Voiding Warranties..again
- Disclaimer - I won't be responsible for anything you do to your phone, voiding waranties, setting small cats on fire, or causing your local subway system to stop working -Disclaimer-
I recently got the HTC Desire Z. Slightly older, but it has the qwerty slider, which i wanted. Anyway, the HTC Sense UI default "shell" put on top of Android is great. By far better than the Samsung uh.. Touch Wiz thing. Smoother, and smarter. But i won't get into that. What comes with Sense UI on this phone (and i'll bet a lot of other HTC phones), is a bunch of applications. Applications that i didn't need. So obivously i tried to remove some of those applications. Turns out, to remove apps like Facebook or Twitter (that i do not want on my phone), you have to have root. I didn't find any smart way of getting rid of the apps without root, because it requires modification or removal of files that are in directories that are not world or group-writable.
So, after some internal debate between me and myself, i decided to root the phone. I quickly realized that the operation would not be as easy as on the Samsung, which has a fairly established and easy-to-use toolset for doing both rooting and rom management. Samsungs can also be exploited on pretty much any version of the OS.
However, on the HTC, i found that i had to first downgrade the firmware, so that i could use an exploit to gain root. And to make matters worse, this didn't work on it's own. I had to turn my microSD card into a "goldcard", then do the downgrade, then the exploit to gain root, and then flash the new firmware on top. In this case, i ended up with Cyanogen Mod 7.1. again, since i had good experiences with it.
So, let's go through the process that i had to go through. Reading a bunch of forums, i quickly got the picture that your mileage will vary. First of all, let's start with what i had. I had the HTC Desire Z (known as the HTC Vision G2, i think, in the US). I had the latest firmware, which in this case meant uh.. Android 2.3.4 (or 2.3.5), called the HTC Sense version 2.1. Anyway, the latest version available through the HTC OTA update. The phone was bought October of this year.
I started out with the Cyanogen Mod instructions for downgrading the phone to an exploitable firmware version on this page. Or actually, i started out by installing the android sdk, but on arch linux it was as easy as installing android-sdk from the AUR. I use yaourt as a frontend, so i did a yaourt android-sdk. On a 64-bit system, i had to enable the multilibs repository, to get the necessary lib32 libraries.
I ran through the steps of pushing fre3vo and misc_version on the phone, which went fine. I then did the chmods and the debug, which then got me a root shell on the phone temporarily. The next step has me setting the version for a misc_version, and then pushing the actual downgrade onto the phone. All good so far. Next step is to reboot the phone bootloader using adb (the android debugger). This also worked.... until i got a dreadful message. "CID incorrect! Upgrade fail!". CID? Wtf? Okay. Step back for a moment and google this fucker.
Turns out certain phones need some finetuning to be able to downgrade, due to either..carrier lockin, or some branding put on the phone, or perhaps an unknown reason (maybe hardware or software revisions?). I found this thread on the Cyanogenmod forums, which helped me onwards. The thread describes my exact issue, though with a slightly different downgrade firmware than mine. In any case, i decided to give it a try. The process involves the creation of a "goldcard", which is then used as a place to store the downgrade firmware. The goldcard is simply a microSD card, with the first few bytes overwritten with some new data.
The steps were basically:
- Download the goldcard helper application from the Android market. The phone was still bootable and fully operational, as no downgrade had taken place, so i was able to download and install this.
- Using the goldcard helper, get the reverse CID for your MMC2 card. That's your microSD card. MMC0 is your internal memory and can't be used for this, as far as i've read.
- Taking the reverse CID for your microSD card from the program, input it into the goldcard page (a link is also in the application).
- The site generates an image, which you will download
- Download also a hex-editor, such as HxD
- Take your microSD card out of your phone and put it into a memory card reader (i also read you can use your phone as the reader, but i used a Kingston reader instead), and open up the card from the HxD editor using the extra tab, then the open disk menu and under physical disk selected the removable disk which was the microSD card. Make sure that read-only is not checked when opening the microSD card.
- Open up another tab by opening from the extra tab "open disk image", and load the .img file that you got from the goldcard site. Also uncheck the read-only checkbox here. Use the default 512 byte sector size. You should now have two tabs open.
- From the goldcard.img tab, do a select all, then copy. Go to the microSD tab, and select offsets 00000000 to 00000170 and from the edit menu do a "paste write". This will paste the content of the goldcard.img, to the first offsets of the microSD card.
- From the file menu, save what you've done. Accept / ignore all warnings.
- Ok, now you have a gold card.
Proceed by copying over the downgrade image to the newly created goldcard. Continue with the CyanogenMod instructions.Following the instructions for the downgrade, you can safely redo all the steps to make sure. Once you are ready, reboot the bootloader again. You should now have great success, in the words of Borat. Navigate with the volume up and down keys, and select using the power or the navigation-touchpad thing-button. Select bootloader, then select fastboot. Confirm that you want to go ahead if necessary.
This will take a moment. You'll then be downgraded to an earlier version of the firmware, which has a known exploit, allowing us to root the phone. The phone will (i think) reboot on it's own, and give you an older looking Sense UI.
