Rusty's Blog

A couple of notes, This is to do tethering using an Android G1 phone. This should work with all Android based devices that have Debugging over USB enabled, and a network stack that the Tetherbot app can talk to. These instructions are focused on the Ubuntu release of Linux.

First, I’m not talking about full tethering here. To do that requires root access. To get root access you have to install a kernel that is not distributed by T-Mobile. If you are using a device that does give you root access, there are other solutions available.

This Tethering solution basically puts together a socks proxy that you can use to surf the web with your G1 phone anywhere you can get a good cell signal. It also works perfectly well for a local wifi connection (not between the computer and the phone, but say between the phone and your home wifi AP, or at a coffee shop.) For the most part that’s great for testing, but I suspect that if you have a modern laptop with good USB 2.0 ports, that you either have a wifi adapter already you can plug in, or your laptop came with a WiFi connection you can probably use. If you are having problems with some proprietary drivers, this may be a temporary workaround, but you’ve just added a $200 wifi adapter to your kit. Seems a bit extravagant. Doesn’t it?

Start by following the instructions over at http://graha.ms/androidproxy/

If the instructions work, you’re done. I had to do a bit more.

In my case I ended up with the following problem:

./adb devices
List of devices attached
???????????? no permissions


First you need to have a file named adb_usb.ini in your ~/.android/ folder. You can create it with the command

echo "0x0e79" >> ~/.android/adb_usb.ini

As much as I would like to say that the next step is a drop kick, it’s a little bit more detailed. You may not need this. If after doing the above command you see a device identified by ‘./adb devices’ you’re done. However experience suggests that you will need to create a /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules file with the usb maunfacturer ID for your phone included.

To get the manufacturer ID, run lsusb twice, once with your phone not attached to your computer, the other with it connected. The line that is added with the phone there should look something like:

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0bb4:0c02 High Tech Computer Corp.


Obviously Bus and Device will depend upon which port it’s plugged into. The ID is in two parts, the part to the left of the colon is the manufacturer ID, the other is a per manufacturer device ID, but for what we are doing is not critical. So for the Android G1 phone, the part of the ID that we are interested in here is ’0bb4′

The rules file needs to contain the following:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"


Once the file has been created, I’ll leave it to you how, but

sudo echo SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666" > /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

should do the trick, you need to set up the permissions properly, and restart the udev process:

sudo chmod a+rx /etc/udev/rules.d/50-android.rules
sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart


Personally I recommend doing the above with the phone detached (except when testing with adb) and once udev has been restarted plugging your phone into your computer again.

This time when you run ./adb devices you should see something like:

./adb devices
List of devices attached
HT???GZ????? device


The specific numbers have been replaced with ‘?’ but if you see something beginning with HT, you’re probably well on your way.

I ran into one last issue with FireFox. It may have been the fault of the platform, but if you run into it this is the cure.

Basically once I had set all the above up, when I disconnected my lan connection, I would get a ‘server not found’ error from Firefox when attempting to navigate anywhere. The problem is that by default firefox will continue to do dns lookups through the OS DNS lookup resolver. Since that requires a network connection and on it’s own doesn’t recognize a Socks 5 connection as one, the connection doesn’t work.

So the fix? Install the FoxyProxy add on, and create an entry to browse using the proxy for all traffic. One of the check boxes is to do dns lookups through the proxy as well. Make sure it is checked.

Now go back to the instructions at http://graha.ms/androidproxy/ and you should be on your way.

Hope this is useful to someone besides me. Most of this page was written with a local lan connection. However final edits, and posting to the public occurred over a functioning foxyproxy tethered connection. It will work, it’s just a bit of a step by step process to get it going.

So you’re out and about. Having fun with your G1 (or other android phone) you’ve taken some pictures and you decide that right now you want to take one of thoe pictures and use it as the wallpaper on your laptop.

Well, you can e-mail it to yourself. Or you could post it on your picasaweb account, or well “neither of those really interest me.” you say? Well, if you had been thinking this morning when you left the house you probably would have packed along a usb cable to like up your computer to your phone, but if you are like most other people, you’ve decided that that really isn’t something you want to carry today, and you can always take care of that tonight. Or perhaps you have one of those micro sd-card to usb adapters on your keychain? No. Bummer.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just fire up a small web server that points at your photo album? Point your web browser on your laptop at it and download the picture you want?

Actually if you have installed the Android Scripting Engine (ASE) you can.

