Retrieving Data Balance using Tasker

If you are a Mobile Prepaid user (in India), you usually get post Call/SMS/Data session informative messages containing amount consumed, charged and balance remaining. Using Tasker, one can pull the necessary info from such messages and display it as a more useful home screen widget. Here I am explaining how to pull remaining data balance from the Post data session message displayed by BSNL. 

 

Since the formatting of message vary from carrier to carrier, this particular task will not work on any other carrier. However, one can create similar tasks to pull the data using 'Variable Split' and 'Variable Section' actions.

[Pre-requisites] Tasker and Minimalistic Text

[Profile Name] Post Data Session Msg Dismiss //You can change this

[Trigger Event] New Window (Label:*DATA session* Window Type:Dialog) //New Window containing the phrase 'DATA session'. This Query is used to isolate the flash message received after terminating a mobile data session.

[Execute Task when Event Occurs] Data Session

[Example of Flash Message received] "DATA session duration XXmin XXsec and data used is XXX.XXX KB and deducted from free DATA account. DATA Day Acc Bal remaining is XXXX.XX MB" (Carrier is BSNL - India)

[Task] Data Session

A1: Wait [ MS:0 Seconds:2 Minutes:0 Hours:0 Days:0 ]

A2: Variable Set [ Name:%NEWDATABAL To:%WIN]  //Sets variable 'DATADET' to contents of flash message received after disconnecting data. 'WIN' is a system variable that stores the contents of last flash message received.

A3: Button [ Button:Back ] //Simulates 'Back' Button Action to Close the Flash message dialog.

A4: Variable Split [ Name:%NEWDATABAL Splitter:is Delete Base:Off ] //Split the message on the basis of splitter 'is'. If you analyse the message given above, You will see that the remaining data balance is mentioned in the end and is preceeded by 'is'. So to retrieve just the balance, we have to split the message using the Variable Split action in Tasker. The splitter chosen is 'is'. After splitting following new variables are created by Tasker: NEWDATABAL1, NEWDATABAL2 and NEWDATABAL3. Of the three, one we need is NEWDATABAL3 as it contains the balance remaining. The last step is pushing the data to Minimalistic text widget for displaying it in the home screen.

A5: Minimalistic Text [ Configuration:Databalance = %NEWDATABAL3] //Push the variable to Minimalistic Text Widget

[Cons]

Dependent on Flash message. Sometimes, due to network issues, such messages may not be received and hence the data balance will not be updated.

Pebble Toggle

I recently acquired a Pebble Smart Watch for using with my Nexus 4. I wanted an easy system to connect to Pebble. So I created a task to be used as Toggle in PowerToggles. The steps are given below.

TASK: Pebble Toggle
A1: If [ %BLUE ~ Off ] - Checks if Bluetooth is Off. If it is Off, then executes following actions

A2: Variable Set [ Name:%PTPBLEON To:1] - Stands for PowerTogglePebbleOn: When Pebble is connected using Power Toggles
A3: Bluetooth [ Set:On ] - Enables Bluetooth
A4: Wait [Seconds:1] - Wait for One Second
A5: Load App [ App:Pebble Data] - Loads Pebble App
A6: Flash [ Text:Enabling BT and Launching Pebble] - Flashes a Message (This is not required as this action is inserted merely to provide info)
A7: Wait [ MS:0 Seconds:1 Minutes:0 Hours:0 Days:0 ] - Wait for a Seond
A8: Button [ Button:Back ] If [ %PBLE ~ 1 ] - %PBLE is a variable set by an event context. The context checks if pebble is connected and if so, sets to 1. If Pebble is connected, Back Button is simulated. This is done to return to home screen
A9: Modify PowerToggle state [ Configuration:Set current toggle to on Package:com.painless.pc Name:Modify PowerToggle state Timeout (Seconds):0 ] - Modify the state of Power Toggles Toggle to ON

A10: Else If [ %BLUE ~ On ] - If Bluetooth is Off, checks if Bluetooth is On. If so, executes following actions

