Entries tagged as androidRelated tags austria fail finance fun german internet language machine learning phone public transport anti-spam career gentoo google hardware antenna automobile ballooning cw debian education event gnu-linux comic migration photography software time lapse video flickr rant review samsung social web history kernel programming bluetooth diy electronics www guitar movies private tabletWednesday, September 7. 2022Kenwood TH-D72 on APRSDroidI managed to use APRSDroid (v1.6.2b) on a BlackView BV9900pro (Android 10) with a Kenwood TH-D72E TRX. It works, with a few caveats. The HT itself needs to be set to the same APRS settings as the TM-D710, which are:
One difference to the TM-D710 is that the TH-D72 has got native USB. Therefore, I also set PC Port Output (screen 350) to On. I connected the HT with a Mini-USB cable to a USB-OTG adapter which had a Micro-USB plug. Using a USB-C adapter, I connected it to the BV9900pro. A simple USB OTG app didn’t list any USB devices connected, though. I noticed I had to switch on “OTG data exchange” in Settings > System. Now APRSDroid showed a USB device connected, and I could start tracking. I noticed two caveats, which might be completely the smartphone’s fault. (It performs aggressive internal task killing which can’t even be entirely neutralized by rooting and modding.) Note that the “OTG data exchange” setting shows a description that it would be switched off when unused for 15 minutes. In my case, it switches off anyway, even if the phone’s screen is on and APRSDroid is tracking. The second issue is that when I switch to map mode while the USB connection is on, the app freezes and is cumbersome to stop and restart. I always have to switch off OTG first, then study the map, switch back to list view, activate OTG and start tracking again. Additional thoughts: The TH-D72 is an aging device. It was introduced in 2010, I bought it new when I got licensed in 2018, and it was discontinued soon after. It is still the only device available [besides the TH-D74] that offers an all-in-one solution for Packet/APRS/GPS that also works perfectly from Linux and Android. Although I’m a ham for a little time now, it always puzzles me how information can be so inaccessible to newbies: Only recently I managed to use Packet Radio at 1200 baud to
all of which are actually old-school meanwhile. It also took me four years to figure out APRS works directly between the HT and a smartphone or tablet. At least I established these options for me now. The TM-D710 disappeared from the market last year, and I was caught by surprise. After months of searching I could finally buy one used. This mobile TRX also offers APRS on-board which can be directly accessed from Linux.
Posted by Stephan Paukner
in Ham Radio, Information Technology
at
20:17
| Comment (1)
| Trackbacks (0)
Saturday, June 21. 2014Android smartphone coming up, IIII’m adding to my phone history: A look back at the Galaxy NexusI only noticed recently that this phone never had a “Samsung” tag at all; while Samsung indeed was the hardware manufacturer, that device simply was a Google phone. Surprisingly, I was less into rooting/modding with this phone than I was with my first Android phone, the Motorola Milestone, although the pureness and openness of the Nexus devices was dedicated to such purposes. Maybe because Android 4 finally featured a lot innately: Useful home screen, editing contact groups & birthdays, taking screenshots, mobile data usage control, unlocking by face recognition, panorama camera mode, rich notifications, better search, better messaging. I only rooted it once it was clear there won’t be any further updates; I did so to be able to use advanced anti-theft features. But now it’s beginning to bug me that the hardware (RAM) is getting old (small); the phone is lagging a lot if the uptime reaches one week. I had to turn off various useful but RAM-eating services, like, live wallpapers. Well, it’s 2½ years old. Mentioning Android features, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Google Now experience becomes the actual core in the future, making devices smart and active companions that exactly know about their users’ habits. ... and the AppIe ¡PhoneYes, I used an ¡Phone 4 for some months. I didn’t find it that intuitive like it was always praised; e.g., where do you find email settings? No, not at all in the email app, but in the system settings! Also, the ¡Phone has no idea of the concept of widgets or background services. There is no such thing as a third-party keyboard with swipe gestures and text prediction, or a service that changes settings according to detected current conditions. AppIe physically seals phones and notebooks, tries to trick users into buying entirely new devices by making component upgrades expensive or impossible. Yet, ¡People only seem to care about the smoothness of animations. Whoever buys AppIe, it’s their own fault. Coming up: Samsung Galaxy S5I somehow drifted away from praising Google’s “pure Android” experience, although they drive core innovations. Having used my first “real” Samsung device, the NotePRO tablet, for some time, I came to appreciate the AppIe-like benefit (what!!1) of an interlinked environment: Samsung devices are “magically” in touch with each other—I can remote control both my TV and my sat receiver/HDD recorder/Blu-ray player (but, strangely enough, not my microwave), I can stream pictures, videos and even my whole UI screen to my TV over the freakin’ air. I mean, totally on their purpose and without me “hacking” anything. It’s no longer Android or Google integration that’s exciting to me, it’s the Samsung experience. I don’t mind TouchWiz as long as they have a mission behind it. (OTOH, the Samsung store praises cheap and foolish third-party apps exclusively, it’s totally pointless to search for apps there, IMO.) I notice, Samsung is the new Nokia: Every jerk has got one—people who don’t know how to mute their phones or change the standard sounds. I’m the next in line! ... and the Gear FitIn addition, I’m leering at Samsung’s health-centric smartwatch Gear Fit, as it perfectly integrates into their (or my) device environment. Do they also build toothbrushes? Saturday, February 15. 2014How to root the Galaxy Nexus... GSM version (Maguro) with Android 4.3 from GNU/LinuxI found so many incomplete tutorials written in bad English that I decided to write one myself and keep it simple. You must have your phone’s bootloader unlocked; doing so will wipe your device!
