Anyone with a Google Apps account (aka Google Apps for Your Domain or GAFYD) will be familiar with the discrepancies regarding certain Google services and their availability to Apps users. Google Reader for example requires a normal Google Account, an Apps account won’t do. The way round this is to create a separate Google Account using your Apps email address but this leaves you with two separate accounts with no integration and duplication of some services such as Google Docs. All in all it is a mess.
I came across a doozy of a problem this week though. I recently switched from an iPhone to the HTC Desire which of course runs the Google backed Android OS. Android is pretty tightly integrated with Google, offering automatic email, calendar and contacts syncing among other features and very good it is too.
All went swimmingly until after a week I came across an app I wanted that wasn’t free so I clicked on “buy” in the Android market only to be presented with a selection of strange, yet somehow familiar credit cards to use to make the purchase. This threw me for a minute until I realised they were cards that belong to the company I work for and were assigned to a Google Checkout account associated with my work gmail account. An account I had added to my Desire after adding my personal Google Apps account. Nowhere did the Android Market indicate that it had “chosen” this account.
So how do I switch to my personal apps account? This turned out to be a bit problematic. Actually it’s worse than that, it isn’t possible. A Google Apps account can’t purchase from the Android Market even if you have created a Google Account using the same email address and it is a known, long term problem. I found a workaround here, but it wouldn’t work for me as I’d already added my work gmail account to my phone and that was taking precedence. So, the obvious solution is to delete my work gmail account from my phone yes? No! Android won’t let me delete that account unless I do a factory reset (and lose all data on the phone) because it is “required by some apps”.
In the end I took the easy way out and added my credit card to the Google Checkout account associated with my work gmail account which now leaves me with the risk of accidentally paying for a work purchase with my personal card or purchasing an app using a work card.
I know Google have recently made noises that they are working on sorting this nonsense out but it needs sorting like yesterday!
After over 18 months as a very happy iPhone 3G user I decided it was time to make the switch to Android with the wonderful HTC Desire. As a long term Linux user Android would seem to be my natural place and with the Desire the hardware seems to have pretty much caught up with the Apple world so there was no excuse. Having this great new phone without running the latest and greatest release of Android seemed silly though and not wanting to wait for HTC and O2 to pull their fingers out and release an official update the only answer was to root it and install an unofficial ROM. I was pleasantly surprised how easy this was.
Obviously I take no responsibility if you follow this and anything goes wrong but it worked for me on my Desire with HBOOT 80. Rooting using the new unrevoked3 is a breeze and a Goldcard is NOT required and as long as you are careful to make a Nandroid backup of your original setup before flashing a replacement ROM then you can’t really go wrong.
Note that by doing this you will void any warranty you may have.
Requirements:
Linux PC (Ubuntu 10.04 in my case)
HTC Desire
USB Cable
Titanium Backup from the Android Market
Unrevoked3 from here (16.1 MB)
Updated Radio ROM from here (11.3 MB)
Froyo Sense ROM from here (134.4 MB)
About 30 minutes
I succumbed to temptation and bought another Joggler for playing around with as the first is serving so well as a bedside media player using Rhythmbox for streaming radio and podcasts and the odd bit of iPlayer.
I thought I would update with a few small things I’ve done recently that others might find useful:
Fixing the XBMC Skin
When freshly installed from the XBMC PPA there is some graphical corruption of the skin due to packed textures that the Joggler GPU can’t handle. This is fixed in the svn version, I’ve also uploaded a copy of the svn version of the Confluence skin here so you can install it in the PPA version. This also includes the resized backgrounds specifically for Joggler (from here).
To install either ssh into the Joggler or do the following from Terminal on the Joggler itself:
cd /home/joggler/.xbmc/skin/
wget http://zorg.org/6w
tar zxvf xbmc_confluence-stable_skin.tar.gz
rm xbmc_confluence-stable_skin.tar.gz
Then just change the skin to Confluence_stable in Settings->Appearance->Skin
XBMC full screen switch
Another issue with XBMC is that the touchscreen doesn’t work in XBMCs fullscreen mode, I’ve seen a fix mentioned here that works by using the openbox window manager but I’ve done it by installing wmctrl and adding a menu item to switch XBMC to full screen once started. Just create a menu item with the command: wmctrl -x -r xbmc.bin.xbmc.bin -b toggle,fullscreen
XBMC with gesture control
I’ve uploaded a short video of XBMC running on the O2 Joggler with easystroke providing gesture control which you can see below. This is the first time I’ve used easystroke and I’m pretty impressed, it could be useful with other apps as well I think.
Turning the screen off
I also decided to turn the screensaver off altogether and have added a menu item and desktop icon to switch the screen and backlight off with xset when desired. To do this install the xutils package and add and menu item/launcher for: xset dpms force off To turn the screen back on just touch it. This just works better for me for the way I’ve been using it, of course YMMV.
