Matt Daubneys Blog

Since I went to the doctor the other day with a dodgy knee and was diagnosed as being unfit, I have decided to start walking again.  This is good as I can fit it in with an old hobby and a new one too, by going geocaching and by improving my landscape photography.

Having had a potter around the interwebs, there don’t seem to be many resources for walking routes in the Gower.  Since it’s currently on my doorstep, I thought I’d generate a few maps using the open street map, walk them and then publish them for others to use. Initially these are only going to be short walking routes, but I’m hoping to do a couple of long ones over the easter holidays, and maybe do one or two in Berkshire as well.

While on these walks I can take a few photos and go find a few geocaches. My first walk is going to take me from Mumbles Head to Langland Bay along the cliff tops, there’s three caches on the route, and hopefully the weather will be good for some nice piccies. I’ll attempt to use these to illustrate the walks and make them look nice Might need to raid the local library for some history snippets too.

It’s all getting a bit exciting!

Well, a new year and a few changes. Having just moved house, my broken laptop-server machine is at the end of it’s life.  With rent having gone down after the move I’ve decided to get the wallet out and ordered a shiny new VPS from those lovely people at bitfolk.com.

A couple of hours this morning got all the files transferred up, Apache 2, MySQL and PHP 5 installed and set up as well as Postfix, Dovecot, Fetchmail and Procmail. I’ve got Procmail to call SpamAssassin using bitfolks dedicated spam assassin server and it all seems to be working nicely now Shall just have to try and keep this place updated!

I went wandering this evening after being a bit restless, so decided to try out my new camera (a canon EOS 1000D) on some nice landscapes. Not being very good at photography in general I was quite pleased with the results.

I think in this one the sun was a bit too bright, there maybe someway to filter this out, but I’m unsure.

This one is my favourite. The nice warm glow from the clouds and in the wet sand is amazing. Might have another go if we get another dry evening before christmas

So,  the third epic astrophotography adventure was this evening. The first night, I had lots of frames of black, no stars at all. The second night was done by means of cheating, and I haven’t yet sorted the photos…. the third night and……

The Moon

But more exciting than the moon (taken with a blue filter in case you where wondering…)

Jupiter and 3 Moons (out of focus)

Yup, Jupiter and 3 moons. A bit out of focus, but you can just about see them. A bit more practice and I might get a nice shot!!!

All of these images where converted out of RAW using FOSS. I’ll blog a bit more about the set up on a later date.

Following the latest interwebs trend and the one on varios ubuntu planets I see…

“In contrast, the little green park suroundin this memorial is more of a celebration of life and a popular hangout on a fine evening.”

-The Rough Guide to Paris

which is half an inch closer to me than The Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko.

To join in just follow the instructions below:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

This week my prize from the Ubuntu UK Podcast and started playing. The preloaded version of Xubuntu Hardy really didn’t like my 19″ widescreen monitor, so after several hours of mucking about with xorg, I gave up and installed Xubuntu Intrepid Alpha 6. Which liked my monitor straight off!

There are a few things that should be mentioned, to get the machine to boot, the option acpi=off must be added to the boot line in grub, and it’s also a good idea to add pnpbios=off too.

Installing took forever from a USB key. The only USB ports on the machine that are bootable are the 2 USB 1.1 ports on the rear of the machine. It took about 4-5 hours + to install Xubuntu Intrepid from my pen drive.

Other than these little niggles, it’s a bit slow but I expected that. It’s quite a nice little machine. It’s very quiet, but the LEDs are a bit too bright (soon to be fixed with some tape and some a black marker pen). It does get a bit warm, but not excessivley so.

Next on the list of things to do with this machine is install motion and get my webcam security stuffs working, then the USB missile launcher. After I’ve done all this, it’s going to be my django learning server, and maybe something else too… but more on that another time……

Last weekend myself and the missus took a drive around my village logging all the access points my laptop could see. I did this using Kismet (in the Ubuntu Repos) and a bluetooth GPS module through gpsd. I did this for two reason. Firstly, I was greatly interested in what percentage of people in the village did not have any encryption on their wireless internet. Secondly, Open Street Map was severley lacking any decent maps of the village.

Driving around took a few hours (largley because the first time I went around I’d misconfigured Kismet..), and it took me maybe an hour to put that information into Open Street Map, and maybe 2 hours to analyse the data sufficiently. Here are the results from the access point survery;

First, the encryption data:

Encryption types used on Access Points in Inkpen

As we can see, a large chunk (22.43%) of access points logged do not have any encryption on their wireless internet. This is very bad as anyone can easily see anything they send to or recieve from the internet. WEP is almost as useless as having no encryption as it can easily be broken.