Continue with the rooting instructions here. Basically you are downloading and pushing onto the phone a bunch of packages that are needed. Then, you're running the actual exploit which should find a register in the memory, which we will use to sneak in (i think this is a correct analysis of what goes on, though i'm no programmer). Remember to match those md5 sums listed in the instructions before going on.
After this you have a rooted phone, hopefully with clockwork recovery mod installed. You can now keep using the Sense UI thing (i'm not sure that it'll OTA upgrade anymore?), or install Cyanogenmod, using these instructions. For some reason, i either failed some part, or something failed, but i didn't have clockwork recovery mod installed after this process. No sign of CWM anywhere. So, i headed on to the market, and downloaded the thing from there. I was now ready to install Cyanogen, which went without incident.
Note, that if you can't get into recovery mode using the restart into recovery (from the normal shutdown menu, after installing CWM), shut down the phone, and use Power, volume down and the navigation thing pressed all together.
Ok, so now i have Cyanogenmod 7.1.0 on my HTC Desire Z, with Android 2.3.7 on the bottom. Nice! Quadrant scores (yes yes, synthetic benchmarks..) went from 900 to about 1900 compared to the latest Sense UI. Phone feels snappy.
One thing to note was that market kept crashing! I was getting worried for a moment, but then i remembered the internet, found that thread, and fixed the problem. After downgrading, rooting and installing Cyanogen, i had the phone set to a language called English HD. I selected English US, and my problem was gone. So note this.
Winamp keeps crashing now, but it did that on the Sense UI side, so i doubt it has anything to do with Cyanogen. Version 1.2.6 is the latest as i'm writing this, and there is no later version available. The default media player, though, is pretty usable in any case, so i'm just using that for now.
Now, if i could just install this Cyanogen Nightly build... 
A less than great week
So i'm having one of those weeks again. Let's start by describing what happened last Sunday. I was walking to the store to pick up some necessities, when i noticed that my Nissan had been broken into. The shotgun-side front window had been busted to shit, and my GPS was gone. Now yes, i made a mistake by leaving it out in the open. I was naîve, thinking that my GPS was safe in a car in Helsinki. I've always kept it out, but i guess i now live in a neighborhood populated by a bunch of junkies.
Anyway, it was far from a clean job. The window was shattered to a million bits inside the car, and half of it had dropped inside the door. Cleaning it up just so i could drive it to work and put it in the garage was a bitch. So yeah, i decided, instead of taping a black plastic bag over the broken window, i decided to drive it to a safer place. Who know, maybe the same fuck would have come back for my 1994 Green Day "Dookie" cd that i still had in the glove compartment. He also left a 100 euro inverter. I guess it could have been anyone, but my money is on some junkie looking for his next fix of cheap drugs (Subutex or some such stuff). A GPS like that retails for 150 euros or so, and on the black market it ought to fetch 30 bucks? Maybe 40? And that gets you what? In Helsinki, maybe a fourth of a gram of cocaine (probably not his brand of poison), or a few pills of subutex or some benzos.
Sigh.
Anyway, as soon as i noticed what had happened, i pick up my Galaxy S, and call the insurance company to ask about what to do next. However, as i'm slightly shocked by the events, i fumble, and drop my phone, which hits the asphalt with a resounding thump. Perfectly flat on its screen. I pick it up, and next thing you know, i'm picking out small pieces of glass from my hand. Great. Broken car. Broken phone. Phone still works, so i make the call anyway. Insurance company tells me to call the cops, and take the car to a shop for repairs.
Now, all this hinges on the po-lice. The five-oh. Come monday, i look up from their site how to make a report, which can be done either at the station, online or over the phone. I'm adviced by the site that i should not use the electronic form if the crime involves someone breaking in somewhere. Someone broke into my car to steal shit, so i figure i'll call them instead. On the fourth call, someone picks up. Here's the dialog:
Me: Hey, i need to make a report. Someone broke into my car.
5-0: Yeah? Well you need to fill out the online form
Me: But.. it said..
5-0: We can't take reports like this over the phone. Either visit a police station, or fill out the online form.
Me: Fine.
I was stumped, but then again, my faith for our men and women in blue is .. minimal to begin with, so i was not altogether amazed.
So i look up the online form thing. I have to authenticate using my online banking codes. Fine, that's fairly standard in things like this where you need to be sure who's doing what. I fill in my info, and it says "Sending this information [insert name and social security number here] to the requesting site. Again, standard practice. I'm then taken to this 90's rendition of a website, with a simple html form asking for different kinds of information. The first bits of information requested? My name and social security number, which i just authenticated to be sent over for. But hey, okay. Can you make a report under some other persons name? Doesn't make sense to me why you'd authenticate as John Doe, and then make a report under the name Jane Doe, with her soc.security number. That smells illegal, you know?
So i fill in the fields, which are by the way, limited to like 50 characters. Try describing anything in 50 chars. Try writing the model name of the stolen items in 50 chars. There was also a field which asked how i wanted a copy of the report. The options were "by snail mail" or "i'll pick them up". I hit "by mail", and then decide to click the "info" button next to the field. It says "You can get it by email (but that's unencrypted mind you!), by mail, or you can pick it up". There's no field for "email", and since the buttons are radio-buttons, i can't de-select the choice i already made. I was stuck. Fucking sucks. I send it in anyway, and i get a date and time, a reference number. I then file a report with the insurance company. This is a PDF-file, with fillable forms. I then *print it out* because my insurance company doesn't offer an electronic way of sending in stuff. There are rumors of an email address that accepts stuff, but it's not public or i didn't find it. So i then proceed to fucking fax over the form to the insurance company. *bepbepbeeep* Hey look, it's the 90's calling. Yeah? Okay. They said they want their technology back.
