TurtleBeach EarForce PX5

However, there was one issue. Out of the box, the headset produced serious amount of clicks and pops and other static noises. This is because the wireless transmission for this headset is done over 2.4 GHz band which competes with the various wireless devices that I have around the house. Trying various tools like inSSIDer proved useless as the PX5 isn’t a WLAN/802.11 connection evne though it uses the same band. Finally after lot of trial and error, I figured out that doing the following things reduced the noise down to a bare minimum (in fact zero):

- Use Channel 9 on the wi-fi router for 2.4GHz band with band width being 20MHz

- Keep the transmitter away from PS3

- Keep the transmitter away from the TV (It’s surprising how much the EMI emitting from those huge LCDs can affect wireless performance.

Now, it’s working awesomely and I just had a decent run of the missing link DLC of Deus Ex HR

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Fixing The Static Noise, Clicks And Pops with Turtlebeach Earforce PX5, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I was asked recently why do I bother now in this age of 24″ widescreen monitors (and above) with resolutions of 720p at the bare minimum. I could certainly afford to have more than double that limit staring back at me from the screen without overflowing. Then, am I just being pedantic in following this religiously? Am I not wasting precious screen real estate by doing this?

Well, NO. The reason I still do it is I can use that real estate for much better purposes while not breaking a sweat (and my neck) while reading long horizontal lines of code. It is still much easier to keep the code size limited horizontally within your immediate focus of vision and you can use the rest of the horizontal space for things like having a directory tree or a database of tags showing. But I keep these extras ready at the whim of a button (mapped to key combos in vim) and the most I use it for is having two (or more) files open simultaneously in vim splits to make the code easier to understand or even write. Many times, what I am reading/writing needs me to back and forth between a few files and I can keep them all open using the big screens if I limit my horizontal code size in each file.

I wasn’t still able to convince the person of my self-imposed rule but maybe I’m wrong? What do you follow?

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled The 80 Column Coding Rule, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

A few days ago, this new patent showed up about Apple’s “new wave approach to fighting malware” with the author giving up half-researched commentary on it.

I was intrigued by this news (if you can call it that), not because it’s something new but instead because process isolation is hardly a new concept. The author mentions “Qubes OS” as the one to be original inventor before Apple but in fact, it has been used for years (eg chrooting/containers in linux) and more popular recently in Android’s uid based approach. Even Qualcomm (and other SoC vendors) have stuff that helps in this space with Trustzone based isolation between processor entities at hardware level.

So, I wanted to check out what’s new here (which was not immediately clear and probably no one else tried to see it because the patent link is wrong in the article and it links to some display patent, not the one in question). The correct patent is this: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/RE43987.html

After going through the mangled language that any patent embodies, it is clear that “conceptually” it is similar to what has been done till now, but the approach is different. On the whole, the basic difference seems to be that linux uses chrooting, android uses separate users, Qubes adds a virtualization layer to achieve the above and Apple goes one further (not necessarily better) and makes it real/physical separate processor instead of a virtual one.

However, I’m still not sold on this and it doesn’t seem foolproof. (I’m not a security expert by any means, so please take the below with a tablespoon full of salt and you are free to add corrections or throw me out the window ) In fact, it doesn’t seem much better than the current system but has an add-on of cost (extra physical processor, dedicated circuitry/components) and losing ease of use. Some points to be noted:

1. The burden is still mostly on user. The user still needs to keep all his anti-malware programs updated all the time and be alert for each indication on the system and allow/disallow things to happen in system all the time to keep it protected. This approach is not going to save the system in any way if any of the above steps falter. Which is, pretty similar to what we see today.

2. The approach does not mention aversion of several crucial points:

a. If processor P2 itself is compromised by the malware, then it is rendered useless in the scenario where P2 itself is tasked with scanning the memory/files on Memory M2 for malware. It can be made to just report “all clean” by malware as the scanning engine running on P2 is still accessible by network content in the same way it would have been on P1 in a non-dual-processor system.

b. P2 is connected to the video display subsystem and this can be used to malware’s advantage to trick user into clicking on wrong areas or doing wrong things in the same way as it is today

c. It says keypresses can be encrypted by P1 and decrypted by Network device 190 to allow P2 to not know what was pressed. But this again seems to not require the above approach. First, it requires a special network device now, not a generic one as mentioned in the patent. Second, since the network device itself needs to be configurable now for this, there is another attack vector there. This is, however, somewhat similar to what existing SoC solutions do in mobile space but that is better/feasible because the other end is a software entity and the mechanics of how it works is different.

d. For online gaming etc, where the influx of data is huge and needs to be processed in real time, P1 takes this data directly from M2 once P2 signals availability. Not sure, how is this different then from having a single processor system without the above isolation?

e. Several other things which I can keep typing about till my keys wear out.

