Arkadian.eu

I had a day off today and ended up spending most of it surfing. Here are some interesting sites I found:

The following site has a great dissection of the Logitech 9000 pro camera, one of the best hi-def webcams for Linux: LINK.

Nanonote: a tiny $99 laptop that can run linux but has very limited conectivity (no WiFi, no ethernet, no host USB). Interesting concept though.

Openmoko are the creators of the FreeRunner, a linux mobile phone, which is very hackable.

The new Arduino Uno has been released. LadyAda has a great page on it. I love the idea that an Arduino can easily be converted to a custom keyboard. Now I need to buy one of these new boards!

And, finally, Shapeways, a Dutch company specialising in custom 3D printing. Funnily enough, I found them through Ponoko.com .

For a while now, I have been thinking about putting together a video surveillance system at home, based on linux, webcams and python. I’m aware that out of the box systems exist, but I wanted to create something more personalised, which, let’s face it, it’s more fun!

After reading a bit online, I decided to use a command-line tool to grab frames from my webcams. There is a little program called “streamer” which allows you to save frames from the various webcams as jpegs (or videos if you like). In ubuntu type

sudo apt-get install streamer

to install it and then something like:

streamer -q -c /dev/video1 -b 32 -s 1600×1200 -o outfile.jpeg to take a snapshot of whatever dev/video1 is looking at… (look at streamer –help for more options).

My python script will be checking for new jpegs on a regular basis and will be uploading them on a remote ftp server. The complete python script will (hopefully) follow shortly.

Eli Bendersky has three interesting posts on plotting data with Python and matplotlib:
matplotlib-plotting-with-python
matplotlib-with-wxpython-guis
matplotlib-with-pyqt-guis

Thanks for sharing Eli!

With the arrival of the iPads, we’ve been changing many of our processes in order to put information on the fingertips of our senior mgmt team. Our key app right now is Dropbox and we convert most of the files to pdf.

Dropbox is a great little tool, as it enables us to update files on the fly. As it stands right now though, it is not suitable for wide corporate use for 3 reasons.

The first reason is that it doesn’t have a central admin point. For example, I can share folders with my contacts, and my contacts can share folders with others. Ideally, you need a service where access management is controlled centrally. If an employee leaves, we don’t want him/her to be able to access confidential data.

The second reason is that you cannot save the dropbox folder on the company network. To bypass the access mgmt control issue, my original plan was to set up a pc with dropbox and save the dropbox folder in one of our network drives. That would allow our colleagues to save files directly in specific folders (within the dropbox folder, saved in our network). This problem was solved by writing a simple sync script in python that synchronises various folders and files from our network with the dropbox folder which is located on a single machine. This solution turned up to be a better solution in the end as I managed to pick up a lot of files from their original network locations and sync them with the local dropbox folder, meaning that most of my colleagues kept saving their files as normal and minutes later these files would appear on the various ipads. A simple python script allowed us to avoid installing dropbox on every pc and creating an administrative nightmare for ourselves!

The third reason is that, due to the way dropbox saves files in a remote cloud, we don’t quite control our files. This can be addressed with a corporate company-owned dropbox server.

By having a single pc with drobox installed and a python script that syncs the files every couple of minutes, we created a practical configuration that allows our senior mgmt team to access the files they need on their ipads, without having to install dropbox on various machines, create accounts, share folders and create an admin nightmare for ourselves.

Yesterday, I got an iPad at work (I love my job!), to replace my overweight and ageing A5 Filofax. It’s a US import, with only 16GB and no 3G, but hey, I got it for free, so I’m definitely not complaining!

Web browsing is fantastic and the usual apple gestures make surfing very easy.

Today, to rectify the “no 3G” issue, I bought a 3G WiFi modem, Huawei E5830, aka MiFi, from 3:

This little 3G modem creates a hotspot around it, which allows my WiFi-only iPad to get online.

It’s quite small, smaller than my blackberry:

In a few days, I’ll report on whether the iPad/MiFi combination works well.

Right now I’m busy loading the iPad with apps. These are the ones I’ve loaded so far:
1. Dropbox – great app for the iPad, and the reason I got it in the first place.
2. GoodReader – because every iPad should have it!
3. IMDb
4. Now Playing – showtimes and info on films in release.
5. Skype
6. Google App – personal email, calendar, rss reader, etc, etc.
7. TouchOSC – which I’m planning on using it with Processing.
8. iSSH – SSH and VNC app.
9. Various news apps – AP News, FT, USA Today, Reuters, NPR, Boomberg.
10. Sony Pictures – great app for the Ipad, kudos to the guys at Sony.
11. Iron Man app – I was just curious.
Amazon Kindle app – not working in the UK though…
Amazon UK app – iPhone app really, looks horrible when x2…

The App Store is not working directly from the iPad, I have to download all the apps on the PC and sync them. Hopefully that won’t be a problem for too long, as the iPad gets released in the UK in a week’s time or so.

I’m really looking forward to see the ebooks that will eventually become available on the iPad as I really think that the iPad can do for books what the iPod did for music. I’d really love to see all my IT book collection saved in there!

One of the things I noticed is that the WiFi connection is a bit temperamental. Basically, to save battery, you lose the connection every time you don’t connect to the internet for a while. What I did at home and it seems to be working very well (for the past few hours) is that I allocated an IP address to the iPad, instead of relying on the DHCP server to allocate a new IP address every time the iPad needs to go online.

By the way, skype works great on the iPad, but a headset is probably recommended as it’s not exactly the smallest handset around , quite the opposite actually!

Anyway, enough said! I’m going to play with my new toys now and report back in a few days.

It came to my attention today that a workshop took place in Italy a while ago on Arduino/Ikea lamps. This was an Arduino Workshop, part of the Torino Design Week.

Event Description:
http://arduino-tdw-2009.eventbrite.com/

Video on Vimeo:
http://www.vimeo.com/8559277

Arduino Code:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1263217950/

Blog post:
http://www.alluvionemediatica.it/Blog/tabid/59/entryid/25/Default.aspx

My original Arduino/Ikea lamp post was used quite a bit. One of my photos was used on the event description
and a few code posts referenced my site. I was surprised to see that I even got a credit on the video posted at Vimeo! Thanks guys!