So after reading this article in Technology Review, I started wondering whether there was an easy way to use the T-Mobile G1 as a remote microscope. I wanted to be able to build something and use it, along with my G1, to take some extremely close-up photos, which I could then send quickly and easily over email.

The catch is this: I wanted to do this with only stuff I could find around my home. There seems to already be a lot of buzz about remote microscopy, to the point at which companies are actually selling (expensive!) microscope adapters for your camera phone. I didn’t want any of these–if someone is cobbling together a cellphone microscope, I’m assuming they don’t have $375 to spend on a lens. If they did, they could probably buy…a microscope.

So I started to think about what around the house would contain a lens with enough magnification to produce useful images. I wasn’t trying to look at blood cells and whatnot just yet–I just wanted something which could be used for looking at materials, things of forensic interest, cuts and other little traumas, etc.

The solution I arrived at was using the lens from a CD player. These lenses are everywhere–you could even grab one from an old optical drive. They’re generally easy to get at (I plucked mine out of the CD player with needle-nose pliers), and they provide good magnification.

The rest of the build was equally simple–I just took the back off of my G1 and taped the lens over the aperature for the G1’s camera.

Here are some of the resulting photos:

Human hairs imaged by the G1 microscope

A 12 point letter 'e'

A small cut on my thumb...gross, yes?

The metallic end of a USB cable

A millimeter ruler...anyone know how to use this to calculate magnification?

Next step would be to incorporate a second lens to get higher magnification, since at the moment this is really more of a glorified loupe than an actual microscope.

Please share your thoughts!

Other Stuff android microscope, cd player lens, cellphone microscope, diy microscope, g1 camera, g1 lens, g1 magnification, g1 microscope, remote microscopy

Ever since I discovered the Android Unlock Pattern, I’ve been trying to come up with a creative way to get around it. I’m sure there are plently of snazzy software ways to do this, but there’s an even easier one–use smudges.

Especially after you’ve made a call and held the G1 up to your face, some grime inevitably builds up on the screen (eww!). When you run your finger over the screen to unlock the phone, it ends up leaving a surprisingly clear fingerprint trail behind. If you hold the phone up to a light or a window and tilt it around enough, you can generally see the patterns of fingerprints on the screen. Unless the person using the phone did a lot of scrolling around after entering their unlock pattern, it’s also usually possible to clearly see their pattern as a nice little trail of disrupted grime on the screen.

Several people have pointed this out in forums, but I wanted to get a clear picture of the problem. Given the reflectiveness of the G1’s screen, however, this proved surprisingly hard to do. Eventually, I ended up placing the phone under a bright light and then photographing it with an SLR, which allowed me to selectively focus on the screen, and not focus on the reflection on the screen, as my point-and-shoot inevitably chose to do. I then made the resulting image negative in Photoshop, ran it through a high pass filter, and messed around a bit with the brightness and contrast.

The result is an image, on which I’ve overlayed the unlock “dots”:

It’s not hugely obvious at first, but if you look closely, you can see a line connecting the dots from the lower left to upper right corners (forming an L rotated clockwise), the correct pattern. It’s a lot of hassle to show something which is really obvious when you’re actually looking at the phone under a light, but you can see the idea.

This begs the question of how to protect your phone. The most obvious solution would be to wipe the screen after each use (or shower/wash your hands more often), but who wants to do that? Another idea is to create a pattern where you double back over lines you’ve already drawn, thus obscuring the actual pattern, even if someone should see its basic layout. The ease of doing this, however, suggests that maybe the unlock pattern isn’t all it’s cracked up to be–how about adding support for PIN entry in a future release, Google?

Other Stuff android hacking, android security, G1 security, hacking unlock pattern, unlock pattern

I’m currently writing this on my G1, while waiting at a Jiffy Lube for my headlight to be fixed. Since this blog runs on Wordpress, I decided to test one of two Wordpress apps available from the Android Market.

If you’re reading this post, that bodes well for wpToGo, an app that promises to add posts to any Wordpress blog which has xmlRpc enabled.

The app seems relatively straightforward–there’s a title line, a body line, and some basic formatting options (Bold, Italic, linked, and quoted). For some reason, you have to type text and then select it in order to apply formatting, which is somewhat iritating.

Other options, too, are sparse–there’s a place to add pictures, and a dropdown which loads categories from the blog.

Overall, though, the program seems quite usable, if a bit utilitarian. Again, assuming you’re reading this…

App Reviews

At 3.2 megapixels, the G1’s camera certainly doesn’t set any records–the Samsung Omnia gets 5 megapixels, and apparently 10mp models are on the way. However, 3.2mp is not half bad for a phone which doesn’t cater to the avid photographer. Besides, I remember when 3.2mp was the state of the art for digital cameras. My Nikon Coolpix 3100 still takes great pictures, dammit!