TL;DR: This patent on its own may be a new idea (rather a new twist to an existing concept) but it is hardly something that can be put into practice and maybe the reason why Apple hasn’t actually produced anything with this, yet. It might become better with other ideas coupled (which Apple may have filed separate patents for but are currently unknown).

Aside: Why do patents cite archaic things? Every patent gives examples of some old stuff. E.g. Even though this patent was filed in 2011, it refers to Pentium 4 as an example of processors and Quake 3 Arena as an example of online games?

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Apple, Anti-Malware, Patents, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Using different controllers made sure that it was not a controller issue. I suspected that it could be a bad coding issue on Sony’s part where the store is trying to communicate over some ports and the thread blocks on not being able to (since I had the router firewall on and UPnP disabled) making it look like the controller isn’t working. So, I turned on UPnP and rebooted the router but still the same issue.

But, ultimately I hit upon the solution by mistake. I kept a button pressed on the controller while the PSN store was starting up and there it was. I could now move around and use the store without any issues. So, that’s the solution folks. Just keep a button pressed before starting the store app and keep it pressed till the main screen is fully loaded. I don’t know how or why this fixes the problem and I’m going to drop a mail to the Sony customer care after writing this blog post. I hope they fix this in the next update.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Fixing the DS3/Sixaxis Controller Not Working in PSN Store Issue, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Overscan: 

So, many TVs have this issue that they miss out on displaying the corners of the image put out by the Odroid U2. The phenomenon is called overscan. Now, all you have to do is select settings such as “Just Scan” or similar on your TV that allows your TV to display image coming from U2 as is. This setting is called “Screen Fit” on Samsung TVs but I found something weird. My TV already had this setting set for the picture mode, but still I had the overscan issue. What I had to do was to switch to another mode and then back to Screen Fit and it started working fine.

emmc Adapter:

The emmc adapter that hardkernel/odroid folks send out with the board to use with a microsd card reader doesn’t seem to work. However, the issue is that it is slightly bigger than a regular microsd and hence doesn’t fit properly inside the reader. All I had to do was to file the top edges a bit and then it worked fine.

HDMI-DVI Adapter:

Currently I’ve attached it to my old Samsung B2030 monitor. A tip btw for B2030 owners (or anyone else having a monitor with only DVI input and not HDMI). Despite many folks (including hardkernel/odroid guys) saying that HDMI to DVI adapters are not supported and won’t work, they do work but the thing is that the monitor should be turned on before turning on the U2 otherwise U2 doesn’t output anything over the HDMI and the monitor won’t display anything.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Odroid U2 Tips: Overscan, emmc Adapter, HDMI-DVI Adapter, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Odroid U2

I’ve got quite a few things planned on how to use it and will post more about my adventures with the U2 here soon.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Odroid U2 is here, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I headed over to the Android developers site some time later and was pleasantly surprised to see that actually 3rd party widgets can indeed be added to the lock screen. They just need a small change for this. They need to add “android:widgetCategory=”keyguard|home_screen”" parameter to your xml where the appwidget provider element is defined. Simple enough

If you are the one who doesn’t like to wait, you could even change your favorite app’s manifest to allow the widget to be added. There are a few more details if you’d like to get into the nitty gritty which can be read from over here: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/appwidgets/index.html

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Third Party Widgets on Android 4.2 Lock Screen, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

(For the impatient, if you want to use it, I’ve uploaded my profiles to my github account.)

So, I set up and quick and simple but much better working night mode profile. It consists 3 different profiles actually as listed below:

• Night Mode -> This actually turns on the night mode based on a host of different combinations listed later in the post.
• Alarm Detection -> Detects when the alarm goes off
• Unlock Detection -> Detects when the phone display is unlocked.
• Home Detection -> Detects if I’m at home

The basic premise behind this night mode setup is:

• The phone should detect that I’m sleeping by taking a combination of following scenarios:
  • The location should be at home (Done by home detection profile using “Cell Near”. I use this mostly because it is more accurate than network location and works indoors as well which GPS doesn’t do and is very light on battery as well)
  • Time should be between 11 PM to 7 AM (my likely sleep time)
  • Display should not have been unlocked in the last 30 minutes (i.e. make sure I’m not actively using the phone)
  • It’s dark in the room (Make sure that lights are turned off. Need to turn on ambient light sensor to work with screen off in tasker settings for this)
• Once all the above conditions are established, my phone is fairly certain by now that I’m indeed sleeping and turns off auto sync
• The night mode still has to check whether the conditions still exist after every half hour or so (e.g. I might not be sleeping yet but lights turned off to allow my wife to sleep and I didn’t fiddle with the phone for some time)
• If I unlock the phone any time at night, it should tell my phone immediately that I’m not sleeping and it deactivates the night mode (for the next 30 minutes or so when night mode check kicks in again)
• When the alarm goes off, night mode should be stopped since I’m obviously awake now
• There are quite a few other checks and balances incorporated to make sure all these 4 profiles don’t go out of sync and also do as less as possible to preserve battery.

