Aug 26

New Voip Provider? HELP!

By linc Customer Service, Home Life, TLLTS, Voip 3 Comments »

I have to admit that I have been using Broadvoice for quite a while now. We even use it for the TechShow as well. They have served pretty well with only a few growing pains and problems early on. All would have been happy ever after if I hadn’t read a horrible Broadvoice review on the web recently. It prompted me to go back and read the Broadvoice Terms of Service (TOS).

That particular TOS is probably one of the worst I have ever read, doing such things as giving them permission to back bill your credit card thousands of dollars for anything they perceive may be a violation of their TOS, without notice, without arbitration, etc. Now I haven’t had any problems with them, but I was horrified at what I read (and I do not remember any of this stuff when I signed up – go figure). I followed their cancellation procedure and will be rid of such nonsense at the end of the month.

This leaves me in a bit of a pickle. I do need home phone service. It seems logical that I should continue down the road with my technological affinity and stay with VOIP, but with whom? That is where you all come in. I am looking for a good quality provider, with a relatively (<$25) inexpensive monthly plan for unlimited US calling (or maybe an obscene number of minutes). Please let me know if you have any recommendations. Currently the ones I am looking at are Axvoice and PhonePower, however, I am sure there are a ton that I am missing. In fact, I may even consider Vonage, simply because the hardware is readily available and the price point meets. Any horror stories? Recommendations? Send ‘em along!

Aug 25

Installing elegance, Slackintosh 12.1

By linc Apple/Mac, Linux, Slackintosh 7 Comments »

Long have I been a fan of Slackware. It’s a wonderful distribution, fast, clean and free of much of the bulk and cruft that plagues other Linux distributions. Lately, though, I have not had a Slackware box on which to play, and that has bothered me. My main server currently runs Ubuntu server edition 7.04 (yeah, I know, old), my main laptop runs Ubuntu 8.04, my home workstation runs Ubuntu 7.10, my wife’s laptop runs Ubuntu 8.04, my picture frame runs Ubuntu 7.10, my kids eMac runs MacOS 10.4.something as does my iMac. Notice a pattern here? The only thing I currently had running different was one of my test machines running CentOS 5.2 and another running RHEL 5.1, both leftovers from my semi-recent RHEL exams. Well, that and I keep telling myself I would like to run something similar at home to what I need to support at work in order to help keep my skillset sharp. Speaking of work, other than running all my servers on RHEL, I even run Ubuntu 8.04 there on my workstation. As you can see, I certainly need my Slackware fix!

Enter this weekend when I was staring at my iBook G3 500. I bought this iBook used, broken, and cheap. I fixed it up and use it frequently to mostly check my email and rss feeds from bed. It did the job adequately, however, a little on the slow side with MacOS X. I grabbed up the iBook and surfed over to Slackintosh’s Website. I had run Slackintosh years earlier on an oldworld PPC along with Debian, both with great results. Since Slackware, as a distribution, ranks very high on my list, and I already have my fill of Debian based machines, I decided then and there that Slackintosh was going to be my new OS on my iBook. I also must say that I think the translucent snow iBook is probably one of the best looking laptops that was ever made. That + Slackware, one of the best operating systems ever made, is elegance if I ever heard of it.

Installation, if you have ever done a Slackware install, is the usual business except for the partitioning. To partition a macintosh, you use mac-fdisk (suprise)! There is a decent document about using mac-fdisk at http://penguinppc.org/bootloaders/yaboot/doc/mac-fdisk-basics.shtml which is very well written. The short and quick version is do an “i” for initialize the drive (I am not running OS X, just Linux). Do a “b” to create a mac boot partition. Then, create your linux partitions with “c”. I made a partition named “swap” and a really big one named “root” then saved the whole shebang. When I ran setup afterwards to do the actual OS install, the setup program detected the swap and root partitions correctly and did what it was supposed to with them.

Once that was all taken care of, the install completed normally. I found only 2 small problems post install that I had to correct to get things really moving the way I liked. The first was that X would not start. This had to do with an incorrect config. To fix, I simply needed to add:
HorizSync 28-51
VertRefresh 43-60
to the Section “Monitor” and make sure that the default display depth was 16 and set to 1024×768. After that X started right up into a nice fast KDE session. The last problem was I had no right mouse button. Of course, the iBook has only 1 mouse button, so right-clicking is problematic. I remember long ago there was a function key that served as the right button on a Yellowdog install, so I tried them all to no avail. After a little digging I found that adding this:
dev.mac_hid.mouse_button_emulation = 1
dev.mac_hid.mouse_button2_keycode = 125
dev.mac_hid.mouse_button3_keycode = 96
to your /etc/sysctl.conf file would do the trick. These will map your middle mouse button to the right apple key and the right mouse button to the enter key right next to the right apple key.

Once all that was going I was in great shape with KDE chugging along, sound, networking and all. I am sure I’ll have more to say about this as I go along, but that’s all for now. If you have an old PPC laying around, you sure couldn’t do better than to give Slackintosh a try!

