Steven Osborn

1/12th Scale Canoe

steve918 — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 12:53:00 +0000

Built from the free 14′ Canoe plans available on http://www.bateau.com/ from the back of a legal pad, some scotch tape, whiteout and Sharpe.

$51 Standing Desk

steve918 — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 22:40:34 +0000

Below are some pictures of my office in my new house. The piece I’m most proud of is the standing desk I put together from cheap parts purchased at IKEA. Overall I have $51.50 in parts. To keep cost down it’s mounted on one side and the back to the wall using standard shelf mounts I paid $0.50ea for. The top is an IKEA Vika Amon for $20 and the single leg is a Vika Byske priced at $30.00. You could save some money if you came up with a cheaper option for the leg, but this one looks good and is adjustable up to the height I needed.

Attaching the legs to the bottom of the table. Notice three sides are attached to the wall with $0.50 shelf mounts.

Using the file cabinet to support one side, nothing attached to the wall yet, just getting it level.

The final result! Being used to write this blog post.

I spent some time and searching a experimenting with different heights by stacking my file cabinet and some books on the side opposite the leg. I settled in around 44.5″ and screwed it into the wall with the assistance of a laser level.

I’ve drilled a hole through the top with my hole saw and just need to find a grommet to stick in it to finish it off.

Read Sync

steve918 — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 20:46:30 +0000

While riding the train home I finished a book I had been reading and immediately went in search of something new. I quickly became frustrated with Amazon’s suggestions which included every Django book ever printed because I once bought a book on the subject. It also included many irrelevant items, including scrap-booking items that were a result of my wife sharing my account. So I did what I usually do and asked my friends on IRC what the recommend. This produced immediate results. I had a good recommendation from a trusted source.

This experience motivated me to improve this process and make it easier for people to share what they are reading and discover new content. There are other great services like Goodreads that have similar goals, but in the age of e-readers, I should be able to share automatically and effortlessly.

The real problem is that none of the popular e-reader companies (including Amazon) offer an API that would allow someone to build something like this. But what kind of hacker would let something like a lack of API hinder innovation? So I spent a few days taking apart the Kindle App for Android, taking it apart until I had a service that could mimic it and register itself as another Kindle device.

The result is Read Sync, a simple Facebook application that allows you to share your Kindle reads with friends, see what books your friends have read and recommend and which of your friends own a particular book.

The screen shot above is an example of a book two of my friends have on their Amazon bookshelves. On this screen I can see details about the book, related titles, and what friends have read it. If I click on one of my friends pictures it takes me to their bookshelf where I can explore what they have read.

Decompiling Android Apps

steve918 — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 01:02:14 +0000

Once you have an APK you want to take a look at you need to extract the contents of it. An APK is really just a jar/zip file. To extract it’s contents just

unzip YourApp.apk

This will give you a directory with all the resources in it along with a classes.dex file. This file is the compiled Dalvik code. There are a couple of good tools for decompiling the dex. Below is a link to each of them along with instructions on how to run it.

Dedexer: http://dedexer.sourceforge.net/

The following will decompile classes.dex into the out_dir of your choice. Just download the Dedexer jar from the link above and rename the jar to ddx.jar or change the command below to reflect the new filename.

java -jar ddx.jar -d out_dir classes.dex

I also recommend taking a look at this presentation on Dedexer on slideshare.

Smali/Baksmali: http://code.google.com/p/smali/

Smali is ‘assembler’ in Icelandic and Baksmali is ‘disassembler’. All we care about right this second is disassembly so you want to download the baksmali jar. I also recommend downloading the wrapper script and the example below assumes you are running baksmali via that wrapper. This will place the decompiled results into a directory called ‘out’.

baksmali classes.dex

Doing this is almost a violation of the terms of service for any application you look at so be-careful and use these tools for good.

Update: I created a Textmate bundle for syntax highlighting smali, check it out: http://github.com/steve918/smali-textmate-bundle

Lolsborn

steve918 — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:12:45 +0000

Android 2.2 isUserAMonkey() check

steve918 — Sat, 22 May 2010 06:16:45 +0000

Per the documentation: Returns “true” if the user interface is currently being messed with by a monkey.

There is another gem in the Log class, they’ve added a new log level ‘wtf‘ which in this case means “What a Terrible Failure”

Email is Evil

steve918 — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:04:54 +0000

I’ve had my suspicions for a while, this settles it.

DropBox on Android

steve918 — Wed, 05 May 2010 03:47:43 +0000

I’m a huge fan of Dropbox so android support is a welcome addition.

http://bit.ly/9tDeXd

iPhone Dual boots Android

steve918 — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:15:49 +0000

And it has Multitasking! :-p

http://www.pcworld.com/article/194748/hack_iphone_now_runs_android.html

What The New iPhone Could Mean For Gaming

steve918 — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:14:28 +0000

Basically the forward facing camera gives it a lot of the properties of a DSi

http://kotaku.com/5520381/what-the-new-iphone-could-mean-for-gaming