using connectbot on Android

ConnectBot is an Android SSH client which runs on older versions of Android also. It could import the RSA key pair once I copied it to memory card from my Linux desktop's .ssh directory. In order to use Ctrl, Esc, Func and arrow keys, it uses the trackball.

ESC = press trackball twice

CTRL = press trackball once.

Tab = CTRL + i

Function key - CTRL + number

Arrow keys = move trackball right/left/up/down

vlc preliminary trials - fail

Paul Bourke mentioned that a VLC plugin for warping is under development. Tried out exporting a filtered video using VLC as given at this forum thread,
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=55449&f=14

Unfortunately, the output doesn't seem to have the filter applied. Code used was
vlc -I dummy stellarium_movie.avi -v --video-filter="wave" --file-caching="20000"  --sout="#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=8192,scale=1,
deinterlace, audio-sync,acodec=mp4a,ab=128, channels=2}:duplicate{dst=standard{access=file,mux=ts,dst=test\output3wave.mpg}}"

I tried --vout-filter also, as given in the forum, but no go. Output video does not have the filter applied.

vlc -I dummy stellarium_movie.avi -v --vout-filter="wave" --file-caching="20000"  --sout="#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=8192,scale=1,
deinterlace,audio-sync,acodec=mp4a,ab=128, channels=2}:duplicate{dst=standard{access=file,mux=ts,dst=test\output3wave.mpg}}"

Edit: Solution is here.

reviving the old Mac as an internet radio

This is going to be a long post.

It all started with the idea of using the old mac as an internet radio. As its screen had become damaged and showed up scratches, and it was underpowered for most tasks, this seemed a good idea. The final solution was to enable booting to console by installing a base install from mini cd of Ubuntu 12.04 and running a script on login. Network connectivity via the built-in ethernet port. Efforts to use a USB wifi adapter were not successful in the sense that the wifi was not reliable, would come up sometimes and not at other times. This post will chronicle the entire story.

Final working solution:

The internal CD drive was not reading. So the easiest way to upgrade to a new distro, booting from CD, could not be used. An external USB CD drive was also not recognized as a CD to boot from, by pressing C at boot time. The netboot procedure for using a Windows machine as TFTP server was used, with the files needed for the netboot being listed at the bottom of this page. For Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, the PPC netboot files are at http://ports.ubuntu.com/dists/precise/main/installer-powerpc/current/images/powerpc/netboot/

For doing the netboot, after setting up tftpd with the required files as above, the Mac needs to be booted into open firmware by pressing Alt+Command+o+f at boot, and the command

  boot enet:0

needs to be entered at the Open Firmware prompt. The Ubuntu netboot installer works, but stops at "getting installer components" with a blank screen, and continues after 15 minutes! The whole base install takes an hour or so, downloading required files online took around 15 minutes with our 2 Mbps shared link.

The machine was made to auto-login to the user shell by editing /etc/init/tty1.conf. An interactive bash shell script was the choice for running the "radio" - a simple bash case statement with a while loop asking for input to change streams. Changing streams by killall mpg123 followed by the relevant mpg123 stream-url. This was made to start on boot by putting it in .bash_profile. Then the system boots up and starts playing in 90 seconds.

To prevent sleep when lid closed, used the tip given at http://mrob.com/pub/ibook.html and put a plastic CD case between the lid and the bottom half.

Ease of shut-down - the Ctrl-Al-Delete method given here was adapted, editing /etc/inittab and changing the shutdown -r to shutdown -h to halt the system instead of reboot on Ctrl-Alt-Del. On the Mac keyboard, the keypress for del needs Fn+Delete, since Backspace is labelled as Delete.

Mis-steps:

In hindsight, the final result above could have been accomplished in around 10 minutes' time. Instead, a week was spent in various explorations. Many things were learnt, which are listed below.

Initially, the idea was to upgrade the running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to 12.04, so that the newer kernel would have built-in support for the USB wifi device. Upgrade from 8.04 to 10.04 went off OK, via

#apt-get update

#apt-get upgrade

#apt-get dist upgrade

#do-upgrade-release

But 10.04 to 12.04 failed.

At this point, I'd tried to get a console-only install by removing all X related stuff. The tasksel method did not work, nor did apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop. But using wildcards and aptitude, removed ~ngnome , ~nxorg and so on, till finally the system booted to a simple bash shell and no X. Getting a list of all installed packages would sometimes be useful.

Perhaps this was because of not doing the
#apt-get update ? Software sources were manually changed archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu to ports.ubuntu.com , and then doing the above,  do-release-upgrade worked. But at the end of the install, some errors were reported, and on reboot, the system went into a loop and refused to boot. Single user recovery console was the only working option, and ifupdown etc seemed to be borked. So, a fresh install was attempted.