Aug 16

TivoGrab Howto:

By linc F/OSS, Programming, TivoGrab No Comments »


For those of you who are following the whole TivoGrab script, a friend, Russ Wenner, wrote a nice howto for the program:

A Step-by-Step How-To on using the “TivoGrab” PHP script by Linc Fessenden (by Russ Wenner 8/14/08)

1. A few things you will need before you begin:
a. You will need to make sure your TiVo is “Network Enabled”.
b. You will need to know the IP address of your TiVo.
c. You will need to know the MAK (Media Access Key) for your TiVo.
d. You will need PHP v5.2.x or newer on your Linux box. It may work with an older version but this is recommend by the author of TivoGrab.
e. You will need ‘curl’ installed on your Linux box.
f. Depending on how many shows you download from your TiVo to your PC you may need a fair amount of free space on you hard disk or /home partition. Just make sure you have several free GB’s first.

2. Download TivoGrab from http://lincgeek.org/linc/docs/tivo/tivograb.tgz

3. Move tivograb.tgz to a location you want to store you converted files. I recommend you make a directory somewhere under /home.

4. Extract tivograb.tgz (Most GUI versions of Linux allow you to right click on the file and choose ‘Extract’)

5. Next, using a text editor open tivograb.php

6. At the top of tivograb.php inside the empty quotes ” ” you will need to insert the IP address and MAK for your Tivo.

// The IP address of your web enabled Tivo
$tivoip=”192.168.1.xxx”;
// The MAK of your Tivo
$tivomak=”2xxxxxxx6″;

7. Now, save the changes to tivograb.php.

8. Open a terminal window and navigate to the location you have the extracted files and type ‘php tivograb.php’

9. This will automatically create some additional files in the directory

10. Using a text editor open the file ‘getshows.sh’ and remove the shows you DO NOT want convert for use on your Tablet. You do this by high light everything between the #———————————————————— and hit the delete key.

11. Next you will need to make the file getshows.sh executable using the following command. At your terminal prompt type the following chmod +x getshows.sh (In most GUI Linux distros you can right click on the file and choose Properties>Permissions>check “execute file as a program”)

12. Note: This next part can take a long time (i.e. over night) depending on the speed of your network, CPU, and the number of shows you are downloading from your TiVo. You now need execute getshows.sh to download the shows from the Tivo. At the prompt type the following command (don’t miss the beginning dot)
./getshows.sh

13. You may now copy completed .avi files to you Nokia Internet Tablet

14. Last step…Enjoy!

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. Especially since I, like most OSS coders suffer from the condition known as Bad Documentationitis. This was a great idea on his part and I wish more people would take his queue and offer to do some documentation (or even revise/update what is already existing) for their favorite OSS project!

Since we’re on the subject and I have had, I guess, at least a few people who have contacted me saying they are running/using this script (and please let me know if you are), I think I ought to make a legitimate project out of it with a webpage, etc. The problem is, I just don’t dig the name, not to mention I am concerned about using “tivo” in the name due to this litigious society we live in. So, please do me the favor of sending me name suggestions, and if you have any ideas about logos, etc., too, that would be extra fantastic!

Aug 06

Textification-Update

By linc Home Life, Linux, work No Comments »

A quickie note about my use of the alpine email client lately. It came to my attention today that my emails were getting delivered with incorrect From and Reply-To addresses. Somehow alpine munges the smtp account holder user name you are using with the domain you specify in the config file as your default From field. This really didn’t work for me and after a couple minutes of googletime the answer is in the config file (.pinerc) as:

customized-hdrs=From: you@yourdomain.com,
Reply-To: you@yourdomain.com

Make sure that is in there and it will override any wonky defaults you may have.

Aug 04

Textification

By linc Linux, work No Comments »


Because so many of you have asked:

I mentioned last week on the show that I was digging once again using some text applications. Just for recap I am using screen, alpine, and bsflite regularly to get me going in the morning.

Screen is a utility a person who uses the command line simpoly cannot do without. It lets you run and switch between several “sessions” in a single terminal. This, in my case, means I can have one xterm session open, and I can switch between one of my 3 email accounts and my AIM without losing all that screen realestate. A good tutorial can be found here.
I set up a .screerc file which starts multiple screen sessions up at once with the applications I wanted. That file looks a lot like this:

startup_message off
autodetach on
screen -t Email1 alpine
screen -t Email2 alpine -p /home/linc/.pinerc-lincoln
screen -t Email3 alpine -p /home/linc/.pinerc-linc
screen -t AIM bsflite

Alpine is basically a reorg of the old and reliable pine email client, with less restrictive licensing. I have used pine for many years, and I was thrilled to hear about Alpine, and it certainly works as expected. Alpine is FAST and for you mutt people out there, it can also send mail without having to configure an external mail program. I’ll admit that it has been a while since I have used pine, but Alpine seems quicker, more mature and imap certainly works better than I had remembered pine working.