A11: Bluetooth [ Set:Off ] - Disables Bluetooth
A12: Kill App [ App:Pebble Use Root:Off ] - Kill Pebble App
A13: Flash [ Text:Disabling BT and Killing Pebble App] - Flashes a Message (This is not required as this action is inserted merely to provide info)
A14: Modify PowerToggle state [ Configuration:Set current toggle to off Package:com.painless.pc Name:Modify PowerToggle state Timeout (Seconds):0 ] - Modify the state of Power Toggles Toggle to OFF
A15: Variable Set [ Name:%PTPBLEON To:0] - Stands for PowerTogglePebbleOn: When Pebble is Disconnected using Power Toggles. 

A16: End If 

The following Tasks are executed when Pebble is connected via Bluetooth. A Profile is Created to Check if Pebble is connected (State: Bluetooth Connected, Name:Pebble) and if so, Task Pebble Connected is executed and if not so, Task Pebble Disconnected is executed.

TASK: Pebble Connected

A1: Modify PowerToggle state [ Configuration:Set Pebble Toggle to on Package:com.painless.pc Name:Modify PowerToggle state Timeout (Seconds):0 ] - Modify the state of Power Toggles Toggle to ON

A2: Variable Set [ Name:%PBLE To:1 Do Maths:Off Append:Off ] - Set the PBLE Variable to 1. Used to check if Pebble is connected in Task Pebble Toggle

TASK: Pebble Disconnected (When Pebble is Disconnected automatically - e.g. loss of Bluetooth Signal)

A1: If [ %PTPBLEON ~ 1 ] - Executes following actions if Pebble was connected using Power Toggles Toggle

A2: Wait [ MS:0 Seconds:5 Minutes:0 Hours:0 Days:0 ] - Wait for 5 Seconds. To check if Pebble is connected.

A3: Bluetooth [ Set:Off ] - Disables Bluetooth to save power

A4: Flash [ Text:Pebble has been disconnected. Switching off Bluetooth Long:Off ] - Flashes a message 

A5: Modify PowerToggle state [ Configuration:Set Pebble Toggle to off Package:com.painless.pc Name:Modify PowerToggle state Timeout (Seconds):0 ] - Modify the state of Power Toggles Toggle to OFF

A6: Variable Set [ Name:%PBLE To:0] - Set variable PBLE to 0 to indicate that Pebble has been disconnected

A7: End If

New Year Animation - 2014

The Tradition of Dedicating an Animation to Welcome the New Year enters its Fifth Year. So Here Is The One For 2014!! (Done in Flash, Time Spent Approx 60 Minutes)

New year Animations of earlier years:Click here

Force Signal Refresh App (Nexus 4/Android 4.3)

After the recent update to Android 4.3, my Nexus 4 has been experiencing many irritating side effects. One of such bugs was loosing the phone signal every now and then. Sometimes the phone will come back online after few seconds. But more often than not, it wont come online and the phone remains without service untill I try to use the phone. In such a case, the only way to force signal search is by enabling Airplane Mode and then disabling it. Eventhough I have put the Airplane Mode Toggle in my PowerToggles home screen widget, enabling the Airplane Mode and then disabling it is a cumbersome thing to do. In order to simplify the process, I wrote a simple Tasker action and put that as a widget in homescreen. The action requires root access and Secure Settings Plugin installed. Using the Tasker App Factory, I have converted the action to a standalone app and you can use it to refresh the signal manually on your Nexus 4 running Android 4.3. I have tested it on my phone and it worked without any issues. You can download the APK file from the link below.

Download RefreshSignal APK

 

PreRequisites for ths App to Work:
1. Root Access
2. Secure Settings Plugins must be installed

New Year Animation - 2013

        

The Tradition of Dedicating an Animation to Welcome the New Year enters its Fourth Year. So Here Is The One For 2013!! (Done in Flash, Time Spent Approx 60 Minutes)

New year Animations of earlier years:Click here

Aruppukottai Diaries: Karadi Maligai

'WHAT??? Are you sure that’s the name of the hotel', I asked again to make sure that I heard the name correctly.
'Yes' the voice from the other end of the telephone line said with an unnerving tone of certainty.

