I’m back in Denmark after a mixed quality flight and insanely wrong airline punctuality. San Francisco has treated me well and now I’m in the middle of my exam project.

Shortly after my arrival, my beloved and I helped these guys moving in together, which involved a lot of furniture, consumer electronics and a third floor without an elevator. Afterwards we went out for a beer with a view on the little lake in this town.

Right now my work/blog space is a little improvised and consists of a rooted and freshly unlocked smartphone and a laptop, but since I’ve worked under similar conditions for the past months, it should be fine.

An album, that I’ve dragged around for some weeks in San Francisco now is Born to Die by Lana Del Rey. First I was introduced to her by Ieva, but I didn’t really look beyond the song I liked (I better should have back then).

That I like female vocalists may not come as a surprise to any of you, but this one is a little different. The lyrics tell many stories and the mixture of this silk like sweet voice collides with the bloody truth of the words, leaving the audience with a cracked world, that quivers in its spin.

What musically sounds like easy listening, soft rhythms and samples is a masterpiece, which still is soothing after twentieth time.

Some of my favourite passages from this album:

Come and take a walk on the wild side
Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain
You like your girls insane
Choose your last words
This is the last time
Cause you and I, we were born to die

Born to Die

My old man is a tough man
But he got a soul as sweet as blood red jam
And he shows me, he knows me
Every inch of my tar black soul

Off to the Races

But he headed out on Sunday, said he’d come home Monday
I stayed up waitin’, anticipatin’ and pacin’ but he was
Chasing paper
“Caught up in the game” that was the last I heard

Blue Jeans

Carmen, Carmen
Staying up till morning
Only 17, but she walks the streets so mean
It’s alarming truly
How disarming you can be

Carmen

Just rooted my phone

As mentioned earlier I bought this android phone. To make it more usable I had to root it, to free up the very limited internal storage and of course just to be the admin user on my fucking phone.

So rooting an android phone can be done through a couple of different methods, which mostly are designed and written for Windows (yuck!). So first I tried to use SuperOneClick with mono, which didn’t work out, but then I found DooMLoRD’s Easy Rooting Toolkit [v4.0](zergRush Exploit)

So to root my AT&T Fusion / AT&T Huawei Huawei-U8652 on MacOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard I went through the following steps:

1. Download the Android SDK
2. Download DooMLoRD’s Easy Rooting Toolkit
3. Download the runme.sh
4. Find the adb file, which comes with the Android SDK and put it in the DooMLoRD folder
5. Replace the occurences of adb with ./adb in the runme.sh
6. run runme.sh

This did it for me. Instead of replacing anything in runme.sh, you can also make sure adb is in your path for executable tools on your Mac.

After doing this, you can install apps that require ROOT privileges to operate correctly. By this I can now move more apps to the sd card instead of bloating up the memory and install instagram, wuhu!

 $ ./runme.sh
 ---------------------------------------------------------------
 Easy rooting toolkit (v1.0)
 created by DooMLoRD
 using exploit zergRush (Revolutionary Team)
 Credits go to all those involved in making this possible!
 ---------------------------------------------------------------
 [*] This script will:
 (1) root ur device using zergRush exploit
 (2) install Busybox (1.18.4)
 (3) install SU files (3.0.5)
 [*] Before u begin:
 (1) make sure ./adb is in your path
 (2) enable "USB DEBUGGING"
 from (Menu\Settings\Applications\Development)
 (3) enable "UNKNOWN SOURCES"
 from (Menu\Settings\Applications)
 (4) [OPTIONAL] increase screen timeout to 10 minutes
 (5) connect USB cable to PHONE and then connect to PC
 (6) skip "PC Companion Software" prompt on device
 ---------------------------------------------------------------
 CONFIRM ALL THE ABOVE THEN
 Press any key to continue...
 --- STARTING ----
 --- WAITING FOR DEVICE
 --- cleaning
 rm failed for *, No such file or directory
 --- pushing zergRush"
 194 KB/s (23060 bytes in 0.115s)
 --- correcting permissions
 --- executing zergRush

[**] Zerg rush - Android 2.2/2.3 local root
 [**] (C) 2011 Revolutionary. All rights reserved.

