Text Message Storage Limits

We need open source cell phones

So I’ve been rather perturbed for a very long time at the 50/50 inbox/outbox limit of stored SMS text messages in all LG cell phones.  Other phones have similar limits, like a Samsung I have is limited to 100/50, and it just erases messages when an overflow occurs, as opposed to the nice prompts on my LG VX9800, with its QWERTY keyboard, which I love.

I have done some minor hacking on cell phones and tinkered with the firmware, but without a proper emulator, I would never be able to find out where the 50 cap is set and be able to make a hack for phones could store more.

So today, I was at a Verizon store [unimportant ordeal here] because I got a little bit of water on my LG phone and it was having issues.  Immediately after the spill, it had a bunch of problems including the battery thinking it was always charging, buttons on the front side sending two different buttons when pressed, and some other buttons not working.  I immediately set to shaking it out at all angles to get most of the water out (which there wasn’t much to begin with...), and then I thoroughly blow dried every opening into the inside circuitry.  This fixed everything but the worst problem, signal dropping.  Basically, the phone would lose any connection it made after about 5 seconds, so I couldn’t really answer or makes calls.  Fortunately I was still able to send and receive SMS messages, but received ones didn’t signal the server they were received, and I kept receiving them over and over and over until a connection finally stayed open long enough to tell the server I got it.
So I took it back to the store to see if they could fix it, and all they tried was updating the firmware... but they said I could trade it in for another phone for $50, which I figured from the beginning is what I would have to do, and was a good idea anyways because of this [temporarily down].
So they realized they had no replacements in stock... or at the warehouse... for the VX9800 OR the VX9900, which they said they’d upgrade me too if they couldn’t find and VX9800, and I wanted (yay).  So I was told to call back tomorrow and try again.  Bleh. Anyways, I was at the store where I found out why this was.  Apparently, cell phones start slowing down considerably with too many stored SMSs.  I was told of a lady that had come in the previous week with 600+ stored messages and the phone took very long intervals to do anything, and clearing it fixed it.

I know that, on my phone at least, each SMS message is stored as a separate file, so my best guess as to the reason for this problem is that this creates too many entries in the file system for the phone to handle.  This seems like a rather silly and trivial problem to work around, but the cell phone manufactures can get away with it, as they have no good competitors that fix problems like this.

This is why we really need open source cell phones.  There have been word of open source phones in the works for years... but nothing too solid yet :-\.

So ANYWAYS, I had already started taking a different approach in early January to fix the problem of backing up SMS messages without having to sync them to your computer, which is a rather obnoxious work around.  I had been researching and planning to write a BREW application that extracts all SMS messages into a text file on your phone so that you don’t have to worry about the limits, and could download them to your computer whenever you wanted, with theoretically thousands of SMS messages archived on your phone.  Unfortunately, as usual, other things took over my time and the project was halted, but I will probably be getting back to it soon.

Video driver woes

TV output issues

So I’ve recently switched over to an old Geforce4 Ti 4600 for TV output on my home server/TV station. Unfortunately, my TV needs output resizing (underscan) due to being dropped a long ways back during transport from a Halo game, and the CRT output is misaligned.

If I recall, old Nvidia drivers allowed output resizing, but the latest available ones (which are rather old themselves, as NVidia stops supporting old cards with newer driver sets that have more options) that work for my card only allow repositioning of the output signal, so part of the screen is cut off.

The final solution was to tell VLC media player to output videos at 400:318 aspect ratio when in full screen to force a smaller width that I could then reposition to properly fit the screen. A rather inelegant solution, but it works. One of these days I’ll get myself a new TV :-).

Truecrypt 5.0 tribulations

Adopting programs at release is often a bad idea

Just as is the case with windows, where you never install before at least the first service pack is released, so is the case with TrueCrypt, it seems.

TrueCrypt is open source, which is a major plus, and in my opinion, the best solution for encrypting data.  In a nutshell, TrueCrypt allows the creation of encrypted “container files” that when mounted act as a hard drive partition, accessible through a password and/or a key file.  The encryption, security, and speed are all top notch and the program runs completely transparent to the user after volume mounting, so I would highly recommend the program to anyone that has anything at all to hide :-).

It also has some other useful options like the ability to encrypt USB flash cards for opening at other locations without having TrueCrypt installed, and “hidden container files” in which a second hidden volume is contained within the same container, unlockable by a separate password/key file, which is great for plausible deniability.  I have been always been a fan of TrueCrypt since I first found and adopted it years ago, and would highly recommend it.

Unfortunately, TrueCrypt 5.0, which was just released a few days ago, does not yet meet quality standards.  It does all the old stuff it used to of course, and adds some great new features, but the multiple bugs I have found are forcing me to revert to an older version of it, and back to other 3rd party applications I have been using for other types of encryption.

The new feature, which I’ve been looking forward too for ages is pre-boot authentication volume encryption, which basically means encrypting 100% of your hard drive (partition) that contains Windows (or another OS) on it so you only have to put in your password during boot, and EVERYTHING is encrypted and safe, and impossible (by today’s standards) to access before the password is put in.  This is especially important for laptops due to the increased likelihood of it falling into others’ hands through loss or theft.  Unfortunately, full volume encryption has broken 2 things; the ability to put my laptop into hibernation (which was also a problem with other volume encryption programs I’ve tried in the past), and oddly enough, it broke my audio drivers so I have no sound XD.  So, I’m reverting back to BestCrypt Volume Encryption [v1.95.1], which I’ve also been using for quite a while, that does the same thing, but allows hibernation.  My only beefs with it are that it’s closed source, something that isn’t usually a problem in my book, but is for this case [security], and that hibernation is SLOW, probably due to the fact that it can no longer use DMA, due to needing to pass data through the CPU for encryption.  Another, technically not so important, feature TrueCrypt doesn’t include yet that most other volume encryption pre-boot authentication packages include is customized boot password prompt screens.  I’ve included my incredibly dorky screens (for BestCrypt Volume Encryption) below :-D.

The other thing that is broken, oddly enough, forcing me to revert to TrueCrypt 4.3a, is I can’t mount containers over a network anymore through Windows File and Print Sharing :-\.  Ah well, hopefully they’ll get these things fixed soon enough.

My boot password prompt, and no, I will not explain it, except that DarkSide was my previous computer handle a very good number of years ago.


A boot prompt I made for a female friend, weeee, ASCII art ^_^;.


And for reference, the ASCII chart.

Note that when creating a screen for BestCrypt Volume Encryption, the characters 0x08 0x09 0x0A 0x0D are all invalid. The “&” is used to place the password prompt.

One other Volume Encryption I tried, which was just about as good, though I do not recall if it allowed hibernation, was DriveCrypt Plus Pack [v3.90G]. It also allowed bitmaps [pictures] for the boot password prompt screen.

Internet Explorer Identity Crisis

It just wants to think it’s Firefox

Does anyone else find it odd that IE reports itself as ‘Mozilla’ if you access the navigator.appCodeName variable? You can test this out by putting the following in your browser as the URL javascript:alert(navigator.appCodeName), or you could check out this script, where I noticed this, which reports all information that can be found out about you through going to a web page, and accessible via JavaScript/PHP.