Have fun! Sunday, January 12. 2014My quest for a tablet, IIShortly after I had published my first post in this series, rumors about a large (12.2”) high-resolution (2K) Note-branded Samsung Android tablet turned up. I followed those rumors closely until the sudden reveal of the Galaxy NotePRO at CES a few days ago! This device finally seems to fit my original requirements, tailored around “active” reading:
I still get opinions that even 10” tablets are too large & heavy and 8” are about right; anything larger ought to be a MS Windows 8 notebook. But MS does not play a role in my personal computing setup. I really do care about the points listed above. A different point is software updates. I'm an update geek regarding Android, but in this case my focus is on the stylus software features (consider search by hand-drawn shape—yes, it works!), so I don't mind Samsung's TouchWiz UI or the possible lack of OS updates, especially since Samsung has finally fixed some long criticized issues. And it's based on the still fresh Android 4.4 after all, while my Galaxy Nexus is now stuck to 4.3. Originally, I wanted such a device for a better workflow of reading scientific publications for work. Too bad my job has meanwhile changed... twice. But I will still make use of its features for “active” reading (annotating) of math/CS literature and for conceptual work, as well as for image editing. Wednesday, May 22. 2013My quest for a tabletI started the following section as a draft in 2008, with the generic title “Mobile device wanted”:
Yes. The ¡Pad didn’t exist yet. That mentioned netbook back then was a convertible, with a touch-screen LCD that could be rotated to be operated like a tablet. Similar solutions still exist, e.g. the Lenovo ThinkPad X230, but I dislike the low screen resolution, its weight and the MS Windows 7 OS that’s not tailored for touch use. But the main reason why I disliked both the netbook and the e-readers was that these were no dedicated solutions for stylus input—I wanted to write formulas and draw graphs and arrows. I followed the evolution of e-readers with e-ink displays, but they were just too laggy. When the ¡Pad was introduced in 2010, I saw the desired technology approaching, but I was leering at a more open Android solution. Sadly, in the first time those tablets were only targeted at game and movie enthusiasts, and were more considered gadgets than productive devices. I was drooling over Plastic Logic’s QUE e-reader that also had a stylus, but of course it never appeared on the market. The finally tablet-optimized Android 3 of 2011 wasn’t mature. Also, I still think that 10” screen diagonals are somewhat small compared to textbooks or magazines, so I was drooling over Kno’s 14” tablet. (I shake my head over opinions that 10” are already too large.) Of course, Kno went out of the hardware business before reaching production. From a different manufacturer, and while too underweight for my needs, the NoteSlate was a nice concept, but it still doesn’t exist. 2011 also brought Samsung’s S Pen technology with their Android-based Note brand, and I thought that a tablet variant would be just around the corner. Indeed, the Note 10.1 came in 2012, but it still had that pixelated 720p resolution (regarding font rendering) instead of more reasonable 1080p. Finally, there seem to be two 11” Samsung tablets lurking for 2013, but none of them is Note branded; there’s also a rumor that there won’t be a Note 10.1 successor soon due to weak sales of the current model. It appears I’ll have to wait for yet another year. Thursday, December 1. 2011Android smartphone coming up, IIA look back at the Motorola MilestoneI’m continuing the history of my [cell] phones by replacing my two-year-old Milestone. It literally has been a milestone: It was my first smartphone, and I could do everything with it (which, of course, wasn’t specific for that device, but for Android in general): Contacts and calendar were magically in sync with Google’s web apps. I could browse the web fully, even start embedded Flash videos—a zombie technology, considered dead since years. I used the GPS to do local exploration, e.g. with Google Maps/Places, used location-based games like Brightkite (meanwhile dead), Foursquare or Gowalla (which I lost interest in soon), or recorded my bike rides. It’s so “living in the future” to pan through Google Street View on a mobile device. I was root on a Linux system. GTD task managers and note apps are in sync with their respective web apps. I access important files in my DropBox. I receive audio streams from Google Music. I hold the phone up to a speaker and it freaking tells me what song it’s playing. Apps with AI (e.g. text predicting keyboard apps) are popping up, just as those implementing computer vision and augmented reality. However, since several months my most used app is Running Services (which I called ruining services), followed by Android’s internal Task Manager: I had to cope with the phone’s limited RAM of only 256 MB every day. I could hardly install additional apps, although I had already applied a mem hack. It was a regular task to copy a Google Maps upgrade from /data/app to /system/app using Root Explorer (and do a hot reboot followed by deleting the old cache file). The phone also had a memory leak (since that infamous Android 2.2 upgrade that every European Milestone user was whining for for months), occasionally killing the alarm clock app during the night, making a precautionary reboot necessary every other day. However, I didn’t have the nerve to flash one of those very experimental alternative unofficial ROMs—Argh, the locked bootloader!