ASE includes interpreters for Bean Shell, (a Java based shell scripting language) Lau, (found in some Linux distributions) Python, (pretty much everywhere these days) bash, (also pretty common) and more to come. Now I’ll be one of the first to admit that all of these are probably anything but feature complete. If you are thinking ‘Hey I’m going to write a push button app with custom lables using tk!’ sorry, tk is not included. However if you are interested in talking to the network, get information from features of the phone such as the location via gps, or the orientation of the phone (face up/down, on the side, etc) you can do some pretty interesting things. In time the screen may be dot addressable, and you may be able to do gui stuff, but it’s not currently being planned.

I’ve not done anything with Bean Shell, and not all that much with Lau. Both have fans and from what I have seen are likely to be used fairly heavily. However I do like to dabble with Python, so you’ll find most of my blog postings here relating to ASE are going to focus on Python.

But we’ve got that photo to get to the laptop. Right? Lets work on that.

Perhaps you haven’t installed ASE but that might work for you? Poing your browser at http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ and you should see a QRcode bar code on the page. If you have the BarcodeScanner application istalled fire it up on your phone, point the camera at the bar code on the screen, and you’ll end up in the application installer looking at the install helper for ASE.There are additional instructions that you will want to follow to add in the actual python interpreter as well as some sample scripts.

Now since the 0.10 alpha release of ASE, not only can you download the application itself via qrcodes, but you can enter small scripts that way as well. Launch ASE, hit ‘Menu’, pick ‘Add Script’ and select ‘Scan Barcode.’ The barcode reader will come up again, point it at the following qrcode based on the script posted by Mrflakey to the ASE-Scripting mail list:

httpd.py

You’ll actually be able to run it immediately, however it’s always a good idea to take a look at the code. It should look something like this:

httpd.py

import SimpleHTTPServer

from os import chdir

chdir('/sdcard/')
SimpleHTTPServer.test()

If all you wan to do is browse your pictures, then you will probably want to change the chdir line to read something a bit more like “chdir(‘/sdcard/dcim/Camera’)”

Now there is only one ‘issue’ left. “How do I get to the server?” Well, to tell the truth, that has been the real reason for this posting.

<hr>

The first time I used the script and downloaded content from my phone, the way I found the IP address for my phone was to open a terminal session on my dhcp server and looked for the message indicating that my phone had just been assigned an address via dhcp. That’s all well and good for when I am at home, but if you are out on the road, you probably don’t have that ‘advantage.’ Last I checked T-Mobile wasn’t exactly giving me access to their system at a level where I could get the IP address that my phone was using from their servers. Not really expecting that any time soon either.

If you dig around, you can find the ip address, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could present it as part of that httpd.py script? Actually, you can. But it’s a bit more work.

<hr>

The Android platform allows you to see the current IP addresses on your phone by using the command netcfg at the command prompt. You already know about 127.0.0.1. If you don’t a brief note, don’t bother to try to download anything from your phone by pointing your web browser on your laptop at 127.0.0.1:8000, it won’t work.

There are 6 different ‘interfaces’ that may have an IP address on your phone.:

$ $netcfg

lo      UP      127.0.0.1       255.0.0.0       0x00000049

dummy0  DOWN    0.0.0.0         0.0.0.0         0x00000082

rmnet0  DOWN    25.96.178.24    255.255.255.252 0x00001002

rmnet1  DOWN    0.0.0.0         0.0.0.0         0x00001002

rmnet2  DOWN    0.0.0.0         0.0.0.0         0x00001002

tiwlan0 UP      192.168.0.2     255.255.255.0   0x00001043

The above is something ‘like’ what is deisplayed on my phone. Presumption being that I’m at an internet cafe with wifi access and I’ve gotten both the cell phone and my laptop on the wifi, I would simply point my web browser at http://192.169.0.2:8000/ after launching httpd.py on my phone and I would be up and running. (caveat the internet cafe or wifi provider has to have enabled the ability of wirelessly connected customers to communicate directly with each other.)

If rmnet0 was UP rather than DOWN, and unless you have a rooted phone or a more recent phone than the G1 you will find tiwlan0 will thus be DOWN, and the internet cafe allows internet browsing, I could point my browser at http://25.96.178.24:8000/ and I would be able to browse the content as well.

On the other hand that’s a couple of extra steps. First you get the IP address of your phone, then you launch the server, then you hope you remember what the IP address was so you can point your laptop at the address. Annoying right?