GMail iPad interface
I also tried the GMail iPad interface in Chrome, click the image on the left for a full size screenshot. You can do this by spoofing the iPad user agent string so that Google thinks the Joggler is an iPad. Just add the following to the command to start Chrome: –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10“
so it reads: /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10” %U
Whilst it looks great, scrolling doesn’t work so it’s not particularly useful unfortunately. Would be nice if this could be fixed somehow.
O2 have got the Joggler on offer at £50 again until the end of May so if you missed out last time now is your chance. This is a cracking deal for a nice hackable bit of hardware, I’m very tempted to get another.
See my previous post on the Joggler for more info. Things have moved on a bit since then too and most of the niggles with running Ubuntu have been sorted. I’m actually using a different Ubuntu image now which works “out of the box”.
Android is also running on the Joggler but isn’t really usable yet do a lack of graphics drivers but it’s only a matter of time before that is sorted.
When the window control buttons were moved to the left of the window in Ubuntu 10.04 there were a lot of complaints, Mark Shuttleworth would only say that the move was necessary to free the space on the right for something else; Well here is that something else: Window Indicators, or Windicators. “Windicators are indicators displayed in the window title bar that behave just like the indicators in the panel: they have an icon which shows state, and clicking on the icon brings up a menu.”
Part of the idea is to allow the status bar to be removed from most applications, instead using a Google Chrome like status overlay for transitory messages and moving things like Online/Offline status, progress indicators and so on to the new windicator panel. The windicator panel could also allow for things like application specific volume controls, something which is currently buried in the sound preferences.
This sounds like an excellent idea to me with lots of potential for future development. Hopefully it will placate some of those moaning about the button position too!
I’ve been running the betas of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx release for a few weeks now and it has been rock solid so it looks like the final release will be on target on or around the 29th April.
Visually, Ubuntu has never looked so good, the new ambience and radiance themes are a huge improvement over the old default brown and orange look, I’m using the dark ambience theme and it looks great out of the box.
Under the hood things are improved too, as well as all the usual updates to the latest versions of most packages Lucid also has a much faster boot time which will be great for laptops and the like and comes with Gnome 2.30 which has a lot of useful updates including a handy split view mode for the Nautilus file manager. There is also a new panel notification system and a new “Me Menu” to control instant messaging and social networking status. One big feature that is getting a lot of attention is the addition of libimobiledevice to provide easy interfacing with the iPhone and iPod devices. Watch the video here for a demonstration of what is possible with this and a few other tools. The most surprising thing about this to my mind is that it doesn’t require the iPhone/iPod to be jailbroken, an impressive feat and a most welcome update.
Control buttons on Ubuntu 10.04
One somewhat controversial change has been the decision to move the window control buttons to the left hand side, the reason for this has been said to free up the space on the right for “something else” in the future, vague as that might be at the moment the reaction from a lot of people seems to have been a bit extreme; I found that I got used to it very quickly and it is only that way in the new themes and can be changed easily enough using gconf if it really bothers you that much. I’ve decided to leave them on the left.
The upgrade from 9.10 went smoothly as usual, I love how the upgrade procedure on Ubuntu is so robust now, I’ve been using Linux for a long time (since 1995) so I can remember when an full distribution upgrade was the over optimistic attempt you made before giving up and doing a fresh install! This system has been continually upgraded from a 8.04 KDE4 Remix installation right through 8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and finally 10.04 with all but zero issues along the way.
Lucid is an LTS (Long Term Support) release that will be supported until April 2013 on the desktop and April 2015 for the server edition so this is going to be a good one to upgrade to if you don’t do so regularly.
I grabbed one of the O2 Jogglers last week while they were on special offer at £49.99. The Joggler is a rebranded version of the OpenPeak OpenFrame and is touted by O2 as a “replacement for your fridge door” it is intended to be a sort of home messaging hub with calendar, weather, news headlines, streaming radio, photo viewer, music player and 50 free text message per month. Physically it looks like a fairly standard 7″ digital photo frame but underneath it hides a lot more. Powered by a 1.3GHz Z520 Atom CPU and with 512Mb RAM, 1Gb storage, WiFi and wired ethernet, 800×480 capacitive touch screen, audio out and USB it has a lot more potential than either the default O2 or OpenPeak software offers.
With the possibilities such hardware offers O2 really are doing themselves a disservice by crippling it with the rubbish default software, it’s no wonder it got such rotten reviews when launched last year at £149.99. Fortunately it is very hackable. It’s a doddle to enable telnet so that you can install extra apps using the default OS. Someone has even made a script called “Pimp My Joggler” to automatically install many of the OpenPeak apps, streaming of BBC TV channels, games and more, although it does install a lot of rubbish so you might want to stick to doing it manually.
As it uses an EFI bootloader booting other operating systems on it is also relatively straightforward and due to the amount of people who have got one of these in their hands since the £49.99 offer the hacking community around it has really taken off in the last couple of weeks. There are people working on various alternate OS options including Linux, Android, MER and MeeGo.
Ubuntu Netbook Edition on the O2 Joggler
I’ve put the Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Edition on mine using this image which has support for the touchscreen, WiFi and sound (with a couple of tweaks required to get the sound working). It’s just a case of writing the image to a suitably sized USB device (I used an 8Gb SDHC card in a USB adapter) and turning the Joggler on with it inserted in the USB socket, it will then boot from the USB device leaving the default OS untouched. The Joggler only has the one USB socket so a hub will be required to connect a mouse and keyboard.