USB disk install as given at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick did not work. But then, it was done using the mini.iso, and that page says mini older than 13 does not boot from USB. Then the netboot option mentioned at the top of this post was tried, and worked.

Several times when the Mac was booted without an ethernet connection, the date and time were off. Apparently these iBooks don't have a BIOS battery, and only use a capacitor and the main battery. The capacitor as well as the main battery seem to be dead in this case. Resetting PMU and PRAM etc did not help.

Possibly due to the power constraints of the USB 1.1 port on this iBook, sometimes booting with the DWA-131 USB wifi adapter would cause repeated errors scrolling by every second, complaining unable to enumerate usb device on port 1 - connecting via a USB hub stopped this issue. After the driver was detected, removing the hub also did not cause this problem to recur.

In this case, lsusb showed the appropriate device name, and checking the driver for it, googled 07d1:3303 D-Link System DWA-131 wireless n nano adapter linux and found the driver was
https://wiki.debian.org/rtl819x

also googled 07d1:3303 D-Link System DWA-131 wireless n nano adapter ubuntu and found via
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1392153.html

that the command to be used to connect via wifi is iwconfig and not ifconfig.

Also, found that on listing drivers, lsmod was listing the driver rtl819x as loaded, so probably it should work.

So, did
#apt-get install wireless-tools

and tried to connect, as given at this post - in that page, in the "Make it a script" section, perhaps the first line should be ifconfig wlan0 up

Anyway, tried it, did not work. Finally found via this thread that iwconfig works only for WEP, and that wpa-supplicant has to be used for WPA. Tried the methods given here, did not work, so tried to install ubuntu desktop. This was in Ubuntu 13.10 - but starting X was causing a segmentation fault. Even after googling and trying to remove other errors, and following the steps given here, X still seg-faulted when a window manager was installed.

So, went back to 12.04 to try the procedure given at this post to load X - but before doing the X install, thought of trying to connect with commandline using wicd and found this post. This method succeeded! Except in the last line, it was dhclient wlan0 and not dhcpd wlan0 in my case.

# ifconfig wlan0 up  

# iwconfig wlan0 essid "my_network"  

# wpa_supplicant -B -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf  

# dhclient wlan0

Then used this method to make it come up at boot, editing /etc/network/interfaces. But the wifi connection was erratic. Sometimes would not connect at all on boot. Sometimes would connect if the time was set using open firmware with

decimal dev rtc 09 34 13 28 08 2013 set-time

but sometimes not. Would sometimes connect if ethernet cable was connected, sometimes not. Tried going to WEP instead of WPA, and it seemed to work as per the iwconfig method given above, and seemed to connect OK even when the time was off, even when ethernet was off. But a cold reboot the next day showed that the wifi connection was still erratic, and so wired was the way to go.

Testing the networks with wicd, needed to enter wlan0 in Preferences of wicd-curses as per this post.

mpg123 failed to open module  etc errors as non-root user. Installed alsa, rebooted, fixed.
#apt-get install alsa alsa-tools

Then, choosing amixer set Master 45 seems to be a good volume level to set.

After all this, needed to install ntpd, otherwise time is off
https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/NTP.html

blogger post editor broken on IE 8

Probably part of Google's "older browsers not supported" campaign. The post editor seems to be working only in html mode and not in compose mode when using IE 8. Tried clearing cache, still no go. So finally it's time to say goodbye, I suppose, and use Opera or Chrome instead, as a secondary browser. Or I can post like this, using email.

youtube video to mp3

There are quite a few services offering conversion of youtube videos to mp3. vidtomp3.com did a reasonably good job, doing an hour long video in less than 10 minutes. Ad supported, of course. Some other sites have size limits, this one seems to be free of duration restrictions.

DD links and bug in Description form

While adding links to the Descriptions for Divine Discourses found that the form for adding Descriptions which we use internally has some bugs, with erratic behaviour for filenames which have spaces and or other characters. Have alerted PB on this. Meanwhile, the links were added without quotes, since the form again needs special treatment for quotes, and various bash csv export scripts may misbehave with quotes. I was pleasantly surprised to find that even target=_blank works without quotes.

mysql db table repair for phplist

As a follow-up to this earlier post on table repair, PB suggested the following:
He found that the following one line command checks, repairs and optimizes all the databases.

 mysqlcheck -u root -p --auto-repair -c -o --all-databases

This could be used  in situations where we are not sure of which tables have crashed or needs repair.....

easily importing Nokia contacts into other apps with vcf support

Guest post from V:

Create a back up of contacts using application on the Nokia phone. By default it will be saved as Backup000.NBF. The extension looks strange, but the file is similar to an archived file like .zip

Open Backup000.NBF using any archive manager and navigate to /predefhiddenfolder/backup/WIP/32/contacts Extract the folder containing all contacts as .vcf files to another location

Open Terminal and navigate to the folder containing the .vcf files. [Alternate method: sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal adds a right-click “Open Terminal” option into the Nautilus File Manager in Ubuntu.]