Well we’re going to add two bits of content to the httpd.py script in a bit, one imports the library we are going to write, the other displays what our IP address is. But in order todo that we need to add a script to the phone. Let’s call the script ‘netip.py’.It’s going to have to do a few things.

• Get the list of ip addresses and interfaces from the phone. We’ll call the program netcfg to get that.
• ignore the ‘lo’ interface.
• return the interface and ip address of the UP interface(s) or
• return the ip address of the UP interface(s)
• be able to show that the library functions.

There are some contitions that over the long term you will want to address as well, but I’m not going to for this script. What do you do when you are in a place without cell service or wifi? Currently the script does not address that.

Ok, we are going to import the following libraries.

import os, sys, android, string, time

os and sys allow us to talk to the operating system, android because the script will want to be able to show us things like what IP address we got using the makeToast() android call. The time librarry we are using to allow us to display two or more results with a delay between them. We are going to be using the string library to manipulate the output of the system call to netcfg. but we better get that first:

def colint():
    status = []
    a = os.popen('netcfg','r')
    while 1:
      line = a.readlines()
      if line:
        status.append(line)
      else:
        return status
        break
    return status

Ok, status is set to an empty list. the os.popen() call tells the phone to run the netcfg program and we are going to ‘read’ the results from the system call. Start a while loop. ’1′ is always ‘true’ so we’ll use that for the test. In the loop we assign ‘line’ to the result of doing a readline on a. Now if the result of that is true, i.e. we got something other then an end of file mark we append the content of line as a new list entry to status. if we don’t get anything from the readline we return the status and break out of the while loop. The final ‘return status’ is not necessarily required, but I would rather have the function return a blank status if the while fails for some reason. Up to you.

Of cours we’re really only interesetd in entries that have a status fo UP right? so let’s get rid of the rest.

def upips(work):

    status = []

    a = 0

    while a < len(work[0]):

      if "UP" in work[0][a]:

        status.append(work[0][a])

      a += 1

    return status

This time we call the function with a list and presumably in that list there are some entries that have the string ‘UP’ in them.

And of course we are not interested in the ‘lo’ interface so we’ll clean that out:

def nolo(work):

# given a list of strings (with embeded '\n') break as needed, return

# list of strings w/o 'lo' in them)

  status = []

  a = 0

  while a < len(work):

    if "lo" in work[a]:

      a += 1

    else:

      status.append(work[a])

      a += 1

  if len(status) == 1:

    rets = status[0]

    statusl = rets.split()

    status = statusl[2]

  return status

If there is only one interface with an up status (other than lo) we also break up the string and only return the IP address. That’s done by calling the ‘split’ string function and assigning the resulting list to ‘status1′ then status will get the third entry (first is at 0 and is the interface name, ‘lo’, ‘tiwlan0′, etc. the second at 1 will be the up/down state.) Otherwise if it looks like there are multiple interfaces up besides the lo interface we will return a list of the entire strings.

The rest of this can either be considered ‘test’ code, or you can call the next to functions directly. The labels are a bit misleading. At an early stage in development these functions actually displayed the IP addresses. I decided later on that I really just wanted them to return them to the calling function. At some point you may be interested in binding to the up interface. The two functions are displayUp() and displayNoLo() which returns all up interfaces, or all but the lo interface. You will probably be most interested in the displayNoLo() function, but who knows.

def displayUp():

  nets = colint()

  nets = upips(nets)

  return nets

def displayNoLo():

  nets = colint()

  nets = upips(nets)

  nets = nolo(nets)

  return nets

Now then it’s always a good idea to include in a script some code to run to make sure that it all works. Since each of the two functions above will call the earlier functions we really only need to call those two functions. However we are going to make use of the makeToast() android call so we need ot initialize android. Also makeToast() displays a popup for about 2 seconds so let’s give it a chance to complete between calls to it, and exiting the program.

if __name__ == '__main__':

  droid = android.Android()

  droid.makeToast(displayUp())

  time.sleep(5)

  droid.makeToast(displayNoLo())

  time.sleep(5)

  droid.exit()

The ‘if’ conditional at the top is the first line that will be run if you execute the program directly. I personally recommend including all of this. At the very least you will be able to look at how various functions can be called later on.

Ok, if you have a clean camera lens, you may be able to load the entire program via qrcode. Again launch ASE, ‘Add Script’ from the Menu button, and ‘From Barcode’ Once that is up, point the camer at the screen and see if it will read the following bar code:

netip.py

And a modified httpd that uses the code is at:

httpd2.py

If you would rather, the full text of the scripts are at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/android/netip.py and http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/android/httpd2.py

Now if you have an available network connection and access to the internet, you should never be unable to get documents off your sdcard for your Android based cell phone.

