About stuff people couldn't care less about!
I’ve long been a subscriber to the openID idea – I just think its a gracefull way of being able to prove who you are without the site owner actually having to do anything or actually being involved in the process.
This blog now supports comments being left by using your openID credentials – should make it quicker fro comments to be left.
Thanks to a few helpfull soles on the sipdroid site I have been succesful in getting sipdroid to register with my Asterisk server AND be able to make calls.
The trick is (thansk to Adrian)
In your sip.conf, comment out “secret = …”. Instead use the following: auth=username@password@host
I also made a change to the extension sipdroid runs on in asterisk and changed: qualify=no
Sipdroid registers to my asterisk box fine and is able to make and receive calls fine. As for the call quality – well that is another thing – keep in mind my testing to date is over Optus 3G.
The first issue I am having is that if I call someone’s mobile I loose the first say 10 seconds of the conversation, ie, I miss them saying “Hello” which starts the conversation off on a failry bad footing, the person I called is usually first heard by me saying” Hellllloooooo, any body there” or something to that effect – not great. Secondly there is still some lag. This is odd becasue I thought the lag I experienced using pbxes.org would reduce given the server I am regsitering to now is local and not in Japan.
Lastly, you need a very stable and good internet connection. I believe now that my data usage has doubled for calls I make as effectivley my asterisk box uploads and downloads from sipdroid AND it uploads and downloads to my VSP. Given the codec used in sipdroid is G711 data usage is high so keep that in mind – 80kbps up and down times two = 160kbps up and 160kbps down for a phone call.
Anyway, best of luck for anyone deploying sipdroid on their asterisk server. Let me know how you go.
Today I got interested in mucking about with emacs, it always facinated me and I thought I would mess about.
I logged into my web/mail server from work and prceeded to install emacs. I noticed that it had the ability to read my email which I thought would be very cool so I ran RMAIL. Before doing so I thought – eh, she’ll be right, I was wrong. It dragged all my email in my INBOX (I use IMAP thask to Dovecote) and dumped it into a file called RMAIL. In effect, it hossed my INBOX!!!!. Chnaging permisision, ownership and file name of this new RMAIL file didn’t help.
A few heart punding minutes later I realised my nightly backups will save me and I replaced the hosed INBOX with a backedup one.
Thank god for nightly back ups and scp.
I’m still interested in emacs.
The other day my laptop borked. I think it was a combination of a file system error and a dodgy stick of RAM. In any event, my arch linux installation didn’t work so I thought it a good oportunity to installa fresh one and completely change the way I use it.
To this end I have decided to go very light weight
Openbox WM (this thing is just great, bare minimum, customisable greatness)
Mutt (with side bar patch!);
Firefox (not light weight I know but elinks just doesn’t do what a browser I use needs to do);
Mktorrent;
Screen;
Urxvt (cos I want to be l33t);
No dock or pager or login manager bloat just unclutered goodness;
Moc;
Feh.
I think that’s it. It is now practically unuable by anyone but me which is in a way fun.
I’m at uni studying and am bored.
Had to try out wptogo. I plan to use it heavily in next years Milan to Taranto race.
My dad is currently riding across australia with someone who is raising money for st vincents hospital in sydney. Read all about it here
Enjoy the view from my desk at work…..
Over the weekend I built a new mythtv box. My old box (Dell GX260) has been in service for about 3.5 years and has been very good but its getting old and times are moving on, its hardware is starting to get left behind.
With the new release of Mythtv v0.22 due later this month and the recent release of VDPAU by Nvidia I thought it time to build a new box and take advantage of these new features.
Having bought a used Dell GX620 for AU180 I threw in a new Leadtech 8400GS GPU (low profile), 1TB HDD and a used Dvico Dual digital 4 TV Capture card.
I have to this point only ever used Mythdora which has been great and am currently running 10.21 (after running 3.01 for 3 years). This time around I wanted something that was easy to upgrade and keep up to date, easy to install and was stable – enter linHES. linHES is the ‘new’ knopmyth but is now based on Arch linux. I have been using Arch on my laptop since Christmas so have a fair amount of experience with the distro so it seems to be a perfect fit for me.
Installation of linHES was painless and the Dual digital card was working fine (its a version 1) although for some odd reason on the first installation ( I have since done a few) the first time I tried to add the second DVB tuner on the card it wouldn’t work, every installation since then has worked fine which seems odd.
Prior to setting up the cards I made sure I had the mythtv package that had VDPAU prebuilt. to do this I just passed pacman -S mythtv-vdpau and off it went.
My previous mythboxes have used the fantastic script to get the TV listings called Shepherd. Shepherd has some perl dependencies that need to be installed prior to running the Sheperd config. I found a few of them were packages prebuilt to be installed using pacman but one remainied elusive and was a requirements to run shepherd, it was called ‘Compress::Zlib’. I ended up getting it by installing perl pacman -S perl and finally was able to run Shepherd.
Just now I realise I could have installed shepherd and all its dependencies with a simple pacman -S shepherd. I’m such a idiot. I recall seeing shepherd in the repo the other day when I was having a poke around and thought it must be something else. I’m a glutton for punishment.