[**] Parts of code from Gingerbreak, (C) 2010-2011 The Android Exploid Crew.

[+] Found a GingerBread ! 0x00000118
 [*] Scooting ...
 bugreport dir[/data/local/tmp] exist.
 [*] Sending 149 zerglings ...
 [+] Zerglings found a way to enter ! 0x10
 [+] Overseer found a path ! 0x00017180
 bugreport dir[/data/local/tmp] exist.
 [*] Sending 149 zerglings ...
 [+] Zerglings caused crash (good news): 0x40121cf4 0x0064
 [*] Researching Metabolic Boost ...
 [+] Speedlings on the go ! 0xafd2516f 0xafd3928f
 [*] Popping 8 more zerglings
 [*] Sending 157 zerglings ...

[+] Rush did it ! It's a GG, man !
 [+] Killing ADB and restarting as root... enjoy!
 --- WAITING FOR DEVICE TO RECONNECT
 if it gets stuck over here for a long time then try:
 disconnect usb cable and reconnect it
 toggle "USB DEBUGGING" (first disable it then enable it)
 --- DEVICE FOUND
 --- pushing busybox
 657 KB/s (1075144 bytes in 1.596s)
 --- correcting permissions
 --- remounting /system
 --- copying busybox to /system/xbin/
 2099+1 records in
 2099+1 records out
 1075144 bytes transferred in 0.365 secs (2945600 bytes/sec)
 --- correcting ownership
 --- correcting permissions
 --- installing busybox
 --- pushing SU binary
 555 KB/s (22228 bytes in 0.039s)
 --- correcting ownership
 --- correcting permissions
 --- correcting symlinks
 --- pushing Superuser app
 2592 KB/s (785801 bytes in 0.296s)
 --- cleaning
 --- rebooting
 ALL DONE!!!
 Press any key to continue...

The last two days I’ve been wandering the streets a little and I got some pictures to illustrate what Mission and Downtown look like a little.

View full set San Francisco on flickr

I like to get close to my subjects sometimes, taken in Mission.

soon to be covered by the curtain of shadows

A street is as good as it’s worst spot

in white sheets

rough night, rough life

repairing a huge sculpture on Market street, San Francisco

Talk to Jesus brothers and sisters! Talk to Jesus!
(yelled through a megaphone)

a small audience is too little to keep going, but too much to stop playing

A little diptych test of a stranger, close and as she leaves me and my camera again.

I very recently bought a smartphone, but not everything went as planned. Radio Shack sells phones that are labeled GoPhone, which basically are prepaid phones. I was lucky to find one that has an exchangeable SIM card (an AT&T Fusion, something Huawei manufactures). Even though I explicitly only wanted the data plan, since I will not be calling or texting inside the US, that’s the only thing available. AT&T sells Smartphones without any data traffic support at all, which I think is a pretty annoying thing to do. It’s like selling a screwdriver with a perfectly round tip, that got me stuck on an unlimited calling and texting plan for a month.

It’s not like I’d launch a nuke into the US if I had some 3G/4G network access on a prepaid phone.

Anyways, I’ve now been using my smartphone for a couple of days and gotten over the grutch towards the nightmare combo of Radioshack and at&t and have even purchased my first book through the Google play store, Hagakure, which I once owned in German and buried with the label “borrowed and never seen again”.

Here’s a list of apps I have downloaded so far and a little rating of them: Pixlr-o-matic is a nice app that kind of fills Instagram’s spot on Android and lets you take some spontainious pictures and slam a lot of heavy filters on them. The diaspora* webclient is a nice app to connect to diaspora (after specifying your pod), but I have not yet figured out how to make it sync the stream correctly or the same way as usual.

Although Google talk comes with this android ROM, I wanted an independent xmpp client and found Xabber. Most of this entry was written with the WordPress app, that lets you upload, edit and post to your blog, sadly the Drupal Editor is not working right now, caused by the broken drupal blog api module.