"possum cam testing" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by leogaggl One common task for my Raspberry Pi Zero with (infrared) Camera is to do still image capture in regular intervals and upload the images for storage and post-processing. A simple way to achieve this with standard software tools available in the Raspberry Pi OS repositories is to use the S3 CLI tools and a simple bash script run by a scheduled cron job. Install S3CMD tools on RaspberryPi sudo apt install python3-pip sudo pip3 install s3cmd Configure Linode Raspberry Pi AWS-CLI s3cmd --configure The values:

"possum cam testing" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by leogaggl One common task for my Raspberry Pi Zero with (infrared) Camera is to do still image capture in regular intervals and upload the images for storage and post-processing. A simple way to achieve this with standard software tools available in the Raspberry Pi OS repositories is to use the S3 CLI tools and a simple bash script run by a scheduled cron job. Install S3CMD tools on RaspberryPi sudo apt install python3-pip sudo pip3 install s3cmd Configure Linode Raspberry Pi AWS-CLI s3cmd --configure The values:

The Siemens IoT2000 series has been a very interesting development from Siemens and it’s really encouraging to see the use of Open Source in the Automation sector definitely on the increase. And that can only be a good thing for developer productivity. Seeing a different IDE for each manufacturer of a PLC invokes some nasty memories of last century web-application development… Download existing image The image can be downloaded from the Siemens support site (if you don’t have an account with Siemens you might have to sign up for a login first.

As the convener for the Adelaide community of The Things Network, I am frequently setting up Multitech Conduit Gateways. Depending on your PC or notebook hardware you might have some problems with the Exar USB-UART driver on Linux. Here are the steps to getting this unit setup from an Ubuntu (should work for any other Linux distro) machine. lsusb Should show something like this: Bus 002 Device 006: ID 04e2:1410 Exar Corp.

Having just wasted a few hours on getting this Java software running on Linux I am documenting this for future reference and hopefully saving other LoRa / TTN folks some time. Prerequisites Install a Java JDK + JavaFX. This should work with the default OpenJDK 8 or 9 which comes as part of the Ubuntu repositories. I ended up installing Oracle JDK 8 as well as I thought the error might be related to OpenJDK.

I recently purchased a GrovePi Zero and expected this to be a reasonable straight forward way to connect Grove sensors to your Raspberry Pi, read sensor values via Python and pushing them upstream via MQTT. However the software side of things turns out anything but straight forward. Most of the suggestions on the Dexter Industries forum suggest to download some custom OS image – WTF? Hopefully this will save some people time to chase down the same rabbit holes….

EDIT [2018-06-05]: I have updated the code with the Firmware 1.18.+ releases. The code is available at our Growing Data Foundation Github. These notes are to assist Australian IoT enthusiasts to get started in connecting a LoPy to The Things Network as it is unfortunately (not yet) straight forward to make them work with the current AU-915 TTN Channel plans. As the initiator of the local Adelaide Community of The Things Network I have been experimenting with a number of devices to connect sensors to #TTNADL.

"possum cam testing" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by leogaggl One common task for my Raspberry Pi Zero with (infrared) Camera is to do still image capture in regular intervals and upload the images for storage and post-processing. A simple way to achieve this with standard software tools available in the Raspberry Pi OS repositories is to use the S3 CLI tools and a simple bash script run by a scheduled cron job. Install S3CMD tools on RaspberryPi sudo apt install python3-pip sudo pip3 install s3cmd Configure Linode Raspberry Pi AWS-CLI s3cmd --configure The values:

The Siemens IoT2000 series has been a very interesting development from Siemens and it’s really encouraging to see the use of Open Source in the Automation sector definitely on the increase. And that can only be a good thing for developer productivity. Seeing a different IDE for each manufacturer of a PLC invokes some nasty memories of last century web-application development… Download existing image The image can be downloaded from the Siemens support site (if you don’t have an account with Siemens you might have to sign up for a login first.

Installing VirtualBox is getting increasingly painful on Ubuntu due to the problems with UEFI Secure Boot and the VirtualBox kernel modules. Another reason for an alternative is that running VirtualBox VM’s completely in the background is not as straightforward as it could be. From the available alternatives I looked into (VMWare, Xen & KVM) it was KVM that fitted my needs (casual VM usage with mostly headless VM’s for testing purposes).

I recently purchased a GrovePi Zero and expected this to be a reasonable straight forward way to connect Grove sensors to your Raspberry Pi, read sensor values via Python and pushing them upstream via MQTT. However the software side of things turns out anything but straight forward. Most of the suggestions on the Dexter Industries forum suggest to download some custom OS image – WTF? Hopefully this will save some people time to chase down the same rabbit holes….

If you are using the GUI (Raspian full download) and want to connect your RPi Zero to a keyboard and monitor there are probably easier ways to do this. These notes are for people that want to use a headless (no monitor and GUI) setup ready to connect to your RPi after first boot via SSH from another terminal. wget -O raspbian-lite-latest.zip https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest Download link: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ Write Image to SD Card dd bs=4M if=2017-08-16-raspbian-stretch-lite.

Since Synology (despite requests) still has not added DNS Made Easy as a listed provider (despite listing some really obscure services – go figure!) here is the steps to add a custom provider. DNS Made Easy Setup Create a new A-Record Set the name Set the IP (initial – any valid IP) Tick the “Dynamic DNS” tickbox Enter your chosen Dynamic DNS Password Save the new record When saving the record you will see a “Dynamic DNS ID” – note down this number.

Upgrade or install SANE backends Since the version of SANE in the Ubuntu 16.04LTS repos is not working for this scanner you either need to install from sources (see this blog) or from this PPA. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rolfbensch/sane-git<br></br>sudo apt update<br></br>sudo apt install sane-backends tesseract-ocr gscan2pdf Security Add yourself to the ‘scanner’ group to be able to use the scanner. sudo usermod -a -G scanner USERNAME Checking SANE Check for the libsane version (needs to be at least libsane.

Unfortunately it is still much harder than necessary to find notebook hardware to use with Ubuntu (or other Linux variants). This blog is full of past experiences (some of them quite time-consuming) on finding notebook hardware that will work without too much fiddling. This short note is to document my recent research on that front to help others who want to do the same (as there doesn’t seem to be a lot of good current info around).

Add SDK repository sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-sdk-team/ppa<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install ubuntu-device-flash Enable USB Debugging on the device Make sure you have developer mode enabled (see http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html if you are unsure). Navigate to Settings > Developer options Enable USB Debugging. When a device is connected, you will be prompted in Android to authorize it. Unlock Bootloader adb reboot bootloader<br></br>fastboot oem unlock<br></br>fastboot reboot Check that you have the right device adb shell grep ro.

This is a follow-up on an older blog using Ubuntu. Raspberry Pi Prerequisites Since this will be a purely headless install designed to sit in a corner behind the scanner I am using a Base Raspian (Debian Wheezy) install (I personally like the clean minimal install via https://github.com/debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst the best). apt-get install sudo vim wget wput libusb-dev build-essential git-core Add non-privileged user account(s) adduser USERNAME<br></br>adduser USERNAME sudo<br></br>groupadd scanner<br></br>usermod -a -G scanner USERNAME

Since I have found some issues with my previous LXQT setup in real-life work I decided to fall back to standard Lubuntu for my cloud desktop. As part of this I also switched to TightVNC which seems a lot easier to configure. Add local user account adduser USERNAME<br></br>adduser USERNAME sudo Install Lubuntu Desktop sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends lubuntu-desktop tightvncserver TightVNC Configuration sudo vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf #<br></br># VNC Server configuration<br></br>#<br></br># enabled = True if VNC connections should be allowed<br></br># port = TCP/IP port to listen for connections on<br></br>#<br></br>[VNCServer]<br></br>enabled=true<br></br>port=5900<br></br>width=1366<br></br>height=768<br></br>depth=24

Since paper and myself have never gotten on well I have always been dreaming of a paperless office. A while ago I purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 scanner for the office. I did this after doing some research on which Automatic Document Feed (ADF) multipage & duplex scanners were both affordable as well as supported on Linux. scan the document perform OCR to convert to text combine the text with PDF to create a searchable PDF OPTIONAL – send the resulting document into Alfresco Document Management Server via FTP Install dependencies NOTE: PPA is only required for support of Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500

Now that Twitter has totally killed their V1 API there is no official way to get Twitter feeds via RSS. Which is a real shame as RSS is a well accepted Open Standard for this type of information :-( SHAME ON YOU TWITTER ! Currently there seem to be very few third party sites providing RSS services and it appears unlikely many will as Twitter will just kill them with changes to their API and/or terms & conditions as soon as they gain traction.

Since I always had trouble with the Eclipse version that is avaialable via the Ubuntu repositories I often need to install Elcipse on new machinery. Hence I am documenting the process for myself and hopefully it might help others as well. Java dependencies install sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk icedtea-7-plugin Eclipse download Note: download link needs to be updated – current as of 2014-01-27 cd /tmp<br></br>wget http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/epp/downloads/release/luna/M4/eclipse-standard-luna-M4-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz&mirror_id=1051<br></br>tar -xzf eclipse-standard-luna-M4-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz<br></br>sudo mv eclipse/ /opt<br></br>rm -f eclipse-standard-luna-M4-linux-gtk-x86_64.

Since I have been really happy with the performance and mobility on the Toshiba Ultrabooks (see previous blog entries) I have now chosen to stay with a tried brand and uprgrade to the Z930 i7 model. Unfortunately this now comes with added hurdles by our good friends at Microsoft in the form of UEFI and the pre-installed disaster that is Windows 8. Instead of totally wiping the system as I did with the Z830 model I decided to install next to Windows 8 as lots of people have reported problems with the UEFI bootloader and the BIOS if you start messing with the pre-installed partitions (specially the EFI partition).

Having seen more and more articles on the use of micro-blogging tools in educational and corporates settings, I am constantly surprised that one of the most useful options from my point-of-view seems to be constantly overlooked. Micro-blogging is like Twitter, but private to your organisation. It is a great way to capture those more informal internal discussions. It can help distribute useful information (such as links) throughout your organisation or help kick-start conversations.

For roaming mobile clients PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) is still the quickest way to get VPN connections to tunnel traffic over a secure link. Installation I always prefer installation via a yum repository as this will ensure patches are applied during regular system updates sudo rpm --import http://poptop.sourceforge.net/yum/RPM-GPG-KEY-PPTP<br></br>sudo rpm -Uvh http://poptop.sourceforge.net/yum/stable/rhel6/pptp-release-current.noarch.rpm<br></br>sudo yum install ppp pptpd -y Configuration Note: replace $USERNAME and $PASSWORD with actual values IP configuration echo "localip 192.168.0.1" >> /etc/pptpd.

Since I am tired to constantly recite this list whenever one of these designer-type people tells me that they need Adobe’s Whatever Suite to do some basic task here is a summary that I can point them to. Vector Graphics Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/) Xara Extreme (http://www.xaraxtreme.org/) Raster Graphics Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) Desktop Publishing Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/) Photo Editing Gimp (see above) Darktable (http://www.darktable.org/) RawTherapee (http://www.rawtherapee.com/) Luminance HDR (http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/) Layout Tools (DTP): Scribus (http://scribus.net/canvas/Scribus)

Debugging things on the Android Emulator (incluced in the SDK) can be a very slow and cumbersome process. Thanks to the Android-x86 Project it’s quite easy to run Android in VirtualBox. This is highly useful when you need to test mobile apps and websites from the Android Browser (as well as Chrome Mobile). Download an Ethernet enabled ISO from Tablets x86wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75945873/android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent<br></br>transmission android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent Create new ViratualBox VM Important Settings (see screenshots) OS: Linux, Version: Linux 2.

After upgrading my Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook to 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) I noticed that the ability to control the screen back-light was not working using the Toshiba Fn F6/F7 keys. Thanks to http://www.linlap.com/wiki/acer+aspire+s3 the solution was found quite quickly. sudo vim /etc/default/grub This will open the grub configuration file. (Grub is the initial boot selection software) To be able to dim the screen brightness, You’ve got to modify the line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

UPDATE: [01-May-2012] It appears that this PPA repo is currently broken (does not allow to get GPG key and has unmet dependencies on x84_64). It appears that the install on i386 systems does work anyway if you ignore the GPG key error, but I wouldn’t install in that case as PPA installs are security risk enough without GPG errors. UPDATE: [11-May-2012] The reason the PPA does not work is that it has been disabled by Ubuntu due to a licensing issue with (not hard to guess) Oracle.

I have recently been looking at different CAD options on Ubuntu and LibreCAD (http://librecad.org/) is looking like the best option for my needs at current (apart from the wish there would be some DWG support). Since the main Ubuntu repositories are usually a fair bit behind the lastest stable realeases of LibreCAD you need to add the LibreCAD Dev PPA Repository sudo add-apt-repository ppa:librecad-dev/librecad-stable<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install librecad<br></br>

When you need to convert multiple documents to PDF for distribution (or from one Office format to another) there are a few utilities around. The most workable I found is the UNOCONV utility which is build on top of LibreOffice / OpenOffice. This uses the OpenOffice conversion facilities rather than a simple PDF print driver. On Ubuntu it can be installed via Software Center or via apt-get from the core repositories.

Getting Multifunction Printers to scan under Linux can be a bit of a pain. The Samsung SCX-3400 I had to install recently was no exception. Here are the necessary steps I had to perform: Ignore all Samsung Provided CD’s and downloads. They do not work under Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) Add Samsung Unified Driver repository http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/smfpv3.html Install Samsung drivers and libsane-extras Edit sane configuration files vim /etc/apt/sources.list #add the Samsung Unified Driver Repo deb http://www.

One of the most important utilities on any computer is a decent text editing tool. Since there are as literally hundreds of text-editors out there you would think it is an easy task to find a similar one for each platform. The requirements list in order of priority: Fast & Native (reading NOT Java or similar runtime requirements) Excellent Search & Replace (which is where most fail ….) Lightweight Simple GUI (reading NOT an IDE) Potential Candidates Scite Scite was my first try since it is based on the same engine as Notepad++.

EDIT: Here are some tweaks if you install 12.04 (Precise Pangolin). Since I will have to do a fair amount of traveling in the next year I was in need of upgrading my trusted workhorse of Toshiba Qosmio F60 to a more portable option that will be easier on the shoulders during long travels. After doing some research into which of the major manufacturers offer the best support for a Linux based Operating System it came down to a final two: the Intel i7 variants of Samsung Series 9 and the Toshiba Z830.

One of the lesser known free Google services in our experience is Google Goggles. Specially in it’s lastest release (Version 1.7) it has received a few enhancements that make it very useful for some mobile learning applications Scanning of barcodes Google Googles will scan most standard barcodes and provide information on the product scanned. Here is an example from the Google Mobile Blog: Let’s say you’re reading a magazine article you really like and want to share it with your friends.

This is an interesting report and info-graphic by the folks at VisionMobile on a new way of measuring the openness of some mobile open source projects. The Open Governance Index measures the true openness of eight open source projects – Android, Qt, Symbian, MeeGo, Mozilla, WebKit, Linux and Eclipse – and analyses how governance, and not licenses, tell the full story of a project’s openness, across transparency, influence and control.

Thanks to Olivier Berten for providing this package via his PPA Repo ! sudo add-apt-repository ppa:olivier-berten/misc<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench-gpl EDIT: this has been confirmed to work on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) as well).

Finally I made the effort to completely get rid of my Facebook Account. After initially getting a Facebook Account in the very early days (as an ‘occupational hazard’ to investigate the potential of Facebook Applications) I have always been suspicious of the companies motives and decided not to use such a closed system as a base for application development. Recent developments have only confirmed this suspision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2011/08/08/facebooks-privacy-issues-are-even-deeper-than-we-knew/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ln2e0/facebook_patent_to_track_users_even_when_they_are/ Instead I will concentrate all of my content inside this blog (including as a backup for other social services I create).

I am not generally one for writing blog entries about customer support failures. Thanks to my technical work I have had my fair share of dealing with call queues and help-desk systems over the last 20 years. But compared with my experience with Google AdSense over the last weeks all of these just pale into funny memories. I have never experienced the outright refusal to acknowledge an issue and blanket denial of communications.