Jesus fucking christ.
Then i drive over to the car repair shop, so they can take pictures and get an estimate over to the insurance company. So far all good. Two days pass. On the third, i get a call from the insurance company, who say they have not heard from the police department. I then call the police, who give me the run-around, and finally forward me to the documents department. They spend a good 15-20 minutes searching for my report. They ask for my name. They ask for my social security number. The date and time i sent it in. The city i live in. None of these apparently produce any results, and i'm left to wonder whether they ever got the report or not. I try to offer the clerk the reference number that i got after i filed the report. Her reply? "No that's useless. I can't do anything with that". So what, either she's incompetent, or the reference number is.. a random generated number to make me feel better?
Also, i've never made a crime-report. And there should only be one person with my name and social security number in the entire country. So how can it be this difficult to find my report? This is beginning to sound like the work of some big IT service provider.
I was also told that "No the documents are not sent to the insurance company unless they request them (which they also don't automatically). So i either have to ask the insurance company to ask the police to get the documents, or wait for the police to send the documents to me, so i can i guess..uh.. fax to the insurance company.
All this has yet to happen. No nothing from the po-po. The car guys are waiting for the insurance company, who are waiting for the police. So i'm stuck until they do their thing. Great.
..as for the phone
As i didn't have a company phone (or i did, but i gave it away to a colleague when i got the galaxy s), i decided to get one ordered for me to replace the now-fucked Samsung. I wanted the Galaxy S 2, but they didn't have it in stock, and i'm a very impatient man, so i got the HTC Desire Z (the HTC Vision elsewhere). That's the qwerty-slider. I'll write something about it once i've had a chance to use it first. It seems solid, and they physical keyboard is a nice thing to have around. Also, it supports Cyanogen Mod 7.1.
I feel like titling every post ‘Random’
Yeah I'm bad at figuring out titles for my posts, so they will be..what they are. For now.
I've been back at work for about 7 days now, and I'm already pretty stressed out. Nothing I can't handle, but still. A decent reminder that yes, i have a job that i do well, but that is not easy to do well without feeling the effects.
My home garden is still alive, and looking better than ever. The balcony-project has been growing lettuce for many many weeks and providing tasty goodies for many a salad. The basil is looking good as well, and right in the middle, you can see some slow-growing parsley.Inside i have another similar box which has some Chives, and some Rucola growing in it. They are not yet in representable condition, so pics will have to wait.
Home-growing (not that, hippies), I've found, is quite satisfying, even on this small scale. But in an urban environment (such as in our bustling megacity of a capital, Helsinki), small is where the game is at. Word.
I had the weirdest dream last night. Perhaps one of the weirdest ever, and all without any mind blowing, groovy, 60's drugs. Basically it was me, my father and my paternal grandfather (who just turned 90, props) on the yard of one of their previous homes. For some reason, which was not explained by anything else by twisted dream-logic, he had.. a cake. Growing out of his left temple. It had apparently started out as just a.. splotch, and dismissed as something old people just "get". But then it started growing, and turned out to be a cake. And it kept growing and growing. I found a screw on the top side of this cake (at this point he was unable to move because of the size of the cake), and i for some reason, reasoned that this screw is what holds the entire thing in place. So we started turning the screw, which eventually released the cake.
Now if this isn't fubar, get a load of this. On the side of the cake was.. a door. Opening the door revealed a bakery or a coffee shop. A coffee shop inside a giant cake, growing out of a mans head. And there were people, employees, inside this giant cake/bakery .. thing! So i promptly told them to get the fuck out of the giant cake, and to leave my grandfather alone. The shift-manager, was this weird.. Stepford-Wife kind of person who just had this creepy smile on her face, and without commenting on the weirdness of the situation, calpped her hands merrily, and asked the other employees to leave. I think her happy (creepy happy) face and demeanor was the last thing i saw in this dream.
I would wager i had some late-night fever or something, because never, in my nearly 30 years, have i had a dream that was this fucking convoluted. I've been fighting some viral infection for a few days, so it might explain things.
This is so fucked up, you have to realize i could not possibly make this shit up.
So what else. Finished the patio/whatever at the cottage, and it now kicks ass:
Kick. Ass.
Still don't reaaaally have a well-behaving Ubuntu 11.04 with kernel 3.0 rc[n]. It does boot, but i get bogged down with a bunch of issues. I've been posting some bug reports, but most of it has already been posted. So there's not much i can add. But i try to do my share.
I love how Linus Torvalds has taken up using Google+ to announce new kernels and other misc stuffs. Not sure i like google+ though. It's turning into facebook for me, which i left nearly 2 years ago. The only thing I'm liking more, is the way it handles links and media, for some reason. Facebook might be just as good nowadays. Who knows. The games addition is (not yet at least) as bad as Facebook, since you can actually choose to opt in to seeing game-related content. So i don't have to follow your progress on fucking Mafia wars or some other inane piece of productivity-waste.
