Getting Android Auto working on the 2015 Hyundai Sonata

I recently purchased a 2015 Hyundai Sonata, Android Auto support was one of the many reasons for my choice. I downloaded Android Auto to my Nexus 6 and connected it to my car with a USB cable... but nothing happened.

I expected Android Auto to "just work" from the dealer but I quickly discovered that the audio system required an update before Android Auto would function. The update process was simple but painfully slow. An "Android Auto" icon appeared in the all items menu once the update was complete but the icon appeared to be disabled (gray and did not respond to touch).

After a lot of experimentation and research I discovered a forum post on Android Central about Android Auto on the 2015 Hynundai Sonata with a couple of suggestions for getting it to work:

1. Ensure Android Auto is enabled under the "connections" menu on the Hyundai Sonata.
I had paired my phone to the car with bluetooth immediately after purchase, any time I attempted to open the connections menu I received an error that it couldn't be configured while connected. I could only see the options once I disabled bluetooth on my phone (forcing a disconnect).

2. Enable USB debugging on the Android phone
This was an unexpected requirement but Android Auto started working almost immediately after enabling USB debugging!

The process for enabling USB debugging is documented in the Android Developer Documentation.

Crashing crashplan

I'm evaluating CrashPlan for performing backups of my home computers. It worked flawlessly for my smaller files (Photos, documents) but started crashing when I added my video directory.

After a quick search I discovered that the CrashPlan backup service was exceeding its memory allocation. It was trivial to change the allocation from 512m to 1024m:

1. Stop the CrashPlan Backup Service
2. Launch notepad as Adminitrator
3. Edit C:\Program Files\CrashPlan\CrashPlanService.ini
4. Change -Xmx512m to -Xmx1024m

Answer was taken from http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/3978-is-your-crash-plan-crashing.

tmux repeating keys

When upgrading from tmux 1.1 to 1.5 I found a few key bindings changed slightly. In particular, the arrow keys used to switch panes now repeat.

I often use the sequence C-b Down immediately followed by Up and then Enter to re-run a unit test. With 1.5 I was doing this too quickly (tmux's repeat-time is 500ms by default) so I was switched back to my previous pane. To fix this I simply added the arrow keys to my .tmux.conf without the -r option:

bind-key Up select-pane -U
bind-key Down select-pane -D
bind-key Left select-pane -L
bind-key Right select-pane -R

Invalid tmux term causes irssi issues

Today I finally switched my long-running IRC screen session to tmux. I rarely disconnect so I was simply waiting for a "good" time.

After a few minutes I noticed that my irssi scrollback was misbehaving; only half of my window would redraw when I pressed PgUp of PgDn.

I had manually set "TERM=xterm" in my bashrc; however, tmux advises only using "screen" or "screen-256color" as the term. I have no idea why I had specified term within my bashrc; removing the line and restarting tmux corrected the issue.

http://tmux.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tmux/tmux/FAQ

irssi autolog options

My favorite IRC client is irssi. I keep a log of my conversations using autolog; however, I dislike logs from chanserv, nickserv, and other random bots which I'll never reference. I discovered that autolog has a setting to ignore them:

/set autolog_ignore_targets chanserv nickserv 

While searching I also found log_create_mode; irssi's default file mode is 0644. I prefer to keep my conversations private unless I specifically broaden permissions:

/set log_create_mode 0600

 Now new messages and channels are private until I chmod them.

Primary instances on a node

Sometimes I need a space delimited list of instances on a Ganeti node. There isn't a direct command to get this but an easy bash one-liner:

gnt-node list --no-headers -opinst_list $node | tr ',' ' '

pinst_list fetches the primary instances on the node. You can replace this with sinst_list for the secondaries.

Chrome OS and Passwords

I have been using the CR-48 / Chrome OS for the past few weeks. I really enjoy using the OS but I don't think it could replace my Macbook Air (yet). I agree that the CR-48 is incredibly underpowered and has a terrible trackpad but this is "beta" hardware. I am excited to see how the hardware from Samsung and Acer compare.

My biggest annoyance? ChromeOS breaks my security routine. I currently use Keepass (with Dropbox) to create and store passwords. I trust Google... but I am not comfortable storing my passwords using Chrome sync. Yes, I am storing my password file on another cloud service (which is known to be unencrypted) but I feel safer knowing that my password file is encrypted under my parameters.

I also care about the accessibility of my passwords. The Dropbox + Keepass solution provides access everywhere (Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS). What happens when I cannot use Chrome? I often use other browsers for mobile, cross-browser testing, and accessing different Google accounts. What do you do when you cannot use Chrome that is logged in with your personal account? A web interface would improve accessibility but be an obvious target for attacks, just like LastPass.