Basic guide to install Optware on the device (allowing you to install whatever packages you like form OpenWRT) Here

Package that worked nice with my DNS-323, working inotify, etc Here

Basic Config guide for MiniDLNA Here

There were a number of guides found in various places on the internet but no single guide managed to cover all of the issues that cropped up as part of the installation.

As such I thought it would be good to condense them all into one location.

Download and install the Android Developer Toolkit

If you have mucked around with Android devices before you might already have these installed, otherwise…

The installer for this can be found here

Specifically, it is the “Android SDK Tools” and “Android SDK Platform-Tools” packages that are required to be installed.

Download and install HTC Sync

Not having owned a HTC branded phone for some time, I first needed to download HTC Sync. (for drivers, etc)

Version 2.0.33 was required for later steps, it can be obtained here.

Create Goldcard

There were a large number of tools available with various methods of how to make a Goldcard.

The most simple one (which also worked) could be found here and it features a helpful gui tool and good instructions.

Preparing for the Downgrade

This is where most of the dramas occurred. Most guides talked about simply downloading hack4legend and using crackin.bat, but this process never seemed to work properly.

Despite numerous attempts to powercycle the phone, reset it to factory defaults and redo the goldcard, it simply wouldn’t finish in a way that allowed us to proceed with the downgrade (same error as here)

Download hack4legendv5

You will need to either have adb in your path (such that you can just open a command promt and type “adb devices” and get a list of your connected devices), or unzip hack4legend-v5.zip into your or sdk/platform-tools (version 11 moves the ADB file from sdk/tooks to sdk/platform-tools) directory so your pushes will work properly. (hacklegend needs to use ADB)

Once this was done, the process required was:

1. Connect the phone in charge only mode.

2. run crackin.bat

3. even if you end up with the cr–rw—- download and install modaco visionairy apk (either install it using adb install or htc sync)

4. temproot phone.

5. in cmd, type adb shell, then ”su” and accept super user permissions on phone

You should see a # <this means you have the permissions.

6. in cmd, type: /data/local/flash_image misc /data/local/misc1-2.img

Your device is now ready to be downgraded.

Run RUU

The RUU package that is needed to downgrade the phone can be found here.

For this to detect your phone, you will need to have HTC Sync installed (versio 2.0.33, as mentioned above)

When attempting to run RUU, I found that it would proceed to the point where it was “waiting for bootloader” (with the phone on a black screen with a HTC logo) but would not move past this. (leading to an eventual error 170 when it timed out)

I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the phone after drivers had been installed but it still wouldn’t detect it. Upon checking in device manager I found that the phone was being detected using a generic Android Bootloader driver. To resolve this, I simply selected to update the driver, after which windows downloaded an updated driver and the driver name to “HTC Bootloader”. After this the device as detected and RUU applied the update without any dramas.

Rooting the downgraded phone

1. After this, the process followed the process found here. (adapted below)
2. This required the download of the HTC Legend Rooting Tools. Once downloaded, unzip them on your computer and navigate to that folder in command prompt.
3. Turn off your phone and turn it back on by holding down Back and Power until you see Fastboot come up on the screen. Push the Power button while highlighting Fastboot on the phone and Fastboot should show up in red now on the phone (if it doesn’t push Power again until it does).
4. Plug the phone in via USB cable to the computer.
5. Open the folder you extracted to the C drive and double click “step1-windows.bat” and wait for it to finish.
6. Once you see the menu on the phone come back up, navigate to BOOTLOADER and push power, then navigate to RECOVERY using the volume buttons to navigate and the power button to select and the phone should boot to the ! screen.
7. Now on the computer double click the “step2-windows.bat” file and wait for it to finish. (UPDATE 12.13.10 – You MUST have HTC Sync version 2.0.33 not a newer version for step2 to work. Please uninstall HTC Sync and download and install this version instead, unplug then plug your phone back in, then rerun step2-windows.bat).
8. Now you should see a custom recovery screen, using the optical trackpad navigate to Wipe and push on the trackpad to select it. Then navigate to Wipe data/factory reset and select that.

The previous step will leave you with a perfectly good rooted system, but we were after Cyanogenmod.

The guide for flashing Cyanogenmod can be found here.

The steps that were followed were:

GPS Fix

Upon loading into Cyanogenmod, we found that the built in GPS wasn’t working. We found a solution here, and flashed the radio version 7.08.35.21 (using Rom manager to download and install Clockwork Mod to do the update)

Finished!

