Qball's Weblog

Update

Qball — Sat, 11 May 2013 21:20:50 +0000

I have been very lacking in blogging lately, so here comes a quick summary:

GMPC

The big change from GOB written GmpcMpdDataTreeview to a new, vala widget is finally done. Beside being more maintainable, it also reduces a lot of duplicate code.
So in the end, the amount of code went down.
Keybindings are made better, e.g. the handling of keybindings on treeview is now done inside the new widget. This page keeps track of the progress.
Expect more VI like bindings to GMPC!
For now on, only bug fixes will go in, slowly working to a new release. TESTERS NEEDED
New wiki now up: http://wiki.gmpclient.org/

Domotica

I previously blogged about my DomBox, because of stability issues with my pandaboard (shamefully) and breaking of pulseaudio in update of ubuntu, I moved the setup over to a Raspberry PI. It struggles a lot more cpu wise, but it seems stable for now.

Currently it does:

433.92 MHz control of lights.
IR blaster. I improved this a bit, it now has to wide angle leds and uses a switched current source to generate the pulse. This made things more reliable.
Pulseaudio audio server: This seems to be less reliable then before, working on it.
IfThenElse: Running event based scripts.
Temperature logging.

Random other stuff

Nixie clock

With a friend I have been building a DCF-77 Nixie clock:

Very fun project to work on, but very annoying sometimes. Especially the DCF-77 module from conrad, it is _crap_ the alignment of the antenna comes down to a few degrees. But it works.

Video of one of first time syncs here.

Arduino

At work I have been fiddling with Arduino, seems very nice and dummy proof. I love the fact that you can still program it like a normal AVR. I need to play with this more, esp because you can get a lot of add-on stuff cheap.

I will try to keep up blogging better in the future.

AVRDRAGON pin layout

Qball — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:53:06 +0000

I recently got an avrdragon for a small project.

They thought it was a good idea to put the pin-layout of the headers, on the bottom.
This is not very useful, esp. when you put it in a case.
So I made this image with the file layout.

Maybe somebody else find it useful:

Notes.txt

Qball — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:18:37 +0000

In the past 1 1/2 week I have been testing Notes.txt a lot and made a lot of small improvements.

A small list:

Print last edit date in list.
Speed up showing of list by factor 3.
Possible support for multiple markup backends.
Allow exporting to a configurable format. (e.g. with asciidoc you can now export to f.e. docbook)
Editing/viewing item not only by ID but also by searching. e.g. notes.sh view ‘Notes.txt user manual’
Move a note to another category.
Make system for installing.
etc.

Beside this also a ton of small bugs has been fixed.

If anybody is ever planning/is using it, let me know.

Hopefully I can make a ‘release’ soon.

Notes.txt

Qball — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:48:46 +0000

notes.txt is a simple command-line note managing application.

Warning

This is preview release of the program. I only released it to collect ideas on how it can be improved. Your data should be relatively save as everything is stored inside a git repository.

LICENSE

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name of Qball Cow nor the names of contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY Qball Cow ‘AS IS‘ AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL Qball Cow BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Motivation

Notes.txt was written because I wanted a simple application to takes notes. It had to be command-line and version controlled. A quick search did not turn anything up, so I decided to write one myself. It tries to re-use as much as possible. Therefor it reuses the following tools:

asciidoc: For markup of each note.
git: For version control.
bash: To put everything together.
find: Find files.
grep: Search in files.
nm-online: Check if online (optional).
sed: Automatic edit notes.
vim: Note editor. (configurable)
md5sum: Check if file changed.

Notes.txt will do the following things:

Allow you to quickly search through your notes.
View each note in the browser.
Commit changes when changed on edit.
Delete notes.
Push/Pull from remote repository, if online.
Organize notes.
Bash Tab completion.
Export note to html

Installation

Notes.txt installation needs the following files installed:

notes.sh: The main script.
includes/*.inc: Helper files with the actual functions.
config: The configuration file.

A good installation would be:

notes.sh ? ~/.local/bin/
includes ? ~/.local/share/notes/
config ? ~/.notes.config

The first two locations can be configured in the config file. The configuration file should always be in this location.

