It took a while to figure out this little annoying config issue while setting my android phone for development, so here it goes (thanks to comments on androidboss.com).

At the time of writing these lines, if you follow the official android documentation on this topic, you’ll probably get this frustrating error message.

$ ~/bin/android/tools/adb devices
List of devices attached 
????????????	no permissions

Then, to fix it, you should edit your “/etc/udev/rules.d/50-android.rules” that way:

SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0fce”, MODE:=“0666″

Please, mind the “:=” on MODE, instead of just “=”. This last one doesn’t work on Ubuntu 10.04. After restarting the udev daemon connecting/desconnecting the device, you should get something like:

$ ~/bin/android/tools/adb devices
List of devices attached 
CB511JDU5Y	device

Hope that helps !

UPDATE: Filed the issue on android bugtracker.

I would have preferred that my Android 1.6 device supported OpenVPN out of the box. Unfortunately, this is only available for rooted devices and a bit of suffering. Instead, I went for configuring IPsec inside L2TP VPN server. All of it stuffed into an old and low-end Soekris net4511 board running Voyage Linux.

First, I will just redirect you to the well-documented, lengthy but primary resource:

Using a Linux L2TP/IPsec VPN server

On the client side, this post is quite complete:

Adding VPN connections to Android 1.6 (Donut)

If you’re feeling impatient and brave, perhaps you’ll succeed with the configuration files that follow (they worked for me)… since those are highly dependant on your network setup, YMMV, a lot.

Before jumping right into the meat and to avoid confusion, let’s see what is the game all these evil daemons are going to play:

1. A client (my android phone), connects to the server on port 4500.
2. IPsec server (OpenSWAN) responds and asks for the PSK.
3. If the previous “gatekeeper” is ok with you, control is handed over L2TP, the other “tunnel keeper” who will ask for another password.
4. If L2TP is satisfied with your answer, PPPD, the ancient UNIX beast will be waken up and ask for… your user and password !
5. Congrats ! You’re survived the gates, now you’re on your home network from your smartphone, ain’t it cool ?

Continue reading →

If you ever happen to need GPRS “MoBoffice” data connection in India with Airtel.in, keep in mind that after activating your pre-paid SIM-card you should:

1. Send an SMS message to 170 with text PLIVE
2. Dial *148# (toll free).
3. You will be presented a menu with 2 options: select 1, to activate Airtel Moboffice.
4. After 1 hour you’ll receive nearly 6 SMS’s with details on howto configure your mobile.
5. If you use a nokia770, make sure that the GPRS access point is airtelgprs.com and *not* airtelfun.com. Nokia 770 hacker edition has this outdated info by default and will not work out of the box :/

Airtel.in website is hugely undocumented on this aspect, I discovered this details (tricks?) by sending an email to Airtel.in support: 121@airtelindia.com :S

And btw, the tariff at the moment is 30 paisa for each 50KB you use… 100 paisa is 1 rupee, so to check your email and post a text entry on your blog costs you about 1 to 2 rupees… really cheap indeed !

Aquest és un post de proba usant la nokia770+wordpy, un sistema de publicació de posts offline ideal per el viatger

I aquesta és la meva oficina mòbil, no tant virguera com el món de les HTC’s i companyia, però força útil/cómode:

If you’re switching between providers and want to keep your addressbook and sms’s, here is a simple way of doing so with gnokii:

$ gnokii --getsms AR 1 10 -d >> sms_archive
$ gnokii --getphonebook SM 1 200 > phonebook

The “AR” stands for “ARchive” and tells gnokii to search the SMS’s there, and not in the INbox (“IN” being another cellphone storage area). Following AR, there is the SMS range you want to save (sms 1st till 10th). Make sure you have a look at gnokii manpage if this is not working for you. For instance, on the following command, the “SM” is referring to the SIM card… perhaps you’re not storing your phonebook there, but in the internal mobile phone memory (“ME”).

Here I’m assuming that you have configured your /etc/gnokiirc properly. Just for the record, I’m using a bluetooth usb adapter.

As a result of this mini-howto, you have a plaintext copy of your phonebook and sms messages on your computer, isn’t it easy and convenient ? Sure, there are clearly better and comprehensive alternatives out there, like SyncML (OpenSync), but this solution suits my needs very quickly and it’s quite effortless.

Doing a backup of the photos is even simpler if you happen to have kblueetothd, one of the coolest KDE kioslaves: just drag&drop the pictures to your PC and you’re done !