I’m tired of waiting for T-Mobile NL to give me FroYo (Android 2.2). Besides, that controlling which apps I can or can’t have access to.

So, let’s get to it ourselves!

Starting this process I didn’t have the needed warm and fuzzy feeling because the tutorials I found were not so detailed. Which is why I’ll describe step-by-step what I did  (actually typing while I’m going through the process myself):

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Note: I’m not responsible for anything that happens to your phone and I can’t provide any support or additional information. I ran it on my own doing some research, please try to do the same if you get stuck.

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1. First, backup your apps. I did it with an app called “Astro File Manager”
2. To get root, go to Unrevoked. Select your mobile device and your OS.
3. I’m on a Linux machine, so after I have reflash.tar.gz downloaded on your computer, untar it, than run sudo ./reflash
4. You’ll be guided about the next steps (connect your phone as disk drive, turn on USB Debugging).
5. Once everything is done, I got on my phone a “ClockworkMod Recovery” boot screen. Just to be extra safe, I ran through “Backup and restore” to create a backup. After the backup was done, I chose “reboot system now”
6. Now you should have root! The phone should restart the looking the same as it did before.
7. Let’s prepare to install something else. From your computer download the latest version of the radio. I got the link from here . Move the zip file to the root of your phone’s SD card.
8. Go to the Android Market and find/install “ROM Manager” (I used the free version). After it is installed, run it and choose to boot in recovery mode. You should get a screen asking you if the action has root access, allow it and run it again.
9. Now back in ClockworkMod Recovery, choose “install zip from sdcard”. Find the zip file you just downloaded and install it.
10. Reboot your phone.
11. Now back into your normal looking phone again. Go back to ROM Manager and select “Download ROM”
12. Let’s pick CyanogenMod, latest build is given and select Google Apps as well.
13. Once everything is downloaded, click both checkboxes “Backup existing ROM” and “Wipe Data and Cache”. Press ok.
14. You’ll now reboot to CyanogenMod! Process done!

References:

• Unrevoked
• HTC Desire full update guide to CyanogenMod.

Here is a simple and quick way for you to encrypt files in Linux:

gpg –output doc.gpg –encrypt –recipient EmailofRecipient@blah.com original_file.doc

Further explained:

• –output (or -o) is the name of the encrypted file
• –recipient (or -r) is the person who will be decrypting the file. If the file is for yourself only, use the email address of your GPG key.

To decrypt:

gpg --output output_file.doc --decrypt doc.gpg

I recently used this to encrypt a sensitive file before placing it on my Dropbox account. Nice safe way to place a private document in the cloud.

Reference, GnuPG manual.

Want to know how to download a YouTube video? Just go and watch the video! It’ll automatically be downloaded for you. Let me explain further…

While you watch the video on the web it is being downloaded for you to your /tmp directory. Try it out:

1. go watch any YouTube video
2. go to /tmp
3. you’ll find a mysterious file name there without any extension reference. Double click and you should see that is is your video. If you’d like change the file name to something you’ll remember better and move it to whichever folder you want.

The  file downloaded will be .flv so if you want another format later on, please use a converter app.

A quick tip to get the dust out of our blog

If you hear the fan of your computer going way up, most likely that was because some application or process is using too much CPU. Find out which one and terminate it by:
1. Open the terminal
2. Run “top”
3. Press “k” and the number on “pid” column of the process which appears on the top of the list.

Gwibber, an open source microblogging app for Gnome has now reached version 2.0!

Although at 2.0, the developers are not considering this a stable release yet and not making it available on the stable distribution channels. What I could notice first from the upgrade was the UI from:

to

Which means:

• it is now easier to jump between different accounts (Gwibber supports Identi.ca, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StatusNet, Flickr and more).
• You can easily post to only one account.
• Easy “re-dent” / “re-tweet”.

I’m sure there are more behind the scenes improvements but so far I haven’t seen any list. For now, the upgrade was worthwhile.

If you’re trying to recover deleted files or files in a corrupted partition, you might want to give Magic Rescue a try. With this command-line tool you will basically be looking for specific file types (searching by their extension). So, for a massive file recovery task, it will not be a good approach.

The program uses what it calls “recipes” as the instruction of which files to look for and how to do so. On a standard installation of Magic Rescue on my Ubuntu 9.04 distro, I got the following recipes (located at /usr/share/magicrescue/recipes) :

• avi
• elf
• gimp-xcf
• gzip
• jpeg-jfif
• mp3-id3v2
• perl
• zip
• canon-cr2
• flac
• gpl
• jpeg-exif
• mp3-id3v1
• msoffice
• png

If you’d like you can write your own recipe, the man page will instruct you how to do so.

To start looking for files, make sure you create an output directory and than execute:

magicrescue -r [name of recipe] -d [output directory] [DEVICE PATH, eg /dev/sda]

*more options and parameters are available, the above are the mandatory ones.

I used it testing .avi extensions and it worked pretty well to recover some files I had deleted even a long time ago.

If you want to run a WebKit web browser with no strings attached (unlike Safari and Google Chrome), Arora is surely worth a try.

First plus is that it runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS X. It is fast, has private browsing and looks like it has some plug-in support. Another good news is the announcement Kubuntu will carry Arora as its default browser in the 9.10 release.

One of the “I thought it would never come” moments in the open source software industry would be audio and video support in Pidgin. Now it is here! Almost… Windows is not yet supported.

With the release of Pidgin 2.6.1. audio and video is finally supported in the xmpp protocol (used by GTalk). I have to say I haven’t tried it yet since my default IM client is now Empathy (already having audio and video support), which will be the default multi-protocol IM client for the Ubuntu 9.10 release.

Hurray for the release of the new feature! I’m pretty happy for it since it might place a dent in the market share Skype has for VoIP and could make Pidgin more popular for Windows users in comparison to other proprietary solutions.

Not long ago I was working with some .po files and needed a nice and simple diff program to merge 2 files. First I tried the multi-purposed text editor vim.

Using vim as a diff and merge tool:

with Andrej’s article I found some nice tips & tricks and the Vim manual for diff tasks. Some useful commands,

• “vim -o one.txt two.txt three.txt” (for horizontal split), “vim -O one.txt two.txt three.txt ” (for vertical split)
• go to the next diff point   ” ]c “; go to previous diff point “ [c “
• merge to original “do“, merge from original “dp“.

The window you’ll be looking at will look something like this:

Where text highlighted red will display text which doesn’t match from the files being compared.

Another tool I found was Meld. This program was incredibly simple to use and visually simple to work with.

Using Meld Diff Viewer:

• open the files (or directories) which you’d like to compare;
• you will visually see where on the original file the text is at on the other file(s) being compared. Specially useful if the text in the files you’re comparing are in completely separate lines;
• clicking on arrows between the files being compared, the text will go to or from the original file.

Conclusion:

if you’re working on the command line, vim will do the job quite nicely but can be troublesome to inform you if text in both files are the same but spaced out in different line numbers. On the other hand, Meld was the tool I used for the task since there was basically no learning curve to get started and it displayed very well differences and matches in the file even if text were separated by dozens of line between both files I was comparing.

Gnash, the freedom alternative to Adobe Flash Player now supports displaying YouTube movies!

The to-do list for Gnash is still pretty large until we’re all freely able to browse the web without the Adobe plug-in. But, at least this is some major good news I found out today.

Now let’s hope html5 gives us more goodies and web developer adopters to make Adboe Flash Player even less needed.

Update: I was hoping I could use Gnash completely now but unfortunately a lot of websites are still not functioning well with it (such as Google Analytics) so I had to remove it.