Android

Most Useful Android Apps

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[Update, May 2015]

I use a Samsung Note 3, recently firmware updated to Android v5.0.

Apps that I find most useful and use on a daily basis include:

  • GTasks (Google Tasks; syncs with Tasks on the PC, etc)
  • Torch
  • Evernote (and Skitch)
  • Drive
  • Maps
  • Alarm Clock Plus
  • Chrome
  • Inbox
  • SwiftKey keyboard

Not on a daily basis, but useful:

  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Quora
  • Dropbox
  • Stack Exchange
  • Google Translate
  • Camera360
  • Wikipedia
  • Exercise
    • Nike Running
    • 7 Minute
    • Workout Trainer
    • JEFIT
    • Abs
  • Amazon Kindle
  • Easy Uninstaller
  • Security
    • Lookout
    • Lastpass
  • Misc
    • Android Wear
    • Contacts Optimizer
    • xe currency
    • Gravity screen
    • S Planner

[Older]

Very useful app- ASTRO File Manager – as one can backup all existing installed apps onto the SD card and (re)install them from there..
Also realize that apps that sync data online are the way to go..

So, among my Best Android Apps are:
Built-in: Contacts (w/ gmail), gmail, (google) calendar,
Sync: 3Banana, twitdroid.
LBS: GPS Status, MyTracks, Compass, SnapPhoto,
Misc: ASTRO, Useful Switchers, ToggleBlu

More to follow…

Ok, an update (6 Oct ’09):

Widgets:

Internal Memory Widget : useful to see how much space remains on internal flash (as all apps get installed there).

MoonPhase : as it says, and really done nicely.

Continue reading Most Useful Android Apps →

Misc, SysAd

LINUX CHEATSHEET – vmstat, ps, top

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LINUX Quick Reference Cheat Sheet

vmstat, ps, top


v 0.1 : Last Updated: March 2009 : <kaiwan at designergraphix dot com>
(c) kaiwan billimoria.

Much of the information below gleaned from various Linux man pages.

 

———————————————————-

vmstat

vmstat fields quick reference

The -a switch displays active/inactive memory, given a 2.5.41 kernel or better.
The -f switch displays the number of forks since boot. This includes the fork, vfork, and clone system calls, and is equivalent to the total number of tasks created. Each process is represented by one or more tasks, depending on thread usage. This display does not repeat.
The -m displays slabinfo.
The -n switch causes the header to be displayed only once rather than periodically.
The -s switch displays a table of various event counters and memory statistics. This display does not repeat.

delay is the delay between updates in seconds. If no delay is specified, only one report is printed with
the average values since boot.
count is the number of updates. If no count is specified and delay is defined, count defaults to infinity.

The -d reports disk statistics (2.5.70 or above required)
The -p followed by some partition name for detailed statistics (2.5.70 or above required)
The -S followed by k or K or m or M switches outputs between 1000, 1024, 1000000, or 1048576 bytes
The -V switch results in displaying version information.

FIELD DESCRIPTION FOR VM MODE

Procs

r: The number of processes waiting for run time << ready-to-run >>.
b: The number of processes in uninterruptible sleep << blocked >>.

Memory << (default) in kilobytes >>
swpd: the amount of virtual memory used.

free: the amount of idle memory.
buff: the amount of memory used as buffers.
cache: the amount of memory used as cache << page cache, not incl. swap cache>> .
inact: the amount of inactive memory. (-a option)
active: the amount of active memory. (-a option)

Swap << in kilobytes/second >>

si: Amount of memory swapped in from disk (/s).
so: Amount of memory swapped to disk (/s).
 Continue reading LINUX CHEATSHEET – vmstat, ps, top →
Linux Kernel, Uncategorized

Linux and Stale? Never!

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The words Linux (and all that it implies), stale/boring never go together.

Take a look at LinuxDevice’s excellent report on the LF’s (Linux Foundation) Collabaration Summit held last week in SF, USA.

A quick sampling to whet your appetite:

  • Intel hands over the Moblin project to the LF
  • KVM’s being pushed as the way to go within Linux virtualization
  • The Kernel Summit / Panel discussion was energetic, techy and interesting-
    • 2.6.29 kernel released two weeks back by LF
    • Andrew Morton bags the first-ever “Unsung Hero” award!
    • Intel and ATI will work towards greatly modernizing the kernel graphics stack
    • Ted Ts’o talks about moving to Oracle’s Btrfs filesystem
  • LF announces the winning entries to the “We’re Linux” 1-minute video contest.

