Bluetooth DUN with BlackBerry 9700, T-Mobile and Ubuntu 9.10

December 29th, 2009

I just bought a new laptop (Thinkpad T500) but the only WWAN cards available built in were for either Verizon or AT&T, which is suboptimal as I use T-Mobile which uses the AWS UMTS bands (1,4,8) instead of the bands used in the US by AT&T (1,2,5,6). Since my Blackberry 9700 supports T-Mobile 3G as well as their implementation of UMA I decided to try to get the Bluetooth DUN working.

Bluetooth DUN, T-Mobile UMA

Bluetooth DUN, T-Mobile UMA

I was hoping that with 9.10, things would have progressed enough that I could pair the phone with the computer and let NetworkManager take care of all of the irritating tedious stuff. With my GPRS PCMCIA card this is basically the case, NetworkManager notices that it is a GPRS WWAN card, and asks me who my carrier is and connects just fine. Unfortunately this is not the case with Bluetooth. I can get the phone paired but for some reason it exclaims that this is not a GPRS modem and refuses to let me tell it otherwise, so I’m forced to go about this the hard way.

After much searching, this post got me the closest though recent changes either with the new OS 5.0 on the 9700 or T-Mobile’s network have made some tweaks necessary.

http://pegelinux.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/blackberry-curve-8310-as-bluetooth-modem-on-ubuntu-hardy/

I will not go into all the step-by-step details as it is covered above and elsewhere, but first you need to get your computer to bind to the Blackberry DUN service via Bluetooth, I chose to edit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf to make this happen automatically, but BlueManager also seems to be able to do the same thing with a much more friendly UI if you want to try that route, anyway you cut it, you need to have the DUN service show up as a /dev/rfcomm# device. Once you have completed that you will want to setup pppd(8) much like the above article suggests.

This resulted in a session that looked like the following for me:

mernisse@mernisse-laptop:/etc/chatscripts$ pppd call gprs
Press CTRL-C to close the connection at any stage!
defining PDP context...

OK

OK
waiting for connect...

CONNECT
Connected.
If the following ppp negotiations fail,
try restarting the phone.

Script /etc/chatscripts/gprs-connect-chat finished (pid 14835), status = 0x0
Serial connection established.
using channel 1
Using interface ppp0
Connect: ppp0 < --> /dev/rfcomm0
sent LCP ConfReq id=0x1 <asyncmap 0x0> <magic 0x5db98b32>
rcvd LCP ConfReq id=0x0 <asyncmap 0x0> <auth pap>
sent LCP ConfAck id=0x0 <asyncmap 0x0> <auth pap>
rcvd LCP ConfRej id=0x1 <magic 0x5db98b32>
sent LCP ConfReq id=0x2 <asyncmap 0x0>
rcvd LCP ConfAck id=0x2 </asyncmap><asyncmap 0x0>
sent PAP AuthReq id=0x1 user="mernisse-laptop" password=""
rcvd PAP AuthAck id=0x0
PAP authentication succeeded
sent CCP ConfReq id=0x1 <deflate 15> </deflate><deflate (old#) 15>
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x1 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms -dns1 0.0.0.0> </ms><ms -dns2 0.0.0.0>
rcvd LCP ProtRej id=0x1 80 fd 01 01 00 0c 1a 04 78 00 18 04 78 00
Protocol-Reject for 'Compression Control Protocol' (0x80fd) received
rcvd IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 <addr 169.254.1.1>
sent IPCP ConfAck id=0x2 </addr><addr 169.254.1.1>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x1 <ms -dns1 0.0.0.0> </ms><ms -dns2 0.0.0.0>
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms -dns1 0.0.0.0> </ms><ms -dns2 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x2 </ms><ms -dns1 0.0.0.0> </ms><ms -dns2 0.0.0.0>
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x3 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms -dns1 0.0.0.0> </ms><ms -dns2 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x3 </ms><ms -dns1 0.0.0.0> </ms><ms -dns2 0.0.0.0>
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x4 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms -dns1 0.0.0.0> </ms><ms -dns2 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x4 </ms><ms -dns1 0.0.0.0> </ms><ms -dns2 0.0.0.0>
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x5 <addr 0.0.0.0> <ms -dns1 0.0.0.0> </ms><ms -dns2 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x5 </ms><ms -dns1 0.0.0.0> </ms><ms -dns2 0.0.0.0>
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x6 <addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x6
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x7 </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x7
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x8 </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x8
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x9 </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x9
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0xa </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0xa </addr><addr 14.36.76.18>
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0xb
rcvd IPCP ConfAck id=0xb
Could not determine local IP address
Connect time 0.1 minutes.
Sent 186 bytes, received 120 bytes.
sent IPCP TermReq id=0xc "Could not determine local IP address"
rcvd IPCP TermAck id=0xc
sent LCP TermReq id=0x3 "No network protocols running"
rcvd LCP TermAck id=0x3
Connection terminated.

