Tuesday, July 03, 2018

packet sniffing wifi

Packet sniffing on a wifi network is a bit more complicated than using a wired network and a hub. Promiscuous mode alone is not enough -

https://osqa-ask.wireshark.org/questions/61656/promiscuous-mode-not-working

https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/WLAN#Monitor_mode

Then the packets have to be decrypted.

https://wiki.wireshark.org/HowToDecrypt802.11

For that, if using WEP, the WEP password has to be converted to the Hexadecimal key -
http://corecoding.com/utilities/wep2hex.php

change Google Home mini wifi settings without Google Assistant app

Trying out a Google Home Mini device. For setup, it needs the Google Home App on an Android or iOS device. For changing certain settings, it needs Google Assistant to be enabled on your phone. Since my current phone runs an earlier Android version than 5.0 which is the least required for Google Assistant, I am unable to change language of the device, unable to change the voice, and so on. Even changing the wifi network needs a different procedure than the one listed on google support.

So, my procedure, found by trial and error, was:

1. Open the Google Home app
2. Tap on the devices icon on top right corner.
3. If there is a card which says "your speaker name" speaker needs setup, and a setup link, you can use that.
4. Else, click on your device name, if it is listed, and the three dots on top right.
5. Choose reboot.
6. From the list of linked devices, unlink the device for which wifi needs to be set up.
7. Tap the back button to go to the home screen of the Home app.
7. Then the app would say that it has found one device which is ready for setup.
8. Click through to set up, including linking to an account and wifi settings.
9. When using a wifi network which was previously configured, it does not ask for the wifi password again.


Friday, June 29, 2018

ITR2 - paying income tax

1. Using the java based ITR2 utility needs openjfx in addition to installing java etc - on Mint/Ubuntu, sudo apt-get install openjfx

2. PAN / TAN of deductor = PAN/TAN of employer

3. importing - pre-filling the form - takes longer than a minute on the Acer laptop, takes 10 seconds on the i7 machine.

4. The re-calculate button of the java utility is not the same as validation. On clicking Save, validation errors pop up. So, use 'Save' to validate, and 'Save draft' to save partially completed form.

5. For the first time, I needed to pay tax. Payment is via https://onlineservices.tin.egov-nsdl.com/etaxnew/tdsnontds.jsp , Challan 280 at the bottom of the page. Netbanking and Debit cards are accepted. The type of payment is Self Assessment Tax.

6. The Challan serial number and other details like date are available in the pdf made available to download from the SBI post-payment screen. These have to be entered in the ITR2 form under self assessment tax payment made, and then submitted.

5. The Aadhaar based verification of return did not work for me - said that service is not registered with UIDAI. The bank account based verification worked.

Friday, June 22, 2018

blender z axis flip

Just a quick recipe for flipping an object in Blender -

  • Select object
  • Ctrl A (for Apply)
  • Choose Scale
  • Enter Z scale as -1
  • Ensure that scale checkbox is ticked under apply.


Wednesday, May 30, 2018

unhelpful error message - google groups

While adding users to a google group, came across this error - An error (#847) occurred while communicating with the server.

Apparently this has nothing to do with internet connectivity issues. These forum posts point to a bad email id in the submitted batch. Sure enough, there was a "blogger.com" email id in the batch which was causing problems for me. Removed it, all well. 

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Google Apps legacy documentation

Looks like legacy Google apps users can't purchase extra drive storage - Can't purchase Google Drive Storage in legacy Google Apps Free edition - https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/z0tUAkQl_rM

Friday, May 11, 2018

Linux Mint Live CD / DVD

Some notes for Linux Mint Live CD / DVD


  1. username is mint, and no password.
  2. sudo does not ask for password.
  3. to take a backup, can do sudo cp -R /source/folder /destination/folder
  4. to switch between screens, Ctrl+Alt+F2 or Ctrl+Alt+F7 etc - need to press Fn also on Mac keyboard.

web hosting on github

A useful option for small static websites -

https://help.github.com/articles/using-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/

https://pages.github.com/

The limits are quite generous - https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-github-pages/

"GitHub Pages sites are subject to the following usage limits:

  • GitHub Pages source repositories have a recommended limit of 1GB .
  • Published GitHub Pages sites may be no larger than 1 GB.
  • GitHub Pages sites have a soft bandwidth limit of 100GB per month.
  • GitHub Pages sites have a soft limit of 10 builds per hour."

