KINGSQUEAK.ORG & KC2RGW.COM

So when people with relatively sane objectivity wind up strapping bombs on themselves and taking hostages, what does that say?

This is the site of the Discovery building hostage taker….frankly he’s not wrong on most of this.

My Demands.

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Some light reading for a Monday.

What collapsing empire looks like – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

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So today I tried to pay for goods using PayPal as I’ve done since 2001. My transaction was refused. It turns out there is a cumulative lifetime limit of $10k for using PayPal via a credit card. Who knew?

I use PayPal so that there is a proxy between my information and various vendors on line. The entire point is to have the CC vendor AND PayPal as levers should any issues arise.

PayPal wants me to submit my ACH routing information for my checking or savings account in order to become ‘verified’ and in turn, lift this arbitrary lifetime limit. Let me explain why I’m even writing this. There is NO way I’m submitting my ACH account information to an online vendor or anyone at all…period.

Years ago, I got into a dispute with a very disreputable RIM Blackberry CDPD based web access company. Basically a pager company that had web browsing on the original 957 Blackberry. I disputed the service with them, it was lousy and they basically told me to go scratch. I cancelled my account with them.

One mistake; I had set up a monthly auto debit from my checking account to make the bill pay easier. This company proceeded to file withdrawals from my account $40 at a time, attempting to basically run my account up to about $550 for the cost of the Blackberry. I’d told them I’d send it back, but they didn’t want it back. I never authorized them to charge me for it, but they went ahead pillaging my account anyway.

I only realized it happened (pre-internet banking) because they overdrafted my account and the bank put me into collections over a $150 or so overdraft…never even called me to ask about it. Once I caught up to the whole mess, the bank refused to do anything at all to get my money back and I wound up having to pay them all sorts of penalties on top of losing the money itself.

This made me wonder about the ACH system and I did some research into it. Years later I met a US Treasury agent and he explained the entire thing to me.

The ACH system (on the bottom of a check, the account number and routing number) that places like Telecheck or now, many online vendors use to debit your account (i.e. to PULL funds FROM your account vs you PUSHING funds TO them) is a very murky system. There is no authentication on this system. All someone has to do is actually posess your account number and the routing number and they can make a withdrawal. They don’t even need to know your name or any other bits of identity, they simply just need your two numbers. Posession of these numbers implies consent for account access. This is _incredible_ and most people are not aware of this.

There is a tiny bit of protection on this system. Cases/complaints are handled by the Secret Service. However there is a tiny catch. The minimum dollar amount (I may be off a bit, but it’s still a ludicrously high number) for them to even take a complaint is $300,000.00. Can you guess what the number one most common dollar amount is for fraud on this system? Yup, $299,999.99.

This means that if you have $100k in your savings account, it’s completely fair game for anyone who gains access to your account. Nobody will even attempt to track this fraud down and the bank will not make good on fraud via the fed wire system.

The moral of this story is simply

DO NOT EVER GIVE YOUR ACH ROUTING INFO to anyone, EVER.

If you want to configure bill pay etc, only configure it when you PUSH funds TO the vendor. Never allow an automated debit of any sort really as you are consenting to that party to have access to your account. At least with a normal credit card, you have some recourse if you have fraud along these lines. With your checking and savings account via the Fed wire system, you have NONE.

This will be my last PayPal transaction after 9 years of using them without any issues at all. What a pain in the ass this will be.

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Use this link at SDX, will save you time later for making 2.1 feel like home.

SDX-Developers Official Android DE03 (2.1)

I’ve got it all installed with all my own tweaks, so far so good. Will know in a day or so how it all shakes out compared to the leaked pre-release versions.

** So far, I’m seeing better wi-fi lock and faster GPS lock, noticeable so far.

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I’ve had a minor annoyance since I first got my Samsung Moment. The buttons on the body ‘wake’ the phone if carried in my pocket or in a sleeve case and this kills the battery. Batt life can be just a few hours as a result.

I’ve been poking around at various hacks people have done and came accross a key layout hack. I modified the button assignments so that nothing will wake the phone aside from sliding it open.

Easy fix and makes the phone more complete for me. This is the advantage of having platforms open if not at least “opened” where people can tinker and exchange ideas.

