Messenger app only working on WiFi?

I’m a huge fan of the Telegram Messenger. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and it’s nothing short of amazing. I have it installed in almost every device I use. I kept trying to get Randy and Chanux to switch to using it and even managed to finally get Chanux to set it up on his android but I don’t see him using it much. Randy kept disappointing me as he usually does these days and simply refused to try it (he also refused to watch Star Wars, so yes, my dear Internet, I think we can safely give up on the guy now).

Anyways I didn’t really write this blog post only to talk about Randy and his awful tastes. About a week ago I noticed that Telegram stopped working in the background while on mobile data and only started working while I’m connected to WiFi. This was really annoying because more than a couple of times I missed all my messages while on the road only to realize that Telegram was offline during my travels. When I get back on WiFi Telegram would notify me about all the messages that I didn’t receive during the day.

This obviously looked like a problem with my data settings that would restrict Telegram from using any mobile data and to my surprise it was all set to normal. Then I thought it was a restriction from the Power saving mode in android and that was also not the case.

A quick search on google led me to a bunch of forums that showed this is not just a problem with Telegram but also happens to be a problem common to a lot of apps that uses background data. And none of them seem to have solved the issue.

I kept looking through the threads and found one suggestion that finally worked for me. It was to reset all app preferences in android. This looked crazy at first but after trying everything I gave up and just did it, and guess what! Telegram now works well on mobile broadband.

So if your messenger app is not working and nothing else works you can do the following:

Go to Settings -> Applications -> Applications manager

Select Reset app preferences from the “MORE” menu and you’re done.

Be warned though. This would reset the preferences for all the apps in your android phone. So only do this if nothing else works for you.

This trick should also fix apps like Slack, Snapchat, Viber or any other app not working on mobile data.

~SeeJay

How to Unlock the Huawei E220 HSDPA modem

Huawei e220 or Vodafone e220 is the HSDPA modem we usually get from Dialog Telecom or Mobitel GSM (probably from Airtel) when we purchase a mobile broadband connection. But usually it’s operator locked, so we can’t switch between networks when the current ISP starts treating us like dust, If you’ve read my previous post you know I have my reasons to unlock the Huawei e220 modem I got from Dialog Telecom. Here I’m gonna explain how I did that and I’ll try to be as simple as I can. But Feel free to ask for help if u need any.

e220

Disclaimer: I’m not responsible, nor will be held liable, for anything you do with the information I provide in this tutorial. Use it at your own risk.

Ok, since we are done with the traditional “Disclaimer” Lets see what you have to do.

First you’ll have to download the following tools.
e220 CardLock UnLocker
e220 Updater version 11.117.09.04.00
QC Mobile Analysis Tool
And a Hex editor. But if you do it correctly you can do it with an ordinary text editor too 😉

Or you can download and extract this file. It contains all the tools we need for the job, including a lightweight portable hex editor 🙂

Basically, Unlocking the e220 is simple as running the E220 CardLock Unlock tool and entering the unlock code and pressing the “Ok” button. But that’s when you “know” the unlock code.

unlock

So how do we find the unlock code for our modem? that’s where the other tools come in handy.

Plug your modem to the computer and run the E220 Updater. Wait till it detects your modem and then press the “Cancel” button. yes! Cancel it! This is just to make it easier for the “real tool” to identify the modem.

Now open the QC BQS Analyzer and click on Hardware forensics menu, select Use Com/USB Port

Now the “QC Com Diag” window should be open. Most of the time your modem and com port is automatically selected on the Serial Com port drop down list. If not you’ll have to select it manually. And then click on the “Send Cmd” button and wait till the message “Successfully sent command” appears on the bottom right.

Now Select ” Read EFS” from the Diag Functions drop down menu and Click the “Lets go” button. When it asks, enter the file name e220.bin and save it. A message saying “Successfully read EFS” should appear.

Now its time to do some hex reading 🙂 Open the e220.bin file from your Hex Editor. And search for the ASCII string Sd, (including the comma) or Search for the for the Hex string 53 64 2c
After few random characters you’ll see a clean 8 digit code. Believe me, it’s easily recognizable and guess what! thats our Unlock code 😀

Once you’ve found the unlock key all you have to do is enter it on the CardLock Unlock utility and click “OK” And your modem is… Unlocked!!! 😀

Hope this will be helpful. I’d absolutely love to know your views on this. Good luck with unlocking your modems 🙂
-seejay

Using Huawei E220 HSDPA modem in GNU/Linux

If you’ve been following me on twitter you already know that I got a mobile broadband connection. But if you don’t know it yet, thats a good reason you should follow me on twitter. Anyways! the modem I got with my connection is the Huawei E220, And I’m very happy to say that it works perfectly fine under GNU/Linux. I was actually planning to write a blog post on that but was busy by some projects done with our local kde developer siraj 🙂 (nothing related to KDE by the way)

Few days back I stumbled upon a blog which the blog owner has written a post on switching to GNU/Linux. One of his consernce was getting his Huawei e220 working on Linux. Well, of course its a piece of cake, but I could risk a new linux user steping away from linux because he had a small prob with his 3g modem 😛 so wrote this comment on his blog to realize that I almost wrote a complete blog post on how to get it done. And decided that I should publish it on my blog so anyone else having problems with 3G connectivity on linux can solve them. so here goes my mini tutorial. Btw, I did some adjestments to it so it fits in.

