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).

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.

Software installed:

• iTerm (latest svn build)
• fink – with customizations
• XQuartz updates
• Quicksilver – a very useful application launcher
• Witch – window switching on steroids
• Psi (Nightly snapshot) – an excellent jabber client
• Firefox

Fink customizations

I have quite a few packages that I use that are not (yet) in the standard fink repos. This means I must remember to add my own custom ones to the mix.

The first step is to install mercurial:
[sh]
fink install mercurial-py26
[/sh]

After this, you may clone the two custom repos that I use:
[sh]
cd /sw/fink
hg clone http://tsukasa.net.au/~hg/fink_infos gregdarke
hg clone http://delx.net.au/hg/finkinfos jamesbunton
cd dists
ln -s ../gregdarke
ln -s ../jamesbunton
[/sh]

After you have cloned these repos, you will need to update your fink.conf file:
[sh]
sudo vim /sw/etc/fink.conf
[/sh]
Add “jamesbunton/main gregdarke/main” to end of the list for ‘Trees:’.
Now you will need to update the packages list:
[sh]
fink index
fink selfupdate
fink update-all
[/sh]

Fink packages

[sh]
fink install mutt mplayer vim-nox screen git debfoster
[/sh]

Custom Compiles

Since I like the new version of offlineimap (containing the patches for idle), I generally compile it from source. For this, you need to have a fink version of python installed (as the system python has a memory leak in ssl) and you must also have installed git.

I also like to have a fresh copy of iTerm, and thus grab that from source as well. This is a fairly easy install though:
[sh]
mkdir -p ~/Projects/software ~/Applications
cd ~/Projects/software
svn co https://iterm.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/iterm/trunk iterm
cd iterm
make Development
mv build/Development/iTerm.app ~/Applications/
[/sh]

Enabling dual screen support

Information taken from the everything website.

To enable support for dual monitors (ie, not mirroring), jump into open firmware:
Hold command+option+o+f, then at the prompt, type:
" /" select-dev
00000000 " graphic-options" get-my-property 2drop !
mac-boot
To make the above permanent, before typing mac-boot, press ctrl-c, then type the following:
nvstore
setenv use-nvramrc? true
reset-all

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.

sudo rmmod snd_hda_intel
sudo modprobe snd_hda_intel

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.

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

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
  main()

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.

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