Landis Vinchattle An aggregation.

April 30, 2016

Updating US Cellular Galaxy S4 w/ Vanir ROM

Filed under: Android,Links,Linux — Tags: , — Landis V @ 6:51 pm

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.

March 26, 2013

WikiStart – Tiny Tiny RSS

Filed under: Android,Business,Links,Projects,Web Applications — Tags: , — Landis V @ 6:48 am

http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki

I was reminded this morning, while reading some of James Altucher‘s very interesting posts and wanting to add to my subscription list, that I’m eventually going to need to do something to replace Google Reader as my feed reader.  This might be an interesting way to do so.  The Android client is a plus.  I’ll have to add it to my project list.

Edit 6/18/13: Also ran across https://www.commafeed.com/welcome today, which does not look bad, but I still have some inclination towards tt-rss at this time.

January 28, 2012

Android VPN Articles and References

Filed under: Android,Communications,Security — Tags: , , — Landis V @ 1:44 pm

Looking towards configuring StrongSwan as an IPSec VPN endpoint for Android.  The long-term goal is to set up a VPN configuration in which the phone automatically forwards all traffic through the IPSec VPN tunnel to be routed via my home connection unless 1.) the phone is connected to my private wireless network (perhaps one dedicated to the phone) or 2.) I manually disable forwarding, possibly to be resumed automatically after a timeout, and definitely to be resumed at phone reboot.  On the private network, will be doing some HTTP filtering, mangling, redirecting, and blocking; some file sync’ing and/or “private cloud” streaming; some monitoring; some outright blocking; some home automation… all kinds of wonderful, fun and exciting things.  I’m coming up on a year since I left the giant red atrocity that is Verizon and purchased an Android phone and plan from US Cellular (which has been an outstanding upgrade in every way… both the phone and the carrier), and I’m just now getting things in place to begin configuring the VPN hub, hence “long term”.  This post is primarily to note a few pages with hints, tips, and configurations for Android (and iPhone) device connections to a (Open|Strong)Swan server.  The biggest problem I seem to be encountering thus far is that I don’t think any I have yet encountered are descriptive in setting up an “always on, automatic at boot” connection, and I’m thinking I’ll need to get a working tun.ko module for my phone to really make this happen as I would like.  We shall see.

More to follow/update to post later.

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