A five-row full hardware keyboard.
That’s all there is to it.
Every other Android phone either has NO hardware keyboard, or has a crappy 4-row keyboard on which typing is annoying and numbers are HORRIBLE to type at all. Come out with a 4G Android phone with a 5-row keyboard and we’ll talk. Until then, I’m sticking with my G1.
IF THIS GUIDE HELPS YOU, PLEASE COMMENT. Last updated 2012-01-24.
[UPDATE: Added Android keyboard bug note; added step to remove ADWLauncher.]
[UPDATE 2: The launcher “Zeam” seems to be even lighter than LauncherPro. Changing VM heap size to 12 and enabling JIT seems to improve the phone’s AVERAGE behavior considerably. While slower than after the initial boot with VM heap size = 24 + no JIT, the latter combination seems to slowly degrade performance until a reboot is needed, while the new settings don’t have such an effect. However, my phone is literally FULL with apps, so if you run lighter (i.e. remove Maps and Google Voice, don’t have many apps) you may prefer the 24MB heap size.]
[UPDATE 3: You REALLY should perform the EzTerry 14MB RAM hack which makes a massive difference, but requires more advanced work and is beyond the scope of this tutorial.]
I managed to FINALLY get my T-Mobile G1 to perform very well while running Cyanogenmod 6 (specifically I’m running CM 6.1-RC1 for Dream/Sapphire), and because it’s been such a difficult and elusive process, and people all over the Cyanogen forums have been screaming about often lackluster T-Mobile G1 performance (due to the 96MB of OS-usable RAM installed in the G1) I should share everything I’ve done to get this far.
What’s so different about my performance as compared to others who report GOOD performance with a CM6 G1 is that mine had started to become quite poor, which is often the case with these phones and custom ROMs. Everything would work great after a wipe+flash, which erases pretty much everything, and then over the course of a few weeks the performance would drop until it became laggy and very annoying. Reports of dialer/phone appearance on an incoming call lagging so severely that calls would be missed are not uncommon.
How does it perform? Well, most of the time the launcher doesn’t unload, meaning my icons appear immediately when I go “home.” When it does unload, it’s very quick to come up. Application load times are drastically better and there is no noticeable lag in most usage cases. In particular, the 3D gallery, which is very notorious for being slow to come up when using the default CM6 settings, pops up in approximately 5-6 seconds, and all of my 150 or so pictures on my 4GB Class 4 microSD card pop up in another 4-5 seconds (the first gallery startup makes thumbnails and is significantly slower, but we can ignore that since it’s largely a one-shot deal.)
BIG FAT UGLY NOTE TO ALL G1 CYANOGENMOD USERS: The default CM6 Dream/Sapphire settings are NOT OPTIMAL FOR THE T-MOBILE G1!!! I will be telling you to change settings in the “Performance settings” which has a BIG WARNING when you open it about dragons and voided warranties. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe with my setting changes.
First and foremost, you need to get some apps from the Market. Search for and install the following:
Now we’re ready to clean up the software on the G1 and get it performing like it was meant to. Follow these steps:
mount -o remount,rw /system
rm -f /system/app/com.amazon.mp3.apk
rm -f /system/app/GoogleQuickSearchBox.apk
rm -f /system/app/GenieWidget.apk
rm -f /system/app/VoiceSearch.apk
pm uninstall com.amazon.mp3
pm uninstall com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox
pm uninstall com.google.android.apps.genie.geniewidget
pm uninstall com.google.android.voicesearch
mv /system/app/ADWLauncher.apk /data/
[UPDATE: Don’t remove ADWLauncher; if something goes wrong and you remove Zeam or LauncherPro, you’ll have NO LAUNCHER and a reflash will be forced upon you. The 14MB hack will relieve some of the memory pressure and make this unnecessary anyway.]
Type “exit” three times to leave the console. After all of this mess is completed, I’d suggest rebooting the phone to make sure everything is in a consistent state. I noticed that lots of services run at initial startup, so don’t be alarmed if the G1 is slow for about a minute after the launcher appears. I have found that deleting my Messaging threads and limiting them to 100 messages per contact significantly boosts Messaging app performance. Since Messaging is locked in memory, you might want to regularly clean it out to maintain optimal performance. The same goes for the various Browser caches and saved information, though cleaning these will only make Browser perform better and has no effect on the entire phone.
After doing all of this, I noticed that my phone boots faster and is extremely responsive all of the time. Even when the system reloads LauncherPro or starts an app from scratch, it’s MUCH faster to do so. AGAIN, note that I am NOT using ANY of the following performance hacks:
Please leave a comment with feedback if you followed these directions. I can’t provide help (that’s what the CM forums are for), I just want to know how it works for others. Thanks!
