If there hasn’t been enough reason to root your phone and flash a custom ROM in the past, this whole CarrierIQ mess ought to be the death blow to factory junk. It is a rootkit, and it is ridiculous. What does this thing do? All of this stuff from Verizon’s website:

Verizon Wireless will use the following categories of information: Mobile Usage Information: • Addresses of websites you visit when using our wireless service. These data strings (or URLs) may include search terms you have used • Location of your device (“Location Information”) • App and device feature usage Consumer Information: • Information about your use of Verizon products and services (such as data and calling features, device type, and amount of use) • Demographic and interest categories provided to us by other companies, such as gender, age range, sports fan, frequent diner, or pet owner (“Demographics”) How is this collected? CIQ logs it. In plain text, disregarding https, etc…read this article to be blown away by the degree of privacy infringement. Moral of the story: root your phone. This garbage is unacceptable.

I’ll update this thread first thing in the AM, but there is some major unbelievable nonsense going down with Carrier IQ and assumed secure connections. Consider this article a primer until I can dig in more completely…

Oh? Zelda Twilight Princess? Conquered it. The hardest part of snapping this pic was avoiding eye contact with Katie, who was on the couch laughing at me. Tradition is tradition. As I was preparing the shot, I noticed that my phone was picking up the infrared LEDs from the Wii sensor bar… I had pegged the Wii bar as a passive unit…a la IR receivers only. I guess I was wrong, and now have an urge to rip one apart. But I digress. This game took me ages to complete…feels good to be done with this one. Not quite as fun as Ocarina, but Twilight was a good time. Rumor has it that the new Zelda for Wii is borderline unreal…look for me to post a ‘conquered it’ picture on this site in 2016.

My new IOIO project is in the ‘bunch of pieces’ state. It also happens to be in the ‘my effing hardware works’ phase as well.. I’ll keep mum on this for the time being…a bunch of coding and refinement remains to be seen. Stay tuned for this one…

It (still) never rains… The second woot bag of crap is equally as crappy. …as much as I like refurbished ethernet routers, I think BOC round two wins. Winning being on an inverted scale, whereas less crappy is awarded more points. I can chop up USB Guard Dog for its infared sensor, and the small Swanson girl will play with the caped monkey. Win win for the win…

The project is wrapped. I have fully shown servo control via bluetooth, via Android, via IOIO. +3 via The easiest way to test this, by far, is to snag the app on the Android Market. Here: This does require a newer version of the IOIO bootloader than is currently shipping from units at Sparkfun, but details can be tracked down at this Google Groups area on how to update. It will work standardly, with a USB cable. From there, you can take a look at my code on GitHub. I haven’t included the IOIO libraries, but that will be part of the Eclipse setup if you decide to start hammering out some code. I can provide some guidance if anyone is in need of any. Take a look. I bumped the SDK minimum again, in order to ensure that this function is intact. If this causes any hardship, I can relax the requirement. Anyhow, take a look at the app in action in the previous post. Cheers.

Taking it up another notch…servo control via bluetooth

Watch the video to see the Andoid / IOIO / servo in action:

I’ll get app updated on the Android Market and on GitHub this weekend. Happy Friday.

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I’m preparing to publish a project utilizing the new bluetooth library for the IOIO. I started horsing around with my IOIO Servo Controller application, and finally got frustrated with the lag that was existing between my slider bar and the servo. I never pulled my improved function from my IOIOSeek work over…it was overdo. Anyhow, I sort of cleaned house and put together an improved interface, and pushed it to github. Here is a quick vid of the new app in action: I pushed a new apk to the Android Market as well. If you have it installed, it should update in the morning. Here is a sneak peek of the updates: *Optimized code to alleviate lag between slider bar and servo positions. *Increased minimum version requirements, for future bluetooth connectivity *Added function to keep slider in an inactive state until IOIO connection made *Cleaned up code to remedy force close situations *Remapped PWM pin from 5 to 10 for consistency with my other apps *Removed text field of slider position / on board LED *Simplified layout for smaller screens I pulled some function, but am more than willing to reintroduce the relative readout and/or on-board LED display. I am trying to go simple with this one, and ramp it up once I can figure out the lag that the bluetooth connection will introduce.

It never rains… …another Bag O Crap. Expect another unboxing when number two arrives.