Used the process found here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=820909&page=2

1. Install root-explorer (to get r/w access to /system/xbin),
2. Create /system/xbin/bb,
3. Copy ifconfig and route from /system/xbin into this new folder (they are symbolic links anyway)
4. Use OpenVPN Installer from the Market and put the binary into /system/xbin and set the paths to route/ifconfig to /system/xbin/bb

(my experience  has been that this binary will always look in /xbin/bb for route and ifconifg, regardless of what is selected here)
6. Install OpenVPN Settings from the Market,
7. Copied my existing and working OpenVPN-settings to the memory card and finally
8. Set the path to the OpenVPN configuration and to the OpenVPN binary.

And the VPN worked a treat

With that, it was also time to have a crack at moving onto x64, as the issue (drivers) which prevented me from doing so several years ago on Vista should have now been mostly resolved.

The process was (mostly) very smooth and I am enjoying the OS.

There were a few issues that I did think warranted a mention.

HP HS2300 HDSPA modem. (Sierra MC8775)

The process was as follows:

• Download and the latest driver from HP (Found Here)

• Download the latest driver from Lenovo (Found Here)

• Download and install 7-Zip (found here)

• Install the driver from HP. This driver will not itself but means that once the base USB device from Lenovo is installed, all of the ports and device should be assigned the correct HP driver, making it easy to update them.

• Open the Lenovo driver  with 7-zip and runMC87xx.msi. Once installed, first replace the HP driver for the “USB device” with the one from Lenovo, the other devices should now be discovered, but not actually work. (You will need to manually select the “Sierra Wireless MC8775 Device” driver after pointing Windows to C:\Program Files (x86)\Sierra Wireless\MC8755\AC\Drivers\WinVista\64bit)  The task then it to update each of the newly discovered devices to use the lenovo driver as opposed to the HP driver. (each will need its corresponding driver manually selected from the above location)
• After this, you simply need to install the Wireless Watcher application (Found Here) and you are on your way.

Note on the updated patched driver (2.1.6.0) (Found here).

I also dabbled with an updated version of the driver.  To make it work without hanging, I found that it was necessary to apply to each of the devices with the 2.1.6.0 device, with the USB device LAST. (updating the composite device caused a Blue Screen of Death on swumx12.sys and then BSOD on boot whenever the bluetooth was switched on)

While this driver is newer, the catch is that it unsigned. This is an issue for x64 installations of Win7 for which there is no simple and elegant option for perminantly disabling driver signing enforcement. (Testing mode is an option but I would rather avoid that) One solution does exist which doesn’t depend on Windows itself (so is unlikely to get disabled in the future), Ready Driver Plus (found here) which is basically a macro that will automatically select to disable driver signing on every boot…. Though this can all be avoided by simply sticking with the older, but signed driver.

Dell 355 Bluetooth Module

The latest driver for the Dell 370 Bluetooth module works a treat as an updated driver for the Dell 355. (no modifications required)

Link to driver from Dell

Logitech Webcam

The Vista x64 driver (found here) can be used (though installation itself will fail) by selecting the x64 driver from the directory that the Dell package extracts too before installation.

It would seem however that things have changed significantly since then. We-Travel, a Java based application now provides and options, when used in conjunction with OSM data to have free offline GPS nav on compatible phones. While it isn’t particularly mature, it looks very hopeful. (especially given my three year nokia maps navigation licence will last until next July)

Secondly, it would seem that the quality of the data available through the Open Street Map has improved dramatically. This gave me a bit of motivation to do some mapping around my area but I was quite impressed at how this has progressed since I last looked at it.

I experimented around a bit with making use of this openstreetmap data and created a basic openlayers example which resides at maps.burningsilicon.net which was a bit of fun.

In addition to this, Atlas generation for We-Travel required downloading a large number of OpenStreetMap tiles. Not wanting to do suck bulk downloads from OSM (for a number of reasons) I decided to try generating my own tiles.

The result of this is that through making use of some helpful guides (listed below) and a pre-build VMware Ubuntu Server appliance, I put together a pre-built Virtual Machine which can be used to do your own Mapnik rendering of OSM tiles.

The VM is only a single core implementation but I found that running several instances of it on multi-core computers around my house worked really well. While not quite as fast as running installing it directly on the PC, the performance is more than acceptable for rendering reasonably sized areas. The other massive advantage of using this virtual machine was that I could make use of several computers sit unused throughout most of the day at my home, without the slow process of having to installing and configuring the software or interfering with the existing setup in any way. The installation was quick and simple with each VM beings assigned to render a separate set of tiles, with the results of all of them being combined together at the end…  (I was testing with rendering parts of Australia down to an 18 zoom) After doing this, I can definitely appreciate the reasoning behind the Tiles@Home project for the OSM. (see below for notes on the VM)

Resources:

http://www.openstreetmap.org

http://www.we-travel.co.cc

The view of Brisbane with locally rendered tiles

The pre-built virtual machine for rendering openstreetmap tiles canbe found below

http://maps.burningsilicon.net/resources/ubuntu-server-Mapnik.7z (approx 1.1gb download)

