nexus

Hacking Android/Cyanogen Email in KitKat and Lollipop
[17:51:38] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.cor Work switched from Zimbra to MicroSoft Exchange some time back, and I've stopped synchronizing my calendar with my Nexus 4 since then (instead using my Handspring Visor Edge). The reason was straight forward: the MicroSoft server wanted the ability to wipe my entire device.

This seemed like overreach, and after talking with people in IT, it wasn't intentional, it was just the default. The changes in the AOSP code are pretty straightforward to disable this. I've posted diffs for both KitKat and Lollipop: http://matt.wronka.org/stuff/projects/icpp/android/cyanogenmod/

The KitKat changes also include some clean-up of CM code I didn't find useful (CMUpdater, CMAccounts), these aren't in CM12 yet. If you'd rather cherry-pick the changes for CM11 or AOSP 4.4 there are two AOSP applications to patch: http://matt.wronka.org/stuff/projects/icpp/android/aosp/4.4/

It looks like a lot of refactoring went into the Exchange services in 5.0, the patchset is smaller, but there's a new issue as reported to horde: https://bugs.horde.org/ticket/13702
I can confirm that this is an issue with Android 5.0—the effect is that the device appears to sync, but when it is about to complete it removes all data it received. I have not looked into fixing this yet but appears unrelated to Horde itself.

For now, full builds are at:
http://hume.matt.wronka.org/~matt/tmp/cm-12-20141204-SNAPSHOT-CNJ-mako.zip (Nexus 4, Android 5.0/CM12/Lollipop)
http://hume.matt.wronka.org/~matt/tmp/cm-11-20141122-SNAPSHOT-CNJ-mako.zip (Nexus 4, Android 4.4/CM11/KitKat)
http://hume.matt.wronka.org/~matt/tmp/cm-11-20141114-SNAPSHOT-CNJ-crespo.zip (Nexus S, Android 4.4/CM11/KitKat)

Welcome to Android.
[05:00:47] matt [wronka.org]/navic I got an Android device because I got fed-up with the broken WPA2 support in Nokia Belle on the E6-00.

Apparently I should have searched through the Android issue tracker first:

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=40065
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=51221
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=34212

Basically, the current version of openssl added new versions of TLS (new being used liberally) and many routers, technically broken, won't work with it.
This bug dates back to mid-2012, looks to have been fixed in later versiosn of 4.1 and broken again in 4.2. It's broken in the latest Nexus 4 (Mako) Cyanogen RC.

It's annoying.

IPv6 on Mobile
[03:40:59] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.generay T-Mobile supports native IPv6; I played around with it a bit on my N900 during their open beta phase. It's now mainstream, and rolled into their standard APN which anybody who's signed-up for an account in the last six years or so would probably be on (apparently some of my phones are still on the old Voicestream APNs which have at least recently still worked). According to them, only certain Android phones still work (half of them are Nexus brands). All recent Nokia phones (S40, Symbian) dating about at least five years should work fine too, the S40 phone I had has an option for it but I seem to recall it didn't work during the beta phase, and Nokia didn't want to support it.

Nokia Belle (S60) on the other hand was as easy as selecting "Advanced Options" from the network definition (when not connected) and changing the type from "IPv4" to "IPv6"; everything works from that point on. Well, except the native SIP client which wouldn't connect anymore (to my IPv4 server) and my J2ME Jabber client which wouldn't connect to (or resolve, I'm not sure which) the server. All synchronization, Opera Mobile, and in-built eMail worked fine; but the SIP client is a deal breaker.

Galaxy Nexus
[23:20:40] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.generay Mark wrote a pretty good write-up of his experiences with the Galaxy Nexus some time ago. I've come to the same conclusion about its size just being too large for a phone and it simply doesn't fit my hand. More interesting is that it finally got him to drop AT&T. If Pacific Bell and BellSouth had still been on AMPS instead of GSM AT&T would probably be much happier and along the IS-95 technology progression.

http://prolixium.com/mynews?id=963

One Hour with the WebOS TouchPad
[17:16:54] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.dementia The web browser has different trade-offs with the pre-IOS5 web kit browser. General display is better, but there are instances where the scrolling is broken until you zoom in or out first; support for Arabic is noticeably absent by default.

The device itself collects and displays fingerprints more-so than others I've used (Apple iPad, Nokia N900, Samsung/Google Nexus S).

Oddly, when I set the language to Spanish, it still showed the Google location services terms-of-service in English. Other license agreements were in Spanish.

It required me to create a "WebOS" account with my name and eMail address. It didn't require me to set the timezone, which it presumably got from my location.

My co-worker, and IOS advocate, voiced that there weren't enough apps in the store, and that the UI looked too much like KDE.

I might like it better than an IOS device--the fact that I can switch between the Web browser and other programs without closing each in turn is a large part of this--but I'm not sure that I would buy one on my own. It seems rough still, but still promising. If it hadn't been for the disruption of Palm going out of business and being acquired by HP, I would imagine that a lot of these rough edges would have been polished, and am dissapointed that this hypothetical device isn't what it is my hands.

Not Quite Ready For Prime Time Operating Systems
[16:17:33] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.dementia http://bohmian.org/disc/Google_Nexus_S_first_impressions

We just got Jamie's Android phone in the mail yesterday, the venerable Google-branded Nexus S--currently the state-of-the-art in Android phones.

It's not immediately obvious how to get a calendar onto the device.