Like it or not (personally I am in the second category) Blackboard Collaborate or Elluminate (as it is still more commonly referred to) is something you have a hard time avoiding if you work in online education. I discovered that I have audio issues on some Ubuntu Linux machines and found the following to fix the issues. 1) Install alsa-aoss apt-get install alsa-oss 2) Save the Elluminate Java Webstard (.JNLP) file to a local folder – DO NOT OPEN IN BROWSER

With every new release of Ubuntu I am becoming more resigned to the fact that the effort to revert back to the Ubuntu Classic (Gnome 2) interface is getting harder and sooner or later I will have to bite the bullet and learn to live with the ugly and more cumbersome Unity interface (specially since Gnome 3 seems to be even worse). One of the first issues I found is that there seems to be no easy way to manually add programs to the “Launcher” (as well as to the applications list).

UPDATE: To install on 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) you need a different PPA. Since sun-java6-jdk has been removed from the default Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) repositories you need to add a PPA repository (unless you want to install by hand) sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

After the recent takeover of Delicious from Yahoo Inc by Avos and the subsequent total screw-up of what was a workable system I have been struggling to export bookmarks from Delicious in XML format (since the API is badly broken). The API export of all bookmarks limits the export to 1000 bookmark entries. Which is fine if you have less than 1000 bookmarks stored. But it makes it impossible (since there is no paging functionality exposed by the API) to export the rest should you have more (and many people would have much more than that).

Just a quick note on how to configure backups of Google Apps email to a local machine. Install getmail apt-get install getmail4 create config directory Create a subdirectory in users home folder (and change permissions) mkdir .getmail touch .getmail create config file Create a file such as .getmail/username.gmail [retriever] type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever server = imap.gmail.com username = username@domain.tld password = password mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/All Mail",) [destination] type = Maildir path = /path/to/storage/directory/ [options] # print messages about each action (verbose = 2) # Other options: # 0 prints only warnings and errors # 1 prints messages about retrieving and deleting messages only verbose = 1 message_log = ~/.

After recently researching the available software for e-book creation for some of our clients (in the education sector) I came across quite a number of options. However after some further look into the option and trying some I was able narrowed the field down to 2 options that seem to be reasonably user-friendly and matured. The two are using a very different approach and will suit different types of users. One is a native e-book writer which will give better low-level control for the more technical types.

The release of the latest Ubuntu Version has been seen by a number of commentators as the most end-user friendly yet and signals another milestone in the readiness of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for more widespread (and business) use. As a long-term user of a number of different Operating Systems and as SME Owner for the last 15 years I have overseen the gradual replacement of a number of proprietary software solutions with FOSS Alternatives.

As one of those who grabbed a HP Touchpad at the recent firesale (after announcing the killing of the product line) I did it as in full knowledge that this device in it’s current form is of limited use and (highly) unlikely to have lots of additional applications created for it. After casually using it for a few nights of use I am personally not surprised that HP decided to ditch this product.

This is an interesting info-graphic comparing the 3 most popular OpenSource Content Management Systems. While I don’t really agree with some of the metrics (such as the web-service stats) it is never the less a very good visual overview. As a long-term user of WordPress and Drupal there are some good points to give a quick overview.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 11 (Natty) I did some further research on VoIP clients (SIP) for Ubuntu Linux as XLite seems horribly out of date now. I came across QuteCom (formerly WengoPhone) and from first testing it seems to work quite well. The install is easy as it’s part of the Ubuntu Community Software (Universe) and that means it can be installed via apt-get, Software Center or Synaptic. So far the early testing has been very positive and the interface seems quite workable as well as having a number of other instant messaging options available.

Taking part in MobiMOOC has given me the opportunity to take stock of my own MobilePLE – the top 5 tools I find most useful as part of my ongoing learning. Catch Notes (previously 3Bananas) – mobile note taking the most critical component. Whenever I get a new device – this is what has to be installed as one of the first actions. For those not familiar with this software – it’s like Evernote without the bloat.

If you upgrade you Ubuntu Netbook release to 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) you will notice a change to the new ¨Unity¨ user interface. Personally I think the new interface is absolutely horrible (from a usability perspective) and I wanted to revert to the previous Netbook-Launcher. HOWTO Install the required components via terminal: sudo apt-get install netbook-launcher-efl After install just change the “Login Settings” Log out and after the next login: voila – the laucher interface:

Having used IP Telephony for a number of years I need a workable SIP client for all of the devices I use. I have found a very capable client for my Android phones (SipDroid) and on Windows/MacOSX I generally use X-Lite (as well as it’s paid version EyePhone) from Counterpath. Having tried several different Linux SIP clients (Ekiga, Twinkle, …) but all discarded them because of weird UI’s and/or problems with stability I noticed that there is a Linux version of XLite available.

Due to the hype generated by the recent launch and my reservations on using the Apple Inc. iTunes I was doing some research into alternatives to the proprietary and completely locked iPad device (and the associated lock-down to Apple’s iTunes Store). Hopefully this list can be of use for other people as well. I can see the form factor and the tablet style with a cut down (mainly web-browser based) Operating System as useful in a number of settings not least in educational institutions and libraries.

Getting excited about a new text editor of all things is not something I like to admit to easily, but in my line of work (although less and less is actually doing hands on coding) text editing is an important part. That’s why I checked out the BESPIN project as soon as I heard of it. The prospect of being able to edit your files from anywhere is very appealing to me since I spend a lot of time away from the desk and on devices that not always have good text editor (let alone all the files necessary).

One of the nicest ways to get photos straight from your mobile to Flickr (without having to use e-mails) on Nokia devices is the Flickr Plugin for the Nokia Share Online application. Since a lot of my clients in the educational sector are starting to use Flickr as part of their online teaching I decided to create a short HOWTO. The application itself comes with the phone on most recent Nokia S60 devices (with recent Firmware – check Nokia Software Updater for new firmware).

In running my businesses over the years I have been an unhappy user of MYOB for years. But due to time constraints I have always put off a change in accounting software as it is very disruptive and the alternatives were not too convincing (better the devil you know …). However due to the fact that our business is growing and we were at the end of a financial year the pain of using MYOB became greater than the pain of switching.

Turns out that working with PLC equipment you are still fully stuck to Windows. Which means I have to bite the bullet and get an up to date version of a Windows VM running on my machine. Since I have already paid for my Windows license with my laptop (even though I have never used it) this came in really handy. <pre class="wp-block-preformatted">sudo apt install acpica-tools sudo acpidump -n MSDM This command should dump the Windows key in the bottom right of the output.

After getting rid of my Facebook account a long time ago, finally, I have decided to pull the plug on Twitter as well. I have become increasingly wary of the changes of the platform as it seeks for a way to monetise it’s user-base. The timeline has increasingly become infested with annoying ads and no way of getting rid of them. Since Twitter effectively killed the whole app ecosystem with their changes to API rules and banning anything that became useful to a substantial number of people.

Installing VirtualBox is getting increasingly painful on Ubuntu due to the problems with UEFI Secure Boot and the VirtualBox kernel modules. Another reason for an alternative is that running VirtualBox VM’s completely in the background is not as straightforward as it could be. From the available alternatives I looked into (VMWare, Xen & KVM) it was KVM that fitted my needs (casual VM usage with mostly headless VM’s for testing purposes).

I haven’t been using Opera for quite a while as I didn’t really have a need for a third browser lately (Firefox & Chrome being the main ones). However I came across this article today mentioning that Opera has integrated ad-blocking as a core feature rather than a plugin to manage. If there were no bloated ads, some top websites would load up to 90% faster. Today, we wanted to share with you a native ad-blocking technology in our Developer channel for Opera for computers.

Synology NAS systems are great VPN servers for a home or small office. However if you want to connect to the VPN and route all your traffic through the VPN and be able to browse the internet there are a few things you need to change on the Synology server. Theoretically you should be able to set these options on the client, but I have not managed to get this to work with Synology and judging by the amount of forum threads a lot of other people had the same problem.

On remote systems sometimes a web-based tool can be very handy. Webmin is such a tool that has been well maintained for decades. To install quickly on a Ubuntu Server without having to manage dependencies and keeping it updated as part of normal OS update operations installing from a PPA Repo is handy. sudo echo "deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list<br></br>wget -q http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install webmin

Foursquare decided that it was too hard for them to compete with location services like Yelp and split their app into two separate apps. Whilst that might make sense to the 4Square CEO and his VC masters, it makes no sense from a users perspective. Foursquare can be a bit of a battery hog already, and having 2 apps to open and “annoy” you with notifications is not an improvement by any means.

Whilst most commandline editors have the ability to edit files on a remote host directly this can get messy sometimes when there are multiple files involved. Mounting the remote folder via SSHFS seems to be more reliable in practical use. Mount sudo apt-get install sshfs<br></br>sudo addgroup USERNAME fuse<br></br>sshfs remoteuser@remotehost:/remote/path /local/mountpath Unmount fusermount -u /local/mountpath

This covers only the basic install and configuration for future reference. More info on Privoxy can be found on their website http://www.privoxy.org/. Install apt-get install tor privoxy vim /etc/privoxy/config uncomment the following line: forward-socks5 / 127.0.0.1:9050 . If you need to browse internal hosts while connected: forward 10.*.*.*/ Browser Configuration Firefox: FoxyProxy Chromium: Proxy Switchy Documentation: http://www.privoxy.org/faq/misc.html#TOR

Just a short note on Wireshark install (needed to beat an Asterisk SIP install into submission) sudo apt-get install wireshark<br></br>sudo useradd -U -M -s /bin/false wireshark<br></br>sudo chgrp wireshark /usr/bin/dumpcap<br></br>sudo chmod 754 /usr/bin/dumpcap<br></br>sudo setcap 'CAP_NET_RAW+eip CAP_NET_ADMIN+eip' /usr/bin/dumpcap<br></br>sudo gpasswd -a YOURUSERNAME wireshark Source: http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/CapturePrivileges

If you really need Oracle Java (some applications seem to insist on it) on Ubuntu here is the procedure using a PPA. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer HT to WebUpd8 http://ppa.webupd8.org/

Since it seems everybody has to do one of these “10 <insert marginally useful term> I can not live without” articles here is my take. The 10 Apple iOS Apps I can not live without Enjoy ! I hope you find them as useful as I do. :)

Here are the slides from a presentation for the South Australian Department of Education & Childrens’ Development – Luchtime Bytes Series. The original copy of this blogpost was posted on http://www.brightcookie.com/2011/11/education-and-the-internet-of-things/

Thanks to Olivier Berten for providing this package via his PPA Repo ! sudo add-apt-repository ppa:olivier-berten/misc<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench-gpl EDIT: this has been confirmed to work on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) as well).

Finally I made the effort to completely get rid of my Facebook Account. After initially getting a Facebook Account in the very early days (as an ‘occupational hazard’ to investigate the potential of Facebook Applications) I have always been suspicious of the companies motives and decided not to use such a closed system as a base for application development. Recent developments have only confirmed this suspision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2011/08/08/facebooks-privacy-issues-are-even-deeper-than-we-knew/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ln2e0/facebook_patent_to_track_users_even_when_they_are/ Instead I will concentrate all of my content inside this blog (including as a backup for other social services I create).

One of the most annoying things in the recent ‘upgrade‘ of the Google Docs editor was the removal of the ‘Edit CSS’ and ‘Edit HTML’ functionality without any replacement (such as a Custom Styles Editor). Thanks to a discussion on the Google Help forum (where 100’s of people wonder how this could have been called ‘upgrade’) I discovered this hack. Create an empty document in LibreOffice or OpenOffice (MS Office is also reported to work) Change the default styles (using Format –> Styles and Formatting (F11)) Upload the resulting document to Google Apps (Note: you will need to convert to GoogleDocs) and use as a template To get the ARIAL font on Ubuntu I also had to do install the MS Fonts package

If you have kids going to school you will know these questions: Why can’t you have Microsoft Office ? I can not find ‘xyz’ font on this …. – why ? I have managed (after some time) to convince my kids that there is no need for having a particular Word Processing Software and they are much better off knowing the concepts of text processing rather than some particular office package.

Due to a recent absolute Customer Service failure with Google Adsense I have done some research on the alternative to Google Adsense as a content-sensitive mobile and web advertisements. We are currently reviewing the following services: http://www.adbrite.com/ http://chitika.com http://www.admob.com/ https://pubcenter.microsoft.com/Login http://advertisingcentral.yahoo.com/publisher/index http://www.clicksor.com/ http://www.infolinks.com/ http://adhitz.com/en http://buysellads.com/ Once we have some results I will update this post. Please add your comments should you have any (good or bad) experiences with similar services.

Keeping mail on a local machine does not make sense when working across a large number of different (vitual) devices. As a GoogleApps user I have long preferred browser based mail client as my default. Unfortunately this is not yet a very straight process on most Operating Systems and Ubuntu is no difference. Edit: all the commands need to be run with root privileges. so either run “sudo su” or prefix all with “sudo ” (thanks to Paul for the comment below)

I sometimes need to link to a specific Twitter status update and since the recent upgrade (or as I personally see it downgrade) of the Twitter UI it is quite annoying to find the Status ID, as it can not be copied from the interface (without some Javascript debugging tools at least). http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=[screen_name] This will show the users timeline in XML format revealing the Status ID in the XML result. The following URL can be used to then construct the permalink to the specific status update:

Recently my father, who has so far not wanted to have anything to do with computers, decided to change all of this with age 67. While initially surprised (and remembering the comments I got when sitting in front of computers as a teenager instead of working on the family farm), I quite liked the idea. It’s a great to see him still wanting to explore and learn new things. Unfortunately since there is approximately 17.

One of the nicest ways to get photos straight from your mobile to Flickr (without having to use e-mails) on Nokia devices is the Flickr Plugin for the Nokia Share Online application. Since a lot of my clients in the educational sector are starting to use Flickr as part of their online teaching I decided to create a short HOWTO. The application itself comes with the phone on most recent Nokia S60 devices (with recent Firmware – check Nokia Software Updater for new firmware).

With the help of SL resident Moggs Oceanlane I was able to get our first Sloodle implementation off the ground. Being a bit new on the SL concepts (Moodle as such is my daily life) I found the technical process quite easy, but was struggling with SL terminology a little. Looking forward to getting some hands-on experience of the use of SL in an educational setting. I can see the practical applications – looking for some pilot projects to put them into ‘reality’ once we have got all the technical side tested thoroughly.

After getting rid of my Facebook account a long time ago, finally, I have decided to pull the plug on Twitter as well. I have become increasingly wary of the changes of the platform as it seeks for a way to monetise it’s user-base. The timeline has increasingly become infested with annoying ads and no way of getting rid of them. Since Twitter effectively killed the whole app ecosystem with their changes to API rules and banning anything that became useful to a substantial number of people.

After getting rid of my Facebook account a long time ago, finally, I have decided to pull the plug on Twitter as well. I have become increasingly wary of the changes of the platform as it seeks for a way to monetise it’s user-base. The timeline has increasingly become infested with annoying ads and no way of getting rid of them. Since Twitter effectively killed the whole app ecosystem with their changes to API rules and banning anything that became useful to a substantial number of people.

Since Synology (despite requests) still has not added DNS Made Easy as a listed provider (despite listing some really obscure services – go figure!) here is the steps to add a custom provider. DNS Made Easy Setup Create a new A-Record Set the name Set the IP (initial – any valid IP) Tick the “Dynamic DNS” tickbox Enter your chosen Dynamic DNS Password Save the new record When saving the record you will see a “Dynamic DNS ID” – note down this number.

Every once in a while you find a gem. One of these for me is SShuttle – until now I have not known about this one. Use-case: I just been trying to get Ubuntu Make to install Eclipse IDE and the local AARNET download mirror is just refusing to cooperate (https://github.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-make/issues/90). A quick forward to a remote VPS fixed the issue without headaches Install sudo apt-get install sshuttle Run sshuttle -r username@servername.