Sending break to the modem

PDP context detached
Script /etc/chatscripts/gprs-disconnect-chat finished (pid 14843), status = 0x0
Serial link disconnected.

As you can see, a number of Naks have been received for things that do not work and the connection fails. Tracking each error down step by step I removed noauth from the peers file and replaced it with user “” to force a null user-name in the PAP authentication. I also removed userpeerdns as it appears that the Blackberry was refusing to give it to me. The final piece was that I was hitting what I assumed to be a race condition, as the Blackberry did not have an IP address to give me yet, it kept sending ConfNak to me until it finished setting up the tunnel to T-Mobile on my behalf… (see inset)

Tunnel List

Tunnel List

To overcome this I had to up the ipcp-max-configure to accomidate, the default according to pppd(8) is 10 so I set it to 20. This, along with a few other tweaks allowed me to connect successfully.


mernisse@mernisse-laptop:/etc/ppp/peers$ pppd call gprs
Press CTRL-C to close the connection at any stage!
defining PDP context...

OK

OK
waiting for connect...

CONNECT
Connected.
If the following ppp negotiations fail,
try restarting the phone.

Script /etc/chatscripts/gprs-connect-chat finished (pid 15068), status = 0x0
Serial connection established.
using channel 12
Using interface ppp0
Connect: ppp0 < --> /dev/rfcomm0
sent LCP ConfReq id=0x1 <asyncmap 0x0> <magic 0x448e9c82>
rcvd LCP ConfReq id=0x0 <asyncmap 0x0> <auth pap>
sent LCP ConfAck id=0x0 <asyncmap 0x0> <auth pap>
rcvd LCP ConfRej id=0x1 <magic 0x448e9c82>
sent LCP ConfReq id=0x2 <asyncmap 0x0>
rcvd LCP ConfAck id=0x2 </asyncmap><asyncmap 0x0>
sent PAP AuthReq id=0x1 user="" password=<hidden>
rcvd PAP AuthAck id=0x1
PAP authentication succeeded
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x1 <addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfReq id=0x1 </addr><addr 169.254.1.1>
sent IPCP ConfAck id=0x1 </addr><addr 169.254.1.1>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x1
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x2
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x3 </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x3
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x4 </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x4
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x5 </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x5
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x6 </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x6
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x7 </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x7
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x8 </addr><addr 0.0.0.0>
rcvd IPCP ConfNak id=0x8 </addr><addr 14.34.55.230>
sent IPCP ConfReq id=0x9 </addr><addr 14.34.55.230>
rcvd IPCP ConfAck id=0x9 </addr><addr 14.34.55.230>
replacing old default route to wlan0 192.168.196.1
Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP
local IP address 14.34.55.230
remote IP address 169.254.1.1
Script /etc/ppp/ip-up started (pid 15070)
Script /etc/ppp/ip-up finished (pid 15070), status = 0x0
^CTerminating on signal 2
Connect time 4.7 minutes.
Sent 300422 bytes, received 1437245 bytes.
restoring old default route to wlan0 192.168.196.1
Script /etc/ppp/ip-down started (pid 15112)
sent LCP TermReq id=0x3 "User request"
rcvd LCP TermAck id=0x3
Connection terminated.

