10 years of Last.fm

My Last.FM account gets 10 years old today. Here's the top 10 artists I've been listening to for the past 10 years.

You might also be interested to read what I wrote on my 100.000th scrobble.

Books and Music in 2015

A new year starts, and with it my list of music and books for the previous year.

2015 started musicly, for me, receiving the opulent limited edition of Marilyn Manson's latest album, "The Pale Emperor". The album screams "Marilyn Manson is back", and if I had any doubts about it, they would be gone when I ended up seeing the concert the band gave in Stockholm for the correspondent tour. I just wish they'd put Portugal back in their "tour in" list... There are two compilations in this list: "Colours of Black" which shows a good collection of Russian neo-folk, but that ends up being a mandatory record to have thanks to DVAR's participation on it (in a track from Moon Far Away); 400/100 is a different kind but spetacular compilation of many kinds of experimental music, all of the tracks having in common the fact that these bands somehow gravitate around the world of Metaphysical Circuits. The highlight on that compilation goes Kokori's track "The Prisoner", and while this compilation is now sold-out, you'll be able to grab that track on Kokori's upcoming album, Rootkit. Mindless Self Indulgence also presented a sort-of compilations, with early tracks in the fabulous "Pink". The list ends with the first album from Corpo-Mente, whom I'll be able to see live in the upcoming Entremuralhas 2016 festival.

As usual, the list of books aren't of books released in 2015, but that I've read in 2015. As you can see, the year topic was "music", too, with particular highlight to the great books about 78" and vinyl records.

See you next year!

How to extract a dts from an Android Phone

How to extract a dts from an Android Phone

1) Get its boot.img

    $ adb pull /dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/boot boot.img

2) Find out which dts is the device using

    $ adb logcat # the device's boot process, watch the first few lines.
   
3) split the boot.img in its components

    $ # wget http://www.enck.org/tools/split_bootimg_pl.txt -O split_bootimg.pl
    $ split_bootimg.pl boot.img
  
4) Look for the correct dtb on the boot image

    a) hexdump -C -v boot.img-dtb |less
    b) On this hexdump, search for "d0 0d fe ed"
    c) there are probably several occurrences, choose the one matching what the device is using (point (2))
    d) take note of the address where it is
   
5) convert the address from hex to binary

    $ # https://github.com/ARivottiC/aliases.sh has conversion aliases
    $ hex2dec address

6) extract the correct dtb from the bunch

    $ dd if=boot.img-dtb of=correct.dtb bs=the_result_from_5 skip=1

7) convert dtb to dts

    $ # look for dtc on the $OUT of an android build
    $ dtc -I dtb -O dts -o correct.dts correct.dtb