Database Develop

How to filter ads on your G1

You can find the latest version of this app on the slideme app store.
http://slideme.org/application/adfree
This is the old thread, I started a new thread in the general section => http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=40759351
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Spoiled by ad free browsing on my normal desktop computer it became increasingly annoying seeing all the ads on my phone. However it's really easy to make them disappear, although you most likely will need root on the phone.
Download the hosts.txt file from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt, you may need to run dos2unix over the file to remote \r characters, rename the file hosts and copy it to /system/etc on your phone and say goodbye to most ads.
You may find the list to be imperfect, for example some feedburner URLs are "blocked" as a result which can screw with RSS feeds, although it's annoying giving too much info to Google but like everything else in life some things are a trade off.
If you want to root your phone, try this article.

Thanks for this!
As soon as I read the topic title I realised what you were doing and I never thought of it myself.
My hosts file was /etc/hosts though, not /system/etc/hosts

Dark X Dragon said:
As soon as I read the topic title I realised what you were doing and I never thought of it myself.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've been using this technique for a bit, just didn't think to post about it before did a quick search and noticed no one else had so thought I might as well
My hosts file was /etc/hosts though, not /system/etc/hosts
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Doesn't seem to matter, I just checked the /etc dir and it has the same hosts file.

Actually, /etc is a symbolic link to /system/etc, so your hosts file is really at /system/etc -- however, accessing the file through either path is equivalent.

Ha ha hosts exists on android!? I had no idea. I'm also a spoiled ad-less pc user. This is great. Thanks.
If you can't download the file above (it appears as text in browser), replace .txt with .zip at the end of the url. This will download the zip file which u can later unzip with an unzip app in the market.
Ok. I can't paste over the original hosts file using the phone? Astro and lynda file managers don't do it for me. And yes I am rooted, running 1.5 dudes build. Can this be done only from a PC?

ShatBag1105 said:
Ok. I can't paste over the original hosts file using the phone? Astro and lynda file managers don't do it for me. And yes I am rooted, running 1.5 dudes build. Can this be done only from a PC?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You have a couple of options, you can download the terminal app from the market and use it, or you can use ADB to shell into the phone, or wait for someone to code an app to do it all for you.
For the time being go with installing terminal, then type 'su' to become root. That is unless you have a copy of adb handy, if you can 'adb shell' the following commands are the same, except you can copy and paste.
Then remount the system partition read-write.
Code:
mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
Then you go into the etc dir
Code:
cd /system/etc
Then you can rm the hosts file
Code:
rm hosts
Then grab the hosts.txt file
Code:
wget http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt -O hosts
Always more than one way to skin a cat, but the above works for me(tm)

lbcoder said:
Actually, /etc is a symbolic link to /system/etc, so your hosts file is really at /system/etc -- however, accessing the file through either path is equivalent.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ugghh, I read that ages ago but really didn't commit it to memory. It is now. =)
There's a fair chance I won't get around to it but I'm tempted to take this ad blocking further. Namely an automatic app but there might be more to add to it.

Thanks for the help delta. I figured it had to be done in terminal. And you know, this would definitely become very popular as an app.

I'm a dummy its etc not ect

delta_foxtrot2 said:
Then grab the hosts.txt file
Code:
wget http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt -O hosts
Always more than one way to skin a cat, but the above works for me(tm)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
(I am using the terminal program on the phone)
Until the above step, no problems
After typing in the above I get the following message:
"bad address "www.mvps.org"
I checked for typing errors, tried it 3 times but get the same error message
Any suggestions please?
thanks

nyayo99 said:
(I am using the terminal program on the phone)
Until the above step, no problems
After typing in the above I get the following message:
"bad address "www.mvps.org"
I checked for typing errors, tried it 3 times but get the same error message
Any suggestions please?
thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try it without the http://www. It might work like that. This is a lot harder than it should be lol. The g1 is putting up a fight!

ShatBag1105 said:
Try it without the http://www. It might work like that. This is a lot harder than it should be lol. The g1 is putting up a fight!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, but this didn't work either.
Some googling indicated a possible DNS issue.
So I looked up the IP address (209.68.48.119), substituted that into your instructions and presto, everything worked!
Many thanks for the ad killer option for the G1

Aah beautiful work. Just to clarify for newbs like me. The last line is (# wget http://209.68.48.119/winhelp2002/hosts.txt -O hosts). Make sure that -O hosts is a captialized O.