Sending break to the modem

PDP context detached
Script /etc/chatscripts/gprs-disconnect-chat finished (pid 15117), status = 0x0
Serial link disconnected.
Script /etc/ppp/ip-down finished (pid 15112), status = 0x0
mernisse@mernisse-laptop:/etc/ppp/peers$

Looking at the phone it appears that it snuck into Modem Mode and I was able to ssh around and perform the speedtest that adorns the top of this post. I used the gprs-disconnect-chat file unmodified from the post I linked to, but modified the gprs and gprs-connect-chat files which you can get by clicking on their names or looking at http://www.ub3rgeek.net/gprs/

Modem Mode, UMA

Modem Mode, UMA

Hopefully this will help someone get past this needlessly difficult hurdle and also enjoy wireless data anywhere in T-Mobile’s coverage area. Cheers.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

Backups!

December 5th, 2009

With hard drive capacity growing by leaps and bounds it is not uncommon for most people to have computers with several hundred Gigabytes worth of internal storage. While drives have gotten much more reliable the importance of good backups have only increased with more and more of our data being stored on our computers. Digital photos, movies, music, financial documents, e-mails, all live on our computers and could easily be deleted, or corrupted by user error, application faults, or a physical failure of a part in your computer.

Backups prevent:

  1. Data loss from computer error. (Operating System or Application Crash)
  2. Data loss from drive failure.
  3. Data loss from user error. (Accidental deletion, alteration, etc)
  4. Data loss from disaster. (House burns down, computer lost or stolen)

It is important to note that RAID systems ONLY address drive failures and should NOT be thought of as a backup solution.

My Goals:
I really like Time Machine. Apple did an AMAZING job with that application and bundled with the Time Capsule you get a really robust, high-capacity versioned backup solution that solves 90% of the problems that backups are supposed to solve. If you periodically copy your Time Machine backup to an external hard drive and store that at a friend’s house or in a safe deposit box or at the office, then you get 100% of the backup goals in a neat little package. You can even restore a Time Machine backup from the OS X restore CD. Slick.

Since I don’t run OS X I have to engineer a solution myself. I want a system that allows me to produce versioned backups on the network without much interaction. It must be encrypted on disk as my laptop’s /home is encrypted and storing the backup unencrypted would be a super-easy attack vector. Ideally the storage would be swappable so I can have 2 drives and swap it with an off-site drive periodically and so I could fairly easily restore the data to a new drive when the drive in my laptop (or the backup drive) scorches itself.

My Solution:

I have an old IBM ThinkPad R42 laptop that I’m not using for anything anymore so I tossed Ubuntu 9.10 on it and plugged it into the network. (I would use my server but I do not have any USB 2.0 ports on that machine currently.) I connected a 250GB USB hard drive to the ThinkPad and encrypted a partition using dm-crypt to store the backups and meta-data.

I then setup ssh on the ThinkPad to trust my ssh key from my laptop and I setup sudo(8) to allow my user to run rdiff-backup without entering my password. Combined with my backup.sh script, i can fire off a backup in the background from cron(8) that doesn’t really affect the performance of my laptop over the network.

I am a big fan of jwz and this is how he does backups.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

13 years with Linux

September 16th, 2009

I first installed Linux from floppy disks back in 1996 on an old computer I had laying around. A friend of mine whom I knew through a local BBS had told me about this thing “Linux”, it was like Unix but for cheap Intel computers. I was amazed and after some tinkering I was also completely hooked. From that point I have always had at least one Linux machine running in my home. I got my mother to buy our first Internet connection with the promise that everyone in the house could use it, all thanks to Linux and this new thing called IP Masquerading.