I started reading Devil's Eye, by Jack McDevitt. So far it's basically a "far-in-the-future", as in millennia from now, detective story. So far. The sole reason i picked it up, out of the blue, was that i was reading an article on Hypernovas (as opposed to Supernovas), and the article mentioned that this book features a hypernova. That sounded interesting,so i placed my order.
Ok enough rambling. I'll update with some stuff on my HTPC at a later date.
Distrohopping like a Motherfucker
Like the topic sez. I've been trying out different distros over the past weeks, and landed right back where i started. Basically. I've gone through Arch, Archbang, Xubuntu, Debian 6, and finally Ubuntu. This is sad to admit, but in all other distros, i had some deal breaker problems that i was unable to solve in a decent amount of time, and ended up valuing the fact that most things work pretty much out of the box on Ubuntu. I can't believe that i'm actually giving Unity a try as well! It's probably going out of the window pretty soon, because i just can't get a hang of how to use this most effectively. Things are sliding in and out of view.. i can't see what i'm running, i can't see the menu bar until i hover over it, and.. oh god. It's just not Gnome 2, y'know?
Arch i like. I like pacman, it feels right. It feels like 10 years ago, in a good way. But i ran into some stupid audio problems. And automounting usb sticks and the likes didn't work as well as i hoped it would. Now, I'm not saying the issues are unsolvable, they are not. But i gave them a reasonable amount of effort, and if it didn't work, then it was out of the game. For instance, Archbang, which is a bleeding edge rolling distro, like Arch, had massive problems with audio. Alsa lost my cards, or some mixer element, and i'm talking lost the entire /dev devices that were supposed to be there. The excellent Alsa Troubleshooting page was not able to save me, at least not as far as i could deduce. I was going to download Alsa and compile from source, but i said fuck that noise.
So here I am, typing away on Ubuntu 11.04, with Unity (shrug), and waiting for something to break so i can say "Aha! Told you so!". Deep down i know it won't break, not that badly anyway. Sure it's not a rolling distro. Sure it's for "noobs" but whatever. I mean i like to have a tool that gets the job done. Ubuntu has done a bad thing by taking in Unity, at least that's what i feel now. I guess I'm just getting too old. But it is *still* a pretty good out-of-the-box experience. No matter how you turn it. You can still do the Gnome Classic thing, and run with what you're used to. Xubuntu worked quite well too, but there were some issues there too. XFCE4 is pretty damn brilliant. KDE is just something i haven't touched for so many years.. It hurt me back then. Left me creepy voicemails. I'm not taking her back.
I've also been giving Google+ a whirl, mainly because it is not Facebook. I hopped off that wagon over a year ago, and i haven't looked back. Look, i don't care how many fucking melons your Farmville farm grows. I don't. Twitter is opt-in which i like, and you can easily grasp the concept, and with a short glance, see what people are saying. That's the main reason for using Twitter. Brevity. Now, Google+ is a new thing from Google. So naturally i had to try it. I got an invite from an old boss of mine, and soon i was typing away at something that is kind of like.. Facebook way back. Or an unbloated Facebook. But also not. It has some novel concepts, like the Circles, as a way to limit the distribution of whatever it is you are sharing. It's much more multimedia oriented, which i like. It has the whole Hangout thing. It has no Farmville.
But still I'm not sure what it gives me over using Twitter. It's status messages. It's people's doings and goings. It's Google. I dunno. I probably won't stick around, but I'll give it a run for it's money, that's for sure.
At home, we're still putting the finishing touches on the place. We're having some people over tomorrow, god knows what that'll be like. Tomorrow also marks the day i start my summer vacation. It could be in more relaxed circumstances, as I've been dealing with some nightmarish problems at work this past week. Somehow, even though i know i shouldn't bring my work home, i end up doing that anyway. Because i feel that it's somehow my duty. I want to do a good job, even if it means long hours. I want to make sure things are running smoothly. But i also know i desperately need a vacation. And the following four weeks are just what the doctor ordered.
Some Android bits and bobs: I've been running GingerReal 7.1.3 for the better part of a week now, and fucking hell it is a good ROM! My Galaxy S has longer battery life than ever, and the UI is snappy as hell. I'll probably do a proper writeup once I've played around with it some more. I've now had my Galaxy S for a year, and the only complaint i really have is the lack of a physical QWERTY keyboard. My next phone will have that, for sure, but I might go with the Galaxy S for as long as it goes. It's a solid phone, with a great community around it.
Assorted updates, week 18
This week has been mostly about preparing for the move, which will take place at the end of the month. The new apartment is hopefully ready at this time (the day it is supposed to be ready is 16.5). If not, well, then we have 100 square meters of stuff with no place to go. Maybe i'll dump it at the office....
Speaking of the office, there's been a lot of cool stuff happening there as well. New hardware coming in, new stuff to learn. It doesn't seem to be slowing down toward the summer just yet. Lately, i've mostly been learning more things about IBM hardware, VMWare and installing a very cool piece of IBM Power7 hardware. Work is more interesting than it ever was!