Initially I had to log in at the console (login: joggler, password: joggler) and type startx to get X running but strangely once I had fixed the sound it automatically boots straight to the Ubuntu NE desktop, not sure why that would be the case but that is all that was changed.
To fix the sound you need to rename the file /lib/modules/2.6.31.6/kernel/drivers/acpi/processor.ko (eg. to processor.ko.old) and comment out the last line of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add options snd-hda-intel model=basic to the bottom of the file. Reboot and sound should work.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that tonights airing of the Delia Derbyshire documentary “Sculptress of Sound: The Lost Works of Delia Derbyshire” on BBC Radio 4 was listened to by enough people to make her name a trending topic on Twitter in the UK for most of the evening – and not just because it means I wasn’t the only person listening to Radio 4 at 8pm on a Saturday night!
Most people will have been exposed to Delia Derbyshire’s work even if they aren’t aware of her name as she created the original 1963 arrangement of the Doctor Who theme tune. Her interpretation of the original score by composer Ron Grainer left him so stunned that on hearing the finished version he asked “Did I really write this?” to which Delia replied “most of it”. Grainer was so impressed with the result that he even tried to get her credited as co-composer but BBC bureaucracy prevented it.
The documentary explains how creating such other worldly sounds in those days was a laborious process involving recording individual notes on magnetic tape which were then spliced together to make up the final tune. The show also includes various interviews and recordings with Delia and other examples of her music that demonstrate how far ahead of her time she was. In particular the 1968 White Noise album “An Electric Storm” made with David Vorhaus and fellow Radiophonic Workshop member Brian Hodgson is one of my favourites and is now considered an important and influential album in the development of electronic music.
Sadly Delia died in 2001 at the age of 64 as a result of complications from breast cancer treatment. After her death her private collection of the material she recorded was bequeathed to Mark Ayres, archivist for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who has worked with Manchester University to create a digitised archive of her work.
If you missed the documentary you can hear it on iPlayer here or it is repeated on Monday at 3pm on Radio 4.
In the last post I described how you can use XBMC Live on the Acer Revo but as well as that works it seemed a waste to restrict the Revo to just XBMC so I’ve since installed the 64 bit version of Xubuntu instead and run XBMC on top of that.
I chose Xubuntu as it is a light weight version of Ubuntu using the XFCE window manager instead of the Gnome desktop environment so has the advantage of having all the Ubuntu repositories available without the overhead of running Gnome or KDE (in the case of Kubuntu).
I installed the 64-bit version of Xubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) available here.
As with XBMC Live I used unetbootin to create a bootable image on a USB flash drive (actually an SD card in this case). Once this is done insert the flash drive or SD card into the Revo and turn it on, pressing F12 during boot and selecting the USB drive or SD as the boot device.
I installed it into the unpartitioned space on the Revo drive leaving the factory Linpus install in place. Linpus is added as an option to the Grub boot menu allowing you to choose between it and your new Xubuntu install should you need to (I can’t see why you would).
Once you have installed Xubuntu and booted into it you will see a popup within a few minutes prompting you to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers which you will need to use the Revo’s ION GPU for HD playback (you will also need to change the “Render Method” to VDPAU in the XBMC settings later on as with the Live setup).
Earlier this week I bought an Acer Aspire Revo R3610 to replace my original Xbox based XBMC system which has provided sterling service for the last 7 years.
I’ve been a big fan of the Xbox version of XBMC and its predecessor Xbox Media Player (it was the only reason I bought my Xbox) but it’s getting a bit limited now due to its 733MHz CPU and paltry 64MB RAM.
By contrast the Revo R3610 has a dual core Atom N330 CPU and up to 4GB RAM as well as a NVIDIA GeForce 9400 Ion GPU. As a result XBMC on the Revo is capable of playing full 1080p HD video without problem. It makes a perfect media center; it’s small, low powered and if you have a MCE remote control it will work straight off, just plug the USB receiver in.
I’m currently using the XBMC Live release which is a self contained install built on top of a minimal Ubuntu installation. Installing XBMC Live on the Revo is a breeze:
Use unetbootin to create a bootable image on a USB flash drive
Insert the flash drive in the Revo and turn it on, pressing F12 during boot and selecting the USB drive as the boot device
At the menu you can select to run straight from the USB drive (option 1) or you can select “Install XBMCLive to disk”
Once that is done just reboot and it will boot straight into XBMC
You will then want to go into the settings and change the “Render Method” in the video section to VDPAU. This allows XBMC to use the Revo’s NVIDIA Ion GPU for video processing. If you are using HDMI for your audio output you will also need to go to the audio section and change the output to Custom and enter plug:hdmi
It makes a fantastic media center and the Revo R3610 with dual core Atom N330 CPU, 2GB RAM and 250GB HD is currently on offer for £199 at ebuyer which is a great deal.
