As a long-term Ubuntu user I am extremely interested in what Canonical and the Ubuntu community are doing on the mobile front. Their convergence strategy (I am testing Snappy Core on IoT devices as well) seems very well thought through and once the the Meizu MX4 phone was released I got myself an invite and ordered a unit. It took a while to ship and then also had to make it’s way down under as Meizu only ship to Europe (and Asia I believe).
One of the main reasons for setting up a cloud desktop is that I tend to use a lot of different devices some of which are not very powerful.
One of my favorite devices of late has been a HP 11 Chromebook. I originally bought it for a new employee and wanted to check myself how this thing stacks up to do day-to-day computing tasks more efficiently than a standard laptop without all the headaches of running Windows (viruses, endless driver installs, bloatware, malware, …). We already have several people at work working exclusively from Chromebooks and they absolutely love them. Long story short – I ended up keeping the Chromebook for myself as it’s an absolutely great secondary device for me. I can carry it with me everywhere (doesn’t weigh much more than a tablet, roughly the same size as a tablet & has a keyboard and is so much more useful than a tablet).
The APN provisioned by default when the Voda SIM card is inserted (vfinternet.au) does not work for the LTE Data Network. It works with GPRS & WCDMA, but fails to connect when the phone is set to prefer LTE (4G) Networks and they are actually available. It means that the handset will loose mobile data connectivity altogether. There are various APN Settings floating around on the interwebs, but any I tried previously did not fix the issue.
Contrary to my normal inclinations not to buy anything but Stock Android phones I ended up with a Sony Xperia Z2 in a hurry over the weekend (it’s a long story…). It appears to be quite a decent handset (with a pretty good camera actually) and one of the main reason to choose this over the other options was that is was one of the few high-end devices which already had a CM snapshot rather than just nightly releases. However similar to their colleagues at Samsung the Sony people also opted to stuff all sorts of crap-ware bloat onto the Android base OS. It appears not to be as bad as the Samsung (who are the kings of crap) mods, but for somebody used to the clean Android experience it’s just very annoying. So I opted to flash it straight to CyanogenMod.
Foursquare decided that it was too hard for them to compete with location services like Yelp and split their app into two separate apps. Whilst that might make sense to the 4Square CEO and his VC masters, it makes no sense from a users perspective. Foursquare can be a bit of a battery hog already, and having 2 apps to open and “annoy” you with notifications is not an improvement by any means. And if I wanted Foursquare to be Yelp – I would have used Yelp in the first place. So no – I do not want to install another separate check-in App (called Swarm). One battery hogging location app was enough.
The Nokia X seems to be a nice piece of hardware for just around $125 AUD. Nothing spectacular in terms of computing power, but much better build quality than your average cheap Chinese Android clone. I have always been a fan of Nokia hardware until they decided to commit suicide by firstly adding CEO Stephen Elop and ditching all of their software for Windows Mobile.
The problem with the device out of the box is that is has a horribly butchered version of Android. And by horribly I mean way worse than the usual bloat and crapware that poor Samsung, HTC or Sony users are normally subjected to. Hopefully this is only Nokia’s first step to a more open platform, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.
Apache Cordova has very nice documentation, however as so many projects it is focused on the Windows/MacOS duopolies only. Fortunately it’s not too hard to work out the differences.
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make ant openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk
Installing Android SDK
Please note: one of the problems I found was that I had some Android tools from the Ubuntu repos that were conflicting with the SDK install. It’s probably a good idea to remove them first. That might save you from a lot of headaches down the line (and time to troubleshoot).
That is it really ! This is how a OS change on a mobile should work !
Issues
Ubuntu touch can not yet handle the radio firmware past Android 4.3 devices. So if your N4 was upgraded to Android 4.4 (KitKat) you need to flash the radio to the Android 4.3 (up to Version 2.0.1700.84) else WIFI will not work.
Or as an alternative title “Liberating your Galaxy S4 Hardware from Samsung Bloatware”.
Unfortunately there is lots of (ad-infested) blogs and forums with dodgy pieces of information on this topic and I found it pretty hard to get descent concise information. So hopefully this might help some poor Linux User liberate their phone. Whilst this has been tested on a Samsung GT-I9505 S4 International LTE device (JFLTEXX series) it should be applicable to other similar Samsung phones that are not fastboot capable (ie. all but the Galaxy Nexus range).
Just got myself (actually it’s for our Office Manager back in OZ) one of these Chromebooks while in Europe (since Google Australia with their absolutely hopeless hardware strategy do not seem to be able to ship any devices – Nexus 4 anyone ?) .
