Pulling sender and subject from Gmail

This came up on the Tasker group today. Someone wanted a way to get the sender and/or subject from Gmail to have Tasker keep beeping until they read an email from an important person. Or something like that.

The Android Gmail client doesn't have an API to allow you to get any information about a new email. But we're root and we don't care about that API business.

In the directory /data/data/com.google.android.gm/databases is a file named mailstore.YOURNAME@gmail.com.db. Breaking out the trusty sqlite3, we find that the sender and subject is contained in the 4th and 11th fields of the messages table and we can extract that by dumping the table...

sqlite3 mailstore.YOURNAME@gmail.com.db "select * from messages"

...and filtering it with awk.

awk '/@/{FS="|";print $4,$11}' | tail -n1

The last line seems to be the most recent email. For some reason I can't get awk to grab the last line on my phone, so I had to use tail.

That is what I posted on the Tasker group but that was a test and it needs tweaked. It is essentially grepping all the lines containing "@" then printing the 4th and 11th fields. I tried that first because you can get some gibberish in those messages, and I wanted to grab the lines with email addresses and that was a quick way, but the receiver's (your) email address is on the same line as the information we want so it would be a lot safer to grab lines containing your email address instead of the general "@" symbol.

awk '/YOURNAME@gmail.com/{FS="|";print $4,$11}' | tail -n1

The end result is something like "John" <john_doe@isp.net> Re: blah blah

Instead of posting a huge long line that makes my blog look funny, I'll put it all together like this:

#! /system/bin/sh
email=YOURNAME@gmail.com
file=/data/data/com.google.android.gm/databases/mailstore.${email}.db        
sqlite3 ${file} "select * from messages" | awk '/@/{FS="|";print $4,$11}' | tail -n1

I didn't actually test it, but Tasker can listen for notifications which belong to any apps including Gmail. You can have a profile that watches for Gmail notifications, then executes that script and sends the output to a file, then reads the line from the file into a variable, and acts on it accordingly. You could have it read the sender's name to you, remind you to read the email if it's someone important, or whatever.

ssh on ICS

Since getting the Galaxy Nexus, I've been unable to use ssh until now. The problem was something with the router. Everything was set up properly, all my other computers can ssh to each other, and I could ssh from outside my network, but once connected to wifi, I couldn't ssh from the computer to the phone or from the phone to the computer. I finally solved it by buying a new router.

There is still one oddity though. When connected to wifi, the phone will not ssh to the external IP address of anything on the network. What I mean is that if my computer's assigned IP address is 192.168.1.5 and ssh is running on port 1234 and the external IP address is 123.45.54.321, I should be able to connect to 123.45.54.321 port 1234. I always use that since it's the same address I would use if I were trying to connect remotely. But for some reason it won't work.

Luckily Tasker provides an easy fix. I set up a profile to write "connected" to /sdcard/Tasker/wifi when connected to my wifi and write "disco" when disconnected. Since I already had to write a script to connect to multiple ssh servers, I can read that file and see if I'm on wifi and use the proper IP.

#! /system/bin/sh

if grep -q connected /sdcard/Tasker/wifi
then
comp1ip=192.168.1.9
comp2ip=192.168.1.5
else
comp1ip=$(hip)
comp2ip=$(hip)
fi

case "$1" in

comp1)
echo "$comp1ip ssh-rsa AAA==" > /data/data/com.magicandroidapps.bettertermpro/home/.ssh/known_hosts

ssh USER@$comp1ip -i PATH/TO/KEYFILE -p PORT;;

comp2)
echo "$comp2ip ssh-rsa BBB==" > /data/data/com.magicandroidapps.bettertermpro/home/.ssh/known_hosts

ssh USER@$(hip) -i PATH/TO/KEYFILE -p PORT;;

esac

There's also another improvement that can be made to that script by changing the section for each computer.

comp1)
echo "$comp1ip ssh-rsa AAA==" > /data/data/com.magicandroidapps.bettertermpro/home/.ssh/known_hosts

if [ -z "$2" ]
then
ssh USER@$(hip) -i PATH/TO/KEYFILE -p PORT
else
shift; ssh USER@$(hip) -i PATH/TO/KEYFILE -p PORT "$*"
fi
;;

What this does is check for arguments to the script. If there are none, it will connect normally. If there are arguments, it will run them as commands on the remote computer.