The year was 2009 and It was the beginning of the monsoon season in Kerala. I had just completed 38 days in SIB when I got the call from HO with an instruction to proceed to branch Aruppukottai. I had to check Google maps twice to locate the place and it took me another 2 hours to select the best way to reach the place on June 2nd. In case you are wondering where this place is, lemme help you with that. Aruppukottai  is a village located some 60 KMs south of Madurai on the banks of NH 38 taking which one can reach the southern port city of Tuticorin. Though it is a small village, Aruppukottai can be termed as an Industrial town when compared to any city in Kerala. Major business house is the Jayavilas Group and they practically own the whole village including five textile mills.

Since I would be spending almost a week there, I had to arrange for lodging and since it can’t be done 'online' (no surprises there) I called the branch which I was supposed to inspect and asked them to book a hotel room. I was at the Guruvayoor KSRTC Bus Stand waiting for the bus that goes to Madurai when phone rang. It was the branch and the voice introduced himself as Mr B. He told that a room has been booked at 'Karadi Maligai' Lodge.

'WHAT??? Are you sure that’s the name of the hotel', I asked again to make sure that I heard the name correctly.
'Yes' the voice from the other end of the telephone line said with an unnerving tone of certainty.

Apparently 'Karadi Maligai' is one of the best hotels in the region that caters mainly to visiting business men and bank officials. But somehow I found it difficult to swallow and my mind resembled the evening sky that had become pretty dark with rain clouds confirming the arrival of Monsoon. There is nothing to say about the bus ride. You have to travel in one of the 'Super Deluxe' bus that SETC runs to understand how 'great' the service is. However, the major shock was not the bus ride. It was the end of the bus ride. It reached Madurai by 3.30 in the morning of June 2nd and I didn’t know from where I can get a bus to Aruppukottai (the bus stand is huge). But thankfully one fellow passenger was kind enough to help me with the directions and I discovered the platform for Aruppukottai buses. Since it was the day of reopening of schools after summer vacations, the bus was already packed by angry fathers, loud mothers, crying children and people with school supplies. I didn’t get a seat. After some 15 minutes a blast of sound waves woke me up from my half sleep. The bus had begun its south bound journey and the driver had promptly switched on the DVD player which was now playing heavy duty 'dappamkuthu' (if you don’t know what’s that, it’s like hard metal rock in which the guitar is replaced by traditional drums and the lyrics is in Tamil) songs. It couldn’t get any worse, I thought: Another mistake.

It was 6 AM by the time the bus reached the Aruppukottai bus stand. As instructed by the voice on the phone, I got down in front of the old bus stand and took an auto to Karadi Maligai. The voice told me that just the name would be sufficient as it’s a famous landmark of the town. On my way I could see the Gopuram of an ancient temple and the music of MS Subbalakshmi was already in the air. It had a soothing effect. But that lasted only till I entered the famous 'Karadi Maligai' Lodge…

(contd)

A Novice's Guide to Rooting An Android Phone

Disclaimer: Following account traces the events unfolded during two days and contains technical information which may not be appropriate to some of the readers. Parental discretion adviced!

Chapter 1: The day the phone was bricked
Two days back (15th of February to be exact) my phone broke into a frenzy of weird music announcing the arrival of a brand new Firmware. The music pulled me back from the vortex some people call The Facebook. With trembling hands and a heart heavy with expectations I grabbed the phone and as expected I saw the notification announcing availability of firmware update. Ever since I found out from the manufacturers website that current firmware of my phone need to be updated to unlock the boot loader (program that loads the OS) of my phone, I have been anxiously and impatiently waiting for this moment. 'Finally.... 'I thought and pushed the update button without giving it a second thought. I was happy. The phone connected to my home WIFI and downloaded the update, rebooted itself and then installed the updated, again rebooted and slowly the welcome screen flashed. But something had gone wrong, really, really wrong...

