Posts

Source: Malwarebytes Labs: Relax. Internet password books are OK So this was posted on April Fools’ Day, but I do believe it’s a serious post & I agree with the content. The author brings up the point early: Whether using a physical password book is a good thing depends on your threat model & risk. If you are not good with computers & can’t figure out how to use a password manager (see some of my other posts about passwords: Don’t Change that Pa$$w0rd, FINALLY: A Good Password Management Article, & ANOTHER GOOD article about passwords) & you don’t have to worry about someone you live with abusing access to the book, then this is a great way to store passwords without remembering them or re-using the same one over & over. Having the details saved in a book that’s kept in a drawer at your desk is a good way for some people to store different passwords. And it would obviously stay safer if the book stays at home, versus keeping it with you at all times & potentially losing it while out & about. That of course leads to other questions like “What do I do if I am away from home & need a password?”, but that will have to be answered by the user: Is it worth carrying the book with you at all times or is it really something that can wait until you get home & can access the book.

Source: The Hacker News: Google Reveals What Personal Data Chrome and Its Apps Collect On You And this is why I avoid using Chrome where possible:

In the last 24 hours… Screenshot from Pi-Hole dashboard For anyone else looking to run a network-wide adblocker, I recommend Pi-Hole. I have also recently started testing out AdGuard Home & will see in the long run if I decide to switch, or just leave it as a backup. I run Pi-Hole as my primary DNS & DHCP server with an excessive number of blocklists (totaling ~4.5m blocked sites) & have no issues with it. I only started looking into AdGuard Home after a resource issue on my original Pi-Hole (it seems when I added Resilio Sync to my Pi, the system would lock up). So, I decided to replace RasPi 3 B+ with a RasPi 4, 8GB, & turn the original 3+ into the secondary AdGuard DNS server. ...

I find it pretty ironic that Google Fi is the reason I’m leaving Android as well. Whether it’s because of an actual Fi issue or juts a tower issue in my area, that caused me to finally switch off of Fi (something I’ve been meaning to do anyway), & I decided to switch to an iPhone to get more use out of my phone, but also so I could actually still communicate with some people on iMessage. ...

This seems to be very popular with the release of iOS14, & I’m writing this up as a personal reference so I don’t have to continue to watch the great setup video that u/zeeshan_02 posted on Reddit: Beginner’s Guide on Playing a Custom Sound when Connected to Charger! Shortcut 01: Encode Audio This converts a sound file (in my case I was using an MP3) to Base64, for later use by the next shortcut: ...