One of the main reasons for setting up a cloud desktop is that I tend to use a lot of different devices some of which are not very powerful. One of my favorite devices of late has been a HP 11 Chromebook. I originally bought it for a new employee and wanted to check myself how this thing stacks up to do day-to-day computing tasks more efficiently than a standard laptop without all the headaches of running Windows (viruses, endless driver installs, bloatware, malware, …).

This ‘feature’ has been annoying me for a while and after this has caused some confusion with some of my clients I decided to go and look where to disable this. Why this has been made a system wide default is beyond me. Rather than in the users Calendar Settings this is actually in the Google Apps Admin Console (https://admin.google.com/) Console –> Google Apps –> Settings for Calendar –> Sharing Settings

Or as an alternative title “Liberating your Galaxy S4 Hardware from Samsung Bloatware”. Unfortunately there is lots of (ad-infested) blogs and forums with dodgy pieces of information on this topic and I found it pretty hard to get descent concise information. So hopefully this might help some poor Linux User liberate their phone. Whilst this has been tested on a Samsung GT-I9505 S4 International LTE device (JFLTEXX series) it should be applicable to other similar Samsung phones that are not fastboot capable (ie.

Just got myself (actually it’s for our Office Manager back in OZ) one of these Chromebooks while in Europe (since Google Australia with their absolutely hopeless hardware strategy do not seem to be able to ship any devices – Nexus 4 anyone ?) . Since the first days turned out to be a bit of a frustrating experience, I thought I share some of the findings as I had a hard time finding much useful info on troubleshooting ChromeOS.

Having seen more and more articles on the use of micro-blogging tools in educational and corporates settings, I am constantly surprised that one of the most useful options from my point-of-view seems to be constantly overlooked. Micro-blogging is like Twitter, but private to your organisation. It is a great way to capture those more informal internal discussions. It can help distribute useful information (such as links) throughout your organisation or help kick-start conversations.

I sometimes have time to read RSS feeds when I have no Internet connection. Granted this is happening less often these days with wireless connectivity pretty much ubiquitous, but I frequently have that need. Most often it’s in an air-plane when you want to catch up on non-essential news and don’t have any connectivity. This is where Lightread comes in handy. It synchronizes your Google Reader Account with excellent integration into the Ubuntu UI (desktop notification of new items …).

I recently had a need to install a VPN service in a OpenVZ container. Since I normally only use Hardware emulating VM’s I ran into quite a few issues in terms of low-level networking support on this Container Virtualisation System. Turns out that you are stuck with a TUN/TAP solution as most services won’t enable PPP services on their infrastructure. Also Ethernet bridging is not available (at least on the service I used) so you’re stuck with NAT IP masquerading.

For roaming mobile clients PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) is still the quickest way to get VPN connections to tunnel traffic over a secure link. Installation I always prefer installation via a yum repository as this will ensure patches are applied during regular system updates sudo rpm --import http://poptop.sourceforge.net/yum/RPM-GPG-KEY-PPTP<br></br>sudo rpm -Uvh http://poptop.sourceforge.net/yum/stable/rhel6/pptp-release-current.noarch.rpm<br></br>sudo yum install ppp pptpd -y Configuration Note: replace $USERNAME and $PASSWORD with actual values IP configuration echo "localip 192.168.0.1" >> /etc/pptpd.

The latest instalment in my never-ending quest to find a decent SIP client (see Ubuntu SIP I & Ubuntu SIP II) I came across JITSI (http://jitsi.org/). Since the website looked very interesting and the project seems very well maintained (http://jitsi.org/index.php/Main/Screenshots) I decided to give it a go. The installation is a breeze with a Ubuntu/Debian package available and the installation also adds the repository to keep the package up to date.

Connecting to IPSec VPN gateways has always been one of the more painful things to do. Unfortunately Cisco is not helping by being extremely sluggish on making their utilities available on most recent OS revisions (you can’t even get their QuickVPN client to work properly on 64bit Win7 yet). Operating System support outside of Windows seems to be pretty much non-existent (see https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2040595). Shame on you Cisco ! Option 1 – running QuickVPN under using wine Download the QuickVPN client

The release of the latest Ubuntu Version has been seen by a number of commentators as the most end-user friendly yet and signals another milestone in the readiness of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for more widespread (and business) use. As a long-term user of a number of different Operating Systems and as SME Owner for the last 15 years I have overseen the gradual replacement of a number of proprietary software solutions with FOSS Alternatives.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 11 (Natty) I did some further research on VoIP clients (SIP) for Ubuntu Linux as XLite seems horribly out of date now. I came across QuteCom (formerly WengoPhone) and from first testing it seems to work quite well. The install is easy as it’s part of the Ubuntu Community Software (Universe) and that means it can be installed via apt-get, Software Center or Synaptic. So far the early testing has been very positive and the interface seems quite workable as well as having a number of other instant messaging options available.

EDIT: As of Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) this is now much easier as KeePass 2 has finally made it into the repositories apt-get install keepass2 ————————————————————————————————————- If you need to read KeepPass 2 data files (.kdbx) on Ubuntu (as well as from other platforms such as Windows or Android) you need to run the Portable Version under Mono (.NET Runtime). Make sure you download the Portable Version 2.x from http://keepass.info/download.html

Taking part in MobiMOOC has given me the opportunity to take stock of my own MobilePLE – the top 5 tools I find most useful as part of my ongoing learning. Catch Notes (previously 3Bananas) – mobile note taking the most critical component. Whenever I get a new device – this is what has to be installed as one of the first actions. For those not familiar with this software – it’s like Evernote without the bloat.

Having used IP Telephony for a number of years I need a workable SIP client for all of the devices I use. I have found a very capable client for my Android phones (SipDroid) and on Windows/MacOSX I generally use X-Lite (as well as it’s paid version EyePhone) from Counterpath. Having tried several different Linux SIP clients (Ekiga, Twinkle, …) but all discarded them because of weird UI’s and/or problems with stability I noticed that there is a Linux version of XLite available.

Since I have switched my 3G data network from Hutchinson Three to Vodafone AU recently I also upgraded the USB modem from a Huwaei E220 (which used to work fine on recent Ubuntu NBR releases on my trusty old ASUS EEE 900) Unfortunately the new Huawei K3765 would not be recognised as a valid modem by the network manager. After a fair bit of searching it turns out that you only need to install one additional package (usb-modeswitch) to make this modem work (be recognised) on the current stable 10.

Due to the hype generated by the recent launch and my reservations on using the Apple Inc. iTunes I was doing some research into alternatives to the proprietary and completely locked iPad device (and the associated lock-down to Apple’s iTunes Store). Hopefully this list can be of use for other people as well. I can see the form factor and the tablet style with a cut down (mainly web-browser based) Operating System as useful in a number of settings not least in educational institutions and libraries.

Since Ubuntu 9.10 NetbookRemix has been released I am again finding myself using my trusty old ASUS EEE when on the road. And finally it seems I have found a vanilla Linux distribution that is reasonably responsive and works ‘out of the box’. One thing I don’t need on the road (as a matter of fact on none of my equipment) is having to install & maintain some client/server mail client.

I have been a user of an EEE PC 900 for over 10 months now and in general very happy with the form-factor and it’s portability. I has been very useful in public transport, waiting rooms, coffee shops,… However – in terms of Operating Systems I am now on my 3rd OS (despite initially telling myself that I will stick with the default and avoid tinkering) and it looks like I still have not found what I am looking for.

Being out and about a lot, I am a fairly heavy user of my mobile internet plan (currently with Hutchinson 3). One of the more common tasks when there is some down-time while in transit or waiting for coffee is checking out what’s happening in the twittershere. Personally (being a web-app developer for years) I generally prefer browser-based apps over ‘native apps’. Dont even get me started about J2ME apps. One of the main reasons for this preference is that I tend to switch handsets fairly frequently.

Came accross this project recently. Seems like an excellent tool for web meetings. Certainly something that we will give some more attention to as it seems to have some good integration with various products we are using such as Moodle and SugarCRM.

After reading an excellent article by Brad Reed on Network World (this seems to be the online version: Co-working: the ultimate in teleworking flexibility),�I finally got motivated enough to do some more research about this�phenomenum in the two places of interest to me (Austria and Australia)�as well as write a quick entry about this. The whole co-working concept has been interesting me ever since it started, but the organisational issues associated with starting such a�venture (and as with everything else – a lack of time) have always�prevented any serious attempt to actually move in this direction.

As the convener for the Adelaide community of The Things Network, I am frequently setting up Multitech Conduit Gateways. Depending on your PC or notebook hardware you might have some problems with the Exar USB-UART driver on Linux. Here are the steps to getting this unit setup from an Ubuntu (should work for any other Linux distro) machine. lsusb Should show something like this: Bus 002 Device 006: ID 04e2:1410 Exar Corp.

Installing VirtualBox is getting increasingly painful on Ubuntu due to the problems with UEFI Secure Boot and the VirtualBox kernel modules. Another reason for an alternative is that running VirtualBox VM’s completely in the background is not as straightforward as it could be. From the available alternatives I looked into (VMWare, Xen & KVM) it was KVM that fitted my needs (casual VM usage with mostly headless VM’s for testing purposes).

Since there is now a supported Raspbian version without GUI and other unneeded add-ons available as Raspbian Lite the need to use other installers (with sometimes some downsides) is now not a necessity anymore. Below is a list of steps I like to perform before using them for any purpose as my Standard Operating Environment. Download Raspbian Lite Download link: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ Write to SD Card dd bs=4M if=2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/sdb Boot RPi Default login details are

Whilst there is a .DEB installer to download from the GoHugo sites I get all matter of warnings that the package is of bad quality and I am not comfortable to run these kinds of installers. I rather install from sources in this case which is very straight forward since the main dependencies (largely GO) are in the Ubuntu main repositories. Install dependencies sudo apt-get install golang git mercurial python-pygments

One of the things that is not implemented in the Secure Shell Chrome extension is the ability to remove know_host fingerprints which alert you if the fingerprint for a specific IP address has changed. However there are times when you upgrade a systems and this need to be done. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY! Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!

There are plenty of sites out there that give advise on this topic, unfortunately most of them are highly ad-infested to the point of being unreadable as well as only containing single bit rather that an overall picture. This is a collection of useful links to source materials as well as steps necessary to install. Crouton Github: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton – Thank you David Schneider for the excellent work !!! Developer Info for Chromebooks: https://www.

One of the main reasons for setting up a cloud desktop is that I tend to use a lot of different devices some of which are not very powerful. One of my favorite devices of late has been a HP 11 Chromebook. I originally bought it for a new employee and wanted to check myself how this thing stacks up to do day-to-day computing tasks more efficiently than a standard laptop without all the headaches of running Windows (viruses, endless driver installs, bloatware, malware, …).

If there would be an Oscar for the WORST firmware upgrade procedure (and associated drivers, documentation and general quality of software) Rikomagic should win this by a country mile ! Since all the information I found on the interwebs said Linux was not supported I ended up borrowing friends notebooks (as I don’t own any Windows machinery anymore). My main Toshiba Ultrabook seemed to have issues with picking up the USB from a Windows Virtual Machine).

Thanks to Paolo Rotolo there is now a Ubuntu Launchpad PPA for Android Studio sudo apt-add-repository ppa:paolorotolo/android-studio<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install android-studio

Apache Cordova has very nice documentation, however as so many projects it is focused on the Windows/MacOS duopolies only. Fortunately it’s not too hard to work out the differences. Installing dependencies Thanks to: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make ant openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk Installing Android SDK Please note: one of the problems I found was that I had some Android tools from the Ubuntu repos that were conflicting with the SDK install.

I have switched most of my Social Media postings to Google+ over the last year. Despite popular opinion being that Google+ is some ‘ghost town’, I find G+ the most useful environment for my particular needs & interests (specially since the introduction of groups). It has in my experience a vastly better signal-to-noise than other social media in particular Facebook. However I would still like to feed postings through to my Twitter stream.

In my never ending quest to find the ideal text editor here is another installment. Since I have been using VIM as my default command line editor for years I thought I give it a try for basic GUI editing as well. Install and set desktop app & icon sudo apt-get install vim vim-gnome<br></br>sudo wget --output-document=/usr/share/applications/gvim.desktop https://raw.github.com/leogaggl/misc-scripts/master/gvim.desktop<br></br>sudo wget --output-document=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/gvim.svg http://gfxmonk.net/images/vim-logo/vim-logo.svg<br></br>sudo update-desktop-database Set MIME defaults vim ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list<br></br>#add or edit the following mime type and add others as needed<br></br>text/plain=gvim.

I just had one of my old hand-me-down phones returned by my offspring in a great condition (junior is very careful with his equipment – well done young man !). This doesn’t happen all too often shows that the Nexus S is a decently built phone. This is also a good example of breaking the built-in obsolescence of modern phones. This particular unit has served me well for nearly 2 years (my average is one year) and served 2 kids after that.

Turns out that the Broadcom BCM2708 chip on the RPi has a hardware watchdog. This can be very useful if your RPi is located remotely and locks up. However, this would not the preferred method of restarting the unit and in extreme cases this can result in file-system damage that could prevent the RPi from booting. If this occurs regularly you better find the root cause of the problem rather than fight the symptoms.

Testing the RPi for some remote sensing application I needed to use a wireless connection as it would have been a pain to reach with an Ethernet cable. Parts Raspberry Pi Series B 512MB Raspbian 3.6.11+ Kernel Comfast 802.11n – Realtek RTL8188CUS WLAN Adapter Install WPA Supplicant sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wpa_supplicant Check for the USB adapter sudo lsusb This should show output similar to this (depending on your USB adapter)

My normal combination on the big-server side would be Apache + MySQL (or PostgreSQL), but on the RPi this seems to be absolute overkill. For data-logging operations I would not use the local system anyway (looking at MQTT as well as Remote MongoDB datastore via REST Webservices). After some poking around and reading up on the options I decided to go for the following combo: LightHTTPD + SQLite. Both are lightweight replacement of their fully-featured big-server counterparts (Apache HTTP & MySQL) and have very familiar configurations.

To connect 1-wire serial devices to the RPi I am using a DS9490R USB 1-wire adapter (rather than wiring I2C 1-Wire master components to GPIO I2C – which I might look at sometime down the track) Install packages sudo apt-get install owfs ow-shell Edit config file vim /etc/owfs.conf ! server: server = localhost:4304<br></br># USB device: DS9490<br></br>server: usb = all<br></br>######################### OWFS ##########################<br></br>mountpoint = /mnt/1wire<br></br>allow_other<br></br>####################### OWHTTPD #########################<br></br>http: port = 2121<br></br>####################### OWFTPD ##########################<br></br>ftp: port = 2120<br></br>####################### OWSERVER ########################<br></br>server: port = localhost:4304

Just a quick note on Speech Synthesis a Raspberry Pi project. I had to research some of the options on the Raspberry Pi while looking into a project where I need some audio announcements. Configuring Sound echo 'snd-bcm2835' >> /etc/modules<br></br>sudo modprobe snd-bcm2835 sudo apt-get install mplayer alsa-base alsa-utils pulseaudio mpg123<br></br># make mplayer use mpg123 codec instead of default ffmp3float<br></br>echo "afm=mp3lib" >> ~/.mplayer/config Since I am using Raspbian which is a Debian based (Wheezy) Distribution I used some Ubuntu documentation (https://help.

