I recently bought a Telstra Prepaid (ZTE MF823) 4G stick to use while I’m out and about. It works great for internet, getting a nice 20Mbits in some locations, but I’ve run into some issues with the IP addressing scheme of the stick’s network.
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I finally got around to playing with the Telstra SMS API some more after very successfully using it to send messages from my Zabbix instance at home.
I wanted to get responses from the messages so that I could potentially automate some responses if I get an alert via my Zabbix instance.
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I recently found out that Telstra has a SMS API, and for now, it’s free to use for up to 1000 SMSes a month for Australians (sorry rest of the world).
As I’ve been building up Zabbix for our work environment where SMSes are used regularly to alert techs to critical alerts, this piqued my interest as this means that for now, I could have SMS alerts for my homelab, and potentially implement the same solution at work.
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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.
