Back to 1979 again or iPod vs. Walkman

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13 years old boy from UK has switched from his iPod to original 1979 Sony Walkman. The most interesting output of this story is to see the difference regarding the features of such devices – they are not technology driven anymore, but content driven. For instance from the report: “I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.”

Check out complete review and head-to-head comparison of the devices on BBC.

Technology as a weapon

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Commoditization of hi-tech devices such as digital cameras, video cameras, mobile phones together with almost omnipresent internet connection changed the ways the information battle between the authorities and the public. Of course it applies the most to situations such as current protest in Iran with totalitarian government fighting its own citizen, but remember Czechtek 2005 case [czech only, for english check Google translate].

The technologies seem to be a huge advantage for the otherwise weaker side of the public, but is that really true? Image North Korea which is a sort of a time trip to the fifties, where the people do not have any technology at all, so it can’t help. And there is much worse situation if the propaganda would start to use them as well. Then it would have no clear winner again and would become the battle of which source to trust. Am I more skeptical than usually today?

Customized T-Mobile G1 android phone

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I have been using a T-Mobile G1 phone with new open source Android operating system for a while. It was a sort of “least evil” decision first, but later I started to like the phone. One the main reasons I changed my mind was the ability to flash other firmwares that the original. This is where the real power of open source comes in – you are free to change anything you want.

I haven’t time to play with the phone to create the environment to be able re-flash the firmware – particularly to create so called “Gold card” which enables you to store file on this SD card which will be used in the recovery mode as a source of new firmware. I approached one of the users of Android forum [czech only] to help with
this. Thanks and respect to Xsoft.

When I got everything to flash a new firmware a natural question appeared – which one to flash? You can find quite extensive overview of the firmwares in JAB ROM database. My experiences with the major ones are:

  • Haykuro – Heavily modified with stuff from HTC meaning more features on one hand, but bugs, a lot of chineese on the other hand. Visually more flashy and coloured, but not as polished and clean.
  • Jesus Freke – One of the first mods, the base for most other builds. Enough for everyone, visually clean and polished based on original Google user interface.
  • The Dude’s – I used only version 1.2 and it is completely horrible visually with modified theme, icons and everything. Otherwise seemed allright.

I found two others which seemed to me OK – Cyanogen (a.k.a. “Jesus Freke on steroids” performance optimized, stripped to tha base) and TwistedUmbrella (Jesus Freke with ports of some HTC enhancements), but none of them has a important feature to me because of ability use GSM banking with my bank – SIM Toolkit application. They are both based on US version of Jesus Freke firmware which probably does not contain it in contrast to EU version.

So started hacking it … and here you have a simple guide how to create your customized firmware.

  1. Get and unpack the base firmware you would like to modify.
  2. Change the content of the directory structure as you wish (copy the apps into it in /system/apps, add media files into /media, …). The easiest way is to reuse other firmwares, but of course you can experiment much more.
  3. Download and unpack SignApk application to be able sign the firmware package (private keys and certificate compatible with recovery image are included).
  4. Delete the signature in /META-INF – files CERT.RSA, CERT.SF and MANIFEST.SF
  5. Zip all the content in your structure into a your_firmware.zip file and put it into the directory where you unpacked SignApk.
  6. Sign the zip file with SignApk: java -jar signapk.jar testkey.x509.pem testkey.pk8 your_firmware.zip your_firmware-signed.zip

Now you can proceed firmware flash with this signed file. If you do not want to get into here is my modified Cyanogen’s firmware version 3.4. Changes are:

  • SIM Toolkit added
  • MarketEnabler 3.0 beta added
  • few media files from JF 1.51 (ringtones, notification etc.) added

Download it here: update-cm-3.4-mod_ch-signed.zip [46.8 MB].

Bush vs Obama – Star Wars vs. Star Trek

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Definitely one of the most entertaining movie review ever was Newsweek’s review of the latest Star Trek franchise commenting the political reminiscences of Star Wars and Star Trek “doctrines”. A brief comparison of Bush and Obama administrations also included! Dark picture, but anyway Dick Cheney starring as Emperor and Barrack Obama as Mr. Spock … click to enlarge.

Project Renaissance

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Finally OpenOffice is going to get a major User Interface overhaul. Features improvements were impressive in last two big releases – version 2.x and few weeks ago 3.x, but UI mostly stayed horrible as it is since the beginning. Now there is “Project Renaissance” ongoing to adapt UI to 21st century.

So far more than ten proposals were submitted. Some just minor changes, some too difficult to understand in 20 seconds watching the page, some promising. Check out especially Flux UI and Iced Coffee.