Tag Archive for 'phone'

Persistent session with ConnectBot

Published on Saturday 12th December 2009 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

One of the coolest applications available for Android is ConnectBot – though I say this as an owner of a G1, which has a hardware keyboard. I doubt it would be as useful if I were restricted to an on screen keyboard only. Something which makes ConnectBot even more useful is GNU screen (of course screen extremely useful all the time, not just when used in conjunction with ConnectBot).

Something which I’ve added to make all this even more usable is a script which reconnects a specific screen session when I connect to one of my servers using ConnectBot.

#!/bin/sh

# Do stuff when I connect from my phone

if screen -ls | grep g1gir
then
 screen -x g1gir
 exit 0
else
 screen -c .screen-g1gir -S g1gir
 exit 0
fi

Nice and simple :-) . This takes advantage of ConnectBot’s post-login automation setting to launch the script, which I have placed in ~/.local/bin/ on my server. I’m also loading a custom screen configuration which starts some programs for me (that’s what -c does) but this part is optional.

cupcakes are nice

Published on Friday 29th May 2009 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Well, I upgraded to cupcake a few days after my last post. I rooted my phone as soon as I got it, so I didn’t get the “over the air” update automatically, I installed the ADP cupcake build instead.

I had to wipe the data from my phone to do that but that didn’t really bother me, the Market stores a list of the apps you’ve downloaded so it’s nice and easy to install them all again. The on screen keyboard is quite nice, good predictive text, I use it only for short bits of text though, the hardware keyboard is much faster. The Google Mail client isn’t any different as far as I can tell, still only top posting :-( .

I can now use my A2DP Bluetooth headset/headphones properly, but I still can’t send or receive files to other phones/computers, which sucks a bit. Battery life does seem slightly improved compared to Android 1.4, but it’s still quite terrible.

I’ve started using PMix, an MPD client for Android, it works well enough, but is a little slow in places, hopefully this will improve with later releases :-) . I also found the Locale app, which lets you configure your ringtone, volume, background, screen brightness and wifi state based on your location, date, time and battery state. Very cool! No more switching to silent when you get to work and then forgetting about it at the end of the day and missing calls. Another potentially useful app is Pintail, which responds to a txt message containing a PIN you decide with the phone’s current location, so if you lose it or leave it at a friend’s house you can at least figure out where it is.

That’s it for now, perhaps I’ll think of something more interesting to blog about than my phone one day… never know!

gigglephone

Published on Friday 24th April 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

I broke the screen on my old phone, and decided that was as good an excuse as any to get myself an android phone.
So here I am, blogging on my G1.
So far on the whole I’m really loving it, I can ssh in to my server from anywhere, so I’ve been playing around getting irssi working just how I like it, but more importantly (or is it really just extremely geeky?) I can get a shell and fix it if something goes wrong and I’m not near my PC.
My favourite apps at the moment are ConnectBot, Shazam, ShopSavvy and Banshee Remote (which isn’t finished yet, but still very cool).
Perhaps I’ll start keeping a list of all the apps I’m using on here.

My major gripes with android at the moment are the lack of decent bluetooth support (handsfree/headset only support I think, am I missing any?), and top-posting only in the google mail app. I hear bluetooth will be extended in cupcake (the next major release), with any luck google mail will be improved as well, so I’ll have to find something else to complain about :-) .