I’ve just published my second Android App !
Again, for Perth Drivers, this time it’s a simple list of today’s multanova locations
At the moment, it’s very simple but I’m planning on building more features as I go along.
It updates daily from the WA Police website, and allows you to touch the location to search it on Google Maps.
You can get it from the play store
Hopefully I can get some feed back from users of this app ! 🙂
If you have a spare Android phone lying around, you can turn it into an IP camera very easily.
There’s an App on the play store called – surprisingly – IP Camera.
This app allows you to view the phone’s camera as if it was an IP camera.
Once installed, you can use the Tinycam App mentioned in this post to view the camera from afar.
To view it, just enter in the phones address with the port and /videofeed appended into the Edit JPEG image address and you will be able to view the webcam. e.g. http://10.1.1.1:8080/videofeed
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.
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
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.
I recently got the Android Modding bug, and wanted to change my Telstra HTC Desire’s splash screen.
This is the first screen that comes up when you turn on the phone, which is then followed by the boot animation, which I have also changed.
To do this, you will need to S-OFF your phone first, which will void your warranty.
Windows users will also need the Android SDK to get the fastboot tool that is used to flash the new bootscreen to the phone.
Linux users will either have to compile it from source or find it online as it’s not included in the SDK for some strange reason.
I used this Revolutionary to get S-OFF on my phone.
** I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO YOUR PHONE IF THIS IS ATTEMPTED **
With that out of the way, onto the fun bits.
Once the phone is S-OFFed, you will need to find or create a suitably sized BMP file to use as the splash screen.
For a Desire, this should be 480×800.
Once you have the image ready, use This tool – nbimg to convert the BMP file into one that is usable by the phone as a splash screen.
Once the image is converted, you will need to boot the phone into fastboot mode.
This involves powering it off, then holding down the volume down button while you power it back on.
While it’s powering on, plug the usb cable into the computer.
Once the phone is in the boot menu, which has a white background and little android robots on skate boards, you will need to select the top selection which should say “HBOOT” and press power. This should make it turn red and say “FASTBOOT” now.
Once it’s in fastboot mode, run this command from where the converted image and nbimg resides –
fastboot flash splash1 splash1.img
You will need to replace “splash1.img” with the filename of your splash screen.
It should output something like
sending 'splash1' (750 KB)... OKAY [ 0.125s]
writing 'splash1'... OKAY [ 0.218s]
finished. total time: 0.343s
Which means that you now have a new splash screen.
Select reboot in the menu and you should now see your new splash screen.
