eduroam is a very nice thing: Using your access codes from your own university, you receive instant network access at any participating university.
Sony Reader PRS-T1 is an e-ink reader device that I use mostly for PDFs. It can also read EPUB files from publishers such as Project Gutenberg or Baen, plus some DRM-locked content if that is your ambition. It runs a heavily modified version of Android 2.2.1 that allows installation of additional software (including a terminal and su for root access, or a more standard launcher and a package installer for easier customization) using update scripts that you transfer via USB.
What it cannot do is roam on eduroam. That is, the device is perfectly capable of doing so, but for some reason Sony in its infinite wisdom thought it prudent to disable the relevant functionality in its home-grown configuration interface. As you can buy it, the device refuses to use any enterprise-grade wireless network.
In theory, installing an alternative launcher that permits access to Android's original configuration tools should enable you to use eduroam. Alas, that did not work for me, so I had to use a different approach, which I am presenting here.
You will have to root your device first. See elsewhere for how to do this.
For German institutions, download the "Deutsche Telekom Root CA 2" (crt format) from https://www.pki.dfn.de/root/globalroot/. Put it on the READER partition of your PRS-T1 for the time being.
If you're not familiar with vi, download this configuration snippet and edit it beforehand. Move it onto the reader partition as well. This is the relevant portion:
network={
ssid="eduroam"
key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
eap=TTLS
identity="q1234567@fernuni-hagen.de"
anonymous_identity="anonymous@fernuni-hagen.de"
password="my_eduroam_passphrase"
ca_cert="/data/misc/wifi/deutsche-telekom-root-ca-2.crt"
phase2="auth=PAP"
priority=5
}
Obviously, you will have to replace 1234567 with your id, fernuni-hagen.de with your provider (twice), and my_eduroam_passphrase with your passphrase. The anonymous identity is the same for everybody at your provider.
Turn wireless networking off on your device. Normally, these configuration files are created and changed automatically, and we don't want some wizard to hurt what we're attempting to do.
Open a terminal window. Switch user to root, then move the two files in place and edit /data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf to include the stanza listed above:
$ su # cd /data/misc/wifi # busybox cp -p /mnt/sdcard/deutsche-telekom-root-ca-2.crt . # busybox cat /mnt/sdcard/wpa_supplicant_eduroam.conf >>wpa_supplicant.conf # exit $ exit
(Note 1: It turns out most command line binaries on the device are linked to toolbox, which provides a very limited version of cp, for example. At the same time, busybox is installed in a reasonably complete configuration and provides the usual look and feel. If you need vi, just say busybox vi. If you want command completion in your shell, start a reasonable shell with busybox sh.)
(Note 2: find / -name wpa_supplicant.conf lists another version of that file in /system/etc/wifi. I don't actually know what that is for. All networks created on my device were found in /data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf, and the latter version is referenced from /init.rc, so I included our stanza there.)
(Note 3: Device naming is a bit unexpected for Linux users. I don't know if this is a peculiarity of Android or of Sony. The internal partition (that is listed upon USB connection to your computer as READER) is mounted as /mnt/sdcard. This is not the external SD card if you happen to have one. So be mindful what you put where.)
That's it! Turn networking on again and try it out.
posted at: 09:57 | path: /en/computers/phones | permalink
Autograce is a simple AppleScript to change the grace period of your screensaver automatically, depending on the BSSID of your current WLAN. If you're at home, after the screen saver activates, you've got one hour before having to re-enter your password. If you're away, this time is reduced to five seconds.
For this to work, you will have to enable support for assistive devices in the Universal Access pane of your System Preferences. After download, edit the script to set the BSSID of your home WLAN. Save it as an "Application" and make sure to set the option "Stay Open" so that it will keep monitoring your connection. You can add the script to your startup items to have it open whenever you log in. The script uses the System Preferences application to make changes. To avoid interrupting your work too often, it will only check once in five minutes, and will only change things if necessary.
The script was tested on OS X Lion and will probably not work on other releases of OS X. Say Hi to Apple for working hard to ensure programmers stay in business. ;-)
posted at: 10:52 | path: /en/computers/mac | permalink
The Software Freedom Law Center has an interesting article about the Windows Hardware Certification Requirements: It wants hardware vendors producing ARM-based devices running Windows 8 to disallow the installation of alternative operating systems, using UEFI to lock the device.
People have been warning this might happen. Until now, Microsoft used to say "no, we're all about choice". Guess what.
Via LWN.
posted at: 18:26 | path: /en/computers/linux | permalink
Steve Litchfield has an interesting article over at All About Symbian where he shows that, for most of the most successful commercial Android applications available in the Android market, there are equivalents available for Symbian.
However, I'd argue that the advantage of having a larger market should be least visible in the "top anything" apps, as these are most likely to be adapted for more than one operating system. If everybody wants a certain app, it seems reasonable to port it, if it's at all possible.
