After a long time and a lot of hard work, SqueezeCommander 0.9.6 finally arrives on AndroidMarket and on SlideME.

This version contains a lot of changes.

It has a new UI (similar to a well-known iOS app) and many new features.
You can now use Drag-And-Drop in the Playlist and the PlayerServerScreen (to sync/move players).
SqueezePlay/Jive menus do work now, i.e. most plugins will probably work.
If you enter an album, you can now select a default “playmode” (play/add/playnext) that will be used if you tap on an item.

Some new screenshots can be found at:
http://slideme.org/en/application/squeeze-commander

I’ll update the documentation to the new version in the next few days:
http://www.squeezecommander.com/doc

If you find any bugs/problems, please drop me a line at
android ATT flattermann DOTT net
or open a ticket in the tracker
http://www.squeezecommander.com/trac

Changelog of 0.9.6:
- Complete rewrite of most of the code
- Implemented SqueezePlay Menus (i.e. most plugins should work now)
- Adding Favorites does work
- Caching of Artists/Albums/Genres implemented
- Added Option to “Play other Tracks in Album”
- Random Mix
- Change the volume of all synchronized players
- Fixed Pandora Idle-Timeout-Bug
- MainMenu saves the last position
- A-Z index for Albums/Artists/Genres
- CustomBrowse support
- SongInfo support (e.g. for Lyrics)
- Auto text-size for most items
- Transcoding (e.g. FLAC to MP3) when downloading (needs SBS 7.6+)
- Expert Option to ignore Players or Servers
- Added HiRes and LowRes icons
- Swipe gesture (left-to-right) to go back within HomeMenu
- Caching of SqueezePlay menus where supported (e.g. CustomBrowse)
- Option to pre-fetch all album artwork after a DB Sync

Have fun!

Because the registration site for Google I/O 2011 was crap I was unable to get a ticket. ;-(

Therefore, I’m searching for a Google I/O 2011 ticket (either Academia or Regular).
If you want to sell one, please contact me and I’ll buy it for a reasonable price.

android [ATT] flattermann [DOTT] net

I’d really like to go this year…

Unfortunately, Java/Android does not offer an API to find a MAC address by IP.
The DatagramPacket class does not reveal this information for the source host, either.

But Android is Linux, and hence we can try to find the MAC by accessing the ARP cache information!

If we take a look at /proc/net/arp, we can find a table like this:

IP address       HW type     Flags       HW address            Mask     Device
192.168.18.11    0x1         0x2         00:04:20:06:55:1a     *        eth0
192.168.18.36    0x1         0x2         00:22:43:ab:2a:5b     *        eth0

So we can use a simple helper method that reads this file and returns the MAC for a specific IP address:

	/**
	 * Try to extract a hardware MAC address from a given IP address using the
	 * ARP cache (/proc/net/arp).<br>
	 * <br>
	 * We assume that the file has this structure:<br>
	 * <br>
	 * IP address       HW type     Flags       HW address            Mask     Device
	 * 192.168.18.11    0x1         0x2         00:04:20:06:55:1a     *        eth0
	 * 192.168.18.36    0x1         0x2         00:22:43:ab:2a:5b     *        eth0
	 *
	 * @param ip
	 * @return the MAC from the ARP cache
	 */
	public static String getMacFromArpCache(String ip) {
		if (ip == null)
			return null;
		BufferedReader br = null;
		try {
			br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("/proc/net/arp"));
			String line;
			while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
				String[] splitted = line.split(" +");
				if (splitted != null && splitted.length >= 4 && ip.equals(splitted[0])) {
					// Basic sanity check
					String mac = splitted[3];
					if (mac.matches("..:..:..:..:..:..")) {
						return mac;
					} else {
						return null;
					}
				}
			}
		} catch (Exception e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} finally {
			try {
				br.close();
			} catch (IOException e) {
				e.printStackTrace();
			}
		}
		return null;
	}

I’m using the OpenVPN Settings App for Android to connect to my OpenVPN (big thanks to Friedrich Schäuffelhut!).

It works great, but I was always annoyed about not having a home screen widget, because I use it pretty often.

Therefore, I’ve now added a simple 1×1 widget.
It’s not exactly pretty, but it fits my needs.

If you click the widget, it just enables/disabled the OpenVPN service.

You can get the OpenVPN Settings source here (the diff file is based on hg-rev. 37f16fd900):
http://code.google.com/p/android-openvpn-settings/

You can download the diff file for the widget support here:
http://www.flattermann.net/files/android/openvpn-widget-support.diff

For now, you need to recompile OpenVPN Settings on your own after applying the diff file, but I’ll also contact Friedrich, maybe he will add the widget support to his next official release.

Have fun!

http://twitter.com/flattermann09

Stay tuned!

It works pretty good and can also make use of multiprocessor CPUs by using the “Cluster Mode”, i.e. you start n nodes on your PC and dvd::rip will do the load balancing.

Unfortunately, some users (including me) have encountered a problem in cluster mode:
The process will stop with an error of “AVI file has no video data” for PSU1 while merging the video files.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=819529
http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/dvd:rip-cluster:-fehler-beim-merging/#post-964897
http://www.exit1.org/archive/dvdrip-users/2007-04/msg00049.html

The strange thing is that the source material only has a single PSU (Program Stream Unit) with actual data (PSU0).

PSU1 is empty, therefore transcode will throw this error.

Encoding the material in normal (not cluster) mode works, but it does not make use of your multiprocessor CPU and is therefore pretty slow.

I’ve applied a small hack to one of the Perl files so that very small PSUs (< 100 frames) will be ignored by dvd::rip.