Once you run a program that imports a python library you will end up with both a .py and a .pyc of that file in your list of scripts. The .pyc edition can be run the same as the .py, but is a ‘compiled’ version of the program that speeds up execution of library system calls in the future.

You may wish to create a ‘shared’ folder on your sdcard that you point httpd2.py at instead of pointing at the entire card. Or as noted earlier just point at your /sdcard/dcim/Camera/ folder for images only. The reason for that is that there are no restrictions on who can download content from your phone while httpd2.py is running, except for the limitation that it is in a subdirectory of the current directory. You may also want to change the print out to read more like ‘print “connect to http://”, netip.displayNoLo(), “:8000/”‘ to give you a reminder that it is on port 8000 and that you use a web browser.  If 8000 is entirely too likely for someone to connect to, you can point SimpleHTTPServer.test() at a different port. I’ll leave learning how to do that to you. If you don’t have a rooted phone, you can’t point at anything below 1023, but you could point it at 58080 if that works better for your mental image.

Enjoy, and play around.

Minor setup stuff. I use a G1 phone from T-Mobile and have very much enjoyed the experience. One of the things that I’ve been looing for since I started using it has been a way to post microblogs to http://identi.ca. There are a couple of apps out there for twitter users, and while I do use twitter, it’s had a few problems that make it unsutible in my view for ongoing use.

There really are several different ways of getting content out of identi.ca onto my phone. sms messages, e-mail, web browser, gtalk/xmpp, etc. However I really didn’t want to be reading messages from identi.ca, I’m a bit more interested in sending messages to there.

For me a critical point is that I have a jabber/xmpp server running on one of my own servers. As a matter of fact I had already linked my jabber account there. If you have a gmail account, you might prefer to use that. However a pointer there is that any time you receive an IM at your gmail gtalk account, it very well may be using an sms message to talk to your phone. That can get expensive. I recommend using a server of your own, or getting an account on jabber.org or a public server and use that resource for sending and receiving jabber to identi.ca messages.

Now getting a jabber message from a phone to a jabber server is not really difficult. I suspect that I could install a development package on my desktop, write a bit of code for the android environment, compile a package, put it on a server I have access to, install the package to my phone, test, and repeat the steps from write a bit of code on, until testing gives me the results I expect.

An alternative that has just recently shown up is the Android Scripting Environment. http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

With the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) you can write scripts in Bean Shell, Lua, or Python. By default Bean Shell is installed, but you will need to install the interpreters for Lua and Python. The Environment is a .8 code base, which means it is very functional, but may not be complete from the perspective of a general user.

I’ve personally never done well in Java, and Bean Shell really is a scripting environment for Java. If you happen to like Java, it may be all you need. I’ve also never worked with Lua, but from what I see in the collection of scripts that are available as examples, it appears to be a reasonable language as well. I have played around a bit with Python, and while the environment is hardly complete, it seems to be sufficient for what I need. For android, it does include xmpp support, as well as support for pulling down URLs, interpreting html, and a few other elements as well. All I needed this time was the Android support and the xmpp support.

I’ve liberally copied code from a couple of different resources. For an example of how to send a message to a jabber server, (which was not written for the android platform, but it’s python and all the referenced libraries are included in ASE) I used the tutorial at http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/618

Here’s the sample:

import android
import xmpp

droid = android.Android()

# User interaction stuff
message = droid.getInput("What's Up?")
tag = droid.getInput("What tags? (Prepend w/#)")

# Varios Variables we will use
_SERER = 'jabber.server.you.use', 5223   # put in your own jabber server name and appropriate port
username = 'your.user.name'              # give it the user name you want to use
password = 'your.password'               # until I figure out how to store these credentials securely
fullmessage = tag + message              # build the message we're going to send. (could use improvement)
destid = 'somename@jabber.server'        # for identi.ca use 'update@identi.ca'

# to send to a specific user instead, use something like:
#destid = droid.getInput("Who should get this? (username@host)")

# send the message
cnx = xmpp.Client('jabber.server.you.use') # don't need the port so don't use when creating a connection instance to use
cnx.connect( server=(_SERVER) )          # establish a connection
cnx.auth(username,password, 'G1')        # authenticate yourself, and give a 'presence' (G1 in this case)
cnx.send( xmpp.Message( destid, fullmessage ) ) # Send the message

# exit 'cleanly'
quit = droid.exit()                      # we're done, time to go

And that pretty much summs it up. There are a few things I will be investigating over time. I suspect that using a dictionary, I can create a set of ‘tags’ that I want to use regularly (#cvg2009, #c25k, etc.) then feed that to some sort of a pick list, and hopefully I could enter the update and select the appropriate tag all in one dialog. Worst case, 2 dialogs sort of like what I’m doing now. This currently has a bit more flexibility, but in the end I would also like to be able to identify if this is to be a message to update, or to some other specific user.

