and then there’s Chrome OS.

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I recently wrote about how I am using ThinClients in our house to always have a ready-to-use working environment that get’s shared across different desks and work places.

To complete the zoo of devices I wanted to take the chance and write about another device we’re using when the purpose fits: ChromOS devices.

A little bit over a year ago I was given a HP Chromebook 11 G5 and this little thing is in use ever since.

The hardware itself is very average and works just right. The only two things that could be better are the display and the trackpad. With the trackpad you can help yourself with an external mouse.

The display works for the device size but the resolution being 1366×768 is definitely a limiting factor for some tasks.

What is not a limiting factor, astonishingly, is the operating system. I did not have any expectations at all when I first started using the Chromebook but everything just fell into place as expected. A device with almost no local storage and everything on the google cloud as well as a device that you can simply pick up and start using with just your google account may not sound crazy innovative. But let me tell you: if you start living that thin client, cloud stored life these Chrome OS devices hit the spot perfectly.

Everything updates in the background and as long as you are okay with web based applications or Android based applications you are good to go.

being productive?

Did I miss anything functionwise? Yes. At the beginning there was no real shell or Linux tools available for Chrome OS natively. This has changed.

Chrome OS comes with linux inside and exposed now.

Would I buy another one or do I recommend it and for whom? I would buy another one and I would recommend it for certain audiences.

I would recommend it for anyone who does not need to game anything not available in the Google Playstore – anything that can be done on the web can be done with the Chromebook. And as long as there is not the requirement of anything native or higher-spec that requires you to have “Windows-as-a-hobby” or a beefy MacOS device sitting around I guess these inexpensive Chrome OS devices really have their niche.

For kids – I guess this would make a great “my-first-notebook” as it works when you need it and does not lock you in too much if you wanted to start exploring. But then again: what do I know – I do not have kids.

using calendars to automate your home

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

When you want to make things happen on a schedule or log them down when they took place a calendar is a good option. Even more so if you are looking for an intuitive way to interact with your home automation system.

Calendars can be shared and your whole family can have them on their phones, tablets and computers to control the house.

In general I am using the Node-Red integration of Google Calendar to send and receive events between Node-Red and Google. I am using the node-red-node-google package which comes with a lot of different options.

Of course when you are using those nodes you need to configure the credentials

Part 1: Control

So you got those light switches scattered around. You got lots of things that can be switched on and off and controlled in all sorts of interesting ways.

And now you want to program a timer when things should happen.

For example: You want to control when a light is being switched on and when it’s then again been switched off.

I did create a separate calendar on google calendar in which I am going to add events to in a notation I came up with: those events have a start-datetime and of course an end-datetime.

When I now create an event with the name “test” in the calendar…

And in Node-Red you would configure the “google calendar in”-Node like so:

When you did wire this correctly everytime an event in this calendar starts you will get a message with all the details of the event, like so:

With this you can now go crazy on the actions. Like using the name to identify the switch to switch. Or the description to add extra information to your flow and actions to be taken. This is now fully flexible. And of course you can control it from your phone if you wanted.

Part 2: Information

So you also may want to have events that happened logged in the calendar rather than a plain logfile. This comes very handy as you can easily see this way for example when people arrived home or left home or when certain long running jobs started/ended.

To achieve this you can use the calendar out nodes for Node-Red and prepare a message using a function node like this:

var event = {
   'summary': msg.payload,
   'location': msg.location,
   'description': msg.payload,
   'start': {
     'dateTime': msg.starttime,//'2015-05-28T09:00:00-07:00',
     'timeZone': 'Europe/Berlin'
   },
   'end': {
     'dateTime': msg.endtime,//'2015-05-28T17:00:00-07:00',
     'timeZone': 'Europe/Berlin'
   },
   'recurrence': [
     //'RRULE:FREQ=DAILY;COUNT=2'
   ],
   'attendees': [
     //{'email': 'lpage@example.com'},
     //{'email': 'sbrin@example.com'}
   ],
   'reminders': {
     'useDefault': true,
     'overrides': [
       //{'method': 'email', 'minutes': 24 * 60},
       //{'method': 'popup', 'minutes': 10}
     ]
   }
 };
msg.payload = event;
return msg;

And as said – we are using it for all sorts of things – like when the cat uses her litter box, when the washing machine, dryer, dishwasher starts and finishes. Or simply to count how many Nespresso coffees we’ve made. Things like when members of the household arrive and leave places like work or home. When movement is detected or anything out of order or noteable needs to be written down.

