My pursuit to hack on an android device - 2

So this week I have been able to root the android tablet I have with me.
Frankly I thought rooting would be a real hard process where I would have to sit for long hours in front of my terminal with my android device connected and type long long commands. But a simple app did it for me after a small process of enabling USB debugging in my device the option for which is not there in my device inside the settings menu.

So this is the link for the video which helped me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_mVnzd7w04

All credit goes to Poweruser77 for finding this.

So things I had like to understand more are
- How to hack firmware of devices ?
- How does z4root work?

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Some good links and info

1) Tree style tab Firefox plugin 
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 This is just too awesome. I had to reposition this to the top postion out of the 3 points in this post because it is just too awesome. I always had a big issue with tabs. 
I am sure this happens to a lot of people. You start reading an article and you come across some thing which you haven't heard of before, or else you got distracted and you opened some other link. THis way I end up opening a lot of tabs and not knowing how did I get to some link. So I craved for some extension like this. I almost decided to learn how to write firefox extensions and write it on my own during this summer. But ofcourse, as much as I like reinventing the wheel I tried finding out if there is anything like that is already available and found this.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

Edit: It also works great with vimperator although you don't see vimperator in the below screenshot.

An image of my firefox

2) Real informative android internals 
explanation by Karim
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You can find the video and the slides here - http://www.opersys.com/blog/android-internals-101103
But apparently he also took another talk recently.
So this is the link for that
http://lanyrd.com/2011/2011-androidtm-builders-summit/sfmyr/

3) A nice material on networks 
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'Professional .Net network programming' by Tim Parker, Vinod kumar and a few other names some of which I find it really hard to spell now :P

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How to get a copy of flash video in firefox if you have the latest flash

I usually keep large youtube videos for buffering and watch them later after copying them from /tmp folder. But sadly updating your flash to 10.2 changes all that. And I dint know that until I finished buffering 2 large videos of more than one hr. So I began searching on how to do it ... found this awesome post on one Ubuntu forum. I would like to have easy access to it and hence I am storing the exact same thing here. Would love more solutions



1)Open flash video page (that you own of course) and let it load. Don't close the page.

2)Open terminal and give

Code:

lsof | grep Flash

lsof: list open files
In my case (opera user) it gives

Code:

operaplug 2840        teo    9u      REG        8,8  6962837     392986 /tmp/FlashXXFfe85s (deleted)

Notice the 2nd (process id) and 4rth (file descriptor - without the letter) columns.

3)

Code:

cp /proc/2840/fd/9 ~/Desktop/video 

I confess I dunno how this exactly works but one thing I know is in '/proc/2840/fd/9' fd stands for file descriptor. So we are just getting the fd for the video and then copying it.

This is where I got it from


http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1688948&highlight=Temp+Files&page=2

Credit to TeoBigusGeekus 

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My pursuit to hack on an android device - 1

Ok. The first think I had like to make it clear here is that this is not a "guide" to start hacking on your android device. This is just a documentation of my pursuit to hack onto my android device.I am writing this since I am having to take a break for today and if and when I resume my pursuit again I had like a place to recap what all I did and how.

One more thing I had like to add is I am not experimenting on my own phone. I may seem dumb as you proceed through this post but I am not that dumb too. I happen to lay my hands on an android tablet from my company which I can play around with as much as I like.
Bottomline: Do not blame me if your device gets screwed up badly :D

First thing I told myself - "I wanna definitely root my device later but before that to start hacking on something you need a terminal right? So let me install a terminal."

I go to android market and search for an android terminal emulator. I get one instantly but then I realize that I don't have internet on my device because of the !@#$% proxy in my institute. So I need something like cntlm on my device for me to access internet from insti behind a proxy.So I search for this and on XDA developers I end up at this link. But alas! I need to root my device for that. So to summarize my pursuit
Want to root = > install terminal
      ^                            ||
      ||                            V
Need root < =     Install Autoproxy

So I got tired of going round and round. Ofcourse you don't _need_ terminal first to root your device but it is the same process for installing anything here.
So next I decided to try to get the .apk directly and attempt to install. So I hit upon this - 3-places-to-download-android-apk/ .
I happily downloaded terminal emulator from Android Terminal Emulator for Android .And then!! I realize that I left my SD card reader in my office and hence I cannot move the apk file to my tablet!
All this reminded me of Lemony Snicket's A series of unfortunate events. So I have to wait till monday to go back to office and continue :(

I would really love comments on how else could I have done all this ( even if you are reading this post a decade after I wrote it ).


Edit #1:  I realised that I have a USB port on the tablet. I was so dumb. So I just installed terminal, droidssh and an ebook reader onto my tablet

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