Many Android Developers (and users) get confused that why a certain app isn’t showing up on the new Xperia X10 Mini (and few other) phones. This happens even if they support all android versions and have published their apps for all countries, so that shouldn’t be the issue. I came across this as well when few people mentioned that they couldn’t find my app Wi-Fi Keep Alive in the X10 mini marketplace. On some digging into the android docs and the X10 mini specs, I found the issue.

If you want to have a secure browsing environment or just want to access your home network securely without exposing extra services to the internet and without the mess that comes with setting up and maintaining a VPN server, ssh tunneling is your rescuer. In this post, I’ll tell you how to setup an ssh tunnel to your home network easily. Also look for some bonus tips at the end ;)

We all know that Android does not allow the camera LED to be controlled directly from apps and hence, you cannot use the camera LED as a Torch or Flashlight unless you are rooted. There are many flashlight apps on the Android Market Place but none of them will work for you if you don’t have a rooted phone. BUT this changed recently. I use a brilliant app called “quick settings” which keeps an icon in the notification bar and I can pull it down and change any settings without leaving other apps. It has a flashlight function but so far it used to work by turning on the screen with a white screen, which was a less than ideal solution. I upgraded to the latest version a few days ago (1.9.4 p1). While messing around with the settings, I wandered across the flashlight settings which allows you to choose what kind of flashlight you want. Now, I’m not sure whether this setting was present earlier or not but I decided to give it a try and chose LED instead of screen (Screenshot below):

Recently I came across a weird error while trying to run firefly itunes server (mt-daapd) on my router (Asus wl-500w). It had something to do with sqlite and gave a vague message “Unable to open database file”. After going bonkers for a short time, I solved it and this is how.

One of my hard disks crashed recently and unfortunately it was the one I had connected to my router to serve media to me all over the house (through PS3/laptop) or when I travel (through laptop/phone). I had all the data backed up but somehow didn’t preserve the firefly server. I rebuilt the server from source using my own guide (Thank God I did it. I wouldn’t have been able to preserve my sanity finding all that out the hard way again.). But after doing all the installation and reconfiguration, it gave me a weird error “unable to open database file” every time and exited. I checked the permissions on the songs3.db file (in /opt/var/cache/mt-daapd for me) and made it writable by all but the issue persisted. I changed its ownership to the user under which firefly was running but the issue was still there. Finally I found that the server (or maybe its an sqlite thing) was trying to create a temp file in the cache directory for the transactions and since the user with which it was started, didn’t own the directory it wasn’t able to create the file in it.

Update: Made a minor update for a small bug that can make wi-fi keep reconnecting in quick succession.

Pushed out a new update to my Android App Wi-Fi Keep Alive today. This update brings in another work around for the issue where the wi-fi is alive on the phone and it is also connected to the network but is somehow unable to send/receive any packets to the network. The new work around will automatically re-associate your phone with the wi-fi router if it detects such a situation. This seems to make it work properly again for sometime. When it fails again, the workaround kicks in automatically again. This is not an ideal “fix” as such because streaming apps like Pandora radio etc might have a hiccup because of this but it is unavoidable as of now and atleast the notifications for mails and other things etc will work fine because this state stops even the mobile data network from taking over since the phone perceives that wi-fi is connected but is not working actually.