How would you like for your file archives to be 20% smaller, with just the tools every Linux distribution already provides and a little ingenuity? Read on and see how I did it!
There was a folder “NESRen” that I wanted to pack up for archival, and I knew it contained many files that share the same data, minus a few changes here and there. When packing them up and compressing them into a tarball archive, I knew that I will achieve better compression if these largely similar files are put side-by-side in the archive so that the repeated blocks of data “compress themselves away” and take up almost no space. Unfortunately, the GNU “tar” command in nearly every Linux distribution packs up files and folders in the order that the underlying filesystem chooses, which is almost always unordered and not optimal for compression.
How do we make tar put files in an order which will compress better? The answer is to use the tar -T option, which lets you feed tar a list of files to pack up. The list is processed line-by-line, and each file is packed up in the order provided. You can, for example, create a list of files with the “find” command, then hand-edit that list to be optimal, and pass the list to tar (you must use the –no-recursion option when creating the archive from this list since the “find” makes a recursive list already):
find folder_of_files/ > list.txt vi list.txt tar -c --no-recursion -T list.txt | xz > archive.tar.xz
In my case, however, the folder structure and naming conventions allowed for creative use of the “sort” command to arrange the files. Since there is one folder “NESRen” followed by a series of categorizations, followed by the file names themselves (i.e. “NESRen/World/Pinball (JU).nes”) I can do something like this to make all files with the same name sort beside each other, regardless of the name of the category directory (as “sort” with no options would do):
find NESRen | sort -t / --key=3 | \ tar -cv -T - --no-recursion | xz -e > NESRen.tar.xz
The “-t /” tells sort to use a slash as a field delimiter, and –key=3 tells it to sort by the third field (NESRen is field 1, the folder is 2, the file is 3). What kind of difference did that make for the size of my .tar.xz archive? Take a look (-nosort archive created with “tar -c NESRen | xz -e > NESren-nosort.tar.xz”):
Size of each file in bytes:
212958664 NESRen-nosort.tar.xz 170021312 NESRen.tar.xz
Size of the original folder and each file in megabytes:
705M NESRen 204M NESRen-nosort.tar.xz 163M NESRen.tar.xz
By sorting the files, I saw a 20.1% drop in archive size using the exact same compression method, with a total compression ratio of 23.1% versus the unsorted 28.9%. That’s a huge difference! If this were 70.5GB instead of 705MB and the data exhibited identical performance, the final archive would be 4.1GB smaller–nearly the entire capacity of a single-layer DVD-R in space savings, just by sorting the file names before compression.
Applying a similar sort-then-compress process to the packing of the “ext” version of the Tritech Service System, a 700KB reduction in the total size of the archive containing “ext” was seen. Of course, this doesn’t help as much because the archive itself was already 32.7MB in size (700KB is only a 2.1% reduction) but it still means shorter load and boot times due to less overall data to handle.
Next time you’re packing a lot of stuff up, see if you can use these tricks to improve your compression ratio.
I’ve officially started the ground work on version 2.1 of the Tritech Service System. Major changes and bug fixes that are already in the works:
Visit http://c02ware.com/tss.php periodically so you don’t miss the release!
Rather than writing many lengthy updates for each IP reported, I will maintain a list of IP ranges and who to report to at the bottom of this post. Also, if you have a blog or site, please link back to this post with the text “Scion Star Online Marketing” so other victims can find it more easily.
I have some clients who recently have been getting huge piles of spam messages from “Scion Star Online Marketing” (which appears to be a fictitious company name.) It seems that many others have posted complaints on various complaint websites about the same company. They don’t comply with unsubscribe requests and they send about 25 messages per day.
According to one set of headers in one of the messages forwarded to me by a client, they are using mail.gunneldown.com as the server, IP address of 98.158.237.40, which is hosted at AccelerateBiz. We are in the process of reporting them, but if you are also having trouble with Scion Star Online Marketing, you may find this useful.
You need to look up how to view message headers in your email client program, and view the headers for the spam message you suspect. You’re looking for an IP address starting with “98.158.” and the “158.” must be followed by any number from 224 to 239. If you see ANY IP address in the headers that is 98.158.XXX.YYY, where XXX is anywhere from 224 to 239, you need to contact AccelerateBiz at abuse@acceleratebiz.com to report the spam.
It’s very important to check the IP address in the headers, because if your spam doesn’t have it, then reporting it to AccelerateBiz will waste their time and yours.
Getting spammed by Scion Star Online Marketing but your header IPs don’t match AccelerateBiz hosting? Feel free to submit headers as a comment if your IP doesn’t match, and I will edit out your private information before allowing it to post and reply to you with the contact(s) you should try to get the spam stopped. Together we can teach these sneaky characters a lesson!
