Well, it seems that some ugly bugs made it into version 1.2.0 of Hash It!. Unfortunately, it took five days to notice…
Anyway, a new version (1.2.1) is out now, which should hopefully solve these issues. If any force closes remain, please drop me a mail.
It has been a while since I published my guide to cross-compile Asterisk for the FRITZ!Box 7270. This guide and build script was based on Asterisk 1.6.0.19.
Asterisk development has not stopped, though, so the current Asterisk branch – currently at revision 1.6.2.9 – got out of sync with the asterisk-freetz-build script.
Now, what is so great about community-based software is that it facilitates contributions by others: Recently, I received an e-mail from Thomas Rueter, who provided me with a set of patches to compile Asterisk 1.6.2.8 using asterisk-freetz-build. His patches served as a basis for a revamped asterisk-freetz-build v0.2 package, which is capable of cross-compiling Asterisk 1.6.2.9 and chan_capi 1.1.5 for Freetz 1.1.x.
If you just want the updated package, you can grab it here. In case you are interested into contributing to its development, a copy of it is now available on GitHub.
And if this executive summary does not make too much sense to you 
, feel free to read my original blog post, which I also updated to reflect the version change.
Today marks another important milestone for Hash It!, your friendly password memorization brain extension.
While you can conveniently use Hash It! from your preferred mobile web browser via its “Share” feature, some people prefer starting Hash It! from the launcher, which requires manual entry of the site tag. So far, Hash It! did not remember these manually entered site tags, which required repeated re-entry of the respective tag over time. To close this usability gap, Hash It! will remember the site tag in a history from this release on. Just type the first few characters of the desired tag and the history of matching tags will be shown. Users concerned with the privacy implications of this feature can easily disable it in the settings.
Furthermore, Hash It! did not support FroYo’s (Android 2.2) Apps2SD feature. While Hash It! is pretty small (< 100 kB) compared to other Android applications (so this feature is probably not vital), I would still like to leave this decision to the end-user, which is why starting with Hash It! 1.2.0 you can move it to your SD card (given that your phone is running Android 2.2).
Hash It! 1.2.0 is available via the Android Market. Details are also available at: http://android.ginkel.com/
Have fun!
As Skype voice recording stopped working for me after upgrading from Karmic to Lucid, I thought I would document what I needed to do to fix it:
Apparently, PulseAudio had my microphone muted although KMixer did not show this. The mute could easily be removed using pavucontrol, though.
A couple of days ago I visited the UK and also took my Android smartphone with me. After accessing some loal .co.uk web sites I quickly noticed that Hash It! would not figure out the right site tag for them when it was invoked from the Android web browser via the “Share” intent.
So, I just rolled an update, Hash It! 1.1.0, which adds support for the most common ccSLDs (country code second-level domains), such as .co.uk, .ac.uk or .com.sg.
Hash It! 1.1.0 is available via the Android Market. Details are also available at: http://android.ginkel.com/
Enjoy!
Weeks have passed and still no update from HTC regarding the availability of the HTC Desire’s Linux kernel source code. Let’s take a look back at the history of the case: On April 3rd, I initially asked for the Desire’s Linux kernel source code in accordance with the GPLv2. A couple of mails and a few weeks later, HTC finally escalated the support ticket and eventually forwarded my request to R&D on April 16th. (more…)
It has been a while since I last worked on Hash It!, but thanks to the bug report of an attentive user I just uploaded a new version (1.0.2) of Hash It! to the Android Market. Bottom line: Hash It! now works correctly on Android 1.5.
Hash It! is licensed under the GPLv3 and as such comes with full source code for your entertainment.
Further details on how to download it to your mobile phone as well as the changelog are available at: http://android.ginkel.com/
Get it while it is still hot!
Well, Linux is not just free as in beer, but also free as in speech. As I wanted to dig a little deeper into HTC’s modifications applied to the Desire’s Linux kernel I did, what I am entitled to as per the GPLv2 the Desire’s Linux kernel is licensed under: I requested the source code via HTC’s support as the “HTC Developer Center” at http://developer.htc.com/, which usually hosts the Linux kernel source code drops for their Android phones, does not mention the Desire yet:
Dear HTC support,
I would hereby like to request the Linux Kernel source code for my HTC Desire phone according to section 3 of the GNU General Public License v2 under which the Linux kernel the Desire is based on is licensed. A download URL will be fine.
Thanks,
Thilo
The answer I received was somewhat unexpected, but I will leave the judgment up to the reader:
Dear Thilo-Alexander
Thank you for your enquiry about linux.
Sorry we don’t support Linux, even though linux and android have similarities they’re not made for eachother. But here is the link for our kernals http://developer.htc.com/, happy Easter!
Best regards,
xxxx x
HTC Tech Support
www.htc.com
Tel: +44 8458900xxx
Better luck next time… I replied through their ticketing system insisting on a source code copy (along with a short educational section about the true origins of the Android platform ). Let’s see what their next reply will look like…
Due to current events I started to think about options for a backup solution that would be able to cope with a complete disastrous loss of hardware. So, off-site storage was warranted.
What I came up with is a backup solution based on Duplicity and Amazon S3.
Storing personal data in the cloud may ring one or another alarm, but with Duplicity the data is safe from prying eyes as all backed up data is sent through GnuPG using public-key encryption before being transferred to Amazon’s data center. You should, however, make sure that one of the private keys used for encrypting the backup is locked away in a safe place, so you have it handy when it is time to perform a restore.
As far as storage costs are concerned, storing 50 GB of data in the AWS S3 cloud for a month costs around 6 EUR, which I personally consider quite competitive for redundant off-site data storage.
Naturally, one drawback remains: Bandwidth usage. It takes a while to load the first full backup into the cloud as the upstream of most DSL lines is rather limited. After that initial load has completed, however, Duplicity is capable of appending incremental backup sets to the existing backup data, so the incremental backups complete much faster.
P.S.: It may sound a little weird that I chose Amazon Web Services as a storage provider after my recent trouble with Amazon.de, but after some thorough market analysis AWS remained as the only feasible option.
As a happy long-term user of the Password Hasher extension for Mozilla Firefox I got used to being able to use different secure passwords per web site without having to take the burden of remembering them all.
When I recently bought an Android-based smartphone I was missing most of that convenience while surfing the Internet from my smartphone as Password Hasher was not available natively on that platform.
Hash It!, an application for the Android platform I developed, is there to bridge this gap: It eases using unique passwords per web site without overloading your brain by generating site-specific passwords derived from a secret master key. It maintains compatibility with the Password Hasher Firefox extension.
Hash It! is free (as in speech) open source software released under the GPLv3 with the source code being available on GitHub.
Further details on how to download it to your mobile phone are available at: http://android.ginkel.com/
Enjoy!