Since the first days turned out to be a bit of a frustrating experience, I thought I share some of the findings as I had a hard time finding much useful info on troubleshooting ChromeOS.
As a Galaxy Nexus Owner I have been waiting for months for an OTA (over the air) upgrade to the factory installed Firmware (4.0.2). I am finally sick of waiting and complaining to Google (an absolute lost cause).
After some research it turns out that (contrary to popular opinion) not every unlocked Google Nexus actually has the ‘official’ Google Firmware. Some of them have a Samsung variant (WTF !?) of the firmware. Now I really don’t want to get off the technical topic, but I personally think that this means Google is misleading their most loyal customer base. The reason I chose a Nexus device over the (from a hardware perspective) superior HTC One X was the fact that they were supposed to have the official Google Firmware and I did not have to wait forever for bugfixes from the manufacturers.
Debugging things on the Android Emulator (incluced in the SDK) can be a very slow and cumbersome process. Thanks to the Android-x86 Project it’s quite easy to run Android in VirtualBox. This is highly useful when you need to test mobile apps and websites from the Android Browser (as well as Chrome Mobile).
Download an Ethernet enabled ISO from Tablets x86wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75945873/android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent<br></br>transmission android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent
Create new ViratualBox VM
Important Settings (see screenshots)
OS: Linux, Version: Linux 2.6
Enable VTx/AMD-V
Use Bridged Network Adapter (if you want to allow direct Internet Access)
Mount the ISO file downloaded previosly and start the VM
Create the Root Filesystem (ext3) on the VBox .vdi created with the new VM, mark as bootable
Write the Filesystem changes to disk (VDI) and format the disk
Install GRUB Boatloader
Copy files from ISO to VDI
Unmount the ISO image and reboot
Note: You need to disable the mouse pointer integration (if you have installed VirtualBox Client Add-ons) in the menu of Virtualbox (‘Machine’ –> ‘Disable Mouse Integration’) when you start the VM (see screenshot). I have not found a way to disable this by default on Virtualbox on Ubuntu (If anybody has managed this I would love to know how !)
After upgrading my Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook to 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) I noticed that the ability to control the screen back-light was not working using the Toshiba Fn F6/F7 keys.
This will open the grub configuration file. (Grub is the initial boot selection software)
To be able to dim the screen brightness, You’ve got to modify the line:
As a follow-up on a very old post I thought it’s worth providing an update. Despite it’s age (& only costing $350 at the time) my little Asus EEE PC 900 it is still a useful device. It has turned out as one of the better IT investments in my lifetime. However it’s not (and was never) the fastest kid on the block and recent OS upgrades have become increasingly resource hungry.
Since I will have to do a fair amount of traveling in the next year I was in need of upgrading my trusted workhorse of Toshiba Qosmio F60 to a more portable option that will be easier on the shoulders during long travels. After doing some research into which of the major manufacturers offer the best support for a Linux based Operating System it came down to a final two: the Intel i7 variants of Samsung Series 9 and the Toshiba Z830.
If you need to check websites for mobile compliance on a regular basis you know that having a device to constantly check is painful and slows down your work during debugging and phases of constant change.
One of the lesser known free Google services in our experience is Google Goggles. Specially in it’s lastest release (Version 1.7) it has received a few enhancements that make it very useful for some mobile learning applications
Scanning of barcodes
Google Googles will scan most standard barcodes and provide information on the product scanned.
This is an interesting report and info-graphic by the folks at VisionMobile on a new way of measuring the openness of some mobile open source projects.
The Open Governance Index measures the true openness of eight open source projects – Android, Qt, Symbian, MeeGo, Mozilla, WebKit, Linux and Eclipse – and analyses how governance, and not licenses, tell the full story of a project’s openness, across transparency, influence and control.
The release of the latest Ubuntu Version has been seen by a number of commentators as the most end-user friendly yet and signals another milestone in the readiness of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for more widespread (and business) use.
As a long-term user of a number of different Operating Systems and as SME Owner for the last 15 years I have overseen the gradual replacement of a number of proprietary software solutions with FOSS Alternatives. With the beginning of the new financial year however, we are planning to go another step further and are starting to change our default Operating System to Ubuntu (from MS Windows).
One of my oldest pieces of hardware is a trusty Nokia SU-8W Bluetooth Keyboard. I have tried to revive it on an Android 1.6 & 2.0 device with not much luck. However I got it working successfully on a Gingerbread (2.3.4) Google Nexus S.
As one of those who grabbed a HP Touchpad at the recent firesale (after announcing the killing of the product line) I did it as in full knowledge that this device in it’s current form is of limited use and (highly) unlikely to have lots of additional applications created for it.
