Friday, 17 August 2012

Bypass Android Pattern Lock In Easy Steps

Android devices has this security feature known as pattern lock which prevents the access of other people in your device. One of the senior members at XDA has revealed a way to bypass this pattern lock feature completely.

There have been several attempts on finding different methods for bypassing pattern unlocking in the android devices. Early methods were tracking the smudges on the screen and guessing since human are more likely to use the patterns they have already seen.

This method, posted in XDA developers forum by m.sabra, requires the USB debugging to be enabled in the android device and then you can use ADB (Android Debug Bridge), a part of Android SDK to easily bypass the pattern unlock with few lines of commands. The user has revealed two methods for bypassing this, the first one involves running few SQLite queries and the second one requires deleting the associated key.

You will need to download the Android SDK in order to continue with this hack.

Method 1:

adb shell
cd /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases
sqlite3 settings.db
update system set value=0 where name='lock_pattern_autolock';
update system set value=0 where name='lockscreen.lockedoutpermanently';
.quit

AND/OR

Method 2:

adb shell rm /data/system/gesture.key

You can either choose one of the methods or perform both of the methods (method 1 first and method 2 second). Be sure to reboot once you perform any of the above mentioned methods.



Users have said that this method is not working on the latest Android Jelly Bean and other custom ROMs such as Cyanogen Mod. But, earlier android versions are vulnerable to this hack.

Even if the USB debugging is disabled, you can still run these methods if custom recovery was installed in the android device. You will have to mount the working partition. Just go to 'Mounts and Storage' and mount /data. Then you can follow the above methods to bypass the lock.


Read more...

Monday, 13 August 2012

Screen Recording Software Solutions For Linux

Windows users have several options to choose from when it comes to the desktop recording (and only paid ones are good generally) but Linux users have fewer options but robust, simple, and best of all, free and open source desktop screen recording tools that we can trust on.

Below are some of the screen recording tools you might want to try:

recordMyDesktop


recordMyDesktop is a desktop session recorder for GNU/Linux written in C. recordMyDesktop itself is a command-line tool and few GUI frontends are also available for this tool. There are two frontends, written in python with pyGtk (gtk-recordMyDesktop) and pyQt4 (qt-recordMyDesktop). recordMyDesktop offers also the ability to record audio through ALSA, OSS or the JACK audio server. Also, recordMyDesktop produces files using only open formats. These are theora for video and vorbis for audio, using the ogg container.

Installation under debian and ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

XVidCap


XVidCap is a small tool to capture things going on on an X-Windows display to either individual frames or an MPEG video. It enables you to capture videos off your X-Window desktop for illustration or documentation purposes.It is intended to be a standards-based alternative to tools like Lotus ScreenCam.

sudo apt-get install xvidcap

Istanbul


Istanbul is a desktop session recorder for the Free Desktop. It records your session into an Ogg Theora video file. To start the recording, you click on its icon in the notification area. To stop you click its icon again. It works on GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others. It was named so as a tribute to Liverpool's 5th European Cup triumph in Istanbul on May 25th 2005.

sudo apt-get install istanbul

Vnc2Flv


Vnc2flv is a cross-platform screen recording tool for UNIX, Windows or Mac. It captures a VNC desktop session (either your own screen or a remote computer) and saves as a Flash Video (FLV) file.

Wink


Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. It requires GTK 2.4 or higher and unfortunately is just a freeware(could not find any source code for it).

Screenkast


Screenkast is a screen capturing program that records your screen-activities, supports commentboxes and exports to all video formats.

If you got any more suggestions, please drop the comment. :)


Read more...

Download Youtube Videos From Command-Line With Youtube-dl

youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and few more sites. All it requires is the Python interpreter version 2.5 or higher, and it is not platform specific.

This small tool is simple and offers everything you would love to have, but not the GUI. It supports several websites listed as below:

Supported sites

YouTube.com.
YouTube.com playlists (playlist URLs in "view_play_list" form).
YouTube.com searches
YouTube.com user videos, using user page URLs or the specifc "ytuser" keyword.
metacafe.com.
Google Video.
Google Video searches ("gvsearch" keyword).
Photobucket videos.
Yahoo! video.
Yahoo! video searches ("ybsearch" keyword).
Dailymotion.
DepositFiles.
blip.tv.
vimeo.
myvideo.de.
The Daily Show / Colbert Nation.
The Escapist.
A generic downloader that works in some sites.