An included install.sh script (very simple) will link all the files in the right location.

Setting up Notes repository

Notes.txt by default assumes the Notes repository is a checkout from a remote git repository and it can push/pull. If this is note desirable, set HAS_INET=0 in config. Then it will not automatically push/pull.

cd ~/
git clone  Notes

Or create a new one:

mkdir ~/Notes
git init .

Commands

add: Add an item.

    notes.sh add

remove: Remove an item

    notes.sh remove

view: View the html rendering of the note

    notes.sh view

edit: Edit an item

    notes.sh edit

Note	If you do this on a note that is being edited, the temporary file will be build and displayed.

list: List items

    notes.sh list

A generated list looks like:

ID Project      Description
-- ------------ -----------------------------------------
1  Prive.Gmpc   Keybindings Review
2  Prive.Notes  Notes.txt: Command-line Notes application
3  Prive.Others Headphone Research
4  Prive.Others RSS Alternatives

export: Export an item

    notes.sh export

push: Push local changes to remote git

    notes.sh push

pull: Pull local changes to remote git

    notes.sh pull

clean: Clean out all the temporary files

    notes.sh clean

Download

You can download the program from github: here

Feedback

You can report bugs on github: here

Features requests are welcome. Do keep in mind I am trying to keep this program as simple as possible. If something more complex is needed I advice you to look at org-mode or desktop wiki applications.

Bash auto-complete

There is an auto-complete functions in notes.autocomplete.

Note	Most of the auto-complete code is build-in. This can be called by putting –complete in front of the arguments.

Screenshot

GMPC Updates

Qball — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 18:07:11 +0000

Spend a lot of time today rewriting an important Widget in GMPC, namely the widget that displays song-lists.

The old version was written in GOB and left a lot of basic functionality still at the user side (.e.g. implementing keybindings, and context menu, cut/paste/add/remove/insert/etc).

So I decided to rewrite the widget, It is not yet done (by far). But it is making good progress. It already is reducing the amount of code, and I haven’t even replaced all instances (+ code) of the old widget.

The new widget offers:

Support for song-lists and showing the playqueue. (this means other bindings should be active.
Copy/Cut/Paste support (depending on the type of widget)
‘Queue’ support.
Consistent Keybindings. (as they are implemented in the Widget and not in the layer above).
Column editing. (Build-in, not using code from libegg anymore, this will be a significant reduction in code once removed.)
Storing/restoring column(s) state.
Context menu. (now with menu key enabled. dunno why I forgot todo that previously)
etc.

Tiny I3 patch

Qball — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 13:03:04 +0000

I wrote a tiny i3 patch that adds a small separator line between the i3bar and the workspace.

The result is very subtle!

Screenshot:

Code:

The code can be found here: here

Or the patch: here

Interresting warning messages.

Qball — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:35:44 +0000

I unwrapped a HP ProCurve switched recently and this sticker was placed on the power socket:

It comes with a normal IEC C14 power connector. It accept voltages from 100-127 V – 200-240V 50 and 60Hz. I have _no_ idea why anybody that buys a switch like this would needs instructions from a user-guide for plugging in this connector.

GMPC gets QUEUE support, again

Qball — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 15:12:51 +0000

GMPC used to have this before when there was an implementation in MPD a few years back, this implementation never made it into MPD-stable, so was removed.

BUT it is back, in completely different form. You can now give a song in your playlist a higher priority, so it wil be played next. For this to work, you need a recent MPD and
GMPC+libmpd from git.

REMEMBER: Giving songs priority only works in RANDOM mode.

The QUEUE-ing works as follow: (I need to find a better name then queue-ing)

Select a song in the playlist:

As you can see, all songs have priority -1 (aka no priority):

Now Press : “alt-q”

As you can see the priority jumped to 255, and it will be the the next song played (see sidebar).

GMPC will automatically remove the priority once the song is played:

You can also select multiple songs, and queue them. They will get a decrementing priority, this to ensure they play in the right order:

This is a first implementation, I plan to change the color of the song-icon depending on the priority and do some other GUI-updates.