Once inside the folder on Terminal, use: cat *.vcf > combined.vcf to combine all .vcf files into a single file.

This file can now be easily imported into Google Contacts or any other application that accepts .vcf files

Edit: There is one more elaborate method of VCF multiple contact import given at http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum/showthread.php?p=488142

sharing audio links - sharethis custom link

One of the requests from our listeners was an easy way to share audio links. Exploring the different ways to share, found that sharethis.com does support custom urls and custom text, as given in their documentation. But directly plugging this into the Download.php page would make it a bit ugly, with a separate email for each download link. Something better needs to be designed.

More Seeker bugs

Seeker Theater Edition, Build 828 as per the startup splash screen - The items under Help menu don't seem to be working - Help -> Manual... , Help -> Support... , Help -> About Seeker don't have any effect.

Also, the 'Solar System Map' doesn't seem to be working. When it is enabled, the Sun and planets (if they were visible) disappear. But the map as such does not appear.

Edit: The About Seeker and Solar System Map work when not in "Fulldome" mode, and when the flat screen version of "None" is selected in Settings -> Dome Projection. More info in the post on further experiments with Seeker. 

Software Bisque Theater Suite trials

Trying out the Seeker Theater Edition, found that my machine is not capable enough to do realtime rendering of hi-res - 1920x0180 or more - accelerated video. Frame rates hover around 5 fps. Offline rendering is good, though. Offline rendering of the "Grand Tour" into warped 1920x1080 movies averaged around
5.5 fps for MJPEG / Photo-JPEG codec mov
4 fps for targa frames (slowed down by hard disk)
2 fps for PNG frames (slowed down by compression)
2 fps for H.264 codec mov (slowed down by compression)

and so on.

JPG frame export fails - the files are written as 0 kB files.

Offline rendering of 2K movies averaged
3 fps for MJPEG / Photo-JPEG codec mov

2 fps for targa frames (slowed down by hard disk)
1 fps for PNG frames (slowed down by compression)

Offline rendering of 4K went at around 1 fps for MJPEG / Photo-JPEG codec mov.

Noted that the anti-aliasing option under Settings -> Graphics setup don't seem to affect the offline rendering. The offline rendering seems to be done without anti-aliasing. Sample parts of the 4K frame, zoomed in and cropped,

But the whole frame by itself looks good,

Interestingly, the stars render much smaller in relative size in the 4K frame as compared to a 1K frame, as below:

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any setting option to control the size of the stars. They seem to render the same size whatever be the size of the entire frame, so in a lower resolution frame, the stars are too clunky. So, if the stars look too big, I have to render as large fisheye masters - 3K or 4K - and then warp them down to our 1920x1080 warped files.

Now, all this was about Seeker. The Theater Suite also has Mojo, Syzygy and SkyX Theater Edition. Mojo doesn't seem to do realtime warping - just makes a timeline of multiple video files. Syzygy launches all the components of the Theater Suite in a multi-monitor configuration. SkyX has similar capabilities to Stellarium and accepts map files for warping. Probably I'll be using only Seeker, and doing offline renders.

Edit: More Seeker bugs are reported here, as well as on bisque.com (login required). Also, documentation is lacking on script commands like WAYPOINT2.

bug fixes to audio search

V had come over for Gurupoornima, and kindly helped bug-fix the radiosai audio search results page.

The first bug was displayed when searching for Discourses: if the description is exactly the same, in the search result, only one of the DDs is displayed, even though there are two different versions in different languages. Solution was simple - changed line

$dataQuery.= " group by description ";
to
$dataQuery.= " group by description, language ";

The next bug was harder. If the search result had a very large number of files within a single line, i.e. with the same description, clicking the download button used to fail, or give a truncated list. Checking out the database calls one by one by giving echo statements, V found that the truncation was happening at the group_concat sql command. Apparently mysql has a group_concat default size limit of 1 kB. The blob returned is truncated to 1024 bytes. Googling found the answer. Since we don't have system-wide access on that server, we had to change the size limit for the particular session. Just adding the line

$inc_result= mysql_query("SET @@group_concat_max_len = 512000;");

just before the relevant queries were fired did the trick. The @@ means for this session.

online buying of physical products from overseas

Found out the hard way about Indian customs laws when we ordered the Theater Suite from Software Bisque. The package, sent via UPS, was detained at customs, and the Indian UPS partner asked us for IEC code. Luckily in our case the University has import licence (and duty exemption) so we got the package cleared, even the process took a month. But other institutions may not be so lucky.