You can download the tool from GitHub. For more information about the tool, check the documentation. The standalone executable for windows is also available for download from the same github repository.


Read more...

Sunday, 12 August 2012

Rootbeer - High Performance GPU Computing in JAVA

Good news for JAVA guys that the high performance GPU compiler has been released that aims to bring high performance GPU computing to the Java Programming Language with the minimal effort from the developer.

Rootbeer is more advanced than CUDA or OpenCL Java Language Bindings. With bindings the developer must serialize complex graphs of objects into arrays of primitive types. With Rootbeer this is done automatically. Also with language bindings, the developer must write the GPU kernel in CUDA or OpenCL. With Rootbeer a static analysis of the Java Bytecode is done (using Soot) and CUDA code is automatically generated.

Rootbeer was created using Test Driven Development and testing is essentially important in Rootbeer. Rootbeer is 20k lines of product for and 7k of test code and all tests pass on both Windows and Linux. The Rootbeer test case suite covers every aspect of the Java Programming language except:
1. native methods
2. reflection
3. dynamic method invocation
4. sleeping while inside a monitor.

This means that all of the familar Java code you have been writing can be executed on the GPU.

GitHub of Rootbeer



Read more...

Thursday, 9 August 2012

Slalom Canoe 2012 Google Doodle Trick

Google has been releasing the doodles with the Olympic themes and the latest one is the Slalom Canoe doodle. If you guys have not been trying these doodles, you are missing the obvious fun. In this post, I'll reveal a very very simple trick to obtain extremely short timing so that you guys can share in fb and boast with your friends :D

Most of the people have been using the HTML inspection and editing to have an awesome statistics in the doodle. The trick is to use the "Inspect Element" feature of the browsers and edit the values of different HTML elements that wrap the scores and stars.

However, many non-techies might have found that method to be cumbersome so here's even more simpler trick. The trick here is to note the system time you start canoeing and once you are near to the end of race, edit your system time to retain the value, for example, only 1 second ahead of system time you had noted while you were starting.

If you don't know how to change system time, windows users can access through the bottom right part of the Desktop where your system time is displayed and linux users should right-click and select preferences in one of the panels containing time.

You can even leave the slalom canoe tab as it is and continue your other tasks and once you feel you are to the end of the race, adjust the system time so that the difference from starting time is minimal (as you need).


The best thing about this trick is its simplicity and clean nature which leaves no trail for finding the cheating (of course, unless you decide to have too low time or negative time).

Note that this is cheating and is discouraged though :D

Original credits to Brisha for this trick.


Read more...

Saturday, 28 July 2012

Download Windows Binaries For Python Packages

Someone from the University of California has made it easier for windows python users to install python extension packages easily by providing several 32-bit and 64-bit windows binaries for several scientific open source python libraries.

If you can't figure out your way in installing python libraries, you can download the binaries for several libraries from HERE.

Most binaries are built from source code found on PyPI or in the projects public revision control systems. Definitely the page to be bookmarked for the windows python'ers if you want to easily install python libraries :)


Read more...

How To Easily Install EasyInstall In 64 bit Windows

Easy Install(easy_install) is a python module (easy_install) bundled with setuptools that lets you automatically download, build, install, and manage Python packages. Easy Install gives you a quick and painless way to install packages remotely by connecting to the cheeseshop or even other websites via HTTP. It is somewhat analogous to the CPAN and PEAR tools for Perl and PHP, respectively. This How To will guide you in installing the easy_install utility easily in windows.

First download the ez_setup.py file.

Run the above script by typing in command prompt the following:

python.exe ez_setup.py


Once the script finishes, new directory "Scripts" will be created in the python installation directory and it will contain the easy_install.exe file in that directory.

Now all you have to do is add the Scripts path to system's Environment Variables to access this tool easily.

Right click on computer, go to properties, Advanced System Settings, Environment Variables, System Variables and edit the "Path" variable by adding correct path to the Scripts directory.

I hope this helps :)


Read more...

Friday, 27 July 2012

Determine Your SATA Disk Model And Vendor In Ubuntu

Sometimes you need to determine the model and vendor of your hard disk and here is the small tips on how to find those information.

All you have to do is type one of the following commands for the respective outputs:
cat /sys/class/block/sda/device/model

cat /sys/class/block/sda/device/vendor
I hope this becomes useful sometimes. :)


Read more...