And of course it’s convenient as it can be – here’s the view of a recent saturday:

get your calendar (one each)

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

In less than 10 days the season of chaos will end and discord will take over.

To be prepared and to not miss any important days – as some sort of public service announcement – I hereby link you to the discordian calendars adjusted for the current year 3185 (2019).

A holyday not found on any calendar. A calendar not found on any planet. A planet not found in any universe. A universe not found in any imagination. An imagination not found.

cliche internet alias

pushing notifications in home automation

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I was asked recently how I did enable my home automation to send push notifications to members of the household.

The service I am using on which all of our notification needs are served by is PushOver.

Pushover gives you a simple API and a device management and allows you to trigger notifications with icons and text to be sent to either all or specific devices. It allows to specify a message priority so that more or most important push notifications even are being pushed to the front when your phone is set on do-not-disturb.

The device management and API, as said, is pretty simple and straight forward.

apparently we’re sending a lot of notifications to these devices…

As for the actual integration I am using the NodeRed integration of Pushover. You can find it here: node-red-contrib-pushover.

With the newest client for iOS it even got integration for Apple Watch. So you not only are limited to text and images. You can also send our a state that updates automatically on your watch face.

As Pushover seems consistent in service and bringing updates I don’t miss anything – yet I do not have extensively tested it on Android.

a new header

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I had redone the header of this blog a while ago but since I was trying around some things on the template I wanted something more dynamic but without any additional dependencies.

So I searched and found:

Tim Holmans creation

Tim Holman did a very nice implementation of this “worm generator” with only using the HTML5 canvas tag and some math. I made some very slight changes and integrated it into the header graphic. It will react to your mouse movement and resets if you click anywhere. Give it a go!

wireless mesh network

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Since AVM has started to offer wireless mesh network capabilities in their products through software updates I started to roll it out in our house.

Wireless mesh networks often consist of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways. Mobility of nodes is less frequent. If nodes constantly or frequently move, the mesh spends more time updating routes than delivering data. In a wireless mesh network, topology tends to be more static, so that routes computation can converge and delivery of data to their destinations can occur. Hence, this is a low-mobility centralized form of wireless ad hoc network. Also, because it sometimes relies on static nodes to act as gateways, it is not a truly all-wireless ad hoc network.

Wikipedia

With the rather complex physical network structure and above-average number of wireless and wired clients the task wasn’t an easy one.

To give an impression of what is there right now:

So there’s a bit of almost everything. There’s wired connections (1Gbit to most places) and there is wireless connections. There are 5 access points overall of which 4 are just mesh repeaters coordinated by the Fritz!Box mesh-master.

There’s also powerline used for some of the more distant rooms of the mansion. All in all there are 4 powerline connections all of them are above 100 Mbit/s and one even is used for video streaming.

All is managed by a central Fritz!Box and all is well.

Like without issues. Even interesting spanning-tree implementations like from SONOS are being properly routed and have always worked without issues.

The only other-than-default configuration I had made to the Fritz!Box is that all well-known devices have set their v4 IPs to static so they are not frequently switching around the place.

How do I know it works? After enabling the Mesh things started working that have not worked before. Before the Mesh set-up I had several accesspoints independently from each other on the same SSID. Which would lead to hard connection drops if you walked between them. Roaming did not work.

With mesh enabled I’ve not seen this behavior anymore. All is stable even when I move actively between all floors and rooms.

a scientific paper a day

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am long-time subscriber to a service that is delivering a curated choice of scientific papers to your inbox every morning.

And even better: On top of the choice and link of the paper you also get a great summary with additional links and hints on the topic.

The Morning Paper: a short summary every weekday of an important, influential, topical or otherwise interesting paper in the field of computer science.

https://blog.acolyer.org/about/

Depending on your specific interests the papers chosen will give you deep insights into certain topics. Recently a lot of AI related topics show up there.

The papers are delivered by eMail, by RSS feed of by just reading the blog.

celebrate the discordian holyday: Chaoflux

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

allow me to explain by quoting wikipedia:

Dicordianism is a paradigm based upon the book Principia Discordia, written by Greg Hill with Kerry Wendell Thornley in 1963, the two working under the pseudonyms Malaclypse the Younger and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst.

According to its primary historian, Adam Gorightly, Discordianism was founded as a parody religion. Many outside observers still regard Discordianism as a parody religion, although some of its adherents may utilize it as a legitimate religion or as a metaphor for a governing philosophy.


The Principia Discordia, if read literally, encourages the worship of Eris, known in Latin as Discordia, the goddess of disorder, or archetypes and ideals associated with her. Depending on the version of Discordianism, Eris might be considered the goddess exclusively of disorder or the goddess of disorder and chaos.