UPDATE: Complaintsboard.com has at least five complaints about these people, one of which indicates an originating IP address of 69.43.248.???, which is hosted by PacketExchange. PacketExchange owns the IP addresses from 69.43.XXX.YYY, where XXX is anywhere from 240 to 255. Report these to abuse@packetexchange.net instead of to AccelerateBiz.
List of IP address ranges and who to report to (xxx can be any number):
I have canceled the copyright-infringement-notice.com domain name and archived the text elsewhere on this blog. All of this content was written in 2012 and hasn’t been updated in years. I am keeping the post you’re currently reading for historical and entertainment purposes. If you follow any outdated advice or information given below, you do so entirely at your own risk. I am not a lawyer and only a fool would take anything I write as legal advice.
Update 5, 2012-12-06: I’m working out the details of a next-gen P2P file sharing program that should fix up most of the problems with P2P file sharing today, including the IP address issue.
Update 4, 2012-10-18: Added a rambling post containing my thoughts on why it’s impossible to prove that individuals infringed over the Internet without their own confession to doing so.
Update 3, 2011-11-02: Added a new post with an analysis and the actual text of one of these notices.
Update 2, 2011-11-02: My little site at http://copyright-infringement-notice.com/ has been massively updated, including a guide for people who are panicking and feel a need to do immediate damage control.
Update: This is one of the most popular pages on my entire blog now…so, I’m now running a small website that provides information about copyright infringement notices. Check it out at http://copyright-infringement-notice.com/ and give me additional ideas, suggestions, or information to make it better!
I generally keep myself aware of what’s going on with the whole peer-to-peer file sharing scene, particularly because the case law it generates changes the nature of copyright law in this country, and as someone who writes software, I need to know about such changes. Additionally, because I download a good number of legitimate files from BitTorrent trackers (i.e. Linux distribution CD images), I want to know what I’m stepping in. I’ve noticed a very disturbing trend over time which concerned me enough to finally write a whole blog post:
“Copyright cops” who threaten users of BitTorrent trackers frivolously pursue anyone whose IP appears on their radar and their evidence would not stand up to even the most trivial review.
That’s right, companies such as BayTSP, Copyright Enforcement Group, U.S. Copyright Group, and other paid agents of large media companies are bringing claims against torrent users without even collecting evidence of infringement. For example, the University of Washington was able to trigger a DMCA copyright infringement cease-and-desist notice being sent to their technical department. The copyright cops caught the user at this UW IP address RED-HANDED, INFRINGING ON THEIR COPYRIGHT!
The IP address being accused of BitTorrent-based copyright infringement belonged to a network printer.
No, I’m not kidding. The recording/movie/television industry copyright “enforcement” corporations accused their network printer of stealing movies. That’s how easy it is to be wrongly accused. But what else? There’s another experiment from 2007 which was performed with a specially written BitTorrent client which explicitly did not download nor upload any material, only jumped on a tracker and added itself to peer lists. This client, which was designed to be incapable of actually infringing copyrights, generated copyright infringement notices from BayTSP despite the fact that such infringement was simply not possible with that application!
I find this to be absolutely ridiculous, particularly because of the nature of these notices. Many of them are also legal threats. Regardless of innocence or guilt, any filing of a lawsuit against you costs money to handle, and if it’s so easy for these automated copyright scanning processes to both target the wrong person entirely AND target people who didn’t provably upload or download file data at all, that doesn’t bode well for any of the parties involved. It’s fairly obvious that the “copyright cop” companies are basing their claims of infringement solely on the population of BitTorrent trackers’ peer lists. They don’t actually download the entire file from you and keep logs that show they did so as evidence that you indeed infringed on their copyright; they merely see your address in a particular list and send off the notice.
Study 1: http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/
Study 2: http://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2007/02/big-media-dmca-notices-guilty-until.html
TechDirt article on this topic: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100401/0846028831.shtml
What’s even more outrageous to me is that these companies advertise their services as being unethical right off the bat. They resort to legal threats and mass lawsuits against “infringing parties” but they advertise it to content owners and rights holders this way: “Monetize copyright infringement! We can bring you income from a surprising source: people who download your content illegally!” It’s not even about doing the right thing, it’s about the bottom line, meaning they have no reason to care about innocent people being caught in the dragnet.
Despite the risk of a lawsuit, if you happen to receive a DMCA copyright infringement notice which is forwarded by your ISP, either by email or regular mail, here’s my advice:
As a creator of copyrighted works, I can’t condone the piracy of copyrighted material, but I also feel that the major media industry corporations have gone way too far with their “sue them all” tactics. If someone pirated my creation and I found out, I wouldn’t threaten them or demand a settlement payment so quickly; I’d ask them to do the right thing and just pay up for it if they liked it (or toss it if they didn’t and tell me why so I could make it better.)