That first Linux distribution was Slackware, a distribution by Patrick J. Volkerding which has always focused on simplicity, stability and having a sane collection of packages and defaults right out of the box. It is kind of like the OpenBSD of Linux if I was to try to make a really unnecessary analogy. Over the years my home server has always been Slackware, it was what I was the most comfortable with and it has never let me down. I even ran Slackware on my workstations up until a few years ago when World of Warcraft came around and I needed something a little more bleeding edge to get an X server with all the fancy direct rendering and 3d acceleration bits to make wine happy. I have trusted literally TeraBytes of data to Slackware and have not once been let down.

Over the last few days I have been struggling with a number of problems with my Sirius transcoder scripts. Between Sipie being unloved and requiring some work, and vlc being a royal pain sometimes I decided to upgrade my home server to Slackware 13.0. I have to start by saying i’m impressed with Slackware and the progress it has made over the years, a very small team (usually of one) has been able to make a stable, secure, reliable distribution for a very long time and the new version is no exception. And Slackware 13.0 is no exception to this rule, now bringing in amd64 support into the core distribution.

After a good 2 days of fighting the realization came that I just had to embrace, I have changed. The sad truth is that as with hardware I have come to expect software to Just Work(tm) and leave me out of it. I spend 60 hours a week wrestling with hardware and software in my job as a Systems Administrator for an ISP and I just don’t enjoy fighting it when I get home like I used to. My server acts as a media server for my PS3 so I can enjoy media content on my TV, a VOIP server for my home (I do not have a land line any longer) and hosts a number of status monitoring applications and stream recorders that I turn into podcasts for my private consumption. I need it all to just quietly work and cause me as little grief as possible.

So sadly it became time for me to go from loyal Slackware user for over a decade to full-on Ubuntu convert. We use Debian (and now Ubuntu) at work and I have been using Ubuntu in varying places since a friend of mine gave me a link in a chat pointing to what he promised was going to be a new Linux distribution that would change how people looked a Linux. It just made sense to convert, it meant I didn’t have to maintain 2 local mirrors anymore for security updates, I am much more comfortable with apt(8) and dpkg(8) and utilities like slapt-get(8) and swaret(8) are just kind of (very good) 3rd party hacks on top of the Slackware package management system.

It is amazing to see how far this dream has come, more and more I find myself quietly relying on various Free Software products to make my life simpler, easier and better and Slackware and Ubuntu have both been huge parts of that software stack. Thanks Pat, for 13 years of reliability, stability, security and sanity. Thanks also to Mark and Matt and the entire Ubuntu/Canonical gang for literally changing how thousands of people think of Linux. I converted my Mother a few weeks ago and have had less calls about the computer than I ever did with Windows.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

BlackBerry SMS logger and site changes

August 21st, 2009

Firstly let me apologize for the mess, right now I have moved the WordPress installation to a standalone domain for back-end architecture reasons. There are redirects in place for most things but some things may be broken. Accept my apologies in advance for the inconvenience.

Secondly I have removed my old Gallery instance. I’ve been using Gallery 1 for ages because I don’t see a good reason to upgrade to Gallery 2 which I consider HIGHLY inferior due to the reliance on a RDBMS. As a replacement I have redirected all /gallery/ URLs to my Flickr page.

Thirdly, as a result of moving to Bazaar from CVS, much of the code that has been linked in previous entries is now over at repo.ub3rgeek.net.

Finally, for anyone with a BlackBerry that would like to get the SMS messages off the device so they can save the memory without losing the messages, or just to be able to use Unix tools to manipulate the messages I have written a small Python script which can be used, alongside the Barry Project’s btool program to extract the SMS messages to a set of files sorted by Phone Number of the person you are corresponding with.
You can get the script at http://repo.ub3rgeek.net/branches//top/bbtools/files. Feel free to let me know if you find it useful.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

Revision Control Revision

June 1st, 2009

I’ve been using CVS for revision control for quite some time for a number of different things here, not the least of which being a public repository of scripts and miscellany that I have tossed into the Internet for public consumption. Recently I have started to feel the desire to change to one of the newer version control systems out there. Git and Hg smell a lot of ‘ooh shiny’ syndrome and we use Subversion at work so I was sort of naturally drawn towards Bazaar. It doesn’t help that I’m a huge fan of Canonical and Ubuntu, and as that seems to be the VCS du jour over there these days I figured that this would give me a good excuse to learn it.

