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Introduction There are tons of different approaches to this, all leading to the same end state. Here, I will overview a few of the possibilities, and discuss, in particular, what I did to enable this. The options seem to be: Boot Linux from grub-pc, using rEFIt or rEFInd or similar boot shims Boot Linux from [...]

There’s a lot of articles on the Internet saying that Nexus 4 (code named “mako”) isn’t supported in AOSP: Google “can’t comment“; and the factory images at a point had disappeared from Google’s website. (Update: factory images are back on the Google website.) True, maybe it’s not officially documented, but it’s pretty easy to build. [...]

RATC and z4root exploits are perhaps some of the most widely published on the internet, for a slew of devices: Samsung, HTC, Motorola, whatever. Many root procedures on the internet are based on the basic premise. Essentially, this family of exploit works like this: Drop a fork bomb, kill adbd, and then it restarts as [...]

So you want to continue to get sensor events in your Android service, even after the screen turns off? Well that’s too damn bad, kid, cause you can’t. No, I’m just kidding. But you’ll probably need a work-around for Android Issue 3708. In this document I describe what I had to do to get it [...]

GCC 4.4 is the default compiler on Squeeze, and there’s nothing newer in the Backports. So, you can dirty up your system by installing some packages from sid or testing, of you can build your own compiler. Since 4.4 wasn’t sufficient for my needs, I decided to do the latter. I killed a day on [...]

Today’s Android permissions system has many short-comings. While perhaps a decent starting place for development of a more robust solution, the existing implementation is minimally effective at fostering good security practices. Consider the last time you installed an app — did you look closely at the permissions? I sometimes look out of curiosity, or to [...]

The Android documentation is really pretty good. And you can whine about how things are put together — the nature of the APIs, or the Frameworks implementation, but really, it could be a lot worse. And for platforms come and gone, I think it was a lot worse, way-back-when. That’s part of why you’re bothering [...]

Foreword Consider that you might want to just actually use the real Twitter instead of reinventing the wheel. That said, sometimes it can be useful to get assets from Twitter.com to display in your app, as they pertain to your app. In Android, you can launch Twitter with one line of Code: You can also [...]

While I was working on an interrupt service for a(n embedded) driver, I found some useful posts: Howto write a driver for an i2c client device Overview of Workqueues in 2.6 Anyway, I’d never explicitly tried it before, so I was a bit unsure of how to use a workqueue for a bottom-half for my [...]