Thanks SDX …again

SDX post I made as a HOWTO

Here’s the gory details in a diff output for anyone running 2.1 on their Moment. The principle will be the same but the name of the key layout file will vary with your version. Your phone will have to be rooted and you will need to understand editing and moving files on and off your phone. _Do_A_Backup_ of the original file so you can undo the change if you want to.

The file is in /system/usr/keylayout/ The diff is showing you from which lines I removed the WAKE_DROPPED statements to disable waking the phone with those buttons.


diff s3c-keypad-rev0040.kl s3c-keypad-rev0040.kl.orig
19c19
< key 17 VOLUME_UP
---
> key 17 VOLUME_UP WAKE_DROPPED
28c28
< key 25 VOLUME_DOWN
---
> key 25 VOLUME_DOWN WAKE_DROPPED
89,90c89,90
< key 248 CALL
< key 249 ENDCALL
---
> key 248 CALL WAKE_DROPPED
> key 249 ENDCALL WAKE_DROPPED


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So, this looks a lot like a CB microphone doesn’t it? Well, it is. Sometimes you find some equipment that serves multi-use environments nicely and this is one example.

This is a ~$20 (less than half the price) Chinese knockoff of the Turner Road King 56, called the Overdrive CDL-56k. It is a dynamic noise-cancelling element hand mic. I stress noise-cancelling as this thing is very effective to knock out background noise.

I’ve been using an Astatic 636L in my Jeep Wrangler in the nicer weather as I drive around with the windows down and music blasting and don’t want all that racket to get into my signal on the ham bands. It also works well, but has a very restricted audio passband so it makes the transmit audio sound very tinny.

I found some mentions about this Overdrive mic saying that it had a more natural sounding audio response and decided to get a pair of them to play around with and find out.

The results have been excellent, both on FM repeaters and simplex and for SSB use as well. I’m using them on an FT-857D in my mobile and on a Kenwood TS-2000 at home when I feel like using a hand mic.

I highly recommend this mic if you have a need or want for noise-cancellation. For what it does, the audio response is very good. This type of mic will require you to speak right into the mic element or your voice will just disappear. That rubber ridge on the face should be touching your upper lip while talking. If you talk farther back from the mic, this is not the mic for you, nor will you get effective noise cancellation from it.

The mic has plenty of drive to work with either one of my rigs. I’m not sure if it would work with a ‘normal’ amateur 2m/440 rig directly without an added pre-amp though, but I haven’t tried it. It would surprise me if it had enough drive for those typically 2kOhm inputs though.

Driving down the road at 60mph, windows down and music deafeningly loud, people barely even notice it at all while I’m talking…mission accomplished.

I picked mine up from Premiere Electronics and have done business with them in the past for parts and microphones. They are fairly widely available from other sources too.

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A LOT has changed with the hacking of the Samsung Moment since I last posted any updates.

SDX Developers is the site for keeping up with the pace of things. Don’t take anything I note here to be current, things change sometimes more than once a day so I may mention something that turns out to be not such a great idea for your phone. If you are interested in playing with all of the mods, start your reading there.

I just finished installing what seems to be the leaked Android 2.1 beta release for the Moment. It ships currently with 1.5 on the phone, so hopefully this adds yet some more stability to the phone and some new and interesting features.

Right now I’m just running the more or less ‘stock’ image without any fancy ROM mods to it, to get the hang of anything that is different.

Immediately the thing I notice is that the built in gmail now supports multiple gmail accounts and also Google apps accounts….this in itself is worth doing for me. I can now have all my G* accounts aggregated in a common interface. If only gmail itself had account aggregation for the web interface…..

Some nice cosmetic updates for the calendar widget and a few other things are immediately obvious too. They aren’t as hideous as they were with 1.5.

I’ve only had it installed for an hour or so at this point, but no immediate instability issues are obvious. There is an organized bugs report on the SDX site, so definitely have a good look at that. Evidently one of the worst is that streaming of media seems to be broken for people. I really only SMS/email/phone for 99% of my use with Twitter/FB and web browsing, and all of that is working for me so far.

I still haven’t found a particularly great case solution for the phone. Aside from belt cases, which I personally hate, slip cases seem to mash down on the buttons and kill the battery dead in 3hrs of being in my pants pocket. I’m still using a microfiber sunglasses soft pouch to carry it around in. It’s really not that bad as the cloth is handy for cleaning the screen, though it looks a bit goofy to pull the phone out of a baggie all the time.

