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.
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.
Remember all the exciting things we were promised? Back when the year 2000 seemed unfathomably distant the future looked rosy, by now we would be living in a Star Trek like world where robots would do all the work and we would be able to spend all our time on leisure pursuits. A world where diseases and even the common cold would be a thing of the past.
Now here we are, nearly ten years into the 21st century, where is it all? Where is my jetpack, my electric flying car, the underwater cities and the day trips to the moon? What happened to being able to control the weather?
Instead, we have a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots and the technological wonders that would bring our new peaceful, prosperous society have not appeared.
Our cars are still grounded and powered by fuel extracted from the earth at great cost (both monetary and politically) not electricity. The electricity which by now was supposed to be “too cheap to meter” instead of increasingly expensive and still generated by pollution spewing power stations burning a dwindling supply of fossil fuels.
Even some of the things that have materialised are disappointing, the household robot is here after a fashion, but it’s really just a vacuum cleaner. The jetpack is here too but you won’t be going to work on one anytime soon.
Recreational space travel might be on the cards but it’s not going to be the ubiquitous, even routine image portrayed in the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey for a long time, if ever.
So what went wrong? Well I think a lot of the time, investment and talent that should have gone towards bringing us these things has been squandered on military development, procurement and war. The oil companies and others tried to strangle the electric car at birth for their own financial gain (at least this seems, finally, to be making progress again) and fear of nuclear power killed our cheap electricity. Maybe those were just more optimistic times too.
Sure, it’s not all doom and gloom; Computers, the internet and gadgets such as smartphones are bringing a different, perhaps unpredicted, slice of “the future of the past” into our present but it’s not for all, there is still war, famine, sickness and a huge percentage of the worlds population still don’t even have basics such as clean drinking water. Maybe William Gibson was right when he said “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”.
At the very least, we’re more than a bit behind schedule and frankly, it’s all a bit disappointing really.
After much umming and ahhing I finally decided to get an iPhone 3G 16GB and wow, what a fantastic bit of kit. Feels so good in the hand (you’d have to try it to understand) and the OS is the slickest mobile OS I’ve seen by a good margin. Definitely the best thing I have bought in a long while!
If I had a complaint, and obviously I was aware of this beforehand, it is that it needs iTunes for syncing etc… I don’t have any recent macs here, I’m a long term Linux guy as you know but I do have a couple of XP boxes around so that’s not the problem, it’s just that iTunes always seems so laggy and unresponsive on windows. Might be getting a Mac Mini before too long though as I want to have a look into iPhone app development.
Saw this in action at last night… it’s good, but not quite as impressive as it looks in the vid – the 45 degree angle of the Wiimote camera is very noticeable up close, you can hardly move before it is out of range. Still an impressive hack though and very easy to set up, give it a try if you have a Wii.
I’ve replaced my main desktop machine, it’s about time too!
Specs are: AMD Phenom 9550 (2.2Ghz Quad core), Asus M3A mobo, 2Gb Corsair PC2-6400 RAM, 500Gb SATAII HD, Nvidia 8600GT dual DVI Gfx, 700W PSU and a nice case + some fans that weren’t 50p each (learnt that lesson the hard way!)
Should have 3 x 22″ widescreen monitors here on Friday. Two for this new PC and one connected to another, linked with Synergy. Play time
Just had beans on toast with @chilliheat Terminator sauce to try and kill this cold and think I might have overdone it... again. Hell fire!about 19 hours agofrom Ubuntu
Got an email saying it is my @lovefilm birthday, 8 years since I joined (actually it was in-movies but several takeovers later...) long timeabout 20 hours agofrom Ubuntu