What am I doing with this? Well, as a department co-head for the 2009 CONvergence convention, I wanted a way to update my facebook, twitter, identi.ca and planet pages with what I’m doing, and what’s happening now. I’m pretty sure that I can update twitter directly, and possibly through that facebook, and it looks like I could import from there to identi.ca, which also would propogate to my world page, but after seeing the problems that twitter has been going through with it’s growing pains, I didn’t think that was the best route. If it works for you, ok. The facebook app for Android has been having problems since facebook changed something recently, so that was out. And it’s been a while since I wrote anything I considered interesting like this, so here it is.

How things work from here. My jabber server accepts a connection and forwards the message to update@identi.ca, which then places the update in my stream. Through the facebook interface it posts an update to facebook. I also have my account configured so that all events are posted to twitter as well. My planet page pulls any updates I’ve made in the past couple of hourse every 2 hours from twitter and identi.ca. Hey it pulls an update that I’ve posted a blog as well. Handy little page at times.

I always seem to discover ‘issues’ that need to be corrected that have almost nothing to do with the specific project at hand, except that they got in the way. Today I discovered I had not punched a hole for tcp through my firewall for jabber clients. I had punched one for UDP, but since nothing is listening for that…

Have fun. If you find the app useful, and want to let me know about updates, I would appreciate hearing about them.

Back a few years ago, I started buying my music on CD. I happen to be old enough to remember my folks buying 8-tracks, I had a 45 player. Actually I had a 78 player, but those were not in record stores any more by the time I was born, aincient I may be, that old I am not. The 78 player was one of my grandparents opening space in their home and I was currious enough about the stuff that I got to take it home with me.

I don’t know if there is a 45 record anyplace in my collection of ‘stuff’. I’m kind of hoping not. Mostly because the conditions they would have to be in are not exactly good for the records. I do know I have some LPs (33 1/3 rpm vinyl) that I’m hoping are not in truely horrid condition, though I’m not going to suggest that they have been treated the best either.

I think I bought my first CD in 1984. I was stationed in Germany, and had bought a ‘midi’ system. (Nothing to do with the Musical Instrument Digital Interface platform.) I bought a Techniques CD player at the same time, and started building a small collection of CDs. Along the way I’ve lost a few due to various incidents, and a few have just gone missing. It’s not like I haven’t had kids or something right?

In any case I’ve been amassing a bit of a collection. Nothing like some people build, and I don’t expect to be hosting a radio station really worth listening to any time in the future, but I wouldn’t want to have to try to dig through the collection to find a specific CD any time soon either.

Back in the late 90′s I picked up my first MP3 player. A 6 gig Archos hard disk based player. I had already converted a few of my CDs to a small MP3 collection as I wanted to listen to a randomized playback without having to pay a couple hundred bucks for a cd jukbox, and having to wait for disks to change, and mechanical parts to fail, etc. I was using BeOS, and the ripped collection easily fit on the Archos drive at the time.

I looked at the various file sharing applications over time. Napster included, and decided for my own reasons that I really wasn’t interested in having copies of music I wasn’t willing to buy the CD for. I know that it was not a decision everyone made, but that was mine. And I continued to buy CDs from time to time.

I bought a lot of used CDs over the years. For the better part of a decade I would visit music stores and look for a couple of CDs that had disappeared, or been broken. and replaced most of them. At one point I had ripped my collection to over 13 gigabytes of 384kbps MP3′s. I got to thinking about my listening environment, and decided that I really didn’t need my collection to be at that high a bit-rate. So I re-ripped the entire collection back down to 128k, and left it at that. Along the way I discovered that some of my CDs had been revised on the various cd databases that the rippers were using, and some which had not been there before happened to match newer albums that didn’t happen to be in the same genera. So a bit of manual updates being used from time to time.