Sunday, May 06, 2018

C++ programming - using fstream in a cross-platform manner

Some notes about making use of fstream in cross-platform code - 

Some interesting methods are discussed at
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9739948/write-a-file-in-a-specific-path-in-c/40980510#40980510

In Visual Studio,
disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS - 

Configuration Properties >> C/C++ >> Preporocessor >> Preprocessor Definitions >>  _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS

A working code snippet - 

    char path[80];
    char foldername[80];
    sprintf(path,"homeuser/file.txt");
    sprintf(foldername, "homeuser");
    CreateDirectoryA(foldername, NULL);
    std::ofstream file(path); //open in constructor
    std::string data("data to write to file");
    file << data;

Friday, May 04, 2018

making an alexa skill

The Amazon Echo Dot, Google Home Mini, etc are inexpensive ways to listen to streaming radio without the need for interacting with a screen. The Echo can be used with Skills to make it easy to accomplish a particular task. Though in theory, radiosai is available on tunein and it should be possible to listen via tunein, of late, it doesn't seem to work. Alexa says, "I can't listen by genre on Tunein". So, tried to make an official Radiosai skill.

There was already a Radio Sai skill, but that one was missing AfriStream and AsiaStream. So, decided to try to implement this skill, with some improvements, as an official radiosai skill.

Changes in the user interface - the screenshots given here are no longer similar to Amazon's AWS console or the Skills console. Instead of uploading the sample utterances as a text file, I manually created the utterances in the Skill console using the wizard. Also added some confirmation before playing each stream, like


var message = 'Playing Bhajan Stream.';
this.response.speak(message);
this.attributes['stream'] = 'BhajanStream';
controller.play.call(this);

and also added a stop call to the AudioPlayer -

'AMAZON.CancelIntent' : function () { 
// adding the line below to stop the audio player 
controller.stop.call(this); 
////////////// 
var message = 'Good bye.'; 
this.response.speak(message); 
this.emit(':responseReady'); 
}

It looks like only the playModeIntentHandlers are active - the others don't seem to be called. Have submitted for being made available to the public.

Edit: Update May 11 -
1. Bug fixes by the owner of this repository, looks like the SDK had some changes so the zip file needed to be changed.

2. How to build an Alexa audio streaming skill from a template - YouTube video - lots of similar resources available

3. Audio player skill sample from Amazon, for multiple streams. 

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Notes on compiling software lockin amplifier

Abbreviated notes from the software lock-in amplifier at https://github.com/hn-88/SoftwareLockin/

French lockin works on USB stick. Lubuntu 12.04

edited the pro files to add
QT += widgets

vumeter.h:40:25: fatal error: QtGui/QWidget: No such file or directory
on Mint 18.1

edit h files to make QtGui/QWidget QWidget

make clean
qmake multi.pro
make


error: ‘const class QString’ has no member named ‘toAscii’ - solved using

(was solved by install of package qttools5-dev-tools
more info here...) not used

QByteArray QString::toAscii() const
Returns an 8-bit representation of the string as a QByteArray.

This function does the same as toLatin1().

So, replaced in lockin.cpp and dockoutput.cpp

output has NaN

Edit: 20 Apr
ui_lockingui.h:13:29: fatal error: QtWidgets/QAction: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
Makefile:406: recipe for target 'lockingui.o' failed
make: *** [lockingui.o] Error 1

probably have to find replace again?

Also QWidgets/QApplication

changed to QApplication etc - find replace QWidgets/ with nothing.

sudo apt-get --reinstall install libqt4-opengl-dev

Maybe if I upload the makefile?