ShatBag1105 said:
Aah beautiful work. Just to clarify for newbs like me. The last line is (# wget http://209.68.48.119/winhelp2002/hosts.txt -O hosts). Make sure that -O hosts is a captialized O.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, capital letter o, lower case o stores the output of wget into the file which isn't the desired outcome

I plan on suggesting the following URLs to the hosts.txt guy to block admob ads in apps
p.admob.com
analytics.admob.com
r.admob.com
In the mean time you can manually add it to the hosts file yourself, just copy and past from another line.
After updating the hosts file you may need to reboot or wait for the hostname to expire from the internal lookup cache, unless someone knows a quick way to flush the cache to speed up the process that is.

Thanks for this. Worked great for me. Very helpful tutorial.

Just uploaded "AdFree" to android market, this does all the steps I laid out manually at the touch of a button.

Its funny how
127.0.0.1 localhost
is the only thing blocked in the /system/etc/hosts file. lol.

andonnguyen said:
Its funny how
127.0.0.1 localhost
is the only thing blocked in the /system/etc/hosts file. lol.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That isn't "blocked" and in fact nothing gets blocked by the hosts file it just points hostnames to the local system, which usually has no web server running so the connection fails immediately.
However you MUST have localhost listed or various things will fail and cause all sorts of issues.

New version of AdFree is now up, I have the app adding the admob hostnames to the bottom of the list.

What is a mirror?

In relation to ROMs, what is a mirror? I see that on there a lot and don't know what they are and what purpose they serve.

Mirror is not a ROM term at all, but a web term. A mirror is a server that is hosting a file for download. The idea is that in order to either reduce load on the original server or expedite the download by allowing you to choose a server closer to you. The term mirror is derived from the idea that it is a remote server with an exact copy of the original file. Because of the mirror system being out of the original content provider's hands, a checksum of the download is usually provided to help ensure that the file has not been modified in any way.

lineman78 said:
Mirror is not a ROM term at all, but a web term. A mirror is a server that is hosting a file for download. The idea is that in order to either reduce load on the original server or expedite the download by allowing you to choose a server closer to you. The term mirror is derived from the idea that it is a remote server with an exact copy of the original file. Because of the mirror system being out of the original content provider's hands, a checksum of the download is usually provided to help ensure that the file has not been modified in any way.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Awesome. Thanks. Do you know how to check the 'checksum' or 'md5sum' as I've seen it? I'm working on the MacOS platform.
BTW - do you know how to get a term added to the glossary?

Not so sure about the "checksum" thingy, try searching the forums??
However, adding a word is as simple as going:
Settings > Language & Keyboard> Touch Input> User Dictionary> Add New OR you can just spell the word when you're texting (for example) and click the correct spelling instead of the suggested spelling, that adds it too.

Awesome. Thanks. Do you know how to check the 'checksum' or 'md5sum'
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
On linux and windows you go to file directory and type md5sum {file name}. Couldn't see it being different for mac, don't forget the .zip, .apk, etc. at the end of the file name.
Sent from my ADR6300 using Tapatalk

On mac the command is md5 (filepath)

HeroMeng said:
On mac the command is md5 (filepath)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't have my UNIX book in my office, but this sounds right. OSx is based on FreeBSD, so it has a md5 utility built in. Just open up the terminal and type the above command. On windows, you will need to download a project called unixutils, which can be found on sourceforge. The command is md5sum {filepath}. But in order to get this working you will either need to provide the location of md5sum.exe or add the wbin folder from unixutils to your path environment variable.

I have Mac and if I type for example this:
Code:
md5 /Users/kevinsimac/downloads/darchdroid-v265.zip
it returns
Code:
MD5 (/Users/kevinsimac/Downloads/darchdroid-v265.zip) = 9a7af785d5ba97bbbac1ea044c99b420

What's the whole purpose of the md5 in relation to our work here?

jerry43812 said:
What's the whole purpose of the md5 in relation to our work here?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As I explained above, the MD5 is usually included for files hosted on a server other than the content provider so that you can ensure that the file has not been modified. For example, I could volunteer to be a mirror for Fresh and if flipz didn't post the md5, I could add an apk into system that could do something like send me your location or a copy of all your e-mails or something else and you wouldn't know that I had modified the file since flipz handed it off to me.

Possible to edit hosts file on i9000?

have a website that i use often and they had some domain issues recently - used to be able to get it on my mobile browser but not anymore (and the work pc's ban this site!) so it's a pain in the arse.
the site themselves mention editing hosts file names on the computer (i did this with the laptops at home and no problem now) but i can't seem to work out how to do this on my i9000. It's rooted and I have root explorer but under system/etc/hosts i'm not sure where to go from there (or even if that is the right place to be to edit the hosts files!)
any words of wisdom please?

I was just trying the same thing for similar reasons. did a 'mount' and it says / is a read-only system. I remember someone mentioning it here. Aha: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=514698

cheers for the link - looks like some useful tips there though still a bit confused as never done any adb pushing from my computer so will have to read up about it.
trying to find a way to edit the hosts file from within the handset itself - not sure if i can do this with the terminal app?

An easier way to do this, on a rooted phone, is to use root explorer (remember to enable r/w) and go to /etc/hosts and edit it there. Or you can use es file explorer and enable root in settings.

thanks, i was also looking for a way to view and edit the hosts files. just tried a new ROM and it sort of block some popups that i wanted to appear.

beardedwonder said:
An easier way to do this, on a rooted phone, is to use root explorer (remember to enable r/w) and go to /etc/hosts and edit it there. Or you can use es file explorer and enable root in settings.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thanks - tried root explorer in the past but couldn't find way to edit the hosts - didn't notice the 'mount as r/w'! - alas i'm still stuck - added hosts as per the website's instructions and still can't load the webpage, either by the www name or by ip address.
dang!

doktorV said:
thanks - tried root explorer in the past but couldn't find way to edit the hosts - didn't notice the 'mount as r/w'! - alas i'm still stuck - added hosts as per the website's instructions and still can't load the webpage, either by the www name or by ip address.
dang!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you restarted the phone and made sure it's not commented out and there's only one space between the addresses?

doktorV said:
thanks - tried root explorer in the past but couldn't find way to edit the hosts - didn't notice the 'mount as r/w'! - alas i'm still stuck - added hosts as per the website's instructions and still can't load the webpage, either by the www name or by ip address.
dang!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Um, if you can't get the website via the ip address, you have a problem routing. Ensure you have the correct ip address. If that is the correct ip address, and you can get to it from another computer, you may have to use a proxy to get to the site.
A

Transfer FOLDERs via WiFI

Do you know any program that can do this? I've tried WiFi File Explorer PRO and Wifi Transfer but they only let me send files individually, but I need something that would work as if my nexus s was connected via USB. Do you know something like that?

Jerry69 said:
Do you know any program that can do this? I've tried WiFi File Explorer PRO and Wifi Transfer but they only let me send files individually, but I need something that would work as if my nexus s was connected via USB. Do you know something like that?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try ES File Explorer.

I use SwiFTP on the phone combined with Filezilla on computer myself.

Do you use dropbox? If its your computer you're transferring to.. most of the time I use that instead of USB. Unless its a ROM.
•°NS4G • ICS°•

ESFile explorer can see shares in your LAN and has multiple select, and root. It will batch your copies as well. I transfer all my music to my phone with ES. Faster than usb.
If you need transfer outside your network then Drop box is your choice.
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App

I've downloaded ES but i don't know how to transfer

Click on the LAN tab and then on your network share.
Then long press on the files you want to transfer and select "copy to"
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App

I don't know how to connect with my pc, faqs on the site are offline

I did it with "WebSharing", very good program. It can mount nexus s like it was usb-plugged

No one is reading the title of the post. The OP wants to transfer FOLDERS with files inside, rather than having to rebuild file structure in the device and upload all files individually. I am looking for the same thing and I've downloaded 5 programs from this post and all of them do exactly the same thing, they upload files but not folders.
Does anyone have a solution that actually does what the OP is asking?

intrepidpursuit said:
No one is reading the title of the post. The OP wants to transfer FOLDERS with files inside, rather than having to rebuild file structure in the device and upload all files individually. I am looking for the same thing and I've downloaded 5 programs from this post and all of them do exactly the same thing, they upload files but not folders.
Does anyone have a solution that actually does what the OP is asking?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes.
TealLeader said:
I use SwiFTP on the phone combined with Filezilla on computer myself.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
FTP server + client will enable you to drag and drop whole folders and it will rebuild the structure automatically. Just like copying and pasting would do.

