Lazy Geeks Blog

So you’ve just got yourself something like the Nexus One, HTC Desire, Motorola Droid or HTC Incredible (Just to name a few). You’re the proud owner of one of the coolest phones on the planet, largely due to the fact that it runs Android. I mean, let’s face it, it’s incredibly easy to find yourself a phone that has a 1Ghz processor, 512MB RAM, 5MP Camera … the hardware these days is largely the same. So, your phone is special, and (in my opinion) the best, because of Android!

What you have to understand however, is that your phone is also different. If you’ve previously used a PC, or you’ve had yourself another Smartphone like the iPhone, there’s a few things to be aware of, and a couple of nifty features of your new awesome-phone.

I’ll also give you the heads up on some cool apps that are well worth the look at which will compliment your new investment in portable telephony quite well!

(Screenshots / pictures below)

The first big thing that you need to know about your new phone:

Widgets!

Your home screen is completely customizable with cool things like news alerts, 1-touch buttons to turn WiFi on and off, Music player controls, 3G Data usage monitors and so much more!

Simply press and hold your finger where there are no other icons / widgets, and you can go nuts and add them.

For the better part, these will do absolutely *nothing* to your battery life, so you honestly don’t need to worry about that, which brings me to my next very important point:

You don’t need a task manager!

Yes, Android multi-tasks (That is, runs more than one program at once) but here’s the catch: It does it well!

Too often I see people on Forums complaining because they’ve downloaded a Task Manager thinking they’re doing their Android phone a service. Unfortunately that’s not true.

Android is a very clever OS, and it’s perfectly capable of handling multi-tasking without interference. While task managers are there, and they generally speaking do what they say they’ll do, for the vast majority of users there’s no reason for you to have one on your phone. Android will kill apps as it requires the memory etc, and it’ll manage it well.

People get concerned about the likes of the Facebook app, or the Amazon MP3 app running when they don’t use them. I’ve seen people slam Google over these apps claiming they know better than the thousands of people who work on Android. Lets just say you could use them from time to time if you’re running into major issues, but for the better part of users you can live without a Task Manager app.

If you’re interested, you can read more here: http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/

So in summary, don’t bother with them.

Your SD card is upgradable

It might sound obvious but you’re not stuck with the standard amount of storage that came with the phone.

You have two methods of upgrading (I personally did it the first way, because I have a card-reader in my PC):

1. Shut down the phone, take the SD card out, plug it into your PC. Copy everything off then take the card out. Plug in the new one and put all the files onto it. Safely eject it,  pop it into your phone, power it on. Easy!
2. Plug your phone into your PC via USB Cable and on the phone tell “Turn on USB storage”. Copy the files across. Safely eject it, then on your phone tell it that its ejected. Shut down the phone and swap the cards. Power it up and connect it to your PC. Copy the files across then safely eject the phone. All done

Screenshots, because everybody likes pictures:

Live wallpapers wont kill your battery life & you can actually check what’s utilizing your battery

I’ve found live wallpapers use around 2-3% of my battery. Considering I use it for a few hours on a full charge plus 8-9 hours on standby, it equates to about 5 mins battery life. I couldn’t care less personally.

Which brings me to a useful feature, checking what’s utilizing your battery!

From your home screen, press the Menu button, then Settings. Go down the bottom to About Phone, and then Battery Use.

You can look into each individual aspect of what is utilizing your battery, incredibly useful we thought! More-so than any task manager is!!

You can see I’d been plugging it in and out quite a bit while taking the screenshots, so it’s not quite the best demonstration, but it’ll give you an idea. It gets even better when you’ve been using Live Wallpapers, Music, Phone calls etc.

Wireless Tethering

Almost as though it was a direct slap in the fact for iPhone / iPad users, rather than being restricted to JUST tethering via USB to your laptop for example, you can share your Cellphones connection via WiFi. This was demo’d by hooking up a WiFi-only iPad to a Nexus One when Google first showed this off at their Google I/O Conference.

Basically it takes your internet connection from your phone and shares it wirelessly, making your phone a portable wireless hotspot.

