I have been running a custom-built version of Android 2.2 on my own Motorola Droid, as well as my Nexus One for the past few months, and didn’t have a single issue on any of the applications I have in the market. Bedside was even updated to support the new field buttonBrightness in WindowManager.LayoutParams that allows the lower buttons to turn off when the Bedside Night Clock was opened.

However, users kept emailing me about random issues and I noticed that a uninstall/reinstallation of the application in problem seemed to fix the issue. I manually went through the update process of getting my development Motorola Droid from ESE81 to FRG01B, and then to the latest FRG22. Without doing anything else, I immediately tested my applications and they showed lots of issues. I noticed that an adb logcat was showing a lot of “PERMISSION DENIED” warnings, basically, they were broken (Android Security Permissions, not UNIX permissions), and a uninstall/reinstall of the application in question seemed to fix the issue.

If you have problems on any application after updating to Android 2.2, try uninstalling and reinstalling that application and that will fix the permissions and the application in question should start working normally again.

Additionally, for users that have a rooted device and are experiencing similar issues, there’s a nice write-up here that covers how to fix these kind of issues on a rooted phone.

To try that, open Terminal on your phone, or using “adb shell” from your computer’s command line, then run the following commands:

# cd /data/app
# for app in *.apk; do pm install -r $app; done

It might take a while to finish, but it fixes the security permissions on ALL of the applications in the data partition of your phone.

Tasker it’s an Android application that lets you run tasks depending of different events (When using a certain application, time, location, events, etc), automatically, on the background without user interaction. This tool is only available on Android, and it runs great thanks to Android’s abilities to run background services.

I use Bedside every single night (I might be a little biased). If you don’t know what Bedside is then you must check it out. It’s a night clock, but a very powerful one, it’s very customizable but it’s main purpose is to put your phone on silent, while monitoring for Calls/SMS and letting your phone ring depending on your preferences. It even has whitelists. The other thing is that you do not have to use it as a night clock, you can turn off the screen and just use it for it’s silencing powers.

I set up tasker in my own way. Since I use Bedside every night, and I only want my computer to be silent when I’m sleeping, then I thought the best way to achieve this was by using Tasker to detect whenever Bedside was opened, then it would send the command to my computer so that it’s muted, and whenever I closed Bedside, to set the volume to low.

First, you must activate the web server on your Mac:

• Open System Preferences, click on Sharing.
• Select the “Web Sharing” checkbox.
• There, it will give you the address of the “site” on your own computer. Try to set up a static ip for when you are at home, or maybe use the computer name.

Now, I modified the little php script in order to add more options, and so that we can change the volume to different levels. Just copy and paste the source of the file found below as ChangeVolume.php, and save it in the Sites folder (/Users/username/Sites/).

ChangeVolume.php

<?php
 
if (!isset($_GET['setvolume']))
{
	echo "<h1>An error has occurred.</h1>";
	exit();
}
 
switch ($_GET['setvolume'])
{
	case "highest":
		exec("osascript -e \"set volume 7\"");
		echo "<h1>Volume was set to: highest</h1>";
		break;
	case "normal":
		exec("osascript -e \"set volume 4\"");
		echo "<h1>Volume was set to: normal</h1>";
		break;
	case "low":
		exec("osascript -e \"set volume 2\"");
		echo "<h1>Volume was set to: low</h1>";
		break;
	case "mute":
		exec("osascript -e \"set volume 0\"");
		echo "<h1>Volume was muted</h1>";
		break;
	default:
		echo "<h1>The volume command was not recognized</h1>";
		break;
}
 
?>

When you are done, you should be able to point your browser to the correct url and you should be able to change the volume like this:

http://IP_ADDRESS/~username/ChangeVolume.php?setvolume=highest

http://IP_ADDRESS/~username/ChangeVolume.php?setvolume=normal

http://IP_ADDRESS/~username/ChangeVolume.php?setvolume=low

http://IP_ADDRESS/~username/ChangeVolume.php?setvolume=mute

(Make sure to replace the IP_ADDRESS and username found in those urls to the correct ones found in System Preferences -> Sharing -> Web Sharing)

We are done with the computer, now we must set up Tasker. I’m going to assume you already have Tasker installed and have familiarized yourself with it.

• On your Android phone open Tasker, click on New.
• Select Application -> Bedside as the First Context.
• On the Tasks Edit screen, click on New to create a new task.
• Name it “Bedside Active”, or whatever you’d like.
• Now click on the plus sign to the bottom left.
• On the Action Category, select Net and then HTTP GET.
• On the Server:Port field type the ip address of your computer. (do not type http:// just the ip address, computer name or domain by itself) (Example: 192.168.1.75)
• On the Path field type the ~ sign, followed by the username, followed by the name of the php file (ChangeVolume.php). (Example: ~velazcod/ChangeVolume.php)
• On the Attributes field, type “setvolume=mute”.
• Scroll down and click on Done.
• Click on Done on the other screen.
• Click on Apply to apply the changes.

Now whenever you open Bedside, your computer will also be automatically muted.

You can create an exit task with a similar task but make the Attributes be “volumechange=low” so that your computer restores the volume back to low whenever you close Bedside (awake).

All of this can be improved, and there’s no need to use it with Bedside, you can use this however you like, the easiest for me was to use it with Bedside since it was what made sense for me.

Update: I am now also using this script to mute my computer when I receive a call on my phone. I figured I’m usually listening to music while I work, but I do not want people listening to it when I get a call so I keep muting before answering every call, why not do it automatically using Tasker?

Create a new profile and use the Context State -> Incoming Call to set it up. On another profile, I’m checking to see if I’m at home and I set a new variable called %HOME to TRUE. You can also use the new profile to check if you are home, then use the same task as above to mute the computer and add an exit task that restores the volume.

It’d be cool if you could read the current volume using AppleScript in order to maybe save it as a variable so that it can be restored back to the exact volume it used to be before muting.

In order to do this I’m using a slightly modified script compared to the one above. You will find it here.

The old blog is still available and located here [http://velazcod.blogspot.com].

Thank you.

Update:

Sorry about the comments that I missed, the comments notifications were offline and I need to resume work on this website.

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