So, the command s comp1 would login to computer 1, but s comp1 cd ~foo && touch bar will run the command on computer 1 to cd to the foo directory and create the file bar.

That makes it a lot simpler to bounce commands off the remote computer.

Woe is me...

Since getting the Galaxy Nexus, I've had a little trouble and have been flashing ROMs like crazy and spending enough time in recovery that I could have put Betty Ford's kids through college. Wait... I'm not sure that made sense.

Anyway, I assumed the problems were from hacks being rushed to the public with little testing, but I think I actually got a lemon and am going to swap it for a new one.

To begin with, I kept losing root after an hour or two for some unknown reason. I noticed that the file manager I was using was registering battery usage almost as high as the display after one such unrooting, so I stopped using it. That helped me get through a day or two with root intact, but I'm not entirely sure that was the problem because I was working in the terminal last night and lost root again.

I've also had random shutdowns and really bad slowdowns, and I've spend a couple of days trying, and failing, to get ssh to work. Oddly, I can ssh from the phone to my computer from anywhere on the cell network, but it simply will not work when connected to my router.

On the router, I had assigned the phone a certain IP address but it seemed to connect at a different one for the past few days. I kept setting it, thinking maybe I had kept forgetting to hit "apply" or something, until I finally realized tonight that I had set it yesterday for a different MAC address.

A little investigation revealed that my phone's MAC address changes on every boot. Oops, MAC addresses aren't supposed to do that! It's a pretty neat trick but not only troublesome for IP reservation, but could be causing a lot of other problems as well.

I found someone else on XDA who had the same problem and Samsung said it was a hardware problem and swapped it for him. Verizon's phone number is right there on the charger and I didn't know Samsung's so I called the big V and they were a little puzzled. They called Samsung and they were puzzled too, but the Verizon guy told me to swap it.

I'm going to swap it at the store tomorrow so I don't have to wait for one to be shipped.

It nearly brought a tear to my eye, but I just typed "fastboot oem lock" in a terminal and brought my phone back to stock. But hopefully I'll be ready to start playing with the GNex for real after tomorrow.

Galaxy Nexus

I finally got a Galaxy Nexus. I went Thursday at 11:15, walked in and told them I wanted a Galaxy Nexus and they said "We don't have them yet. They're coming in via UPS today. We're getting 8 of them and can save one for you if you want."

Yes, I live in a small town.

I didn't get around to buying one until yesterday afternoon. Since I enjoy voiding warranties within an hour of purchase, I promptly rooted it but didn't have time to do much else. Last night, I was a little upset because I kept losing root. I still don't know what the problem was, I'd flash the recovery and su binary and I would be doing something as root in a terminal when suddenly it would tell me "only root can do that" and I could no longer su. The root checker app said I had root, and the superuser app showed that certain apps were allowed and logged them as allowed when I opened them, but they still reported that they couldn't gain root.

It kept losing root after numerous flashes and rootings until I flashed this ROM this morning, and that seems to have cleared it up.

Anyway, my impressions on the Galaxy Nexus...

This puppy is huge! I'm charging the battery on my digital camera to try to get some comparisons of the Nexus One and Galaxy Nexus, but if you want a good idea of the size, it's almost the exact same size as a dollar bill, except a little shorter.

You ever go to a cell phone store and look at the flip phones and think "awww, such cute little screens, but I don't know how you could get anything done on that tiny little window." I felt that way when picking up the N1 after 20 minutes with the GNex.

The N1 had a habit of turning in my pocket, the GNex stands tall and it's thinner, so although it's much larger, it rides in my pocket better than the N1.

There are some things I don't really like.

The phone has very few features and it's easy to pull it out of your pocket and try to use it upside down. The earplug is on the bottom, which may or may not be a good thing, I'm not really sure yet.

The battery cover is a cheap piece of plastic that snaps in place instead of sliding. It's not what I would have designed, but it does raise the possibility of easy replacement, so there may be some cool looking battery covers showing up soon.

There are no hardware buttons for "back" "menu" "home" and "search", instead there are software buttons for "back" "home" and "recent apps". Three small dots are used for settings, and they may be at the top or the bottom of an app. I miss being able to always find them in one place.

