Another way to use Ekiga with google voice on your android phone.

I've already gone over once of how to get your ekiga account to receive phone calls in sipdroid. This will just be a slightly different method of getting an ekiga account to receive phone calls also using sipdroid. This method allows you to either use a Google voice account if you have it.


OK, fairly simple process here. The first thing that you need to do, and the most obvious, register for an ekiga sip account at ekiga.net. if you do not have one already. Write down the sip address that you pick, 'black@ekiga.net' Now run over to ipkall.com and register for their free service. It can take up to a few hours for ipkall to email you back your new US based  DID, but most of the time it's within a few seconds. Log into your new ipkall number. Under 'SIP Phone Number' put in your ekiga username, everything up to the @ of your sip address 'black'. And under the 'SIP Proxy' put in 'ekiga.net' or whatever is after the @ in your sip address.

If you don't have a google voice account just go ahead and stop here. You can now receive normal phone calls through sip with ekiga. Go ahead and give it a test. Just call the ipkall number from any phone that has long distance service.

For adding the number to your google voice account, it's fairly simple. Just add the number and have google call to verify the number. When your phone rings, slide up to answer and then slide the number pad up to punch in the verification code. I've noticed a good bit of lag sending the touch tones back to google. Keep this in mind in case you get into a hurry and google doesn't seem to be accepting the code. Now you can receive calls from google voice over sip without having a gizmo5 account.

As an added little bonus, there is an app in the market called 'GVoice Callback' which allows you to make normal calls with your phone and tells google voice to 'ringback' your ipkall number. So with this work around you can also make as well as receive calls with ekiga. This is the method in which I receive and make ALL my calls now that I'm located in Canada.

NOTE: Ekiga really likes STUN servers. So I'd advise using one if your going to be jumping from network to network making sip calls.

Chicken 'n' dumplings

This really needs no introduction. It's a recipe that's been running around in my family for quite a while. Something that we love to eat as the fall and winter approaches. So, take an afternoon off and make something good over the weekend for your family.



Chicken & Dumplings

1 - large Chicken
2 Quarts Chicken stock
1 - Can of cream of Chicken Soup
6 tbsp of butter.
salt/pepper to taste.


Dumplings
2 hard boilded eggs
1/3 cup of shortening
2/3 cup of milk
1 1/2- 2 cups all purpose flour

place flour in large bowl, add shortening and milk. Stir until moistened add more flour if needed to make a soft dough.


Directions: Boil chicken until tender. Remove from bone and cut into small pieces. Save the liquid for stock. If necessary add enough water to stock to make 2 quarts. Add soup,
butter, salt and pepper into boiling chicken stock. Boil 2-3 mins stiring gently. Fold in chicken and eggs. Simmer for 20-30 mins.

Split for burning large backups to a DVD.

The other day I was getting my backups ready to restore my Archlinux install onto a larger hard drive. I don't delete any packages that pacman downloads. I just move them out of the /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ to /var/cache/pacman/old/. This is just to make sure that no matter what happens I can rollback to any package that I've used. Which I do quite a bit when switching from radeonhd drivers to the ATI drivers. I have to switch out xorg and boot to an older kernel.

Anyway, /var/cache/pacman ended up being about 16GB from over 1.5 years of pulling down packages. I wanted an easy way to copy the whole directory to a couple dvds for easily copying to the new disk. I was asking notklaatu on irc if he had any ideas and he told me that I could use tar, split, and cat to do all this. I could tar the folder and compress it. Then, run split to divide the large file into smaller files that would fill up the entire dvd. Burn the files to the dvds and then use cat to rebuild the original compressed tar. So here are the commands that I used to tar, split, burn to dvd, and rebuild the archive

$ tar cf ~/pacman.tar /var/cache/pacman
$ split  -b 2240m ~/pacman.tar split.pacman.tar.
$ growisofs -Z /dev/sr0 -udf split.pacman.tar.a*
$ cat ~/split.pacman.tar.* > ~/pacman.tar

This is all that it took for me to backup 16GB to 4 dvds, I also decided to back up my digital photos and some of my other digital media with this method. It saved me a lot of time in k3b making data dvd's. burning 8 files was a whole lot easier than burning 9000 or whatever what in that package folder. Hope this helps out someone.

Installing Sapphire 1.0 with google aps on moto droid with SPRecovery

Well yesterday, a new release of sapphire for the Motorola Droid hit the Internet. I installed it [link to screenshots]and was VERY impressed. [Sapphire is a from source android build, similar to cyanogen.] So I'll walk through the process that I used to install this awesome rom. Seeing as I am a Linux user, I'm going to go about installing this rom from Linux using only the CLI. This guide assumes that you have root access.

First off, install SPRecovery (if you don't have it).  Next, grab the sapphire rom, the google apps, and the black bar theme (you only need this if you want to have the same setup as my droid). OK, here comes the fun part. Mount your Droid and copy the files to the root of the sdcard. Rename the sapphire rom to 'update.zip' and reboot your Droid into SPRecovery [hold x on the physical keyboard while booting up]. Use the volume up and down buttons to navigate the menus, camera to select, and the power button to go back to the previous menu.
1. Move down one option to 'wipe data/factory reset' and click the camera button.
2. Move up 4 times to select 'yes' and hit the camera button.
3. Then move down to 'install', hit the camera button, move to allow update.zip installation, hit camera again.
4. move down to Install and hit the camera button again.
5. Hit the power button to return to the main menu.
6. select mount options and hit the camera button
7. select enable usb mass storage and mount phone.
8. rename sapphire update to something else and rename sapphire google apps to update.zip and unmount
9. select disable usb mass storage and click the camera button
10. press the power button to return to main menu and repeat steps 3-7
11. rename google apps update to something else and rename black bar theme to update.zip and unmount
12. select disable usb mass storage and click the camera button
13. press the power button to return to main menu and repeat steps 3 and 4

