First, lets have a look at its design:

Do you see that indicator on the front? Yes, that’s right… It’s a meter that shows the disk usage. The problem is that this meter must function in order for the flash drive to initialize and be readable to the operating system. Through some trial and major error, I found out it reads the first available FAT32 or NTFS partition. If one doesn’t exist, the flash drive simply keeps rebooting itself, rendering it completely unusable unless you can get it to create partition before it shuts itself down again. So if you plan on reformatting this drive, make sure you don’t delete partitions! Or, if you do, make sure you immediately create one afterwards.

Bad bad! Shame on you, Lexar…

Share on Facebook

Personally, the most significant improvement is freeing up rootfs space and the responsiveness of the system. It’s become much more of the phone it was meant to be.

Nokia’s also update their Ovi store for the n900, so expect to see more 3D games like Zen bind and Jurassic roller coaster come out this Thursday.

I highly recommend you flash the ROM using the ROM images here: http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/nokia_N900.php. I also suggest you flash the eMMC partition as well (MyDocs), thus doing a full hard reset. The two ROMs you want are…

RX-51_2009SE_10.2010.19-1.002_PR_COMBINED_002_ARM.bin (pick the one for your region)
RX-51_2009SE_10.2010.13-2.VANILLA_PR_EMMC_MR0_ARM.bin

Flash them in that order… the firmware comes first, then the eMMC flash. Must be done using the provided command line utilities!

If you can’t sacrifice your rig’s configuration, you can always use the App Manager to perform an Over-The-Air (OTA) update. It’s not as clean and you’re likely not to see too much of a performance difference, but does the job quickly & simply.

Enjoy your “new” phone! Stay tuned & I’ll show you how to overclock the n900 using a PR 1.2 compatible kernel.

Share on Facebook

Now there’s a new discovery: A Russian hacker who says he’s in New Zealand is selling the username & passwords of Facebook accounts ranging from $35 to $65, depending on how many friends each account has. He claims he has 1.5 million account credentials, 700,000 of which has already been sold.

Here’s the link to the article’s source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/connect/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501833&objectid=10640757.

Again, please be very careful when you are using Facebook!

Share on Facebook

Spend extra time to get the WNDA3100 to work properly? Yes, it didn’t quite readily work with BT4 (and probably not with other distros running the same kernel version). After doing some searching, I found a thread on backtrack-linux.org’s forum that allows my new adapter to work, with full monitor mode & packet injection capabilities. For a matter of record & for easy searching, I’ll document the directions below.

These instructions work for any Atheros AR9170 based cards:

* Arcadyan – WN7512
* Atheros – 9170
* Atheros – TG121N
* AVM – FRITZ!WLAN USB Stick N
* AMV – FRITZ!WLAN USB Stick N 2.4
* Cace – Airpcap NX
* D-Link – DWA 160A1
* D-Link – DWA 160A2
* IO-Data – WNGDNUS2
* Netgear – WNDA3100
* Netgear – WN111 v2
* Planex – GWUS300
* Sphairon – Homelink 1202
* TP-Link – TL-WN821N v2
* Z-Com – UB81 BG
* Z-Com – UB82 ABG
* Zydas – ZD1221
* Zyxel – NWD271N

IMPORTANT: please note that the hardware revisions matter, especially for the WNDA3100 that I’m working with. The WNDA3100v2 uses a Broadcom chipset instead, which has some other issues & corresponding remedies I won’t be discussing here.

Anyways…

1.) Download the patched firmwares ar9170.fw, ar9170-1.fw, and ar9170-2.fw and place them into /lib/firmware.

2.) Download compat-wireless-2.6.32.3.tar.bz2 and untar it to your favorite location.

3.) Run the following in the terminal:
cd compat-wireless-2.6.32.3
make
make install
make unload

*If you get a “No such file or directory” error when you run make, run:
ln -s /usr/src/linux /lib/modules/2.6.30.9/build

I didn’t get the error so I didn’t run it.

4.) Add “blacklist arusb_lnx ” to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. This will prevent the loading of the buggy/incorrect drivers and load the proper ones instead.

5.) On line 174 of /usr/sbin/airmon-ng, change “xar9170″ to “xar9170usb”. This will tell airmon from the aircrack suite to use the new drivers.

6.) Save all files and reboot.

Test it using the following:

1.) Plug in your adapter (WNDA3100 in my case) and start the networking service.
/etc/init.d/networking start

2.) Run:
airmon-ng start wlan0
Replace wlan0 with your wireless interface’s name. This will put your card into monitoring mode.

3.) Run:
aireplay-ng -9 wlan0
The -9 parameter means –test for short. This should show you some output with the APs found, whether injection was successful, etc.

