This update brings better behaviour on HTC Sense devices, where the screen is kept on (as this is necessary to keep the device’s light switched on).  In addition, when the screen is switched off (manually) and switched on again, it can switch on the light again; previously it didn’t switch the light back on, yet still ran the service.  Oops.

Get the update through the Android Market, or download the APK right here.

In a sort of sequel to my first Android app Torchure, I have just released Searchlight on to the Android Market.

The unique thing about this flashlight is that it’s activated by long-pressing the Search button.  Each time you do this, the LED will toggle on or off.  This means that (nearly) regardless of what app you’re in, you can toggle the LED.

You can even switch off the screen to save your battery for the LED.  Just note that on most devices the Search button will be disabled while the screen is off, so you’ll probably have to switch on the screen, unlock it, then hold the Search button.

When you long-press the Search button for the first time, you’ll probably get a selection of different apps for you to choose from.  Just select Searchlight off the list to toggle the LED.  Check the “Use by default for this action” checkbox to make sure that dialog doesn’t appear in future.

If you want that Search selection to appear again, go to Settings > Applications > Manage applications > Searchlight > “Clear defaults” button.  Then hold Search again and make a new selection.  It will also reappear when the list of actions changes, for example you install or uninstall an app that has global search functionality.

There are a couple of caveats.

• It’ll only work on devices that implement the standard camera flash interface introduced by Froyo.  If it doesn’t work on yours, contact me and I’ll see if I can add support for your device or system software.
• Don’t run Searchlight at the same time as another app using the camera, such as Camera, Barcode Scanner or Shopper.  Things will go badly, trust me.

It’s available on the Android Market for any Android device with a camera and flash running 2.2 (Froyo) and above.  This first version is only a smidge over 11KB and requires no outrageous permissions (just camera for obvious reasons, and wake lock to keep the LED on when the screen is off).

Alternatively, if you prefer not to use the Market, you can download it here.

Update 2010-11-09: Added clarification on why I suggest having a short (sub-10 second) ringtone. You want it to loop, right? =P

Following on from my previous articles on ringtones, I’ve finally worked out how to make ringtones loop seamlessly in Android.

My problem before was that, despite the fact I made an OGG that should loop properly, when played back on Android, it didn’t.  Turns out, there’s a little piece of metadata you need to add to the tags in the ringtone to make it loop properly.

Using your favourite tag editor (I used foobar2000 on Windows), add a tag/field called “ANDROID_LOOP”, and set it to “true”.

Please note that the file itself will also need to loop properly for things to work out.  That means that if you’re basing your ringtone on a longer piece of music, it needs to be trimmed down to 10 or fewer seconds and trimmed in such a way that the audio sounds like it goes on forever when played from beginning to end repeatedly.

The file doesn’t have to be less than 10 seconds, but I figure you’re reading this because you want to make a file that loops!  Most carriers will stop ringing your phone after 15 to 30 seconds and pass the call to voicemail.  This depends on the carrier, your preferences (if you can change how long voicemail waits at all), and whether or not you have voicemail enabled!

Also, you need to use a format that doesn’t add silence to the end of the track. OGG (which I recommend), FLAC and AAC should all work fine. I do not know if Android reads LAME’s metadata with allows MP3s encoded by it to loop. MP3s encoded with other encoders will probably add silence and as such will not loop perfectly.

Have fun with this!

Don’t remind me of the irony…

This update includes:

• A new colour! You can change the screen to red, to help preserve night vision. This makes the torch less effective, mind.
  • To switch colour, either swipe sideways on the screen or use the new menu option!
• New preferences have been added to let you choose what colour you want on starting Torchure: white, red, or whatever you last used.
• The Lock Brightness preference has been fixed, and now actually works.  (Locking via pressing the trackball or the menu option worked fine)
• Added a new Hints & Tips screen, to highlight the little things I can’t fit anywhere else!