A Panda been taken down by a Raspberry…

Qball — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 14:55:54 +0000

You have no idea how strongly I hate saying this, but raspberry pi is currently better then my pandaboards.

The raspberry pi is very slow compared to the pandaboard, but a lot of things just work better. Mostly thanks to the huge hype around it and the fact that
the community is huge and problems get solved quickly:
So the good things:

It is more stable, currently on pandaboard I cannot watch a decent movie without it crashing.
The 3.3V gpio is a lot easier to use. On pandaboard I had problems with converting bidirectional signals from 1.5 to 3.3/5V at high-ish speeds.
Needing (expensive) equipment to be able to debug this.
A lot of ready to use modules exists (w1-gpio, lirc_rpi, etc).
Most stuff plays fine.
CHEAP!

Downsides:

No mpeg2 decoding on gpu, cpu is to slow. (can be fixed by buying license.)
POWER HUNGRY. My rasberry pi model b uses more power idle then my pandaboard, even when playing a 1080p movie, the pandaboard uses less energy.
Model a is a little better, but still uses more then the pandaboard at idle (crazy!!)
No kernel headers with the 3.6 kernel, so I could not easily use my gpio-remote kernel module, but I managed to use lirc to provide me this signal on one of the pins.
slow..
no ethernet on model A, I realy miss this.
no normal level serial port.

So now I have everything setup: IR receiver, IR blaster, RF transmitter (so I can control the lights) and 1-wire bus for the temperature sensors.

Currently the IR module is fed from the 3.3V power, it seems to be using 8mA max (this is making it continuously sending out a 1) so should be safe, giving I have no ethernet I assume I could draw more then 50mA from the 3.3V line. The rest is powered from the 5V line, I want to change the IR receiver to the 3.3V version in the future, but that should only add another 5mA.

A small tip when soldering small stuff (I noticed a few times at work students fiddling with this), and you need to hold something small. You could put it in a vice, or try to hold it in a plier (but you loose a hand this way).
There is a very simple easy solution, take the plier, and use a rubber band, works wonders:

06 Feb. 2013

Qball — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:19:37 +0000

Beside the fact it was an amazingly busy day at work I managed to get the following things done (beside work):

Resurrected my own homepage: http://sarine.nl
It is hacked together with script, makefile and asciidoc, but it works reasonably well.
Asciidoc is actually very nice for this, I can easily set some attributes on the top of the page and re-use those values everywhere in the page.
So to add an simple application I take a template edit the attributes, description and modifications and I am done.
The following things are on the TODO:
Tweak the CSS and put a header/footer that allows you to return to the main page. (help welcome off course)
Add the rest of the available tools from my GITHUB repositories
Add screenshots.
Added 256 color support to out2html.
This turned out to be more tricky then I thought, and the implementation kinda became a hack.
The thing is normally you get a semicolon (;) separated list with ‘m’ as terminator. Each element can be parsed separately.
however with the 256 color, you get a series, first 38/48 indicating then a 5 then the color.
But in the end I got it to work (ish).
Below is copied output of out2html from running: script -q -c “task colors” | out2html.


Basic colors
  black   red   blue   green   magenta   cyan   yellow   white 
  black   red   blue   green   magenta   cyan   yellow   white 

Effects
  red   bold red   underline on blue   on green   on bright green   inverse 

color0 - color15
  0 1 2 . . .
                  
                  
          . . . 15

Color cube rgb000 - rgb555 (also color16 - color231)
  0            1            2            3            4            5
  0 1 2 3 4 5  0 1 2 3 4 5  0 1 2 3 4 5  0 1 2 3 4 5  0 1 2 3 4 5  0 1 2 3 4 5
 0                                                                              
 1                                                                              
 2                                                                              
 3                                                                              
 4                                                                              
 5                                                                              

Gray ramp gray0 - gray23 (also color232 - color255)
  0 1 2 . . .                             . . . 23
                                                  

Try running 'task color white on red'.

(there are two errors in the above output, one I just fixed in git. The otherone is not so easy to fix.. spot them!)