The moral of this story as I’m sure no one cares why I chose which VCS is to say that any of the code hosted on my CVSweb and linked to in one of my previous posts is likely to have moved to the new loggerhead interface over at repo.ub3rgeek.net. If you happen to follow me on FriendFeed or watch the home page here, you will see updates from my bazaar commits as they happen.

Fancy, eh?

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | 1 Comment »

Processing my digital photos

December 21st, 2008

I’ve finally gotten to the point where I HAD to do something about my digital photos. The ~/Photos/lumix folder has over 1100 images in it and it’s just painful loading it up anymore. Nautilus takes like 45 seconds just loading the thumbnails for the folder during which time the scroll bar is jumping all over the place making navigation impossible.

So here is how I finally made this work out in a really manageable way.
1) I wrote a Python script image-process.py that moves the image file to a place in the format of CCYY/MM_Month/CCYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS_Exif Make-Exif_Model.jpg, so a photo from my Panasonic Lumix called P1020411.JPG gets moved to 2008/12_December/2008-12-21_19-08-17_Panasonic-DMC-FZ7.jpg

2) Setup Gnome to run my script upon mounting of a device:
Under Ubuntu, navigate to System -> Preferences -> Removable Drives and Media then under the Digital Camera section I enabled “Import digital photographs when connected” and pointed the Command to my script using the %m macro and my script’s -d flag. This passes the location that Gnome mounted my camera at to my script as a directory and lets it do the rest.

3) My laptop is backed up periodically to an external hard drive, so all my photos are more or less safe, barring a catastrophic failure of both my laptop’s hard drive and the external drive.

I am hoping to get bbtrack working on my BlackBerry so I can save GPS tracks, then using the Exif Capture Date and the GPS track my image-process.py can geolocate the photos automatically. I’m sure I will post an update if I ever get that working.

I’d be interested to hear how other people solve this particular problem. Also any suggestions of a decent photo viewing application for Gnome that I can point at my directory hierarchy, that won’t go through and try to move the photos into it’s own crap like F-Spot does?

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

mutt and your gmail contacts

December 14th, 2008

I was looking for contact sync alternatives for my BlackBerry and came across an announcement that Google Sync for the BlackBerry now includes two-way contact sync. I decided that was good enough reason to start using my GMail contacts, something I never did before since I don’t use the GMail web UI very often.

Other than the BlackBerry I use mutt as a mail user agent. I have a few scripts already written to hook mutt into GMail’s outgoing mail server and Google Calendar so I figured if I was going to use my GMail contacts on the BlackBerry I should shim it into mutt’s contacts as well. In my CVS Web is a small Python script that I wrote to do just that.

If anyone finds any of this useful I’d love to hear about it. Ditto for feature requests, bug reports, or patches.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | 5 Comments »

6th photo 6th page

December 4th, 2008

6th photo 6th page

I’m such a nerd.

From Thomas Hawk, Via Benjamin Golub.

Tags: , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

Why social networks are lying bastards.

November 17th, 2008

You’ve seen it I’m sure. Myspace purports “a place for friends”, Bebo says it “is a social media network where friends share their lives and explore great entertainment” and Facebook says it “helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”

They all are lying. Granted it may be a lie of omission, but that’s a lie just the same. What they are forgetting to tell you is that they are little islands of popularity that are only as useful as the percentage of your friends that they have already tempted onto their bosom. Which means that most of us are constantly taunted to join up to one or more of them to connect to our friends, and we can’t shake the nagging feeling that we’re missing out on re-connecting with what’s-her-name, the cutie you snogged back in grade 12 and have been wondering about lately when the lights are low. And pretty soon my friends we have 2 or 3 or 12 different sites maintaining lists of our ‘friends’ with varying (infuriating in some cases) levels of overlap and omission.