For me, this has fixed the error and dvd::rip encodes the material without problems.

To patch the file, open the file /usr/share/perl5/Video/DVDRip/Title.pm and change the function calc_program_stream_units (around line 1205) from:

sub calc_program_stream_units {
...
 if ( $last_frame != 0 ) {
  push @program_stream_units,
  Video::DVDRip::PSU->new(
   nr     => $current_unit,
   frames => $last_frame,
  );
 }
...
1;
}

to:

sub calc_program_stream_units {
...
# Hack to remove very small PSUs (<100 frames)
# Christian Erpelding, http://www.flattermann.net
# 2010-10-26
 if ( $last_frame >= 100 ) {
  push @program_stream_units,
  Video::DVDRip::PSU->new(
   nr     => $current_unit,
   frames => $last_frame,
  );
 }
...
1;
}

PS: I’m using dvd::rip 0.98.11-0.0 from the Debian Multimedia Squeeze Repository (debian-multimedia.org).

Phones running this firmware will not be able to receive UDP broadcasts (sending works fine).

The issue is described on http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=8407

That makes apps that rely on UDP broadcasts, like SqueezeConfig, not working.

Fortunately, if you have root access to your phone, there is a solution!

As jimmychingala mentioned in the issue above, you only need to replace the wpa_supplicant binary with a working version.

I’ve now created a small app that will accomplish this task.

I’ve tested it with my HTC Hero running stock 2.1-update1 firmware and it’s working fine.

If you have another HTC phone running 2.1/2.2 and encounter the UDP issue, feel free to also try the app.
Please add a comment and tell me if it works for you.

The app will create a backup of wpa_supplicant on your sdcard first (/sdcard/wpa_supplicant.bak).
If anything goes wrong, you should be able to revert to your original version.

Anyway, a nandroid backup of your phone before using this app is strongly recommended.

You can download it from the Android Market (direct Market link or use the QR code) or from my server:
HtcUdpBroadcastFix.apk

You can also download the source code if you like:
HtcUdpBroadcastFix.src.tgz

After patching the wpa_supplicant binary, you can safely remove the app to save some space.

The app is licensed GPL:

(c) Christian Erpelding aka flattermann, http://www.flattermann.net

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

Version 0.9.5.1 is mostly a bugfix release:

• Added App2SD for Android 2.2+
  
• Fixed TrackStat problem
• Fixed cover art download problem
• No confirmation dialog when downloading single files
• Allow downloads to internal storage (“/emmc”), where applicable
• Fixed WOL config problem/crash
• Fixed alarm playlist selection on MySB
• Several smaller bugfixes

You can find the full ChangeLog here:
http://www.squeezecommander.com/trac/query?status=closed&group=resolution&milestone=0.9.5.1

As always, please report any problems in the Tracker:
http://www.squeezecommander.com/trac/

Have fun!

Christian

The solution to this problem is to use a VPN service that will give you an IP of the country of your choice.

I’ve now tried BlackVPN, a global OpenVPN service, located in the Netherlands.

It has VPN servers in 3 countries:

• USA
• UK
• Netherlands

You can either buy access to one of these countries (for 5 EUR per month) or to all of them (for 10 EUR per month).

You can access the service by using OpenVPN (that’s what I’m using and recommending) or PPTP.

See https://www.blackvpn.com/support/ for sample configurations for several platforms (Windows/Linux/MacOSX/iPhone…).

I’ve created a global account for 10 EUR and did some quick tests.

To check the speed of the OpenVPN, I’ve tried to download a Debian NetInst image (debian-506-amd64-netinst.iso). The file has a size of 132MiB.

Here are the results of my little speed test:

• Direct download (without active VPN): 795KiB/s (2:53 minutes)
• BlackVPN USA: 213KiB/s (14:42 minutes)
• BlackVPN UK: 594KiB/s (3:21 minutes)
• BlackVPN NL: 393KiB/s (7:06 minutes)

Of course, traffic through the VPN is slower than a direct connection, but I’m pretty impressed by the speed.
>200KiB/s (=1600KiBit/s) should be enough even for video streaming.

As I’m located in Germany, especially the UK/NL VPN servers are really fast.

If you like to try BlackVPN, you can use my Referral Code “BCFYSFP”.

Using this referral code, you will get 2 months VPN access as a free bonus (i.e. you pay for 1 month but get 3) and I will get one month for free.

Have fun!

It is a little helper app for Zerg players in the game StarCraft II®.

As a Zerg player, you need to spawn new larva with your Queen every 29 seconds (on game speed=fastest).

I tend to forget that (especially if a battle is going on) and that makes it very difficult to e.g. rebuild my army, because I’m short on larva.

Therefore I’ve created Zerg Timer.

It works this way:

1. Just before you spawn your larva, you click on the Start/Restart button in the App
2. Afterwards, you spawn larva in all hatcheries
3. The app will notify you as soon as the you can spawn larva again (depending on the game speed, this will take between 29s and 66.4s)
4. Go to step 1

Note:
A notification sound will be played when the timer hits zero and 50% later (if you forgot to spawn the larva/restart the timer).

Hint:
To quickly spawn larva in every hatchery, put all your queens in one group (e.g. group “0″) and repeat these steps for every hatchery:

• BackSpace (to jump to the next hatchery)
• “0″ (select all queens)
• “v” (select “Spawn Larva” ability)
• Click on the hatchery

You can download Zerg Timer on Android Market.

This App is not associated, affiliated, endorsed or sponsored by Blizzard nor has it been reviewed, tested or certified by Blizzard.
The App logo and the background image were taken from StarCraft II®, ©1998 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. StarCraft and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.