Better Locking

So PadLock is powered by this thing called Usage Access which is one of the very few (possibly one of two) things in Android that is allowed to watch the phone as a whole instead of just itself as a specific application.

Using its special Usage Access powers, PadLock is able to see the last used app on the phone, compare it to its list of "I want these apps locked" and lock the app if it is needed.

Unfortunately, these special powers are very dumb and difficult to work with resulting in PadLock sometimes being overly aggressive in watching for the last used app on the phone. PadLock was so aggressive it would even watch while the screen was off - which is an oversight on my end. If the screen is off - after all - the device is not being used and therefore would not need to detect the last used application for locking.

So the next version of PadLock will come with an optimization which basically puts it to sleep while the device screen is off. This will save a large amount of battery - since most of the time the device is off in a pocket or a bag - and will let PadLock be a better Android citizen.

I'm excited to release this change along with many stability and memory improvements in the next release cycle.

Stay tuned!

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Updatesssss

Pushed out some Android updates today.

Most notable includes PadLock 3.0.0 which gets a fresh coat of paint as well as a more reliable backend storage solution! Check it out on the store here and leave me some feedback!

I've noticed some issues with Android P which I will be addressing shortly but decided to release anyway because let's be honest who is using Android P when its still in developer preview.

Updates to everything for better or for worse. Report bugs to me via the bug report dialog in app! Thanks for sticking with me through the last couple months of radio silence, and I hope to continue making new interesting creations for all of you.

Stay tuned!

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Long Time No Nothing

Hey remember me?

I'm still here.

Haven't released anything new for a while - life catches up to us all in weird ways and I've found myself busy with other things that means I don't have endless hours to just update Android apps.

Lame I know.

I have some changes I want to get out but things need to stabilize around libraries and the new AndroidX changes with the new Android P stuff, so its all pretty up in the air at the moment.

I don't want to push out builds using Alpha libraries - but I'll settle for "production ready" beta libraries I suppose.

New stuff coming when I have the time - hopefully I have the time soon.


Stay tuned.

========================
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=========================

Crashtacular

I have recently removed Firebase Crash Reporting from all pyamsoft Android applications. The crash reporting on the Play Store has greatly improved in the past year or so, and I find that I no longer need the specific real time crash reporting of the Firebase toolkit. The recent GDPR changes also serve to encourage me to remove the otherwise unused library from the Android applications I publish.

Aside from this, I have also updated git-ssh and ipwaiter - both which are written in Python now, and have cleaned up the Android projects to play nicer with Android Oreo now that I have a device running the latest version of Android again (thanks Lineage OS)!

Stay tuned.

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=========================

More new stuff

git-ssh and ipwaiter have both been rewritten in Python.

Python 3 to be exact. Python 3 is a stronger scripting language, and allows us to avoid the situation in bash where we were forced to call eval() on an arbitrary piece of code.

At this time I have no plans of porting pstate-frequency or update-hosts to Python, as both scripts are more reliant on starting up quickly and running quickly, and in the case of update-hosts in particular, are very reliant on bash's strong piping and external program syntax. Neither make calls to eval in an unsafe manner (though an eval call is made to parse the OPTIND but in a safe environment) so the general need for a stronger language like Python is not as convincing as it was to port ipwaiter or git-ssh. I also - regrettably -  like bash.

Android apps continue to get updates and excitement builds as new Android P features are announced. One in particular that caught my attention was the new cropping and editing features which are now built into screenshots at an OS level. As such, Screenie will be shelved for the time being as it is no longer a needed third party application. Alas - beaten to the punch by Google again, although at least this time for good reason. New app will swing around soon - since I like making things and there will always been things that need to be made.

Stay tuned.

========================
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=========================

pstate-frequency new stuff

pstate-frequency now supports a new option syntax for --min and --max!

Instead of having to specify a hardcoded number value for min and max, you can now also specify values in the format '+number' which pstate-frequency will interpret as 'SYSTEM_CPU_MIN + number'.

This is especially beneficial for the powersave plan which will now set the cpu min frequency to the system minimum, and the max frequency to the system minimum + 30. This number may be adjusted in future releases.