From your home screen, press Menu –> Settings –> Wireless & network settings –> Tethering & portable hotspot

Once you’re there you can tick “Portable Wi-Fi hotspot” and your phone will do some magic in the background and set itself up as “AndroidAP”. Then if you have a nearby laptop, you can check in your available nearby wireless networks and you should see your phones wireless now appear!

You can also adjust the settings and password-protect your wireless network so strangers don’t start using it.

This way you don’t have to pay for a secondary 3G connection for your laptop / data stick / iPad for example. You can simply have one single connection on your main Cellphone SIM and potentially save yourself money while getting a “bigger” plan with a much higher data allowance. Brilliant!!

Awesome applications you probably want to check out

Have to recommend some of my favorite applications and get you kick-started.

Not only are many of these useful, but some of them allow you to put your friends with iPhones to *shame*, with that cool factor that they can only dream about!

ChompSMS

It’s a nice improvement over the regular SMS application. On-screen popup notifications, customizable ball-color notifications, a nice 4×2-sided Widget. It comes in a free version, but you can pay a couple of dollars and get it Ad-free. For the couple of bucks, why not, it’s worth supporting the developers I thought. Highly recommended (Both free or paid versions):

You can also remove the notifications from the default SMS app so you don’t get double-up. And no, you don’t need to worry about performance either!

3G Watchdog

This superb application will keep track of all your 3G Data transfer. Simply punch in when your month starts, how much you have per-month, and it works out all the rest. It even tells you how much you’ll have used by your months end if you keep up your current use. You have the option of having a Widget on your home screen, and I find it nicely compliments the on-going notification:

This app is free from the Android Marketplace!

One thing to keep in mind is that the Widget only updates every 3 minutes by default I believe, this is to keep CPU usage to a minimum

Nexus One LED Flashlight

OK so this is really specific to the Nexus One, but from what I gather there are other devices out there that either have similar applications, or that this works with.

If you’ve owned an iPhone or the likes, you’re no doubt familiar with the “Flashlight” applications that turn your screen bright white. That’s all very well and good, but when you have an uber-bright LED like the Nexus One, you’re going to feel (As I did) as though you’ve been cheated for the past two years when it comes to Flashlight applications.

This widget sits on your home screen. Just press it once, the LED comes on and the widget changes yellow. Press the widget again and it turns it off. Simple!

This app is also free from the Android Marketplace!

Mario Live Wallpaper

This is quite possibly one of the coolest ever wallpapers you could have.

Mario runs across your background on dynamically generated levels, with dynamic pathing based on what obstacles are in his way. You honestly have to see this to believe it, and it’s well worth the 2% battery life I found it was using.

This screenshot really doesn’t do it justice, but search for it, give it a whirl, and you’ll be very impressed! It’s hard to describe with words, it’s so awesome. Take that iPhone users!

Chrome to Phone

To use Chrome to Phone you need to be running at least Android-2.2 (Froyo). To check this, go to your home screen and press Menu –> Settings –> About Phone, and check the Build Number. If it begins with “FRF”, then you’re running Android 2.2 (Froyo), and you can use Chrome to Phone.

This useful wee app allows you to take any page you have open in your PC, and send it direct to your Phone. Things like a news article you’re reading, or navigation on Google Maps work excellently, and you really need to try it to appreciate how useful it is. It requires the plugin on your PC and phone.

Download the PC plugin here: http://code.google.com/p/chrometophone/

You want to click on the .crx file from within Chrome on your PC, and you want to send the .apk to your phone. Once it’s installed on both, you need to login to both with the same gmail account, and this won’t work if you have a custom Google Apps for your Domain login (currently), it has to be @gmail.com.

Once both are installed, from your PC you simply click on the little Phone icon and usually within about 4-5 seconds, that link is on your phone!

If you were on Google Maps, it’ll automatically load up the mapping application and direct you to the location you had open on your PC. It’s freakin cool and you’ll be surprised by how often you use it.

Lightning Bug

If you’ve ever tried any of the iPhone apps such as Ambience or Asleep, you’ll appreciate this.

Lightning Bug plays rain / thunder / lightning, amongst other things. It also flashes the lightning in time with the thunder rolls (marginally before it) which is pretty cool!