Read about all this (and more!)  here.

Android

Google-Android (ABO) Executive Conference, 5 Mar 2009, Bangalore, India

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google-android-conf

Was happy to be a speaker at the ‘Google-Android for Executives Conference ’09’ organized by ABO Ventures, held in Bangalore on 5 Mar ’09.

I made a brief presentation entitled “Android – A Look Under the Hood”, which was pretty well received. It included a couple of demos on the Android Developer Phone (ADP1):
– changing brightness of the LCD screen (using a shell script, low-level hardware access via /sys – not the recommended way to do it!)
– flashing the device: saving and restoring the bootloader, kernel and system/app images.

Some pics taken during the flashing process below:

ADP1 hooked up to the laptop via the USB cable

ADP1 (Android Developer Phone v1) hooked up to the laptop via the USB cable.

ADP1 showing the bootloader-loaded recovery util (JF v1.3)

ADP1 showing the bootloader-loaded recovery util (JF v1.3).

ADP1

ADP1 ‘Settings/About phone’ screenshot after upgrade (flash).

Uncategorized

My open source contributions, listed on ohloh.net

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ohloh.net does a really neat job tracking open-source projects / efforts. It tracks by person, project, language.

Really cool!

My personal (& very small!) contributions to open source can be seen here:

See https://www.ohloh.net/people?sort=kudo_position&q=kaiwan+billimoria

(Note that my actual commits are to the project ‘Linux Kernel 2.6’ and the ‘OpenMoko VisualGPS’ project; their being used in other open source projects makes it show up elsewhere as well…).


Ohloh profile for Kaiwan N Billimoria

Android

A few “Android FAQs for Beginners” Answered

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Begin

  • Q. Are there actual physical Android devices?

    A. Yes, as of this writing, the HTC “Dream” T-Mobile G1 and the unlocked Google Android Developer Phone 1 (ADP1). Also, very recently (24 Feb 2009) the HTC “Magic” Vodafone G2 has been released. All handsets have been built by OHA-member HTC.

    Update [2 May ’09]:
    Samsung has just released the Samsung I7500 Android mobile smartphone; the announcement was made on 27 April 2009.

 

Application Development

  • Q. Prerequisites?
    A. You should know (at least the basics of) Java programming.

  • Q. How does one develop applications for Android?
    A. First, download and install the SDK. Read the Developer Guides, tutorials, books (etc). Write applications (using Java, and probably, the Eclipse IDE with the Android ADT plugin). Start here.

Android

Porting Android kernel to the TS-72xx board (EP93xx)

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Porting Attempt

From: Android base (2.6.25-android-r1.0), ARM11, on android phones (like G1)

To: TS-7200 SBC, ARM9, 2.6.24.4-ts… (Matt’s) kernel.

Upside: TS72xx learning, android learning, porting experience.

Downside: no full LED screen/touchpanel, moving to lower-powered processor, toolchain (asm) issues?

Resources:

http://www.nthcode.com/pubs/porting-android-to-a-new-device-p2.html

Verify TS-7200 board running off a 2.6 kernel (because it ships with 2.4.26)

So: downloaded kernel codebase of 2.6.21-ts from here:

tskernel-2.6.21-ts-src.tar.gz 56618 KB Thursday 15 November 2007 12:00:00 IST

$ wget ftp://ftp.embeddedarm.com/ts-arm-sbc/ts-7200-linux/sources/tskernel-2.6.21-ts-src.tar.gz

–18:27:16– ftp://ftp.embeddedarm.com/ts-arm-sbc/ts-7200-linux/sources/tskernel-2.6.21-ts-src.tar.gz

=> ‘tskernel-2.6.21-ts-src.tar.gz.1’

Resolving ftp.embeddedarm.com… 67.40.67.44

Connecting to ftp.embeddedarm.com|67.40.67.44|:21… connected.

Logging in as anonymous … Logged in!

==> SYST … done. ==> PWD … done.

==> TYPE I … done. ==> CWD /ts-arm-sbc/ts-7200-linux/sources … done.

==> PASV … done. ==> RETR tskernel-2.6.21-ts-src.tar.gz … done.

Length: 5,79,75,931 (55M) (unauthoritative)

2% [> ] 13,86,578 18.46K/s ETA 25:18

…

$

Use the correct configuration file.

Continue reading Porting Android kernel to the TS-72xx board (EP93xx) →

Tech musings, hands-on, mostly Linux

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