see. The technique has involved breaking down the part of the brain which deals with vision into tiny cubic zones, known as volumetric pixels, or “voxels.” That’s another new word to learn. Then a machine with access to vast computational power learns what the voxels are seeing by referencing it against a clip which the subject has been watching.

The patient would watch one trailer while a computer program recorded their brain activity and built an algorithm by checking it against the video’s visual patterns. Researchers would then show a second clip to test the computer’s movie reconstruction algorithm. The end result of the research was a blurry-but-continuous 100 second reconstruction of the original movie. 5,000 hours of footage from youtube was used. In the image below, the man on the left was shown to the subject and the machine recorded the image on the right. This is considered to be a pretty good start.

In the 1950s people crowded around boxes with this sort of image quality and called it television. It needs refining but has all sorts of potential. Medically, we’ll stand a better chance of communicating with stroke victims. Entertainment wise, the best dreamers will be on a money making mission. They won’t be living their dreams, they’ll be selling them. Doubtless the porn industry will lead the way, as it has done with all other video technology and much of the internet. Yes people, you may not like to think of it that way but the fact is that the porn industry put money into these technologies and got them off the ground when no-one else had the liquidity required for the high risk investments needed to improve the gadgetry. Perhaps a new form of privacy rights will arise, to protect men from embarassment. In the clip below, there’s a series of videos in pairs. Each moving image on the left is what a subject was shown in the experiment and each one on the right is what the Berkeley machine recreated (after it had learnt what to do) from the brains of the subjects viewing the clips.

The following video contains lots of clips and shows how the machine learnt the magic. The movie that each subject viewed while in the fMRI scan is shown at upper left. Reconstructions for three subjects are shown in the three rows at bottom. All these reconstructions were obtained using only each subject’s brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video that did not include the movies used as stimuli. (In brief, the algorithm processes each of the 18 million clips through the brain model, and identifies the clips that would have produced brain activity as similar to the measured activity as possible. The clips used to fit the model, the clips used to test the model and the clips used to reconstruct the stimulus were entirely separate.) The reconstruction at far left is the Average High Posterior (AHP). The reconstruction in the second column is the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP). The other columns represent less likely reconstructions. The AHP is obtained by simply averaging over the 100 most likely movies in the reconstruction library. These reconstructions show that the process is very consistent, though the quality of the reconstructions does depend somewhat on the quality of brain activity data recorded from each subject.

This is going to blow away the sellers of those wicker and feather constructions known as dream catchers.

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Posted in fMRI, Tech, Tech Outside The Cave

DarkyRom 10.2.2 – the best operating system for the Samsung Galaxy S

Posted on 21 September 2011 | 7 Comments

As explained yesterday, this week Tuesday actually comes after Wednesday. Outside of this blog the days of the week carry on as normal but owing to rush of political blood to my head, I’ve muddled up these two days. After today, be assured, everything will be back to normal.

On 6th September, I flashed a new rom onto my Samsung Galaxy S. Everything seemed okay at first but then it went horribly wrong with various services refusing to synchronise with their servers. Mainly google servers, which was a little irritating. The phone became positively temperamental. I did a bit more reading and found this page, which implied that DarkyRom 10.2 was not entirely stable.

I decided to upgraded to DarkyRom 10.2.2 and followed the instructions on that page by downloading the zip file to my computer, transferring it over to my phone’s internal SD card and then flashing it from recovery mode. Bingo! This time I am convinced that everything is working beautifully.

The first time you reflash a phone it is quite scary. The second time it feels a bit like offering to look after a pub, a great idea which could go badly wrong. By the third time, it is becoming a minor inconvenience. As ever, the trick is to read stuff. Time for a benchmark test methinks. For those of you who don’t know, a benchmark is a standard piece of software which tests various aspects of a machine’s performance. Quadrant tests CPU power, memory, database writes, 2D graphics and 3D graphics. Then it shows the results as a bar chart against the stock roms of the phone you’re using. Here’s the bar chart after it had tested my Samsung Galaxy S running on DarkyRom 10.2.2, which is allegedly the last rom Darky will be doing…

One man often talks another off his bench and seats himself upon it.

That’s my phone at the top there (click on the image to expand it). My phone with Samsung’s rom is 6th from the bottom. Pretty clear that Darky and crew know some stuff which Samsung don’t huh?