Above, is the main screen. It’s black, because when the lightning strikes you’ll see it light up. Because it flashes so quickly it was impossible for me to take a screenshot of

There are additional “scenes” which you can purchase such as a beach with waves, but I’m a big fan of just the rain.
Also, if you have the desktop dock, you can program your phone to launch it automatically when you put it in the cradle. This occurs the first time you dock it after you have installed the app.

RockPlayer

This app allows you to play videos in a variety of formats.

Personally I’ve used it to play Music Videos which I bought through the iTunes Store back when I had my iPhone, and same for movies. It plays AVI files, MP4, MKV, WMV, MPG, and supports both DivX / XviD and h.264 video.
I can honestly say that compared to my old iPhone 3G, video on my Nexus One is a million times more vivid and better looking!

Replica Island

Every Android owner should try this. One of the oldest and better games available for the Android OS, its easy to pick up, not super challenging, but still fun.

It also makes nice use of the trackball to control the Android in this great platform game.

If you’ve ever had a spare moment where you’ve sat in the doctors office or something along those lines, then Replica Island will certainly help pass the time.

Flickie Wallpapers HD

This is where I got my cool background from. There’s a sweet collection wallpapers there to suit any style / preference / mood.

Just browse through either their top wallpapers, or they group them by similar themes .

In closing

Hopefully this has given you a bit of a taste for some of the cool things that your new phone / tablet can do. There are endless possibilities out there, if you’ve found something super awesome that you’d like to share then feel free to leave a comment and say so. If you’ve also found this in any way useful or educational, then please leave a quick note to say so

Warning: This is a completely personal post, my own thoughts and feelings, and largely digresses from the semi-professional tone of most of my others. There are also no pictures, sorry.

Now, I’m an activist, and I’ll freely admit it.

Not in the traditional poster-protester style, but I will gladly debate anything I feel I know enough about to be “fluent” in the subject-matter (Read: Technology, not something like gardening for example). If I don’t know, I’ll freely admit it, or simply keep my mouth shut.

What really bugs me is when people make half-assed statements that they have clearly put no thought into at all, and are simply venting because they feel more secure doing so behind their keyboard and monitor!
I call these people cowards, and idiots.

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So the end of financial year rolled around a while ago. I thought “What a great chance for me to check my taxes”, considering I’d not been employed half the year.

I’m glad that I did! I was entitled to a rebate.

Now, I could just use a service like I have in the past such as taxrefunds.co.nz, but they charge something like 15%. That might not seem like much, but when your refund is $1,000, they’re taking $150 just to do something you can do yourself in a few minutes.

The whole process only took me about 5-10 minutes in total, and was surprisingly stress-free!

Here’s how (With pretty pictures):

First of all you need your IRD number

Once you’ve got that, sign up for the IRD Online Services website:

https://e-services2.ird.govt.nz/interact/services/ird/registration/

This will allow you to check things online like your tax refunds etc, just like you’d have to sign up for a Tax Refund-specific website.

It will ask you for your first and last name (Hopefully you know what these are), your date of birth (I think you should know what that is also) as well as a contact phone number and email address for you. You get to pick a UserID and password, and then a “passphrase” that they’ll ask you for if you forget your password.

Once you’re all signed up

You’ll need to ring the IRD on 0800 227 774 to get your account “activated”.

It will ask you if you are calling about a PTS (Personal Tax Summary), say No. Then, enter your IRD number.

When the message asks you what you want to do, tell it “Online Services registration”. It will confirm that you are calling for “Online Services”, tell it yes.

You shouldn’t need to hold long before it suggests that they ring you back (About 60 seconds usually). Press 1 to accept.

They’ll then ask you for your callback phone number. Punch in your phone number, including area code, and then the # key. For example: 098345678#

You’ll say your full name after that, then press the # key again, and the voice prompt will confirm when you’ll be called back. My first call was 2-4 minutes, but only 5 minutes later when I rang back again it told me I’d be waiting over 45 minutes. Your mileage may vary.