Both views are supported by the Principia Discordia. The Principia Discordia holds three core principles: the Aneristic (order), the Eristic (disorder), and the notion that both are mere illusions.

Due to these principles, a Discordian believes there is no distinction between disorder and chaos, since the only difference between the two is that one refers to ‘order’.

This is likely a major reason for the inconsistency in the wording. An argument presented by the text is that it is only by rejecting these principles that you can truly perceive reality as it is, chaos.

wikipedia

And given that information you can expect a discordian calendar to exist. This calendar defines years (YOLD = year of our lady of discord) and seasons and days. And holydays:

Chaosflux is a Holyday of the season of Chaos. It is celebrated on Chaos 50 (Discordian calendar) or February 19 (Gregorian calendar).

Very little is known about this holyday. What we do know is pretty much made up as we go along.

discordia wikia GFDL

So now back to the holyday itself. How would you celebrate such a distinguished day?

I will use the services of theuselessweb.com to click 5 times on their most interesting button and then meditate on what comes up:

How to get me to actively avoid your products

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

It is a simple one step process: shove unasked advertising in my face. Bonus points for loud full blast audio right of the start.

If I ever see unasked advertising that tried to be sneaky or not do sneaky I am going to block it without noticing from whom or for what it was.

But when it’s shown so often and is so intrusive that I take note of your brand. That brand is not considered for future business anymore.

That is especially for services where I am the product paying with my data.

Sample 1
blocking
Sample 2

data security and privacy on this website

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

As of early 2019 I’ve started to bring back my content output stream to this website/weblog.

So far I am feeling quite confident publishing content here and even with changing legislation I am doing my best to provide an as good as possible experience to each visitor.

As of End-of-February 2018 this blog is being provided securly encrypted with SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt.

So security is one thing. Data privacy and safety another.

Apart from the commenting and searching there’s no functionality provided to enter/store data.

comments

When you enter a comment the assumption is that this is your call for consent. Your comment will be stored. With the information you’ve entered and can see on-screen as well as the IP address you’ve used. Akismet then is used to provide Anti-comment-SPAM functionality – so part of this data is transferred over to Akismet for processing. After moderation the comment is visible for everyone under the article you’ve created it.

cookies and browser local storage

No cookies are used or required by the website.

server logfiles

There are no logfiles. No access and no error logs. There is no tracking or analysis. There is no advertisting or monitoring. All I can see is an nginx and php process delivering websites. Your IP address is know to the server for as long as it takes to do his job of delivering the asset you asked for. Nothing gets stored on server side for your read requests.

content loading

No content is loaded from other domains or websites. Everything is hosted on my server. No data is exchanged with externals to bring you this website.

two factor mandatory for apple developers

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Apple has started to force developers that want to develop and publish on the MacOS and iOS platform to enable two-factor authentication.

Two-factor authentication (also known as 2FA) is a type, or subset, of multi-factor authentication. It is a method of confirming users’ claimed identities by using a combination of two different factors: 1) something they know, 2) something they have, or 3) something they are.

wikipedia

When I just got around enabling it for one of the apple accounts I’ve got there seems to be a much much higher security barrier in place already…

That’s probably some sort of zero-factor no-authentication. I guess. Anyway: Kudos to Apple for finally forcing people to minimum standards. Properly integrating the second factor will make this so much simpler for users. Apples ecosystem solution already is quite well integrated.

Have you switched all your daily used services to two-factor authentication yet?

disaster warning!!! This is just a test.

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Apparently yesterday somebody pushed the wrong button. Twice.

Like most countries Germany got a system in place to broadcast out warnings to the public in case of disasters or else.

And it proved to be quite useful in the past when it comes to the occasional storm or heavy snowfall/rain/lightning.

Seeing that they run a test and then again send out an apology to have run a test is puzzling and funny at the same time. Everyone has a “bad hair” day, right?

can your kitchen scale do this trick? – ESP8266+Load Cell+MQTT

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Ever since we had changed our daily diet we started to weigh everything we eat or cook. Like everything.

Quickly we found that those kitchen scale you can cheaply buy are either not offering the convenience we are looking for or regularly running out of power and need battery replacements.

As we already have all sorts of home automation in place anyway the idea was born to integrate en ESP8266 into two of those cheap scales and – while ripping out most of their electronics – base the new scale functionality on the load cells already in the cheap scale.

