Gade(b)llaa

A quick intro: I use CF.lumen to adjust my screen temperature during the evening and night and I love it. It's highly customizable and the one thing I really like is that it actually filters the colors instead of just overlaying a color. That means that black remains black (because there is no color to filter) instead of a getting an orange/reddish tint. And CF.lumen offers a ton of options to let you tweak its behaviour.

One of those options is that, besides the actual color temperature and amount of red, blue and green, it lets you configure the display brightness for when it's day, evening and night. But that's exactly where I ran into a bit of trouble because I use Android's Adaptive Display feature (the one that lets you set the display brightness but still gives the system some room to maneuver based on the amount of light the device detects in your surroundings). The problem is that apps can only set the system brightness when Adaptive Brightness is disabled. Which is stupid.

Luckily, Tasker comes to the rescue.

I'm not going into a lot of detail about what Tasker is and what it does and-so-on but lets keep it at this: Tasker lets you configure certain rules (called 'profiles') and do things (called 'tasks') based on those rules. And there are a LOT of plugins available for it, extending its not-so-limited standard feature set even more.

I found out that Android actually does provide for a "settings key" to change the brightness when the Adaptive Brightness feature is enabled[1]: "screen_auto_brightness_adj". And you can use that key by running a shell command with Tasker.

Now, you could of course just set a time and run the command based on that but - in most parts of the world - the sun doesn't come up and goes down at the same time of the day. Here's where the Tasker plugin Twilight comes to the rescue. It lets you create rules based on your location's dawn and dusk times!

So just a quick rundown (I'll update this section later but it's getting late right now so this'll have to do for now):

1. Open Tasker and create a new profile > State
2. Search for twilight, tap it and then the 'pen' icon
3. Choose your from/until and confirm
4. Create a new task, give it a useful name ("Brightness Night" or something)
5. Add a command, search for "run shell"
6. Paste "settings put system screen_auto_brightness_adj [value]" where [value] is between -1 and 1.
7. Don't forget to check the 'run as root' option or it won't work.
8. Confirm everything and in the Profile section of Tasker longpress the task you just created and choose "Add exit task"
9. Create a new task, name it "Brightness Day" and repeat step 6 and 7 but now with the brightness value you want to use during daylight.
10. Done! Keep pressing 'back' until Tasker exits (this is important, it seems Tasker doesn't actually save things until you do this!)

[1] Some manufacturers - among them Samsung of course - decided to change and/or remove this key. It might still exist but you probably need to google for it..

"A picture says more than a thousand words" so I'll keep this short (and still have a post worth of more than 4000 words :)). For anyone wondering what my workflow is for creating a #dailygadellaa comic: here we go!

Although I know how to work with a wacom I prefer to use pen and paper so we start out with exactly that.

In most cases I do one quick sketch of what I want to draw to get a good idea of the face expression I want and optional objects I need and where to place them. In this case I did a quick Google Image Search to find an example of a Star Wars Episode VII stormtrooper helmet. When I have a good idea of that the image should look like I do the final version. I almost never do a pencil sketch and just draw the image using a black pen. If something goes wrong I start over.

Then I take a picture using my phone. Fun fact: I've been using phones that are known for their 'terrible' cameras since I started the comic (Nexus 4, Moto G 2013, Moto X 2013). Especially the Motorola cameras use a lot of post-processing to get the image up to an acceptable level and that actually works pretty well for this use case.

Next up: some quick image processing using the (Motorola) Gallery app:

• Punch
• Border (with smallest thickness)
• Exposure (+50)
• Black and white (+50)
• Save
• Share

Okay let me immediately start by saying: this is absolutely not a thing that only the Raspberry Pi can do - but because it's such a small device and it uses relatively little power I think it's safe to assume that lots of people have this thing turned on day and night. And in that case, it's the ideal device to do some maintenance jobs over the network.

This little guide will show you how I've set up my Raspi to reset my router every day (it's a long story but one of my routers is very unstable in its current set up and I haven't figured out how to fix it yet).

UPDATE:

I forgot to mention which router I use this script for. It's a ASUS RT N66U.

As Jeroen pointed out in the comments it can be a bit more complicated if you use other routers. If you have a Fritz!box (xs4all tends to supply these as modems/routers) you are in luck:
https://github.com/jpluimers/bash-fritzclient

REQUIREMENTS

I've been looking into audio boosters for Android and in my search I stumbled upon Viper4Android. It's pretty awesome but requires a bunch of installation steps and I found the documentation a bit incomplete and/or confusing - so much that, at some point, I found myself holding a (soft)bricked device. So here's what I did to get it to work.

NOTES

This guide is based on the steps I had to follow to get everything working on my Moto X 2013 running the official, stock Moto Android 5.1 rom. The actual (system version) version is 222.27.5.ghost_row.O2.en.DE.

If you have any further tips or if you think I forgot something: give me a shout in the comments

REQUIREMENTS

• A rooted device with SuperSu (or a similar app) and BusyBox installed
• The Viper4Android FX (just download the zip, we'll cover its contents later)
• SELinux Mode Changer (not available through the Play Store because Google does not approve)
• A "root file explorer" like ES File Explorer or Root Explorer (I prefer the latter)