But back to the other stuff. Moving is arduous business. There are papers to be filed, documents to be signed. And the packing of the god-damn boxes. So far i've:
- Canceled the old rental agreement
- Signed the new rental agreement
- Sent in a paper to the maintenance company to take our names off the door etc. by the end of this month
- Sent in a paper to the new maintenance company to put up our names at the new place
- Arranged for the transfer of my power contract
- Arranged for the transfer of the home insurance to the new apartment
- Official moving announcement to the magistrate
- Ordered 30 boxes to put our stuff in
- Arranged for a van (thanks B)
And i'm stressed out of my mind.
On top of this, i'm participating in a research on early detection of psychoses (as a control patient. don't worry, i'm not that crazy just yet..), which included an extensive neuropsychological questionaire and test, an MRI scan, and some labwork. The MRI was fascinating business. The device was a 3 Tesla scanner, by General Electric. That's a pretty powerful magnetic field it can generate, there. The scan took a little over an hour, and consisted of one anatomical "classic" scan, at a high resolution and different angles, and then two different fMRI's (functional MRI), which measure brain activity during (in this case) answering questions, and watching a 10 minute clip of a movie. The scanner takes one (quite low resolution) image every 2.3 seconds, and then makes a "gif" out of the activity, which can be correlated to whatever question or thing you were watching at the time. This was then processed by a very powerful HP workstation (an xw8400 if i'm not mistaken), and then burnt on a disc and sent to a radiologist. I was allowed to look at some of the images, and boy was that cool! Turns out i do have a brain in there!
I sold my aquarium, and it's being picked up on saturday. This means i won't have to move it ever again. It's kind of sad at the same time, but i'm glad to get rid of it. It's been with me since 2005, and i've had an aquarium for the past.. what.. 15 years or so? The last original fish, an armored catfish, had survived for about that time, died a few months ago. It was probably more than 15 years old.
I came into posession of a Linksys WRT54G last week, but to my dismay, it was a version 7, which has the Atheros chipset, instead of the Broadcom, and is therefore about as useful as a cock-flavored lollipop. It's not supported by any of the major distributions of "router linux", openwrt or dd-wrt, and there are i think no plans to add support either. A bit sad. But maybe it'll get a good home somewhere, or i'll figure out a way to put it to good use. My OpenBSD router/pf machine crashed last weekend, i think due to a faulty secondary hard drive. I didn't spend too much time debuging it; instead i just took out the drive (a Western Digital Green-series 1TB drive..my second of this type to break), and put in a smaller drive. Since 4.9 just came out, i decided to upgrade to that while i was at it. Install went well, and pf config was mostly intact from 4.8. I think they corrected some feature with the built-in egress-macro (?) , because it now worked better than in 4.8, where i decided to use my own macro instead.
Ubuntu 11.04 is also out, but i clicked "Don't upgrade". Unity can suck my ballsack, and i don't think i'll ever upgrade to that. It's very possible that 10.10 is the last iteration of Ubuntu i will ever use, unless they somehow magically decide to backtrack to a sensible UI. KDE isn't an option, and well, while i like XFCE, i don't think i would run that as an everyday WM. I have been looking into Arch, and it seems like a solid choice. I have been using Linux for 12 years now, so maybe it's time to take the training-wheels off anyway..
I got my Sony fail-mail last friday along with, oh, 77 million other people. I don't own a PS3, but i have used PSN on a console, and registered for an account. I didn't use a credit card though, luckily, so at least i won't have to cancel that. And i'm lucky in that i very, very rarely use the same password anywhere, so i won't have to worry about that either. But still, it's nice to be a part of something bigger than me! Sony started blaming Anonymous a while ago, due to, alledgedly, a file left on a system that has the words "Anonymous" and "We are Legion" in them. That qualifies as proof i guess. And hey Sony, maybe if you play the blamegame long enough, nobody will notice that you (alledgedly) had an unpatched box on your fucked up network that enabled the attack in the first place!! I mean, if it was Anonymous, then who the hell cares about anything else, right? How about this instead: You man the fuck up, and say: Hey, we had an unpatched box, and we stored and trafficked data in an unsecure manner. We're sorry, and we'll work to create a better system. And try to be open about that new system, so people can test it, and point out flaws while you're at it. Instead, i'm hearing that they are "fixing problems and coming out with a "new and improved PSN" very soon!". Which means, they are spending didley-squat on security, audits and whatever, and just concentrating on getting back online ASAP. Which means, sooner or later, you are going to get fucked over again. But maybe that's someone elses fault as well, and it won't matter that you just lost the personal information of like half of the worlds console-gamers. Wake up, Sony. This alone is a good excuse not to buy one of your shitty, propietary consoles. If only it weren't such a good bluray player..
There's a 2600 meeting happening everywhere today, so go there. I'm going.
Saving Google Video and other assorted gimmicks
Google Video is shutting down as of the end of this month. Video's will be available for download for some time after that, but then it gets the big shift+delete over at the Goog. The Archive Team sprung into action once again to save this potential treasure trove of digital information that would bite the binary bullet if not saved in time. Currently, there is an effort to save all the material at Google Video before they pull the plug. I decided to join in on the fun, since i have a metric shitload of bandwidth and storage to the point of sheer irrelevance. The amount of material is estimated to be between 100 and 200 TB (or more if some sources are to be believed) There are some guestimates, but i'm not sure we can accurately say yet.
