Don't Hurt Your Head!

Archive for the ‘Mobile Electronics’ Category

Why would you need a SSH Tunnel? You may want to get around a firewall or just encrypt your communications so prying eyes can not see what you are doing online.  On Linux/Unix system you can tunnel all of the traffic from your local box to a remote box that you have a shell account on. You can do the same with Android, and here is how:

First you will need to download some software from the Android Market. The following are FREE apps.

SSH Tunnel This will build the tunnel for your browser to use.

Firefox, a good browser with an easy tunneling add on.

Proxy Mobile Add On

Install all three.

Then you will need a SSH account somewhere. There are a lot of free SSH services out there. Send me an email at brad@crackednoodle.com if you want to hear my favorite, or run a google search and I am sure you will find a couple. Make sure they support SSH Tunneling. Sign up and get a user name and password. You can also use your own SSH server if you have one.

Now open up your  SSH Tunnel program on your Android device. and put in your credentials. Hostname, Username, Passowrd, click on the Use SOCKS Proxy click box and make  note  of the port. It was 1984 for me. Activate the SSH Tunnel by clicking on the Tunnel Switch Check box  (tunnel has to be activated every time you use it).

Next open the Firefox browser and go to the Add Ons in options. Open the options for Proxy Mobile. Set Use Proxy, set SOCKS proxy to 127.0.0.1 and SOCKS port to 1984 (or the port you used on SSH Tunnel).

Your Tunnel should now be working! Enjoy and use wisely.

How to Video:

There are a couple of things you need to set up to control your servers with your Android phone. Here are the tools I use. First it helps to have a good broadband connection to you server. I prefer to use SSH to to communicate with my servers.

The fist tool I am going to talk about is Connect Bot. ConnectBot is a powerful open-source Secure Shell (SSH) client. It can manage simultaneous SSH sessions, create secure tunnels, and copy/paste between other applications. This client allows you to connect to Secure Shell servers that typically run on UNIX-based servers.

The next one is the Hackers Keyboard. A full 5-row keyboard including arrow and Esc/Ctrl keys, intended for tablets. Are you missing the key layout you’re used to from your computer? This keyboard has separate number keys, punctuation in the usual places, and arrow keys. It is based on the AOSP Gingerbread soft keyboard, so it supports multitouch for the modifier keys. This keyboard is especially useful if you use ConnectBot for SSH access. It provides working Tab/Ctrl/Esc keys, and the arrow keys are essential for devices such as the Xoom tablet or Nexus S that don’t have a trackball or D-Pad.

Last tool is BotSync.

BotSync periodically synchronizes files with a remote SSH SFTP server, over the wifi or cell network. As new files/directories are created, BotSync will recursively download them to the phone, or upload them to the server (like rsync). Use it to transfer new content securely, wirelessly, and automatically. Why pay for Dropbox (although there is a free option) when you can run your own private cloud? BotSync works with opensshd – no inefficient, expensive, or potentially-insecure server SW required. BotSync transfers about 4X faster than AndFTP SFTP.

These are the 3 tools I use the most. You will need to know the IP of your server and have the SSh port 22 forward from your router. You can use the Connect Bot to connect to the server and run your scripts and Control your server. The Hacker’s Keyboard allows you to easier type on your server during your session.

Bot Sync you use to keep all your files up to date and sync via SSH.

I would recommend setting up your servers security to only connect to your cell phone. I will cover SSH security in my next article.

I am old school, I love the Atari 2600 games. I know that Stella is a good EMU for Linux, I was happy to find that they have a version for Windows Mobile.
Go to the Stella site and download the version for Windows Mobile. Then unzip it in your phone. and copy over your roms. If you don’t have any Atari 2600 games do a Bittorrent search and you will find some.

Then start the program and Enjoy.

Here is a little movie of my Blackjack.

Here is some more info on BlackJack II must have software.

I recently got myself a Samsung Blackjack II (AT&T). I love the phone, but noticed right away that it needed more. So I started finding all the software that worked well. I tested a lot of crappy programs, hope it saves you some time. I have a nice little list of software that makes this phone much nicer. Hope it helps.

1. The Explorer that comes with Windows mobile 6 sucks. Get yourself the Skyfire Browser. the Skyfire browser is currently in Beta but seems to work great. With Skyfire you can watch any video (yes including http://www.youtube.com), listen to any music, socialize on any network and browse whatever you want. It is the best browser I have found for the moble platform. Get it at http://www.skyfire.com/.
2. Get yourself a big micro SD card. 2 gig or better. 4 gig is a nice price point. The phone allows you to use it as a USB drive also.
3. Get a the Divx player for the mobile platform. This allows you to play all those divx movies you have at home on your computer. I don’t even bother making the files smaller, thats why I said go with the bigger card. It is a free download http://www.divx.com/mobile/
4. Dowload Google Maps, it might just keep you from getting lost.
5. GPS, here is the fun part. Now AT&T would have you think that you can only use the GPS on the phone if you pay an extra $9.99 a month. Not true! Here is how you unlock your Samsung Blackjack II GPS.
6. You also may want a better GPS app. Check out Noni GPS Plot.