Torchure (for Android) is a pretty simple application.  It turns the screen white and, as default, whacks up the backlight to maximum.  I did say simple, didn’t I?

However, it also lets you change that backlight brightness (useful if, say, you’ve been to a particularly wild party and you need to step over some people without waking/blinding them) and lock it so you don’t go accidentally changing it.  Torchure is designed to work for you, not make you work for it!

It marks my first release on to the Android Market, and it requires no permissions whatsoever — it is a torch, after all.

Even though Google is telling me this link will not work, go check out Torchure on the market now!

And if you’re not using an Android handset, AndroidZoom has you covered until Google release their updated Market.

NB: The link does work (on Android 2.2). Guess they forgot to update the documentation.

Personally I find it irritating as the battery readout in all the distros of Linux I’ve used on my Eee report the battery at 0% over half an hour before the battery is actually dead.  No amount of conditioning or software modification seems to fix it, so I’m living with it.

However, with the newer versions of Gnome Power Manager, Do Nothing is hidden!  So my machine would go to sleep, despite the fact I know there’s at least 30 more minutes of battery life going to waste.  So annoying!

To fix it (albeit temporarily), you need to edit the gconf values for the settings you’re interested in to “nothing”.

The easiest way to do this is to use an application like gconf-editor and edit the values through that:

1. Run gconf-editor.
   • If you don’t have it installed, go to your favourite package manager and install it through that.
2. Using the column on the left side, navigate to apps > gnome-power-manager.
3. In my case, I wanted to change the critical battery behaviour to Do Nothing.  So I navigated in to actions and set the value of critical_battery to nothing.
   • If you want to change, say, the behaviour of a power button press, navigate to buttons instead of actions.
   • Repeat this step for each value you want to change.
4. Close gconf-editor.

That’s it!  One thing you need to keep in mind is that if you later change the setting away from Do Nothing to something else, the Do Nothing option will disappear.

Hope this works for you as it has me.

(I’m typing this post with 0% battery left!  What I crazy daredevil I am.)

Update 19:58: Forgot to mention that Do Nothing will disappear if deselected.  Fixed.

The Problem

Today I’ve been trying to configure the touchpad on my Eee PC 901 to my liking.  It’s a Synaptics touchpad, and supports tracking multiple fingers, and I wanted to take more advantage of that.

GNOME does have support for configuring multiple finger gestures out of the box, with gnome-mouse-properties (or System » Preferences » Mouse) and then selecting the Touchpad tab.  This is all good and works fine — if you’re satisfied with what GNOME gives you.

Unfortunately I wasn’t.  When you enable clicking on the touchpad, GNOME sets one finger taps to left-click, two to right, and three to middle.  I tend to use middle-click more often than right-click, thanks to browsing the web and liking making new tabs, plus I already have a dedicated right-click button.

So I set off to change it.  After reading material courteousy of Arch Linux’s wiki, I found (and remembered from attempting the same thing ages ago) that configuration is done through the HAL using fdi policies, which are just specifically formatted XML files.  (The old xorg.conf way is deprecated and isn’t as flexible, not that it matters for configuring the trackpad.)

It sounds scary and involves more typing, but in the end it’s just as simple a process as it used to be, even if it involves jumping through an extra hoop or two.

Configuration

First you have to create a file with the fdi extension in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/.  I’ve named my file 99-synaptics.fdi, following example from /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/, but you can name yours whatever you like.

sudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/99-synaptics.fdi

Note: You need root permissions to be able to create and edit this file.  If you run Ubuntu (or are in the /etc/sudoers file), this can be accomplished using the sudo command as shown above. You can use whatever editor you like, too. vi, emacs, nano, kate…