So one afternoon in January 2018 I sat down and put all the parts together:

ESP8266 + HX711 + 4 Load Cells
my notes of the wiring… this might be different for your load cells…

After the hardware portion I sat down and programmed the firmware of the ESP8266. The simple idea: It should connect to wifi and to the house MQTT broker.

It would then send it’s measures into a /raw topic as well as receive commands (tare, calibration) over a /cmd topic.

Now the next step was to get the display of the measured weights sorted. The idea for this: write a web application that would connect to the MQTT brokers websocket and receive the stream of measurements. It would then add some additional logic like a “tare” button in the web interface as well as a list of recent measurements that can be stored for later use.

the web app. I am not a web designer – help me if you can! ;-)

An additional automation would be that if the tare button is pressed and the weight is bigger than 10g the weight would automatically be added to the measurements list in the web app – no matter which of the tare buttons where used. The tare button in the web app or the physical button on the actual scale. Very practical!

Here’s a short demo of the logic, the scale and the web app in a video:

You can grab the sourcecode for the Arduino ESP8266 firmware as well as the source code for the web application here.

try to read/listen to japanese

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am at the stage of “trying to comprehend” the japanese spoken language.

I’ll be a happy camper if I would understand most of what is being said and could follow daylight normal conversations pointed towards me japanese. Like, you know, when trying to make a purchase or having to ask for that one bit of information.

For this, apart from excessive exposure to the spoken language, I am using some tools to help with reading to a small degree.

For those completely out of the loop:

Japanese has no genetic relationship with Chinese, but it makes extensive use of Chinese characters, or kanji (漢字), in its writing system, and a large portion of its vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese. Along with kanji, the Japanese writing system primarily uses two syllabic  scripts, hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名). Latin script is used in a limited fashion, such as for imported acronyms, and the numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals alongside traditional Chinese numerals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language

Here’s a list:

getkana
Anki
KanaTeacher: Kana
KanjiRepeater: Kanji
language analysis and explanation based on random news

icon this blog

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I’ve written about the progressive web application functionalities provided by this blog. But I’ve missed to explain in all simplicity what it means for most of you trying to read.

This is where Volker explains in simple terms what to do:

Step 1: Tap this icon in your browser:
(maybe someone can send me an android icon that does this?)

Step 2: Find and tap on “Add to Home Screen”
Step 3: give the icon a name

Enjoy the quick access to this blog.

japanese festival calendar

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Last year I had started to create a calendar that would hold all the events and festivals (まつり / matsuri) in Japan – especially Tokyo – I can get ahold of.

Since it has become a custom in my family to spend several weeks several times a year in the Tokyo area this calendar is used and updated frequently.

Of course it is a calendar you can export, import and subscribe to with any iCal / ICS capable device at your disposal. And probably that means any device that has a calendar app or a browser.

You can click this link and subscribe through google calendar: japanese matsuri calendar

subscribe here

progressive web applications

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

These days even heise online is writing up about the wonders of PWA (progressive web applications).

PWA simply put is a standardized way to add some context to websites and package them up so they behave as much like a native mobile application. A mobile application that you are used to install onto your phone or tablet most likely using an app store of some sort.

The aim of PWA is to provide a framework and tooling so that the website is able to provide features like push notifications, background updates, offline modes and so on.

Very neat. I’ve just today have enabled the PWA mode of this website, so you’re now free to add it to your home screen. But fear not: You won’t be pestered with push notifications or any background stuff taking place. It’s merely a more convenient optional shortcut.

“making your home smarter”, use case #11 – money money money

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

The Internet of Things might as well become your Internet of Money. Some feel the future to be with blockchain related things like BitCoin or Ethereum and they might be right. So long there’s also this huge field of personal finances that impacts our lives allday everyday.

And if you get to think about it money has a lot of touch points throughout all situations of our lifes and so it also impacts the smart home.

Lots of sources of information can be accessed today and can help to stay on top of the things going on as well as make concious decisions and plans for the future. To a large extend the information is even available in realtime.

– cost tracking and reporting
– alerting and goal setting
– consumption and resource management
– like fuel oil (get alerted on price changes, …)
– stock monitoring alerting
– and more advanced even automated trading
– bank account monitoring, in- and outbound transactions
– expectations and planning
– budgetting

After all this is about getting away from lock-in applications and freeing your personal financial data and have a all-over dashboard of transactions, plans and status.

How to weigh your cat! – the IoT version

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

This is Leela. She is a 7 year old lilac white British short hair cat that lives with us. Leela had a sister who used to live with us as well but she developed a heart condition and passed away last year. Witnessing how quickly such conditions develop and evaluate we thought that we can do something to monitor Leelas health a bit to just have some sort of pre-alert if something is changing.