The IRD will call you back shortly

When you’re speaking with somebody you’re going to basically tell them you want to “Activate your Online Services account”. They’ll ask you a couple of security questions to verify that they’re actually speaking with you, such as your name and address, but the whole process is usually very painless. If they ask who your current tax agent is, if you’re anything like me and have used Taxrefunds.co.nz then that’s who your tax agent is.

Now is probably a good time to ask them to remove your current tax agent if it’s somebody like Tax Refunds. You can ask them who your current tax agent is. If it’s the likes of Tax Refunds, it’s worth removing them so that your correspondence doesn’t get posted to them.

Once you’re done and activated, you can login to the IRD Online Services website:

https://e-services.ird.govt.nz/interact/myservices/e-services/welcome

Or, go to http://www.ird.govt.nz and click on “Log In” in the top right-hand side.

Once you’re logged in you’ll see a screen summarizing your tax affairs, like mine:

Now that’s great that you’re on there, you’ve got two options. You can either follow through the website and confirm your PTS (Personal Tax Summary) or you can use the following calculator: http://www.ird.govt.nz/calculators/tool-name/tools-p/calculator-pts-calculator-2010.html

To be honest, it’s probably easiest to do it straight from your Online Services login.

Doing your Return

You’ll see under “Income Tax” is a couple of arrows for “More Detail”. Click on that. We’ll ignore your student loan and other things for now.

Once you’ve clicked that, you’ll be taken to a screen where you can choose what you want to review. This is kind of pointless, it should take you directly to which ever option you’ve chosen, but still. Click on INC – Income Tax:

It’ll now take you to a page called “Income tax account summary” and show you the last few years worth.

It’ll either be squared on Zero, or like me it’ll say something like “$123.45 CR”. If it says “CR” then thats a credit, and you’re owed money! Awesome!

Now unfortunately I completed all of mine before I thought of documenting the process so this part is a little hazy on the specifics (If you can please let me know I’d be very grateful), but from here when you’re logged in, you want to click on “My Income” up the top of your main Online Services page:

It should give you the summary for the year of what you need to do, you can either apply for your refund or you can check to see if you need to complete a PTS form.

This is the part that I need confirmed, so if you can let me know specifically what it is called in there, that you need to click when you have a refund owing, that would be appreciated.

You’ll be taken to a page where they’ll get you to confirm several things, and then you should be all completed!

Once you’ve confirmed your refund

Now you need to make sure that they’re going to pay you, and not your previous tax agent such as Tax Refunds.

Scroll down and click on Bank Account:

You basically want to edit them all (Specifically the first one – Income Tax) so that they point to your bank account.

That’s it, you should be done, and your tax refund is on its way! I know that when I do a GST return it only takes them a week or two to get it out to you, so keep an eye on your mailbox.

If this has been of use to you in any way, please leave a comment and just say Hi.

Yes it’s surprisingly easy, and yes you too can have it today!

This is still very much a work-in-progress, as we’re merging two unfinished products and I’ve not had enough of a chance to test it thoroughly either so I’m hoping for some response from the community on this one. I think this is quite possibly the first time that FreePBXv3 has been tied into a major distro, and I reckon it’d be cool to see Elastix-2.0 support FreePBXv3 officially.

I have however tested Ext’s registering happily, calling each other, so I know that FreePBXv3 is tied in correctly.

Anyway, I’ve tar’d up a slightly older version of FreePBXv3, as they’re undergoing some design changes right at the moment which mean that the current version doesn’t install. So, we’ll be using this.

Total installation should only take about 5 minutes, so this How-To will be nice and short!

So what you’re going to do is start by installing the latest Elastix-2.0 RC3. In my case I used i386.

Once it’s installed, ssh into the server and run:

cd /var/www/html
wget http://c2s.co.nz/dumpfiles/freepbxv3.tar.bz2
tar xvjf freepbxv3.tar.bz2
cd freepbxv3
sh preinstall.sh

It’s 8.5MB, and this is the snapshot of FreePBXv3 that we’re going to be using.

I’ve already modified the preinstall.sh so it uses the user “asterisk” instead of “nobody”, keeping in line with how Elastix does things.