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Posted in Android, Android 2.3.4, Darky, DarkyRom 10.2.2, phones, Reflashing, Samsung Galaxy S, Tech, Tech Outside The Cave

My favourite android apps

Posted on 13 September 2011 | Leave a comment

Something went awry with the formatting of today’s post. Apologies. Haven’t got time to sort it out. Here’s a list of the apps I use on my android phone (a Samsung Galaxy S i9000), which is rooted. That means that I have obtained privileged control (“root access”) into Android’s Linux subsytem. The advantage of rooting is that you can overcome limitations that mobile phone companies and even the phone’s manufacturer puts onto the device. Rooting voids the warranty but so long as you are careful there shouldn’t be a problem with that. There are no moving parts and if the phone was functioning properly before rooting, it will function properly after rooting. Here’s the full instructions to root your Samsung Galaxy S i9000 with a one-click procedure (You can unroot it too!). It’s easy but I’m bound to say, I’m not responsible for anything that goes wrong. Just sharing information here.

Here’s the apps I use. All are free, unless stated otherwise.

Adobe Reader

Read PDF documents on your phone. Plenty websites provide information in the form of a download in PDF format, presumably because this makes it harder for you to copy the information and paste it elsewhere. For example, Brighton & Hove Buses provide timetables in PDF format. I’ve downloaded the PDFs for the routes I use, so that I don’t need a network connection to find out what time the bus is coming.

Alchemy

A game loosely based on Aristotlean chemistry. You start with four elements: Fire, Water, Earth and Air. Beautiful graphics – real eye candy. Dragging the elements together creates new elements. The fun is in discovering which combines with which and chuckling at the humour employed. There are 380 elements in all. I haven’t made it as far as Skyscrapers yet…

Aldiko

Read and download thousands of ebooks. Find it very reader friendly. Worked better than the Kindle app for android.

Barcode Scanner

Scan barcodes on products then look up prices and reviews. You can also scan Data Matrix and QR Codes containing URLs, contact info, etc., Also share your contacts, apps, and bookmarks via QR Code.

Blogger

Somewhat embarassingly, I confess to still using blogger. I always recommend WordPress to people wanting to create a blog. However, I’m a member of a very old blog whose other members prefer the blogger set up. This app makes it easier to post to that blog on the move. You can  publish posts with pictures, labels and location information. View the list of posts and if you have multiple accounts or blogs, you can easily switch between them.

Google Docs

Create, edit, upload and share your documents. You can also read the documents already stored in your Google Documents account.  Edits to your documents appear to collaborators in seconds. Make quick changes to spreadsheets. Upload and convert files to the Google Docs format. Take a photo of printed text and convert it to a Google document. Share docs with your phone’s contacts.

Gesture Search

This is a must have app for any touch screen device. I use it every day. It wipes out the need to search through indexes. Quickly find a contact, a bookmark, an application, or a music track on your device by drawing on the screen. Search results are updated as you add each letter or digit and becomes better by learning from your search history.

GO Launcher Ex

Changes the look and feel of your phone. The resulting user experience far outstrips the app launcher screens provided by Samsung, for example. Massive amounts of customisation available.

Google Goggles

Search the real world by taking a picture. Goggles uses image recognition technology to recognize objects and return relevant search results. Identifies products, famous landmarks, storefronts, artwork, and popular images found online. Goggles can translate words in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese & Russian. Can extract contact information from business cards.

Google Sky Map

Turns your phone into a window to the night sky. Beautiful. For the first time, using this app, I was able to locate constellations properly and know which stars where in them and which were not. Even better, you can identify planets in the sky. Don’t use it much but when I do, it’s a real pleasure.

Guardian

Visually, this is a close second to the Guardian Newpaper’s mobile website but it does have the advantage that you can download whatever content you want and read it offline.

Hungry Shark – £0.80

A platform style game that broke into marine territory. Great fun. When you’ve exhausted its complicated challenge, there is Hungry Shark Part 2 & 3 to enjoy, which successfully ramp up the difficulty.

Linda File Manager

An easy to use file manager. Roam around inside your phone.

Google My Tracks

I use this a lot. It’s brilliant. Record and share your GPS tracks, including statistics.Use My Tracks while you run, bike, hike, or do anything else outdoors, and it will use the GPS sensor in your phone to record the path you took. It will also gather useful statistics such as time, speed, distance, and elevation. You can review all of this data live, or you can save it for use later. While you’re out, you can mark relevant waypoints, and can ask to hear automatic voice announcements about your progress.

