Angry Birds Fix on Android

(Note: I realize this is very simple, but I wasn't able to find it by searching and therefore had to figure it out myself. Hopefully by posting it somewhere, I can save someone else the time. And if not someone else, maybe I'll save myself the trouble next time it comes up.)

Recently, after an update for Angry Birds Seasons on Beth's Motorola Droid, the app refused to open. I know that if I were to just reinstall it, all progress would be lost. I looked around online and I see other people have had similar problems with the various Angry Birds versions on android phones. I filed a bug report with Rovio but never heard back.

A little while later, the SD card on my phone had some issues. This causes both Angry Birds and Angry Birds Rio to stop working on my Droid Incredible. I could just reinstall them, but that would also cause me to lose all my progress. Turns out it wasn't too hard to solve both problems.

Angry Birds stores its save data and settings in files on the phone in:

/data/data/com.rovio.angrybirds
/data/data/com.rovio.angrybirdsseasons
/data/data/com.rovio.angrybirdsrio

If your phone is rooted, then you can just access these files directory from a terminal on the phone. Unfortunately, if your phone isn't rooted, you don't have access to these files (and rooting some phones requires wiping them which would defeat the whole purpose of this).

There is a way around this. If you download the Android SDK from google, you can access these files without root permission on the phone. Install the SDK following the instructions from google. When you connect your phone, make sure to turn USB debugging mode on (it can be found in Settings->Applications->Development).

Once you are connected, you can use the adb tool to copy the Angry Birds files off the phone for safe keeping. You should get both the file settings.lua and highscores.lua. Assuming you are doing this with bash on GNU/Linux (or a Mac)

john@yoshi ~ $ cd tmp/
john@yoshi tmp $ GAME=angrybirds
john@yoshi tmp $ mkdir $GAME
john@yoshi tmp $ adb pull /data/data/com.rovio.$GAME/files/settings.lua ~/tmp/$GAME/
john@yoshi tmp $ adb pull /data/data/com.rovio.$GAME/files/highscores.lua ~/tmp/$GAME/

(And the repeat with GAME=angrybirdsrio and GAME=angrybirdsseasons.)

After doing that on my phone, I reinstalled all three Angry Birds on my phone and then copied the files back with the command:

john@yoshi ~ $ GAME=angrybirds
john@yoshi ~ $ adb push ~/tmp/$GAME/settings.lua /data/data/com.rovio.$GAME/files/
john@yoshi ~ $ adb push ~/tmp/$GAME/highscores.lua /data/data/com.rovio.$GAME/files/

(Again, repeating for each game.)

For Beth's phone, the pull command could not find the settings file for Seasons. It seems that the settings file was erased during the update. Just putting a blank file back was enough to fix it! All the settings were lost, but there aren't many settings so that didn't really matter since the level data was saved.

So, now I back up my Angry Birds data every once in a while. I haven't had a chance to really examine the save files (.lua) but since I have copies, I'll probably take a look at some point.

Old Tech

I found this while going through some computer parts.  Makes me think that perhaps I keep old computer stuff just a little too long.

Android app.

Just trying out the Android app for Blogger.  It actually seems pretty nice.  Maybe it will convince me to actually use this blog again.

The only complaint I have so far is that it doesn't let me pick labels from a list which is a problem considering the fact that I don't remember any of the labels I've used in the past.

iCal/org-mode/python

I haven't posted any code in way too long.

I hope to write more about org-mode real soon since I am very impressed with it (and it is nice to take care of one of my more important computing tasks (todo lists) in emacs) but for now, here is the blurb about this python code from my download page. I realize I could probably do this using emacs lisp, but I'm a bit (or more than a bit) better with python than with lisp.

I depend on my todo lists pretty heavily. At one point I used the
palm todo list (and jpilot for syncing on my computer). Eventually
I switched to Apple's iCal (I could never get Mozilla Sunbird to
work reliably enough). This was kind of annoying since I'm not
really a fully time Mac user (I still prefer GNU/Linux or at least
UNIX cmd line stuff). For some things (grad school and work) I used
some perl/LaTeX thing which is a bit cumbersome. So I was pretty
excited by Emacs org-mode. I wrote some python to convert my ical
files to emacs org-mode. I tried to make it general enough that the
todo class would be a good start for a python-ical interface. If I
feel motivated, it should be fairly easy to expand this into something
more. For now, it is just to get iCal todo items into a python data
structure and can write it to orgmode todo items.

read_ical.py

Blog spam

I'm not exactly what you would call a "good" blogger. I can go months without actually posting anything (I blame facebook and twitter for taking care of my desire to talk to myself). So I found it a little odd when I started seeing a few comments on some old posts.

I didn't delete them immediately because I didn't initially understand them. In one case, there was a comment from an Anonymous user on a two year old posting about video game consoles. The funny thing was the comment was sort of on topic and had no links in it. Then a day latter there was another similar comment.

Finally, a day after that there was a post that starts out by apologizing for being off topic and has some sketchy looking links in it. The links have their href tags (or some attempt at a blogger shortcut for that) messed up which does not help make it any less sketchy.

Then next day, another identical copy of the same comment shows up (and I hadn't removed the first one yet at this point).

I've removed those comments, but it seems like a lot of work just to try and slip in a few sketchy links onto a blog that gets basically zero traffic.

Just makes me wonder if a tiny boost in page rank is really worth that much to people.

Of course it would be really funny if I was wrong and those were actual people, in which case I would have some apologizing to do, but I doubt it.

ASD Podcast

Having taken care of movies years ago, it was clearly time to move on to other media.

So, here is my brief debut on Goddard's Astrophysics Division's Podcast (which may be an even worse made-up word than 'blog'), Blueshift.

I talk for under a minute at the very end about the last step in how Fermi data gets to the scientific community. Here is the official page with an mp3 and transcript. It is also available on iTunes (it is the June 30th one). I don't know if that iTunes link works or not but it can't hurt.

New URL

Well, despite not actually using this blog, I decided to move it so the URL is on my site.

So now instead of

http://netpurgatory.blogspot.com

it is

http://blog.netpurgatory.com

Still hosted on the google servers but I prefer having things at least at my own URL. And they seem to redirect everything correctly which is nice.

If only I could remember to post here occasionally.