GeoIP enables you to identify the location, organization, connection speed, and user type of your website visitors. yum install GeoIP mod_geoip<br></br>cd /usr/share/GeoIP/<br></br>wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCountry/GeoIP.dat.gz<br></br>wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz<br></br>gunzip GeoIP.dat.gz<br></br>gunzip GeoLiteCity.dat.gz<br></br>rm -f *.gz<br></br> Edit the VirtualHost settings in httpd.conf <ifmodule mod_geoip.c><br></br>GeoIPEnable On<br></br>GeoIPDBFile /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat Standard<br></br>GeoIPDBFile /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat Standard<br></br></ifmodule> Restart Apache /etc/init.d/httpd restart

Every once in a while it is handy to be able to access an Amazon RDS Database Instance remotely from a desktop. ssh -i <strong>YOUR-AMAZON-PRIVATE-KEY</strong>.pem -l <strong>YOUR-AMAZON-RDS-USERNAME</strong> -L 33060:<strong>YOUR-AMAZON-RDS-PRIVATE-IPADDRESS</strong>:3306 -N ec2-usr@<strong>YOUR-AMAZON-EC2-INSTANCE-PUBLIC-ADDRESS</strong> Note: YOURAMAZONRDSPRIVATEIPADDRESS needs to be the AWS internal RDS IP Address – not the external hostname You can then connect to RDS using mysql commands or any GUI tool such as MySQL Workbench via localhost:33060 Thanks to: Dirk Taggesell via AWS Forums

I have recently been looking at different CAD options on Ubuntu and LibreCAD (http://librecad.org/) is looking like the best option for my needs at current (apart from the wish there would be some DWG support). Since the main Ubuntu repositories are usually a fair bit behind the lastest stable realeases of LibreCAD you need to add the LibreCAD Dev PPA Repository sudo add-apt-repository ppa:librecad-dev/librecad-stable<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install librecad<br></br>

If you need to check websites for mobile compliance on a regular basis you know that having a device to constantly check is painful and slows down your work during debugging and phases of constant change. by adactio There are a few tools that will make this work a lot easier: Google Chrome Chrome does have some nice dedicated plug-ins to help with this task Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/geelfhphabnejjhdalkjhgipohgpdnoc) appMobi HTML5 XDK (https://chrome.

Getting excited about a new text editor of all things is not something I like to admit to easily, but in my line of work (although less and less is actually doing hands on coding) text editing is an important part. That’s why I checked out the BESPIN project as soon as I heard of it. The prospect of being able to edit your files from anywhere is very appealing to me since I spend a lot of time away from the desk and on devices that not always have good text editor (let alone all the files necessary).

FINALLY !!! As somebody that has been experimenting with this technology for over 2 years now I am quite exited to see that the adoption of this technology is gathering some steem. While it has bee widely adopted in Asia for some years now, it has taken some time to get a foothold in the rest of the world this seems to be changing now. At least in Europe as I can see for myself at the moment.

As the convener for the Adelaide community of The Things Network, I am frequently setting up Multitech Conduit Gateways. Depending on your PC or notebook hardware you might have some problems with the Exar USB-UART driver on Linux. Here are the steps to getting this unit setup from an Ubuntu (should work for any other Linux distro) machine. lsusb Should show something like this: Bus 002 Device 006: ID 04e2:1410 Exar Corp.

Installing VirtualBox is getting increasingly painful on Ubuntu due to the problems with UEFI Secure Boot and the VirtualBox kernel modules. Another reason for an alternative is that running VirtualBox VM’s completely in the background is not as straightforward as it could be. From the available alternatives I looked into (VMWare, Xen & KVM) it was KVM that fitted my needs (casual VM usage with mostly headless VM’s for testing purposes).

Having just wasted a few hours on getting this Java software running on Linux I am documenting this for future reference and hopefully saving other LoRa / TTN folks some time. Prerequisites Install a Java JDK + JavaFX. This should work with the default OpenJDK 8 or 9 which comes as part of the Ubuntu repositories. I ended up installing Oracle JDK 8 as well as I thought the error might be related to OpenJDK.

Install XScreenSaver and remove Gnome default sudo apt remove gnome-screensaver<br></br>sudo apt install xscreensaver xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra Run the Screensaver UI and configure In the “Advanced” section enter your Flickr RSS URL in “Choose Random Image” https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_faves.gne?id=YOURFLICKRUSERID #replace with your Flickr User ID Create a systemd user service to autostart mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user/<br></br>vim ~/.config/systemd/user/xscreensaver.service Past the following<br></br>[Unit]<br></br>Description=XScreenSaver<br></br>[Service]<br></br>ExecStart=/usr/bin/xscreensaver -nosplash<br></br>[Install]<br></br>WantedBy=default.target Start and enable systemd user service systemctl --user enable xscreensaver<br></br>systemctl --user start xscreensaver To copy the settings (including RSS URL) onto other PC’s or re-install it might be a good idea to backup or copy the contents of ~/.

If you are using the GUI (Raspian full download) and want to connect your RPi Zero to a keyboard and monitor there are probably easier ways to do this. These notes are for people that want to use a headless (no monitor and GUI) setup ready to connect to your RPi after first boot via SSH from another terminal. wget -O raspbian-lite-latest.zip https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest Download link: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ Write Image to SD Card dd bs=4M if=2017-08-16-raspbian-stretch-lite.

EDIT [2018-06-05]: I have updated the code with the Firmware 1.18.+ releases. The code is available at our Growing Data Foundation Github. These notes are to assist Australian IoT enthusiasts to get started in connecting a LoPy to The Things Network as it is unfortunately (not yet) straight forward to make them work with the current AU-915 TTN Channel plans. As the initiator of the local Adelaide Community of The Things Network I have been experimenting with a number of devices to connect sensors to #TTNADL.

Since Synology (despite requests) still has not added DNS Made Easy as a listed provider (despite listing some really obscure services – go figure!) here is the steps to add a custom provider. DNS Made Easy Setup Create a new A-Record Set the name Set the IP (initial – any valid IP) Tick the “Dynamic DNS” tickbox Enter your chosen Dynamic DNS Password Save the new record When saving the record you will see a “Dynamic DNS ID” – note down this number.

Upgrade or install SANE backends Since the version of SANE in the Ubuntu 16.04LTS repos is not working for this scanner you either need to install from sources (see this blog) or from this PPA. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rolfbensch/sane-git<br></br>sudo apt update<br></br>sudo apt install sane-backends tesseract-ocr gscan2pdf Security Add yourself to the ‘scanner’ group to be able to use the scanner. sudo usermod -a -G scanner USERNAME Checking SANE Check for the libsane version (needs to be at least libsane.

Since there is now a supported Raspbian version without GUI and other unneeded add-ons available as Raspbian Lite the need to use other installers (with sometimes some downsides) is now not a necessity anymore. Below is a list of steps I like to perform before using them for any purpose as my Standard Operating Environment. Download Raspbian Lite Download link: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ Write to SD Card dd bs=4M if=2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/sdb Boot RPi Default login details are

Whilst there is a .DEB installer to download from the GoHugo sites I get all matter of warnings that the package is of bad quality and I am not comfortable to run these kinds of installers. I rather install from sources in this case which is very straight forward since the main dependencies (largely GO) are in the Ubuntu main repositories. Install dependencies sudo apt-get install golang git mercurial python-pygments

As a long-term Ubuntu user I am extremely interested in what Canonical and the Ubuntu community are doing on the mobile front. Their convergence strategy (I am testing Snappy Core on IoT devices as well) seems very well thought through and once the the Meizu MX4 phone was released I got myself an invite and ordered a unit. It took a while to ship and then also had to make it’s way down under as Meizu only ship to Europe (and Asia I believe).

One of the things that is not implemented in the Secure Shell Chrome extension is the ability to remove know_host fingerprints which alert you if the fingerprint for a specific IP address has changed. However there are times when you upgrade a systems and this need to be done. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY! Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!

Unfortunately it is still much harder than necessary to find notebook hardware to use with Ubuntu (or other Linux variants). This blog is full of past experiences (some of them quite time-consuming) on finding notebook hardware that will work without too much fiddling. This short note is to document my recent research on that front to help others who want to do the same (as there doesn’t seem to be a lot of good current info around).

Every once in a while you find a gem. One of these for me is SShuttle – until now I have not known about this one. Use-case: I just been trying to get Ubuntu Make to install Eclipse IDE and the local AARNET download mirror is just refusing to cooperate (https://github.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-make/issues/90). A quick forward to a remote VPS fixed the issue without headaches Install sudo apt-get install sshuttle Run sshuttle -r username@servername.

Add SDK repository sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-sdk-team/ppa<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install ubuntu-device-flash Enable USB Debugging on the device Make sure you have developer mode enabled (see http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html if you are unsure). Navigate to Settings > Developer options Enable USB Debugging. When a device is connected, you will be prompted in Android to authorize it. Unlock Bootloader adb reboot bootloader<br></br>fastboot oem unlock<br></br>fastboot reboot Check that you have the right device adb shell grep ro.

This is a follow-up on an older blog using Ubuntu. Raspberry Pi Prerequisites Since this will be a purely headless install designed to sit in a corner behind the scanner I am using a Base Raspian (Debian Wheezy) install (I personally like the clean minimal install via https://github.com/debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst the best). apt-get install sudo vim wget wput libusb-dev build-essential git-core Add non-privileged user account(s) adduser USERNAME<br></br>adduser USERNAME sudo<br></br>groupadd scanner<br></br>usermod -a -G scanner USERNAME

There are plenty of sites out there that give advise on this topic, unfortunately most of them are highly ad-infested to the point of being unreadable as well as only containing single bit rather that an overall picture. This is a collection of useful links to source materials as well as steps necessary to install. Crouton Github: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton – Thank you David Schneider for the excellent work !!! Developer Info for Chromebooks: https://www.

Just a quick update of the previous article on “Sony Xperia Z2 upgrading to CyanogenMod 11“. One thing is that CM now included the custom recovery and you do not need to download any other custom recoveries ! Download the CM 12 ZIP file for Sony Xperia Z2 (sirius) and extract the ‘boot.img’ file Download link: https://download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=sirius Get the device into fastboot (bootloader mode) fastboot -i 0xfce flash boot boot.img<br></br>fastboot reboot

On remote systems sometimes a web-based tool can be very handy. Webmin is such a tool that has been well maintained for decades. To install quickly on a Ubuntu Server without having to manage dependencies and keeping it updated as part of normal OS update operations installing from a PPA Repo is handy. sudo echo "deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list<br></br>wget -q http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install webmin

Since I have found some issues with my previous LXQT setup in real-life work I decided to fall back to standard Lubuntu for my cloud desktop. As part of this I also switched to TightVNC which seems a lot easier to configure. Add local user account adduser USERNAME<br></br>adduser USERNAME sudo Install Lubuntu Desktop sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends lubuntu-desktop tightvncserver TightVNC Configuration sudo vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf #<br></br># VNC Server configuration<br></br>#<br></br># enabled = True if VNC connections should be allowed<br></br># port = TCP/IP port to listen for connections on<br></br>#<br></br>[VNCServer]<br></br>enabled=true<br></br>port=5900<br></br>width=1366<br></br>height=768<br></br>depth=24

One of the main reasons for setting up a cloud desktop is that I tend to use a lot of different devices some of which are not very powerful. One of my favorite devices of late has been a HP 11 Chromebook. I originally bought it for a new employee and wanted to check myself how this thing stacks up to do day-to-day computing tasks more efficiently than a standard laptop without all the headaches of running Windows (viruses, endless driver installs, bloatware, malware, …).

I have had some issues recently with getting LTE (4G) connectivity on the Vodafone Australia Network using CyanogenMod 11 on multiple devices (http://forum.cyanogenmod.org/topic/92919-no-4g-signal-on-vodafone-au/). Turns out that it was an APN issue after all. The APN provisioned by default when the Voda SIM card is inserted (vfinternet.au) does not work for the LTE Data Network. It works with GPRS & WCDMA, but fails to connect when the phone is set to prefer LTE (4G) Networks and they are actually available.

Contrary to my normal inclinations not to buy anything but Stock Android phones I ended up with a Sony Xperia Z2 in a hurry over the weekend (it’s a long story…). It appears to be quite a decent handset (with a pretty good camera actually) and one of the main reason to choose this over the other options was that is was one of the few high-end devices which already had a CM snapshot rather than just nightly releases.

This ‘feature’ has been annoying me for a while and after this has caused some confusion with some of my clients I decided to go and look where to disable this. Why this has been made a system wide default is beyond me. Rather than in the users Calendar Settings this is actually in the Google Apps Admin Console (https://admin.google.com/) Console –> Google Apps –> Settings for Calendar –> Sharing Settings

Install dependencies sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"<br></br>sudo yum install kernel-devel Mount the Virtualbox Additions CD ISO sudo mkdir /media/cdrom/<br></br>sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom/<br></br>sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Since I am a bit of a sucker for German “Krimis” as well as some their excellent documentaries I like to watch ARD Mediathek IPTV. However there are several problems with this when you live at the opposite side of the world. ARD has a block for any films that are 15+ years outside of 20.00h-6.00h GMT+1. Which makes it pretty much impossible to watch at a reasonable time in Australia.

Using Amazon EC2’s free usage tier to host your own cloud desktop is a very economical way to to have a desktop at hand anytime you can not be near one. Since I quite often use Chromebooks these days when on the road this is a particular handy way should I need a full desktop for certain tasks. Since Ubuntu 14.05 is my default desktop on my normal hardware I obviously want to have my cloud desktop running the same underlying OS.

The Nokia X seems to be a nice piece of hardware for just around $125 AUD. Nothing spectacular in terms of computing power, but much better build quality than your average cheap Chinese Android clone. I have always been a fan of Nokia hardware until they decided to commit suicide by firstly adding CEO Stephen Elop and ditching all of their software for Windows Mobile. The problem with the device out of the box is that is has a horribly butchered version of Android.

Trying to install Google Earth on Ubuntu. You could just download the .deb file and run dpkg command, however I prefer to use it via a repo to make sure upgrades are installed as part of the system upgrades. http://www.google.com/earth/download/ge/ Google Keys Note: this should not be necessary if you have use the GoogleTalk plugin or similar package from the Google DEB Repo cd /tmp/<br></br>wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub<br></br>sudo apt-key add linux_signing_key.pub<br></br>rm linux_signing_key.pub

Since the upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) I have had issues running the Android SDK Tools. For example this error: ./adb<br></br>bash: ./adb: No such file or directory Check the multi-arch architectures installed on the system. sudo dpkg --print-architecture Mine only showed ‘amd64’. Turns out you need to add the i386 architecture and install libc6:i386,libncurses5:i386,libstdc++6:i386 library packages. sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386<br></br>sudo ./adb

My old Asus EEE PC 900 is the oldest piece of hardware I own. With an old Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM it’s never was the fastest kid on the block (in fact I never considered the Windows XP version of the same unit usable as it was very sluggish). However after owning it for nearly 7 years I am very surprised I can still use it. Granted I only use it occasionally when I am at home, but thanks to LXDE it was still usable.

Thanks to Paolo Rotolo there is now a Ubuntu Launchpad PPA for Android Studio sudo apt-add-repository ppa:paolorotolo/android-studio<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install android-studio

Connecting securely to your home network has always been a bit of a challenge since common home ADSL routers not normally contain any VPN Servers (those which do contain such are generally PPTP servers which I would hardly call secure these days). Which is probably a good thing as they would be horribly out of date considering the firmware release policies of retail router manufacturers. You could run/maintain your own dedicated server, but for most home networks that is overkill and out of the technical depth of most hobbyists.

Excellent coincidence that the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) fell into the Easter holidays. This gives me the time to install earlier than I normally have time for. This realease being a LTS (long-term support) release means it is a fairly conservative release. There are some nice enhancements and most importantly for me the 3.13 Kernel means finally Wacom Touch devices are supported without kernel mods. Unfortunately some things are still not included (such as the boot-repair tools not being part of the standard repos).

Unfortunately the mess that is UEFI Secure Boot still causes issues on some hardware. In my case it’s a Toshiba Z930 Ultrabook. I have documented the procedure to get it working here. However it turns out that there is no ‘Trusty’ release for the boot-repair utility. The fix is relatively easy. sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yannubuntu-boot-repair-trusty.list<br></br>#change the following line from 'trusty' to 'saucy'<br></br>sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yannubuntu-boot-repair-trusty.list You can then just finish with sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && (boot-repair &)

Apache Cordova has very nice documentation, however as so many projects it is focused on the Windows/MacOS duopolies only. Fortunately it’s not too hard to work out the differences. Installing dependencies Thanks to: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make ant openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk Installing Android SDK Please note: one of the problems I found was that I had some Android tools from the Ubuntu repos that were conflicting with the SDK install.