Everyone claims the web 2.0 is all about communities and openness and sharing and blah blah blah lies. What we really have is a bunch of people who see what they think is a problem. And they have this grandiose idea of how to organize us and the stream of information we generate daily into useful and manageable pieces. Granted some of these apps work great, but the problem is that they all either seek to lock your entire online world into their framework, or do one thing really well… but only that one thing. The sheer hubris of FaceBook and MySpace trying to lock your friends, and pictures, and videos all up inside their walls is staggering and yet the omission of anything other than the one thing that Flickr of Vimeo does leaves them somewhat lacking. Someday, probably soon; someone will come invent something better than whatever the social network site du-jour is and users will go running abandoning their old profiles to become husks as a snake shedding its used skin. That is life in the big bad void. MySpace becomes GeoCities becomes Prodigy and the cycle repeats.

What I want to see some pervasive, accepted way of having one giant friend list that is bound to me that I take from site to site so I don’t EVER have to rebuild it (or worse: harass my friends to join the new hotness so I can ‘friend’ them.)

I don’t care what it is under the covers be it FOAF, or XFN, or some other thing that someone else invents, or hell all of them. I just want one goddamn friend list that I can take everywhere.
Granted this means something like XFN is going to have to get into bed with something like OpenID, but damnit the technology is there and wouldn’t you rather keep all these little husks of Internet identities all tied together and relevant?

I started thinking about this a little while ago and was set off by an update by jwz on his livejournal. My irritation at this phenomenon became even worse when I started to organize all the profile pages I had out there. It is getting so cluttered that most of the information out there about me is old, unloved and abandoned.

Something really needs to be done.

PS, you can follow me on:

to name a few…

Tags: ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | 1 Comment »

Edinburgh, London, and back in time to vote.

November 4th, 2008

What a whirlwind week, last Tuesday I flew from Rochester to Edinburgh to finally meet a friend from one of the IRC channels I frequent. So I landed early Wednesday morning and we spent some time wandering around Edinburgh. I can report in that in fact Haggis is actually pretty good, and in spite of what I’ve heard about the Guinness the USA gets being different from the real stuff, it’s really not.

Thursday morning we picked up the rental car, which was a pretty spiffy new Audi A4 Advant TDI (btw, the future is here folks, I got 42MPG in a wagon… gooo diesel) and promptly drove out of Edinburgh and headed south towards London. I admit that driving around the city was a bit of a white knuckle ride but once we got out on the A702 it was nothing but clear skies and beautiful countryside. We tossed on some awesome and classic tunes and bombed through the countryside zipping from classic English roadworks to classic English roadworks pausing only to eat shitty fast food at rest stops. We rolled into London at about 21:30 and checked into our hotel and flopped to sleep.

Friday we returned the rental, which taught me that London biker dudes (motor bike and pedal bike alike) have no fear at all and that the cars give exactly enough space to them and not a millimeter more. It was a bit harrowing but we made it through without any major problems. I am really glad we didn’t just fly or hop a train. After wandering around Camden a bit we scoped out the venue for the show and ate at a place called “The Diner.”

The show was amazing. It was crazy to see an electronic band pull out the stops like this. There were 2 guitars, a bass, a cellist, DJ, and flautist! Not to mention a crazy monk male dancer dude with eyes on his back, 3 go-go dancers, and a pair of costume-changing female vocalists who performed the chanting and wailing live. I’m not as much of a Shpongle fan as some in my group but I can tell you the show really impressed me. There wasn’t a single song I didn’t enjoy and it was just about 2x as thumpy and loud and insane as I’d expected. At one point during the encore they brought out a guy with a steel drum that sounded exactly like the the generic trance steel drum sample…. It was beyond amazing. The hoodie I bought says it all “I was Shpongled”

(From Wikipedia’s Shpongle article)

On October 31 2008, Shpongle played a sold out live concert at The Roundhouse venue in North London – this was reportedly only the third concert they had ever played together, although Simon Posford often plays Shpongle DJ sets. As well as Raja Ram and Simon Posford, the band featured Andy Gangadeen (drums), Nogera (percussion), Chris Taylor (bass), Pete Callard (guitar), cello and Dick Trevor (keyboards and programming); Michelle Adamson and Hari Om (voices), three dancers and for one song only Manu Delago on hang drum.