So far, I’ve found the quality of the G1’s photos to be excellent. Since the phone has no flash, the shutter slows down a lot in low-light conditions, but the colors stay true and there’s almost no grain. Outdoors or with good light, the camera performs even better.

Using the G1's camera

Getting photos from the G1 to a computer is relatively easy as well–since the pictures are stored on the microSD card, you just have to connect the USB cord to your computer, mount the phone by going to the Notifications screen, and navigate to the resulting removable drive on your operating system of choice. Photos are in the “dcim” folder, just like with a digital camera.

My one gripe with the phone is that the photos are saved as 72 dpi by default–too low for a good quality print. Changing the resolution to a more realistic 300 dpi in Photoshop, however, still yields a 6.8′ by 5.1′ image–certainly big enough for a good 4 X 6 print. Thus far, my images average 357kb, certainly small enough to email or send using MMS.

Features/Basics android photos, g1 camera, megapixels, photos

Once you’ve got all your contacts, personal emails, embarrassing party photos, etc. on the G1, it’s nice to have a way to keep everything nice and secure in case the phone gets lost. Luckily, the G1 has a very Googley solution that allows you to avoid typing a password each time you go to use the phone. It’s called the Unlock Pattern. You enable it by going to Settings–>Security and Location and selecting Require Pattern.

You’ll be promoted to draw a little pattern by connecting a series of dots. From now on, when your phone is sleeping and you press the Menu button to unlock it, Android will ask you to repeat it.

You then simply redraw your pattern to get access to the phone. As an aside, I still haven’t worked up the courage to press the Emergency Call button…

If a thief were to find the phone, it’s unlikely that they would be able to guess the pattern. Also, after a few incorrect attempts, the phone shuts you out for 30 seconds, preventing thieves from using brute force to break in.

If you’re afraid of your friends seeing the pattern, you can avoid the little green circles by unchecking the Use Visible Pattern box in the menu where you turned the feature on.

Features/Basics android security, draw pattern, touchscreen, unlock patter

Clearly, the Multitouch capable touch screen is one of the better features of the G1 phone. Although I’ve found it to be somewhat less refined than the iPhone’s touchscreen (for example, the inability to zoom in and out by “pulling” and “pushing” with two fingers is consistently maddening), it’s effective.

Since, as a rule, I don’t read product manuals, I discovered most of the extended features of the touch screen by accident:

Moving An Icon and Killing the Analog Clock: Go to the Home screen. Touch and hold the icon or offending widget for about 2 seconds. The phone makes a reassuring “buzz” to let you know you’re moving something, and the application slider becomes a trash can. Drag the icon/widget there and let go to kill it. Drag to a different part of the screen to reposition.

The Lauded Copy/Paste: A true iPhone killer. If the text is in a text box (as with an online form), touch and hold for 2 seconds. Choose “Copy” in the resulting menu. Repeat elsewhere to paste.

Double Click: I find that, when the screen is being difficult, it helps to do a fast double-tap. This seems to work especially well for opening apps.

Selecting Text: Android seems to pull the following bits of information out of emails, websites, etc: street addresses, URLs, and phone numbers. Touch these and hold to add to contacts and whatnot.

Moving Around Within Text You’ve Written: Say you’ve written something, like an email, and you want to make changes. Ideally, you’d want to be able to click somewhere earlier in the email and use the delete key, like with a word processor. I’ve found that the touchscreen is consistently bad for this–it’s hard to get to the right point in the text. Instead, I’ve taken to using the little scroll ball–you can move around much more accurately and kill offending typos far faster.

Features/Basics clicking, controls, copy/paste, scroll ball, touch screen

An Uninteresting Android Screenshot

What’s a tech blog without pretty screenshots, eh?

Unlike with the iPhone, taking screenshots in Android is a somewhat involved process. One needs to download the Android SDK, install everything correctly, enable debugging on the phone, and jump through loads of other hoops. However, the results, it must be said, are excellent.

To simplify matters, Download Squad has a great article on the topic here: Taking Screenshots on an Android Based Phone

Development android screenshots, Development, SDK

Welcome to the blog! Recently, I received a T-Mobile G1 as a (solicited) Christmas present, equipped with Google’s new Android operating system. It took about 5 minutes to discover that Android is everything a nice piece of open source software should be–extremely capable yet endearingly temperamental. My first interaction with it–attempting to crop a photo for my wallpaper–yielded a comically huge enlargement of my forehead, plastered across the G1’s lovely Multitouch screen, with a nice friendly-looking analog clock smack in the center of it. This had neither the polish of an iPhone, nor the ruthless efficiency of a Blackberry. I was delighted–it was like carrying Ubuntu Linux around in my pocket!

Ever since, I’ve been experimenting with the G1. In learning about its features, I’ve found other blogs and websites extremely useful. For that reason, I decided to document what I discover, in case other people are Googling for the same things. Enjoy, and please comment!

Other Stuff android, g1, linux, open source, welcome