To help out, first read this page: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Video, and then decide how to help out. You can use almost any operating system imaginable, and there are people working on improved instructions and scripts all the time. Personally i've used both ubuntu and windows to do some downloading.
You can:
- Help index videos (if you have lower bandwidth and/or storage
- Help download videos and later upload them to archive.org
- Help people out on IRC (#googlegargle #archiveteam and #boincgoogle on the EFNET network)
- Help improve or test scripts and methods
It has been awesome watching the community at work. Within a matter of hours, multiple people were downloading videos, and we have hundreds of gigabytes down already. People were working day and night (thanks to timezones) developing scripts and helping people out. Jason Scott of textfiles.com fame is also an active with Archive Team, and is on IRC helping out as well and organizing things on different levels. There are people buying time and storage from the Amazon cloud to help with the effort. The dedication and friendliness of the people is simply amazing. People just show up and help with the effort without any personal gain. On the contrary, people are willing to offer their own personal time, storage and bandwidth for such an altruistic cause. Sure, most of those videos are probably irrelevant, but then, who can say what is going to be interesting to see in 10, 20, 30 years? Local news from Malaysia? "Real life Mortal Combat" ? Who knows. That's kind of the point behind all this. Saving stuff that would otherwise be lost forever.
The Archive Team have so far dished out like 140TB of storage, with more promised as we start filling that up.
So anyway, if you feel like this is something you could get into, go read the page and see how you can help out. Personally i'm downloading videos and putting them on my fileserver that has a (mostly) empty 1TB drive. And what the hell else would i use my 200/10 Mbit bandwidth for if not this? Sheesh.
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In other more generic news, we think we may have found an apartment. A three room place, not far from here. It should be fully renovated, and the rent is cheaper than in our current (too large) apartment. We're going to go look at it tomorrow, but it's already reserved for us, if we choose to take it. I have a good feeling about this.
I'm still trying to get rid of the aquarium, and i'm also in the process of selling my 2003 Nissan Primera stationwagon. I need to clean it out a bit first, and get it checked out so it's street-legal.
Work is busy as ever, and i am very thankful to all Christians who have kindly provided us with the four-day weekend this week. And all this because of the death of an imaginary jewish carpenter zombie. Imagine that.
HTPC Ubuntu 10.10 Upgrade
Yesterday i started upgrading the HTPC to Ubuntu 10.10. I was having some problems with audio (no doubt related to pulseaudio....) and i had a bunch of updates waiting to be installed that i didn't dare install. I have this nagging feeling that every time i do an apt-get upgrade, something breaks in XBMC. Might just be a feeling. Might not. Anyway. I started with a clean install of 10.10, installing propietary codecs and updates from the web during the install. After the installation, i tried to remove pulseaudio. I did an apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio, which still left some libraries like libpulse0 and others. I tried removing them by hand, but that resulted in some dependency-errors. Further trying to remove that resulted in me not having a stable gnome desktop to log into. It started GDM, but after that i just got returned to the login window. I did an apt-get install ubuntu-desktop, and a reboot, which fixed the problem. Then again apt-get remove pulseaudio, and left it at that.
After that i added a few PPA's to keep my Nvidia and ALSA-drivers current. Alsa works better with XBMC, handling both Dolby Digital, DTS, as well as MP3 and other stereo audio. The latest Nvidia drivers have not always been problem-free, but i decided to give them a try. The PPA's i added were from this, and this site, and the complete commands were:
/ some dependencies first / sudo apt-get install dkms python-software-properties sudo reboot / after the reboot install the nvidia drivers / sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings /installing the audio drivers/ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install linux-alsa-driver-modules-$(uname -r) sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/unstable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils
After this, i rebooted, and ran sudo alsamixer. This starts a console-based mixer-application, that you can use to un-mute required outputs. Sometimes tihs is needed to get audio out at all, if you're using for instance HDMI (i haven't tried this), or say some analog output.
Then i added the XBMC ppa, which allows me to install the latest version.
/ some dependencies / sudo apt-get install python-software-properties pkg-config sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc sudo apt-get update / and the actual xbmc packages / sudo apt-get install xbmc xbmc-standalone
Finally, starting XBMC produced an error that i didn't have the required packages for hardware acceleration installed. I downloaded the libvdpau package, which cleared the problem.
XBMC seemed really well configured at this point already, because sound worked out of the box (thank you and goodbye pulse, and thank you alsa). Also, video acceleration was configured correctly out of the box. This is a stark difference to some of the old old versions of XBMC i had once installed.
I tried some playback already, but not in the living room with the amplifier and TV, so that's up for later today. The current setup i have is:
- Samsung 40B535 40" LCD television
- Harman/Kardon AVR-235 amplifier
- HTPC
- Silverstone HTPC-case, incl. 120W power supply (model Lascala SST-LC19S-R) - Current price 173€
- ASUS AT3N7A-I motherboard with an Intel Atom processor (dual core 1,6 GHz), Nvidia ION chipset/graphics - Current price 155€
- 2GB DDR2 memory - Current price 28€
- 1 TB Western Digital Green hard drive - Current price 58€
- Totally 414€ with current prices
- Connectivity
- HTPC -> TV with HDMI
- HTPC -> Amplifier with SPDIF (optical cable)
- Wireless Logitech mouse with the Universal Nano Receiver (model M215, red)
- Wireless Logitech keyboard (an older Logitech Comfort)
- Network: 1Gbit through an HP Procurve 1400-series switch
Things to note here. The price of the entire thing hasn't gone down much in a year or so, which is pretty curious. You can get better ION motherboards now, so that's probably something i'd change. Maybe with WLAN or more i/o ports? Perhaps. The case i am pleased with, though it could be entirely passive. The ION/Atom combo, plus the mechanical hard drive create a lot of heat, and i think that this set couldn't run without the CPU fan.