Once the file is created, it’s time to get messy!  The fdi file contains a match rule, which tells HAL which device you want to configure, and then a series of merge rules which apply your desired configuration into the HAL.  The easiest way to show this is by example, so here’s my prospective configuration:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.product" contains="Elantech Touchpad">
<merge type="string" key="input.x11_driver">synaptics</merge>
<merge type="string" key="input.x11_options.VertTwoFingerScroll">true</merge>
<merge type="string" key="input.x11_options.HorizTwoFingerScroll">true</merge>
<merge type="string" key="input.x11_options.TapButton1">1</merge>
<merge type="string" key="input.x11_options.TapButton2">2</merge>
<merge type="string" key="input.x11_options.TapButton3">3</merge>
<merge type="string" key="input.x11_options.ClickFinger1">1</merge>
<merge type="string" key="input.x11_options.ClickFinger2">3</merge>
<merge type="string" key="input.x11_options.ClickFinger3">2</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

Starting from the top, here’s a quick description of each part:

• The <?xml part is the XML declaration required in any valid XML file.  Nothing interesting here.
• The <deviceinfo> and <device> are just boilerplate code that tell the HAL to expect rules relating to devices. Again, nothing interesting here.
• Now things start getting good!  The <match> line describes how to find the device you want to configure:
  • Simply put, the HAL searches for the contains string inside the key field.  Whatever matches that search it’ll apply the merge rules to.
  • There are other ways to match aside from contains, but this is all you need to know to get things working.
• The <merge> lines are the meat of the file, describing each and every configuration change you want to make.

You’re probably thinking this is all good and well, but how did I come up with this stuff in the first place?  Well, the answer lies in the HAL itself.

The lshal command lists all the devices the HAL can detect (that’s “ls hal”, get it?).  You might want to pipe the contents to less, to be able to scroll and search through the large amount of text that’s returned:

lshal | less

In less, type /synaptics to search for the string “synaptics”.  less should automatically scroll to the point we’re interested in; your touchpad.  If it cannot be found, you either don’t have a Synaptics touchpad or the synaptics driver isn’t being loaded.  Try searching for Touchpad or similar words, but anything more than that is beyond the scope of this article.

Once you have found the device on your list, you’ll be able to see a list of keys and their values.  You want to pick one of these fields that will not change between boots to place as the match rule inside your fdi file.  I chose info.product, but you can choose something else like input.product if it strikes your fancy.  Either way, fill in the <match> line with the key that you chose and the string that’ll match it.  Ideally this search will only match your touchpad and nothing else.

Next is the fun part — configuration. To do this simply open up the man page for synaptics:

man synaptics

This’ll give a detailed list of everything that can be changed within the synaptics driver.  For each value that you want to change, find its name on the manpage, and add a new merge rule with the appropriate key.  Note that every key in the fdi begins with “input.x11_options.” followed by the synaptics key you want to change.  (The exception to this in my file is the first merge rule, which just makes sure that the synaptics driver has been loaded for my touchpad.)

If you want to test an option before making it permanent, use the synclient key=value command, filling in key and value with the option you want to change.

Once you’ve added all the merge rules you like, close all the tags and save the file.  Now just restart the HAL (or your computer) and your settings will be applied.  Almost.

GNOME Respect

Now that you have your configuration all set up, you need to stop GNOME from changing your carefully crafted settings to ones of its choosing.

To do this, simply run the following command:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/plugins/mouse/active false

If you get cold feet and want to enable GNOME’s control over mouse and trackpad settings, run this command:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/plugins/mouse/active true

That’s really it.  Thanks to jan for finding this value.

I’ve written this to be as generalised as possible, so it should work for many different distros so long as they are using the latest HAL/Xorg/kernel.  I’m running Fedora 11 and have added my name to the /etc/sudoers file, allowing me to run sudo.

If you have any questions or just want to say thanks, feel free to leave a comment or contact me!

Remembering the previous times I’ve used EAC, when you click a button to start a rip, it asks you where you want to save the ripped files.

Turns out if you set EAC to save into a predetermined location instead of asking, EAC manages to rip perfectly fine!

