Testing web functionality of the UDOO linux (ubuntu) environment by logging into this blog and doing a post.
Hello World! It's been a while.
Lots of TV here lately, the kids are getting older and the weather is getting warmer I can tell them to go outside and play while I catch up on the lastest stuff.
Top of the Lake is a mini-series so it won't be continuing on but the series is stark. About a cop from Australia returning home to New Zealand (I am pretty sure anyway, accents made it tougher) while her mother is dying from cancer. While there a teen girl is found in the local lake trying to freeze her lower body because she is pregnant. That stuff is from the first 5 minutes, no spoilers. From there the path the detective takes will bring her into contact with her own origins, justice in a small town and first loves. The thing is only 7 episodes and by the last few I wasn't sure I wanted to continue just because of the stuff it makes me think of as a father. The worst thing about the series is it didn't really portray time going by very well. It's only in 5th episode they lay down a milepost from the first episode and then you can deduce how long it has been by other events in the final episodes.
In another month I may revisit this series, there are some things that don't get resolved and I think they offer great 'what-if' conversations.
This is the article that got me thinking I should watch the series.
Two weekends ago (when it was released) I powered through Netflix's Hemlock Grove. The show is about werewolves and more than anything it wanted me to read the book. I don't want to go too deep into this for fear of spoilers but I can put it this way, if you like True Blood, you'll probably like Hemlock Grove. There is some meat to the meal, there are some subplots that play out with a twist revealed in the 7th or 8th episode that is interesting.
Again, like Game of Thrones, this series just got me interested in the source material but that is only one book right now so depending on how this goes, the show may take over for the books in a rare case.
JoCo's remix from last year.
So this past week, I've watched the first season of Continuum. The following post has some minor spoilers as I discuss the first season and my gripes.
First up, the show isn't Arrow which is a good thing. Arrow is the worst of the shows I watch and I watch Arrow at this point as an exercise to see how they've had to change some things to make it not Lost meets Smallville with a dash of Nolan Batman. I like a lot of the ideas Continuum tries to tackle and how it can lead to conversations about broader ideas but this isn't Shakespeare, yet. For those too lazy to read the Wiki link above, the show is about a cop from the year 2077 who gets time-warped to 2012 with an organized group of anarchists/revolutionaries and continues her work to stop them in our current time. The cop from the future has tech embedded within her and in her suit that makes her a one-woman army. Just quick run-down in her body she has an embedded hud that can tell her facts about everything around her like sizes of things, heart rate, pupil dilation and work with chemicals in her future-gun to enhance latent fingerprints. The future-gun does things like stun, limited tracking implants and killing as well as shoot chemicals for that fingerprint thing. The suit which goes out of commission for half a season can tase, stealth, defend against ballistics and as seen in the final episode of season one offer an area force-field.
The good stuff
I like the overall themes of the show some of the bigger ones are corporate sovereignty vs personal freedom (Cyberpunk/Shadowrun type stuff), the nature of technology which is essentially, good vs evil. The show is hinged on a bigger one though, while the show avoids the paradox stuff one of its biggest themes is, "Can you change the future?" The first episode lays this out fairly well, if you kill a butterfly in the past does it kill your species off or was that already incorporated into the timeline when you left in the first place? We find out in the first episode that Cameron's non-cop partner is a technologist/inventor/corporate head in the future and from some of the not-so-subtle body language and over-extended camera lingers we get the idea that he may have set some aspects of this journey in motion or at least not stopped them from happening. In the final episode the central theme gets a big push but without a resolution.
The bad stuff
For a show about time travel, continuity sucks. In some of the final episodes Cameron's cop-partner gets injured and put in the hospital Cameron goes to someone and spends the night, end credits. Next episode, Cameron wakes up in the bed of the person she went to, comes out dressed says it was a mistake and never will happen again and as she's leaving she gets a call from cop-partner saying how the hospital cleared him a few days ago. We have time travel in the present! There are a few times things like this happen. I get that you need one of your main characters around in the final episode and I'm not sure how much I would have noticed these types of things if I watched the episodes weekly vs two or three at a time but it is sign of bad writing if you are hoping the viewers forget where things are at when you are writing a show where people are looking for how pieces fit together. The way people roll-over when they get a call from someone saying Cameron is Section Six and to let her work with the police is almost comical when it returns towards the end of the season. The first few episodes dealt a lot with this and the non-cop partner (the Chloe if you want to put it in Smallville terms) comes up with forgeries and actually faxes stuff, so when you thought they had resolved it in an almost realistic way it was cool. Then in the final arc you have some new guy asking the same questions as before but until he gets a call from his boss (you are never told who called his boss) to lay off Cameron he's suspecting her of being in with the anarchists.