I would also switch to a bigger HD, since the amount of media has exploded. A 2TB drive is like 10 bucks more, or so. 3TB drives have just been released, though they are still rather expensive.
A remote control would be nice, but i've yet to spend any time researching that. I'm pretty good with just the mouse so far. I don't need that far of an integration to the living room. It's still a computer to me, and not an appliance.
The final afterthought goes toward a Blu-ray drive. The case fits a slim Blu-ray drive. The price of such a device is like 100-200€ depending on the model (i'm not sure they all fit?). I've read many positive reports that say Blu-Rays work just fine with Ubuntu + XBMC, but i have no first-hand experience. I may go this route, or i may just stick with the PS3, which seems like a great player.
Brand Bias
This is by no means a new phenomena or anything, but it caught my eye.. or ear i should say, when i was listening to the latest episode of the Linux Action Show (Season 15, episode 3). There was a mention of the curious Apple-bias that many tech sites seem to have; the one mentioned was Tech Crunch. They recently made an article on how many percent of smartphone users are using the latest version of their software. For apple, the number was ~90%, and for android this was 0.4%. Yes. But see for Android the rules were not the same, no. IOS, the apple smartphone OS, has had numerous versions of the 4.x series (which were all included in the 90%), and android has had many under 2.x. But Tech Crunch (which, i know, is a group edited site, so content is perhaps not always of the highest quality) decided that they would compare to Android phones using 2.3 Gingerbread. Which isn't really fair, if apple gets an entire whole series of releases under 4.x and Android gets one specific version with no variance. Oh well, i guess apple just rules because their users are almost all on the latest version then.
This is a widespread phenomena. Anything Apple does is toted as revolutionary, even if it has been done and re-done thousands of times before. They release the iPad which is a crippled piece of shit, and then wait a year and soon they will release the iPad2, to the amazement of all, and it will be the best thing out there because they added an SD card slot and the ability to make video phone calls or something. That's some dank shit right there guys. Apple also called out Android tablets as being nothing but oversized smartphones (this was during CES, which saw the release of multiple Android-tablets), and that their OS is not designed for tablet use. Sure, Android tablets have so far been mostly crap and slow, but then, at least we have choice, and hardware that isn't locked down. Android 3.0 will be geared towards tablets, so there is development here too. And if the iPad isn't a crippled oversized iPhone then i don't know what is.
Engadget has been pretty good at not freaking out about apple stuff, but they do their share too. Gizmodo obviously is another one who just licks the honey-dew sweat off the balls of Apple. There are too many sites to mention that ride that ugly train.
It should be noted that i am typing this on a MacBook Pro, which my employer got for me, at my request. I also had an iPhone 3GS, which i swapped out after about 6 months of use, because i thought it did not deliver what i wanted. I picked the Galaxy S simply because of its features, not because it has a shiny apple on the back of it.The main reasons for choosing an Android phone today is that you get an exchangeable battery, SD card slot, the freedom to choose what applications and most importantly, what carrier you use. Carrier lock-in is perhaps the stupidest invention of the 21st century, and it should be fought whereever it appears. When you buy a device, make sure you own it, and not the manufacturer or carrier.
Yes, the iPhone is exceedingly easy to use, and if you live in a country that has working cellular networks (unlike the US), it'll work great for the basic user. But i can't imagine any advanced user wanting to use an iPhone, simply because the platform is controlled by Apple so tightly. Apple recently even went as far as to change the screws on their flagship hardware (like the iPhone 4), so that you couldn't open the phone as easily as before. Ofcourse, Ifixit now sells the screwdriver and kit to change the mangled freedom-hating screws to regular philips head screws for 9.95. If you still own an iPhone, and you want to keep owning the hardware you paid for, and for instance, change the battery (which is not possible without opening up the device entirely), get that kit from ifixit. The same goes for the Macbook Air, and i think the newer Macbook Pro's. This is just rude behavior, and they had to know that people would open the phones anyway. So why go through the trouble? I wonder how many millions it cost to replace the screws, and what benefit they thought they got out of it?
I also have to hand it to Apple. They have the best marketing team ever. Never fire those guys, they are pure gold. No other company in the history of man has such overhyped crap that everyone seems to want. On top of that, they cost a shit-ton, are completely locked down and behind the curve in features. And again i stress that i picked an iPhone out of my free will, i just didn't like the way it made me feel locked down. You can argue all you like about jailbreaks and unlocks, but the fact is, it's your phone. But with Apple, that's just not the case. You don't own your own phone.