You’re going to then run the following commands to upgrade PHP:

yum install yum-priorities
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/CentOS-Testing.repo
yum --enablerepo=c5-testing install php
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

We need PHP-5.2 because of one of the FreePBX dependencies (Kohana) and Elastix only comes with PHP-5.1

Now you need to fire up the Elastix WebUI, but instead of just going to the regular URL, add in /freepbxv3/ to the end and you should be greeted with the install window:

Agree, hit Next.

You will be prompted with a pre-flight checklist. It should pass the lot. Again, hit Next.

Now, on the next screen, you’re going to see the database details.

Set the database to freepbxv3, the username to “root” and put in the default Elastix root MySQL password: eLaStIx.2oo7

You might also want to adjust your timezone.

Now, create a Username and a Password that you will use to access the system. Whatever you enter in here will be the email address used to log you in, it’ll create the account based off this, so remember the address / password you use. Don’t worry, this account is unique to your Elastix / FreePBXv3 installation.

On the next screen you need to change it from the FreeSWITCH driver to the Asterisk driver. All the other defaults are fine except the AMI admin password which needs to be changed to “elastix456″

The next screen will complain a little about a few bits n pieces relating to Media Management. We’re going to ignore this for now simply because I’m lazy. Scroll right the way down and hit “Next”, as the default selections suit us fine.

It will then go through and do the installation of everything:

When that’s done you’ll be taken to your newly installed FreePBXv3 system!

One thing I’ve found is that the default passwords didn’t seem to work until I modified the password on the accounts. You can do this under Destinations –> Devices

Select Device 1 and choose Edit. Adjust the password and then hit Save.

You should now be able to take a phone and register it using the Username “sip1″.

I then did the same for Device 2, registered with “sip2″ after changing the password, and was able to make calls freely between them.

Granted there’s a lot more to be tested, but that should be enough to get you pointed in the right direction. I’d love to hear from some people how they get on with this, and the blog will be updated in-future.
This has also been cross-posted at http://blogs.elastix.org/en/?p=385

So I’ve recently imported a Nexus One. I live in New Zealand, and it’s not “officially” available here.

The Nexus One works both on XT and Vodafone, and at USD$529 including free shipping (In the states) you should be able to land it for around NZD$900 (Roughly, depending on exchange rates etc).

Here’s a few thoughts on importing it, using a mail-forwarder, avoiding unneeded taxes, getting it here ASAP and selecting the right phone for your network.

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Continuing with our screencasts, we have a short How-To on installing the Power DNS Recursor (pdns-recursor) package as a way of getting around certain DNS issues in Asterisk.

When Asterisk loses connectivity, it can also affect the likes of PSTN fallback, not to mention Asterisk just outright behaves funny with DNS at times. The pdns-recursor package I’ve found works better than the likes of dnsmasq.

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Starting off a new line of Screencasts, we have the first one on securing the default Elastix WebGUI passwords. This may seem obvious but many people only do *half* the job, leaving their system totally wide open when they port-forward TCP 443 so it’s publicly accessible.

See for yourself by going to your Elastix system and adding this in to the URL:
/admin/

You will see yourself presented with a new login box. Type in “admin” as the Username & Password.

Many people don’t know, or don’t change the Unembedded FreePBX password, so we will show you how to fix this issue.

This is the first of hopefully many screencast tutorials.

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I’ve had my iPhone 3G for 1 month shy of 2 years now, and it’s been a brilliant phone. Admittedly I had it replaced after 3 months because the GPS on my first one was horribly inaccurate, however the whole replacement process was superb: Full phone replacement in under 2 hours of dropping the device off! When I bought the Nexus One, I waited first for the iPhone4 to be officially released. Everybody had seen engadgets breakdown of the new look, and it does look slick, but I wanted to know about the OS and other features before deciding on a new iPhone or a Nexus One. How did I decide? Here’s some of the reasons: Read more...

It’s happened to everybody at some time or another, you wish you could go back to yesterdays system. You make a change and delete some IVR menu you shouldn’t have but can’t remember how it was setup so you can’t recreate it.

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The advent of the internet has meant that the transfer of information happens almost instantly. Emails exchanged, businesses updated, news crosses the globe in seconds, more people can work from home, global offices are brought together. It’s a beautiful thing.

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