Then there is the retconning. In the beginning of the series Cameron tells everyone how she only knew of the anarchists by name, however through flashbacks you see her having quite the involvment in some of their apprehension. Cameron's backstory also has some issues, Cameron is is a military vet in the future when she joins the police force and she gets her tech. Many of the anarchists that came back in time are vets and have enhancements but Cameron gets all her upgrades on first day of cop duty. Of course by fixing this the writers will need some more retconning.
I don't feel I am being overly harsh here, I'm not going all gangbusters over the fact that a 20 year old is hacking DOD networks like nothing, because in these types of show you need to have that kind of suspension of belief. The holes the writers are creating are bigger than the extraordinary things the characters are supposed to be doing.
Couple of conversations I've had with my kids in the past few months.
(Alicia Keys - Girl On Fire, is playing on the radio)
Lena - Daddy, are there really girls that are on fire?
Me - No, in this song the girl isn't on fire. The girl is hot, so she is singing that a girl is so hot that she is on fire. And hot means that she is very pretty. So really, the song is saying that this girl is so pretty that the world just doesn't understand her.
Lena - Oh.
(At the playground pushing Lena on a swing when another girl comes up and lays with her belly on the swing)
Lena - Daddy, you can go very fast with your belly on the swing.
Me - Yes but i can't give you underdogs when you're on your belly because that causes face-stitches.
One of the benefits of sending your kids to a religious school are conversations like this, keep in mind she's still four:
Lena - Daddy, Jesus died on the cross for us.
Me - Yep, he sure did.
Lena - Yeah Pontias Pilate put nails in him here, here, here and here (pointing to her wrists/ankles) and put a crown of thorns on him!
Me - Yep, they sure did.
Logan and Lena are playing in the backyard:
Lena - Logan do you want to be the dad? (she means her husband)
Logan - No, I'm the kid.
Lena - Logan please be the dad.
Logan - No, I want to be the kid.
Lena - Ok, Logan do you want to pretend to be kids whose parents have died?
I'm not quite a linux newb but I'm not 31337 either, the following is a post of how I got the PI to do what I wanted, mis-steps and all.
When you first boot your PI you will get dropped to an old school GUI. The first time (or three) I got into this I didn't know how to get out so I rebooted (ctrl-alt-del) and it came back. I then configured the setting for Open GUI on Boot. Now I could get into the windows manager (not sure if it used KDE or GNOME, shoot me) and I configure the wireless card with the GUI. I was able to get the MAC of the WIFI NIC add it to my DHCP server and configure my PSK. Now I didn't want to boot into GUI so I ended up reflashing my drive as I couldn't figure out how to edit the files needed to just boot to command line. Google-fu wasn't helping me either.
This time around I tried something different, in the old school GUI (I'll call this raspi-config from now on for reasons you'll see shortly) I actually clicked on the FINISH item. At this point the menu dropped me to the cmdline login prompt and it takes me there every boot, I figure out along the way that I can get back into that initial GUI via the raspi-config command. So I log in and start working.
Some helpful commands:
startx running this gets me back into the GUI to confgure the WNIC. Sure I could use the cmdline but it hurts my head. Once I'm connected I drop out of the GUI.
sudo apt-get update this command finds out what packages are installed and what updates are available.
sudo apt-get upgrade this command actually installs the stuff from the previous command.
At this point I'm ready to actually start tinkering to see if the pi will do what I want.
Using this guide I set up the PI for joining my home SSID or creating it's on ad-hoc wifi network if it isn't home. Now if I were a dick I could leave it at that but I won't, getting the files onto the PI can be a pain. So here's how I did it:
raspi-config This opens that old school menu from initial boot, I enable SSH and FINISH
On my windows machine I can then use the tools I'm used to to save .txt files of the three scripts that the lcdev page walks through. I edit the files to my network config, for example, change the SSID, WEP Key, and static device names and reserved addresses. I then use SFTP to connect to the pi and save the files to /home/pi/Desktop. Now either via SSH or on the console of the pi I can sudo pico or sudo nano the files, purge the files of their contents and use the CTRL R function to read in the saved text files into the config files. Save the files and reboot. For this phase I was using the console for everything but the saving editing of the .txt files I saved over to the pi. This is because on the desktop of the PI there is a ROOT CONSOLE terminal you can run and not have to 'sudo' everything. Plus, if crap goes bad it's eaiser to have the PI attached to a console (in my case the living room TV) with a keyboard and mouse in case any of those files had a typo and you get a glitch.
When I was done with this my PI was joining my network and the DHCP server wouldn't start if it saw my home network.
Next came the media server. I chose Minidlna for this and the guide I used is here though there are some steps that need to be augmented. Let me do that now.
