Tomas' log of stuff

I love my HTC Desire. I really do. And after having tested a HTC Desire HD for work for a little over a month, I love it even more (my Desire, that is). There’s only one thing I hated to let go when I returned the Desire HD, and that was the 1GB of space for apps. My Desire has only 149MB available, and even with Froyo and App 2 SD, that ain’t enough.

So I’ve been considering installing a custom image for quite some time. But at the same time I’ve been dreading it and putting it off. After all… my phone is working fine now, what if something goes wrong? And finding what ROM to choose isn’t exactly easy.

But tonight I finally decided to take the plunge and do it. I had a migraine earlier in the day, so possibly the medication had some impact on the reasoning circuitry in my brain. At least I decided to Root it for a start. Since I have the memory of an ant on prozac, I’ll record the steps here for my own sake and anyone I’ll start preaching the gospel to.

Rooting for the good guys

I’m not a hardcore android user or a coder. Nor do I have any ambition to be, so I opted for the path of least resistance. For rooting the Desire I used unrevoked 3(.32). I simply downloaded the Windows version, connected my phone in debugging mode, and ran the downloaded file. From then on the app pretty much controlled everything itself, I simply entered the needed codes on each reboot. at one point after the 2nd or 3rd reboot it tried to install drivers for a device but couldn’t find them. While keeping the app running I installed the drivers according to this guide, and and the app simply continued automatically. Easy!

After a little while my Desire was rooted and I could install nifty little utilities such as screenshot apps etc. Other than that, nothing was changed and the phone was just like before. Kind of an anticlimax :-)

So I decided to install an image… ;-)

It’s all about having the right image

For a while I was pretty much set on wanting to install MoDaCo’s image on the phone, but after having browsed some threads in his forum the future commitment seemed a little unclear, and a lot of commenters were being enthusiastic about LeeDroid, so I decided to give that a try after having read up on it.

Since the main point was to get more app space, I was going for the A2SD version. And according to the wiki, to make effective use of that, you first need to partition your SD card with a 512MB ext3 partition. I used ROM Manager on the android, selected 512 for EXT and 0 for swap. Remember, this wipes your SD!

And since I already had ROM Manager there, I decided to use it for creating a backup of my current config, and apply the LeeDroid image. The current version was 2.3d, so I downloaded LeeDrOiD_2.3d_A2SD.zip and copied it to the root of the SD card. Selected it from within ROM Manager, which took care of the rest. A few minutes and reboots later, I had a nice new image that looks and works much like the original sense I had, but so far with much more app space and some nifty additional features on top of that :)

I’ll try to update with my findings… :)

In April 2010 I got my first new generation smartphone, the Android based HTC Desire. Like most smartphones today it has a GPS module, which enables a lot of fancy stuff, including tracking your movements and recording them to a file. This again enables the fine art of geotagging your pictures, which this and an unknown number of subsequent posts are about. Geotagging in this context is taking the coordinates of where you were when you took a digital photograph, and storing it inside or with that photo. Obviously your smartphone will support this natively for pictures you take with it, but phone cameras stink, so what I'll be discussing is geotagging of photos taken with *good* cameras, such as a digital SLR or a neat point and shoot.

So after I got my Android phone I set about to find the optimal process for achieving efficient and cool geotagging of my photos. The first part of the process was easy; finding a good app to actually record my movements into a usable file format. The first post in the series will probably be about this, and will focus on Android. Similar apps exist for the competing platforms such as iOS, Windows Mobile and... well, I guess those are the ones that matter. There's also the option of using dedicated GPS devices such as car navigators and hiking GPS'es etc. The requirement is their track data can be exported as a file that can be converted to GPX.
I will not be focusing on dedicated GPS devices for dSLRs such as the Nikon GP-1 because I consider it too expensive and it has several drawbacks and consumes the important data connector port. If you've got it then... hey, congrats... you're done. I might get back to some dedicated third party solutions if an affordable and practical one comes along.

The second part of the job was to find a good geotagging app for matching the GPX track data to the photos I've shot with my Nikon D300s or my venerable Nikon D70 once I get back to my PC. And since I'm using Windows 7 64-bit as my main desktop platform, that's the target OS. This proved to be much harder, in that there's so many apps, each with certain strengths and weaknesses, and there doesn't seem to be and good comparison, so I decided to do my own. This post will be filled with the criteria I will be evaluating as I come up with them, as well as the apps I come across that I plan on testing (and maybe even listing the ones I won't be testing and why). If you have feedback or suggestions from the start, or along the way, feel free to comment with them here.

Testing criteria

Software discovered

*This post will be updated over the course of the testing

I finally got the opportunity to install Windows 7, so I decided to do some system changes at the same time, some of which I've been meaning to do for quite some time.

When I built the current workstation around an Asus Rampage Extreme I bought 2x4GB OCZ Platinum DDR3 ram timed at 7-7-7-20, planning to later upgrade to 8GB. But by the time I ordered the new mem, despite even having the same product number, it came with 7-7-7-24 timings. Now I don't know for 100% certain that one of the modules aren't defective, but they seem to be working well separately, but if both kits are installed, the system will BSOD randomly.

So top on the list was 8GB of identical memory modules. I got some nice Corsair XMS3 2GB modules (4 of them) at a decent price, and while I was at it I got an Intel x25 Generation 2 SSD drive to install Windows 7 on. I know shouldn't have, but I couldn't help myself.

I did the installation Friday night, and so far the memory has been working exemplary, and the combination of Windows 7 and the SSD drive is a joy to use. So far good news all around. While I'm installing everything over, I decided I should do some posts on what I always add to my system after a fresh install, as I always forget stuff, and people sometimes ask me about my essential tools.

The Norwegian tech site Hardware.no has posted a test where they compare assorted common "household" liquids and substances as thermal paste replacement for use between cpu and cooler. For reference they use Arctic Silver Ceramique. The results are quite amusing.

References: Test, results (in Norwegian). Google Translator results.

So my firewall is a an old Compaq d500 desktop running Windows 2003 and ISA 2006 Server. It's running headless (without monitor, keyboard or mouse connected) in a corner, being managed over RDP. But since the hardware isn't new, the concept of usb keyboards is kind of alien to the bios, but I finally managed to get it to boot without nagging for a ps/2 keyboard. However, seems Windows also feels it should've been given a keyboard connection, because forever it's been throwing a service error at logon:

Event Type:	Error

Event Source:	Service Control Manager

Event Category:	None

Event ID:	7026

Date:		01.08.2009

Time:		10:16:19

User:		N/A

Computer:	******

Description:

The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: 

i8042prt

I finally got tired of this so I decided to search out a solution to this. And woohoo, I found 2:

1. Boot to recovery console (from the CD or if you've installed it on the HDD), at the prompt type: disable i8042prt
2. Start regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt and change value of "Start" to 4. This will disable the boot start of this service.

Hope this is of some use for someone else.