Something that is starting to annoy me about some of the newer smart phone operating system (I am looking at you iPhoneOS and Android) is that when you tick the box to make your phone discoverable by Bluetooth, it does not stay discoverable. Other operating systems give you an option to switch between hidden, temporally visible or always visible.

After a bit of hacking around on the my phone (a HTC Dream), I have discovered a way to make the Bluetooth stay discoverable. These instructions require adb (the Android Developer Bridge), an a (slightly) nonstandard rom. The reasoning behind requiring the non-standard rom, is that chown under android does weird things.

Remember that this is done at your own risk.

adb remount
adb pull /system/etc/bluez/hcid.conf ./hcid.conf
sed -i'' -e 's/iscan disable/iscan enable/;s/pscan enable;/&\n\n\t\#Make the device stay discoverable for ever\n\tdiscovto 0;/' hcid.conf
adb push hcid.conf /system/etc/bluez/hcid.conf
adb shell chmod 440 /system/etc/bluez/hcid.conf
adb shell busybox chown 1002.1002 /system/etc/bluez/hcid.conf
adb remount
rm -f hcid.conf

HCID_CONFIG="$(adb shell ls /data/misc/hcid/*/config | sed -e 's/\r//g')"
adb pull "$HCID_CONFIG" hcid_config
sed -i'' -e 's/^discovto.*$/discovto 0/' hcid_config
adb push hcid_config "$HCID_CONFIG"
adb shell chmod 644 "$HCID_CONFIG"
adb shell busybox chown 1002.1002 "$HCID_CONFIG"
rm -f hcid_config

After all this is done… Don’t forget to power cycle the Bluetooth system (untick, then tick the box for Bluetooth).

Now that I have moved, I have decided to reclaim my old iBook (which I was using as my router). With this decision, I thought it would be a good idea to keep track of what I had to do to get this machine to a state where I was happy with it (and thus a mac in general).

So, here it is, for those who are interested. You might even find a few things that you had not though of performing on your mac.
More…

I have recently been playing around with the (relatively) new Google service named Latitude. This service may be either used from your mobile phone (including the Nokia S60 range) to allow you to see where your friends are located.

Something I have wanted to do with this service for a while is to use it to keep track of where I have been. Recently Google released an API to do this. The only problem with this is that your are required to change your privacy settings, effectively allowing everybody to know where you are.

This lead me on the quest to reverse engineer the data that the latitude iGoogle gadget uses to update itself. So far, I can parse the data into a set of lists once given a url to where the data is.

To obtain this url, you will need to use firebug to watch all of the requests made by the iGoogle page (with the latitude gadget loaded into that page) and look for the one that contains makeRequest. Copy this url, with all of it’s parameters to get access to the data.

I have written a small parsing library (in python) that will grab the data, and parse it out into the specified data structure. This library is available from my mercurial repository under the latitude project.

I was having problems where the sound was crackly and quiet. So the fix seems to be reload the snd_hda_intel driver (kinda annoying… but at least it works)

sudo rmmod snd_hda_intel
sudo modprobe snd_hda_intel

I just discovered this little gem: Stop Google.com Redirecting to Your Local Google. Now, I am sure you would be asking why I would want to stop the redirection.

My answer is quite simple… Google has a bad habit of letting the ‘local’ google page lag behind the US version, meaning things like latitude don’t work on google.com.au.

This is just a really quick post to mention that I have found (well, actually Mat found it) a nice plugin for wordpress to support dumping source code into entires. This pluging is called syntaxhilighter-plus. It allows you to easily drop source code into a page.

It also adds a few nice buttons. Here is an example:

def main():
  print "This is python^^"

if __name__ == "__main__":
  main()

As most people know, I have moved away from using Apple’s Mail.app as my email client. I now use mutt to perform all of my mail duties… or, so I thought.

The other day I decided to use iCal to send an event invitation to a friend. When I clicked on the send button, I was greeted with a copy of Mail.app, not exactly I wanted. At this point I changed the default Mail application to mutt (via iTerm).

Now you would expect iCal to listen to this setting, but alas, the mail was still (automatically) sent with Mail.app.

After a lot of investigating, I discovered there is a apple script within the iCal app bundle. The script of interest is /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Mail.applescript. After spending a few hours learning applescript, I came up with a solution. You will need to replace the file /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Mail.applescript with the one available from my repositories.

Once you have replaced this file, you must then recompile the script: osacompile -o /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/Mail.scpt /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Mail.applescript

Note: You will need to have at the mail script and modify it so that it points to the correct version of mutt on your system.

Can anybody figure out why these links are related?

• http://pydns.sourceforge.net/index.html
• http://www.doxpara.com