Finally found some time playing with a RaspberryPi and an attached PiFace Interface board to control some garden pumps and potentially an Aquaponics setup in the near future. Requirements Raspberry Pi (Model B in my case, but any will do) PiFace Interface board (http://www.piface.org.uk) Base Raspian (Debian Wheezy) Install (I prefer the clean minimal install via https://githutb.com/hifi/raspbian-ua-netins). Configure the base system as per my previous base install. Install Apache & PHP sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-dev php5-cli php5-mcrypt curl raspi-config

As with most hardware manufacturers of hardware Foscam utility software is Windows or Mac only. The actual unit tested with the below is a FI9805E Outdoor POE camera. Installation The installation is relatively painless as the unit is set up to get the IP assignment via DHCP (check your routers DHCP assignment list). https://IP.ADDRESS.OF.CAM should get you to the web-admin interface. The default user is ‘admin’ with no (empty) password.

I have switched most of my Social Media postings to Google+ over the last year. Despite popular opinion being that Google+ is some ‘ghost town’, I find G+ the most useful environment for my particular needs & interests (specially since the introduction of groups). It has in my experience a vastly better signal-to-noise than other social media in particular Facebook. However I would still like to feed postings through to my Twitter stream.

This is the last of a series of alternative mobile OS installs and the easiest install by a country mile ! Install Everything is quite well documented here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:phablet-team/tools<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install phablet-tools android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot<br></br>phablet-flash ubuntu-system --channel devel --bootstrap That is it really ! This is how a OS change on a mobile should work ! Issues Ubuntu touch can not yet handle the radio firmware past Android 4.

In my never ending quest to find the ideal text editor here is another installment. Since I have been using VIM as my default command line editor for years I thought I give it a try for basic GUI editing as well. Install and set desktop app & icon sudo apt-get install vim vim-gnome<br></br>sudo wget --output-document=/usr/share/applications/gvim.desktop https://raw.github.com/leogaggl/misc-scripts/master/gvim.desktop<br></br>sudo wget --output-document=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/gvim.svg http://gfxmonk.net/images/vim-logo/vim-logo.svg<br></br>sudo update-desktop-database Set MIME defaults vim ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list<br></br>#add or edit the following mime type and add others as needed<br></br>text/plain=gvim.

I just had one of my old hand-me-down phones returned by my offspring in a great condition (junior is very careful with his equipment – well done young man !). This doesn’t happen all too often shows that the Nexus S is a decently built phone. This is also a good example of breaking the built-in obsolescence of modern phones. This particular unit has served me well for nearly 2 years (my average is one year) and served 2 kids after that.

I am currently looking into the use of Django for one of my extra-curricular projects and needed to set up a development environment on Ubuntu. This is the log for future reference and hopefully useful for anybody needing to do the same. Dependencies & Django Installation Core Dependencies & Django sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-mpm-itk libapache2-mod-wsgi mysql-server python-django python-mysqldb Optional add-ons For my purposes I need a few more additional modules

There are several reasons why you might want to run different Apache Virtual Hosts as separate users from the Apache user account. My most frequent usage is on my development machine to allow running from my home directory. The most commonly recommended option for this purpose is MPM-ITK (a quick hack would be to add yourself to the www-data group using “sudo usermod -a -G www-data USERNAME”) sudo apt-get install apache2-mpm-itk<br></br>sudo a2enmod mpm_itk

One of the annoying things with Synology NAS servers is the fact that a video file moved to the filesystem does not automatically appear on the DNLA share on client devices. It needs a re-index of the media files. You can log into the HTML Admin Console and start a re-index, however this will be a full re-index and most likely take ages to complete. A quicker way is to connect to the SSH Console and issue the following command:

With the demise of the Medibuntu repository and libdvdcss not being hosted in the main Ubuntu repos due to licensing issues a new repository is needed from 13.10 upwards. Thanks to the good folks at VideoLAN (makers of the awsome VLC Video Player) there is a ready and updated source available. wget ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/videolan-apt.asc | sudo apt-key add -<br></br>echo "deb ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/stable ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libdvdcss.list<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

Since paper and myself have never gotten on well I have always been dreaming of a paperless office. A while ago I purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 scanner for the office. I did this after doing some research on which Automatic Document Feed (ADF) multipage & duplex scanners were both affordable as well as supported on Linux. scan the document perform OCR to convert to text combine the text with PDF to create a searchable PDF OPTIONAL – send the resulting document into Alfresco Document Management Server via FTP Install dependencies NOTE: PPA is only required for support of Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500

Whilst EVINCE is a very capable PDF Viewer, if you have a need to fill in editable PDF forms it is required to install the Adobe PDF Reader. sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ precise partner"<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install acroread PS: If anybody is aware of an Open Source alternative to the Adobe Reader for editable form please leave a comment !

Or as an alternative title “Liberating your Galaxy S4 Hardware from Samsung Bloatware”. Unfortunately there is lots of (ad-infested) blogs and forums with dodgy pieces of information on this topic and I found it pretty hard to get descent concise information. So hopefully this might help some poor Linux User liberate their phone. Whilst this has been tested on a Samsung GT-I9505 S4 International LTE device (JFLTEXX series) it should be applicable to other similar Samsung phones that are not fastboot capable (ie.

I have been planning to set up a SMS Gateway for sending and receiving SMS messages via a headless utility unit (Raspberry Pi) for a while. Since I had a leftover Sierra Wireless AirCard 880U from Telstra in Australia I wanted to re-purpose this unit with a spare SIM card. Unfortunately it was very hard to find any good setup manual for this particular combination and took some time to fiddle & debug.

Now that Twitter has totally killed their V1 API there is no official way to get Twitter feeds via RSS. Which is a real shame as RSS is a well accepted Open Standard for this type of information :-( SHAME ON YOU TWITTER ! Currently there seem to be very few third party sites providing RSS services and it appears unlikely many will as Twitter will just kill them with changes to their API and/or terms & conditions as soon as they gain traction.

One of the most annoying features in Ubuntu from 12.10 onwards are the pesky notifications popping up asking if you want webapps support everytime you visit a supported webpage? Whilst you can disable this in Firefox’s browser options: Firefox > Preferences > General: Uncheck “Prompt integration options for any website”. However I prefer to remove the browser extensions entirely. sudo apt-get remove xul-ext-unity unity-chromium-extension NOTE: Take care – unfortunatly you can not remove the following as their removal will cause Unity to fail !

Since I always had trouble with the Eclipse version that is avaialable via the Ubuntu repositories I often need to install Elcipse on new machinery. Hence I am documenting the process for myself and hopefully it might help others as well. Java dependencies install sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk icedtea-7-plugin Eclipse download Note: download link needs to be updated – current as of 2014-01-27 cd /tmp<br></br>wget http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/epp/downloads/release/luna/M4/eclipse-standard-luna-M4-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz&mirror_id=1051<br></br>tar -xzf eclipse-standard-luna-M4-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz<br></br>sudo mv eclipse/ /opt<br></br>rm -f eclipse-standard-luna-M4-linux-gtk-x86_64.

Just a quick note on install and configuration of Conky. Installation sudo apt-get install conky conky-all hddtemp curl lm-sensors<br></br>sudo chmod u+s /usr/sbin/hddtemp<br></br>sudo sensors-detect vim ~/.conkyrc This is the content of my config file. use_xft yes<br></br>xftfont Ubuntu Condensed:size=9<br></br>xftalpha 0.8<br></br>override_utf8_locale yes<br></br>update_interval 5.0<br></br>total_run_times 0<br></br>own_window yes<br></br>own_window_transparent no<br></br>own_window_argb_visual yes<br></br>own_window_argb_value 155<br></br>own_window_colour 081100<br></br>own_window_type normal<br></br>own_window_class conky-lgaggl<br></br>own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager<br></br>#background yes<br></br>#out_to_console no<br></br>double_buffer yes<br></br>#max_user_text 32768<br></br>minimum_size 300<br></br>draw_shades no<br></br>draw_outline no<br></br>draw_borders no<br></br>draw_graph_borders yes<br></br>default_shade_color black<br></br>default_outline_color white<br></br>default_bar_size 150 5<br></br>default_gauge_size 20 20<br></br>imlib_cache_size 0<br></br>draw_shades no<br></br>alignment middle_right<br></br>gap_x 15<br></br>gap_y 15<br></br>border_inner_margin 10<br></br>no_buffers yes<br></br>uppercase no<br></br>cpu_avg_samples 2<br></br>override_utf8_locale no<br></br>default_color ffffff<br></br>color1 ffffff<br></br>color2 cccccc<br></br>color3 000000<br></br>color4 FFAA00

Since I have been really happy with the performance and mobility on the Toshiba Ultrabooks (see previous blog entries) I have now chosen to stay with a tried brand and uprgrade to the Z930 i7 model. Unfortunately this now comes with added hurdles by our good friends at Microsoft in the form of UEFI and the pre-installed disaster that is Windows 8. Instead of totally wiping the system as I did with the Z830 model I decided to install next to Windows 8 as lots of people have reported problems with the UEFI bootloader and the BIOS if you start messing with the pre-installed partitions (specially the EFI partition).

I have been watching progress on FreedomBox ever since watching a video of Eben Moglen a few years ago. Turns out that that they recently announced the availability of their 0.1 preview release. As part of this there is one component that is extremely useful for RaspberryPi users (funnily the co-founder of RasperryPi is also called Eblen by first name – go figure) out there concerned about increasing snooping of private information by governments and corporations for a variety of reasons.

By default OpenVPN only routes traffic to and from the OpenVPN Server. If you need all traffic from a client through the OpenVPN tunnel there are several options listed in the OpenVPN docs (http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto.html#redirect). Since I don’t have any control over the server in some cases I needed a client side solution. As I already have ufw running with Ubuntu I wanted to use the existing software. Here is how to configure ufw to enable routing all traffic from your client machines through the OpenVPN Server.

The ability to connect Android 4.+ devices to Ubuntu using the USB Mass Storage interface has always been a pain. With Ubuntu 13.04 a new MTP back-end (gvfs-mtp) is going to be introduced, but I have had some issues with the 13.04 Beta so I found this backport PPA to Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:langdalepl/gvfs-mtp<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install gvfs<br></br>sudo apt-get upgrade Kudos to Phillip Langdale for the work and maintaining the PPA !

Turns out that the Broadcom BCM2708 chip on the RPi has a hardware watchdog. This can be very useful if your RPi is located remotely and locks up. However, this would not the preferred method of restarting the unit and in extreme cases this can result in file-system damage that could prevent the RPi from booting. If this occurs regularly you better find the root cause of the problem rather than fight the symptoms.

Testing the RPi for some remote sensing application I needed to use a wireless connection as it would have been a pain to reach with an Ethernet cable. Parts Raspberry Pi Series B 512MB Raspbian 3.6.11+ Kernel Comfast 802.11n – Realtek RTL8188CUS WLAN Adapter Install WPA Supplicant sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wpa_supplicant Check for the USB adapter sudo lsusb This should show output similar to this (depending on your USB adapter)

My normal combination on the big-server side would be Apache + MySQL (or PostgreSQL), but on the RPi this seems to be absolute overkill. For data-logging operations I would not use the local system anyway (looking at MQTT as well as Remote MongoDB datastore via REST Webservices). After some poking around and reading up on the options I decided to go for the following combo: LightHTTPD + SQLite. Both are lightweight replacement of their fully-featured big-server counterparts (Apache HTTP & MySQL) and have very familiar configurations.

Just got myself (actually it’s for our Office Manager back in OZ) one of these Chromebooks while in Europe (since Google Australia with their absolutely hopeless hardware strategy do not seem to be able to ship any devices – Nexus 4 anyone ?) . Since the first days turned out to be a bit of a frustrating experience, I thought I share some of the findings as I had a hard time finding much useful info on troubleshooting ChromeOS.

The Raspbian Install process is fairly well documented using the Raspbian Installer. This is just to document common tasks after the stock install. Install base utils apt-get install sudo vim ntpdate git-core binutils make gcc ca-certificates rpi-update Allow non-root user account access to ‘sudo’ adduser USERNAME sudo For those Ubuntu users there is no ‘admin’ group in Raspbian (Debian Wheezy). NTP time update sudo rm /etc/localtime<br></br>sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Adelaide /etc/localtime<br></br>sudo ntpdate -u au.

Add apt repository key sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 7F0CEB10 Add apt repository sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/10gen.list<br></br>#add the following line:<br></br>deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/ubuntu-upstart dist 10gen<br></br> Install mongodb & python utils sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install mongodb-10gen python-pip python-dev build-essential<br></br>pip install pymongo

To connect 1-wire serial devices to the RPi I am using a DS9490R USB 1-wire adapter (rather than wiring I2C 1-Wire master components to GPIO I2C – which I might look at sometime down the track) Install packages sudo apt-get install owfs ow-shell Edit config file vim /etc/owfs.conf ! server: server = localhost:4304<br></br># USB device: DS9490<br></br>server: usb = all<br></br>######################### OWFS ##########################<br></br>mountpoint = /mnt/1wire<br></br>allow_other<br></br>####################### OWHTTPD #########################<br></br>http: port = 2121<br></br>####################### OWFTPD ##########################<br></br>ftp: port = 2120<br></br>####################### OWSERVER ########################<br></br>server: port = localhost:4304

Since I didn’t have any luck playing videos on the RPi using mplayer I found omxplayer after some search. It has the ability to use the RPi’s GPU thus taking some load of the CPU. UPDATE 2013-04-01: omxplayer is now included in the Raspbian (Debian Wheezy) repositories and can be simply installed by one line. sudo apt-get install omxplayer Check another article on how to install Raspbian. OMXPlayer binary (.deb) downloads can be found here: http://omxplayer.

Just a quick note on Speech Synthesis a Raspberry Pi project. I had to research some of the options on the Raspberry Pi while looking into a project where I need some audio announcements. Configuring Sound echo 'snd-bcm2835' >> /etc/modules<br></br>sudo modprobe snd-bcm2835 sudo apt-get install mplayer alsa-base alsa-utils pulseaudio mpg123<br></br># make mplayer use mpg123 codec instead of default ffmp3float<br></br>echo "afm=mp3lib" >> ~/.mplayer/config Since I am using Raspbian which is a Debian based (Wheezy) Distribution I used some Ubuntu documentation (https://help.

One of the more common uses of Twitter for me is to monitor “back-channels” at events (often events I can attend, but more often these days events I am unable to attend). Unfortunately Twitter’s search capabilities cease to be useful after a little while and so it is very handy to be able to create an archive for the events ‘hashtag’. There used to be a number of tools in the early days, but mainly because of Twitter’s changes to policies and very unfortunate morphing into a closed ‘media-publishing’ platform, the developers of such tools were forced to discontinue their services.

GeoIP enables you to identify the location, organization, connection speed, and user type of your website visitors. yum install GeoIP mod_geoip<br></br>cd /usr/share/GeoIP/<br></br>wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCountry/GeoIP.dat.gz<br></br>wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz<br></br>gunzip GeoIP.dat.gz<br></br>gunzip GeoLiteCity.dat.gz<br></br>rm -f *.gz<br></br> Edit the VirtualHost settings in httpd.conf <ifmodule mod_geoip.c><br></br>GeoIPEnable On<br></br>GeoIPDBFile /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat Standard<br></br>GeoIPDBFile /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat Standard<br></br></ifmodule> Restart Apache /etc/init.d/httpd restart

Every once in a while it is handy to be able to access an Amazon RDS Database Instance remotely from a desktop. ssh -i <strong>YOUR-AMAZON-PRIVATE-KEY</strong>.pem -l <strong>YOUR-AMAZON-RDS-USERNAME</strong> -L 33060:<strong>YOUR-AMAZON-RDS-PRIVATE-IPADDRESS</strong>:3306 -N ec2-usr@<strong>YOUR-AMAZON-EC2-INSTANCE-PUBLIC-ADDRESS</strong> Note: YOURAMAZONRDSPRIVATEIPADDRESS needs to be the AWS internal RDS IP Address – not the external hostname You can then connect to RDS using mysql commands or any GUI tool such as MySQL Workbench via localhost:33060 Thanks to: Dirk Taggesell via AWS Forums

I sometimes have time to read RSS feeds when I have no Internet connection. Granted this is happening less often these days with wireless connectivity pretty much ubiquitous, but I frequently have that need. Most often it’s in an air-plane when you want to catch up on non-essential news and don’t have any connectivity. This is where Lightread comes in handy. It synchronizes your Google Reader Account with excellent integration into the Ubuntu UI (desktop notification of new items …).