After casually using it for a few nights of use I am personally not surprised that HP decided to ditch this product. Compared to the current Tablet leaders the Touchpad is miles behind both Android and iOS and HP would have had to spend serious money to even get close to the current functionality of the competition. And you can take a bet that both of these will not remain static. I was actually hoping that WebOS can be a serious competitor to the current duopoly, but after using this thing I have to say that it is not even close.
Since some older hardware (Toshiba Satellite A300 for example) has issues with the current version of Grub as well as the newer Kernel I still need to run 10.04 on some machines.
However since the 10.04 Repository still uses Firefox 3.6 you need to add a PPA repo to upgrade to Firefox 4.
Either go to Ubuntu Software Center > Software Sources and click the ‘Other Software’ tab. Press ‘Add’ and enter ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
Note: this has been verified to work on 11.04 (Natty), 11.10 (Oneiric) & 12.04 (Precise)
To convert a DVD and make it viewable on your mobile device Handbrake seems to be the most useful tool I have discovered so far. Since it is not part of the default Ubuntu Repositories here is the installation process. The first step is to insure libdvdcss2 is installed
After upgrading to Ubuntu 11 (Natty) I did some further research on VoIP clients (SIP) for Ubuntu Linux as XLite seems horribly out of date now.
I came across QuteCom (formerly WengoPhone) and from first testing it seems to work quite well. The install is easy as it’s part of the Ubuntu Community Software (Universe) and that means it can be installed via apt-get, Software Center or Synaptic.
EDIT: As of Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) this is now much easier as KeePass 2 has finally made it into the repositories
apt-get install keepass2
————————————————————————————————————-
If you need to read KeepPass 2 data files (.kdbx) on Ubuntu (as well as from other platforms such as Windows or Android) you need to run the Portable Version under Mono (.NET Runtime). Make sure you download the Portable Version 2.x from http://keepass.info/download.html
The default Mono Distribution on Ubuntu (V11 Natty) is missing a few dependencies required for KeePassX
Taking part in MobiMOOC has given me the opportunity to take stock of my own MobilePLE – the top 5 tools I find most useful as part of my ongoing learning.
Catch Notes (previously 3Bananas) – mobile note taking the most critical component. Whenever I get a new device – this is what has to be installed as one of the first actions. For those not familiar with this software – it’s like Evernote without the bloat.
TwiDroyd – mobile Twitter / Status.Net client. This could be replaced by similar Twitter clients
I am using the opportunity of me taking part in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on mobile learning as an excuse to add some more content to this neglected blog.
On of the issues I am facing with my participation in the MOOC is the massive amount of e-mails generated and my already overflowing inbox would not cope (let alone me managing it). That is not taking into account other sources such as Twitter & Flickr
Having used IP Telephony for a number of years I need a workable SIP client for all of the devices I use. I have found a very capable client for my Android phones (SipDroid) and on Windows/MacOSX I generally use X-Lite (as well as it’s paid version EyePhone) from Counterpath.
Having tried several different Linux SIP clients (Ekiga, Twinkle, …) but all discarded them because of weird UI’s and/or problems with stability I noticed that there is a Linux version of XLite available. Unfortunately on current versions of Ubuntu (10.04) it needs a deprecated version of a library.
Since I have switched my 3G data network from Hutchinson Three to Vodafone AU recently I also upgraded the USB modem from a Huwaei E220 (which used to work fine on recent Ubuntu NBR releases on my trusty old ASUS EEE 900)
Unfortunately the new Huawei K3765 would not be recognised as a valid modem by the network manager. After a fair bit of searching it turns out that you only need to install one additional package (usb-modeswitch) to make this modem work (be recognised) on the current stable 10.04 release:
Due to the hype generated by the recent launch and my reservations on using the Apple Inc. iTunes I was doing some research into alternatives to the proprietary and completely locked iPad device (and the associated lock-down to Apple’s iTunes Store). Hopefully this list can be of use for other people as well.
I can see the form factor and the tablet style with a cut down (mainly web-browser based) Operating System as useful in a number of settings not least in educational institutions and libraries.
The media hype generated by the launch of the Apple Inc. iPad has been seriously irritating me over the last weeks. Apart from the fact that I can not see anything revolutionary about either the hardware nor the software, I can see a number of highly problematic developments with the way Apple is trying to create a total vendor lock-in.
