Category: Things I Learned

Things I learned

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Free National Academies Press publications

Something I rediscovered recently is that almost of the titles in the National Academies Press catalog are now available to read online for free or as a free PDF download.

The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academy of Sciences to publish the reports of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative information on important matters in science and health policy. The institutions served by the NAP are unique in their ability to attract leading experts in many fields to join panels and committees charged with providing policy advice on some of the nation’s most pressing scientific, technical, and health-related issues.

There are a great many titles available covering a wide range of scientific topics. The catalog is an interesting place to browse and I’ve already grabbed a handful of publications including some previous BEIR (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) reports.

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Morse code ringtones and vibration patterns

Yesterday I discovered that I can make custom vibration notification patterns for people in my Contacts list.

On the Galaxy S2, select a contact, scroll down to Vibration Pattern tap it to bring up a list and hit the Create button. When you tap the center of the circle, a line starts to sweep around the circle and you just tap out the vibration pattern you want to create. I’ve used it to create some Morse code vibration patterns for a few people

While I was doing that, I figured why not do the same for ring tones! Using the text to CW converter at lcwo.net made it super easy. Enter your text, select the speed and tone to play it and it gives you a link where you can download an MP3 file to send to the phone to use as a ring tone.

Play / Pause  

Learn CW Online – LCWO.net – Text to Morse Converter

So now for a few people stored in my phone, I have call sign Morse code ring tones and vibration patterns set up.

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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.