Category Archives: Android

CyanogenMod 12.1 brings back stock features on the Moto X

About two years ago, I replaced my iPhone 4 with a Moto X.  One of the coolest features at the time was that you could shake it while it was “asleep” to bring up the camera.  It’d also wake up the screen periodically to show the time and recent notifications.

These features went away when I unlocked the bootloader and switched from stock firmware to CyanogenMod 11 a while back, but the advantages of a mostly-unlocked phone (still need a SIM unlock…can probably do that next month for free when my plan’s up) outweighed the disadvantages.

Today, I got around to updating to CyanogenMod 12.1.  It took an unusually long time to install and Lollipop has moved lots of things around compared to where they were in KitKat, but the hardware is still able to keep up with it.  More importantly, the sleep-mode notifications and the shake-to-switch-to-the-camera feature are back.  It was nice to not have to unlock the phone and dig through the menus to fire up the camera; shake it anytime and the camera’s ready in about a second.  That means fewer missed shots when something happens.

Keepass2Android & ownCloud are playing with each other again

tl;dr: All is well with the world once again. :-)

A while back, I switched from LastPass to KeePass for password management; while I had no suspicion that my passwords were compromised with LastPass (they’re stored in such a way that they’re not supposed to be able to read them), I still felt better having my password info residing on equipment under my control.  (That KeePass is also open-source is a nice bonus.)

My password database is in a WebDAV share served up by an ownCloud instance on a server at home.  This makes it accessible from pretty much anywhere: home, work, on-the-go.  KeePass provides a desktop client that runs anywhere you can get either the .NET Framework or Mono running, so both Windows & Linux are covered.  For Android, there’s Keepass2Android.

For the past few months, though, there’s been a snag.  There was an ownCloud upgrade that kept Keepass2Android from being able to access the password file over WebDAV.  (It also broke WebDAV access for a bunch of other Android apps; I think the only one that still worked was ES File Explorer.)  Trying to load the password file directly from WebDAV would throw an error.  My workaround was to grab it with ES File Explorer, note the location, and have Keepass2Android load the local copy.  This, however, breaks synchronization between devices.

I don’t know if ownCloud changed or if Keepass2Android changed, but as of the versions I’m currently running (ownCloud 8.0.2 and Keepass2Android 0.9.7), loading the password database over WebDAV works again.  This means a password created or changed on my phone or tablet gets synced back to the server so that it appears across all my devices (including desktops and notebooks).