Pocket Budget

Very useful. Fifteen years ago a NatWest bank manager pushed credit on me like a drug dealer. He said, “You’re a barrister, I trust you. You want £6,000 but I’m going to give you £10,000″. Trouble was he wasn’t giving me the money he was lending it. This huge overdraft facility got me into the way of debt. I failed to manage my money properly for, well, fifteen years after that. Until I got this app. Now I religiously put all my income and expenditure into this app and keep on top of everything. It allows tracking of expense/income transactions for multiple budgets. Features include: multiple budgets, expense/income tracking, fully customizable categories, transaction editor, customizable data filtering, budget reporting, a simple user interface, database backup/restore and export to csv.

ROM Manager – Requires Rooted Phone

£3.76. Must have app for any root user. Make backups, flash ROMs, and own your device.

Root Explorer – Requires Rooted Phone

The ultimate file manager for root users. Access the whole of android’s file system (including the elusive data folder!). Features include SQLite database viewer, Text Editor, create and extract zip or tar/gzip files, extract rar archives, multi-select, execute scripts, search, remount, permissions, bookmarks, send files (via email, bluetooth etc), image thumbnails, APK binary XML viewer, change file owner and group.

SetCPU – Requires Rooted Phone

£1.25. A must have app for a rooted phone. Alone it justifies rooting your phone.

]SetCPU is a tool for changing the CPU settings (capable of overclock and underclock). SetCPU also allows you to set up powerful profiles to change the CPU speed under certain conditions, such as when the phone is asleep or charging, when the battery level drops below a certain point, when the phone’s temperature is too high, or during certain times of day. See the screenshots for examples of how you might set up profiles. A wide feature set make it useful to beginners and enthusiasts alike. Accelerate your processor to unleash your phone’s multitasking potential, or dial your CPU’s speed down to save battery. It also includes a “voltage control” menu, for use with certain devices with custom kernels that support it, to control undervolting to save even more battery. Keep in mind that undervolting is only available for certain kernels.

Shredder Chess

£5.19. Non-serious chess players will baulk at the price and point out that there are other chess apps available for free. They’re rubbish! Once you know something about the beautiful game, these apps become easy to beat. They also lack the features the serious player needs.

You can play against Shredder, analyze with him and solve chess puzzles. It offers the usual Shredder standard for your pocket. In addition to the outstanding playing strength of the 13 times computer chess world champion, Shredder is also able to mimic the play of a human chess player with any playing strength. He even deliberately makes typical human mistakes in those levels.

Solve 1000 built in chess puzzles. Shredder keeps track of your performance and offers advice if needed.

You can adjust Shredder’s playing strength from beginner to master level. If you like, Shredder automatically adjusts his strength to yours. He even calculates an Elo rating for you. This is how the playing strength of chess players is typically measured.

Features include:

* Adjustable playing strength
* Intuitive and very easy to operate
* 1000 built in chess puzzles
* Rates your play
* Outstanding playing strength
* Simulates opponent of any strength
* Analyse your games with Shredder, find your mistakes and improve your play
* Coach shows your mistakes
* Great variety with built-in opening book
* Enter and analyze any position you like
* Load and save games (incl. names, date, etc.)
* Import and export games in PGN format
* Different chess boards and pieces
* Improve your play whenever and wherever you like

 

Spirit Level

This isn’t a copy of the world famous book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in which he demonstrates why more equal societies almost always do better. Please read it! This is a builder’s spirit level and very useful too.

 

 

Superuser – Requires rooted phone

Manages which apps can make use of root access to your phone. Puts everything under your control.

 

 

 

Swype Installer

Swype is crucial for touchscreen phones. Vastly speeds your ability to type. Watch this video. I make no apology for furthering the hype about this incredible development. The only differences between the way I use it and the way they use it in the video is that I am much faster and I use my thumb.

Watching people’s reactions is fun. Here’s a comparison with an old-style touch screen text interface, the iphone:

Still not convinced. Think they were fiddling the test. You can take my word for it. Swype is faster is faster than physical buttons and I type fast.

This is not available from the Android Market. The link above goes to Swype’s own site, which gives full instructions on how to set swype up on your phone. Some android phones come with it pre-installed. Mine did. Then I got rid of it by flashing a stripped down rom (DarkyRom 10.2 Extreme Edition) onto the device, which meant I had to get swype.