### The evil is in the Store
However – the single biggest issue is not actually the device (iPad) itself, it is actually it’s lock to Apple’s iTunes Store. There will be no (at least for the ‘normal’ end-user) way to install software or load content onto the device other than going through iTunes. The device seems to have been deliberately crippled (not even a USB connection) of any way to get content on or off it other than Apple’s mandated iTunes. The resulting vendor lock-in from both the hardware (Apple only devices), Software (all Software that will install on the device will have to go through iTunes) as well as increasingly Content (purchased via iTunes Store) is a very worrying trend from my point of view.
### Return of the dinosaurs ?
One possible reason for the hype generated for the iPad seems a vested interest on behalf of the media industry in the ability to lock down content and create a paid digital market for their content. It’s about creating a walled garden where previously was a free and open Internet. It seems that the old media conglomerates are looking towards iTunes as a possible extension (saviour) of their failing business models.
### Television 2.0 – the new rise of new media consumerism ?
From initial reviews it seems that the iPad is primarily a media ‘consumption’ device rather than a focus of the creation (or at least co-creation) of content. It seems geared to create a new generation of ‘viewer’ beyond television. A good further explanation on why I consider this a step backwards can be found at this entry on the [SpeEdChange Blog ](http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2010/04/welcome-ipad-and-web-15.html "SpecEdBlog")
### No iTunes – no education ?
One of the most problematic areas for me is the use of the iPad as the primary computing device used in Education. There seem to be a number of educational institutions planning to replace printed lecture materials with iPads even before the release of the device. While I don’t see any issues with the replacement of printed material, the replacement with one single proprietary & closed system seems an extremely bad choice on a number of fronts.
1. Requires an AppleID for each student (a very problematic privacy issue)
2. Content only accessible to Apple Devices
3. Proprietary (non-standard) formats
There are plenty of approaches already in the public domain (from the use of Open eBook standards to complete Open Education Resources in a variety of formats) that can be accessed from an iPad as well as any other (tablet or other) device with a decent web-browser or similar retrieval mechanism (RSS, …).
As stated on the beginning of this blog entry I don’t have an issue with the iPad as a hardware device (and I haven’t actually used one yet – due to the fact they will not be available in Australia for a while). But from all the technical details available the combination of a locked device with a locked store and locked content seems a bad idea all around from my perspective.
Since a fair bit of my time is spent working and researching in the field of Mobile Learning and there is not a lot of recent listings of Software useful in practical m-Learning implementations I have compiled the following list from my bookmarks and Software I commonly use for these purposes. This list tries to represent currently usable applications not applications in the development stage.
Rather than writing this in the form of a blog entry I decided to keep this as a live document within Google Apps that people can contribute to.
This one nearly escaped my attention yesterday. Google has just announced the ability to edit Google Docs on your mobile device via their Google Mobile Blog.
Just point your mobile browser to m.google.com/docs and start editing.
Along with the use of 2D barcodes this will open a few interesting m-learning possiblities for educators that would previously have required custom coding to achieve. I can see this being very useful in situations where you have students being in the field and allowing them to enter data gathered using a standard mobile phone. The barcodes could point students to the location of the spreadsheet (avoiding the need to type the information)
I have been a user of an EEE PC 900 for over 10 months now and in general very happy with the form-factor and it’s portability. I has been very useful in public transport, waiting rooms, coffee shops,…
However – in terms of Operating Systems I am now on my 3rd OS (despite initially telling myself that I will stick with the default and avoid tinkering) and it looks like I still have not found what I am looking for.
Being out and about a lot, I am a fairly heavy user of my mobile internet plan (currently with Hutchinson 3). One of the more common tasks when there is some down-time while in transit or waiting for coffee is checking out what’s happening in the twittershere.
Personally (being a web-app developer for years) I generally prefer browser-based apps over ‘native apps’. Dont even get me started about J2ME apps. One of the main reasons for this preference is that I tend to switch handsets fairly frequently. This makes installing software on phones a large waste of time. Just copying your bookmarks (in my case I have made up my own custom start page on the device) saves a lot of time.
One of the nicest ways to get photos straight from your mobile to Flickr (without having to use e-mails) on Nokia devices is the Flickr Plugin for the Nokia Share Online application. Since a lot of my clients in the educational sector are starting to use Flickr as part of their online teaching I decided to create a short HOWTO.
The application itself comes with the phone on most recent Nokia S60 devices (with recent Firmware – check Nokia Software Updater for new firmware). To check if your particular phone is capable you can check the Nokia Share Online Support site.
Just came across this post about barcode tombstones in Japan. Shows very clearly how much public acceptance the 2D barcode technology has got in Japan.
It allows visitors to the grave to access to the biography and photos of the deceased person and leave a personal message.