The syntax should work on both command line invocations as well as via power plan configuration files.

Have fun!

========================
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=========================

More Licensing

I discovered this morning that in a normal state, the Apache2 license is not compatible with the GPLv2.

Since so many of the library dependencies used in pyamsoft applications are Apache2, this was not good. I have decided, as sole contributor to all pyamsoft projects, to relicense all Android pyamsoft projects under the Apache2 license.

Any releases going forward will be under this new license, the older releases which were under the GPLv2 will still respect that license at least in respect to my original code.

Please let me know if there are any other license issues noticed, I do not want to breach the terms of any licenses, and they are very confusing.

 Releases going out later today, stay tuned!

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=========================

scripts tools and things

I like things. I like new things. I like learning about these new things.

For about the past month now or so, I've been using bubblewrap to jail the launching of applications on my Linux box. By itself, bubblewrap is very plain and kind of weird to configure, but with a little massaging it can actually end up being very nice to use. I have it configured to create private directories for each application that launches under bubblewrap, and I have aliased many applications in my environment. Some require a bit of extra special care, but most launch painlessly. It's pretty neat, but still can't do some of the things that firejail used to do.

One of the things that I bubblewrapped as an excercise in configuring the system was Lollypop which is basically one of my favorite applications ever. Its just so good at its job. It launches a file portal to work with flatpak, but for some reason, it never played quite nice on my system, so I had to work around it with some scripting voodoo. But its still awesome, and its one of the few applications on my machine that is always open, along with Firefox, and Android Studio (and Steam but shh).

The last nugget I have for today is this thing called paprefs which is a preference frontend for PulseAudio (which I'm sure most all of you are using). It has this neat little checkbox for "Simultaneous Output" which will allow you to play the same application audio stream to all the things at once. I use it to play audio to a pair of headphones as well as a speaker so that I can have directional audio, but the other people with me will still be able to hear. It's neat, check it out.

Now to figure out JACK server and how to use MIDI, and then figure out VGA passthrough - or SPICE - depending on if I will ever be able to buy another graphics card.

Keep on keeping on.

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=========================

ipwaiter

I made a thing.

The ipwaiter is a script which is meant to help client machines (not really for servers, but it can work) handle the accepting and blocking of packets on specific ports.

ipwaiter is like an extremely simplified firewalld, if firewalld was written by a single person in a couple of hours using only shell script with the only goal of serving the author's specific use cases. Yeah.

ipwaiter handles the firewall as if it were a collection of services - or in keeping with our restaurant related theme - orders. Orders are simple configuration files that use iptables syntax - but do not include the chain name - and can do anything that iptables can do. The difference is that these orders are injected into three special chains -  input_orders, forward_orders, and output_orders. The ipwaiter can dynamically add and remove orders from these chains, meaning that you can - for example - only support SSH connections when you are ready to launch an SSH server, or only accept KDEConnect connections when you are on specific wifi networks.

Of course, since the tool is currently extremely KISS, you would have to script many of these situations on your own. But please, feel free to contribute new orders if you think they are neat or helpful for a client machine.

The tool is very hands off, meaning it will not add these new order chains to your iptables rules anywhere, you are welcome to incorporate them wherever you want to in your packet rules. The only caveat, is that the ipwaiter expects it has exclusive control over these order chains, and will not hesistate to completely remove all rules in them when told to.

For some inspiration, I currently use the script to open up input ports for Steam to host local games when I have a game client open, and then automatically close up these ports when the game closes. I launch the KDEconnect services only when I am connected to my home wifi, and remove the order once I leave or drop connection.

I think it's neat, and maybe you will too.
GitHub
AUR package

========================
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=========================

Whats up

Buncha cruncha stuff.

Everything uses ConstraintLayout now since it's the new hotness.

Better shadows, better perception of depth and liveliness on views and all that good stuff.

Screenie is a new screenshot cropping tool I'm working on. It's ugly currently, but it works to take cropped screenshots and then save, share, whatever them.

PadLock bugfixes, ZapTorch bugfixes, better support when in the smallest flavor of multi-window mode, all that good stuff.

Hoping for later this week or next week, we'll see. Stay tuned.

========================
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=========================