Gingerbread on tsvinc

HTC Desire Z battery tile: the SD card its launcher can't write

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first builds of the logger turned the tile green and wrote nothing. The fifth place I tried to put its file worked. About thirteen hours after the first of those builds, I moved the file to the SD card on principle, and well after midnight I found it had written nothing again. The tile itself, the part with actual logic in it, took one build.

The tile lives on MeshLauncher, the home screen I wrote for my HTC Desire Z, a 2010 phone on CyanogenMod 7 (Android 2.3, a community build) where I had started replacing stock apps with small ones of my own. MeshLauncher runs as UID 1000, the system user, because this build trusts the platform key it is signed with. Hold on to that UID; it is the villain. The tile shows the phone's current draw from a kernel file, smem_text, which the previous post takes apart. Tap it and it logs one CSV line every ten seconds. This post is the day it took to find a directory that would accept those lines.

HTC Desire Z battery drain in milliamps, straight from sysfs

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The battery icon said 100% for the whole session, and it was telling the truth. The phone was on a USB cable and full, so 100% was the correct answer to a question I had stopped asking. The number I wanted sat one layer down. In one 70-second stretch of my log, the phone's estimated time left on a full charge went from 6.8 hours to 15.3 and the percentage did not twitch. I have a soft spot for a gauge that is accurate and useless at the same time. This one gets a place on the shelf.

Terraria on the HTC Desire Z: a DRM loop and a dead edge

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My thumb is on the row of hearts at the top of the screen, and nothing happens. Not a slow response, not a wrong item selected: the game behaves as if the thumb is somewhere else entirely. Tapping again, slower and with more conviction, is a debugging technique with a perfect record of not working, and it kept that record. By the end of the afternoon I had patched the game's license check three times, signed it with two different keys and swapped it for a newer build, all to arrive at a screen I could not touch.

A camera app for the HTC Desire Z, cut from 13,144 lines to 881

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The plan was a fork. Take AnonCam, an open-source camera built on the Android 2.3 camera app, delete what my phone does not need, keep the rest. What shipped is 881 lines, and the part of AnonCam still in it fits in three files, renamed and cut down. I call that a fork the way I call a house with one original doorframe a renovation: technically, and only when nobody is checking the paperwork.