Don’t steal stuff, but don’t let big companies steal from you for something you didn’t do either.
It would be nice to hear from a real copyright lawyer on this issue. Feel free to comment, especially if you’re a lawyer. I don’t post email addresses, your comment will be as anonymous as you name it to be.
You want an easy fix for this one? Uninstall Google Desktop. What’s going on with this? Google Desktop installs something called a Winlogon notification which is causing the hang-up. Google Desktop somehow gets broken and causes Winlogon to hang while sending the notification that you’re logging on; Control+Alt+Delete interrupts Winlogon, and causes it to abort the notification sending. If you check the system event logs, you’ll see evidence of this clearly spelled out, though Google Desktop won’t be mentioned as the culprit.
If your Windows XP system has icons on the desktop which absolutely refuse to show drop shadows, despite having changed the effects setting in the System control panel to use them, here’s what you need to do to fix it.
That’s all there is to it!
One of the most novel ideas has been that of having a TSS CD which doesn’t require upgrading, because every upgrade cycle I’m forced to distribute new burned CDs to all of the technicians and rewrite all of our bootable USB flash drives for the new system. TSS 3.0 will have the ability to upgrade over a network automatically during early startup.
I recently bought this laptop because Amazon had it as a “Lightning Deal” for $279 (reg. $399) and based on the specifications, there was no way I could resist making the purchase. I’m absolutely happy that I did. This laptop is a fantastic unit, one that is definitely worth the $399 price point, so with $120 off you’d be a complete fool not to purchase it.
I’ve written a lengthy review for Amazon on the product, but before I purchased, I found that there are no good reviews of the unit anywhere online. Thus, I’m re-posting my Amazon review here (with updates in the future, of course!) so that prospective buyers will be able to walk into the purchase of this laptop feeling well-informed.
(By the way, my Sylvania G netbook is still going great. It’s an awesome platform for testing software and websites on, and I continue to carry it with me everywhere I go.) On to the review of the eMachines eME527-2537 laptop!
I bought this laptop purely out of the compelling nature of the Amazon Lightning Deal price of $279 plus the specifications of the unit (since then it seems they’ve made the deal price the standard one, for now). I own a computer service business, so I know exactly how to research laptops for potential purchase down to the component level, and here’s why I decided to make the buy:
- CPU: It might be a cheap Celeron, but it has a 1MB cache and 64-bit capability, and is based on the Core 2 processor; DEFINITELY far more powerful than any netbook, and in my tests it plays 720p high-definition H.264 video clips without a single hitch. The lower cache is also somewhat mitigated by the dual-channel DDR3 memory.
- RAM: 2GB of dual-channel DDR3. Enough said. It’s the latest and greatest kind of memory, and there’s enough to get most typical things done. You could even run Photoshop if you wanted, and it’d be fine.
- Hard drive: 160GB SATA…pretty small by today’s standards, but it’s way more than most people will use, including myself since I have a desktop for all the big stuff.
- DVD-RW drive: YES, IT BURNS DVDs. Very compelling, particularly since netbooks’ main missing feature is an optical drive.
- 15.6″ widescreen: You can easily buy a laptop for $300 more and get a smaller screen. The image is crisp and I absolutely can’t complain. The resolution is really good, also. Plenty of video real estate to get things done.
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit: 64-bit! Not Starter Edition! Not Vista! What more could you ask for? (Also, Linux works great on it; I checked!)
- This thing isn’t a 17″ laptop, yet it has a numeric keypad! Not a full one, but just the fact that it has the standard 0-9 and Enter matrix in the proper place is amazing, and awfully handy for keeping those pesky financial records!
Some people will not like the lack of a webcam, but the most annoying compromise is the sound. While you can easily connect a set of speakers and get wonderful sound, the built-in speaker is mono (there is only one speaker), very quiet, and has a very poor response range. It’s sufficient for hearing sounds such as a mail notification (if ambient noise in the room is low), but it’s insufficient for almost everything else, including listening to music. Honestly, most people could care less about the missing cam and pitiful speaker, especially at this price point. It’s powerful, it gets the job done and does so at great speed, and the feature list is absolutely shocking for a $279 unit. If I was evaluating this at its “normal” $399 price, I would advise coughing up an extra $100 and buying a dual-core unit with 4GB and a 320GB hard drive instead, but the $120 off makes this an absolutely unbeatable offer. In fact, I’ve already helped three other people purchase one since mine was delivered and I evaluated it first-hand.
If you get this at a good price, you absolutely won’t be sorry. Just buy it!
Stay tuned for future updates.