Saturday I got a taste of the official English weather. It was cold (about 5°C) and rainy. We did some more walking around Camden and I started to get sick. Later that night Stevie met up with his girlfriend and we took the tube up to London Bridge and wandered around a bit.

Sunday we got a nice day and spent it wandering around some of the more ‘historic’ parts of London. We went from the London Eye, past Parliament House, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Whitehall, and the Royal Horse guards. Then we walked up to Trafalgar Square, past Buckingham Palace, stopped to eat at Chinatown and then back to Camden. It was really awesome and I got a really neat sense of the city. There is an amazing feeling as you’re walking by monuments and buildings from ages long ago.

Monday morning we got up at 05:00, hopped on the tube at Camden, got to LHR at about 07:00, flew to JFK, chilled until 14:30 EST, then flew to Rochester arriving at about 16:00 EST. It was a whirlwind tour and I’m still trying to absorb how awesome it was. It was great to finally meet Stevie and it was really awesome to go visit the UK.

A whole bunch of pictures are up over at my Flickr page…

There’s so much more I want to do and see in the UK, so I can’t wait to go back. Also Stevie needs to come see this side of the pond now.

I’m sure there is a ton of stuff I’m forgetting, but I need to watch more of the Comedy Channel election coverage…

Tags:
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

twitterpy and lastfriends

October 21st, 2008

I keep forgetting to write something about these guys. I wrote a pair of Python scripts to watch my Last.FM and Twitter friends and pop up a little bubble when something new happens.

There are Ubuntu packages available in my PPA over on Launchpad for both of these guys that should work just fine on 8.04, and hopefully will be updated to 8.10.

For those of you not using Ubuntu, my CVS repository has the scripts themselves that you are welcome to try out.

~mernisse’s Launchpad PPA
my CVS web interface

Tags: , , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

Mutt and Google Calendar

October 20th, 2008

I’ve been meaning to throw this out there for a bit. I wrote a little python shim to connect mutt to Google Calendar. My particular use-case is as follows. I use fetchmail to connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server at work which delivers mail into an IMAP account that I check with mutt. Appointments and conference calls show up as .ics files attached to messages. I use Google Calendar connected to my BlackBerry to keep track of all the stuff I do so I need a quick and easy way to get those events out of mutt into my Google Calendar.

Enter ics-gcal.py.

I associate this script to the ics / vcs files and simply exec the attachment from within mutt. This adds it to my Google Calendar.

You can find the script in my CVS web repository.

I’d be super interested if anyone else finds this useful.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | 13 Comments »

Sirius Radio on my PS3? Yes Please!

October 3rd, 2008

So it looks like the svn version of mediatomb (which will become 0.12.0) now supports streaming PCM audio to the PlayStation(R) 3! This is super good news. So I went and updated my Python shim between Sipie and Mediatomb to output PCM.

You can get mediatomb-sirius.py from my CVS repository by visiting this url:

http://bagend.ub3rgeek.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/misc-scripts/mediatomb-sirius.py

Once I have the config sorted out, I will post more.

Edit:
I got FLAC streaming working, and shot a quick video of it in action.


Showing off Mediatomb transcoding FLAC to the PlayStation 3 from Matthew Ernisse on Vimeo.

Edit 2:
I got the sirius stuff working finally, had to overcome a few really annoying behaviours of all the bits involved, but it seems like it is working pretty well. You can head on over to the http://www.ub3rgeek.net/wp/sirius-on-the-playstation-3/ page for more details and another video.

Tags: , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | 3 Comments »

Hepatitis sucks a lot, don’t get it.

