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Updating US Cellular Galaxy S4 w/ Vanir ROM

Posted April 30, 2016 By Landis V

My wife’s phone was having some space issues that I finally got around to looking at today.  I recently upgraded my S5 to a 32GB SD card and it gave me plenty of space, so I was surprised when I checked hers and saw that it already had a 32GB card.  Had I looked a little closer, I probably would have realized that the card itself was not full, and in fact barely had anything on it.  I didn’t even have it set to store pictures on the external card :/

Having already bought a 128GB Class 10/U1 card, I decided to go ahead and install it.  I had run across an app a while back that actually allows the apps to be linked over to the SD card, so they don’t jump back to main memory every time they update, which is annoying as hell. I deleted the partition table on the SD card (referenced http://superuser.com/questions/373463/how-to-access-an-sd-card-from-a-virtual-machine, specifically answer 5 for a Windows machine… after updating VirtualBox and installing the current version of extensions, I was actually able to recognize and pass through my USB to SD adapter to my Linux guest) and recreated with a 96GB FAT32 partition and a 32GB ext4 partition (great thread on this setup here), formatted both appropriately, copied the data over from the old 32GB card to the FAT32 partition in the new card, installed, and booted.

I then configured the camera to save new pictures to the external SD card (FAT32 partition) and installed the Link2SD application from the Play store.  Had some difficulty figuring out why I couldn’t get root on the Vanir ROM, tried installing a couple of the SU apps with no luck.  Turned out I had not enabled it by 8x tapping the build number in about phone, and then apparently you have to select a different option in the “enable root” developer option… even though it shows apps + ADB, apparently it doesn’t set it.  Once I set it to apps only, I was prompted for root authorization as I had expected.

I then linked several apps over to the SD card, which seemed to be pretty straightforward and to work well.  Assuming this fix holds and continues to work as expected through updates, etc., I should have this phone pretty well fixed up for its usable lifetime.

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Filed in Android, Links, Linux | Tagged: ,

Trying to build a useful home calendar

Posted April 25, 2016 By Landis V

One of the things I’ve been planning/intending to do is build a home calendar that shows all of our events at a glance, and to run it on a tablet or something similar.  We use Google calendars for most of our events, and since the intent is to show us everything that is going on, we’ll need to be able to authorize and authenticate to multiple calendars, pull the events, and display them.

One of the threads that either got me started thinking about this or was one of the first things I ran across when I had the idea was this one on Reddit.  I have a couple of Pi’s, and had generally planned on using one of them (and may yet for a similar design on a TV with a little more functionality), but ended up picking up an RCA Cambio tablet at Wal Mart for around a Benjamin, so I didn’t really need to fiddle around with adding a screen, mounting, network connectivity, etc.

The above thread led me to what I believe will work for the dashboard interface – freeboard.io.  While I have a distant familiarity with JSON and XML, I don’t work with it enough to be particularly good at it, and I’m pretty much completely unfamiliar with the Google APIs and how to call them, so I wanted to note a few links that were helpful as I was working through the process.

Code that actually ended up working to pull the basic info from a public calendar (just grabs “id” now):

 

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Filed in DIY, Home, Links, Programming, Projects, Web Applications

Resizing a Raw VMDK For a VirtualBox Guest

Posted December 27, 2015 By Landis V

Had to resize a partition as I had run out of space on my VirtualBox Linux guests.  Pain in the butt.

Shut the guest down.  Ran a ‘lvextend -L+2GB /dev/amdfx/guestname‘ where “amdfx” is my physical volume and “guestname” is the logical volume name.

Had an extended partition with swap space, so used fdisk to delete the extended partition.  Also deleted and recreated the primary partition making sure to select the same starting sector and setting the end sector using the previous ending value plus 2*1024*1024 (should have been *2 again, but decided it was alright for now).

Recreated the raw disk image for the VM.  First detached and deleted it with ‘vboxmanage storageattach kmm –storagectl “SATA Controller” –port 0 –device 0 –medium none‘, ‘vboxmanage closemedium disk VirtualBox\ VMs/guestname/guestdiskname.vmdk‘, ‘vboxmanage closemedium disk VirtualBox\ VMs/guestname/guestdiskname.vmdk‘, and ‘rm VirtualBox\ VMs/guestname/guestdiskname.vmdk‘.  Then recreated and re-attached it with ‘vboxmanage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename VirtualBox\ VMs/guestname/guestdiskname.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/mapper/amdfx-guestname‘, ‘vboxmanage storageattach guestname –storagectl “SATA Controller” –port 0 –device 0 –type hdd –medium /home/user/VirtualBox\ VMs/guestname/guestdiskname.vmdk‘.

Restarted the VM, it booted normally.  I was then able to run a ‘resize2fs /dev/sda1‘ from within the guest and realize a gig of extra space (would have been 2GB, except for my screw-up forgetting to multiply by two).

Resources

  • http://askubuntu.com/questions/115310/how-to-resize-enlarge-grow-a-non-lvm-ext4-partition
  • https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=50255
  • http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/extendlv.html
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Filed in Linux, Virtualization

LaView CUBE camera system

Posted November 14, 2015 By Landis V

Bought one of these a while ago.  It’s alright.  Not particularly secure, software is annoying, and I think there’s a lot more that can be done with it.  Gradually working on improving it, this post will capture random notes on it.

Bought tinyCam Monitor Pro in the Play store when it was on sale a while back, fought with cameras for a bit before giving up.  Came back to it for a bit today and was able to make it work with the following settings:

  • Camera vendor:  (Generic)
  • Camera model:  Generic URL
  • JPEG/MPEG/RTSP request:  rtsp://ip.addr.or.hostname:554/H264?ch=(1-8)&subtype=1
    • Where ip.addr.or.hostname is the IP or hostname of the LaView device and (1-8) is the channel/camera number you wish to add.
  • Protocol: RTSP over UDP (MPEG/H264/H265)
  • Username: valid username on device (default “admin”)
  • Password: valid password for username provided above (default for admin “123456”)

ONVIF Device Manager on SourceForge, appears to provide an NVR for network video forwarding and storage on port 8000.  Not  a ton of info on the port/protocol, but did run across it in the setup.  http://sourceforge.net/projects/onvifdm/

Somewhat relevant manual:  http://www.laviewusa.com/media/attachment/file/u/s/user_manual_d1_dvr_d5100.pdf

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Filed in Android, Links, Linux, Security, Software, Video, Web Applications

How PowerPoint is killing critical thought | Andrew Smith | Comment is free | The Guardian

Posted September 29, 2015 By Landis V

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/23/powerpoint-thought-students-bullet-points-information

Great read.

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Filed in Knowledge and Learning, Links, Technology | Tagged:

The myth of the cybersecurity skills shortage | Computerworld

Posted September 8, 2015 By Landis V

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2979858/it-skills-training/the-myth-of-the-cybersecurity-skills-shortage.html

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Filed in Links, Security, Technology | Tagged:

Census and Survey of the Visible Internet (PDF)

Posted May 20, 2015 By Landis V

http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann08a.pdf

Interesting reading.

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Filed in Internet, Links | Tagged:
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