Tips & Tutorials - 19/21 - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Jun

SysAdmin Series, Article #5: FTP Clients

Posted by Ian Douglas in App Reviews, Applications, Reviews, Tips & Tutorials

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

First off, my apologies for the late posting in the SysAdmin series (or very early since tomorrow is Thursday). I had to deal with a double HDD failure on my home PC this weekend which ate up 14+ waking hours between Saturday night and all day Sunday, which would have been my prime writing time. Then the third HDD in that system crashed Monday evening, egad, what are the odds. I digress…

I've been looking for an easy way recently to manage configuration files for remote servers without having to deal with subversion, and even looked at some sort of file sync with Evernote/Dropbox via Android using an FTP client, but neither Evernote or Dropbox give you easy access to files on your SD storage when you download files.

Jun

Viva Android! How To Watch Live Streams Of World Cup Games On Your Android Phone

Posted by Chris Dehghanpoor in Carriers, News, Sprint, Tips & Tutorials

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed most of the world has been focusing their attention on the 2010 World Cup, which officially started yesterday. We know many of you would love to be able to watch the matches on you phone while you’re out and about, so we’ve put together a few ways that this can be done.

One of the really cool things about the World Cup games this year is that so many sites are streaming them live, for free, making it pretty easy to catch a match wherever you’re at as long as you have high speed internet and access to a computer.

Jun

EVO 4G DamageControl v3.0 - Fast, Improved Battery Life, Tweaks

[EVO 4G ROM] DamageControl v3.0 - Fast, Improved Battery Life, Tweaks

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Development, Eclair 2.1, EVO 4G (Supersonic), HTC, Sprint, Tips & Tutorials

What a day for EVO 4G ROMs! Hot on the heels of the release of Fresh ROM for EVO, another former HTC Hero ROM developer damageless, notorious for his DamageControl Hero ROM, announced his version for the EVO.

DamageControl v3.0 is damageless' and his partner TrevE's first crack at customizing the EVO and making it both faster and much more battery efficient. First, a little introduction:

I am proud to present the first DamageControl ROM for the HTC Evo!

The ROMs I release are always focused on stability, speed, and ease of use.

My partner, TrevE and I, continue to present ROMs that are easy to update through an application that is bundled with the ROM, DCUpdater (based upon cm-updater).

Jun

Fresh Evo 0.1d - Better, Faster, More Battery Efficient, With Bloatware Apps Removed

Updated: [EVO 4G ROM] Fresh Evo 0.2 - Better, Faster, More Battery Efficient, With Bloatware Apps Removed

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Development, Eclair 2.1, EVO 4G (Supersonic), HTC, Sprint, Tips & Tutorials

EVO 4G users, listen up! Flipz, the creator of one of the best custom ROMs for CDMA HTC Hero - Fresh ROM, has dropped his first version of a custom ROM for the EVO 4G a few hours ago.

The ROM is faster and more efficient than the stock ROM due to optimizations and bloatware removal (yup, the bloated apps provided by Sprint and some HTC ones are moved to the SD card and disabled!). It also comes with some visual changes.

Android 2.1 Eclair for now but will be updated to 2.2 Froyo as soon as humanly possible.

Of course, if you know Flipz, this is all just the beginning.

Jun

Free Android WiFi Tether For Root Users App Now Supports WPA2 And Full Hotspot (Infrastructure) Capabilities On EVO 4G

Posted by Andrew Robinson in Development, EVO 4G (Supersonic), News, Sprint, Tips & Tutorials

Only 5 days ago the brilliant team behind the android-wifi-tether project, which provides free WiFi hotspot capabilities to rooted phones, added support for EVO 4G. This meant users of this recently released beast could now turn their phones into WiFi routers, broadcasting WiFi signal to devices nearby, thus removing the need for a similar application Sprint charges $30/month for.

Well, there were a couple of limitations:

The android-wifi-tether hotspot ran in ad-hoc mode, which meant devices that didn't support ad-hoc mode couldn't use or even see it. This included other Android phones, some game consoles (like the Wii), and other devices.