Will do a fresh install tonight after university and install it into the main TV room this weekend for full time use.
OK, so I have been living with VOIP over 3G for a little while now. It is working fine providing you have a good 3G connection. How you know you have a good 3G connection is a mystery to me but I guess the signal strength is a factor. The service provided by Exetel is very good and the price – well it almost unbeatable.
The calls I have made have almsot all been very clear with just a little bit of garble now and then. Last week I had an 8 min phone conversation and the call was very acceptable, especially given the whole thing cost me on my calulation about 50c (data of 2MB per min and VSP cost of 10c).
I think the major issue still is the fact that SIPdroid only supports the G711 codec. With luck the recent bounty proposed on SIPdroids site for the development of low bandwidth codecs (lets hope G729) will help make this an even better experience (an even cheaper).
Here is a little tutorial for using rTorrent on sites using self signed SSL certs that I wrote today.
I have taken bits a pieces from various sites around the place.
Broadly speaking the process to get rTorrent working using a self signed cert are these:-
1. Get the cert and convert to a format rTorrent can use
2. Put the cert somewhere you will be able to find
3. Change rTorrents config to ensure it knows where to find the SSL certs
So, here we go.
1. ==Get the cert==
Log into your linux box as the user that will be running rTorrent and change to you home
directory.
Pass the following command……
sudo openssl s_client -connect thesitenamehere.com:443 | tee out_cert
You will see the SSL certificate on your screen, now hit CTRL-C, magically in the directory
you are now in will be a file called out_cert. Now you need to convert the cert to x509
format. To do this pass the following command
sudo openssl x509 -inform PEM -in out_cert -text -out out.pem
You can view the files we created with a text editor if you so wish.
2. ==Put the cert in a know directory==
Now you need to find out where your QNAP/NAS/PC has all the SSL certificates, they could be
in /etc/ssl/certs, take a look. If not you need to find out where they are. Once you
have found where they are copy the out.pem file to the directory where the SSL certs are
lets pretend they are in /etc/ssl/certs. Pass the following command…
sudo cp out.pem /etc/ssl/certs
Then once it is in that directory change to the /etc/ssl/certs directory. Once you are in
there pass the following command….
sudo c_rehash
3. ==The ~rtorrent.rc==
Now you need to find the example ~rtorrent.rc file that comes with rTorrent (note
that it is a hidden file as it starts with ‘~’).
Once found copy it to the home directory of the user that will be running rTorrent. the name of the
file should be ~rtorrent.rc
Now go into the ~rtorrent.rc file and take a look at the options it gives you, this is the
power of rTorrent. Use your favourite text editor, I use vi, there are plenty others.
Anyway, now you need to put the following line at the bottom of the ~rtorrent.rc file
# directory for ssl certificates on self signed trackers
http_capath=/etc/ssl/certs
That should be it. You should be able to connect to your site now and torrent away.
You will need to change the rtorrent.rc file to ensure it works well with your QNAP/NAS/PC. In particular you should alter it to include a watch directory for new .torrent files so its starts automatically downloading, and also perhaps a default save directory etc.
Check out rtorrents site and also read some of the tutorials out there……
Howto: Use rtorrent like a pro
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/
Enjoy rTorrent, its the shitzen.
Today I received my new SIM from Exetel. After a slight hitch porting out from my old mobile provider I was up and running in no time.
I got a mate to call me on the DID number that I have assigned to my Pennytel account that is a trunk with my PBXes account that SIPdroid registers with (the hoops i go through). It worked fine with just a few seconds of jitter during the conversation that lasted a few minutes. So, so far so good. We will see how it goes over the next few weeks and see how mad it drives me.
I’m excited by the prospects of mobile VOIP using my ADP1 and Sipdroid.
Sipdorid has its draw backs, the main one being development has been pushed to interoperate with PBXes as opposed to any old VSP or even my Asterisk box at home but thats what you get and I can’t bitch to much about something that works (through PBXes) and is free.
So, today I signed up with a provider that re-sells (among other things) Optus 3G data. I can’t get over how cheap (at least for Australia) the data is. They are charging 1.5c per MB of data. At this rate it makes sense to ditch my current MVNO (who re-sells Vodafone) and go with the new mob. Exetel, who I am switching to, are also an ISP here in Australia and I like their style, its cheap and they don’t piss about with the facts. Its kind of ‘here are our prices and this is how we will do you over, if you don’t like it then piss off, and, if we don’t like you we’ll also tell you to piss off’ which is an interetsing but kind of likeable quality in the business that they are in.
The man that runs the show, John Linton, has a blog and his outlook on things is what tipped me to try them out, its refreshing to see these kind of comments in business. Here is a perfect example.
So, we’ll see how it pans out. I’ll be going VOIP for all my calls (when possible) and text messages also using a VSP. Lets hope the Optus service and network here in Perth doesn’t let me down.
EDIT: I’m crapping my self now that this will not work. Sipdroid only supports the G711 codec which is a monster when it comes to bandwidth consumption. I wish it supported G729 – this could be a short experiment ending up in failure due to Sipdroid and the Andorid OS. Please, please Optus network deliver me a fast stable 3G connection.