Friday, April 13, 2018

USB to TTL link dump

A collection of links about communicating with serial control lines over USB - Arduino etc - 

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

bouncing emails in google groups

Maintaining google group by deleting bounced emails. And if needed, re-adding them. 

https://support.google.com/a/answer/7552660?hl=en

Edit: Users can reset their bounce status by going to https://groups.google.com/bounced?pli=1 or https://groups.google.com/a/example.com/groups/bounced?pli=1
next to Bounce Status, email status -> Reset bounce status. (which appears only if it is bouncing.)

Monday, April 09, 2018

Arduino IDE on Linux Mint

From https://playground.arduino.cc/Linux/Mint/
we should probably not use
sudo apt install arduino
because it is outdated or non-standard, and we should instead use the 64 bit binary from 
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

Saturday, April 07, 2018

email slowdown and possible fixes

From March 24 or 25, our mailing list started having a lot of delays in email sending, especially to gmail.com. Found the following issues:

1. For some gmail emails, the server was trying the ipv6 address, and not able to reach it - like

Mar 25 09:34:15 krishna postfix/smtp[19788]: connect to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[2404:6800:4003:c03::1b]:25: Network is unreachable

Mar 25 09:34:28 krishna postfix/smtp[20163]: connect to ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM[2404:6800:4003:c02::1b]:25: Network is unreachable

This was probably due to a router change at the Studio.

Did this -
https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/213398289-Specifying-Postfix-configuration-of-IPv4-IPv6-protocol-support
ie
adding the option:

inet_protocols=ipv4

to the /etc/postfix/main.cf Postfix configuration file. And then as root,

# postfix reload
# service postfix restart

That worked, the emails went out. But the email sending rate was only around 1000 emails per hour, as reported by
# qshape incoming active deferred

2. A lot of mails were being deferred instead of bounced by gmail, OverQuotaTemp.
cat  /var/log/mail.log | grep OverQuotaTemp | wc -l
5878
PB unconfirmed those emails using
cat /var/log/mail.log | grep OverQuotaTemp | grep 'to=' | grep -o '[[:alnum:]+\.\_\-]*@[[:alnum:]+\.\_\-]*' | sort | uniq -i

Then also for bouncing emails, like
cat  /var/log/mail.log | grep "does not exist"
cat  /var/log/mail.log.1 | grep "does not exist"
cat  /var/log/mail.log.1 | grep "553 Mail from 111.93.16.162 not allowed"
cat  /var/log/mail.log | grep "status=bounced"
cat  /var/log/mail.log.1 | grep "status=bounced"

3. Mails were still going out slowly, with the usage on the internet port being like

Next try was to speed up sending to gmail.com domain, since the other emails were going out OK. Then, added these two lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf - 

maximal_queue_lifetime = 2d
default_destination_concurrency_limit = 100

decreasing lifetime from 5d to 2d and increasing concurrency limit from 20 to 100. That seemed to improve things - the outgoing rate went up to almost the peak rate - 

and from the next day, the emails were going out like









Thursday, April 05, 2018

notes on startup / shutdown times

On a machine with dual boot,

Time taken for Windows 7 to boot, open firefox and open youtube.com - 3:30 minutes.
Time taken for Linux Mint 18.3 to boot, open firefox and open youtube.com - 1:15 minutes.
Similarly, Windows takes 40 seconds to shut down, while Linux shuts down in less than ten seconds.
Equivalent of Hotspot Shield, if you want to watch something which is blocked - have installed PureVPN extension for both Chrome and Firefox...

Linux vs Windows 7 brief speed test

N's Lenovo B640 laptop had become old and slow. Tried dual booting with Linux Mint, found quite an improvement. 

Time taken for Windows 7 to boot, open firefox and open youtube.com - 3:30 minutes.

Time taken for Linux to boot, open firefox and open youtube.com - 1:15 minutes.

Similarly, Windows takes 40 seconds to shut down, while Linux shuts down in less than ten seconds.