I use 3 instances of Alpine for 3 different imap email accounts. A few notes:
Alpine (by default under Ubuntu) will not store your password. You have to enter it each time you start your mail client.
In your .pinerc:
An imap inbox path looks like “inbox-path={mailserver.domain.com/user=linc}INBOX”.
To get your sent mail to be saved to your imap sent box “default-fcc={mailserver.domain.com}INBOX.Sent”.
Do yourself a favor and set “rsh-open-timeout=0″ to keep from waiting on rsh timeouts.
And lastly, Alpine will read settings from your .mailcap (or your /etc/mailcap). So if you want to view a URL and it keeps opening in w3m instead of your beloved firefox, you have to fix that there. For instance, I copied the line:
text/html; konqueror ‘%s’; nametemplate=%s.html; test=test “$DISPLAY” != “”
from my /etc/mailcap and changed it to:
text/html; firefox ‘%s’; nametemplate=%s.html; test=test “$DISPLAY” != “”
and put it in a .mailcap in my home directory. Now my html viewer is firefox. There are a lot of other interesting settings in that mailcap file as well :-)
Last note: Alpine can be started with the -p switch which lets you specify a different config file for those of you, like me, with more than one email account.

Last app I wanted to mention was BSFLite. It’s a nice little command line AIM client. Although there are several of these kind of things around, I have found that this one in particular, it the least confusing to use. Simple grab the source, make, make install, and you are up and running. It will ask you for your username and password. Hit the “m” key and type in a im name to IM that person. Hit “r” to reply in a conversation. All the command keys can be seen by “?”.
The only issue I had with this app was for some reason I kept getting an error saying something about “Unknown rate” or something similar. I am not sure if it’s related to the last version of BSFLite or the the latest version of Ubuntu. Either way, I simply went into the source directory for the app, greped for the error message, found it in the code, deleted that line and recompiled. No more error :-)

I hope that answers all your questions. If you have any more or can suggest some great command line time-savers, shoot them my way!

Aug 02

Practical Jokes

By linc Home Life, Humor No Comments »

All I have to say is that at my house for as long as I can remember, my family have been big practical jokers, and if you are anywhere around us, you were fair game. This has followed me into adulthood where I have taken the greatest pleasure in playing jokes on my wife and daughter. We have had some real hum-dingers, but there haven’t been any as funny as the one tonight in a long time….

Lately, we have had a mouse visiting our apartment. Just a little field mouse, but, as you can imagine, with 2 women in the house, they have been twigged about the little critter being around. Yesterday my wife found that there was a little hole chewed in the catfood bag in the cupboard underneath the sink. I made mental note of that and today while shopping I picked up a couple mouse traps (the regular kind) and set it up under the sink this evening.

Lo and behold, a few minutes ago my wife came in to get me because she heard the tell tail “snap”. I opened up the cupboard door and found the mouse, just as you might expect. The funny part starts here though. My wife went and told my daughter and asked her if she wanted to see the mouse. My daughter said that was gross. Well, I just happened to spy the cat toy in the hallway, which is a little mouse shaped catnip bag, and a plan quickly hatched.

I grabbed the cat toy and stuck it in the spare mouse trap, opened my daughters bedroom door, took a step in and tossed the whole shebang on her lap. You should have heard the screams. It could have woken the dead. The only thing louder than that was the sound of hysterical laughter afterward.

Gotcha! :-)

Aug 01

Raw speed

By linc Home Life No Comments »

Last night I put an end to a year long era of procrastination – at least as far as my network access is concerned. When I moved into my new place a year ago I was faced with a hard decision as far as my access was concerned. I had my cable modem and server in the living room, and my main workstation tucked away in a corner of my bedroom. Originally I was just going to run a wall colored cable around the baseboard and to my machine. This, however, proved impossible because there is *no* clearance underneath my bedroom door to get in there. Since it was a new apartment and I didn’t want to peeve anyone by drilling holes in the walls I decided to use one of those wireless gaming adapters, which worked…mostly.

The gaming adapter, when it was working, would not really go very fast, maybe 5-10mbs if I was lucky. That sort of irritated me. What *really* made me mad, though, was that during periods of heavy load, the thing would just randomly disconnect. This was never more noticeable then when I was running bittorrent on something, or more recently, running my tivo script to download and convert shows from there to watch.

Well, as it happens, some time ago I ran into my landlord and jokingly told him I was going to drill a hole through the wall to run some important computer wires, and he told me he would be ok with that as long as I didn’t drill through power wires or something (and he would disavow all knowledge of that conversation). I procrastinated on that for quite a while, partly because I had a *mostly* working network connection, and partly because I am so good at procrastination.

Yesterday was the last straw. Once again my connection was down, however, this time I was not home to correct it (by power cycling the gaming device). I had to call my wife to do it. I mentioned to her that I was sick of having my network connection go down and that I was eventually just going to drill through the wall. She reminded me that I also needed to do that to get cable in our daughters room. I decided right then and there that was going to be the evening project.

I never expected coax to be so expensive, but then again, I had to by 3 sections of it, and add on the new cable splitter and a $25 Linksys 5 port 10/100 switch and I was already up at $100. Sheesh! I am, however, happy to report that my main workstation has a solid 100mbs connection to my cable modem and home server and my kid now has cable in her bedroom to boot. Now to pick up some more memory for my workstation, and a few more ethernet cables (and maybe a new computer desk) and I’ll be high on the hog and almost looking like a respectable computer geek lives at my place once more. :-)

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