Google Reader shutdown - Google player widget no longer up

HMHV blog had all player code hot-linked to the google audio player at
http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf

 Google Reader shut down on the 1st of July 2013 and along with it all its allied services. So I was asked for a simple solution. I suggested:

https://sites.google.com/site/mori79/html-gadgets/media-players/google-reader-player

Where it says upload on your own site, you could use sites.google.com or something like that.

The solution preferred was a direct HTML5 embed, like
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_audio.asp

But of course this has mp3 embeds, which did not work on Firefox. But the latest versions of FF on Windows do support this.

HDMI to VGA convertor

V wanted to use the Toshiba AC-100 smartbook for his presentations. Since the projector did not have a HDMI port, he had to convert to VGA. We ordered this product, and tried it out. First testing with the Blu-ray player, did not work. Probably the Blu-ray player does not supply enough power via HDMI. Tried with the AC-100, worked fine. Default output is 1920x1080 @ 60 Hz. Saw the output both with the LG Studioworks 221U monitor as well as with the Optoma TX1080 projector.

catalogue of astronomy software

Some of these would be useful for those interested in hands-on astronomy, and there are some for PC-based simulations also. But the list is a bit old, some of the links have to be looked up on archive.org's wayback machine. But very interesting and very long list of astronomy software, many of them freeware to do particular tasks - listed at www.pierpaoloricci.it/download/downloadsoftware_eng.htm

Categories like 3D Simulation, Planetarium, Astrophotography, Atlases, Ephemeris, Planets, Satellites and so on.

multiple videos on dome

Checking out different ways to do multiple videos on the dome.

1. Tried making a three-video wide panel, and using DMProjector to warp it for the dome. Using avisynth overlay, something like
video1=Audiodub(Overlay(bg1, top, 834, 771), audio)
video2=Audiodub(Overlay(video1, top2, 234, 771), audio2)
video3=Audiodub(Overlay(video2, top3, 1434, 771), audio3)

resulted in a clip like this after appropriate cropping: 

Using DMProjector to show it onscreen with 40 degrees vertical field of view starting with the horizon (altitude of 20 deg) resulted in a dome master like this,

As you can see, the side videos have been squished. When I used gimp and duplicated the middle video, rotating it and pasting it on the two sides to get

Although the videos are supposed to be identical, on the dome the side videos came out much bigger than the centre video. That's all for now, probably I'll revisit this theme later.

some limitations of certain tools

While doing some renders, found the following:

1. Virtualdub (at least my version, 1.8.8) does not work well with 24 bit wav files  when a wav file needs to be added to the video. Needs to be converted to 16 bit to avoid extreme noise in the avi.

2. DMProjector (version 1.05) does not work with tga input files with alpha channel. So, while exporting the clip for use with DMProjector from After Effects, had to choose "Millions of colours" instead of "Millions of colours +" in the advanced settings.

3. For 1920x1080 input files, DMProjector takes around 3 seconds per frame.

note about restoring Android to Toshiba AC-100

V wanted to use the Toshiba AC-100 smartbook for projecting with its HDMI out. The Ubuntu 12.04 which I had loaded for him did not work with the Nvidia driver. Tried Lubuntu 12.10, with the proprietary driver. But system would hang when I used arandr to set output to HDMI only, no display on the projector. So tried restoring back to Android.

As noted earlier, used the technique and the files as given earlier, and went back to Andoid. At first, I tried restoring only partitions 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 12 - the first few, and the biggest ones. But when the AC100 booted up, it went back to Lubuntu. Then I saw that in my previous post I mentioned partition 6 is the boot partition. So I restored partition 6, and hey presto, Android booted up.

With Android also, the HDMI out was not displaying on the Optoma projector. Suspecting the cable and order of switching on of devices, got the working HDMI cable from upstairs, switched off and disconnected both devices, connected the cable, powered on the projector and booted Android. Then the display came on flawlessly. Hopefully Documents to go will serve V's projection needs.

review of DMProjector from pineappleware

Pineappleware.com has a set of fulldome tools. Trial versions are available for download, unfortunately the contact email for pricing info and purchase elicited no reply. The trial versions are limited to 1K resolution. Passable for our dome, not optimal. The tools save Alpha channel, so stitching together multiple frames with different images on them easier.

DMPanorama has nice features like fill upward, for filling the "sky" part of the panorama automatically.

DMProjector exports a single image (or an image sequence) to a specific part of the dome. Perhaps I can try it for video sequences - doing this would be faster than rendering in blender.

Field of view in DMProjector can be specified either vertically or horizontally. Giving a  vertical field of view double the altitude makes the image just touch the horizon at the bottom, since the altitude is defined at the centre of the image. Anti-Aliasing with a sample level of 3 gave good results for me.

Choosing a panoramic image and a 120 degree field of view gave similar results from DMProjector as with DMPanorama, except without the "fill upward". But DMProjector doesn't seem to do panoramas bigger than that properly.