Kid in a Candystore

As this Internet of Things is becoming a real thing these days I found myself in a candy store when I’ve encountered that there are a couple of really really cheap options to get a small PCB with input/output connectors into my house WiFi network.

One of the main actors of this story is the so called ESP8266. A very small and affordable system-on-a-chip that allows you to run small code portions and connect itself to a wireless network. Even better it comes with several inputs that can be used to do all sorts of wonderful things.

And so it happened that we needed to know the weight of our cat. She seemed to get a bit chubby over time and having a point of reference weight would help to get her back in shape. If you every tried to weigh a cat you know that it’s much easier said than done.

The alternative was quickly brought up: Build a WiFi-connected scale to weigh her litter box every time she is using it. And since I’ve recently bought an evaluation ESP8266 I just had to figure out how to build a scale. Looking around the house I’ve found a broken human scale (electronics fried). Maybe it could be salvaged as a part donor?

A day later I’ve done all the reading on that there is a thing called “load-cell”. Those load cells can be bought in different shapes and sizes and – when connected to a small ADC they deliver – well – a weight value.

I cracked the human scale open and tried to see what was broken. It luckily turned out to have completely fried electronics but the load-cells where good to go.

Look at this load cell:

Hardware

That brought down the part list of this project to:

  • an ESP8266 – an Adafruit Huzzah in my case
  • a HX711 ADC board to amplify and prepare the signal from the load-cells
  • a human scale with just enough space in the original case to fit the new electronics into and connect everything.

The HX711 board was the only thing I had to order hardware wise – delivered the next day and it was a matter of soldering things together and throwing in a small Arduino IDE sketch.

My soldering and wiring skills are really sub-par. But it worked from the get-go. I was able to set-up a small Arduino sketch and get measurements from the load-cells that seemed reasonable.

Now the hardware was all done – almost too easy. The software would be the important part now. In order to create something flexible I needed to make an important decision: How would the scale tell the world about it’s findings?

Software

Two basic options: PULL or PUSH?

Pull would mean that the ESP8266 would offer a webservice or at least web-server that exposes the measurements in one way or the other. It would mean that a client needs to poll for a new number in regular intervals.

Push would mean that the ESP8266 would connect to a server somewhere and whenever there’s a meaningful measurement done it would send that out to the server. With this option there would be another decision of which technology to use to push the data out.

Now a bit of history: At that time I was just about to re-implement the whole house home automation system I was using for the last 6 years with some more modern/interoperable technologies. For that project I’ve made the decision to have all events (actors and sensors) as well as some additional information being channeled into MQTT topics.

Let’s refer to Wikipedia on this:

“MQTT1 (formerly MQ Telemetry Transport) is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC PRF 20922) publish-subscribe-based “lightweight” messaging protocol for use on top of the TCP/IP protocol. It is designed for connections with remote locations where a “small code footprint” is required or the network bandwidth is limited. The publish-subscribe messaging pattern requires a message broker. Thebroker is responsible for distributing messages to interested clients based on the topic of a message. Andy Stanford-Clark and Arlen Nipper of Cirrus Link Solutions authored the first version of the protocol in 1999.”

Something build for oil-pipelines can’t be wrong for your house – can it?

So MQTT uses the notation of a “topic” to sub-address different entities within it’s network. Think of a topic as just a simple address like “house/litterbox/weight”. And with that topic MQTT allows you to set a value as well.

The alternative to MQTT would have been things like WebSockets to push events out to clients. The decision for the home-automation was done towards MQTT and so far it seems to have been the right call. More and more products and projects available are also focussing on using MQTT as their main message transport.

For the home automation I had already set-up a demo MQTT broker in the house – and so naturally the first call for the litterbox project was to utilize that.

The folks of Adafruit provide the MQTT library with their hardware and within minutes the scale started to send it’s measurements into the “house/litterbox/weight” topic of the house MQTT broker.

Some tweaking and hacking later the litterbox was put together and the actual litterbox set on-top.

Since Adafruit offers platform to also send MQTT messages towards and create neat little dashboards I have set-up a little demo dashboard that shows a selection of data being pushed from the house MQTT broker to the Adafruit.io MQTT broker.