Enjoy!

These new firmwares and drivers are likely to be incorporated in a newer version of the kernel, and thus later releases of *nix distros, hopefully eliminating the need for a large portion of this hack.

Share on Facebook

It’s called SSH Status and Switcher that allows you to toggle SSHD directly from the status area menu.

Share on Facebook

Today, I bring to you… How to overclock the Nokia N900! Since the first sighting of an overclocked Cortex-A8 processor has appeared, the folks at maemo.org have managed to flash the N900 with customized kernels in order to allow the CPU to be overclocked up to 1.2GHz (DSP up to 500MHz)! But due to liability concerns, only the kernel images of up to 930MHz have been posted.

Technically, the battery life would be less, but the N900 dynamically scales the CPU speed down to 250MHz when it is idle. The custom kernel allows it to go down to 125MHz.

Personally, I have flashed the 850MHz / 450MHz DSP kernel via XTerminal and the phone is definitely a lot snappier & responsive. So far, it’s been stable for me. As with any overclocking, you are on your own and accept the fact that you may cause hardware damage. In no way is anyone liable for such modifications. Period. You have been warned.

The kernels require N900 firmware PR1.1 or greater to run. However, since PR1.2 is coming soon, I highly recommend you restore the stock kernel before upgrading to the newest firmware or you may see some problems. As a side note, these customized kernel images were based off of PR1.1.1 and will almost definitely be incompatible with PR1.2. So once the new firmware has been released, WAIT for a new version of the custom kernels!

If you’re still interested, here’s a link to the guide that jakiman (thanks!) over @ maemo.org has put together: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=595582&postcount=774

Props to lehto and titan @ maemo.org for their work in creating these wonderful mods. I will update you guys if anything interesting shows up with the overclocking between now and PR1.2.

Share on Facebook

It’s been a while since I’ve updated. This time I bring some interesting “news”. If you don’t already know, Comcast is recruiting volunteers to try IPv6 on their network. This is especially good news, mainly pertaining to computer geeks out there, since IPv6 brings about many improvements. One of which is to solve the depletion of IP addresses, but that’s not the most important.

If you’re interested in trying IPv6 when Comcast plans to make it available (2Q2010), visit http://www.comcast6.net and sign up!

More (technical) information about IPv6 can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6

Cheers!

Share on Facebook

So I recently acquired a Nokia N900 and wanted to SSH into it. With only 2.4GHz 802.11 support, utilizing the 5GHz band was not an option. But I decided to go ahead and try it anyways, since my previous phone (HTC Fuze / Touch Pro / Raphael), after some careful tweaking, would be able to connect to a “foreign” AP for a minute or two before being kicked off.

Guess what? Association works!

But there’s a slight tweak that’s required to be able to use the N900 for any services such as SSH. Normally, at home, I can connect the N900 to my 2.4GHz band and access it from another computer without any special tricks. But due to the bullcrap policy of prohibiting unauthorized APs, the “Power Saving” option for the wireless controller of the N900 needs to be disabled in order to use it for services. Solution #2 is to make an applet that runs a shell script invoking a ping command that pings any IP on the LAN. I used the gateway’s. Both of these keep the WLAN connection “active” and work some magic, probably with CTS/RTS protection.

I personally recommend the 2nd method as it is more secure and allows more control over the power management.

Here’s a “HowTo” for both solutions:

SOLUTION #1 – Disable Power Management
1.) Settings -> Internet connections -> Connections
2.) Select your WLAN’s profile and press “Edit”
3.) Press “Next” 3 times to get you to the end of the wizard.
4.) Press “Advanced”, then to the “Other” tab.
5.) Change “Power saving” to “Off”
6.) “Save”, “Finish”, “Done”, “Save”

SOLUTION #2 – Make a Ping XTerm Script
You must have root access to set this up or it won’t work. (Hint: Install the ‘rootsh’ package.)

Create the file /usr/share/applications/hildon/keepalive.desktop containing the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.1
Type=Application
Terminal=true
Name=KeepAlive
Exec=/usr/bin/osso-xterm 'sudo ping [RHOST]'
Icon=
#X-Window-Icon=timerwidget
X-Window-Icon=
X-HildonDesk-ShowInToolbar=true
X-Osso-Type=application/x-executable

Change [RHOST] to whatever host you wish to use. This script will open up xterm and ping the specified host. A straight up execution of a ping will send the task to the background and you will need to then grep for the PID and kill it to stop execution. Running in xterm will give you a much easier way to stop the script.

Cheers.

Share on Facebook

Blog posts will still be tweeted.

Share on Facebook

Share on Facebook