—as they often introduced heavily disturbing and way too serious bugs, which I consider out of the question for a productive device that simply ought to work. The actual problem of course is that developers are constantly bloating their apps, keeping track with the hardware specs of the most recent phones. My Milestone even got two hardware upgrades: A new and stronger battery, and a new LCD, which I had smashed accidentally. Phone vs. tabletSo, I’m getting a new phone, but I didn’t really want to: Actually, I’m leering at an Android tablet since more than a year, and my intention was to use that device primarily and reduce the smartphone to a simple phone. I want to use a tablet as a kind of e-reader that supports handwritten input—I want to write formulas and draw freaking arrows!—, replacing my non-electronic (cardboard) tablet that holds printed sheets of paper and a pencil. So far, my workflow is to print research papers and read and annotate them with pencil on paper. There are also computer science e-books with hundreds of pages involved, printed incrementally, where I can only carry the currently read sections with me. Sadly, it seems that such a device is still months away. One of the main issues for me is that all of those 10.1" tablets currently only have a pixel count of at most 1280 along the wide edge, resulting in ~140 ppi, what I consider way too low compared to the densities of ~250–300 ppi of current phones. Another thing is precise stylus input using an actively powered stylus, allowing effective palm rejection. Slowly, that technology evolves, e.g. with Samsung’s Galaxy Note. Also, although Android 3.x had been optimized for the tablet form factor, it appeared having been rushed to market. I expect an incarnation of a tablet that meets my expectations within the next months, with an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core CPU, Android 4.x, and e.g. Samsung’s S Pen. But I’m not going to wait any longer. Coming up: Samsung Galaxy NexusThis device is at the bleeding edge. But one of the important advantages is, just like with Google’s previous two Nexus phones, that its Android software is a “pure Google experience”, without any adaptation by a specific hardware manufacturer, what is one of the issues people have to deal with on other phones. This ensures that updates or upgrades come early and for a longer time. Of course, the hardware specs are a total win, giving me a dual-core CPU with 1 GB RAM. New to me will be the NFC chip, what will probably be of no use for me initially (as a European, but we’re getting there), and a front-facing camera for video chats. Let’s see if I’ll miss the Milestone’s hardware keyboard. Given that the Galaxy Nexus is also the first official Android 4.x device, it introduces new software features, but those won’t be specific to that device. As I use to say: With that phone, I won’t need something else for years again. Monday, September 19. 2011OMG, OMG, OMG: SCOTTY mobil für Android!!!11SCOTTY mobil, den mobilen Reiseplaner der ÖBB, gibt’s jetzt auch offiziell für Android! Endlich! Nach dem, dem, dem und dem wurde das auch Zeit! Und die App funktioniert sogar sehr gut, hat ein interessantes Zeitauswahl-UI und macht Echtzeitdaten abrufbar. Monday, January 31. 2011VOR-/ÖBB-Fahrpläne mit Android abrufen, IIINach einer ersten Auflistung einiger Möglichkeiten im April 2010 und einem Follow-Up im Juni mache ich hier nun weitere aktuelle Ergänzungen und erstelle einen Überblick, zumal immer wieder Leute zu dem Thema hier „aufschlagen“ (z.B. in den Kommentaren oder per einschlägiger Websuche). Die unten angeführte Liste ist nach meiner persönlichen Präferenz gereiht, gemäß folgender Anforderungen:
Hier nun meine Lösungen:
Zum Schluss sei noch auf eine Speziallösung hingewiesen: Offizielle RSS-Feeds über Betriebsstörungen. Ja, diese Feeds gibt es, und sie sind gut versteckt, aber via ÖBB-Streckeninformation zu finden. Sie würden sich gut z.B. in einem RSS-Widget machen. [Update 01.02.] Ein Twitter-User hat mich darauf aufmerksam gemacht, dass es offenbar im 2. Quartal eine Android-App von den ÖBB geben soll. Dies geht aus einem Kommentar auf der Facebook-Seite der ÖBB vom 5. Jänner hervor.
« previous page
(Page 2 of 2, totaling 14 entries)
|
AboutCalendar
ArchivesCategoriesShow tagged entriesandroid antenna anti-spam apache astronomy austria automobile ballooning bash bluetooth bug career cloud comic cooking crypto cw debian diy dreams education electronics fail fashion finance flickr fuerteventura fun gentoo geography german gnu-linux gnucash google google earth guitar hardware history image processing internet kernel kids language lifestyle linkroll literature ltd machine learning making mallorca mathematics matlab microsoft migration movies munich music nautilus numismatics octave pdf perl philately philosophy phone photo gear photography podcast politics postfix private programming public transport rant religion review salzburg samsung science security shtf social web software statistics storage sustainability symbian tablet time lapse transceiver tv usenet venice video virtualization wordplay work www yahoo youtube
Syndicate This BlogFollow meBookmarks
Powered by |