Applications with smaller target audiences and smaller developers are much more problematic, as there is much less incentive (or even ability) to port them, so they are much more likely to be missing from "fringe" operating systems. And even so, a developer might argue that, while Bada or Windows have much smaller market shares than Symbian, they might still expand in the future, while Symbian with its definite end of life is only going to lose market share. So porting new small apps to Symbian becomes even less likely.
Another problem is that Nokia's posturing does throw a certain doubt on Qt's future (see a recent discussion on Slashdot, for example), so small individual developers might well be very hesitant to invest the time to learn this framework right now, if they don't already know it. Again, this effect will only apply to apps in the "long tail", not to big titles developed by big developer houses that already have the knowhow for Qt.
However, a large part of the appeal of "apps" on a smartphone is not just downloading "top apps" to make your phone do what is expected from a modern smartphone, but for developers to be able to quickly create small apps that do exactly what is helpful in a certain situation, and for users to discover these and integrate them into their way of life.
So, all in all, I don't think having "top apps" available on Symbian is a sufficient "apology" for Symbian at all.
posted at: 11:35 | path: /en/computers/phones | permalink
Most of the new blosxom installation seems to be working now.
I've fixed up my old postings (both from Blogger and from an ancient blosxom installation on a previous home page), converting them to clean HTML, adding some meta information, and removing blogspot-specific cruft.
I have taught blosxom to respect Date: headers inside stories, as I don't like the concept of the time stamp of a file being the only record of the posting time. After all, a time stamp on disk is all too easily modified by accident.
I've also added some (very simple) support for tagging using the meta plugin. Internally, a posting might now look like this:
Title and description Tags: blosxom Date: 2011-12-15 14:54:47 <p>Post content</p>
Thankfully, Blogger appears to support redirecting the blog to an external server. I traversed the Blogger installation, checking which URLs are used internally, and added simple RewriteRule and RedirectMatch code for Apache to redirect to the corresponding blosxom URLs. This also covers tag search and date search. As I chose to install blosxom in static mode, "search" really means linking to the appropriate resource locations.
I am somewhat unsure whether to immediately support TrackBack. I have included the RDF code for postings for the time being, but have not yet activated the TrackBack server.
Last but not least, I have also integrated blosxom with my (mostly homegrown) content management system. This was a matter of a few lines of shell code.
All that remains to do is markup. I prefer a clean look, and this is a first attempt at it. RSS and mobile views are supported, the former automatically by blosxom, the latter by some very simple CSS magic.
Feedback is welcome. ;-)
posted at: 14:54 | path: /en/computers/blogs | permalink
I've just published calmas, a Web Runtime widget to access your emacs diary (calendar) on your smartphone. You can sync your diary directly to your phone (using obexfs or bluetooth-sendto or the software that came with your phone), or upload it to your web server. This web app retrieves it and displays it both as a home screen widget and as a full screen app. It has support for todo lists, configurable caching, support for both offline operation and online operation with configurable automatic refreshes.
The program has been tested on Symbian^3. It should run on other Symbian platforms as well (notably Anna and S60v5, probably S60v3 without home screen support), and possibly on other phones supporting Web Runtime applications.
posted at: 17:50 | path: /en/computers/phones | permalink
For three weeks now, I've been back to Linux on my desktop. I decided to use Debian, mostly because it is what runs on my own servers, so I'm pretty familiar with it. I installed the current stable release, Squeeze.
Most things work out of the box.
One thing that did not work was printing PDF documents to my Brother MFC-7840W printer. All pages were shifted to the right and upwards, in spite of correct page size settings. PostScript files worked fine, as did converting PDF documents to PS using pdf2ps from the ghostscript distribution. Converting PDF to PS using poppler's pdftops (which is basically what CUPS uses) produced the problem.
Using Brother's binary drivers was not an option for me. I installed Debian to reduce my reliance on proprietary software, after all. Kudos to them for providing Linux support at all, though.
Google told me that the problem was an additional PageSize definition inserted by poppler in the PostScript prolog. And in fact, removing that part of the prolog from the files created by pdftops meant that the files printed correctly.
So I modified the cpdftocps wrapper script in /usr/lib/cups/filter/cpdftocps (here's a copy for download, and here's the diff) to remove the offending part of the PostScript prolog. I also added a file /usr/share/cups/mime/local.convs to invoke the new filter. If that file already exists on your machine, you might want to append instead of replacing it.
Here's the contents of /usr/share/cups/mime/local.convs:
application/vnd.cups-pdf application/vnd.cups-postscript 11 cpdftocps-mas
With this new configuration, printing works flawlessly.
And of course, scanning works perfectly, thanks to the FTP client on this multifunction printer. That's one of the main reasons I bought it. ;-)
In theory, I should now be checking whether the problem persists on Debian testing, and report the solution upstream if it does. After all, having poppler output better PostScript in the first place would be a lot more elegant.
posted at: 11:19 | path: /en/computers/linux | permalink