So, here’s a step-by-step guide to stop it crashing:

1. Open Exact Audio Copy.
2. Go to File > EAC Options.
3. Click the Directories tab.
4. Instead of “Ask every time”, choose Use this Directory, and pick a directory of your choosing.
   • I personally use:

     C:\Users\<Username>\Music\Extracted

5. Click OK.

That’s it!  Good luck.

Did you know that all the icons you line up on the taskbar automatically get keyboard shortcuts?  If you want to launch one of them, just press the Windows key and the number of the program’s position along the list.  So to launch the first program, press Win+1; to launch the second, press Win+2; this continues all the way up to Win+0, which opens the tenth program.  Cool, huh?  This is the same behaviour as the Quick Launch Bar in Windows Vista (which I used extensively).

Even better, if you want to open one of those programs with admin permissions (for example, using Notepad to edit the hosts file), you can press Win+Ctrl+Shift+<Number>, accept any UAC prompt, and voilà!  Program a la admin.

I love keyboard shortcuts.

However, there has been one change which caught me out, thanks to a subtle and ambiguous rewording of the backups dialog.

When backups are taken, as default only user folders that were created by Windows are backed up.  For reference that’s Appdata, Contacts, Desktop, Downloads, Favorites, Links, Music, Pictures, Saved Games, Searches and Videos.

This is different from the default behaviour of backups in Windows Vista, which backed up everything in C:\Users\<Your Username>

If you make any folders of your own at the root of your user folder, they will NOT be backed up.  If you want to back those up, I recommend you go through the backup wizard again and say that you want to configure what gets backed up yourself.  Select more locations, and navigate through the filesystem until you check C:\Users\<Your Username>.

I lost a few files when I reinstalled 7 for unrelated reasons, and lost the contents of my Code and Programs folders.  I’m lucky that I had only been using the OS for a couple of weeks–had I been using it longer I could have lost a lot more.  At least it’s given me an excuse to code!

Just a friendly warning for fellow Windows 7 users who are as fussy about file organisation as I am.

Basically nothing changes, but I just like to be comprehensive.

1. Download the TwitterStatus plugin.  It’ll be a file ending in .pl.
2. Move this file to your Pidgin plugins folder.  If any folders don’t exist, create them:
   • Linux: ~/.purple/plugins/
   • Windows Vista/7: C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\.purple\plugins
3. Install Perl:
   • Linux: It’s probably already installed.
   • Windows: Use the most recent Strawberry Perl installation:
4. Install  the XML::XPath module into perl:
   1. Open a command line.
   2. Run perl -MCPAN -e shell.
   3. Type install XML::XPath and then hit Return.  Wait for the install to finish.
   4. Type quit and hit Return, then close your command line
5. Start (or restart) Pidgin.
6. From the contact list, go to Help > About.  At the very bottom of the textbox that appears it should say “Perl: Enabled”.  If it does not, repeat steps 3 and 4.
7. From the contact list, go to Tools > Plug-ins.  Find Twitter Status on the list, check the checkbox next to it, and then click Configure Plug-in.
8. In the configuration window that appears, type in your username in the top textbox (labelled Username, surprise surprise).  Configure anything else you want to your liking.

That’s it!  You do not need to set this up again, it is a one-off set up for the computer.  Of course, you will need to go through this procedure again if you have multiple computers you use Pidgin on, or if you format and reinstall your OS.

Anyway, just now I realised that I didn’t link to any encoders for it.  So if anyone wondered what I used to accomplish the task, they’d be stuck!

So here’s a quick update to fill in in the gaps:

If you’re wanting to just convert some files you already have into Ogg Vorbis, I’d recommend oggdropXPd.  Open the program, right-click on the “dropbox” that appears to configure it, then when it’s all done, drag and drop the files you want to convert onto the dropbox, and wait!  It works fine under Windows Vista (32-bit) and Windows 7 (64-bit).

If you’re wanting to both edit a music track into a short ringtone and convert to Ogg Vorbis, Audacity did the job for me.  It’s open-source and supports a number of file types (including MP3 if you download a separate plug-in), so hopefully it’ll work for you too.  Again, it works fine in Windows Vista (32-bit) and Windows 7 (64-bit).