Wifi Channels used in Inkpen (subtract 1 from legend)

This second graph shows us the distribution of channels used in wireless networks in Inkpen. The majority of people use channel 1, 6 or 11. This may be to do with manufacturers standard settings.

Manufacturers of Chipsets in Access Points logged around Inkpen

This last one was just an aside really. The data for this probably isn’t that accurate, but it doesn’t surprise me that most access points have a Cisco chipset.

Either way, I thought it was an interesting way to spend a morning. Especially for the improvements made to Open Street Map, almost as an afterthought!

Well, after listening to the radio through mplayer, I got to thinking that there had to be a better way to start up a radio station than finding the url for it then kicking up mplayer afterwards. So I’ve now aliased radio 2, classic fm and bluegrass radio in my .bashrc!

You just need to add the following to the end of your .bashrc file in your home directory.

alias radio2=’mplayer -playlist http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/realmedia/fmg2.ram -cache 1028′
alias bgr=’mplayer http://bluegrassradio.microcerv.net/bluegrassradio -cache 1028′
alias classicfm=’mplayer mms://mediasrv-the.musicradio.com/ClassicFM?MSWMExt=.asf’

Ensure that the each alias is on it’s own line!

I’ve set the cache a bit bigger than needed, but it just means when the internet mucks about a bit the playing won’t get interrupted!

Ive spent the past 2 and a half weeks moving down the east coast of America with my Fiance and her parents. I must admit it’s been a lot of fun.

We flew into Boston and then more or less worked our way down the I95, making some detours to see friends of the missus’ family. We had a week in Boston (more or less), a day in New York, a day in Washington and a day in Savannah. We’re now spending a week (ish) in Florida before flying back Saturday, arriving home Sunday ready for lectures 9am on Monday!

Shall write a bit more when I’m home! (and there’s a few pictures in Flickr from Kennedy Space Center)

Well, you know you have one of those really weird conversations along the lines of

“We need a doorbell!”

“What about a wireless mouse will that work?”

You know it won’t end well. This ended with the destruction of a bluetooth keyboard, a trip to maplins and the creation of a Python based doorbell. Here’s how we did it….

I initially investigated using a mouse to act as a button, as a wireless mouse was kicking around, but problems with curses and the mouse caused a rethink. A bit of investigation led me towards the fact that hacking a keyboard is quite easy. The flimsy on a keyboard just crosses some terminals that selects the character pressed from a kind of table. So if I connected a switch to two of these I could press a button which would be recognised as the letter “e”. Easy! Curses can check for a key press and do stuffs!

Here’s a few piccies of it being built.

You can kind of see the switch in the lid of the box here.

Here you can see the switch, battery pack and pcb wired up.

Here it is attached to the door.

The python code is very very basic! I’ll start to update it slowly and make it a bit better, but it works at the moment. I took some code from the pymedia tutorial and some from here. There are two files, one controls the sound, the other does everything else! They can be found (with usernames/passwords stripped) here. It’s also below for completeness!

main.py

import curses, xmpp, snd, time
emails = ['contact1','contact2']

wavfile = 'chooseyourownbell.wav'
login = 'USER' # @gmail.com
pwd   = 'PASSWORD'

cnx = xmpp.Client('googlemail.com', debug=['never'])
cnx.connect( server=('talk.google.com',5223) )
cnx.auth(login,pwd, 'daubbell')

stdscr = curses.initscr()
curses.noecho()
curses.cbreak()
stdscr.scrollok(True)

while 1:
    c = stdscr.getch()
    if c == ord('q'): break
    elif c == curses.KEY_MOUSE :
        stdscr.addstr("mouse")
        stdscr.refresh()
    elif c == ord('e'):
        for addy in emails:
            cnx.send( xmpp.Message( addy ,"Door!" ) )
            stdscr.addstr(time.ctime() + ': pinged ' + addy + '\n')
        snd.playWAV(wavfile)
    else:
        stdscr.addstr(time.ctime() + ': Ummm... key not found \n')
        stdscr.refresh()
curses.endwin()

snd.py

 def playWAV( fname ):
  import pymedia.audio.sound as sound
  import time, wave
  f= wave.open( fname, 'rb' )
  sampleRate= f.getframerate()
  channels= f.getnchannels()
  format= sound.AFMT_S16_LE
  snd1= sound.Output( sampleRate, channels, format )
  s= ' '
  while len( s ):
    s= f.readframes( 1000 )
    snd1.play( s )

  # Since sound module is not synchronous we want everything to be played before we exit
  while snd1.isPlaying(): time.sleep( 0.05 )

And there you have it, still needs a little work, but a working Bluetooth Jabber Doorbell.