===Notes for the VM===

2009 – Stephen Rothery

==================================
Prebuilt server to generate Map Tiles
==================================
This VMware image has been configured as per the guide found at:

http://weait.com/content/build-your-own-openstreetmap-server

http://weait.com/content/make-your-first-map

All of the tools are installed and working as well as world_boundaries downloaded and installed. (hence the large size of the image)

All that should be required is to download and load the OSM data that you want and set any bounding boxes in the genereate_tiles.py file. (You can likely get an extract for your country from cloudmade)

By default, tiles will be generated in the /home/notroot/mapnik/tiles folder, these can then be placed on any web server, allowing it to serve tiles. (through openlayers or similar)

This has been tested using Vmware player and found to work fine for generating tiles for Australia.

==================================
Networking on the Virtual Machine
==================================

An issue can occur in Linux on VMware regarding networking, arising from the fact that ever time a virtual machine is copied, VMware will assign it’s network card a new MAC address. (a good idea to avoid conflicts)

This can make it such that the eth0 interface may look like it has dissapeared and networking will no longer function.

To fix this, I found that simply deleting this file and rebooting the Virtual Machine is sufficient, this can be done with.

sudo rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

followed by a reboot.

==================================
Using Osmosis
==================================

While Osmosis is installed in the home directory of this VM, Java has not been installed as I was unsure about whether it would cause issues redistributing this image.

Download java with sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

==================================
Generating a Map
==================================
To generate a map you need to follow several steps, mostly from the 2nd part of the guide found at:

http://weait.com/content/make-your-first-map

Specifically the following steps:
1) Download the OSM data required
2) If you only want a section of the OSM data, Apply bounding box to osm file.
3) Import the data with osm2pgsql
4) Edit generate_tiles.py for the area and zoom that you want
5) Execute the commands to generate your tiles (all of them are needed every time)
source set-mapnik-env
./customize-mapnik-map >$MAPNIK_MAP_FILE
./generate_tiles.py

Spending money on extra capacity with Google (for use with Picasa) and, at the same time spending a few bucks a month on web hosting with Hostgator. There was plenty of spare place for all my photos as well as quite a bit more. I also decided that it would be good to have FTP access to upload/download new photos as opposed to being tied to Picasa.

This aside though I do quite like the functionality that Picasa gives me like an email drop box, given that this makes it really easy to upload photos from my phone or make a public gallery for a youth camp that participants can all email their photos to. Basically what I am after is a solution that will let me make use of my existing web hosting to have a PHP powered method to upload photos.

Software Used

Zenphoto (though this should work with any gallery software which will autorefresh albums based on the content of directories, many which allow FTP uploads will do this in some way)

WordPress

WordPress Plugins:

Postie

Auto Delete Posts

The Process:

Anyway after searching around and trying out a few different galleries, I settled with Zenphoto. It had a clean interface, did everything that I was after without being excessively complicated. The only thing it didn’t do was accept uploads via email. Gallery 2 did claim to do this through the use of a community built plugin and upon installing this and testing it out I could not get it to work and it has not been updated in over two years. It seemed that few other galleries offered the feature of an email dropbox either so I decided to pick a gallery platform that I liked and then gain the dropbox functionality through another program.

I had used WordPress before and also made use of it’s ability to accept posts via email. By default WordPress does not handle attachments in posts via email but a plugin called Postie greatly expands this functionality to give the desired functionality with images. (and movies too) WordPress also allows you to change the folder in which it’s uploads are stored so I now had all the pieces of functionality that I required and it was just a matter of putting them all together.

Before we get into this I will admit that this is not the most efficient way to go about a getting the functionality of a dropbox. The thing is that I believe that the benefits of using a polished, flexible and regularly updated piece of software and plugins, as found in WordPress is well worth it, especially considering how trivially easy it is to set these all up. (no code hacking  required at all)

Anyway, now for the process.

Firstly you will want to create an email account that you will use for your dropbox. You will want to pick an email address which is fairly random and that will not be published to avoid getting your dropbox spammed. The emails will be deleted when retrieved via POP so you should most definately NOT try this with your existing active email account or you may delete all your mail.

Once you have done this you can go about installing Zenphoto. Again this a quick and easy process and you can find all the required documentation on their website.

After this is done you can then install WordPress, again check their site for documentation. It doesn’t matter where on your server you install it, no-one should ever see it, you just need to make sure that both your gallery and WordPress blog are installed on the same filesystem, you can’t make this work if the sites are with two seperate hosting providers or on two different servers. You will also have to setup Postie and you may want to test that it works before moving on to the next steps, again Postie is easy to use and well documented as far as WordPress plugins go.

Once the WordPress blog has been installed, log in as the administrator and change a few settings.