Found a post on XDA about building Super Mario 64 for Android using Termux, & figured I’d try it out for fun. Source: XDA Developers: Super Mario 64 can be natively run on Android without a Nintendo 64 emulator Their instructions worked fine, so below is really just a copy & paste from the XDA post: ➜ ~ pkg install git wget make python getconf zip apksigner clang Checking availability of current mirror: ok Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done apksigner is already the newest version (29.0.2-5). clang is already the newest version (10.0.1-2). getconf is already the newest version (0.5-1). git is already the newest version (2.28.0). make is already the newest version (4.3-1). python is already the newest version (3.8.5). wget is already the newest version (1.20.3-3). zip is already the newest version (3.0-5). 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. ➜ ~ cd Development ➜ Development git clone https://github.com/VDavid003/sm64-port-android Cloning into 'sm64-port-android'... remote: Enumerating objects: 15616, done. remote: Total 15616 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 15616 Receiving objects: 100% (15616/15616), 22.76 MiB | 5.71 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (7567/7567), done. ➜ Development cd sm64-port-android ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) cp ~/storage/shared/Super\ Mario\ 64\ \(USA\).z64 baserom.us.z64 ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) sha256 baserom.us.z64 The program openssl is not installed. Install it by executing: pkg install openssl-tool ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) pkg install openssl-tool Checking availability of current mirror: ok Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: openssl-tool 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 185 kB of archives. After this operation, 643 kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 https://dl.bintray.com/termux/termux-packages-24 stable/main aarch64 openssl-tool aarch64 1.1.1g-4 [185 kB] Fetched 185 kB in 0s (214 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package openssl-tool. (Reading database ... 14219 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../openssl-tool_1.1.1g-4_aarch64.deb ... Unpacking openssl-tool (1.1.1g-4) ... Setting up openssl-tool (1.1.1g-4) ... ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) sha256 baserom.us.z64 SHA256(baserom.us.z64)= 17ce077343c6133f8c9f2d6d6d9a4ab62c8cd2aa57c40aea1f490b4c8bb21d91 ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) md5sum baserom.us.z64 20b854b239203baf6c961b850a4a51a2 baserom.us.z64 ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) ./getSDL.sh ~/Development/sm64-port-android/SDL ~/Development/sm64-port-android --2020-09-20 11:56:47-- https://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL2-2.0.12.zip Resolving www.libsdl.org... 2604:a880:1:20::181:e001, 192.241.223.99 Connecting to www.libsdl.org|2604:a880:1:20::181:e001|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 6784187 (6.5M) [application/zip] Saving to: ‘SDL2-2.0.12.zip’ SDL2-2.0.12.zip 100%[=======================================================================>] 6.47M 5.65MB/s in 1.1s 2020-09-20 11:56:49 (5.65 MB/s) - ‘SDL2-2.0.12.zip’ saved [6784187/6784187] ~/Development/sm64-port-android ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) make --jobs 4 ... cp build/us_pc/sm64.us.f3dex2e.unsigned.apk build/us_pc/sm64.us.f3dex2e.apk apksigner sign --cert certificate.pem --key key.pk8 build/us_pc/sm64.us.f3dex2e.apk ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) ls Android.mk Makefile.split assets charmap.txt enhancements key.pk8 sm64.jp.sha1 text CHANGES README.md assets.json charmap_menu.txt extract_assets.py levels sm64.ld textures Dockerfile SDL baserom.us.z64 data first-diff.py lib sm64.sh.sha1 tools Doxyfile actors bin diff.py format.sh rename_sym.sh sm64.us.sha1 undefined_syms.txt Jenkinsfile android build diff_settings.py getSDL.sh rsp sound Makefile asm certificate.pem doxygen include sm64.eu.sha1 src ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) ls build us_pc ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) ls build/us_pc actors bin endian-and-bitwidth level_rules.mk lib rsp sm64.us.f3dex2e.unsigned.apk src textures assets data include levels libmain.so sm64.us.f3dex2e.apk sound text ➜ sm64-port-android git:(master) ...

After a full weekend of originally getting CrDroid on my new OnePlus 7 Pro a few months back, I decided to switch to LineageOS+MicroG because I was never able to get location working on CrDroid. This was mostly due to the changes in Android 10, but when I was still unable to get it working with the new UnifiedNLP package, I just decided it was easier to switch & settled for reinstalling MicroG, which I had avoided on CrDroid because I wanted to avoid as many Google services as possible. ...

Follow up to the OnePlus 7 Pro: LineageOS+MicroG post, where I mentioned I would have to update the Bluetooth & Modem firmware on my device. This fortunately went as smoothly as the LineageOS+MicroG install, so I’m very happy about that. The first step was downloading the latest OxygenOS ZIP through this post: XDA Developers: [ROM][STOCK][FASTBOOT][OP7P] Stock Fastboot ROMs for OnePlus 7 Pro/ 7 Pro 5G by mauronofrio. The specific ZIP i pulled down from Android File Host was “10.0-GM21AA-OnePlus7ProOxygen_21.O.20_OTA_020_all_1909172051_db7a3f61-FASTBOOT.zip”. From there, it was just a simple matter of extracting that, images.zip, & flashing the bluetooth.img & modem.img files: ...

Now that I was able to get my Mi MIX 3 setup with TWRP & a custom ROM (unofficial LineageOS 16 build), I started looking into remapping the AI button to something actually useful. I found a few posts to point me in the right direction, as well as a Magisk module that is supposed to handle this: StackOverflow: ADB Shell Input Events Android Developers: KeyEvent StackOverflow: Need table of key codes for android and presenter I tried out a bunch of the codes to see what would work, & for now just remapped the key to SEARCH, until I can find something better \ more useful. ...

I recently picked up a Xiaomi Mi MIX 3 & was able to unlock the bootloader after the 72 hour waiting period. That wasn’t a problem, however getting TWRP up & running was where I had a problem. For some reason, whenever I would flash TWRP, but device was stuck in a fastboot loop – could not reboot out of it, boot the TWRP image, or any other method of exiting fastboot. I finally got TWRP working properly after flashing perseus_global_images_9.5.17_20190517.0000.00_9.0 _global_134d3070e5.tgz. I tried flashing one of the China ROM’s, & that was of no help. ...