Jun

SysAdmin Series, Article #4: Port Scandroid vs OscanO

Posted by Ian Douglas in App Reviews, Applications, Reviews, Tips & Tutorials

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

A good diagnostic tool for any sysadmin is a port scanner to ensure a firewall is working as intended to open or close ports. When you want a quick and dirty scanning tool, there are some great free apps in the Market to do the trick. A quick search in the Market shows two apps which seem to be popular: OscanO and Port Scandroid.

Port Scandroid

This free app in the Market was written by Rich Jones of NewFreedomApps, found at http://www.thenewfreedom.net/ and the app is described by the author like this:

Port Scandroid is a port scanner for Android. It displays the reachability of a range of ports for a given host.

Jun

Apple iOS 3 & 4 VS Android 2.1 "Eclair" & 2.2 "Froyo": Fight!

Posted by Chris Dehghanpoor in Devices By Manufacturer, Eclair 2.1, Froyo 2.2, News, Tips & Tutorials

In This Corner!

For better or worse Apple has dropped their latest update regarding the groundbreaking iPhone this week along with the official release date for their next version of the phone’s operating system, which has now been dubbed ‘iOS’.

A big thanks to Ian Douglas for all the work he did putting the chart together, and to my fiancee for the image

The announcement comes on the heels of last Friday’s uber-successful launch of the Sprint EVO 4G, which shares many of the same features with the new iPhone. This puts consumers in an interesting spot – as the hardware and software offerings from both the Apple and Android camps begin to share more and more of the same features, it becomes increasingly difficult for a consumer with no allegiance to either side to choose the phone that best suits their needs.

Jun

Tiny Phone, Smaller Price: Pick Up The Sony Ericsson X10 Mini For Free

Posted by Chris Dehghanpoor in Carriers, Devices By Manufacturer, News, Sony Ericsson, Tips & Tutorials, Xperia X10 Mini / Mini Pro (Robyn / Mimmi)

Last Updated: April 2nd, 2011

UK readers only: if you like adorable handsets running an operating system with an adorable mascot or, and perhaps more importantly, if you like free things, then you owe the X10 Mini a few minutes of your time.

It’s not the most powerful Android handset on the block, and hell, it’s not even running Android 2.1, for an attractive, and again, free, Android handset, it’s not a bad deal.

Of course, as with most free phone offers, it will require you to sign your soul away for two years with a new contract, but on the bright side, you have your choice of four carriers to deal with.

Jun

SysAdmin Series, Article #3: Nagios Monitoring

Posted by Ian Douglas in App Reviews, Applications, Reviews, Tips & Tutorials

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

Nagios is by far one of the best solutions for monitoring just about everything on a server, and it’s excellent API system means that anything it doesn’t include out of the box can be written in just about any programming language as long as the program output conforms to their standard. I’ve personally written dozens of modules for micro-managing network interfaces, disk IO and so on. I’ve even heard of elaborate schemes of detecting when system load is too high on web servers and launching more Amazon EC2 instances, or checking when load is low enough to terminate EC2 instances, all fully automated.

Jun

Rooted EVO 4G Users Can Now Enjoy Unlimited Free WiFi/Bluetooth Tether (Hotspot) As Android-wifi-tether App Adds Support For EVO

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, Development, EVO 4G (Supersonic), HTC, Sprint, Tips & Tutorials

Last Updated: June 12th, 2010

EVO 4G users, rejoice! As of a few minutes ago, you can enjoy unlimited free WiFi/Bluetooth tethering using the Wireless Tether for Root users (or simply android-wifi-tether) app.

The app's main committer Harald Mue, who doesn't even have the EVO in his possession, together with a community contributor Andrew Robinson (who does have one) have figured out what was going wrong with the EVO compared to other phones and together collaborated on a fix all within 2 days of finding the problem

Hey, wait a minute, wasn't the EVO released the same 2 days ago? Community dedication never ceases to amaze me.