Installing CoffeeScript on Ubuntu 12.04 is a complete no-brainer by the looks of it (since both node.js Core as well as Node Package Manager are in the Ubuntu repos). sudo apt-get install nodejs npm<br></br>sudo npm install -g coffee-script To check the installation coffee -v Just as a reminder for myself & in case it helps somebody …

Flash Media rtmpdump apt-get install rtmpdump<br></br>rtmpdump -r "rtmp://domain.tld/video_name.flv" -o video_name.flv Docs: http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/rtmpdump.1.html Windows Media mimms apt-get install mimms<br></br>mimms mms://domain.tld/video_name.wmv Docs: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/mimms.1.html mplayer mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile video_name.wmv mms://domain.tld/video_name.wmv

I recently had a need to install a VPN service in a OpenVZ container. Since I normally only use Hardware emulating VM’s I ran into quite a few issues in terms of low-level networking support on this Container Virtualisation System. Turns out that you are stuck with a TUN/TAP solution as most services won’t enable PPP services on their infrastructure. Also Ethernet bridging is not available (at least on the service I used) so you’re stuck with NAT IP masquerading.

For roaming mobile clients PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) is still the quickest way to get VPN connections to tunnel traffic over a secure link. Installation I always prefer installation via a yum repository as this will ensure patches are applied during regular system updates sudo rpm --import http://poptop.sourceforge.net/yum/RPM-GPG-KEY-PPTP<br></br>sudo rpm -Uvh http://poptop.sourceforge.net/yum/stable/rhel6/pptp-release-current.noarch.rpm<br></br>sudo yum install ppp pptpd -y Configuration Note: replace $USERNAME and $PASSWORD with actual values IP configuration echo "localip 192.168.0.1" >> /etc/pptpd.

To keep my desktop (notebook) machine light and responsive I don’t want unnecessary services starting on boot-time. Turns out Ubuntu is surprisingly cumbersome to configure in this area (compared to RedHat / Fedora). Two services I need on my notebook, but don’t want them to start unless I require them running are MySQL and Apache. But it looks like some services are started using upstart init daemon and it appears there is no management tool for this.

As a Galaxy Nexus Owner I have been waiting for months for an OTA (over the air) upgrade to the factory installed Firmware (4.0.2). I am finally sick of waiting and complaining to Google (an absolute lost cause). After some research it turns out that (contrary to popular opinion) not every unlocked Google Nexus actually has the ‘official’ Google Firmware. Some of them have a Samsung variant (WTF !?) of the firmware.

Since I am tired to constantly recite this list whenever one of these designer-type people tells me that they need Adobe’s Whatever Suite to do some basic task here is a summary that I can point them to. Vector Graphics Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/) Xara Extreme (http://www.xaraxtreme.org/) Raster Graphics Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) Desktop Publishing Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/) Photo Editing Gimp (see above) Darktable (http://www.darktable.org/) RawTherapee (http://www.rawtherapee.com/) Luminance HDR (http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/) Layout Tools (DTP): Scribus (http://scribus.net/canvas/Scribus)

Debugging things on the Android Emulator (incluced in the SDK) can be a very slow and cumbersome process. Thanks to the Android-x86 Project it’s quite easy to run Android in VirtualBox. This is highly useful when you need to test mobile apps and websites from the Android Browser (as well as Chrome Mobile). Download an Ethernet enabled ISO from Tablets x86wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75945873/android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent<br></br>transmission android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent Create new ViratualBox VM Important Settings (see screenshots) OS: Linux, Version: Linux 2.

Since the latest version of GIMP has not been included in the main 12.04 repositories because it was not ready at release time you have to use a PPA at current. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install gimp TIP: Go to the “Windows” menu and select ‘Single-Window Mode’ to use Gimp in one window (see screenshot).

After upgrading my Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook to 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) I noticed that the ability to control the screen back-light was not working using the Toshiba Fn F6/F7 keys. Thanks to http://www.linlap.com/wiki/acer+aspire+s3 the solution was found quite quickly. sudo vim /etc/default/grub This will open the grub configuration file. (Grub is the initial boot selection software) To be able to dim the screen brightness, You’ve got to modify the line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

To use a Samsung Galaxy Nexus as a media device (MTP) there is a utility called gMTP. sudo apt-get install gmtp mtpfs mtp-tools NOTE: Unfortunately there is a bug in the 64-bit version at the moment (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mtpfs/+bug/936165) – which means it’s not all that useful to me at the moment.

Having a guest account might be useful on a home computer, but it’s generally not what I want enabled on a notebook. To disable the default Guest account you need to edit lightdm.conf and add a line (allow-guest=false). sudo vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf [SeatDefaults] greeter-session=unity-greeter user-session=ubuntu allow-guest=false Tested in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin & Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

As a follow-up on a very old post I thought it’s worth providing an update. Despite it’s age (& only costing $350 at the time) my little Asus EEE PC 900 it is still a useful device. It has turned out as one of the better IT investments in my lifetime. However it’s not (and was never) the fastest kid on the block and recent OS upgrades have become increasingly resource hungry.

UPDATE: [01-May-2012] It appears that this PPA repo is currently broken (does not allow to get GPG key and has unmet dependencies on x84_64). It appears that the install on i386 systems does work anyway if you ignore the GPG key error, but I wouldn’t install in that case as PPA installs are security risk enough without GPG errors. UPDATE: [11-May-2012] The reason the PPA does not work is that it has been disabled by Ubuntu due to a licensing issue with (not hard to guess) Oracle.

Whilst I am by no means a photographer I do end up taking quite a few photos (these days pretty much exclusively on my phone) and the management of these photos can be a pain. So far I have never found an program worth the pain over plain old file management. But having stumbled across Darktable (http://darktable.org/) I think I might have found a worthwile package. Install on Ubuntu: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmjdebruijn/darktable-release<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install darktable

When you need to convert multiple documents to PDF for distribution (or from one Office format to another) there are a few utilities around. The most workable I found is the UNOCONV utility which is build on top of LibreOffice / OpenOffice. This uses the OpenOffice conversion facilities rather than a simple PDF print driver. On Ubuntu it can be installed via Software Center or via apt-get from the core repositories.

Getting Multifunction Printers to scan under Linux can be a bit of a pain. The Samsung SCX-3400 I had to install recently was no exception. Here are the necessary steps I had to perform: Ignore all Samsung Provided CD’s and downloads. They do not work under Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) Add Samsung Unified Driver repository http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/smfpv3.html Install Samsung drivers and libsane-extras Edit sane configuration files vim /etc/apt/sources.list #add the Samsung Unified Driver Repo deb http://www.

Connecting to IPSec VPN gateways has always been one of the more painful things to do. Unfortunately Cisco is not helping by being extremely sluggish on making their utilities available on most recent OS revisions (you can’t even get their QuickVPN client to work properly on 64bit Win7 yet). Operating System support outside of Windows seems to be pretty much non-existent (see https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2040595). Shame on you Cisco ! Option 1 – running QuickVPN under using wine Download the QuickVPN client

One of the features I missed since the good old Android 1.5 days was the ability to take screen-shots on the device. Prior to Android 4 (ICS) the only workable way to create screen-shots was to connect via USB cable and use the Android SDK to make remote screen-shots. On Android 4.0 all you have to do is press Volume Down Key + Power Key down at the same time and hold.

With the release of the final VLC 2.0 player you need to add a back-port (the next version 12.04 will have it included in the main repositories) PPA to Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) sudo add-apt-repository ppa:n-muench/vlc sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install vlc Thanks to Nate Muench for providing this !

One of the most important utilities on any computer is a decent text editing tool. Since there are as literally hundreds of text-editors out there you would think it is an easy task to find a similar one for each platform. The requirements list in order of priority: Fast & Native (reading NOT Java or similar runtime requirements) Excellent Search & Replace (which is where most fail ….) Lightweight Simple GUI (reading NOT an IDE) Potential Candidates Scite Scite was my first try since it is based on the same engine as Notepad++.

To get an idea on the current power usage and some suggestions on how to improve power-management ‘powertop‘ is a must-have. sudo apt-get install powertop

EDIT: Here are some tweaks if you install 12.04 (Precise Pangolin). Since I will have to do a fair amount of traveling in the next year I was in need of upgrading my trusted workhorse of Toshiba Qosmio F60 to a more portable option that will be easier on the shoulders during long travels. After doing some research into which of the major manufacturers offer the best support for a Linux based Operating System it came down to a final two: the Intel i7 variants of Samsung Series 9 and the Toshiba Z830.

If you need to check websites for mobile compliance on a regular basis you know that having a device to constantly check is painful and slows down your work during debugging and phases of constant change. by adactio There are a few tools that will make this work a lot easier: Google Chrome Chrome does have some nice dedicated plug-ins to help with this task Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/geelfhphabnejjhdalkjhgipohgpdnoc) appMobi HTML5 XDK (https://chrome.

Thanks to Olivier Berten for providing this package via his PPA Repo ! sudo add-apt-repository ppa:olivier-berten/misc<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench-gpl EDIT: this has been confirmed to work on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) as well).

Since the default Ubuntu repository does not have the current version of VirtualBox (currently 4.1.x) here is the installation procedure via apt-get echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -sc) contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.1 To use USB devices on the clients you need to install the Extension Pack from the Oracle Site and install via the File –> Preferences.

Like it or not (personally I am in the second category) Blackboard Collaborate or Elluminate (as it is still more commonly referred to) is something you have a hard time avoiding if you work in online education. I discovered that I have audio issues on some Ubuntu Linux machines and found the following to fix the issues. 1) Install alsa-aoss apt-get install alsa-oss 2) Save the Elluminate Java Webstard (.JNLP) file to a local folder – DO NOT OPEN IN BROWSER

Just some memory aid to help remember how to set up DVB cards in Ubuntu: apt-get install dvb-apps dvbstream w-scan w_scan -c AU -X > channels.conf You can use this channels.conf with a number of TV players (MeTV, MythTV,…) however I prefer the no-nonsense interface of VLC vlc channels.conf Here is the example output (for those in Adelaide, South Australia you can just save this into channels.conf): 7 Digital(Seven Network):177500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:1281:1282:1360 7 Digital 1(Seven Network):177500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:1281:1282:1361 7TWO(Seven Network):177500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:1313:1314:1362 7mate(Seven Network):177500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:1329:0:1363 7 Digital(Seven Network):177500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:1281:1282:1364 Nine Digital(Nine Adelaide):191620000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:512:650:1105 GO(Nine Adelaide):191620000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:514:652:1106 GEM(Nine Adelaide):191620000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:513:0:1112 ONE(Ten Adelaide):219500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:514:0:1617 TEN Digital(Ten Adelaide):219500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:512:650:1621 ONE(Ten Adelaide):219500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:514:0:1623 ELEVEN(Ten Adelaide):219500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:516:681:1624 ABC News 24(ABC):226500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:2314:0:592 ABC1(ABC):226500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:512:650:593 ABC2 / ABC4(ABC):226500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:2307:2308:594 ABC1(ABC):226500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:512:650:595 ABC3(ABC):226500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:2311:2312:596 ABC Dig Music(ABC):226500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:0:2317:598 ABC Jazz(ABC):226500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_3_4:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_16:HIERARCHY_NONE:0:2318:599 44 Adelaide(44Adelaide):543500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_NONE:QPSK:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_8:HIERARCHY_NONE:100:101:3585 SBS ONE(SBS):564500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_8:HIERARCHY_NONE:161:81:833 SBS TWO(SBS):564500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_8:HIERARCHY_NONE:162:83:834 SBS 3(SBS):564500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_8:HIERARCHY_NONE:161:81:835 SBS 4(SBS):564500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_8:HIERARCHY_NONE:161:81:836 SBS HD(SBS):564500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_8:HIERARCHY_NONE:102:103:837 SBS Radio 1(SBS):564500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_8:HIERARCHY_NONE:0:201:846 SBS Radio 2(SBS):564500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_NONE:QAM_64:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_8:HIERARCHY_NONE:0:202:847 ONE(Ten Adelaide):711500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:514:0:1617 TEN Digital(Ten Adelaide):711500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:512:650:1621 ONE(Ten Adelaide):711500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:514:0:1623 ELEVEN(Ten Adelaide):711500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:516:681:1624 service_id 833:760500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:161:81:833 service_id 834:760500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:162:83:834 service_id 835:760500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:161:81:835 service_id 836:760500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:161:81:836 service_id 837:760500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:102:103:837 service_id 846:760500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:0:201:846 service_id 847:760500000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_7_MHZ:FEC_AUTO:FEC_AUTO:QAM_AUTO:TRANSMISSION_MODE_AUTO:GUARD_INTERVAL_AUTO:HIERARCHY_AUTO:0:202:847

With every new release of Ubuntu I am becoming more resigned to the fact that the effort to revert back to the Ubuntu Classic (Gnome 2) interface is getting harder and sooner or later I will have to bite the bullet and learn to live with the ugly and more cumbersome Unity interface (specially since Gnome 3 seems to be even worse). One of the first issues I found is that there seems to be no easy way to manually add programs to the “Launcher” (as well as to the applications list).

UPDATE: To install on 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) you need a different PPA. Since sun-java6-jdk has been removed from the default Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) repositories you need to add a PPA repository (unless you want to install by hand) sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

After the recent takeover of Delicious from Yahoo Inc by Avos and the subsequent total screw-up of what was a workable system I have been struggling to export bookmarks from Delicious in XML format (since the API is badly broken). The API export of all bookmarks limits the export to 1000 bookmark entries. Which is fine if you have less than 1000 bookmarks stored. But it makes it impossible (since there is no paging functionality exposed by the API) to export the rest should you have more (and many people would have much more than that).

Just a quick note on how to configure backups of Google Apps email to a local machine. Install getmail apt-get install getmail4 create config directory Create a subdirectory in users home folder (and change permissions) mkdir .getmail touch .getmail create config file Create a file such as .getmail/username.gmail [retriever] type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever server = imap.gmail.com username = username@domain.tld password = password mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/All Mail",) [destination] type = Maildir path = /path/to/storage/directory/ [options] # print messages about each action (verbose = 2) # Other options: # 0 prints only warnings and errors # 1 prints messages about retrieving and deleting messages only verbose = 1 message_log = ~/.

After recently researching the available software for e-book creation for some of our clients (in the education sector) I came across quite a number of options. However after some further look into the option and trying some I was able narrowed the field down to 2 options that seem to be reasonably user-friendly and matured. The two are using a very different approach and will suit different types of users. One is a native e-book writer which will give better low-level control for the more technical types.

One of my oldest pieces of hardware is a trusty Nokia SU-8W Bluetooth Keyboard. I have tried to revive it on an Android 1.6 & 2.0 device with not much luck. However I got it working successfully on a Gingerbread (2.3.4) Google Nexus S. Pre-requisites SU-8W Manual (http://nds1.nokia.com/phones/files/guides/Nokia_SU-8W_Wireless_Keyboard_UG_en.pdf) BlueKeyboard JP (https://market.android.com/details?id=elbrain.bluekeyboard.ime) Steps Install the BlueKeyboard JP from the Android Market Go to Settings > Wireless & Networks > Bluetooth Settings Scan for devices and click to pair the Nokia SU-8W Enter a passcode (I used the highly inventive 0000 combinaton) on the phone and click ‘OK’ Enter the same on the SU-8W (need to use green ‘fn’ keys for numbers) and hit enter The phone should show the Nokia SU-8W as paired but not connected Go to Settings > Language & keyboard > BlueKeyboard JP Settings Select the Nokia SU-8W as the keyboard and make any other changes you might need Click the ‘Back’ symbol and tick the option box to enable the ‘BlueKeyboard JP’ keyboard In any data entry field (i.

As one of those who grabbed a HP Touchpad at the recent firesale (after announcing the killing of the product line) I did it as in full knowledge that this device in it’s current form is of limited use and (highly) unlikely to have lots of additional applications created for it. After casually using it for a few nights of use I am personally not surprised that HP decided to ditch this product.