These are the raw values which are sent into the weight topic:

You can access it here: https://io.adafruit.com/bietiekay/stappenbach

So the implementation done and used now is very simple. On start-up the ESP8622 initialises and resets the weight to 0. It’ll then do frequent weight measurements at the rate it’s configured in the source code. Those weight measurements are being monitored for certain criteria: If there’s a sudden increase it is assumed that “the cat entered the litterbox”. The weight is then monitored and averaged over time. When there’s a sudden drop of weight below a threshold that last “high” measurement is taken as the actual cat weight and sent out to a /weight topic on MQTT. The regular measurements are sent separately to also a configurable MQTT topic.

You can grab the very ugly source code of the Arduino sketch here: litterbox_sourcecode

And off course with a bit of logic this would be the calculated weight topic:

Of course it is not enough to just send data into MQTT topics and be done with it. Of course you want things like logging and data storage. Eventually we also wanted to get some sort of notification when states change or a measurement was taken.

MQTT, the cloud and self-hosted

Since MQTT is enabling a lot of scenarios to implement such actions I am going to touch just the two we are using for our house.

  1. We wanted to get a push notification to our phones whenever a weight measurement was taken – essentially whenever the cat has done something in the litterbox. The easiest solution: Set-Up a recipe on If This Than That (IFTTT) and use PushOver to send out push notifications to whatever device we want.
  2. To log and monitor in some sort of a dashboard the easiest solution seemed to be Adafruits offer. Of course hosted inside our house a combination of InfluxDB to store, Telegraf to gather and insert into InfluxDB and Chronograf to render nice graphs was the best choice.

Since most of the above can be done in the cloud (as of: outside the house with MQTT being the channel out) or inside the house with everything self-hosted. Some additional articles will cover these topics on this blog later.

There’s lots of opportunity to add more logic but as far as our experiments and requirements go we are happy with the results so far – we now regularly get a weight and the added information of how often the cat is using her litterbox. Especially for some medical conditions this is quite interesting and important information to have.

the xenim streaming network SONOS integration now plays recent shows!

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

 

 

 

Since I am frequently using the xenim streaming network service but I was missing out on the functionality to replay recent shows. With the wonderful functionality of Re-Live made available through ReliveBot  I have now added this replay feature and I am using it a lot since.

Within the SONOS controller app it looks like this:

Screen Shot 2015-07-31 at 14.22.13

IMG_3551

To set-up this service with your SONOS set-up just follow the instructions shown here: a new Music Service for SONOS

Source 1: xenim streaming network
Source 2: ReliveBot
Source 3: Download the Custom Service
Source 4: a new Music Service for SONOS

I wish there was: cheap network microphones with open source speech recognition

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I was on a business trip the other day and the office space of that company was very very nice. So nice that they had all sorts of automation going on to help the people.

For example when you would run into a room where there’s no light the system would light up the room for you when it senses your presence. Very nice!

There was some lag between me entering the room, being detected and the light powering up. So while running into a dark room, knowing I would be detected and soon there would be light, I shouted “Computer! Light!” while running in.

That StarTrek reference brought an old idea back that it would be so nice to be able to control things through omnipresent speech recognition.

I am aware that there’s Siri, Cortana, Google Now. But those things are creepy because they involve external companies. If there are things listening to me all day every day, I want them to be within the premise of the house. I want to know exactly down to the data flow what is going on and sent where. I do not want to have this stuff leave the house at any times. Apart from that those services are working okayish but well…

Let alone the hardware. Usually the existing assistants are carried around in smart phones and such. Very nice if you want to touch things prior to talking to them. I don’t want to. And no, “Hey Siri!” or “OK Google” is not really what I mean. Those things are not sophisticated enough yet. I was using “Hey Siri!” for less than 24 hours. Because in the first night it seemed to have picked up something going on while I was sleeping which made it go full volume “How can I help!” on me. Yes, there’s no “don’t listen when I am sleeping” thing. Oh it does not know when I am sleeping. Well, you see: Why not?

Anyway. What I wish there was:

  • cheap hardware – a microphone(-array) possibly to put into every room. It either needs to have WiFi or LAN. Something that connects it to the network. A device that is carried around is not enough.
  • open source speech recognition – everything that is collected by the microphone is processed through an open source speech recognition tool. Full text dictation is a bonus, more importantly heavy-duty command recognition and simple interactions.
  • open source text to speech – to answer back, if wanted

And all that should be working on a basic level without internet access. Just like that.

So? Any volunteers?

31st Chaos Communication Congress

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

 

Like every year the Chaos Communication Congress gathered thousands of people in one place between the Christmas-Holidays and NewYears.

Since I was out-of-order this year to attend I’ve opted for the Attending-by-Stream option. All Lectures are live-streamed by the awesome CCC Video Operations Center (C3VOC) and made available as recordings afterwards.

