When adding a new entry into Google Calendar on my Android phone, I noticed it defaulted to Dumont d'Urville time (UTC+10), although Sydney/Melbourne was also offered. What?!
A search shows that this is the time zone of a French Antarctic station which happens to be in the same time zone as the Eastern Australian seaboard. When I went into settings and chose Use Home Time Zone, all was good again. Pretty bizarre but amusing bug. I'm glad my appointments are in warmer climes.
It seems somebody has hit this bug before. Maybe it's because my phone has a rather old version of Android.
I had an ancient Asus EEE700 useless even as a netbook for the road. I wondered if I could turn it into an emergency gateway to my Android smartphone for when my ADSL connection goes down. It has Crunchbang Linux installed which is basically Debian. Here's what I did, for the learning experience:
First you need to disable NetworkManager. Easiest way to do this is to first install the sysv-rc-conf package, and then use its ncurses interface to shut NetworkManager down. Next you need to configure usb0 (the tethered interface) and eth0, the gateway interface by editing /etc/network/interfaces. You might want to preserve an old version of this file to restore to the default setup. Here are the stanzas used:
allow-hotplug usb0
iface usb0 inet dhcp
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address GW
netmask 255.255.255.0
GW should be replaced by whatever gateway address is suitable for your LAN. If your ADSL router is 10.0.1.254, perhaps 10.0.1.253 is suitable.
Here are the rules to make it a NATting gateway, taken from Masquerading Made Simple. I have replaced ppp0 with usb0 everywhere:
iptables -F; iptables -t nat -F; iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o usb0 -j MASQUERADE
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
And to secure it:
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW ! -i usb0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -P INPUT DROP #only if the first two are succesful
iptables -A FORWARD -i usb0 -o usb0 -j REJECT
You could save the setup using iptables-save, like this:
iptables-save > /etc/gateway.iptables
Then make a shell script to start the gateway for convenience:
#!/bin/sh
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables-restore < /etc/gateway.iptables
Now tether the netbook to the Android smartphone. When you do ip addr, you should see that it has obtained a private address from your smartphone, and your eth0 address should be static.
Next, on your workstation change the default gateway. From a Linux command line it's
route add default gw 10.0.1.253
When you access the Internet, you should see the traffic icons on your smartphone flash. In addition if you go to a website that tells you your IP address, like whatismyipaddress.com, you should see the external address of your smartphone.
When your ADSL service comes back, delete the route with:
route del default gw
Oh yes, this setup does double NAT, since your smartphone does one NAT.
I often need to select a region of text on my smartphone, to delete, or to copy to the clipboard. What to do when you have a small screen and few input devices, unlike a desktop? I figured it out.
Touch and hold the screen until the popup menu appears. Choose Select Word or Select All. Which one you use depends on how much you want to include or exclude. You will get two "paddles" surrounding the selection. Drag them to surround the region you want, then hit backspace to delete, or tap the screen to copy to clipboard. Depending on the app, there might be other options accessible from the menu to check the text in dictionary, etc.
This is actually explained in detail in this Android guide. I wish I had found that guide when I was first looking.
Hope this helps.