The settings I used for the Ogg Vorbis files on my G1 where 128kbps CBR.  You don’t need much quality because the phone’s speaker isn’t exactly an orchestra, and I used Constant Bitrate under the assumption it would take less CPU to decode. If you know otherwise, please let me know!

Update 2010-06-21: If you want to use custom ringtones in the first place, install Rings Extended from the Android Market, then go to Home > Settings > Sound & display > Phone ringtone.  When it asks which application you want to use, select Rings Extended, and check the checkbox so that it doesn’t ask you again.

This will work anywhere any application asks for you to pick a ringtone, assuming it asks via a standard means!

I’ve also written another article detailing how to convert your music in to Ogg Vorbis files.

Why, do I hear you cry?

Simple really, here’s the story: when I first transferred various files to my phone for use as ringtones (one each for calls, texts, e-mails…) I used MP3s.  Thanks to the Rings Extended application in the marketplace I had no trouble in using them.

But one thing struck me as odd whenever I got a call (or text etc.); lag.  If I were to get a call right now, the phone would vibrate, the screen would turn black, and then a couple of seconds later the contact details show and my ringtone starts playing.  Not ideal.

So I decided to try something.  I set one of the standard ringtones that came with the phone as the current ringtone, and tried again.  This time the phone started vibrating and played the tone at the same time.

After that I had to figure out what format they used, since I had no idea where the files could be and what format they were.  I reasoned that Ogg Vorbis would be the format they’d use — an open-source OS with open-source ringtones.  Makes sense, right?

So I tried it: I converted those same ringtones I started out with to 128kbps CBR Vorbis files.  128kbps because I thought that a higher bitrate would lag the phone out (plus you wouldn’t hear a quality difference from the speaker anyway), and CBR because I thought it would be easier for the decoder to work with, though I have no evidence to back this up.

Voilà!  Suddenly my ringtones loaded a lot quicker, and no longer did I get vibrations with no accompanying ringtone (unless it was set to vibrate only!).

I haven’t tested other settings on the Vorbis encoder (different bitrates, VBR etc.), nor have I tested other formats aside from MP3 and Ogg.

Hope this is of help to someone that actually cares about this stuff.

I cooked up a little command to help out here!  But first, we need to make sure you have the command that we’re going to need here, id3v2.  Install it from the official repositories using your distribution’s package manager.  For example, on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install id3v2

This command is used to view and manipulate ID3 tags inside of music files.  One argument in particular is of use to us, -s, which strips ID3v1 tags out of the specified file(s).

With that in mind the task is just getting a list of the files that you want to remove ID3v1 tags from.  I’ve managed to solve that and fit it all in one line — don’t forget to replace the path with the correct one:

find /path/to/music -name \*.mp3 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 id3v2 -s

That’s it! After testing I ran it on my whole music library and it appears to have survived just fine. Just be patient (and careful) if you’re stripping tags out of hundreds or thousands of files.

Let me know how it works out for you, and any improvements you may have!

But all is not lost!  Simply follow this quick guide.  This is from a Sagem ITC 62 — it may or may not be the same process for other models:

1. Press Menu on your remote control.
2. Select Installation.  You’ll be presented with a screen where you have to enter an Installation Code.
3. Press these buttons one after the other on your remote: Menu, Menu, Red button, Menu.  You should be taken to a new screen displaying User Settings and Box Settings.
4. Select User Settings.

Now what you do at this point is up to you.  You have two choices:

Disable the Installation Code

This means that you don’t have to enter or remember an installation code in future, but it might be vulnerable to inquisitive children.  If this isn’t an issue for you (or you don’t care!), follow these steps:

1. Select Locking.
2. Switch Box Locked and Channels Locked to No.

Change the Installation Code

If you still want an installation code for whatever reason, follow these steps:

1. Select Change Installation Code.
2. Enter any four digit code you like, and press OK.
3. Re-enter the same code again.  Press OK.

