Jun 112012
 

For those of you who have looked at VIA’s APC, it is now available to Pre Order here !!!
I won’t be getting one this round, but I’m sure I’ll get my grubby little hands onto one soon enough.

Once I get one, then I’ll be able to post up some juicy tutorials on how to hack it 🙂

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Jun 072012
 

So I’ve had a HTC Desire for a little while now. I’ve rooted it, flashed it many a time, installed ICS onto it, and it is still working well. However lately, the phone has been turning off before the battery indicator got even close to 0%

I tried to look around on Google for a solution, and got many different answers, but none seemed to work consistently for me. Until I tried running it flat, and then charging the phone while it was off. In the end, after a couple of charges with the phone drained and turned off, it has recalibrated itself and now tells me approximately the right percentage of battery left. It turns off around 1% battery rather than 18% now, so it’s a lot better than before.

This is exactly what I did to get the battery indicator back to normal

  1. Use the phone as per normal, until the phone turns itself off at 18%
  2. While the phone is powered off, charge it up until the light turns green
  3. After the light turns green, turn it back on and use it as you normally would
  4. Keep using the phone until it turns off again. For me, at this stage the battery indicator had already improved a bit, but was still off
  5. After the phone has turned off a second time, charge it back up until the light is green again
  6. Once the phone has been fully charged a second time, the battery indicator should be back to normal

After I followed those steps, my phone was back to normal. However after a few weeks of charging it when it was not empty, it had gone back to turning off at 18%-ish. So once I repeated the above procedure, it’s back to normal.
If it doesn’t fix it straight away, keep emptying it and charging the phone while it is off, and eventually it will be back to normal.

The reason why the HTC Desire has this problem is that the battery meter relies on a ‘Coulomb Meter’ to measure how much battery has been used by the phone. If you charge the phone before it’s empty, eventually the coulomb meter gets inaccurate, and needs to be recalibrated. This is more of an issue when the phone gets older and the battery doesn’t hold as much charge as when it’s new.

Hopefully this has helped someone out there with an annoying phone that turns off at 18% battery.

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Jun 032012
 

I discovered PrintBot a while ago, and noticed that it could print via IPP. I have CUPS installed on my Linux boxes, so I figured that PrintBot could be used to print directly to the printer via CUPS.
This allows me to print from any Android device without installing anything extra on my computers.

After installing PrintBot, it only took a minute to set the protocol to IPP, put in the CUPS server’s IP address and print queue name, and choose the printer.

The CUPS print queue name can be found on the “Printers” tab within the CUPS admin page.

After that was set, I pressed on “Print a Test Page”, and within seconds a new job appeared in the print queue !

Theoretically this can be used on Macs as well as they also use CUPS, but I don’t have a Mac to test on unfortunately.

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May 242012
 

Just caught wind of the VIA APC, a ready to go Android PC that looks like it would do well for a low power server / computer.
Their homepage shows that it has built in LAN, 6x USB ports, and 2GB of built in flash. Display is output via VGA or HDMI, which is great news for anyone with those old monitors lying around. Powered by an 800Mhz ARM11 CPU, it has enough grunt to be a basic net-top or HTPC as it has hardware 1080P decoding. It ships with Android 2.3 but sounds like an ARM-Flavoured linux distribution would work on it also.

Might have to get one and do a review on it.

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Oct 082011
 

As I recently posted, I also changed my boot screen on my HTC Desire, this is the second screen that comes up when you turn on the phone and is normally animated.

With the Telstra HTC Desire, the normal methods of putting a “bootanimation.zip” file into /system/media never worked for me, even after I rooted the phone.
I found out that the Telstra HTC Desire has a file in /system/customize/CID called default.xml which contains a set of lines starting with and ending with which sets the boot up animation on the Telstra HTC Desire.
Removing those lines from the default.xml file will allow you to put the “Bootanimation.zip” file into /system/media and the android_audio.mp3 file into the same location.
Once the files have been placed there, you will now get the new bootanimation instead of the Telstra boot animation.

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