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Sunday 3 February 2013

Overclock and Overvolt

You know how when you buy a computer, and it says like intel atom (i have to use this shitty CPU so that it still relates) 1.66GHZ? that's the clock speed, the 1.66gHz part.

so what does overclocking do?
Well for starters, some games only work on ARM v7 speeds (800MHZ and above) like temple run. So if you're using an ARM v6 phone, there's a few things you can do. You can suck it up and find a shittier version of temple run to play, you can decide not to play anything and use your phone for calling your girlfriend only, you can be a rich spoilt brat and decide to go crying to your mum to buy a new and better phone, or you can overclock your phone to play temple run.

note though, overclocking burns more battery.
So overclocking is basically making the processor run at a higher than normal speed. So with an ARM v6 device you can now overclock it to ARM v7 speeds.
There are 3 problems with this though
a) it overheats, a fucking lot. Study your physics and you should know it will overheat.
b) it sucks a lot of battery. The battery level will drop a lot (and by a lot i mean it can go from 100 to 0 in like about 2 hours, that's what happened with a 40 percent overclock on my X8 to play contract killer)
c) it sometimes requires TOO much battery power

that's where overvolting comes in

Overvolting is making the battery output more than the manufacturer stated amount. The reason why this is physically possible is because industrial standards usually means that a 3.75 v battery should be able to output 4.5v. You do overvolting because you can, you want to, and your processor needs it.

Overvolting burns even more battery btw, so you really have to be careful not to really go crazy on your battery.

The trick to making it stable is to slowly raise the clock speed until it becomes unstable (your phone will auto reboot), then pushing the voltage up a little, then increasing clock speed again, then voltage, etc.

There usually will be a point where your battery cannot output anymore and forcing it past that line will result in either a) auto-reboot, or b) if you still continuously force it there, the ions in the battery will expand so much it'll explode and you'll spend the next 6 months in hospital for third-degree burns (i'm serious, some guy in china did that and it went boom on him, the acid corroded his skin)

Yep that's about it, if you want more info just head over to the guys at xda. until then, keep on hacking (playing with code :D)

ROOTING :D:D:D (not for sony / sony ericsson phones)

so rooting. what does rooting do?
Well I'll use the normal linux way of saying it first
Normally, the developers, to protect the computer/phone from idiots cocking up the whole computer
but if you aren't an idiot, what you'll do on the linux command line is
sudo (etc.)
sudo is basically like an upgrade of permission
so it's like being the master of everything

now, on phones, since it's EASIER to cock up phones than computers
you usually require some root.zip to be installed through clockworkmod
the root.zip is sometimes provided by the company itself on the developers page of their website.
If it isn't there, head over to forum.xda-developers.com and find your phone. There's usually a rooting guide there.

but what exactly does rooting do?
Rooting gives you elevated permissions for your phone, so you can now change the NAND, overclock, overvolt, odex/deodex (for making themes), zipalign, custom kernel, etc.etc.
basically with rooting you can do almost everything with your phone (provided your hardware doesn't fail)
Rooting usually is best used for low-end or mid-end android phones (ARM v6 or v7, max at 1.2GHZ, max Qualcomm Adreno Libs 205 (GPU), 512MB RAM).
so that you can improve it
It's not really necessary for the really light user who only uses it to text his parents and call his girlfriend throughout the night.
But if you're like have a mid-end android phone (like me, Galaxy Mini II) and want to play those super graphics intensive games like shadowgun, dead trigger, modern combat 4 zero hour etc., rooting usually lets you do that (through overclocking, more on that on the next post). There's also a bunch of handy apps out there on the google play store that requires rooting (like chainfire 3D, SetCPU, blade buddy)

and even if you don't really use your phone a lot, I usually suggest rooting it so that when your phone DOES cock up like 1 year later, you know you can fix it. (I still wonder why most non-rooted android phones on Stock ROM usually die at 1 year mark, is it some business trick?)

But i had better warn you beforehand, if you are an idiot and you try to root your phone, this is one of the few things that could happen
soft-brick your phone (bootloop, usually solved through re-flashing rom)
hard-brick your phone (won't turn on, won't charge, just won't fucking respond. You can do 3 things now, get a JTAG RIFF box and fix it, repair your phone/buy a new one, or use it as a weapon for throwing)
remove your phone's kernel (bootloop too, I have no idea how this can happen but it did to my father :P)




For sony / sony ericsson phones. There is a tool out there called superoneclick which supposedly promises to root all phones and tablets. I seriously doubt it works for all phones and tablets, but I DO KNOW it works for the X8, W8, X10, X10 mini, X10 pro, Arc, Arc S, and the Samsung captivate. All the other phones I'm not sure, they claim it works but until someone experiments, I don't know.

Saturday 2 February 2013

Clockworkmod 5.0.2.x

Hi so anyway my name is Randy and I mod android OS phones.
So today I'll be talking about one of the most crucial tools that most android (if not all) have
And best of all, it doesn't require rooting (for the scared people who dare not root)
Although if you use it it's probably to install some root.zip

So anyways, clockworkmod is a boothack that allows you to change the NAND of your phone (the /system partition)
And it's damn useful because it's fast, it's simple (relatively), it does quite a lot of things
so what are the things you can do with it anyways

Well........
install zips (whatever the developer gives you, like Overclocking, Overvolt, custom kernels/ROMs etc)
backup/restore your /system, and your /data
factory reset (note: this isn't actually like a reset to however you got your phone, it just wipes the /data partition)
partition sd-ext (ext2,3,4) honestly i don't know what this does because a) I've only two android phones, the X8 and the Galaxy Mini II, both of which doesn't have any kernel that actually utilises it well. Actually the X8 does, but you need to unlock the bootloader (more on that in some other post next time) and I don't have two jump-pins.
wipe dalvik-cache

we shall see how this is used in the next post!
Which shall be rooting, which you usually (except for pre-rooted AOSP phones) need to do if you want to do anything useful with your phone other than texting your girlfriend and playing temple run 2.