Offensive Thinking

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2013-02-09 Nexus 4 SIM Card Trouble

Hey everyone, haven’t written something in a while, so I figured instead of just posting this on Google+, I could tell the tale of how it took me 20 minutes of sweat and fear to prepare my SIM card for my new Nexus 4 on this blog.

Yesterday, my new Nexus 4 arrived. After two years of using my trusted Motorola Defy, it was time for an upgrade. The Nexus 4 is a lot bigger than I like my phones normally, but the price/performace ratio made me buy it anyway. It is a very nice phone though, and I immediately began to set it up.

I saved the part of taking my SIM card out of my Defy and putting it into the Nexus as a last step, because I wanted the phone to be set up the way I like it, so I can immediately use it. The Nexus only takes a micro SIM via a tray on the side though, so I used this guide to cut my SIM to the right size, since getting a new one is a) time consuming and b) costs money (yes, sometimes I’m a cheapskate).

After cutting it and sanding the edges to make it fit into the tray, I had a bit of trouble sliding the tray back in, but by forcing it a little, it finally slid back. You may already guess where this is going, right? Of course, after switching on the Nexus it just told me “No SIM card found”. The card was also stuck in the tray, no way to get it out by pushing the teensy tiny extraction button (why the hell did they make it so small?). It took me about 10 minutes, one bent original tray extractor and one bent needle to finally pop out the tray by sticking another needle between the tray and the casing and gently prodding it until I could grab the tray with my fingers and extract it.

Long story short, after sanding down the back of the SIM card to make it fit better, removing a plastic foil that apparently was put on the SIM to protect the chip and rebooting the phone, everything works. At least for now.

The moral is: don’t use force to put your SIM in the Nexus tray, make sure it fits in a way that allows you to extract it again. Make sure that is does not only fit into the tray, but that its height also fits, so it doesn’t get stuck when sliding it in. Searching the Internet, however, revealed that I’m not the only one who got his SIM stuck in the tray, which makes me feel at least a little bit better ;).

2012-07-04 Subtle Window Manager

I’m a longterm XMonad user, and still love it. I even improved my (very weak) Haskell skills writing its configuration file.

But recently, I’ve decided to try another window manager, just for fun. This time, it’s subtle. No, that’s really the name of the WM, subtle. It’s written in C and extended via Ruby, so I know my around a little better on this one, being an avid Ruby coder. There’s two main reasons to deviate from XMonad:

Tags

I’ve used wmii in the past (until it got abandonded) and always liked the tagging concept for windows, so I could display them on more than one workspace and even create dynamic workspaces. It is possible to use tags in XMonad, too, I know, but I never came around to configure them, and they’re not part of the core functionality. Subtle uses tags, albeit in a “strict” mode, so you absolutely have to give a window a tag, because subtle will always map your window to a workspace (a “view” in subtle-speak) according to the tag, regardless of your current view. This takes a little time to get used to.

Manual Tiling

XMonad uses dynamic tiling, whereas subtle gives you full control of what you do with your windows by letting you decide where to place them (aka manual tiling). Both ways have their advantages and disadvantages: Not having to think about where to place your windows can be nice, but I wanted to try the approach of full control over how my windows are set up. Subtle’s gravities give you a very flexible way in specifying your own layouts. I also wanted to be able to have multiple windows in one place, either in a tabbed layout or the way subtle handles it, by just stacking them and giving you the possibility to raise and lower windows in the same gravity.

I’ve added my current subtle.rb config file to the dotfiles section, in case anyone wants to try subtle and needs a configuration file. I haven’t decided if I will stick with it for a longer time yet, but I’ll give it an honest try. Many of the concepts are very intriguing. And I can make it do what I want by using its very well documented Ruby API via subtlext, so there’s an incentive to really learn how subtle works.

If you decide to use my config file as a basis, you should also check out the subtle-contrib scripts. I’m especially fond of the launcher.rb script, as it allows you to dynamically add new views and tags on the fly while opening programs.

2012-06-10 On a personal note

Ok, so this is one of the very few personal blog entries you’ll find here. I’ve decided to put up a new blog at bt.offensivethinking.org where I openly talk about my life with a brain tumor. You can read about my decision over there.

On the website you’re currently looking at, you’ll find the same content as before in the future, about IT security and other technical stuff.

2012-05-14 New Project: hedge HTTP Request Parser

There’s a new project I started, and I called it hedge. It consists of an HTTP request parser written with Treetop, the simple Ruby DSL for writing PEGs. It is by no means a complete parser, I’ve started this mainly for fun and to have my own parser ready for other projects, so I can adapt it to my personal needs.

However, feel free to use this if you find it useful in any way. As always, I’m hosting hedge on github.

2012-05-01 Vim Plugins

As I was updating some of my dotfiles, I also started reorganizing the way my .vimrc is layed out. It then came to me that it would be a nice addition to this website to add a list of my most often used vim plugins, if only to remind myself what to download when I set up a new system. So, let’s get started, in alphabetical order:

I do not have all of those plugins in daily use, as some of them are rather special. I also tend to forget about having them installed, until I rediscover their usefulness at a later point. The list is not exhaustive, but should include all the major plugins I use. I might add to this list in the future, if more plugins arise from the depth of my .vim/ directory that I forgot about.


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