Over the years I’ve used a variety of MP3 players. Anything from devices that look like a USB key drive that a pair of headphones plug into the side, on up to my Nokia N800 with 2 16 gig sdhc cards in it. I have had a cell phone that had a built in MP3 player (SK-3), a Samsung Nexus XM player that worked as an mp3 player as well, and more than enough software MP3 players. There are a couple of other players here and there, but for the most part I’ll be ‘done’ with the hardware players fairly soon now.

The only significant problem I have with MP3, has nothing to do with the players themselves. Though carrying around special purpose devices that only play mp3 files seems to me to be a bit of a waste of resources at the moment. Perhaps not as bad as devices that need a special headset adapter perhaps, but that’s a different matter.

Back to what my biggest problem is, it’s that the encoder’s are pattent encumbered. Well, players are as well, but I’m buying the player from a retailer or manufacturer who is paying the licence fees for that player out of the sales price. Under Linux, I’m not buying the encoders. So any MP3 encoder I end up using also happens to be in violation of the patent that is applicable. I don’t expect that I’m likely to be taken to court over it any time soon over the matter, but it is a thorn in the side. A ‘legal’ way for me to circumvent the issue would be to play the audio through a sound card, into one of my Haupauge PVR-250 cards and capture to MPEG, then strip the MP3 audio out of the MPEG file. That encoder I presume is paid for in the cost of the hardware itself. Personally I think that’s a lot of excess work that I’m not interested in doing, especially as there are other ways of accomplishing the same goal.

Remember that the Goal is to have the opportunity to listen to the music I own the CD’s for. I’m not trying to resell any of them. I’m not trying to hand out copies to all my friends, or my family. Just me, listening when and where I would like, preferably without hauling around 20 pounds of CDs.

Obviously I could install a CD Jukebox in my car, duplicate the collection of CDs I have by buying another copy of each one, and so on. You know, I don’t think that’s a reasonable solution. It doesn’t help me when I ride the bus to and from work. It doesn’t help when I’m at work, etc.

A few years back, someone else who wasn’t happy with the situation regarding the pattents related to MP3 developed a new encoder, called Ogg Vobis. (or Vorbis, not sure at the moment) There’s another solution for video called Ogg Theora. (again, I think that’s the title.) They both do a very good job of encoding and playing back music and video, however there hasn’t been a lot of hardware on the market that has support built in for it. One odity related to that is the N800. This device is built around a Linux kernel and platform. Ogg has been available for almost all varients of Linux, but Nokia decided that there was insufficient demand for Ogg to include it in the software included in the N800. Now there are some reasonable explanations for this, in that the device does have a limited amount of space, but since the device supports full motion video and more, there are people who are not particularily happy about the situation. Yes, some people have ported the necessary libraries, and it would be reasonably easy to get them to work, but for most people it’s not really worth the effort.

Last week I bought a new cell phone. I like a lot of what the iPhone has to offer, but really don’t like the idea of having to do almost all update processes through iTunes. (If for no other reason than I don’t want to fight with trying to get that to work under Linux.) However Google anounced the Android cell phone platform specification some time back, and about 2 weeks ago T-Moble started selling the HTC Dream G1 in broad distribution. It’s no more for ‘everyone’ than the iPhone is. And I don’t expect the G1 to be an iPhone killer. However it does provide significantly more service than my previous combination of cell phones, N800, and ‘disposable digital’ camera provided. Mostly because with 1 device I have taken care of all three of those resources, as well as my GPS, and a few other things that I am hoping it will work out for. It won’t be a remote head for my ham radio gear, but…

One of my co-worker’s is a musician. He just released a new CD, of which I bought a copy. I went to rip it so I could listen (again without having to cary the CD itself around) and the CD-ripping software on the computer I used didn’t support ripping to MP3. Flaac and Ogg though are both supported. Again since I’m not too concerned about compression artifacts, I chose the ogg format and once the tracks had been ripped I copied them over to my phone figuring that at worst it would work as a way of getting the tracks home.

I disconnected the phone from the computer, and pulled up the music player. Now if you guessed that with all that I wrote above I was disapointed to find that the song’s were not in the collection the player would handle, you need to re-look at the title of the posting again. Yes it did work. I wasn’t expecting it to, but the Android platform is built around a Linux kernel and they did include the ogg libraries.

So, it’s time to go back to the collection of CDs, and start ripping them again. This time to ogg. I may not be able to do all that much with the podcasts I listen to, however there are a couple that do distribute in ogg.