Recently, there has been this trend. Blogs look for patents filed by companies and then report on each of them as if they are second coming of Jesus in technology. Especially if it is Apple who is doing the filings.

A few days ago, this new patent showed up about Apple’s “new wave approach to fighting malware” with the author giving up half-researched commentary on it.

I was intrigued by this news (if you can call it that), not because it’s something new but instead because process isolation is hardly a new concept. The author mentions “Qubes OS” as the one to be original inventor before Apple but in fact, it has been used for years (eg chrooting/containers in linux) and more popular recently in Android’s uid based approach. Even Qualcomm (and other SoC vendors) have stuff that helps in this space with Trustzone based isolation between processor entities at hardware level.

So, my wife got me a new slim PS3 today to replace my old YLOD’ed phat (Yes, Awesome wife I know. And slim PS3 cuz I hate the looks of the new superslim). But, I digress. The issue at hand is that everything worked fine when I unwrapped it, hooked it up to the power and TV and switched it on. However, once I started the PSN store (or what is now called Sony Entertainment Network Store), nothing worked. I got the main screen/content of the store displayed but I couldn’t move around in the store. None of the buttons on the DS3 worked. I hooked up my older sixaxis and still the same. The only thing I could do was to hit the PS button which would bring up a menu from where I could quit the store app and then again everything worked fine once I was out onto XMB or in any game or for any other feature not related to the store.

So I’ve been spending a few hours on getting my odroid u2 up and running and here are a few tips that I’ve come across in the process.

**Overscan: **

So, many TVs have this issue that they miss out on displaying the corners of the image put out by the Odroid U2. The phenomenon is called overscan. Now, all you have to do is select settings such as “Just Scan” or similar on your TV that allows your TV to display image coming from U2 as is. This setting is called “Screen Fit” on Samsung TVs but I found something weird. My TV already had this setting set for the picture mode, but still I had the overscan issue. What I had to do was to switch to another mode and then back to Screen Fit and it started working fine.

So, this little baby landed up in my mailbox a couple of days ago :). The Odroid U2. For those who don’t know, it’s a cheap dev board based around Samsung’s Exynos 4412 SoC and supports Android as well as Ubuntu.

I’ve got quite a few things planned on how to use it and will post more about my adventures with the U2 here soon.

One of the features I was really looking forward to with Android 4.2 was lock screen widgets but when I got the update on my Galaxy Nexus that it only had 5 pre-defined stock widgets that could be added to the lock screen.

I headed over to the Android developers site some time later and was pleasantly surprised to see that actually 3rd party widgets can indeed be added to the lock screen. They just need a small change for this. They need to add “android:widgetCategory=“keyguard|home_screen”” parameter to your xml where the appwidget provider element is defined. Simple enough :)