The guide has you change the the database directory to /home/pi/.minidlna (the . in front means it will be a hidden directory). You will need to create this directory. So from cmdline you can type mkdir /home/pi/.minidlna or use the desktop. You then need to change the permissions on this directory:
sudo chmod 777 /home/pi/.minidlna
I did this before I found the permission fix so I am not sure if it is necessary, someone reading this can let me know. I ended up doing an:
sudo apt-get install sqlite
Now I was having an issue. I could manually start minidlna after the PI booted but it would not start on its own because it was trying to start before it had an IP address and I had a custom script doing that.
To start minidlna:
sudo service minidlna start
To verify it was running:
sudo service minidlna status
I then found an app on the itunes store to get to test if this project would work at all or not. The app that worked first was 8player Lite, it's free and will play the first five files in a folder so if you put your stuff in separate folders they'll all play I ended up paying the $6 for the full app after my initial tests were showing this project was attainable.
I had ripped a movie to mp4 using ipod touch settings in handbrake and was my test movie. This played fine with the lite player on the home network.
At this point I had proven that I could connect to the PI on my home network from Missy's iPad. Now I had to tackle the minidlna service issue, it was pretty easy. In the /etc/rc.local file where the boot strap script is I added a line before exit 0. I added this:
sudo service minidlna start
Then the service was starting on boot in the right spot. Now I had an issue that the box wasn't updating the database on boot, again I turned to the /etc/rc.local file and added a line after starting the minidlna service that did this:
sudo service minidlna force-reload
Now I could add/remove files from the usb stick and the files would update. I was just about done. Friday night some friends took us to see the house they're buying. I used this road trip to test the ad-hoc setup. I had ripped two short movies and put them on my usb drive. I had both the iPad and an iPod touch and both devices saw the network and connected fine. Both could stream just fine as well. The project was a success.
When I was done tweaking the PI I disabled SSH access once again.
Guides used to assist in my setup:
Wireless DHCP or Ad-Hoc Script
MiniDLNA setup
Ubuntu MiniDLNA Community Page
I got it working, it isn't going to win any prizes for elegance but it works the way I envisioned it (so far). I'm still finishing the technical write-up and hope to have it up by the end of the weekend.
The caveat is, I have a script I'm using to sense an SSID if it is found it will join that network, if it isn't found it will start its own ad-hoc network and give out DHCP addresses to devices those in the reservation list. I haven't tested the ad-hoc operation yet.
So my project for this year is to get the kids off of the DVD players in the cars (they don't work so hot in the winter) with a media server. I've ordered the parts for the server piece and the viewers I am thinking will be used android phones that will be wireless clients.
I would love something like my home Media Center setup but I just don't see a way to replicate that in the car, especially in a low power scenario. I'll do a post on what I do there later this month.
First up, I ordered the Pi from Newark/Element14. With shipping it came to $48 which is what Amazon sells it for (now I think I know where Amazon gets theirs).
For the other kit, I used Amazon, I am a Prime member so the savings in shipping really helped out here.
Case
Car Adapter
Wall Adapter
USB power cable
Wifi
4GB SD Card For the OS.
4 port hub More for setup than use in the car. I'll need USB ports for a keyboard/mouse during configuration of the Pi.
That all came to $58 and some of it is coming from Hong Kong so it may be mid-February before I get all the parts though I should be able to start tinkering before then as most people are getting thier Pi's in a week or so from Newark.
I have a spare 16GB usb flash drive that I'm going to use for media storage. So adding something for that may make your costs different than mine.
I don't currently own any android devices so will use Missy's ipod touch and ipad to test connectivity and transcoding settings. From there I plan on buying used android phones (these won't be turned into phones, they'll be android touches) and use them for clients to browse the samba share I configure.
More posts will follow as I get into the theory meets reality portion of the project.
We had quite the week last week, I was the only one who worked much less left the house until Saturday. The snow and ice storms cancelled work and school for the kids and Missy for the week and I got two free days off on Wednesday and Thursday myself.
Missy cleaned our bedroom starting Friday night and I got the bug in my ear from Lena that the tv console "was Daddy's mess clean up." Missy and I started talking about it and we both love the entertainment center we built from Ikea's Besta system we put in the living room so I mentioned this as something we could possibly do in our bedroom as well, though on a much smaller scale due to size constraints. The bedroom has a baseboard heater and thermostat in the way that the living room doesn't have, which was one reason I built the shelf I did back in 2007. Of course, fast forward four years and you see the rat's nest it has become. Heck, I think the cleanest it ever was is shown in that 2007 pic, even the TV isn't plugged in. The current pics show what we have been living with for most of the life of the unit and it was an eyesore. Mix in a little bit of Les laziness and things just got cluttered, hence appease the wifely gods with a shopping trip to Ikea.
So $150 and a few travel/build-time hours later we have the finished product. Much cleaner and wife-friendly than before.