After installing the WordPress blog we can go into the “Miscellaneous” settings in WordPress and change the upload path for our images. What this folder is will depend on where you have installed your gallery software but basically I am pointing it to the album root directory for my install of Zenphoto. (as above) You will need to include the full path to your files as seen on the server, not the web page, and you can find these details easily from your hosting account page. I also just wanted a single album with all the stuff for my dropbox in it so I unchecked the option to break up the files based on the month/year.

WordPress also has the useful feature of resizing files automatically as you upload them to create smaller thumbnails. The issue here is that we don’t actually want this as they are not required, will clutter up the album and ultimately waste space. To prevent WordPress from making these files we just set all the max sizes for all the thumbnails to zero. (as above)

Another thing that needs to be considered is that every time an email is submitted, a post will be published in your unused blog. After time these could really start to pile up. To avoid this you can get a plugin “Auto Delete Posts” which will delete posts after they are a certain age old. The reality is that once the images are uploaded and moved into the uploaded content directory in wordpress, we don’t need the posts anymore anyway.

Security Measure for Zenphoto

In order to prevent anyone from directly linking to files in your albums (both public AND private) you need to create a .htaccess file with the following code into your “albums” folder within your Zenphoto install. This will break the playback of movie files in your galleries but it really depends on your requirements.

<Files *>

Order Deny,Allow

Deny from all

Allow from 127.0.0.1

</Files>

And that is it!

So there you go, if you have done all of these things you will have yourself a brand new email dropbox to go with your online gallery. You are free to edit the album that will appear in Zenphoto to put passwords on it, etc and do whatever you like.

The bonus over something like Picasa is that, depending on your hosting plan you may have stacks more space and you can now control all of the steps in the process and can tailor them to suit your requirements.

Known Limitations

• Lack of ability to add image captions via email (The subject and body of the email will be placed in the post, not in the image itself and will therefore not make it into the gallery)
• How quickly the images appear in your dropbox after being emailed will depend on how frequently you have postie checking your mail server. (you should note that since people are not visiting this actual wordpress blog, cronless postie plugin will not work, you will need to use cron or have an iframe on another page which will trigger postie to check the email)
• The size of the emails that can be handled will depend on your hosting situation. Testing this on my Hostgator share webhosting allows emails of up to about 5mb to be processed. This is not ideal but is sufficient for how I use the dropbox, as bulk uploads of large images should be done via FTP or something anyway.

Have a look at the project page over at BurningSilicon

I have now moved everything over to Hostgator while switching my CMS to Joomla and blogs to WordPress.

Ultimately these platforms seem much more flexible and a better long term solution than DNN.

Anyway…

Given that TPG have recently enabled ADSL2+ in our local exchange, we decided that it would be a good idea to make the move away from Netspace. Basically we will be getting double the speed and a similar quota for about half the price.

Anyway, we have for some time now been making use of VoIP for all of our phone calls (resulting in quite a considerable saving) through the use of a Linksys SPA 3102 ATA.

Upon reading the fine print for TPG it seemes that in order to make use of their &quot;VoIP&quot; plans, one must purchase their pre-configured VoIP ATA.. What a scam. Furthermore, upon registering on their site for &quot;Softphone Voip&quot;, it seems that they don’t actually give out the settings for manually configuring you own VoIP gear. What a pain. I then decided to install the soft phone anyway and just have a look at what settings it came preconfigured with. The problem is that TPG are actually trying to be sneaky and their softphone is actually a standalone executable with which you just shove the username and password and then go. No configuration avaliable or user editable…

Furthermore none of the settings that I found on sites like Whirlpool gave me any success.

Anyway, after jumping on our router and having a look at all of the outgoing traffic, I found the following settings.

Proxy Server Address: gphone1.tpg.com.au
Use Outbound Proxy set to No
UserID: User Id given in sign up email (Same as per the instructions for setting up the TPG softphone.)
Pasword: Normal TPG User Account password

And finally, upon testing these on our ATA they worked fine.

The issue that would be arising would be that during handover, there would be all manner of problems each AP having a different PMK, but the computer not actually being aware that it is talking to a different device, causing the actual process of the handover to take longer than it should due to the reauth that needs to take place.

That said, the issue of the Wii not working was still present, so I decided to have another look at it.

Upon further inspection it seems that the Wii was having issues connecting to my Edimax-7206 Access point, no matter what the other access point was doing. One setting however seemed to let the Wii connect quite happily.

In its configuration the Edimax access point (like most) allows the user to select either 802.11G only or B and G (for compatibility). Given that all of the the devices that run on our network are G, I had naturally set this to be G only. Upon setting it to B+G however I found that the Wii decided that it would connect.

How strange…

Anyway, it now works (with one AP on G only and the other on G+B) with both Access Points running on a seperate BSSID again and on different channels.

Happy days.