Tips and Tricks for Android Users
Posts tagged wifi
Using Your Android Phone as a Remote Control
Feb 14th
What I initially set out to do was find a program for my G2 that would allow me to use it as a Bluetooth trackpad and keyboard with the Mac mini I have hooked up to my television. I use it as a media PC, but it’s also a general purpose system. Every now and again it’s convenient to be able to control it using a full keyboard and mouse.
I haven’t yet run across the right tool to get my phone to work as a Bluetooth HID device for my computer. But there are some decent VNC clients that do interesting things. I’ve started using AndroidVNC as my default. I wish I could turn off the screen on the device completely. As is I turn the color depth all the way down. Because I’m sitting in front of the computer I can watch the pointer onscreen, transferring the video data over my G2 just cases it to lag.
The essential part to making it work well is to go into the settings and swap the pointer mode to trackpad. That way you can use the touchscreen on the device as a trackpad instead of having to pan around and touch directly (or use the tiny directional trackpad). You still need a VNC server on your PC, but I’m running one anyway so it’s not much of an issue for me. Still, would be nice to be able to use the Bluetooth HID version for other cases. Surprised at the lack of Bluetooth based Android hackery.
Monitoring Network Traffic Using OS X
Jun 1st
Here’s a tip for monitoring network traffic from your Android phone using OS X. The same thing works for iPhone (or any other mobile device you can configure to use a wifi connection). I frequently use it to see how some bit of client/server interaction is done.
- Install Wireshark
- Follow the instructions in the readme to also install the ChmodBPF script
- Under Sharing area of the OS X settings app configure your system to use an ethernet connection and share it out to wifi clients
- Now configure your device to connect to the wifi network provided by your system, test to make sure it works
- Startup Wireshark and set it to capture traffic (wifi is en1 on MacBook Pro systems, what I normally use)
And that’s it, you should now get quite readable dumps of what applications are doing to communicate. Lots of interesting things you can learn digging into how folks structure their client/server interaction.
Toggle Settings
May 25th
Normally I have a few quick toggle applications sitting on my home screen to quickly switch on and off Bluetooth, Wifi, GPS, etc. It really saves a ton of battery life switching off hardware when it’s not in use. I just ran across the free Toggle Settings app from cooolmagic. It has all the hardware switches, some cool status info (like what wifi network you’re connected to), and new toggles for stuff like auto-sync. Very useful, and it looks pretty slick. Just search for “Toggle Settings” in the market and you should find both the 1.1 and 1.5 versions of the app. Here’s a quick rundown of the controls:
- Turn on and off airline mode
- Turn on and off autosync
- Turn on and off bluetooth
- Turn on and off GPS
- Turn on and off Wifi, and show what network you’re connected to if you are connected
- Control the brightness level and screen timeout, or disable screen timeout completely
- Turn on and off silent mode
- Control the volume
