Author: digitaleagle

Android: I have Jelly Bean!

Thanks to ThdDude and his Unofficial CM10 HD2 ROM, I now have Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) on my phone.  I thought I would show off a few pictures and at least capture the link to his XDA Thread so that I can remember where to go back for updates.

Jelly Bean ROMS for HD2

Right now, using the HD2 ROMs page, I see three different ROMs out there.  I have only tried the one at this point, but here is the list of ROMs I know of:

My Home Screen

For starters, here is the way I have my home screen customized.  I removed the stock clock, and I added the Fancy Widgets clock.  I also removed the messaging and Email to replace them with Gesture Search and GMail.

Notifications

One of the new features in Jelly Bean is the notifications.  I like how they are dynamic and adjust to the situation.  For example, the following screenshots show a bunch of notifications all together.  Notice how they are packed in together and take up the minimal amount of space.

When, I clear out some of the notifications, notice how the email notification expands to show more information now that it has room.

Application Switcher

I don’t think this is new to Jelly Bean, but it has the ICS Application Switcher.  When you hold the Home key down, you get this:

Google Now

I just stumbled on the Google Now interface.  I had read a little about, but I just now accidentally pulled it up.  To open it, you click on the search bar on the home screen:

It brings up an interface that looks like this.  The various cards give you information:

When you talk, it has updated the interface.  I have read that now this voice recognition happens on your phone and we don’t have to go to the web to get it to recognize.

Version Information

Here is the basic information from the Settings > About screen.

Here are the build details:

If you tap on the Android Version, you’ll see this easter egg:

The Lock Screen

The lock screen has a slightly different feel to it.  Just a different look…

Chrome

One disappointment I had was that Chrome would not install.  It said that it was not compatible with this version!

I wonder if this is because hardware acceleration is not included yet?

HD2 Toolkit

After getting a new laptop, I was looking for the HD2 Toolkit.  I use it to flash my HD2 phone.  The new Jelly Bean ROM that I am trying out needed a bigger partition.

Apparently, it was just updated in July.  Here’s the new link:

XDA: Updated with new Recovery!

I still can’t use it on Linux though, which is kind of frustrating.  It installs fine under Wine or a on a VirtualBox virtual machine, but it can’t see the phone through the USB cable.  I wish I could fix that, but it works great through my Windows partition.

Background Slideshow for Unity — Need Help

I wanted to create a special changing wallpaper for my old laptop now that I am passing it on to my wife.  I found some instructions, but I couldn’t make it work.  If you have any ideas, please comment below.  I can create the XML and the wallpaper, but I can’t get it to display where I can select it.

First, I found instructions on installing a program called crebs (Create Background Slideshow).  It creates the XML file that tells which images to include in the wallpaper.

I tried installing with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:crebs/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install crebs

Unfortunately, the repository isn’t up to date.  I had to change the version in software sources back to “natty” to get it to install:

Once installed, it didn’t show up in the menu.  I had to launch it from the command line.  To make it easier, I added a launcher with the Main Menu application.

I was able to create the slideshow with no problem.  I added my 3 images.  It doesn’t package them at all, so put them in the place where you want them to live before you place them into the slideshow.  You may want to put them into the /usr/share/backgrounds.

When I hit save, it generated the slideshow xml file in the $HOME/.crebs/<name>.xml directory.  I moved that file to the /usr/share/backgrounds/sunflower directory.

My big problem is that I don’t see the slideshow in the Appearances App to select as my background.  That’s where I get stuck.

Resources

New Skype for Linux Versions!

I kind of let my blog reading get behind, and low and behold, I missed a Skype update.  Skype has a new version that improves many of the problems that I was having with it.  My video even worked after this.  I have had a few Skype calls that worked as well.  I haven’t noticed it just stopping responding either.  Yea Skype!

So, if you use Skype, hit this download link and update your Skype:

Linux Download Link!

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Sudo Plus X11 Forwarding

I originally published this script on my PeopleSoft Blog, but since it is as much Linux related, I thought it should go here, too.

The problem was that I was trying to install the Oracle Database via SSH using the GUI installer.  The sudo command was breaking my X11 forwarding.

I found the answer on the “Bag of Tricks” blog:

Bag of Tricks: x forwarding and sudo for oracle installs

Here’s my version:


#!/bin/sh

user=$1
if [ -z "$user" ]; then
 user=<default user>
fi

displayNum=`echo $DISPLAY | sed -e 's/^.*://' -e 's/\.[0123456789]*//'`
echo "Display # = $displayNum"
cookie=`xauth list | grep ":$displayNum"`
echo "Cookie = $cookie"
cookiename=`echo $cookie | sed 's/\s*MIT-MAGIC.*$//'`
echo "Cookie Name: $cookiename"
echo "user = $user"
sudo -u $user bash -c "xauth list; xauth add $cookie; bash; xauth remove $cookiename"

 

Eclipse + JavaFX

I just ran across a couple of encouraging comments on the Net…

Here’s the first link:

Announcing JavaFX Scene Builder Public Beta

I found this in the comments:

 Is Scene Builder going to be integrated with Netbeans and Eclipse in future?

Ya, we designed it so that the SceneBuilder could be embedded in IDEA, Eclipse, and NetBeans. Obviously we’ll be doing the work on NetBeans and hopefully Thomas or somebody in the community will plug it into Eclipse

I also found this ticket.  (Maybe something to watch?)

efxclipse.org Trac:Ticket #120 (new enhancement)

That project has an installation page.  I’ll have to try that out.  For now, let me just write it down…

efxclipse Installation page

I did find a nice tutorial for using JavaFX with Eclipse (its a little old because it doesn’t list Linux):

Java FX for Eclipse

The Linux files are here:

Index of /general/javafx/eclipse/

And, while I am at it, I want to use Swing with JavaFX, and this tutorial looks like a great place to start:

JavaFX for Swing Developers

Website Detector

Jake pointed out this cool little tool that inspects a website:

JOHN BRUNSWICK: WHAT CMS IS A WEB SITE RUNNING?

So, I thought I would test a few sites that I have visited in the past:

Here are some CMS platforms that I tried (from the List of CMS’s):

This is a very simple test and not thorough at all.  Just playing with curiosity.

If I had one suggestion, I think it would be cool to detect Advertising providers (like AdSense, etc).  I would love to know what others are using.

Traffic Travis on Linux

Recently, a friend told me about this program called Traffic Travis that could help with SEO.  It has some free features and you can pay for PRO features.  Since it had a free version, I decided to try to see if I could get it running under Linux.

Here’s the description from Traffic Travis:

Best Free SEO Software for all your SEO & PPC Management needs. Use Traffic Travis for both on and off page analysis as well as spying on your competitors.

Traffic Travis doesn’t support Linux as far as I could see, so this is an exercise in Wine.  Here’s what I did to get it installed:

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