This is an interesting info-graphic comparing the 3 most popular OpenSource Content Management Systems. While I don’t really agree with some of the metrics (such as the web-service stats) it is never the less a very good visual overview. As a long-term user of WordPress and Drupal there are some good points to give a quick overview.

Since some older hardware (Toshiba Satellite A300 for example) has issues with the current version of Grub as well as the newer Kernel I still need to run 10.04 on some machines. However since the 10.04 Repository still uses Firefox 3.6 you need to add a PPA repo to upgrade to Firefox 4. Either go to Ubuntu Software Center > Software Sources and click the ‘Other Software’ tab. Press ‘Add’ and enter ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

Note: this has been verified to work on 11.04 (Natty), 11.10 (Oneiric) & 12.04 (Precise) To convert a DVD and make it viewable on your mobile device Handbrake seems to be the most useful tool I have discovered so far. Since it is not part of the default Ubuntu Repositories here is the installation process. The first step is to insure libdvdcss2 is installed sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

After upgrading to Ubuntu 11 (Natty) I did some further research on VoIP clients (SIP) for Ubuntu Linux as XLite seems horribly out of date now. I came across QuteCom (formerly WengoPhone) and from first testing it seems to work quite well. The install is easy as it’s part of the Ubuntu Community Software (Universe) and that means it can be installed via apt-get, Software Center or Synaptic. So far the early testing has been very positive and the interface seems quite workable as well as having a number of other instant messaging options available.

EDIT: As of Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) this is now much easier as KeePass 2 has finally made it into the repositories apt-get install keepass2 ————————————————————————————————————- If you need to read KeepPass 2 data files (.kdbx) on Ubuntu (as well as from other platforms such as Windows or Android) you need to run the Portable Version under Mono (.NET Runtime). Make sure you download the Portable Version 2.x from http://keepass.info/download.html

I sometimes need to link to a specific Twitter status update and since the recent upgrade (or as I personally see it downgrade) of the Twitter UI it is quite annoying to find the Status ID, as it can not be copied from the interface (without some Javascript debugging tools at least). http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=[screen_name] This will show the users timeline in XML format revealing the Status ID in the XML result. The following URL can be used to then construct the permalink to the specific status update:

If you upgrade you Ubuntu Netbook release to 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) you will notice a change to the new ¨Unity¨ user interface. Personally I think the new interface is absolutely horrible (from a usability perspective) and I wanted to revert to the previous Netbook-Launcher. HOWTO Install the required components via terminal: sudo apt-get install netbook-launcher-efl After install just change the “Login Settings” Log out and after the next login: voila – the laucher interface:

Having used IP Telephony for a number of years I need a workable SIP client for all of the devices I use. I have found a very capable client for my Android phones (SipDroid) and on Windows/MacOSX I generally use X-Lite (as well as it’s paid version EyePhone) from Counterpath. Having tried several different Linux SIP clients (Ekiga, Twinkle, …) but all discarded them because of weird UI’s and/or problems with stability I noticed that there is a Linux version of XLite available.

Since I have switched my 3G data network from Hutchinson Three to Vodafone AU recently I also upgraded the USB modem from a Huwaei E220 (which used to work fine on recent Ubuntu NBR releases on my trusty old ASUS EEE 900) Unfortunately the new Huawei K3765 would not be recognised as a valid modem by the network manager. After a fair bit of searching it turns out that you only need to install one additional package (usb-modeswitch) to make this modem work (be recognised) on the current stable 10.

Since Ubuntu 9.10 NetbookRemix has been released I am again finding myself using my trusty old ASUS EEE when on the road. And finally it seems I have found a vanilla Linux distribution that is reasonably responsive and works ‘out of the box’. One thing I don’t need on the road (as a matter of fact on none of my equipment) is having to install & maintain some client/server mail client.

This one nearly escaped my attention yesterday. Google has just announced the ability to edit Google Docs on your mobile device via their Google Mobile Blog. Just point your mobile browser to m.google.com/docs and start editing. Along with the use of 2D barcodes this will open a few interesting m-learning possiblities for educators that would previously have required custom coding to achieve. I can see this being very useful in situations where you have students being in the field and allowing them to enter data gathered using a standard mobile phone.

Getting excited about a new text editor of all things is not something I like to admit to easily, but in my line of work (although less and less is actually doing hands on coding) text editing is an important part. That’s why I checked out the BESPIN project as soon as I heard of it. The prospect of being able to edit your files from anywhere is very appealing to me since I spend a lot of time away from the desk and on devices that not always have good text editor (let alone all the files necessary).

One of the nicest ways to get photos straight from your mobile to Flickr (without having to use e-mails) on Nokia devices is the Flickr Plugin for the Nokia Share Online application. Since a lot of my clients in the educational sector are starting to use Flickr as part of their online teaching I decided to create a short HOWTO. The application itself comes with the phone on most recent Nokia S60 devices (with recent Firmware – check Nokia Software Updater for new firmware).

This is Part 3 of the Nokia SIP settings. This time for NodePhone (Internode – Australia). It has been hard to find this information (particularily the Registrar Server settings). NOTE: The Realm setting in the Registrar Server are CASE-SENSITIVE. For some screenshots check the ENGIN Australia setup entry. General Profile name: nodephone Service profile: IETF Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point} Public user name: sip:{NodePhone Phone No}@sip.internode.on.net User compression: No

This is Part 2 of the Nokia SIP settings. This time for sipgate.at (Austria), but it should also work for other SIPGate domains. It has been hard to get this information from the providers themselves. For some screenshots check the ENGIN Australia setup entry. General Profile name: sipgate Service profile: IETF Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point} Public user name: sip:{SIPGate UserID}@sipgate.at User compression: No Registration: When needed Use security: No

Since I had to look all over�for the correct settings and there was a lot of trial and error involved (specially for the Realm). Thanks to Engin Support that finally provided this info after logging a support request. The screenshots are from a Nokia E65, but should be applicable for similar Nokia phones. General Profile name: engin Service profile: IETF Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point} Public user name: sip:{phone number}@voice.

As a long-term Ubuntu user I am extremely interested in what Canonical and the Ubuntu community are doing on the mobile front. Their convergence strategy (I am testing Snappy Core on IoT devices as well) seems very well thought through and once the the Meizu MX4 phone was released I got myself an invite and ordered a unit. It took a while to ship and then also had to make it’s way down under as Meizu only ship to Europe (and Asia I believe).

Every once in a while you find a gem. One of these for me is SShuttle – until now I have not known about this one. Use-case: I just been trying to get Ubuntu Make to install Eclipse IDE and the local AARNET download mirror is just refusing to cooperate (https://github.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-make/issues/90). A quick forward to a remote VPS fixed the issue without headaches Install sudo apt-get install sshuttle Run sshuttle -r username@servername.

Add SDK repository sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-sdk-team/ppa<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install ubuntu-device-flash Enable USB Debugging on the device Make sure you have developer mode enabled (see http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html if you are unsure). Navigate to Settings > Developer options Enable USB Debugging. When a device is connected, you will be prompted in Android to authorize it. Unlock Bootloader adb reboot bootloader<br></br>fastboot oem unlock<br></br>fastboot reboot Check that you have the right device adb shell grep ro.

Just a quick update of the previous article on “Sony Xperia Z2 upgrading to CyanogenMod 11“. One thing is that CM now included the custom recovery and you do not need to download any other custom recoveries ! Download the CM 12 ZIP file for Sony Xperia Z2 (sirius) and extract the ‘boot.img’ file Download link: https://download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=sirius Get the device into fastboot (bootloader mode) fastboot -i 0xfce flash boot boot.img<br></br>fastboot reboot

One of the main reasons for setting up a cloud desktop is that I tend to use a lot of different devices some of which are not very powerful. One of my favorite devices of late has been a HP 11 Chromebook. I originally bought it for a new employee and wanted to check myself how this thing stacks up to do day-to-day computing tasks more efficiently than a standard laptop without all the headaches of running Windows (viruses, endless driver installs, bloatware, malware, …).

I have had some issues recently with getting LTE (4G) connectivity on the Vodafone Australia Network using CyanogenMod 11 on multiple devices (http://forum.cyanogenmod.org/topic/92919-no-4g-signal-on-vodafone-au/). Turns out that it was an APN issue after all. The APN provisioned by default when the Voda SIM card is inserted (vfinternet.au) does not work for the LTE Data Network. It works with GPRS & WCDMA, but fails to connect when the phone is set to prefer LTE (4G) Networks and they are actually available.

Contrary to my normal inclinations not to buy anything but Stock Android phones I ended up with a Sony Xperia Z2 in a hurry over the weekend (it’s a long story…). It appears to be quite a decent handset (with a pretty good camera actually) and one of the main reason to choose this over the other options was that is was one of the few high-end devices which already had a CM snapshot rather than just nightly releases.

Foursquare decided that it was too hard for them to compete with location services like Yelp and split their app into two separate apps. Whilst that might make sense to the 4Square CEO and his VC masters, it makes no sense from a users perspective. Foursquare can be a bit of a battery hog already, and having 2 apps to open and “annoy” you with notifications is not an improvement by any means.

The Nokia X seems to be a nice piece of hardware for just around $125 AUD. Nothing spectacular in terms of computing power, but much better build quality than your average cheap Chinese Android clone. I have always been a fan of Nokia hardware until they decided to commit suicide by firstly adding CEO Stephen Elop and ditching all of their software for Windows Mobile. The problem with the device out of the box is that is has a horribly butchered version of Android.

Apache Cordova has very nice documentation, however as so many projects it is focused on the Windows/MacOS duopolies only. Fortunately it’s not too hard to work out the differences. Installing dependencies Thanks to: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make ant openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk Installing Android SDK Please note: one of the problems I found was that I had some Android tools from the Ubuntu repos that were conflicting with the SDK install.

This is the last of a series of alternative mobile OS installs and the easiest install by a country mile ! Install Everything is quite well documented here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:phablet-team/tools<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install phablet-tools android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot<br></br>phablet-flash ubuntu-system --channel devel --bootstrap That is it really ! This is how a OS change on a mobile should work ! Issues Ubuntu touch can not yet handle the radio firmware past Android 4.

Or as an alternative title “Liberating your Galaxy S4 Hardware from Samsung Bloatware”. Unfortunately there is lots of (ad-infested) blogs and forums with dodgy pieces of information on this topic and I found it pretty hard to get descent concise information. So hopefully this might help some poor Linux User liberate their phone. Whilst this has been tested on a Samsung GT-I9505 S4 International LTE device (JFLTEXX series) it should be applicable to other similar Samsung phones that are not fastboot capable (ie.

Just got myself (actually it’s for our Office Manager back in OZ) one of these Chromebooks while in Europe (since Google Australia with their absolutely hopeless hardware strategy do not seem to be able to ship any devices – Nexus 4 anyone ?) . Since the first days turned out to be a bit of a frustrating experience, I thought I share some of the findings as I had a hard time finding much useful info on troubleshooting ChromeOS.

As a Galaxy Nexus Owner I have been waiting for months for an OTA (over the air) upgrade to the factory installed Firmware (4.0.2). I am finally sick of waiting and complaining to Google (an absolute lost cause). After some research it turns out that (contrary to popular opinion) not every unlocked Google Nexus actually has the ‘official’ Google Firmware. Some of them have a Samsung variant (WTF !?) of the firmware.

Debugging things on the Android Emulator (incluced in the SDK) can be a very slow and cumbersome process. Thanks to the Android-x86 Project it’s quite easy to run Android in VirtualBox. This is highly useful when you need to test mobile apps and websites from the Android Browser (as well as Chrome Mobile). Download an Ethernet enabled ISO from Tablets x86wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75945873/android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent<br></br>transmission android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent Create new ViratualBox VM Important Settings (see screenshots) OS: Linux, Version: Linux 2.

After upgrading my Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook to 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) I noticed that the ability to control the screen back-light was not working using the Toshiba Fn F6/F7 keys. Thanks to http://www.linlap.com/wiki/acer+aspire+s3 the solution was found quite quickly. sudo vim /etc/default/grub This will open the grub configuration file. (Grub is the initial boot selection software) To be able to dim the screen brightness, You’ve got to modify the line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

To use a Samsung Galaxy Nexus as a media device (MTP) there is a utility called gMTP. sudo apt-get install gmtp mtpfs mtp-tools NOTE: Unfortunately there is a bug in the 64-bit version at the moment (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mtpfs/+bug/936165) – which means it’s not all that useful to me at the moment.

Having a guest account might be useful on a home computer, but it’s generally not what I want enabled on a notebook. To disable the default Guest account you need to edit lightdm.conf and add a line (allow-guest=false). sudo vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf [SeatDefaults] greeter-session=unity-greeter user-session=ubuntu allow-guest=false Tested in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin & Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

As a follow-up on a very old post I thought it’s worth providing an update. Despite it’s age (& only costing $350 at the time) my little Asus EEE PC 900 it is still a useful device. It has turned out as one of the better IT investments in my lifetime. However it’s not (and was never) the fastest kid on the block and recent OS upgrades have become increasingly resource hungry.

The latest instalment in my never-ending quest to find a decent SIP client (see Ubuntu SIP I & Ubuntu SIP II) I came across JITSI (http://jitsi.org/). Since the website looked very interesting and the project seems very well maintained (http://jitsi.org/index.php/Main/Screenshots) I decided to give it a go. The installation is a breeze with a Ubuntu/Debian package available and the installation also adds the repository to keep the package up to date.

To get an idea on the current power usage and some suggestions on how to improve power-management ‘powertop‘ is a must-have. sudo apt-get install powertop

EDIT: Here are some tweaks if you install 12.04 (Precise Pangolin). Since I will have to do a fair amount of traveling in the next year I was in need of upgrading my trusted workhorse of Toshiba Qosmio F60 to a more portable option that will be easier on the shoulders during long travels. After doing some research into which of the major manufacturers offer the best support for a Linux based Operating System it came down to a final two: the Intel i7 variants of Samsung Series 9 and the Toshiba Z830.

If you need to check websites for mobile compliance on a regular basis you know that having a device to constantly check is painful and slows down your work during debugging and phases of constant change. by adactio There are a few tools that will make this work a lot easier: Google Chrome Chrome does have some nice dedicated plug-ins to help with this task Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/geelfhphabnejjhdalkjhgipohgpdnoc) appMobi HTML5 XDK (https://chrome.

One of the lesser known free Google services in our experience is Google Goggles. Specially in it’s lastest release (Version 1.7) it has received a few enhancements that make it very useful for some mobile learning applications Scanning of barcodes Google Googles will scan most standard barcodes and provide information on the product scanned. Here is an example from the Google Mobile Blog: Let’s say you’re reading a magazine article you really like and want to share it with your friends.

This is an interesting report and info-graphic by the folks at VisionMobile on a new way of measuring the openness of some mobile open source projects. The Open Governance Index measures the true openness of eight open source projects – Android, Qt, Symbian, MeeGo, Mozilla, WebKit, Linux and Eclipse – and analyses how governance, and not licenses, tell the full story of a project’s openness, across transparency, influence and control.

The release of the latest Ubuntu Version has been seen by a number of commentators as the most end-user friendly yet and signals another milestone in the readiness of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for more widespread (and business) use. As a long-term user of a number of different Operating Systems and as SME Owner for the last 15 years I have overseen the gradual replacement of a number of proprietary software solutions with FOSS Alternatives.

One of my oldest pieces of hardware is a trusty Nokia SU-8W Bluetooth Keyboard. I have tried to revive it on an Android 1.6 & 2.0 device with not much luck. However I got it working successfully on a Gingerbread (2.3.4) Google Nexus S. Pre-requisites SU-8W Manual (http://nds1.nokia.com/phones/files/guides/Nokia_SU-8W_Wireless_Keyboard_UG_en.pdf) BlueKeyboard JP (https://market.android.com/details?id=elbrain.bluekeyboard.ime) Steps Install the BlueKeyboard JP from the Android Market Go to Settings > Wireless & Networks > Bluetooth Settings Scan for devices and click to pair the Nokia SU-8W Enter a passcode (I used the highly inventive 0000 combinaton) on the phone and click ‘OK’ Enter the same on the SU-8W (need to use green ‘fn’ keys for numbers) and hit enter The phone should show the Nokia SU-8W as paired but not connected Go to Settings > Language & keyboard > BlueKeyboard JP Settings Select the Nokia SU-8W as the keyboard and make any other changes you might need Click the ‘Back’ symbol and tick the option box to enable the ‘BlueKeyboard JP’ keyboard In any data entry field (i.