Since the choice of topics is enormous here are some I can recommend:

Source 1: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/wiki/Static:Main_Page
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress
Source 3: http://c3voc.de/
Source 4: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/

 

Map, Search and Filter flights all around the world

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Bildschirmfoto 2014-09-27 um 13.09.20

“OpenFlights is a tool that lets you map your flights around the world, search and filter them in all sorts of interesting ways, calculate statistics automatically, and share your flights and trips with friends and the entire world (if you wish). It’s also the name of the open-source project to build the tool.”

Source: http://openflights.org/

Shaders in your browser

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

“Shadertoy is the first application to allow developers all over the globe to push pixels from code to screen using WebGL since 2009.

This website is the natural evolution of that original idea. On one hand, it has been rebuilt in order to provide the computer graphics developers and hobbyists with a great platform to prototype, experiment, teach, learn, inspire and share their creations with the community. On the other, the expressiveness of the shaders has arisen by allowing different types of inputs such as video, webcam or sound.”

Bildschirmfoto 2014-09-27 um 12.29.04

Source 1: https://www.shadertoy.com

a new Music Service for SONOS: xenim streaming network

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am a frequent podcast live-stream listener. And being that I am enjoying the awesome service called xenim streaming network.

Bildschirmfoto 2014-08-19 um 21.03.21

Any Podcast producer can join the xsn and with that can live-stream his own Podcast while recording. It’s CDN is based on voluntarily provided resources and pretty rock-solid as far as my experience with it goes.

Since I am a frequent user of this – and I’ve got that gorgeous SONOS hardware scattered around my house – I thought I need to have that service integrated into my SONOS set.

The SONOS system knows the concept of “Music Services”. There are quite a lot of them but xsn is missing. But SONOS is awesome and they got an API!

Unfortunately the API documentation is hidden behind a NDA wall so that would be a no-go. What’s not hidden is what the SONOS controllers have to discuss with all the existing services. Most of the time these do not use HTTPS so we’re free to listen to the chatters. I did just that and was able, for the sake of interoperability, to reverse engineer the SONOS SMAPI as far as it is necessary to make my little xsn Music Service work.

As usual you can get the source-code distributed freely through Github. If you’re not into that sort of compiling and programming things, you are invited to use my free-of-charge provided service. To set it up on your home SONOS just follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Start your SONOS Controller Application and find out the IP address of your SONOS.

Click on “About My Sonos System” and check the IP address written next to the “Associated ZP”.

Screen Shot 2014-08-19 at 19.45.56

Step 2: Add the xsn Music Service.

By opening a browser window and browsing to: http://<your-associated-zp-ip>:1400/customsd.htm

When you’re there – fill out the fields as below. The SID is either 255, or if you used that previously, something between 240-253. The service name is “xenim streaming network”. The Endpoint URL and Secure Endpoint URL both are http://xsn.schrankmonster.de/xsn

Set the Polling interval to 30 seconds. Click on the Anonymous Authentication SOAP header policy and you’re good to go. Click on “send” to finish.

Bildschirmfoto 2014-08-19 um 21.16.27

Step 3: Add the new Music Service to your SONOS Controller.

Click on “Add Music Services” and click through until you see “xenim streaming network”. Add the service and you’re set!

p.s.: It’s normal that the service icon is a question mark.

Step 4: Enjoy Live Podcasts!

Source 1: https://github.com/bietiekay/sonos-xsn-service
Source 2: http://streams.xenim.org/

Knight Rider: a conclusion

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Bildschirmfoto 2014-07-06 um 11.25.46

“Knight Rider ist wieder da! Nach Jahren des bangen Wartens zeigt RTL endlich wieder den jungen David Hasselhoff, der mit seinem “Wunderauto” auf große Verbrecherjagd geht. Knight Rider war Kult, Knight Rider ist Kult, und Knight Rider mit Bier ist Oberkult! Angeklebte Armaturen, deren Knöpfe beinahe beliebig in Farbe, Beschriftung und Anordnung variieren, während der Fahrt wechselnde Lenkräder, Stuntfahrer mit krasskranken Clownsfrisuren sowie viele, viele, WIRKLICH viele Logik-, Dreh-, oder sonstwie geartete Fehler laden zur spaßig alkoholgetränkten Analyse ein. Die dümmsten Drehpannen, die peinlichsten Hasselhoff-Anmachen, die unauffälligsten Tarnsack-Autofahrer.”

