Android Froyo Update File

Just a quick post to tell you how to update your Nexus One to Android 2.2 Froyo immediately without waiting for google to send it to you OTA.

Download this file from google’s servers: http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-FRF50-from-ERE27.1e519a24.zip

After that just follow the below mentioned steps:

  1. Put it on your SD card and rename to update.zip

  2. Power off then hold trackball and press power again to boot into recovery

  3. Go to Bootloader -> Recovery

Integrate JDownloader with Flashgot

This is just a short post to to document how I got JDownloader to integrate with Flashgot. JDownloader doesn’t have an installer but a zip file that you just download and extract somewhere on your PC and start using it. Somehow, the Flashgot extension of Firefox is not able to detect it automatically and I didn’t know what parameters to use to add it manually to its list. Latest versions of JDownloader ask you whether you want to install Flashgot or not. I didn’t install it because I already had Flashgot. Turns out that this is the missing step. You should allow JDownloader to install Flashgot in your browser, even if it is already installed(If you have already run JDownloader once and didn’t say yes to installing flashgot, then you can do it by going to Settings->Plugins 7 Addons->Extensions->Flashgot for Firefox in JDownloader and clicking Install). And then, you will see that the JDownloader option is not grayed out anymore. If you see the version of Flashgot that JDownloader is installs is older than the official version, don’t fret. Now, you can re-update the flashgot addon (Tools->Addons->Find Updates in firefox) and the JDownloader integration will still stay intact. Hope that helps someone :)

Automatic Login For Beam Cable

This article will tell you a simple way to login automatically to beam cable (Beam-Telecom) internet connection instead of using the web login manually. Not only that, I’ll also tell you how to do this auto-login through your router if you have one with a custom linux firmware. I took a beam cable connection a few days ago. The price is excellent and speeds are good but the only thing that bothered me was the web based login. You need to open up a browser and login through their online portal before you can access the internet. Now, if you don’t log off, then the login may persist even across PC/router reboots but many times it doesn’t. But in these times, it becomes a pain in the wrong place when I am just looking to play online on my PS3 or one of my various net-capable devices, scattered around the house, are trying to pull data and this forces me to open up my laptop just to login. Even for people who use the internet only on their PC, they might not be using the browser all the time and find it a hassle, minor one but still a hassle, to open a browser and login. Hence, I set out to find a way to do this automatically. (BTW, I’ll also be listing out how I came onto the solution in case you are in interested. If you are not, feel free to skip some paragraphs below to move to the solution)

Real Time Data Plotting with GNUPlot

I wrote this script a few days ago to plot real-time / streaming data with gnuplot. The motivation was that I needed to test a piece of code for a touchscreen driver that I had written at work. The issue was that the UI wasn’t quite ready yet, so I wanted to test just the driver to be working fine. Now, the very first thought for the software to use that came to me was “gnuplot” but I found that it can’t really do this in an easy way. A colleague suggested me to use “replot” command with gnuplot. I whipped out my perl hat and a few hours later, voila!! my very own real time data plotter was ready. Now, I can stream data from any program to this script or provide the data on STDIN and can see the data being plotted continuously. BTW, it was awesome to see all the shapes that I drew on my target board’s LCD touchscreen to come alive on my PC monitor almost instantaneously.

RT-GNUPlot-ter

This is a script to plot streaming / real-time data (i.e. plot the points as the data comes in) with gnuplot. The script is written in perl and works in windows as well as linux. Please read on to see the requirements, installation, usage and download link. I should also thank my colleague Rabindra Mandal, who gave me the initial idea and Thanassis Tsiodras, whose script I looked at before creating mine (though mine is quite different in nature. Tsiodras’ script is for “moving” data like things with limitless ranges, while mine is more for data that has limitless occurences within a limited range as my main motivation behind it was to plot touchscreen data)