Here are the CLI commands that I used. Enjoy

$ cd ~/src/
$ wget http://files.ccroms.net/download.php?q=sapphire/froyo/1.0.0/release/sapphire-1.0.0-update.zip
$ wget http://files.ccroms.net/download.php?q=sapphire/froyo/1.0.0/release/sapphire-1.0.0-gapps-update.zip
$ wget http://files.ccroms.net/download.php?q=sapphire/froyo/1.0.0/themes/spr/sapphire-1.0.0-black_bar-theme.zip

# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/phone
$ cp ~/src/sapphire-1.0.0* /mnt/phone/
$ mv /mnt/phone/sapphire-1.0.0-update.zip /mnt/phone/update.zip
# umount /mnt/phone

# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/phone
$ mv /mnt/phone/update.zip /mnt/phone/sapphire-1.0.0-update.zip
$ mv /mnt/phone/sapphire-1.0.0-gapps-update.zip /mnt/phone/update.zip
# umount /mnt/phone

# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/phone
$ mv /mnt/phone/update.zip /mnt/phone/sapphire-1.0.0-gapps-update.zip
$ mv /mnt/phone/sapphire-1.0.0-black_bar-theme.zip /mnt/phone/update.zip
# umount /mnt/phone

So you bricked your Moto Droid.

Ok, so I have this really bad habit of bricking my Droid or loosing root.... you name it, it's probably been inflicted upon my device. So in an effort to keep me from loosing my notes on the subject, here is my Linux based process for un-bricking my Droid. I'm not sure how legal it is to link to roms and such but I don't need those I already have my nandroid backups.

Needed files, SBF_flash and SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf
This is a retarded simple fix. (you can still damage your phone beyond repair blah blah blah...)

Download SBF_flash and SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf [these are the links from CyanogenMod Wiki] Plug in Droid while turned off and then power on while pressing up on the d-pad. This will dump you into the boot loader. Then run './sbf_flash SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf' This will flash the recovery image to your Droid. And now you are done. Congrats you just un-bricked your phone. Now install the Nandroid backup of your choice or install the rom of your choice. Enjoy.

Android applications that I use

Well everyone else has done it to some extent or another. I'm just going to list the apps that I love, like and just can't live without. As far as the apps that I can't live without, I'll denote those with an (*). I've got a rooted Motorola Droid running the DroidMod rom and a custom kernel.

So here they are in no particular order:

*Appmonster - what I use to backup and store different versions of the apps that I have installed.

*ASE (android scripting environment) - python, perl, and a few other scripting languages on the android platform. It's not python3, but it has run parts of snkmchnb's getcast before. Who needs a GUI pod catcher on android when you have the CLI?

*sipdroid - FOSS VoIP client. It only supports one account at a time, but this is the program that I use for free calling via googlevoice+ipkall+ekiga.

*Bible - online translations of the Bible, newer versions are very bloated. Until an offline version is installed, I run version 1.2

*terminal - does not require an explanation, it's the CLI.

*ConnectBot - SSH client. Allows for more than one ssh session at a time. More control than just terminal.

*drocap2 - root only application that allows for taking screenshots of the device at any time. Can be set to run with a timer or just simply shaking the device. I use it to take all the screenshots that are found on unixporn.

*home++ - replacement home screen that removes the need for the notification bar and has that cool little launcher bar as seen in the above screenshots.

*Google Voice - must have for my free SMS abilities.

*ES File Explorer - file and ftp access, handy for uploading recordings to the ftp directly from the android device.

*G-MoN - war driving

*Maps(-) - openstreetmaps, google maps, opencyclemaps all rolled into one. NO
NAVIGATION. But who needs that anyway?

*overclockwidget - allows me to under and over clock my cpu.

andchat - IRC

audiomanager - for those times when the default audio button just won't cut it.

barcode scanner - yeah

blogger-droid - it's installed but I've never had a reason to use it yet.

Chess - one of the 2 games that have ever been installed on this device.

opensudoku - the other game that's installed.

dPod - *cast catcher until I get getcast or bashpodder working via ASE

DroidLight - use the LEDs like a flashlight.

Dropbox - allows to download stuff from my dropbox account. Does not download folders, which is very annoying.

FBreader - FOSS book reader

mapdroyd + contentdroyd - openstreetmaps cached on the phone. not as up to date as Maps(-) but still useful for area's that you do not have cached.

mustard - identica client

Netcounter - just something that I use to monitor my bandwidth usage of the 3G connection. If you use SIP for your phone calls, this is a MUST.

shopsavvy - bloated app that is kinda fun to play with.

the weather channel - weather... like we need to know anything else about the weather.

wifinder - handy gui for connecting to different access points.


Well that's pretty much everything that I meant to go on about today. If you should happen to read this and have a useful application that I've not listed here, please send me an email at cobra2 {at} unixporn [dot] com. Thanks in advance.

Just a reminder about alias

This is just kinda for my crappy memory.

So I was messing around earlier today with a few alias' in bash. I had them all set up for my user in my ~/.bashrc file. Then I logged into root to do something. Tried to use one of my new alias..... FAIL. So I had to do a little reading on how to set an alias for root. I found that I needed to edit /root/.bashrc.
Then I got to thinking. Wouldn't it just be better to have the alias for the whole system rather than just editing each user's .bashrc? So I did a little more reading and found that just editing /etc/bash.bashrc would solve all those problems.