Tested this setup for past few weeks and it works pretty well. If you want to use it, I’ve uploaded my profiles to my github account.

Improvements/Changes:

• Exchange sync still bypasses the auto sync turn off settings. So need to either buy “Synker” to control exchange sync directly or figure out a way to connect droidwall to tasker to cut the internet connection for exchange app.
• The home mode xml in the account does not have anything in cell tower locations , so you need to open it in tasker and scan for your own cell towers
• I just turn off auto sync for me in night mode (want to receive sounds for other notifications, texts etc), you can edit the profile to suit your other needs
• You can change the timings as well as per your needs
• I have some prints done to a file in these profiles, mainly for debugging. You can remove those once you are certain the setup works well for you.
• Let me know if you can think of any other ways to make this more robust. I’ll post the rest of my tasker profiles as well soon.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled My Tasker Night Mode Profile For Android, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Anyways, the threat is averted for now because a good natured githubber, Jason Salaz, registered the domain name and plastered a pretty generic webpage over there which doesn’t do much (except give him a bit of web traffic boost).

After the map fiasco and then this, it looks like Apple is indeed slipping up and things are falling through the cracks. Let’s see what Tim Cook has to say about this.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled BogusApple.com: Apple Screw Up Saved By Githubber, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Before I go into how I went about it, here is what it does now. When I keep the phone into my car’s phone holder, it automatically starts streaming music over BT from my car stereo and then when I keep it in my pocket, it stops.

Ingredients I used:

• 1 Galaxy Nexus
• 2 NFC tags (bought from tagstand guys. Makers of the awesome NFC Tasker Launcher app)
• 1 male to male stereo cable
• 1 Samsung HS3000 BT headset (since my car stereo doesn’t have BT. This little headset is awesome because it is cheap (25$ or so at amazon), has a stereo port where you can connect any headset or stereo cable, implements apt-x protocol for high fidelity audio streaming)
• Android App: NFC Task Launcher
• Android App: Tasker (NFC task launcher is enough for basic things but my task is a bit more involved)
• Android App: Secure Settings plugin for Tasker/Locale

So, what I did is this:

Hardware:

Pasted one NFC tag to my car phone holder and kept another one in my wallet.

Connected the HS3000 headset to the car stereo through aux-in and to power through a car charger (it uses a standard micro usb port to charge).

Stuck the HS3000 near my dashboard. I could have hidden it in dashboard or somewhere but I also wanted to use it to take calls when they come in so I can use its mic for speaking and incoming audio sounds through the car speakers. You can also disconnect the internal battery by popping up the casing so that it turns on and off with the car but it isn’t necessary as it anyways turns off if there is no device connected for a while.

Software:

Created two tasks in Tasker. First as “Car Mode Enter” and second as “Car Mode Exit”. The car mode enter task basically does this:

• If car mode is not already running (based on a variable)
  • Turn on Bluetooth (This also auto connects)
  • Crank up the Media Volume
  • If Battery level is above 40%
    • Keep the screen always on (using Secure Settings)
  • Else keep the screen on if power is connected (through car charger)
  • Crank up the brightness if it is day time (so that I can see the screen) and store the old value for restoring later.
  • If navigation is not on (through another variable set through another profile which monitors if a navigation or maps app is in foreground)
    • Load the Music app
    • Start playing music
  • Turn on the Read SMS profile cuz I’m a safe driver (Another profile in tasker which reads the incoming SMS’ sender’s name and asks if it should read the text (don’t want any embarrassing ones read out while others are there in my car ) and then proceeds to read the text if I speak “Yes”. For anything else or no input, it doesn’t read the text)

The car mode exit task undoes everything done in the car mode enter task and restores everything to how it was before entering the car mode.

Also created two tasks in NFC task launcher which just launch the car mode enter and exit tasks when tapped against 1 of the tags and wrote this task to the tags.

All together now:

So, we are done now. Now when I enter my car, I place the phone on the holder and nice music starts playing. When I get out, I tap it against my pocket (with the wallet) and everything is back at normal.

Let me know if you need any more information about the above setup or the tasker profile xml files. I use tasker for automating a whole other bunch of things as well. Will try to post that stuff soon along with any other NFC tricks I try out.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled My Android NFC Car BT Audio Setup, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings