11/05/2013

Activate Nexus 5 on a Secondary Sign-On Wifi Network

Google's newest gadget in town, that I ordered within a few minutes of its launch, landed in my hands a few minutes ago.

That was quite fast. But wait...

I turned on the device, and after a few clicks it wanted to connect to a WiFi network. So I happpily selected the access point that I normally use.

There comes the catch ...

My WiFi network has a secondary sign-on meaning after connecting to the network, one needs to open a web-page and enter some information. It's only after that the Internet Connection is established.

However ...

The OS hadn't finished the initial setup so none of the apps were available. There was no way to launch Chrome which made it a chicken and egg situation. How to sign-on to the WiFi?

Well... Here's the how-to.

There is a Terms & Conditions screen that comes right after you select the WiFi network. In it lies a door!

There are two hyperlinks on the T&C page. Click on of those and it should open ... your WiFi login page! Awesome, isn't it.

Not yet...

You cannot enter any text on this page. Buttons can be clicked, thankfully.

There's a way out...

Long press on the text field. That should open the Cut/Copy/Paste/Share controls. Click the Share button and select Gmail.

It's getting weird. Gmail! No internet yet, remember!

Android will ask for your Gmail credentials. Enter them NOT!

Instead enter your WiFi credentials that you use on the Secondary authentication page, all on the same line separated by a space. So, in the Gmail Id field you will enter
wifiuser wifipassword .

Long press on the text field and select+copy the entire text. Now cancel/go back to the T&C screen. Click one of the hyperlinks and on the WiFi login page that opens, paste the just copied value by long pressing on a text field. Your 'wifiuser wifipassword' is now in one text field. Once again, use the long press to split this text and user/password paste into their own respective boxes.

And click your way to Internet!
























7/06/2013

Making AirPlay work with Raspbmc (Mac OS X)

Raspbmc, the Raspberry PI port of the popular XBMC software allows the Pi to receive AirPlay audio content (e.g. from iTunes).

To make this work you need to change XBMC settings to allow AirPlay content.
Go to Settings - Services - AirPlay and enable "Allow XBMC to receive AirPlay content".

Once you do this, Pi will show up as an AirPlay device.



Click XBMC and you get this error:

"An error occurred while connecting to the AirPlay device
"XBMC (raspbmc). An unknown error occurred (-15000).



To fix this, on your Mac go to
Settings - Sound - Output and select XBMC as the output.


And voila!


Linux raspbmc 3.6.11 #2 PREEMPT Sat Jun 15 21:45:28 UTC 2013 armv6l GNU/Linux
OSX 10.8.4
iTunes 11.0.4



1/05/2013

Making Pogoplug work with OS X Mountain Lion

Samba 2 are shares not accessible from Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2
"The version of the server you are trying to connect to is not supported."

I am using Pogoplug (E02)  2.6.22.18 #81 armv5tejl + optware as my NAS and I have mounted a 1 TB NTFS drive on it, along with a 16 GB Ext3 drive to host optware. I exported these mount points using Samba. Both these drives are R/W accessible from Windows. Not from Mac. It seems that Mac OS X Lion has withdrawn support for earlier versions of Samba.

There is a workaround. NFS comes to rescue:
(The recommended package nfs-utils is not available for optware, hence I used unfs3)

bash-3.2# ipkg install unfs3 portmap

mkdir /opt/etc/unfs
touch /opt/etc/unfs/exports

Add volumes to be shared in 'exports' file; a sample file looks like this:

cat /opt/etc/unfs/exports
/mnt 192.168.1.0/10(rw,no_root_squash)

1.0/10 : Specifies the range of IPs allowed to access the exported resources.

To start:
bash-3.2# /opt/sbin/portmap
bash-3.2# /opt/sbin/unfsd -e /opt/etc/unfs/exports

To view exported volumes on Client: (192.168.1.5 is the IP of the server)

macair:~ as$ showmount -e 192.168.1.5
Exports list on 192.168.1.5:
/mnt                                192.168.1.0/24

Credits:

http://www.openstora.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installing_userland_NFS_(UNFSD)
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Optware/Unfs3

With these settings, shared content will be read-only when accessed from Mac. (NFS works best with a central user directory... but that's an overkill on a home network). If you need to be able to modify a file, use sudo.

There is another great app called muCommander which allows you to browse different kinds of networks. Interestingly, where Mac OS X declined to mount Samba shares, muCommander worked.