That’s it!  Let me know how it goes for you.

Credit to Steven Checkley for his amazing hackery.

To launch an elevated command prompt (i.e. a prompt with admin privileges, required to do various things if UAC is enabled on Vista), simply open the Start Menu (Windows key), type “cmd” without quotes, and press Control+Shift+Return.

This will bring up a UAC prompt asking you to elevate the process.  Select Continue (Alt+C). Done!

This does work for some other applications.  But in my experience it’s hit and miss!  Strange.

This technique may also work in Windows 7, but I haven’t been able to test it myself.

Basically, I recently got a NAS and decided that I wanted my router to save its bandwidth usage statistics on it.  That way whenever I perform an upgrade to the firmware on the router I won’t erase all the stats.  This part is easy, as the firmware has the functionality for this.  (The firmware I keep mentioning is the Tomato firmware.  I highly recommend it if you happen to have a compatible Linux router!)

Now, after I set it all up, I went on to the network shares to see if the statistics were being saved properly.  What I saw I didn’t exactly expect:

A screenshot from Directory Opus of my local network share... And some interesting modified times

Now, nothing may look wrong at first glance. But take another look at the screenshot, particularly the column titled “Modified”.

Got it yet? You have? That’s great! You haven’t? You’re probably just not as finnicky as I am, don’t worry.

Anyway, enough suspense: the thing that caught me out was that the modified time for the statistics file was “tomorrow“.

“So what?” I hear you cry!  “You probably just had the NAS set to the wrong timezone.”

Alright, I’ll give you that — I had set it to the wrong timezone.  However, that isn’t the strangest thing!

The strange part is the fact that Windows has provisions for files that have creation/modify/access times in the future.

When you have a file that you have modifed today, it says “Today”.  Nice.  If you then leave the file for 24 hours, Windows will say the file was modified “Yesterday”.  Again, a nice touch.

But now Windows, in its all-powerful, all-knowing ways, can tell me when a file will be modified, before it’s even happened!

At least, that’s the impression it gives me when I think of a developer including “tomorrow” on the list of English relative dates.

And before you complain that I wasn’t using Windows Explorer but rather a replacement called Directory Opus, here’s a screen from Explorer demonstrating the same behaviour, but slightly more hidden:

A screenshot from Windows Explorer of my local network share... With the same interesting modified times

So there you have it: Some crazy behaviour and me thoroughly confused.  With DOpus and Explorer both “predicting” the future for me, I’m beginning to wonder just how much control I have over these computers…

I was looking for a way to check on my MMS settings on Android.  On just about every other phone I’ve used it’s been a submenu of the messaging application, so that’s where I went — except I couldn’t find anything pertaining to access point settings!  I mean, if one phone does it one way, all phones do it that way, right?  Right?

Wrong.  Turns out Android hides the settings in — guess what — its Settings menus!  That’s good, because it’s centralised.  It makes sense when you think about it.  Honest.

Anyway, to find these elusive settings, just follow these instructions:

1. Go to the Home screen.
2. Press Menu.
3. Select Settings.
4. Select Wireless controls.
5. Select Mobile network settings.
6. Select Access Point Names.
7. Finally, select an access point to edit, or press Menu to create a new APN or reset to the defaults that shipped with the phone.

Have fun with changing access point settings!  Mmm.

If you try to re-associate the files with Windows Sidebar by telling to Open With… and navigating to the Sidebar executable, you’ll have found that that doesn’t help — all it does is bring the Sidebar to focus, but doesn’t install the gadget.

Fortunately, help is at hand: all you need to do is download the following archive and apply the registry entries by double-clicking the .reg file inside the archive, and saying Yes at the prompt.

Download Gadget Association registry entries.

All I did was export the corresponding keys from the registry on a Vista machine with a working Sidebar — nothing else!

Hope this helps others like it has me.