Update: ActionBarSherlock is no longer necessary. The latest Google Support Library includes appcompat which is a better solution. ActionBarSherlock is an Android support library designed to allow you to use the ActionBar which was introduced in Android 3.0 Honeycomb with older devices, back to Android 2.1 Eclair. This allows your applications to have a modern looking interface, even on older devices whose API does not support the new features. To get started using ActionBarSherlock in Eclipse follow these steps. ...

A while ago I was working on building a custom kernel for my Android phone. Once you get the source the compilation process is not as straightforward as I hoped. Here are the steps required to get from the kernel source to a flashable image for your phone. Get a copy of the build toolchain and Linux kernel for your device First download a copy of the pre-build toolchain from git. ...

By default CrunchBang Linux does not have hibernation support enabled in the shutdown menu. The reason for being excluded is likely because not all computers support hibernation. However most modern computers will support it. To add a hibernation option just download this file and place it in the bin directory of your home folder: “~/bin/” and make it executable with: chmod +x cb-exit cb-exit Gist If you want to test your system to see if it can handle hibernation run the following command. If your system supports it you should be able to successfully enter and exit hibernation: ...

A while ago I decided that I needed some more JavaScript/AJAX experience, and what better way to get it than to use it to solve an existing problem. Every now and then my apartment hosts karaoke nights, we have a lot of songs, enough to fill a 4-inch binder. Searching for songs was a pain. In order to find the song’s ID code to give to the DJ you must search through pages of songs and artists that were in no particular order. I decided to fix this problem with my skill set, so I created DJQueue. DJQueue is a collection of hacked together PHP, JavaScript, and SQL magic. ...

A while ago I wondered how well modern cellphones could handle a flood of text messages. So I created a simple python program to test just that. The program works by sending emails to a SMS Gateway which will forward the message to the phone in the form of a text message. I tested my program on two devices, my modern HTC Incredible running Android and my aging LG Chocolate dumb-phone. The results where surprising! After starting the program my HTC Incredible froze after receiving the first 20 messages. A battery pull was required to get it to respond. The second it finished booting it froze again! I was only able to make it respond by stopping my program and rebooting the phone. After it boot it froze again while catching up on all the messages that where sent. ...

Have you ever wanted to give a friend access to a wireless network you are on but don’t want to go find the key? WIFI Key Recovery will find the key on your device and allow you to share it via a message or QR Code. Additionally WIFI Key Recovery will allow you to backup/restore your current WIFI configuration to your SD card! If this app does not work on your rooted phone email me I will try to add support. ...

This article is going to help you using LDAP to authenticate users rather than relying on a users table with a password column. I will be assuming you will be using cakephp 1.3 and that you have completed Auth and/or ACL setup on your application similar to the ACL tutorial on the cakephp book. Because we want to control the logging in of the user ourselves and not leave it to the cake magic we need to override the auth component. To do this copy your auth.php from your CAKE_CORE/controllers/components/ to your APP/controllers/components/ folder. Next open it up and fine the login function. It should be around like 684. Once you find it comment out everything inside the function, but leave the function intact. It should look something like this: ...

Backstory A few years ago when the local Circuit City was going out of business I decided to stop by to see if there where any good deals. Unfortunately most of their inventory was at a very low discount (if at all). However they where getting rid of some of their CRM and sales equipment. I picked up a 3M touch-panel LCD monitor for $20 or so, sold “as-is”. When I got home I realized that the LCD panel was only 800x600px, and had a broken back-light. I tried to get the touch panel working but for some reason it was not receiving power and I could not find any drivers for it. Into storage it went. ...

This is about a piece of software I wrote over a year ago to fit a need I had at the time. It probably will not receive any updates but I have released the source to anyone is free to do as they please with it. Background PHPRepo is a PHP CMS for managing Debian package repositories. A while ago I wanted to start my own repository for some of my own packages, so I looked for an easy way to do this. I found none. At the time the only way to run and manage a Debian package repository was through apt at the command line, and since at the time I was learning PHP I decided to write my own software to fill this void. Thus I created PHPRepo. PHPRepo has very minimal requirements and can work alongside an existing repository that is managed with apt. ...

This is a minimalistic how-to to get a Debian environment running on almost any (rooted) android phone. I adopted the method here: http://www.saurik.com/id/10 to be more universal and added some new features. Preparing the Debian Image You will need access to a computer running a Debian based distribution to create the image for you phone. I used Ubuntu 10.04. To create the image you need to install a program called debootstrap. debootstrap will allow you to create a mini Debian install in your image. ...