*******************************

E220 works perfectly with wvdial on ubuntu Hardy Haron.
Here are the steps…
(1) Plug in the modem and run
sudo wvdialconf
(2) Then edit the wvdial.conf file…
sudo vim /etc/wvdial.conf Uncomment Username and Password lines in wvdial.conf and add the following to the end of the file “stupid mode = yes“
(3) Save the wvdial.conf
(4) run wvdial to get connected 🙂

If you are using ubuntu 8.10 then the Graphical Network Manager recognizes the modem and connects you within seconds.

I usually use kppp with my Slackware installation and it runs really well too. I prefer kppp over wvdial because it even logs the data usage of the modem.

*******************************

Thats all folks! if anyone needs help, I’m just a blog comment away, or just send me an @message on twitter and yes I’m the seejay on twitter.

~seejay~

Wanna learn GIMP??? (!!!)

Me too!!! 😀 We gotta develop this web site for our Internet Techs&Apps module for this semester and I’m suppose to design a nice header and a logo for the site. Well, the whole site actually. I’ll have to do all the coding but my other group members are doing a great job collecting required data drawing the layouts and stuff. That kinda stuff are the most difficult for me so I’m really REALLY thankful for them for not putting me in that hell.
But guess what! I suck at graphic designing 😛 well, not exactly. I just didn’t have time (oh no! not the same old excuse again!) to spend for graphic designing. I’d say graphic designing is not my thing exactly. I haven’t done much of Photoshop on my windo$ days either… But now that I have to do something for our project I thought it’d be nice to give GIMP a try. Hope it’s gonna be easy coz I’m not addicted to evil propritery graphic designing tools such as… u know… photoshop (yep! i just said that! 😀 )
So I’m now hunting GIMP tutorials on the net and found these cool sites so far, which i’ll add to my scrap book to use anytime i want (err… scrapbook??? well, thats another post hee hee…)

gimp-tutorials.net
gimp.org tutorials
youtub GIMP tutorials
gimpguru.org
gimp-tutorials.com

ok! thats all folks! feel free to let me know if you know any cool sites with nice tutorials for GIMP, i’ll keep the Links section updated as i find more stuff.
~seejay~

Get Atheros 5007eg working under GNU/Linux

The Wifi card in my new ASUS lappy was Atheros 5007eg and unlike intel’s wifi cards, Atheros doesn’t seems to be working “out of the box” in any Linux distributions 😦 But you can use MadWifi tools to get them working right??? well, thats what i thought until i tried madWifi, I’ve seen many success stories on the web which madWifi worked for Atheros 5006 cards but apparently 5007eg is relatively new and doesn’t seems to be working with madWifi “yet”
After typing sudo iwconfig in the Terminal here’s what i got…

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

So i decided to do it the other way. By using the windows driver with “ndiswrapper” and after few hours of hard work 😉 i was able to get wifi up and running :D. And the first thing came to my mind was “I gotta blog about this so that no one else will have to waste their time finding ways to get Atheros 5007 working with linux” 🙂

So, here i’ll describe how to get Atheros 5007eg working with Ubuntu. I’m also planning to write a post on how to get it working with Slackware as soon as i get some time to try. 😀 ok here’s what i did.

First go to system>>administration>>Restricted Drivers Manager, Disable HAL and then reboot.

Then you’ll have to install ndiswrapper from Synaptic. Here are the three packages you are gonna install.
ndisgtk
ndiswrapper-common
ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

After installing ndiswrapper you’ll need the windows driver of your wifi card in my case. I had the Atheros 5007eg driver in a DVD which came with my lappy and if you don’t have, you can get appropriate driver from the Atheros website. its http://www.atheros.cz/

Open the Terminal. Go to the folder where you got the windows driver(the .inf file) for your Atheros card and type
ndiswrapper -i xxx.inf (replace xxx with the name of the inf file)

Now we have to blacklist ath_pci for type gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist in the terminal

Add the following line to the end of the file.

blacklist ath_pci

Then type ndiswrapper -l to list the installed drivers if your driver is working you should see something like the following

net5211 : driver installed
device (168C:001C) present (alternate driver: ath_pci)

Type these commands in the terminal one after other

sudo depmod -a

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

sudo ndiswrapper -m

And type gksudo gedit /etc/modules
and add ndiswrapper to the end of the file and save it.

That’s all folks! 😀 now reboot the machine and you can check whether the wifi is working (of course it is!) by typing sudo iwconfig in the Terminal here’s what i get after the process.

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

ath0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:54 Mb/s
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Ok! Have fun! and feel free to let me know if you have any problems or any unclear steps in this post
~seejay~