As I unlocked the phone, I noticed little 'wobbliness' of the screen. It was a sign of things to come. As I explored I also learnt that WIFI was not working. The screen sometimes blinked making it very difficult to type. Then I knew: my phone had been 'bricked' (i.e. the phone was made unusable by a corrupted update of software) by the new update! I thought I could fix it by doing a factory rest. So I reset the phone once, then for a second time, a third and I stopped the 'reset' business with the fourth one. Clearly factory reset was utterly useless. So decided to go further. I rebooted the phone and from boot loader, tried the recovery option. I tried that couple of times and on both occasions, the screen froze with a red Exclamation mark. Now I was out of my wits. I had a broken down phone with no contacts (everything got deleted during the first factory reset). I took a backup of the SD card data and then restored an old backup of contacts stored in SD card so that I have something that resembled a useful phone. So ended the day in which my phone was bricked.

Chapter 2: The Decision
Next morning I called the HTC support hotline and they had bad news for me. They told that I have to contact their service centre at Ernakulam which is some 70KMs from my home and only then they can try to resolve the issue. Only problem was that with Information Systems Audit classes around the corner, I had no time to travel to Ernakulam. They told that I could also drop the phone in an outlet at my hometown. I didn’t want to do that either. So I decided to go to the service centre at Ernakulam. However, by the time I reached home, I had a new plan: instead of going to Ernakulam, I decided to try to root the phone and flash (install) a custom ROM (firmware). Thus started the mammoth rescue operation which lasted for 3.5 Hours.

Chapter 3: The Rescue of the phone that was bricked
I settled into the comfort of the armchair with a host of pen drives, USB cables, External HD etc. and began the rescue operation. Earlier in the day I had googled about the ways to root my phone and found a nice little tutorial in one of the forums. It wasn’t all that easy. It involved a complex process of unlocking my boot loader, flashing a custom CWM recovery, rooting the phone and flashing another ROM. But I decided to do go ahead and follow the steps given in the tutorial.

First I had to unlock the boot loader. My handset manufacturer provides a tool to generate an unlock binary file based on the unlock code of my handset. Unlocking the boot loader voids all or any of the warranty and if something went wrong after unlocking, i may not even get the benefit of the warranty. The notice didn't frighten me and i decided to go ahead. Unlocking the boot loader involved some command line theatrics, copying the unlock code and flashing (installing) a binary file emailed by the manufacturer. In the end phone is supposed to have an unlocked phone. And I did have an unlocked phone after completing these steps. Step One of the rescue was thus completed.

Step Two involved replacing the built-in recovery with a custom recovery called CWM (Clockwork Mod) Recovery. This step involved more terminal commands, flashing of an image file and rebooting. These steps were also completed successfully and I had managed to install the custom CWM Recovery.

By the end of this step, I was beginning to admire the beauty of Android and Linux. If it was a windows phone, I am sure that it would have been broken down completely by the end of 1st step. After the first two steps, I still had a phone with something of an OS and I was still able to boot it and make calls using the 'wobbly' UI.

Almost 1.5 hours into the rescue, I was able to successfully unlock the boot loader and install a custom recovery. Now I had to root my phone. Normally in all android phones, super user access (administrator access) is not given to the user as by default it is restricted. This is done to prevent any unauthorized modification to the system files. But some applications won’t work properly without superuser access. Rooting is the process by which superuser access can be gained. Third step involved placing a zip file in SD card and then installing it using CWM Recovery. It was a simple procedure and after installation of the file, I had superuser access to my phone.

Now to the penultimate and most important step: Increasing the Internal Memory. My phone had only about 50 MB of usable internal memory. Most of the apps can only be installed in internal memory. That meant I was not in a position to install most of the apps. Fourth Step was the solution for this memory problem. It involved wiping data and cache, installing Busybox (more command line showdown), partitioning my SD card using CWM Recovery and flashing (installing) a script placed in the SD card using recovery. This took a little longer to complete as I had some difficulties installing the Busybox. Eventually, I found the source of the problem and solution involved wiping the data again and starting from the beginning of Step 4. By the end of the third hour, I managed to successfully complete Step Four and my phone had 2GB of Internal memory.