September 27th, 2008

Words to live by I guess. I find out in 3 more weeks if I’m all better and back to normal and if I am allowed to imbibe alcohol again. I am just glad I’m not yellow and in a ton of pain anymore. I am glad it cleared up in time for the rest of my travel this year, though it did screw up PAX for me pretty bad. Maybe I’ll get a chance to go again, though not next year if both China and Australia work out.

(To be clear, I’m talking about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis being an injury to or inflammation of the liver, not the viral Hepatitis A-E strains)

Tags: ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

Baby, I’m coming home…

September 22nd, 2008

I am almost done with my week here in San Francisco. It has been really good and most importantly relaxing. I got out a bit today and did the touristy stuff today down by the Fisherman’s Wharf. I took a few pictures.

Internet stalking update:

Tags: , ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

Things I demand…

September 22nd, 2008

Dear Roku / Sony
Hulu.com support now please. If the PS3 gets it first I may still buy a Roku box once NetFlix has a better selection of stream-able movies. Though if the Roku box gets Hulu first I’d buy the thing RIGHT NOW. And while I’m ranting, Sony, you still have to address all the other things I bitched about…

BBC iPlayer Guys:
I would subscribe to get access to iPlayer right now. Please figure out a way to take my money!! I would also like PS3 streaming akin to the Wii one, it shouldn’t be hard, the dude at PS3 iPlayer made it work.

Also: a pony.

Tags: ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

Relaxing in San Fran and a little play with HDR

September 21st, 2008

SFO HDR Composite It is now mid day 4 of my vacation here in San Fran and the last two days have been pretty relaxing so far. I got to hang out with mjw and jrrs a bit and got a belly full of yummy sea food and sushi for my birthday. I figure tomorrow I will do some random touristy stuff just to say I did before I have to fly out Tuesday afternoon. So far I think this is a pretty neat city if not a tad expensive but I guess most real cities are more expensive than home.

So I figured that I’d play around with taking a few pictures today while doing the relaxing thing, and the above is a 2 image ‘HDR’ composite of the view out of one of the windows of my gracious host’s apartment. I think it came out better than the 3 image version so I left the light mask off. This was taken with my Lumix DMC-FZ7 using a stack of hockey pucks as a tripod. The original image, and a larger copy of the composited version is on my flickr photostream. Hopefully tomorrow when I do the tourist thing I’ll grab a handful more snaps so I have some actual proof that I was here other than a credit card bill.

Tags:
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

Yarrr

September 19th, 2008

talk like a pirate day

That is all.

Tags: ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

I failed at Seattle, let’s try San Francisco

September 14th, 2008

So I tried to go to PAX in Seattle 2 weeks ago (the few pictures I took are at http://www.ub3rgeek.net/gallery/pax08) and ended up getting extremely ill and being basically unable to leave the hotel room the whole time. It is a testament to the Seattle Sheraton that I had as good of a time as I did, the hotel is gorgeous and the staff is extremely kind. Thankfully Tim got to go go PAX, so I expect he’ll have something posted over at midlifegamer.com. Of course by now everyone who wants to read about PAX probably has.

So the plan now is to go visit some people out in San Francisco this coming week which happens to be my birthday. I have been going through a bunch of medical tests to find out what I had over the last trip and to see if I am better, so depending on what the doctor says tomorrow we will see what happens. Hopefully he’ll clear me to travel… and clear me to drink again so I can enjoy my birthday with a bit of whisky.

So if all goes well, you can once again internet stalk me thanks to Flightaware

Wish me luck! The NetApp guys say I have to get down to Fisherman’s Wharf, I’d like to catch a show at DNA Lounge, and I hope rmance, or mjw can find me some yummy sushi.

Tags: ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | 1 Comment »

…cause I’m leavin on a jet plane…

August 27th, 2008

Internet stalk me all the way to PAX’08 thanks to @nugget and FlightAware!

0610 US/Eastern August 28th: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/TRS586
1128 US/Eastern August 28th: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/TRS11

See you guys there!

Tags: ,
Posted in life the universe and everything | No Comments »

« Older Entries