 

Source: http://www.regelt.org/knightrider/sprittforfun/knightrider.html

How to get a list of all recent Podcasts on SONOS

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am using an external podcast download tool to stay updated on all podcasts I subscribed to. For this purpose SubSonic is a good choice – actually for a lot more also.

Screen Shot 2014-07-02 at 18.56.52

One of the quirks of the SONOS products is that Podcasts are not really well supported. In fact there is no support at all.

So I wrote a tool that extends the SONOS players with the functionality to “remember” play positions within audiobooks and podcasts. Now what’s left to properly have podcasts supported is a view of the most recently updated podcasts. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a “Folder View” in the SONOS controller of what’s new across all the different podcasts you are subscribed to?

Now here’s the trick:

Use a small script on any RaspberryPi in the house to dynamically create hardlinks to the podcasts files in a “Recently Updated Podcasts” folder.

The script is something like this:

find /where-your-podcasts-are/ -type f -printf ‘%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n’ | sort | tail -n 25 | cut -c 32- | sed -e “s/^/ln \”/” -e “s/$/\”/” -e “s/$/ \”\/recentPodcasts\/\”/” | sh

This short line will go through all folders and subfolders in /where-your-podcasts-are/ and then create Hardlinks in /recentPodcasts to the most recent 25 files.

That way, and when /recentPodcasts/ is made accessible to your SONOS controllers, you’ll have something like this:

Screen Shot 2014-07-02 at 19.17.24

Source 1: http://www.subsonic.org
Source 2: play position bookmarker

IPv6 native root server has problems with OpenFire Jabber / XMPP Server to Server

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I was setting up a new root-server machine and went for the Debian 7 minimal set-up. Thankfully the root-server provider I am using (hetzner) is connected with IPv4 and IPv6 natively. Awesome stuff!

If you’re using an IPv6 native set-up these days you STILL have to be cautious about possible side-effects with software having bugs and not knowing how to deal with these ginormous ip adresses.

So there’s a well known Jabber / XMPP server that I am using for some years now without any issues. I was even using it on native IPv6 connected machines earlier.

But with the fresh and clean set-up of Debian 7 and IPv6 by the hoster several problems started bubbling up.

1: the ‘there can only be one ipv*’ problem

Turns out that the debian team decided to set a system setting by default that lets IPv6 aware applications bind to IPv6 only. Good thing, you can disable it by adding this to your sysctl.conf:

net.ipv6.bindv6only=0

2: the ‘who resolves first is right’ problem

When you get a IPv6 native machine it might have a resolv.conf consisting of IPv4 and IPv6 name servers. And don’t worry: Everything is going to be all-right as long as the software you’re planning to use is perfectly capably dealing with the answers of both types of servers. The IPv4 ones will default to the A records, the IPv6 ones to the AAAA record.

Now there’s OpenFire. A stable and easy to use XMPP / Jabber server implementation. It’s based upon Java and I am running it with Java 7 on my Debian machine.

Unfortunately in the current 3.9.1 version of OpenFire there’s a bug that leads to Server-to-Server XMPP connections not working when they resolv to IPv6. So for example your Google-Talk contacts won’t work at all.

The bug itself is rather stupid: Seems that OpenFire expects an IPv4 adress from the DNS lookup and crashes on an IPv6 adress.

The solution is as easy as the bug is stupid: Remove the IPv6 defaulting nameservers from your resolv.conf.

# nameserver config
nameserver 2xx.xxx.yyy.99
nameserver 2xx.xxx.yyy.100
nameserver 2xx.xxx.yyy.98
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4
#nameserver 2axx:yyy:0:zzzz::add:9898
#nameserver 2axx:yyy:0:zzzz::add:9999
#nameserver 2axx:yyy:0:zzzz::add:1010

Source 1: defaulting to net.ipv6.bindv6only=1
Source 2: http://community.igniterealtime.org/thread/51902

The Data Visualisation Catalogue

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

“The Data Visualisation Catalogue is currently an on-going project developed by Severino Ribecca.

Originally, this project was a way for me to develop my own knowledge of data visualisation and create a reference tool for me to use in the future for my own work. However, I thought it would also be useful tool to not only other designers, but also anyone in a field that requires the use of data visualisation regularly (economists, scientists, statisticians etc).

Although there have been a few attempts in the past to catalogue some of the established data visualisation methods, there is no website that is really comprehensive, detailed or helps you decide the right method for your needs.

I will be adding in new visualisation methods, bit-by-bit, as I research each method to find the best way to explain how it works and what it is best suited for.”

Bildschirmfoto 2014-03-29 um 13.11.59

Source 1: http://datavizcatalogue.com/