Persistent Mapping of Windows Folder to a Drive

Have you ever wanted to a persistent mapping of a perticular folder to a drive to keep things segregated? I wanted to do it, because in office we were not supposed to partition the C: drive for some reason which I don't know.

So here is how you do it. You need to a Registry Entry for the new Drive. Open Regedit and make an entry as below.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Dos Devices]

Name - Z: (Drive letter you want to use)
Value - \??\C:\Users\pshetty1\2560P

You can go ahead and hide this folder in C Drive, so that you don't want to see here :). You need to restart the PC to see the changes.

Hacking android apps

Offlate I got some time to write a blog post to explain how to hack an android app. I always thought that hacking is very difficult. But later i realised that it is not that difficult.

There are few tools you need to start with android hacking. You would need to decompile the apk, and modify the smalli code,and then recompile the same. Zipalign and sign,. you are ready to go.

There are few things to keep in mind when hacking, first you need to study the application to find places where we see the checks, for example may be the screen where the password is asked etc. Then you can search the String resources with the Strings on those screens to find the logic related to F password cheek etc,you can then either change the logic or skip the code, os may be make that function return true inspte of the failed cheek. You are done, then recompile and see if it is working. If it does not don't be disappointed. You need to try again untilyou get the right hack.

Remember one thing most of the times the changes needed are not more than one line of code change. You would be surprised to see such week apps, But whatever they make to protect the app it is easy to hack.

Enough for now. This is kind of Introduction to hacking, you may need to google to find out how to decompile, recompile, sign, zip align etc, but at the end of the day it is fun

Refreshed Galaxy SL (S3+)

Here the some UI update i did to my Galaxy SL to make it look more refreshed. Galaxy S3 icon, all new launcher,  and keypad.

Screen Capture In Galaxy SL

I was always assumed that this phone does not come with the default screen capture option. i accidentally got a screen capture when some call screen got captured by a combination of key press.

Then I searched a while and found that holding back key pressed and then pressing the home key will capture the screen shot.

I always used the root utility shoot me to capture the screen. I think this is a great deal.

Adding more wallpapers to TwWallpaperChooser.apk

Now that I have explored how to de-compile an APK, we can play with its resources and XML files. The first experiment I did was to remove unwanted wallpapers from the TwWallpaperChooser.apk and add what I want it as default.

so here it goes, the basic procedure remains same, as decompile the apk and then recompile the apk.

First de-compile the apk into a folder with the below commands
apktool TwWallpaperChooser.apk TwWallpaperChooser

You would see a folder created with the files as shown below.

The contents of the folder is as shown below.

The important folder, and file you need to know in this case are /res/drawable-hdpi/ this folder contains all the images and their thumbnails, thumbnails are with _small in the name, and are of size 170x142, and main wallpaper images are of size 960x800. You can add more pictures and their thumbnails with the same size.

The reference to these files are made in the file /res/values-hdpi/arrays.xml, you need to edit this file to add more files and then recompile to generate a TwWallpaperChooseNew.apk.

Once you have your New APK ready, open both the NEW and OLD APK in some zip manager such as 7zip, and copy the resources.arsc from NEW apk to OLD apk, and also copy the images you have added into corresponding folders, and you are ready. The apk can be renamed to .zip file, so that it can be opened in zip manager, and once your copy is done, rename back to .apk file. 

You can now copy this file into /system/app and chmod to 644 and you are ready to use new TwWallpaperChooser.apk with added wallpapers. 

Here is few screen shots from what I have done. 

Hope you would enjoy doing it. Let me know if you have any questions.