As one of those who grabbed a HP Touchpad at the recent firesale (after announcing the killing of the product line) I did it as in full knowledge that this device in it’s current form is of limited use and (highly) unlikely to have lots of additional applications created for it. After casually using it for a few nights of use I am personally not surprised that HP decided to ditch this product.

Since some older hardware (Toshiba Satellite A300 for example) has issues with the current version of Grub as well as the newer Kernel I still need to run 10.04 on some machines. However since the 10.04 Repository still uses Firefox 3.6 you need to add a PPA repo to upgrade to Firefox 4. Either go to Ubuntu Software Center > Software Sources and click the ‘Other Software’ tab. Press ‘Add’ and enter ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

Note: this has been verified to work on 11.04 (Natty), 11.10 (Oneiric) & 12.04 (Precise) To convert a DVD and make it viewable on your mobile device Handbrake seems to be the most useful tool I have discovered so far. Since it is not part of the default Ubuntu Repositories here is the installation process. The first step is to insure libdvdcss2 is installed sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

After upgrading to Ubuntu 11 (Natty) I did some further research on VoIP clients (SIP) for Ubuntu Linux as XLite seems horribly out of date now. I came across QuteCom (formerly WengoPhone) and from first testing it seems to work quite well. The install is easy as it’s part of the Ubuntu Community Software (Universe) and that means it can be installed via apt-get, Software Center or Synaptic. So far the early testing has been very positive and the interface seems quite workable as well as having a number of other instant messaging options available.

EDIT: As of Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) this is now much easier as KeePass 2 has finally made it into the repositories apt-get install keepass2 ————————————————————————————————————- If you need to read KeepPass 2 data files (.kdbx) on Ubuntu (as well as from other platforms such as Windows or Android) you need to run the Portable Version under Mono (.NET Runtime). Make sure you download the Portable Version 2.x from http://keepass.info/download.html

Taking part in MobiMOOC has given me the opportunity to take stock of my own MobilePLE – the top 5 tools I find most useful as part of my ongoing learning. Catch Notes (previously 3Bananas) – mobile note taking the most critical component. Whenever I get a new device – this is what has to be installed as one of the first actions. For those not familiar with this software – it’s like Evernote without the bloat.

I am using the opportunity of me taking part in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on mobile learning as an excuse to add some more content to this neglected blog. On of the issues I am facing with my participation in the MOOC is the massive amount of e-mails generated and my already overflowing inbox would not cope (let alone me managing it). That is not taking into account other sources such as Twitter & Flickr

If you upgrade you Ubuntu Netbook release to 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) you will notice a change to the new ¨Unity¨ user interface. Personally I think the new interface is absolutely horrible (from a usability perspective) and I wanted to revert to the previous Netbook-Launcher. HOWTO Install the required components via terminal: sudo apt-get install netbook-launcher-efl After install just change the “Login Settings” Log out and after the next login: voila – the laucher interface:

Having used IP Telephony for a number of years I need a workable SIP client for all of the devices I use. I have found a very capable client for my Android phones (SipDroid) and on Windows/MacOSX I generally use X-Lite (as well as it’s paid version EyePhone) from Counterpath. Having tried several different Linux SIP clients (Ekiga, Twinkle, …) but all discarded them because of weird UI’s and/or problems with stability I noticed that there is a Linux version of XLite available.

Since I have switched my 3G data network from Hutchinson Three to Vodafone AU recently I also upgraded the USB modem from a Huwaei E220 (which used to work fine on recent Ubuntu NBR releases on my trusty old ASUS EEE 900) Unfortunately the new Huawei K3765 would not be recognised as a valid modem by the network manager. After a fair bit of searching it turns out that you only need to install one additional package (usb-modeswitch) to make this modem work (be recognised) on the current stable 10.

Due to the hype generated by the recent launch and my reservations on using the Apple Inc. iTunes I was doing some research into alternatives to the proprietary and completely locked iPad device (and the associated lock-down to Apple’s iTunes Store). Hopefully this list can be of use for other people as well. I can see the form factor and the tablet style with a cut down (mainly web-browser based) Operating System as useful in a number of settings not least in educational institutions and libraries.

Since a fair bit of my time is spent working and researching in the field of Mobile Learning and there is not a lot of recent listings of Software useful in practical m-Learning implementations I have compiled the following list from my bookmarks and Software I commonly use for these purposes. This list tries to represent currently usable applications not applications in the development stage. Rather than writing this in the form of a blog entry I decided to keep this as a live document within Google Apps that people can contribute to.

This one nearly escaped my attention yesterday. Google has just announced the ability to edit Google Docs on your mobile device via their Google Mobile Blog. Just point your mobile browser to m.google.com/docs and start editing. Along with the use of 2D barcodes this will open a few interesting m-learning possiblities for educators that would previously have required custom coding to achieve. I can see this being very useful in situations where you have students being in the field and allowing them to enter data gathered using a standard mobile phone.

I have been a user of an EEE PC 900 for over 10 months now and in general very happy with the form-factor and it’s portability. I has been very useful in public transport, waiting rooms, coffee shops,… However – in terms of Operating Systems I am now on my 3rd OS (despite initially telling myself that I will stick with the default and avoid tinkering) and it looks like I still have not found what I am looking for.

Being out and about a lot, I am a fairly heavy user of my mobile internet plan (currently with Hutchinson 3). One of the more common tasks when there is some down-time while in transit or waiting for coffee is checking out what’s happening in the twittershere. Personally (being a web-app developer for years) I generally prefer browser-based apps over ‘native apps’. Dont even get me started about J2ME apps. One of the main reasons for this preference is that I tend to switch handsets fairly frequently.

One of the nicest ways to get photos straight from your mobile to Flickr (without having to use e-mails) on Nokia devices is the Flickr Plugin for the Nokia Share Online application. Since a lot of my clients in the educational sector are starting to use Flickr as part of their online teaching I decided to create a short HOWTO. The application itself comes with the phone on most recent Nokia S60 devices (with recent Firmware – check Nokia Software Updater for new firmware).

Just came across this post about barcode tombstones in Japan. Shows very clearly how much public acceptance the 2D barcode technology has got in Japan. It allows visitors to the grave to access to the biography and photos of the deceased person and leave a personal message. This concept probably takes some time to get used to, but you can see that it could clearly add some value for people visiting cemeteries.

As people that know me are aware I am not the biggest fan of the iPhone (3G – hello ???), but obviously from a professional perspective it is another phone that is with us and gaining market share (although not much happening in OZ yet). And to be fair it is breaking some technical ground as well (just not in the areas I most need). From my own anecdotal evidence I was expecting a high percentage of users to choose the iPhone because it ‘looks cool’ or is a ‘chick magnet’ – but I can not back this up by an empirical research (yet) ;-).

I came accross this article last week which I found quite interesting in terms of it’s impact on m-Learning. University inks unmetered Web access deal with Bigpond The unfortunate thing is that this is only limited to one particular university and one provider only. It would be interesting to see if there are any other institutions that are going down that track. How about a general unmetering for the ‘edu.au’ TLD ?

Another good sign that 2D tagging is here to stay and there is some (long overdue) standardisation on the way. Original Article – Herald Tribune

After reading an excellent article by Brad Reed on Network World (this seems to be the online version: Co-working: the ultimate in teleworking flexibility),�I finally got motivated enough to do some more research about this�phenomenum in the two places of interest to me (Austria and Australia)�as well as write a quick entry about this. The whole co-working concept has been interesting me ever since it started, but the organisational issues associated with starting such a�venture (and as with everything else – a lack of time) have always�prevented any serious attempt to actually move in this direction.

FINALLY !!! As somebody that has been experimenting with this technology for over 2 years now I am quite exited to see that the adoption of this technology is gathering some steem. While it has bee widely adopted in Asia for some years now, it has taken some time to get a foothold in the rest of the world this seems to be changing now. At least in Europe as I can see for myself at the moment.

Since my working world is centered a little more on educational topics at the moment (while attending ICL) I came across this Youtube Video which I think is a very good visual example of what’s commonly referred to as Education 2.0. Personally I hope that I actually comprehend this and a good part of my working life is spend improving this situation. The fact that I am sitting in a ‘lecture’ myself and watching a Youtube video should hopefully illustrate that I am can (despite my actual age) understand the students perspective quite well.

The ability to host your own content from your mobile phone opens some interesting possibilities to engage students and will allow the integration of user generated content in the education process. David Johnson from the University of Reading is working on serving portfolio data from your mobile. Some of the current limitation of this approach: -cost of the bandwidth -speed The ability to proxy the users content on the Mobile Web server Gateway as well as the ability to integrate content outside of the mobile phone seem to be the main points that will have to be improved for this to become a more mainstream technology.

This is Part 3 of the Nokia SIP settings. This time for NodePhone (Internode – Australia). It has been hard to find this information (particularily the Registrar Server settings). NOTE: The Realm setting in the Registrar Server are CASE-SENSITIVE. For some screenshots check the ENGIN Australia setup entry. General Profile name: nodephone Service profile: IETF Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point} Public user name: sip:{NodePhone Phone No}@sip.internode.on.net User compression: No

This is Part 2 of the Nokia SIP settings. This time for sipgate.at (Austria), but it should also work for other SIPGate domains. It has been hard to get this information from the providers themselves. For some screenshots check the ENGIN Australia setup entry. General Profile name: sipgate Service profile: IETF Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point} Public user name: sip:{SIPGate UserID}@sipgate.at User compression: No Registration: When needed Use security: No

Since I had to look all over�for the correct settings and there was a lot of trial and error involved (specially for the Realm). Thanks to Engin Support that finally provided this info after logging a support request. The screenshots are from a Nokia E65, but should be applicable for similar Nokia phones. General Profile name: engin Service profile: IETF Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point} Public user name: sip:{phone number}@voice.

Since I had to do some research on this topic recently, here are the results that I have found. These plans are interesting for people that do not call out a lot, but rather use the phone to be accessible. GoMobile – Pay as you go plans Southern Cross Telecom – Pay as you go plans AAPT – GO15 plan (**needs to be bundled with Landline phone) ** – some conditions apply to qualify for $0 minimum spend)

One of the more common uses of Twitter for me is to monitor “back-channels” at events (often events I can attend, but more often these days events I am unable to attend). Unfortunately Twitter’s search capabilities cease to be useful after a little while and so it is very handy to be able to create an archive for the events ‘hashtag’. There used to be a number of tools in the early days, but mainly because of Twitter’s changes to policies and very unfortunate morphing into a closed ‘media-publishing’ platform, the developers of such tools were forced to discontinue their services.

Having seen more and more articles on the use of micro-blogging tools in educational and corporates settings, I am constantly surprised that one of the most useful options from my point-of-view seems to be constantly overlooked. Micro-blogging is like Twitter, but private to your organisation. It is a great way to capture those more informal internal discussions. It can help distribute useful information (such as links) throughout your organisation or help kick-start conversations.

With the Internet of Things slowly becoming mainstream the potential uses of this technology can also be seen in the Education sector. This blogpost is the first installment of a series of posts that highlights practical examples that can be used in teaching and training. Part 1 – Environmental Noise Monitoring Some of the skills taught in these projects are: Environmental science Citizen science (collaborative data gathering) Measurement / sensing Data visualisation Data comparison With WideNoise users can monitor the noise levels around them using an App downloadable from Android Market or Apple AppStore.

Like it or not (personally I am in the second category) Blackboard Collaborate or Elluminate (as it is still more commonly referred to) is something you have a hard time avoiding if you work in online education. I discovered that I have audio issues on some Ubuntu Linux machines and found the following to fix the issues. 1) Install alsa-aoss apt-get install alsa-oss 2) Save the Elluminate Java Webstard (.JNLP) file to a local folder – DO NOT OPEN IN BROWSER

After recently researching the available software for e-book creation for some of our clients (in the education sector) I came across quite a number of options. However after some further look into the option and trying some I was able narrowed the field down to 2 options that seem to be reasonably user-friendly and matured. The two are using a very different approach and will suit different types of users. One is a native e-book writer which will give better low-level control for the more technical types.

Taking part in MobiMOOC has given me the opportunity to take stock of my own MobilePLE – the top 5 tools I find most useful as part of my ongoing learning. Catch Notes (previously 3Bananas) – mobile note taking the most critical component. Whenever I get a new device – this is what has to be installed as one of the first actions. For those not familiar with this software – it’s like Evernote without the bloat.

I am using the opportunity of me taking part in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on mobile learning as an excuse to add some more content to this neglected blog. On of the issues I am facing with my participation in the MOOC is the massive amount of e-mails generated and my already overflowing inbox would not cope (let alone me managing it). That is not taking into account other sources such as Twitter & Flickr

Due to the hype generated by the recent launch and my reservations on using the Apple Inc. iTunes I was doing some research into alternatives to the proprietary and completely locked iPad device (and the associated lock-down to Apple’s iTunes Store). Hopefully this list can be of use for other people as well. I can see the form factor and the tablet style with a cut down (mainly web-browser based) Operating System as useful in a number of settings not least in educational institutions and libraries.

Since a fair bit of my time is spent working and researching in the field of Mobile Learning and there is not a lot of recent listings of Software useful in practical m-Learning implementations I have compiled the following list from my bookmarks and Software I commonly use for these purposes. This list tries to represent currently usable applications not applications in the development stage. Rather than writing this in the form of a blog entry I decided to keep this as a live document within Google Apps that people can contribute to.

I just recently stumbled across this link to the ‘Heartland Institute‘ via a reference in an American Newspaper site citing their sources for an article about the US Economic Stimulus package. I initially was hoping this might be a satiric site such as CNNN, but after taking a closer look and checking out some references it appears these people are actually serious (and worse still seem to have a lot of funds at their disposal to spread their dubious view).

This one nearly escaped my attention yesterday. Google has just announced the ability to edit Google Docs on your mobile device via their Google Mobile Blog. Just point your mobile browser to m.google.com/docs and start editing. Along with the use of 2D barcodes this will open a few interesting m-learning possiblities for educators that would previously have required custom coding to achieve. I can see this being very useful in situations where you have students being in the field and allowing them to enter data gathered using a standard mobile phone.

With the help of SL resident Moggs Oceanlane I was able to get our first Sloodle implementation off the ground. Being a bit new on the SL concepts (Moodle as such is my daily life) I found the technical process quite easy, but was struggling with SL terminology a little. Looking forward to getting some hands-on experience of the use of SL in an educational setting. I can see the practical applications – looking for some pilot projects to put them into ‘reality’ once we have got all the technical side tested thoroughly.

Came accross this project recently. Seems like an excellent tool for web meetings. Certainly something that we will give some more attention to as it seems to have some good integration with various products we are using such as Moodle and SugarCRM.

One of the few new (for myself in my working life at least) bits of information I have picked up on here at ICL is Open Educational Resources (OER). That’s probably because it is outside of my usual area of expertise (which is more the technical implementation of e-Learning), but I found the concept never the less interesting and very similar to the Open Source Software concept which I have been working with for quite a while.

Since my working world is centered a little more on educational topics at the moment (while attending ICL) I came across this Youtube Video which I think is a very good visual example of what’s commonly referred to as Education 2.0. Personally I hope that I actually comprehend this and a good part of my working life is spend improving this situation. The fact that I am sitting in a ‘lecture’ myself and watching a Youtube video should hopefully illustrate that I am can (despite my actual age) understand the students perspective quite well.

In running my businesses over the years I have been an unhappy user of MYOB for years. But due to time constraints I have always put off a change in accounting software as it is very disruptive and the alternatives were not too convincing (better the devil you know …). However due to the fact that our business is growing and we were at the end of a financial year the pain of using MYOB became greater than the pain of switching.