Testing the E-mail-To-Post functionality of Blogger and LiveJournal

This post is to test out the functionality of both Blogger's and
LiveJournal's E-mail-To-Post features. While each platform will post
the email as it was originally created, I'm hoping that sending them
an e-mail with the content of its body being wider than the width of
the post stream of the blogs themselves so as to get the posts posted
properly instead of in one slim stream. How this'll be done on a
mobile phone is beyond me although tablets should have no problem, so
that's good, right?

Posting to all of Gadgetic Musings via Email

After publishing "Posting to Multiple Blogging Platforms using
tarpipe", I decided to continue and work on adding more platforms to
the mix. All posts, however, are published via email, so it does it
not matter what the platform is, which simplifies the work that myself
and the editor have to do. Currently, I have Gadgetic Musings hosted
on three platforms (<a href="Http://www.blogger.com/">Blogger</a>, <a
href="http://www.tumblr.com/">tumblr</a> and <a
href="http://www.wordpress.com/">WordPress.com</a>) along with the
three that I found today. I plan to add more platforms as time elapses
to further disaster-proof it. Gadgetic Musings represents my two
passions of industrial design and consumer and business technology. It
also represents my hope for the future, where many of my musings have
become reality either through myself, other individuals or a team
effort. With so much riding on this, why would I not want to have
Gadgetic Musings be as highly available as it can be?
</p>
<br />
<p>
This question is what has led me on a search for more platforms where
I have found <a href="http://blog.com/">Blog.com</a>, <a
href="http://blogetery.com/">Blogetery.com</a>, and <a
href="http://www.weebly.com/">Weebly</a>. I will be setting up,
configuring and theming Gadgetic Musings on them within the next
couple of weeks. I also remembered the web host where one of my old
blogs "<a href="http://soul-est.doc776.org/sotp/">Soul Of The
Prestige</a>" was hosted. I will be setting up, configuring and
theming Gadgetic Musings on there as well once I figure out whether to
use <a href="http://habariproject.org/en/">Habari</a> or <a
href="http://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a> for it's underpinnings.
With all these platforms in place and being posted to via email, I can
now turn my attention toward the next two items on my to-do list
regarding Gadgetic Musings which I'll talk about in a later post.
</p>

Tweaking the Sony Ericsson Urushi (Xperia Ray)

Ever since I got the Urushi (Xperia Ray), I've wanted to port Android 4.0 to it. Unfortunately, having received the carrier branded variant of the phone, the phone's bootloader is not fastboot enabled. Therefore, the bootloader is not unlockable via Sony Experia's bootloader unlock site. I was,  however able to root the device using the method found here. (Thanks again DoomLord!) I have done a bit of tweaking to the pre-installed ROM which I'll describe below.

Automatic Light Sensor Hack:
This was rather simple.. so simple in fact that I was surprised that no one found it sooner. The hack involves two files, the hw_config.sh and als_curve.conf files in the /system/etc directory. In the hw_config.conf, find the line that looks like this:

echo 0,0,0,0 > $dev/lcd-backlight/als/params  #[gain],[filter_up],[filter_down],[offset]

and edit it to look like this:

echo 3,2,2,0 > $dev/lcd-backlight/als/params  #[gain],[filter_up],[filter_down],[offset]

Then, using Terminal Emulator or another app capable of executing scripts, run hw_config.sh. *Make sure you have the backlight set to a value higher than 0 and lower than 100 or else the hack will not work!*

SD Card Read Cache Tweaking:
This one was also as simple if not more simple than the above hack. All thanks go to arcatarc for this hack (which you can find here). It requires either the use of Terminal Emulator, SD-Booster or any app capable of modifying text files with root privileges. ADB can also be used for this if you prefer to work with a full size keyboard. In Terminal Emulator, ADB, or similar go to /sys/devices/virtual/bdi/179:0/read_ahead_kb and change the value from 128 to whatever you choose. When using SD-Booster, all that needs to be done is input the value you want and tap the Apply button. I currently have the read cache set at 1152 and the the write speed has increased to 6.8 MB/s from 6.1 MB/s while the read speed has increased from 15.3 MB/s to 26.8 MB/s. This latter hack as proven to be the most useful of the two as the speed increase is clearly evident when shooting and reviewing photos.

Booting the workstation over the home network

Booting and administering a computer over a network remotely isn't that big of an art form, nor is it new. From ever since I was in elementary school and even before that, there have been systems that could power on, pull the software needed from another system and boot into a working system. While it's not new, the way I had to go about booting the workstation over the network from an installation image hosted on my MacBook *was* new to me. I intended to use the Preboot Execution Environmentor PXE to boot the work station over the network. PXE is best introduced in this wiki article from this wiki . The systems that I'll be setting up for PXE booting have the following specs: Workstation: - ASUS A7V8X-X - AMD Athlon 2500+ @ 2.1 GHz - 512 MB RAM - 60 GB HDD - ATI Radeon 7000 64 MB - 500 W PSU MacBook: - Intel Core2Duo T7200 @ 2 GHz - 1.5 GB RAM - 80 GB HDD - Intel GMA950 - 60 W PSU (battery is physically dead) The first thing I did was configure the workstation's bios to boot over the network. The option to actually enable PXE in the Boot Options menu tab was hidden in the I/O Chip Configuration menu under the Advanced menu tab. After toggling that setting and setting PXE first in boot priority, I then setup the MacBook to host the installation image for the workstation. This ended up being quite a challenge, as it seemed that not many people who did computer networking used Mac OS X as their OS of choice on their Mac systems. I needed to at the time, so after looking around for a time, I found this wonderful nugget of information. While it goes over the instructions for working with Debian, I took the info I needed and combined it with the archboot imageand the info I neededfrom the wiki article for installing Arch over the network. After all that, I had to download the appropriate filesfrom here to replace the ones in the /private/tftpboot/boot directory, as the ones that came in the original image kept causing a kernel panic.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray: Xperia Mini replacement?

While looking into the Xperia Mini Pro (the reason why will be in another post), I came across the Xperia Ray which had already launched in the UK. With a form factor similar to the Xperia Mini that is currently available, albeit thinner at 9.4 mm thick, it seems that the Xperia Ray will replace the equally small yet bulkier phone. The most compelling reasons for this is the inclusion of the Exmor R for Mobile camera sensor, a front facing camera and the 3.3" display with a resolution of 480x854, all of which the current Xperia Mini lacks. This could also be a foretelling of a Xperia Mini Pro replacement which is merely receives the more capable Exmor R for Mobile sensor and sharper display. I will update this post once I receive further word on whether these musings are true or not.

Posting to Multiple Blogging Platforms using tarpipe

For the last few years, I've always hosted my blogs on one and only one platform at a time. The biggest problem with that is there is a single point of failure. The Gadgetic Musings blog I have hosted at http://gadgeticmusings.net currently has all of pictures broken on it and the one I have hosted by Wordpress.com risks getting comprised should Wordpress.com's server farm get comprised again. Hosting the site myself would cost me considerably more than owning the domain so I came up with a new plan to keep the blog up and running. I decided to host the blog on multiple platforms and post to then using email.

I accomplished this using a single tarpipe workflow, tumblr and blogspot (to start). In the tarpipe workflow I created, I used one MailDecoder, two TextInputs, and two Mailers to complete the project.

This will be the first of many posts posted using the workflow.