Even after all these steps, the problem with my phone remained. The UI was still 'wobbly' and WIFI was still not working. The only solution was to install another ROM to replace the existing corrupted one. I searched for ROM in XDA Forums and found one. It took some to download the 153MB file. Installation of the ROM involved booting to recovery and entering more commands using the terminal. After that I had to again partition the SD card and run the zip file to increase the internal memory. This too was completed successfully. Finally, 3.5 hours into the rescue, I had successfully restored my phone. Only the painstaking exercise of restoring data backups and installing lost apps remained. It took another 2 hours to restore data backups and install apps over WIFI.

Chapter 4: And he used the phone happily ever after!
I have a phone with 2GB of Internal Memory and all the apps I couldn’t install before (including the angry bird game collection). The phone is working extremely well and some features are performing better

New Year Animation - 2012

        

 

 

New year Animations of earlier years: Click here

Merry Christmas

                                                      

Wish you all a very happy Christmas!!

I Am - Animated Version

This is the Animated version of I AM done in Flash. Press 'Enter' after the movie has finished loading.

Why this Kolaveri Di?

A very simple and quick (more like an animated storyboard) animation done in Flash about the Mullaperiyar Dam Issue. Tamil Nadu is opposing the construction of a new dam instead of the existing one which will crumble any time annihilating the lives of close to 50,00,000 people: Single biggest massacre of humans in the recorded history of human beings.

Pencilmarks Google Plus Page

Google + plus launched 'Pages' feature recently. You can learn whats its all about from here. So, without further ado i created a brand new Google Plus page for Pencilmarks! You can check out the page here. Add Pencilmarks to your circles to get the latest updates in your Google Plus profile!

Pencilmarks

on Google+

The Jump - Animation

This is one of my very first attempt at Animation; created sometime during 2007. The story of a fish that liked to show off!!

Blue

Blue skies!! Such a relief after a week of heavy downpour, wet clothes and muddy roads.

Grey

Today i went to Palakkad - The Rice City. It was raining when we left home and by the time we reached the place, signs of monsoon had begun to disappear. Palakkad is not known for its rains. However by the time i started my journey back home, the weather had changed. I could see ominous looking clouds gathering in the horizon. The sun had already disappeared behind the thick cloud cover. It would be a stormy evening for 'em, i told myself, turned my head away from the clouds and started my southbound journey to Home, to a hot cup of coffee and a warm bed.

Power Off

Today was strike day for the 1 Million bank employees in India. Since i had not joined in the union, i had to go to office, a deserted office. I had some pending work to do and i was at it the moment i reached office. By the time the clock stroke 6 and i shut down the PC, i was able to finish all the pending work. As i came out i couldn't help noticing the puzzled look on the face  of the lone Security Guard at the front gate. What was he thinking, i dont know. Strike or no strike, it was another back breaking day for me.

Observer

Watching the Weather: Snapped on my way home after another day in office.

Green Asphalt

The Protective wall of Urakam Temple is BIG and two months of non-stop rains have turned the wall to a moss covered green turf. I had to take a picture of it. There was no escaping the pull. The result u can see above.

Lanes

We were on our way to Pathirippala (Near Ottappalam, Kerala) from Ernakulam. 45 minutes into the journey we stopped near a hotel for breakfast. Since it was the National Highways, a lot of trucks pass by. The day had not dawned for some that were parked in the truck bay.

Solitary Companion

The night was upon me when I reached Indianoor, a little village near Kottakkal, Kerala. I got down in front of the Indianoor temple and decided to walk to Chitta's home. There was a dampness in the air and frogs were croaking. Monsoon Music!! Rain had stopped, for now. But the sky was overcast, I could tell from the absence of stars. My only light source, the solitary moon, shone feebly among the clouds making difficult to walk in that darkness and potholes in the road, now filled with muddy water, added to my woes.

But i enjoyed that little walk. Refreshing and peaceful it was, at the end of another hectic day.