And no trackball. Oh, how I miss that, but no other phones have them either. I've really been dreading the loss of the trackball, but I'll have to adapt.

With the launcher, you can't add widgets by long pressing the home screen, you have to do it from the app drawer. The app drawer has tabs for apps and widgets, and everything side scrolls now, which takes some getting used to.

LauncherPro still works, so that gives you the old school feel with long press widget adds etc, but it hasn't had an update in forever so it will surely stop working one of these days and old fogies like me will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

I really do love the phone. My gosh, when I pull that thing out it feels like I'm using a tablet. I have a lot of setup to do to get things working the way I want, so that means a lot of playing with this cool phone!

Android blues... and cheers.

The bad.

My Nexus One is dying. About a month ago, I was having problems like my favorite keyboard kept being reset to the Android default and my email sync kept turning off for no reason. So I upgraded to the newest Cyanogen and had even more problems. First it took several attempts to install, then a couple more wipes and attempts and some tweaking, hacking and tricking to get the Market to work, and I've been having random reboots and lock-ups since.

When you have a broken power button, a random lock up means you have to plug it into a charger then pull and insert the battery a couple of times to trick the sucker into booting.

I'm pretty sure there is something wrong with the phone's hardware somewhere. The upside is that it gives me an excuse to get the new Galaxy Nexus. The downside is that Verizon is dragging their feet about putting the darn thing on sale, so I'm stuck with a dying N1 for the time being.

There's nothing cooler than having to leave a party to go outside and plug my phone into the car charger to tease it into a hard reboot when it suddenly locks up in the middle of a conversation.

The Good.

If you haven't been to the web version of the Android Market lately, they've added some handy filters to search results, and they're also having 10 cent app sales to celebrate their 10 billionth download. The downloads have been changing daily and there are quite a few worth picking up. I've grabbed a bunch because, although I don't really want them now, I may have a use for them in the future.

Run Tasker task from command line

I have been looking for an alternative to Notify My Android in order to send myself notifications to my phone when I'm at home. NMA notifications work fine, but you have to open the app to clear them and I just wanted a vibration or sound that didn't leave anything else on the phone for when a job finished at the computer or something.

I first looked at playing a media file with the following command:

am start -n com.android.music/com.android.music.MediaPlaybackActivity -d /sdcard/foo.mp3

That sorta works. It opens the media app and plays the file then immediately goes to the next song. Adding && sleep 1 && pkill com.android.music makes it work more like I wanted, but that's too ugly.

I ran across this post in the Tasker forum about invoking a task from the command line, but the consensus was that it wouldn't work unless the command line app has the right permissions.

But then I discovered that this works:

am broadcast -a net.dinglisch.android.tasker.ACTION_TASK -e task_name YOUR_TASK_NAME

The only difference being the "-e" option instead of "-es."

So I made a simple script called "task" for the phone.

#! /system/bin/sh
am broadcast -a net.dinglisch.android.tasker.ACTION_TASK -e task_name "$*"

Now I can bounce the command off the phone via ssh and run any Tasker task I want.

The Pogoplug is taking over my life

The $50 Pogoplug that I bought to goof around with is now my main server.



The Pogoplug is about the size of a small, thick book. To the right is an Edge DiskGo network attached storage drive. That's where I keep all my media to be played on the TV via the Roku and the MyMedia Server Roku app. The Pogoplug is running a small python server that acts as the companion to the Mymedia app and I simply mounted the drive over the network because I didn't have any USB cables to plug it in directly, so it acts as if it is serving the files from it's own drive.

Debian is installed on the USB stick in the front of it. The white cable in the back is the power cord, and there's a cat5 plugged into the back which you can't see, and the two black cords are USB cords running to my CM11A and W800RF32A, which are an X10 controller and wireless receiver respectively.

It's not only serving media and running the automation, but other scripts to check weather, watch my IP address, back up files from my phone when I connect to my home wifi, etc. Everything installed and runs just as easily as it would on any desktop Linux. The only hard part was getting accustomed to Debian, but it's not so different from Slackware and at least it's not Ubuntu.

That's the beauty of Linux, very small programs requiring very little resources can do as much, if not more, than some $100 program you'd have to buy for a Windows computer, and they can do it in the background without you having to be there to point and click, and they can do it on very minimal hardware.