Since I’ve last posted, I’ve moved to a new apartment. First order of business - get a working internet connection. This is extra-challenging when your primary machine doesn’t even have a wireless network card.

My first hack used my trusty laptop - it has a properly working wireless card, and could connect to my roommate’s router quite easily. It runs Ubuntu, and as it turns out, that means sharing the connection was dead-simple: Right-click on the network manager icon, add a new wired connection called “Shared”, and under IPv4 settings, choose “Shared to other computers”. That’s it. Once I connected my desktop to my laptop, it automatically got all of its settings, and I was good to go.

After a couple of days’ messing with it, I’m releasing it: Transport Droid IL! It’s a handy little app for querying Egged’s site, as well as the new Ministry of Transportation site, on transportation information. This is pretty beta, but seems to work well enough.

More info, source code: http://lutzky.github.com/TransportDroidIL

APK File: TransportDroidIL.APK

There are several good guides for installing Gilad Ben-Yossef’s excellent Hebdroid fonts on physical Android devices, but those don’t really work with the Android SDK’s emulator - changes to the system directory aren’t persistent. Here’s how to get around that:

First, a few downloads. You’ll need:

1. The android emulator (presumably you already have this, if not, you can get it at developer.android.com)
2. The hebdroid fonts
3. unyaffs, which will extract the system.img file
4. A snapshot of yaffs2, which will create our new system.img file. This is actually today’s snapshot from the git repository, which worked for me. For later versions, take a look at the git repository.

Building unyaffs is simple enough, or you can use the prebuilt version from the site. Building mkyaffs2image is also quite easy - just untar the snapshot, and run make in the utils directory. Put both of these utilities somewhere in your $PATH for convenience.

I’ve finally gotten the chance to get one of those newfangled Android phones.

I’ve recently “bought” a Samsung Galaxy Android phone (the older i7500, not the newer i9000 “S”) model. It’s a seriously serious upgrade from my old Nokia 6120 Classic, and as I broke the 6120’s screen and reverted back to my trusty old Nokia 6070 (which I couldn’t even get to run the GMail app), I was quite a happy camper switching to a modern phone.

My Meizu Mini M6 has died a tragic death as a result of being left in my shirt pocket, which in turn was - with the rest of my shirt - in the laundry. I’ve had it for three years, so this would be a good time to review.

My favorite thing about the Mini was the cost. When I bought it, it was far cheaper than comparable players, at ~400₪ for 8GB. For a player with good video support, it was a steal. Other pros it had include:

Last weekend I broke my Nokia 6120’s screen. I have a military phone, which is far cheaper, so I’ve decided to keep it offline. However, being the sentimental guy that I am, I did want to save all of my contacts and SMS messages (in addition to the photos, which presented less of a problem). This proved to be a bit of a challenge without the screen working.

Usually, when you connect the phone via USB, it asks if you want “PC Suite mode” or “Data Transfer mode”. The “Data Transfer” mode has the phone show up as a standard USB storage device, which allows for easy transfer of MP3 files, photos and videos to and from the phone, without any nokia-specific software. However, it only works for the external SD card, so you can’t use that to access SMS messages or contacts.