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...

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.

I’ve been posting this on diaspora, twitter and facebook yesterday, but it deserved a blog entry, so here we go:

Off book is a series of short documentaries of specific topics, which further understanding and analyses our culture at a very current state.  The two videos I’d like to show here, are about the power of videogames and also hacking culture.

Off Book: Video Games

This video shows very greatly, that video games undeniably are culture. The variety and the ways you can interact with them are unique and outstanding.

Off Book: Hacking Art & Culture with F.A.T. Lab

This one is about how F.A.T. Lab has been trying to come up with projects that ride the wave of todays media making processes and how to question monopolies.

There are some more videos on PBS arts vimeo channel and I can also recommend them, because they are interesting peeks into other worlds.

The wordpress developers call it distraction-free writing or zen mode.

It’s what a couple of simple plain text editors have done on the desktop for years. Besides a couple of important features, this is the new cool thing in WordPress 3.2 codename Gershwin. So for everybody who wonders what it looks like, here it goes:

Zen writing with interface on top which appears when the mouse is moved to the top.

Zen writing with no interface, just for typing.

Clients

A client is an application you use twitter through. A great example for that is tweetdeck, because it has multiple columns and you can get it on Windows and MacOS, because it is written in Adobe AIR. I like to keep track of my friends timeline, my mentions and a facebook newsfeed. The fourth column changes between different lists and searches.

Link shorteners

If you’ve been tweeting and including links in your tweets, you may have noticed that links take a big chunk of the overall tweet length, which is limited to 140 characters after all. Link shorteners will be your friend. There are multiple services for that out there, I personally use bit.ly, because it’s widely spread and easy to integrate to tweetdeck or available as a plugin for Chrome/Chromium.

Analysis

There are different tools for analyzing your or others accounts. A service which is fairly new and very powerful is Klout. It calculates how you impact twitter with your tweets upon how much reaction like mentions or retweets you produce. It also analyzes your style, if you mostly tweet links, mention other users and so on. There is a ranking plugin available for Chrome to see other peoples Klout score directly on the twitter website.

Connect

I can only recommend you chain your facebook profile to your twitter account and let your friends there know what you’re posting on twitter. Just go to the twitter application.

These were the first five days of How to Twitter. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment Thanks to everybody who followed through so far!