The Lab is growing…
Okay so i'm having two people move in with me, since the wife took off and left me with a 100 m^2 appartment which is costing me..well quite a few euros. It's not that i can't afford it, but i can't afford it comfortably. Comfort is the key issue here. Having someone, or in this case, two someones, to split the rent with, will help me greatly, and i can perhaps afford to buy some technology and other things that make me happy. Being a materialistic asshole to begin with.
Currently, i'm running all my equipment off a 160x80cm IKEA Galant desk, with the T-legs. This is going to be extended by another 120x80 piece, making the total desk space 280x80. On this desk i'm gonna fit three workstations (one for each occupant of this new, curious household), and under the desks will be some of my servers and other testing gear.
My shelf that previously housed a number of small boxes containing various spare components have now been moved away; giving way to more and more books. Like actual literature.
Also what is going on is i'm gonna be updating Dorsia to OpenBSD 4.8, possibly even today. I hope the pf configurations haven't changed that much since 4.7, though i wouldn't mind learning the new syntax properly. The hardware is also changing to a different box. Currently it's a mishmash of older parts in some generic case. What i have in mind is an old HP workstation, that i have slightly pimped out. Nothing spectacular. Also, DynDNS stopped offering the .homeunix.org domain for the free users, and since i'm a cheap bastard, i'm gonna keep doing the free service since that's basically all i need. The new domain will have to be something else.
And to add insult to injury, i'm rigging up a server at work, since that's something i could use as a proper virtualization platform. I'm thinking of running a debian based linux, with virtualbox. I might change my mind, but i really like virtualbox; it does everything i need and it's free.
A rant about IBM
Having dealt with IBM products (hardware and software) in the last few weeks, i have to open up a can of rant. The shit i've been subjected to i would not put on anyone, except perhaps my ex-wife. So here goes:
First of all, the hardware. I dealt with an, admittedly lower range, IBM Bladecenter S, and ran into multiple problems right off the bat. There's an integrated DVD drive option, so you can install stuff off that drive, and just redirect the output to any bladeserver you choose. The only problem is that the CD drive would randomly, apparently, disappear, and cause any installation or other operation running from the CD to fail. So installing Windows from that drive was basically like trying to grab an oiled bowling ball, with cotton gloves six times too large for you. I ended up mapping an .iso file through the network and booting from that. Which was luckily an option in the remote control system provided by IBM. This was about the only positive thing about this whole ordeal.
So what's next. Well, IBM offers something called AMM, advanced management module, and a web interface for this. This is supposed to be the central location for managing the entire Bladecenter. At first glance it actually looks good. It has a system status monitor, which tells you what components if any are failing, and it has separate sections for each of the modules and blades. The problem is, for each module, you need to authenticate separately, even though they are seemingly integrated under the same management website. Passwords like admin, and PASSW0RD do not inspire confidence. How, in this day and age can't we do centralized authentication, and use random generated default passwords? IBM has been around since forever and they still haven't got it.
To top things off, changing the passwords was different for each and every module. For instance, the SAS modules did not accept any complex characters, and did not allow you to change usernames (which are hardcoded as USERID, USERID1, USERID2 etc.). Bad IBM, bad!
Ok what else.. well then there's the firmware updates. As for the AMM the update was straightforward and managed through the website. As for the other modules... well, i'll pick the SAS module, which is made of dogs and curtains. You can log into the module through it's assigned IP address (you assign it either through the AMM or during the initial setup wizard). Log in. Update firmware. So now you realize that IBM doesn't provide a firmware package above 1.03 which was installed from the factory, that you could install through this. There's an update firmware function, but you can't use it for anything above 1.03. So after hitting my head to the wall until i was bleeding profusely, i realized that i need something called the IBM Storage Manager, which is supposed to take care of everything from RAID configuration to statistics to firmware updates.
Download some 200-300 MB package, take fucking forever to install all of the numerous components needed by this thing. Fire it up. Realize after a while that it doesn't detect the SAS modules at all. Google. Hit head to the wall. Google some more. Realize you need either a Linux platform or Windows Server 2003 (an 8 year old product that is either End-of-Lifed, or about to be), and install Storage Manager on that. Server 2008 currently not supported. Any desktop OS, currently not supported (except for linux, which i guess gives IBM at least one point). Install a freaking Windows 2003 virtual machine just for this piece of shit software. Finally get it installed again. Detect modules. Prepare for firmware updates. Get told that Storage Manager isn't entirely compatible with the firmware version on the SAS modules (at this point i was ready to shoot up the office). So you can't update using the web-interface to anything above 1.03, and 1.03 isn't supported by Storage Manager which is required to update to higher versions. AAAAAAAAaaaaaaGGGhhh.
So, i get the package and prepare to update. I get told that it will take like, 90 minutes. Start the process. Update process freezes at 30 % and stays there for over 90 minutes. So i check the module logs, and realize that the fuckers have already been updated, and rebooted as part of the process. Abort the firmware process despite severe warnings about corrupting everything and setting the sky on fire. Reboot the modules for good measure, check LUNs and everything else, and realize they are okay.
How do you manage to fuck things up so badly? Or is it simply that buying lower range hardware gets you in a world of hurt, which you cause on purpose, so people would buy your upper range stuff? Either option means you are doing a bad job. Shun! Shun!
The end.