So onward SDX goes with 2.1. It will be very interesting to see what they can do with the performance of the phone once Samsung releases the sources to the kernel so they can get fiddling with compiler optimizations. So far, if anything, the phone might even be a bit more responsive with the version I’m running compared to the 1.5 hacked release I had on previously. So things are good.

Android at this point is pretty solid and a lot more addicting than I’d imagined it would be. As it gets cooked a bit more, it should be really something. For now though, it’s still a bit of a ‘hobby’ to fiddle with. For a business type user, I’d still say stick to your Blackberry if you really need it to ‘just work’ without any other level of understanding.

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What is dosbox? DOSbox home page

It is a free/open-source DOS emulator that runs on many operating systems.

It runs DOS inside a virtual machine in a much more true native mode than running a DOS command window inside Windows XP.

What does this do? It allows for old original DOS software including radio programming interfaces to run on current computer operating systems or hardware.

The issue it fixes is that many old DOS applications relied on the speed of the machine running it for handling timing and interrupts. On current hardware, this means the old software runs too fast and is unreliable.

Also, old DOS software wasn’t aware of things like USB to serial adapters and other new hardware.

This software allows you to create virtual bridges between a new serial port USB device and old ‘com1′ only DOS software.

What have I tested it with so far?

I’ve used the CE14 software for Vertex LMR radios inside DOSbox and it make it work perfectly. Whereas with Windows XP on a 1+GHz laptop, it would run, but not function properly.

You can tell you have a problem this may fix, when the software runs, but you don’t get actual read/write performance to the device you are programming. This can cause a lot of errors with the hardware and possibly even brick the firmware if you aren’t careful.

So, go get it…

Go to http://www.dosbox.com/ and download whatever version you need for the platform you are running it on. Follow the basic download and install instructions.

After install…now what?

So you have it up and running now. These are the steps using a USB serial adapter and programming software.

First, you need to map your com port, using Windows XP as an example. The USB adapter is com4 , you can find this in Windows device mgr, right click on My Computer and select ‘manage’ and then ‘device manager’ and inside there, LPT and com ports. You will see your USB device in there if the driver is properly installed and the com port number it has.

So to set/map the com4 in Windows XP to com1 inside of dosbox while it is running do the following

Z:\>serial1=directserial realport:com4

This will make com1 inside dosbox map to com4 in Windows XP directly.

Next you have to ‘mount’ your path to your programming software. To make this very easy, I just copied my folders for CE14 into the root of C:\ as in C:\CE14\ that is where CE14.EXE lives.

The command to mount inside dosbox is

Z:\>mount c c:\ce14\

This is specific for me as c:\ce14\ is where my software is, replace this with whatever you have, wherever you put it.

Now to get to that location you just do

Z:\>c:

Now you see C:\> as the prompt

C:\>dir

Will show you what is in there. In my case I see all the CE14.* files so I do

C:\>CE14.exe

Now the software runs.

The only thing left to know, is you need to go into whatever app you are using and tell it that the serial port to use is ‘com1′ as that is what we mapped earlier.

DOSbox allows you to map serial1 serial2 serial3 serial4 to four external serial devices, they are treated as com1 com2 com3 and com4 respectively.

You can also map multiple paths to multiple ‘local’ DOSbox ‘drives’

mount c c:\path1\
mount d c:\path2\

At the prompt to switch around you would just enter c: or d: and you’ll toggle between the paths. Just typing ‘mount’ will list what you have configured.

There are a bunch of neat features to control slow down and speed up within DOSbox so definitely check out the documentation links on their site and also try the Z:\>info command as it has a bunch of on line help within the application itself.

The immediate applications for this are with old DOS based radio programming software for LMR radios, but I can imagine that many crusty DOS based packet radio apps and other things will run a lot better in it too. I’m not much of a gamer, but it’s evidently quite effective for that as well.

I think this should cover it.

73 de KC2RGW

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Only new to me, but this thing really impressed me. This is Slide Keyboard an alternate keyboard for Android phones. I was going to do an alternate layout for AnySoft Keyboard (which is also a great alternate, better than stock) but stumbled on this. Perfect

You tap any given key to select the center character and to select the alternate quadrant characters, you just swipe in that direction. It’s perfect for vertical mode one hand typing.