 Titanium Backup – Requires rooted phone

The mother and daddy of impressive apps. Backup and restore ALL apps, Market links, remove bloatware and more. I use the free version. The paid for version contains mind-blowing functionality.

Tweetdeck

Does away with the tedious business of checking twitter and facebook separately. Since it was recently bought by Google, it is a shame that it doesn’t also integrate with Google+. Methinks commercial strategy has come into play… essentially it is a social networks browser for twitter, facebook, foursquare and buzz. It works like a dream, can be tweaked nicely with the result that it needn’t drain your battery too much.

Widgetsoid

The standard android power control widget only has 5 toggles and is not customisable. Widgetsoid has over 40 toggles. You choose how many you want your power control to have and where on the widget you want them to be. A must have app.

Wifi Analyzer

Shows the Wi-Fi channels around you. Helps you to find a less crowded channel for your wireless router.

Wikidroid

Formats wikipedia perfectly for your phone. Is also very fast.

WordPress

Write new posts, edit content, and manage comments on your WordPress blog. WordPress for Android is an Open Source app that empowers you to write new posts, edit content, view stats, and manage comments with built-in notifications. WordPress for Android supports both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.9.2 or higher) blogs.

 Iphone owners will be wondering why I haven’t included various apps they depend on, like YouTube. The reason is that there’s no need for these apps on android – we can just watch Flash videos without a special app. Apple won’t let you have Flash technology on your iphone because it could allow an alternative app market to come into being. Instead of competing in an open market, Apple wants to control your wallet completely…

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Posted in Android, App Reviews, Iphone, phones, Rooting, Samsung Galaxy S, Tech

Escaping the black screen of death on a Samsung Galaxy S – flashing a new rom with Heimdall on Ubuntu

Posted on 6 September 2011 | 3 Comments

This post has been amended on the same day it was originally posted.

Following my post this morning about the multi-platform android flashing tool Heimdall (an open source alternative to Odin for Windows), here’s my report on what happened when I tried to reflash my phone. As attentive readers will know, I use a Samsung Galaxy S i9000. Previous to today I was not using Samsung’s stock rom, preferring instead Darky’s Rom 9.3. The aim this morning was to upgrade to Darky’s Extreme Edition 10.2, which is based on Android Gingerbread 2.3.4. Gingerbread is most up to date version of Android. It is blazingly fast on the Galaxy S. If there’s time today, I’ll be running some benchmark tests to see how the phone performs but first let me explain the day’s excitement because my journey to Gingerbread has not been without fear.

Please note, that all that follows requires a rooted android phone. Root access allows you to do wonderful things to your phone. Chances are that the phone you got from the phone company is not rooted. There’s plenty of explanations of how to root phones online. This post is not concerned with the business of rooting your phone. I’ll deal with that another day. For now, you’ll have to read up on that elsewhere.

Odin began life as the software used by Samsung to put their firmware onto their phones (that link is to Odin 1.3). Some sneaky employee leaked it to the wild. This allowed hackers to put alternative roms onto the Galaxy S. Many of these rom developers complained that Odin was ropey. Thus Heimdall was developed. This took some time because, as you would expect, Odin was not open source. It had to be reverse engineered. This challenge was overcome and Heimdall is by all accounts better than Odin. Naturally, it is free. I followed my own advice and read and read and read. I learnt quite a bit and when I was I sure that I was ready, I set Heimdall up on my machine, which runs Ubuntu 11.04 (a version of linux).

Next I used a very useful android app called Titanium Backup. This app lets you take a backup of all your apps and data and store them on your external SD card. Backing up everything is a batch process, which is an option you can reach by looking at the general menu settings in Titanium Backup. Titanium Backup is free, by the way.

I use ADW Launcher for my home screens. This changes the way the phone’s interface behaves. It’s much better and more user friendly than the standard method. I saved the home screens configuration via the phone’s general settings.

Then I downloaded Darky’s Rom 10.2 Extreme Edition to my machine. This is where things started to go awry. I was sure that I followed the instructions on this page. Except that clearly I couldn’t have done because careful reading of that page reveals that it relates to a tarball and not a zip file. Also it deals with Darky’s Rom 10.1, not 10.2. With computing attention to detail is everything. Heimdall failed to transfer the files properly and my phone seemed to freeze. After about 30 minutes I took the battery out and turned the phone back on. Uh oh, I got this screen, which I had never seen before:

Black screen of death

This did not look good. Of course, I did not know that it was the so-called Black Screen of Death. Discovering its name was an ugly moment. I went to tell my wife that I had bricked my phone. She asked what that meant. I explained that it meant that my phone was now of very limited value: it was as about as useful as a small plastic brick. That familiar sinking feeling, which accompanies all those moments when I’ve authored my own misfortune, came flooding in. I kept reading.

