Rooting and unlocking my new Android mobile phone: LG-E400

Last week I got an LG-E400 for free because her owner was not really taking advantage of all its features. The phone was locked to her phone network, so I had to unlock it and root it in order to make it usable. Since I will likely need again this information in the future, I write down some of the resources used.

First thing was to hard reset it, thanks to this page, and then root it. To root it I tried with SuperOneClick, but I was having troubles. As it turns out the firmware of my phone was V10P, and so the version of SuperOneClick I was using was not able to root it. But thanks to this post by AlexPS I got it rooted without problems (it didn't work using "mono" in Linux or in a Windows virtual machine, so I had to borrow a real Windows PC just for this). 

To unlock the phone from its network, I was looking at pages like http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1693491 and http://www.emudesc.com/threads/como-liberar-tu-movil-con-sistema-android-100-funciona.413513/, but the method in the second link didn't work, and the first one was for another model and I was not sure it would work, so in the end I went the easy way: just went to CodesIMEIS page, and by using the promotional code "GSM" (I got that info from some Forum I can't remember anymore), the phone was unlocked for 1€ in about 10 minutes. Then to access the Internet, I followed the instructions from my network provider to configure the phone properly.

The next thing was to increase the very small system memory (157MB, where all the applications would go by default), so that I could install more applications. For some reason the installed SuperUser app was giving me trouble, so I updated it before continuing. The next thing was to prepare a MicroSD card to hold the installed apps. Despite what it is said in some guides, I had to partition my 2GB card as 999MB FAT32 (Logical) and 898MB ext2 (Primary), following the advice at http://www.htcmania.com/archive/index.php/t-449048.html  (pictures, etc. go to the FAT32 partition, and the installed applications go to the ext2 partition).

Then, the next thing was to download Link2SD, so I followed Part C of the instructions at http://rootlord.blogspot.com.es/2013/06/how-to-increase-memory-on-lg-l3-e400.html

After that, I installed a number of applications (Angry Birds, Endomondo K-9 Mail, ...), and the internal memory status is quite healthy, while I see that 181MB of application data have gone to the MicroSD card. Bingo!

Classical guitar progress logging (September'13)

August was too hot to play, so I skipped that recording. In September instead of a guitar recording I present this little exercise that I had to do for the Coursera course "Survey of Music Technology" (here I'm not really playing the guitar at all, but learning to mix audio (July's recording and some other sound clips) with MIDI in a DAW, this time Reaper).

Classical guitar progress logging (July'13)

I forgot to update it in July, but this was the piece for July: Summer Souvenir (by Giorgio Signorile):

 
Summer Souvenir (by Giorgio Signorile) from Angel de Vicente on Vimeo.

Classical guitar progress logging (June'13)

This month we had the Music school guitar concert, so I uploaded a part of it. The original sound recorded with my crappy camera was horrible. After massaging it a bit with Audacity it is now just audible, but couldn't get any better. Next time I will try to get a proper microphone...

Music school June'13 Concert (part) from Angel de Vicente on Vimeo.

Classical guitar progress logging (May'13)

For this month I'm playing Amor Flamengo, by Laurindo Almeida. I think it is the first time that I play something non-classical. Should work on getting it a bit faster and with more rhythm, but here it is what I get so far:


Amor Flamengo, by Laurindo Almeida from Angel de Vicente on Vimeo.

Classical guitar progress logging (Apr'13)

For this month I'm playing Andaluza (Danza española, n.5), by Enrique Granados (1867 - 1916), with a YouTube partner.

The video used is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suTKOmmoBtw. With the help of youtube-dl (http://angel-de-vicente.blogspot.com.es/search?q=youtube-dl) I get the mp3 file:

angelv@pilas:~/GUITAR-APRIL$ youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format=mp3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suTKOmmoBtw

Then I use that one for practice, with the help of audacity. With it, I can use this track nicely for practice by:

• splitting the stereo track and muting the right channel, which has mostly the sound of the first guitar, which I'm playing. I also normalize the audio, as it has some saturation in a couple of places.
• using the "Change Tempo" effect, so that I can practice slower, but maintaining the right pitch.

For creating the final video, I created a stereo track and put the YouTube recording in the left channel (after removing its right channel, which is where most of the first guitar was recorded), and myself in the right channel (so it is more or less like I'm playing a duet with Marisa Gomez). The result is here:

Andaluza (Danza española, n.5), by Enrique Granados (1867 - 1916) from Angel de Vicente on Vimeo.

As an aside: For this piece I wanted to try with my Aria Silent guitar but I just found out that the line-in jack in my Dell Latitude E6530 is one of these combined in/out connections. By mistake I bought just an audio splitter where in reality I needed a Headphone and Microphone Jack Audio Splitter, so I had to do it with the Acer Aspire 1810T netbook.

Presentations with org-mode + beamer

I decided to give a try to creating presentations with Org-mode (and Beamer). In the end I got something that looks nice (though further tweaking will be required).

Webs that helped me to get it:

• For a nice template: http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/rtc/event/introduction-r
• To get movie playbacks in PDFs in Linux: 
• http://abarry.org/the-complete-guide-to-embedded-videos-in-beamer-under-linux/
•  http://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/flashmovie/flashmovie.sty
•  https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.text.tex/VLg2UE3kpLA[1-25-false] 
•  To shorten the titles, etc. in the footer:
•  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2011-01/msg00177.html
•  http://www.uncg.edu/cmp/reu/presentations/Charles%20Batts%20-%20Beamer%20Tutorial.pdf
•  To get rid of navigation symbols:
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1435837/how-to-remove-footers-of-latex-beamer-templates
• For semi-transparency:
• http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.editors.lyx.general/72441
• To scale images: 
• http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2011-03/msg01554.html
•  Greying-out images: in the TO-DO list

I also had to do a couple of small changes to the file flashmovie.sty (which is in the in this tar file). The basic theme of the presentation can be seen below and the resulting PDF (in Linux I think the embedded video will work only with Acroread 9.4.1) is this.