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So I put this off for a while and I’m a bit late to the game for getting an Android based smart phone. I decided on the Samsung Moment for a few reasons.

I’m a Sprint customer so for an Android phone I was limited to two choices at this time, an HTC Hero or the Samsung Moment. The Hero is a bit slower, but generally has a reputation for having a slicker default theme/skin to the OS. The Moment is faster as it is a newer generation of CPU and runs at 800MHz and has a generic 1.5 release of Android on it as stock.

The biggest deciding factor for me was that the Moment has a slide out keyboard. As I do a ton of texting and email, sometimes more than a page of text at a time, a ‘real’ keyboard was important for me.

The fact it has a more generic Android release was also a prime motivator as the phone manufacturers love to promise timely updates as the OS is updated, but seldom deliver. I figured sticking to a platform that supports the generic load would make installing hacked releases a lot easier in the long run.

For the highlights as I usually do, I plowed into any available material I could find on the Moment and Android in general. I already knew there was quite a lot of hacking on the kernel and OS in general going on so I dug in to figure all of that out.

So far, I’ve modified the kernel and base OS in a few ways and have come up to the following configuration.

Stock Sprint CL14 release of the firmware which contains numerous patches and bug fixes. Modified Zeffie Kernel ZE13.2 and I’ve installed SetCPU from the marketplace to overclock the phone.

The performance with this latest update is indeed noticeably faster. I have the profiles configured to throttle on-demand with max speed while plugged in at 1600MHz and 1066 for when the charge is over 40%. I also set the throttling to 800MHz if the battery temp gets high and lowered it quite a lot while the phone is ‘sleeping’.

Only time will tell how the stability is and battery life is overall with the ramped up specs, but initial impression is that it’s stable. I’ll know more about battery life in a day or two.

I came from being a pretty dedicated Blackberry user and had already made the mistake of trying the failure of the Samsung Instinct, which had a completely miserable OS with a lot of bugs and an unusable user interface with horrific lag to touch screen input. Luckily Sprint got me back on a Blackberry Curve with less drama than it usually takes to get customer service from them .

Initial impressions of the Android system are rather incredible. I’m a very heavy SMS and email user and this phone is really great for this. Gmail ‘native’ is supported in a push form for a single Gmail account and this syncs not just the mail but all my contacts from Gmail as well as my Google calendar bi-directionally. Perfect. I’d run Google Sync on the Blackberry so wiping it and firing up the Moment just brought all my contacts back automagically.

For corporate mail, Sprint includes Moxier Mail to interface with exchange. This also worked perfectly and is in push mode with the corporate Exchange server. I get my contacts/mail/calendar all through this app.

For my remaining other gmail and assorted email accounts, there is a POP and IMAP capable app also installed and I have that set to poll via IMAP for my other accounts. This too is working very well.

For SMS, the stock client is fine, but I stumbled upon Handcent SMS which delivers a whole pile of enhancements vs the stock Android client. You can customize all manner of notifications and interface colors and layouts. Highly recommended.

All the apps can be installed simply by using the Android Marketplace which can be searched/surfed via the phone, or you can alternately use Androlib to do some searching from your desktop.

A LOT of really decent free apps are out there…which is great. The Blackberry store was pretty awful. Almost nothing free was decent for the Blackberry.

Other apps that I’ve installed.

• Where – Uses GPS to locate local stores/shops/movies etc and has other location based features
• Mechanic – A file browser, app killer and backup utility
• Crickets – Makes cricket sounds
• Google Shopper – Can read bar codes and book/album covers
• WiFi Buddy – Scans and manages wi-fi connections
• Seesmic – A _great_ twitter client
• S2 Calendar Widget – Option to the built in calendar widget
• Assorted other widget toggles – single button widgets to turn on off silent mode/GPS/Wi-Fi etc.

The list of apps to try is just about endless.

I would tell you NOT to get into hacking your Android phone unless you are willing to deal with the consequences. As I was writing this, my phone locked up, likely due to the CPU clock settings I’m still fiddling with. To me, this is part of the fun. If you are an appliance type user, don’t even bother doing this. You can lose your data, and possibly do permanent damage to your phone….so if you do this…don’t come crying to me.

That’s enough rambling for now.

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