A light appeared in the shape of the information that it was sometimes possible to get back from the Black Screen of Death. I kept the faith. I pressed and held together Volume Down, Home and Power. I waited. After a few seconds the screen went completely black. I released the Power button. Bingo! The Downloading Screen appeared… I was saved, according to the literature. Keeping my phone plugged in, I read furiously. Somewhere I read that another Ubuntu user had had the same experience. He speculated that he hadn’t set Heimdall up properly on his machine. He thought that he had been tweaking his machine a bit too much. Hey, I’ve done that, I thought.

I decided to proceed on safe ground only. I didn’t want a bricked phone. I dug out an old Windows XP laptop. I downloaded Odin 1.3. There are later versions but the instructions I had found related to 1.3. I followed the instructions on this page slavishly. Odin sprang into life. It was immediately obvious that something positive was happening. When my phone rebooted successfully, I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. Success! One more reboot and all my home screen icons came back.

Titanium Backup brought back all my apps without the tedious business of having to download them again. I restored my home screens. Now for some benchmarking tests….

… actually that flashing was completely buggered. I sloped off to an appointment, came back, stopped at the chip shop and had another go with my Ubuntu machine. This time I slavishly followed the instructions on this page and it seemed to work…

… next I went to the Swype website to obtain a beta copy of that groovy touchscreen input system, which blows tapping a shiny screen out of the water. Okay, bad analogy I know – these things don’t do well in water. Swype beta installed perfectly.

Now I’m wondering whether the problems I had before related to backing up system data from a previous version of Android. The market seems to be working okay. The power widget is working okay. Perhaps it is time to leave it alone for tonight… famous last words… it is blisteringly fast too…

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Posted in Android, Android 2.3.4, Darky, DarkyRom Extreme Edition 10.2, Heimdall, Linux, Odin, phones, Reflashing, Samsung Galaxy S, Tech

Facebook threatened by Google+

Posted on 30 August 2011 | Leave a comment

This morning Facebook buckled under pressure from Google+ and introduced a measure of privacy to your posts. Now you can select who sees your posts. It remains to be seen how well this will work. You have a restricted choice: whether to be public or just post to your uncategorised facebook friends… Facebook friends are not divided into groups or circles like your contacts in Google+. Perhaps an option to categorise them will come along later? I can’t see the majority of Facebook users dividing their friends up into categories. Most people seem to have thousands of ‘friends’ inside the system. We might have the time for endless chatter and time wasting with this service but we don’t want to go through all these so-called friends and reclassify them all, do we?

Google is keeping quiet about how many users Google+ has. Membership is still restricted to invite only. Obviously this is partially to build the hype but it is also prevents its data centres from being suddenly overloaded. Facebook used a similar tactic to begin with by restricting its membership to American universities. Some estimates say that 13% of American citizens have a Google+ account. Some predict 22% by the end of this year. How are these figures arrived at? They are mainly plucked out of the air. One way of estimating how many users Google+ has is to log in to the service and then type the following into the Google search bar:

site:plus.google.com *** -asdfsdag

This tells Google to search only within Google+. The asterisks are wildcards. They mean search for anything. The minus sign tells it to exclude the ‘word’ that follows after the minus sign. This is a trick to obtain a search result. You’ll end up with a page of search results which tells you how many users’ pages have been returned. It says there are 107 million results. Some people report that you will get different answers according to where you are in the world. This is because, unsurprisingly, Google is using more than one data centre. I repeated this search but told it to exclude the name “jkdsgndsgjngjdsnkjgkjdsgn”. Some clever sod is obviously called asdfsdag because now it returns a figure of 118 million.

Mere numbers themselves are insufficient to reveal how much the service is actually used – remember Second Life? The key issue is engagement. How many people are relying on the service is a matter of pure speculation. I predict that Google+ will overtake Facebook in time – the service is far better organised from the start.

Curiously, Facebook seems to have dropped the option to post a link this morning. What was the point of that?

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Posted in Facebook, Google+, Tech