March 11th, 2010
After a long period, since Grace moved into her present bedroom, so probably about four years, I’ve finally got my CCTV system running again. This is based in a software package called ZoneMinder – and it allows you to toe up a bunch of video cameras to a PC and do all the monitoring and movement detecting you want – with alerts, time-stamps and the ability to manage and view from any net connected browser.
I have an eight port input card, which cost a fortune originally, and as I no longer run a power hungry file server, I fitted it into a Mini-ITX box. It’s running Ubuntu 8.04 as that’s about the most recent thing that will run (without recompiling a kernel) in the C3 mobo as the Via processor doesn’t have the mov instruction. Probably unsurprisingly, it runs quite well despite the lower specified board in use for this application. I’ve run a length of CAT5 from the point in the loft where the original co-ax cables terminated into the new study and connected a four way BNC/CAT5 balun at each end. This seems to work well enough for monitoring purposes.

Video Feeds at Sefton Villas
I’m collecting four feeds (the fifth, an IP camera, makes the system reboot, so it’s not presently included) – one of which is a nest-cam mounted in a box on the side of the shed. At last, a blue tit has started using the box – as yet only at night to sleep – and this is probably because we have remounted it in a better position, now north facing, on the new shed. The picture accompanying this post is a montage of the feeds, including nightime Front Garden and Back Garden views and of the little bird snoozing this evening. Grace has named him(?) Albert.
Posted in zoneminder | Tags: electronics, nestcam, set-up, zoneminder | No Comments »
March 7th, 2010
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March 2nd, 2010
A couple of Linux related activities in the first part of this week. Firstly, I’ve got my web->SMS page back up and working, so I can now send SMS messages from anywhere with web access. Hardly novel, these days, but when I first built a system like this for the bank I worked at then, it was one of those little occasions where Linux wormed its way into an organisation. That must have been in about 1997 or ‘98 I guess. (It was also about the same time I created the first effective search engine for the organisation using HTDig on Linux as well.)
All went well re-creating the set-up, except I wanted to use a GSM modem that actually had an FXO port on so I could tie it up to my Asterisk PABX as well for voice calls direct into a mobile network. Despite much fiddling, the Psitek modem was so old as to have an antiquated subset of the AT command set and it was too much effort to make it work SMSTools (although, having the source, I did recompile it a few times with some commands adjusted) – and which, by he way, is now at version 3.x under a new maintainer. Once I used the more modern (only just, though!) reliable Falcom GSM modem it worked a treat.
I’ve also updated and added to my entries in the Linux Counter, having been reminded of it by a thread in the Surrey Linux User Group mailing list. First registered there in about 2002.
Lastly, I’ve transplanted my eight port video card (only four ports of it though) into one of the Mini-ITX workstations, so perhaps later this week I’ll see if I can resurrect ZoneMinder and get the NestCam back in operation soon.
Posted in Asterisk, Linux | Tags: htdig, linux counter, nestcam, sms, zoneminder | No Comments »
February 28th, 2010
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February 26th, 2010
Much, well a little, excitement on the way to work this morning – the River Mole at Betchworth had flooded the road, both sides of the bridge, so the Landy was the ideal vehicle to drive through. Sadly, though, it was only about a foot deep – so no problems at all, and no other cars seemed to be having any problems.
The water had subsided by the time I came home in the evening – but the weather forecast suggests that there might be more rain on Sunday so perhaps there will be another chance after that. Hope so!
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February 22nd, 2010
Working from home today, so I needed to set up Citrix on my Linux desktop – which I’ve just rebuilt from a selection of parts from other hosts lying around in the study (including replacing the HDD which had a SMART uptime of more than 5 years – it used to be in a a server).
Anyway, after downloading the ICA client tgz file and failing miserably to get that to work, I looked around for more information. As with the Mac (which was a problem when the snow happened) there’s a newer bit of client software, so down the wire that came, and as an RPM should have been easy to install. A quick rpm -ivh did the trick. First step was then to disable a couple of font files which stopped it launching at all (/usr/lib/fonts/cjkuni-uming/* were the culprits). Logging in with the web interface to the office systems, click on the terminal services icon – and wham – a message saying I’d not chosen to install the AddTrust External CA root certificate.
Well – fortunately that existed in the Firefox setup – so a quick export from FF and copy in to the ICA certs folder and It Worked!
It’s still pretty awful – I can’t seem to adjust the screen size for the client window, so I’m working in a small (scaled down) 1024×768 sort of screen. At least, though, I can actually work.
Posted from GScribble.
Update: Inorder to use the wfmgr.bin utility to manage the citrix onnections I also had to symlink /usr/lib/openmotif/libXm.so.4 into /usr/lib (although there’s probably a better way of doing it). Now the session manager works I seem to have more control of window sizes. Phew!
Posted in Work | Tags: citrix, icaclient, Problems, root certificates, Work | No Comments »
February 21st, 2010
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February 14th, 2010
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February 10th, 2010
Today saw the long awaited arrival of an Arduino starter kit. Ordered from oomlout a couple of days ago it’s arrived in good time, and made a great impression.
The kit itself is neat, tidy and very well presented in a plastic compartment box – so no cause for untidiness or losing anything – together with a great little guide to getting started. The guide, as well as some handy introductory material about the kit, programming and electronic components. After that each page takes you through constructing a small experiment – working up in complexity and using all the components in the kit.
I chose to install the IDE on my eee 1000H netbook rather than my desktop as it had a much more up to date Ubuntu installation which met the requirements without any further hassle.

Arduino flashing a LED
I started with the first example – to make a LED blink – and discovered how case sensitive the sketch seems to be – but it was easy to work out where I was wrong from the way it debugged during the compile and highlighted the offending line.
A very quick upload later and the LED was blinking merrily away. So easy to change the mark/space ratio by altering the delays in the loop and uploading again. How easy is that?
I see much time to be spent playing and learning how to get the best from this. Very satsifying indeed.
Posted in Arduino, Radio and Electronics | Tags: Arduino, electronics, hack | No Comments »
February 7th, 2010
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