This concept probably takes some time to get used to, but you can see that it could clearly add some value for people visiting cemeteries. There is not much info you can fit on tombstone. A good example of providing ‘further information’ for people that are interested.
As people that know me are aware I am not the biggest fan of the iPhone (3G – hello ???), but obviously from a professional perspective it is another phone that is with us and gaining market share (although not much happening in OZ yet). And to be fair it is breaking some technical ground as well (just not in the areas I most need). From my own anecdotal evidence I was expecting a high percentage of users to choose the iPhone because it ‘looks cool’ or is a ‘chick magnet’ – but I can not back this up by an empirical research (yet) ;-).
The unfortunate thing is that this is only limited to one particular
university and one provider only. It would be interesting to see if
there are any other institutions that are going down that track. How
about a general unmetering for the ‘edu.au’ TLD ?
After reading an excellent article by Brad Reed on Network World (this seems to be the online version: Co-working: the ultimate in teleworking flexibility),�I finally got motivated enough to do some more research about this�phenomenum in the two places of interest to me (Austria and Australia)�as well as write a quick entry about this.
The whole co-working concept has been interesting me ever since it started, but the organisational issues associated with starting such a�venture (and as with everything else – a lack of time) have always�prevented any serious attempt to actually move in this direction. But�after reading some of the examples in the above mentioned article and�doing some further research I am starting to warm to the idea again.
FINALLY !!! As somebody that has been experimenting with this technology for over 2 years now I am quite exited to see that the adoption of this technology is gathering some steem. While it has bee widely adopted in Asia for some years now, it has taken some time to get a foothold in the rest of the world this seems to be changing now. At least in Europe as I can see for myself at the moment. In my opinion with Nokia finally getting serious and throwing its (considerable) weight behind this technology (http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/) and some other industry heavyweights joining forces in the Mobile Codes Consortium.� This will hopefully produce one key outcome, the stadardisation of the label technology, which up to now has been one of the stumbling blocks that has kept people such as myself from adopting these codes in real-world projects. Along with the adoption by some major companies in their advertising this should produce the momentum that was needed to push mobile 2D codes into some broad adoption.
Since my working world is centered a little more on educational topics at the moment (while attending ICL) I came across this Youtube Video which I think is a very good visual example of what’s commonly referred to as Education 2.0.
Personally I hope that I actually comprehend this and a good part of my working life is spend improving this situation. The fact that I am sitting in a ‘lecture’ myself and watching a Youtube video should hopefully illustrate that I am can (despite my actual age) understand the students perspective quite well. ;-
The ability to host your own content from your mobile phone opens some interesting possibilities to engage students and will allow the integration of user generated content in the education process. David Johnson from the University of Reading is working on serving portfolio data from your mobile.
Some of the current limitation of this approach:
-cost of the bandwidth
-speed
The ability to proxy the users content on the Mobile Web server Gateway as well as the ability to integrate content outside of the mobile phone seem to be the main points that will have to be improved for this to become a more mainstream technology. Another area of concern (or another potential use of this technology – depending on your viewpoint) is the backup of data from the mobile phone. The ability to proxy the content on the Gateway could also be used as a backup of the content that is hosted within the MWS on the mobile phone.
This is Part 3 of the Nokia SIP settings. This time for NodePhone (Internode – Australia). It has been hard to find this information (particularily the Registrar Server settings). NOTE: The Realm setting in the Registrar Server are CASE-SENSITIVE. For some screenshots check the ENGIN Australia setup entry.
This is Part 2 of the Nokia SIP settings. This time for sipgate.at
(Austria), but it should also work for other SIPGate domains. It has
been hard to get this information from the providers themselves. For
some screenshots check the ENGIN Australia setup entry.
General
Profile name: sipgate
Service profile: IETF
Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point}
Public user name: sip:{SIPGate UserID}@sipgate.at
User compression: No
Registration: When needed
Use security: No
Since I had to look all over�for the correct settings and there was a
lot of trial and error involved (specially for the Realm). Thanks to Engin Support that finally provided this info after logging a support request.
The screenshots are from a Nokia E65, but should be applicable for similar Nokia phones.
Profile name: engin
Service profile: IETF
Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point}
Public user name: sip:{phone number}@voice.mibroadband.com.au
User compression: No
Registration: When needed
Use security: No
Since I had to do some research on this topic recently, here are the results that I have found. These plans are interesting for people that do not call out a lot, but rather use the phone to be accessible.
](https://www.flickr.com/photos/leogaggl/16898140083 “ubuntu phone by Leo Gaggl, on Flickr”)
](http://www.flickr.com/photos/leogaggl/6821823795/ “ultrabook by leogaggl, on Flickr”)
by adactio 
