Best posts made by vandys

@PINE64 For shipping of batteries, I suggest that you fab a flashlight which uses the same battery. One switch, one LED, minimal plastic case. Then you can ship a battery within a device, national post office regs are satisfied, and the recipient can perhaps crack open the flashlight and use the battery elsewhere.

Is there any way to block a caller (better yet, an entire phone number pattern)? Either in the system or via an app?

If not, consider this a feature request... guess why I woke up at 2AM today.

I just updated OTA (the updater called it Version 9). I spotted in the release notes that there is now a new "selection mode". When your cursor is on some text, you long hold space. Swipe to get the cursor to the starting point, then double tap to switch to the mode where you swipe to drag out your range of selected text. Now you can tap cut/copy as usual, but with this excellent mode, you can exactly and easily pick your exact range of text.

Well done! I will be using this feature very often. And since your dragging/control of the selected range doesn't make you put your finger on top of the text you're trying to select (how dumb is that?), this solution is as easy as any I've ever used on a phone. Just remember to long hold space to activate it when you want to select text.

Ok, I got impatient and dug through the UT Tweak tool. Here's a workaround if you're comfortable in a terminal (or, in my case, adb shell):

gsettings get com.canonical.qtmir lifecycle-exempt-appids

For me, this had a value:

['com.ubuntu.music', 'com.ubuntu.terminal']

Then I updated this value:

gsettings set com.canonical.qtmir lifecycle-exempt-appids "['com.ubuntu.music', 'com.ubuntu.terminal', 'morph-browser']"

Voila! My browser is happily running in the background.

Update...

During my trip, I had to switch back to my old phone due to a bug in the Python3 notification2 library. _closed_callback() was using an "nid" which wasn't in the notifications_registry any more. I coded some defensive logic and logging, and will see what's going on.

But with that workaround, I have been able to daily drive my Nexus 5 for the second day now. I'm able to keep real time notifications with one 150 byte packet sent and received every 2.5 minutes. It lives fine behind NAT, and also seems fine with the transition from Wifi to mobile data and back.

I just today finished coding up an alternative notification system; since I run my own message and notification server, I can do things like this. It uses a UDP-based protocol I cooked up, and I'll see how it holds up over a trip I'm taking for the next week. I have pop-up display, sound, and blinking LED for notifications. Reading the actual notifications is via a web interface.

Anyway, anybody who's interested:
https://github.com/vandys/webXMPP

The files udp.py and notified.py are the main parts of this work. At its core the server handles being an XMPP client as a proxy on your behalf, it also talks SMS via a VoIP provider for SMS messaging.

Andy

Re: Caller Blocking?

So I couldn't stand it any more, and remembered an old Nokia N900 hack which sorta did the job. I have a daemon running now which watches for calls on the dbus, and hangs them up if they're in my blacklist config file:

http://sources.vsta.org:7100/webXMPP/dir?ci=tip

You want the tools/blacklist.py file in that project, if you want to check it out.
No, it's not a GUI or a package; if somebody wants to work with me to wrap this
in something prettier, I'd be happy to help.

I couldn't find any way to get word back to my carrier that they're not even worth
a shot in voicemail. But at least they can't ring my phone....

Is there any chance we could get Ubuntu Touch engineers from Canonical to attend an AMA? There's a ton of mechanism in Touch, and much of the internal design is not well documented. It'd be a great way to give the UBports effort a boost in the right direction if we could pull together a bunch of key questions and have them describe which parts in which packages make the magic happen.

@NeoTheThird said in Pointer for those debugging web apps:

@lduboeuf said in Pointer for those debugging web apps:

write an up to date turorial for ubports community then

That would be very much appreciated! Feel free to post something on wiki.ubports.com

Have a look at:
https://wiki.ubports.com/wiki/Web-Browser-app-debugging
and wordsmith it if you can think of nice changes. Thanks!

(BTW, not clear how to link it into the rest of the document hierarchy.)

BTW, will the PinePhone support USB OTG? I'd sometimes like a hard-attached USB keyboard....

@makeixo said in PinePhone:

@vandys Maybe with the crazy dude in office now its 25%.

Nah, I told him I'm rich, so no tax and I can deduct the price.

@rocket2nfinity said in Nexus 5 vs Nexus 5x:

@jjconstr regarding the boot loop, the N5 is really hard to break. Chances are it will boot with the installer. That's why we love the N5 so much around here, it's very difficult to brick. So, if it's in a boot loop, it's most likely that way because someone flashed a wrong file or borked the partitions.

The power button can eventually poop out, which gives you a boot loop. I have two N5's down, have two replacement buttons, but it's a pretty tedious repair, so haven't made the time to buckle down and attempt it.

@vandys Let me note an enhancement request; I'm in the browser, a text pane with some content I want to copy and later paste to another window. It's not an input field, so I still can only reach the old--very limited--text selection widget. Any chance one of the buttons on the selector widget can be "advanced selection" to reach the new code?

I had a hard time finding this! When you open a terminal (or get an adb shell), you're the user "phablet". In the past the default password was "phablet" or "ubuntu". But with the latest UBports it'll be your screen unlock PIN (or, apparently, password, but I used the PIN option).

I'm posting this here in the hopes that somebody looking for this answer will find it quickly!

I have a bug unique to the Morph browser. I knew how to invoke the debugger under the old browser--what's the wisdom on this new one? TIA!

Ha, I had the opposite last night. I was running a (music streaming) web app, closed the tab--and the web app kept running, now with no way to stop the music. Had to close the browser app and restart.

The Morph browser is looking really promising for streaming media--it has decent HTML6/ES6 support and its <audio> element handles ogg, mp3, and flac.

But if you change to a different tab, background the browser, or turn off the screen--the whole browser is suspended, making it useless as a media player.

So close, and yet so far.

In the past, the tweak tool could set the browser to not be suspended. As noted on another Morph Browser thread, the tweak tool doesn't "see" this browser.

So... can a UBports wizard suggest how to let the tweak tool see the app? Or name some other way (no matter how grotty) to tell the environment to not SIGSTOP the browser when it's not foreground?

TIA!

@advocatux, and indeed, no lack of gratitude here for the epic task of catching up with Xenial! Once that one browser glitch goes away, I'm up for trying it as a daily driver.

Ok, dug through the source to obports-installer, looks like most of the goodies hang off of:

https://system-image.ubports.com

In particular:

https://system-image.ubports.com/ubports-touch/16.04/devel/hammerhead/index.json

which tells you where to get bits for various versions. The latest, currently 72, says that there's bits at :

/pool/device-e34756d822387fa9371568fa42292f8baf76d79ec7f2cee0f5c002b909dc08f5.delta-device-cc610cfc131187e182588a0f9c7c5c23ba769679708a4ba08b16878f4e93c101.tar.xz

which, once you pull it and "xzcat device-e3* | tar -xvf -" will give you boot, recovery, and system img files. I booted just to the bootloader and fastboot flash'ed those partitions, and my phone still boots OK. So I guess I'm at least sorta on the right track....

@Flohack FYI, probably just got attacked at the local Cafe. Turned on BT for my external keyboard, but keyboard typing was locked up, then an authentication dialog box popped up. I shut the device down ASAP, will do a clean install since God knows what got scribbled.

No BT in public for me until this is fixed!