Category: Computer bits

Computer stuff

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Galaxy S II and email encryption

During the course of setting up some non-GMail accounts on my SGSII (running Andriod 4.1.2), I discovered the security options in the stock email client (not the GMail client). It lets you select whether to encrypt and/or sign all email, generate and manage secret/private keys and even import them.

I don’t know if this is a stock Android email client, or a stock Samsung TouchWiz client and as far as I could tell with some quick searching, the encryption bit isn’t mentioned anywhere that I could find with about 15 minutes of Google-ing.

I did some experimenting starting with generating a public/private key pair. The key creation dialogue lets you create RSA keys that are 1024 or 2048 bits, or 1024 bit DSA keys. So it looks like something PGP or GnuPG-ish.

Android Email Key GenerationAndroid Email Key Algorithms
Android Email Key Length 

There’s an option to import a key, but it doesn’t let you select a location or file to import from, so it must be looking in some hardocded location.

Exporting the public key I created dumps an ASCII-armoured PGP  file into /storage/sdcard0/openpgp/export with a BCPG v1.45 version identifier

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: BCPG v1.45

Some Google searching suggests the Bouncy Castle Crypto APIs as a likely candidate for this. Their libraries include APIs for OpenPGP. So it looks like I should be able to import my existing GnuPG keys and use them to encrypt/sign my emails with this client. That will be my homework for the next post.

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Fedora + Epson V200 scanner

Getting my Epson V200 scanner to work with Fedora has, in my experience, been kind of hit and miss with each version. Managed to get it to work a few years ago with Fedora 8, and then it stopped working again for a while with subsequent upgrades.

With Fedora 18, I managed to get it to work again installing a couple of iscan-* packages, but with the upgrade to Fedora 19, only the iscan-firmware package was left, with no evidence of the other iscan package I thought I had installed.

A little bit of searching got me the packages I needed to install though.

  • Install iscan-firmware and sane-backends from the Fedora repos
  • Find the driver and software for your Epson unit at http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/search/01/search/searchModule. In my case I was looking for the Epson V200 Photo scanner software and downloaded these:
    • iscan-2.29.1-5.usb0.1.ltdl7.x86_64.rpm
    • iscan-data-1.23.0-1.noarch.rpm
    • iscan-plugin-gt-f670-2.1.2-1.x86_64.rpm
  • Install in this order
    • iscan-data-1.23.0-1.noarch.rpm
    • iscan-2.29.1-5.usb0.1.ltdl7.x86_64.rpm
    • iscan-plugin-gt-f670-2.1.2-1.x86_64.rpm

The order of the last two packages (iscan and iscan-plugin-gt-f670) may not matter, but iscan-data needs to be installed before the other two. After that, I was able to scan again by running iscan at a terminal window.

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Twitter-less Pidgin

With the retiring of Twitter’s API v1.0 a couple days ago, the microblog-purple plugin that lets you use Pidgin as a Twitter client stopped working.

The API retiring has been coming for a while and there’s doesn’t seem to have been any development activity on mb-purple since 2010, so i’m on the hunt for something else that lets me keep using Pidgin, or some other IM client that I can use with Twitter, Jabber/XMPP and IRC. Maybe some kind soul will fork the plugin and fix it up for the v1.1 API.

I’d take a stab at it, but after a quick look at the source code and the Twitter API, it’s probably beyond my rudimentary skills. I might play with it anyway.

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Cracked tablet screen

I try to take care of my devices. I wrap them in cases, put protective covers on their screens and try to treat them gently.

I must not be a good caretaker for my devices because lately it seems like they all want to die or something.

First the phone went belly up. Shipped it off to the Samsung service center, where it took about a week for them to get to and is now waiting on parts to finish the repair.

Today my tablet squirmed out of my arms and hit the ground. The case took most of the impact, but one of the exposed corners still got dinged and the glass cracked there.

cracked tablet screen

Fortunately the tablet is still functional and the damage is largely cosmetic. I’ll have to see what I can do to keep the cracking from spreading. The damage certainly could have been worse if the tablet had landed on the exposed side instead. Still this makes me very sad.

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Dead phone

Well, after only 16 months, my phone has broken. Right in the middle of my using it, the phone went dark. After waiting for a couple minutes for it to come back to life, I decided to pull the battery and restart. Unfortunately it didn’t restart. The boot screen appeared briefly, but went off again and the phone started vibrating every 2 seconds.

A bit of googling suggests that the power switch has gone bad/stuck and shorted out or something, and that it’s a relatively common problem. This thread over at the xda developers forum suggests a possible fix or work around to try.

Since the phone is a few months out of warranty, I might give it a try. The alternative would be to send it in to Samsung to see if an out of warranty repair could be done. Since it is a known issue, maybe they’d even be able to do it as a warranty repair. Will have to get in touch with them to see.

I don’t feel like I’ve had this phone long enough to warrant getting a new one, although the S4 looks pretty nice. I don’t think we could squeeze it into the budget right now though.