So I purchased a G1 from t-mobile when they were reasonably new, and have since was kindly donated a nexus one (best phone ever). But what to do with my old G1? Obvi - turn it into an Android Developer Phone that I can run without a sim card, and test my apps on anything faster than the emulator. Not to mention the value of actual phone, accelerometer and leds.
I know G1′s are locked, hence I took the action as a good citizen and called T-Mobile. Turns out if you have the phone for 90 days then they will just give you the Unlock Code. So I naively thought that would allow me to wipe the phone, and run sans sim. Wrong. Turns out that you only get the unlock prompt if you have a foreign sim card. But if I use a bunk sim, I wont have a data connection, and could not get past registration. I ended up with a useless piece of hardware that would do nothing but report the absence of a sim card.
Let me share a few other highlights:
- ADP “Dream” images can not be flashed to G1s due to signature issues of boot loader UNLESS
- You can root your phone and use sqlite to modify some system settings to bypass the protection HOWEVER
- Only RC29 or earlier OS releases have the vulnerability allowing this, mine did not BUT
- You can supposedly downgrade the image to RC29, root the phone and flash thereafter UNFORTUNATELY
- This just seems like a ridiculous way to get any functionality of a device I paid for and T-Mobile is willing to let me unlock anyhow
So I took a simpler approach.
SInce I am still a t-mobile customer with a data plan I just pulled my sim from the Nexus ONe, back into my G1, and registered a new bogus user. After the user is registered I turned on wifi, and usb debug, then restarted. After the restart I turned off the phone to remove the sim. (my first attempt of removing sim without a clean reboot resulted in a no sim card lockout) This way I can still lend the device to a co-worker as a dev phone, without worrying about my info.
So if any of you happen to have a legit way to bypass the sim card lockout and enter the htc/t-mobile provided unlock code to permanently eliminate the need for a sim card, please share.
I recently read an article on Linux Magazine that suggested JSON is a better tool for data transfer than XML on Android phones. So I decided to try switching some of QueueMan’s queue retrieves over to JSON. Eliminating the verbose tags may be much quicker over wireless airwaves.
The choir I tackled was to compare the performance of XML and JSON by downloading the user’s recommendations from the Netflix API. To make testing quick I would make a call to both XML and JSON classes in each loop, and repeat 10-30 times for each sample point. The sample points were 1,5,10,15,25,50, and 64 discs. (64 being the current # of recommendations Netflix is offering me)
I used org.xml.sax, and org.json. JSON* as the libraries for my parsing.
I never posted the start of this story. To be honest I thought it was a scam, and didn’t want to boast about being burned.
BUT alas it is not a scam! – The phone arrived as promised and ahead of schedule.
'heres yer phone, thanks for rockin'
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As I mentioned in my article “Migrate form Apache to Nginx and keep rewrite rules intact”, Nginx is an awesome and lightweight web server.
The only trouble I have ran into since the switch is Pligg. The htaccess file is ridiculously complex, and I suspect some of the rewrite rules to be repetitive or overlapping in areas.
Using the rules from my past article though I was able to get nginx rules in place that seem to work.
iPad ipad. Ipad ipad ipaddie pad pad. Ipad? ipad ipad. Ipading ipad is ipad for the ipad of ipadia. Ipadia’s prime-minister says
[...] iPady? absurd, ipad ipad ipad ipad”
Update- This just ipad
ipadind ipad is the new ipad for everyone who never needed an ipad. Plus the new ipad doubles as an ipad, Ipad right? Ipad the ipad striclty for ipadding, and it can ipad at 3 frequencies! ipad!
nginx is a very fast and very lightweight web server that can handle static HTML blazingly fast, and does very well with dynamic (PHP) content as well. In fact the very site your viewing is running atop of nginx. nginx isn’t ideal for every server, and can’t handle SVN or WebDAV among other protocols. But for your average site running PHP, Ruby or Django, nginx is choice.
The trouble was that I have lots of site (like this one!) that rely on a myriad of rewrite rules and logic to direct users properly. Because we lose the mod_rewrite provided by apache, we need to tell nginx about our rewrite rules.
Luckily the logic is very similar, and all expression based as before…
Everyone is talking about Google’s Nexus One. Most people are saying that an unlocked phone for $529 just won’t fly here in America. We like our phones with a ridiculous amortization attached through 2 year contracts so we feel like we’re getting a deal. Sure we end up paying far more than the phone is worth – but we don’t pay it all at once. That’s the American way – defer.
Now if you tell a company like Verizon that you don’t want their discount phones for new contracts they will say fine.. but you won’t save any cash. In fact you’ll pay more for unlocked phones plus an overpriced contract.
However for those fortunate few who have escaped the new-every-2-until-your-dead plan there are other options – like a Google Nexus One for $49. If you’ve not had enough of my Verizon bashing, please read on.
I wrote a month or two ago about my Android application for Netflix subscribers. The application allows users to fully manage their instant and disc queues, browse recommendations and search all titles.
The reason then for this post is to share an update and gloat a bit. QueueMan has a whole bunch of new features, has been downloaded nearly 5,000 times (Update: Over 10,000 times!), is tested and proven on Motorola’s Droid platform, and is getting quite positive reviews compared to other Netflix apps on the market. Oh yeah – and it’s all open source – Booyah!
read more…
Android was a nice start, but…
For sometime now Google has been offering its custom built mobile OS – Android – to various carriers and manufacturers. News has been released however that the company plans to offer its very own phone direct to consumers by Quarter 1 – 2010.