[Q] Chromecast command line primer

Apologies if this has already been covered but a quick search turned up nothing. I recently rooted and was wondering if there was any resource to describe the ins and outs of the chromecast shell. Specifically I wanted to know if there is a way to define a custom start up script. For the moment I would just like to auto update the PATH env variable to include my own bin directory on /data with some of the more useful busybox commands symlinked and maybe add some cooler stuff later. I've done something similar in dd-wrt with a special nvram variable to point to a script, but I don't know if there is an equivalent here. Thanks.

bobcat987 said:
Apologies if this has already been covered but a quick search turned up nothing. I recently rooted and was wondering if there was any resource to describe the ins and outs of the chromecast shell. Specifically I wanted to know if there is a way to define a custom start up script. For the moment I would just like to auto update the PATH env variable to include my own bin directory on /data with some of the more useful busybox commands symlinked and maybe add some cooler stuff later. I've done something similar in dd-wrt with a special nvram variable to point to a script, but I don't know if there is an equivalent here. Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think we need to edit /init.rc
but it's write protected =/

bobcat987 said:
Apologies if this has already been covered but a quick search turned up nothing. I recently rooted and was wondering if there was any resource to describe the ins and outs of the chromecast shell. Specifically I wanted to know if there is a way to define a custom start up script. For the moment I would just like to auto update the PATH env variable to include my own bin directory on /data with some of the more useful busybox commands symlinked and maybe add some cooler stuff later. I've done something similar in dd-wrt with a special nvram variable to point to a script, but I don't know if there is an equivalent here. Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mape0661 said:
I think we need to edit /init.rc
but it's write protected =/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can, but you would have to do the modifications with an extracted system image, re-squashfs it back up, and then flash it back to the device.

Thanks for the replies. If I'm feeling bold this weekend I'll take a look at creating a one-off /system for this.

bobcat987 said:
Thanks for the replies. If I'm feeling bold this weekend I'll take a look at creating a one-off /system for this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've been writing some, gonna post it later on git if you want to see it.
mostly stuff to make it easy to start ftp, samba etc.
/mape

ddggttff3 said:
You can, but you would have to do the modifications with an extracted system image, re-squashfs it back up, and then flash it back to the device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Seeing this you guys are making me think (always dangerous!)
Is it possible to code and inject an on device player app that could be inserted into the system (similar to Netflix) that could be triggered by another app for local playback without the need for an Internet connection?
Something like that would really increase the streaming capability for areas where Internet connection is not available.
And if the right code is found could even give local streams DHT capability if we had the ability to add those codecs to the player system.

ddggttff3 said:
You can, but you would have to do the modifications with an extracted system image, re-squashfs it back up, and then flash it back to the device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've been looking at system.img from 19084.001.zip
it seems it only got this then I unsquashfs it
[email protected]:~/squashfs-root# ls
bin boot chrome etc lib netflix res usr
I'm I looking in the wrong file?

Mape0661 said:
I've been looking at system.img from 19084.001.zip
it seems it only got this then I unsquashfs it
[email protected]:~/squashfs-root# ls
bin boot chrome etc lib netflix res usr
I'm I looking in the wrong file?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
if you want to modify init.rc, then you need to extract the initramfs from the kernel, modify it, repackage the initramfs, compile the kernel from src (as the default one is signed, and can't be merged with a modified initramfs), and then merge the compiled kernel with the initramfs you modified.

ddggttff3 said:
if you want to modify init.rc, then you need to extract the initramfs from the kernel, modify it, repackage the initramfs, compile the kernel from src (as the default one is signed, and can't be merged with a modified initramfs), and then merge the compiled kernel with the initramfs you modified.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Looks like this gonna be my "children are sleeping" project for some time .-)
Well I extracted initramfs from boot.img and mounted it with cpio. At least I'm looking at the right files. I have never compiled a kernel for this kind of devices before (only for my computer) and I having trubble to cross compile, my arm compiled programs wont run on CC.
Do you got some good pages I can read and learn this stuff from?