Every American with a phone is being monitored by the NSA.

This blog is not just about technology, it is also a blog about freedom and rights. Because if you are not free then you are not free to use technology in the ways you want.  In a totalitarian regime it is illegal to communicate freely, so you can't share cool hacks with each other.  It becomes illegal to use encryption, or to program micro-controllers, except under the watchful eye of a political officer.

We are finally finding out just how far down the rabbit hole we have fallen. Last month we found out how many reporters were being electronically surveilled. https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/05/virtually-everything-government-did-wikileaks-now-being-done-mainstream-us-reporters  This month we get to find out exactly how many American Citizens are being monitored daily, and it appears that anyone with a phone is being tracked.  The EFF organization has a great write up regarding this entire issue which arrived in my inbox tonight.  The subject line begins  with two words.  "Stunned. Angry."

https://supporters.eff.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=427

This is not a Republican issue, or a Democrat issue, since the same thing has now happened under two different administrations, one of each party. This is an American issue that we should all care about.

I doubt very much that the Feds would just make Verizon hand over all their records everyday, so this must be happening with every telecom company in America. It appears that every phone call in the USA; local, state, interstate, and international, is being illegally tracked without a warrant. How many of those calls are also being listened to, authorized by a judge that will rubber stamp literally anything that crosses his desk, is anyone's guess. 

If they track who you are calling then they have a list of your friends, family, and business associates. For what purpose they need lists like this I have no idea, but the purposes that such lists have been used historically is sickening.

Low cost electric boosted covered seated bike.

Gas prices getting you down?  

I am working on an electric boosted, covered, one person seated bike.  Basically take a tandem frame style bike with a shell and add an electric motor.  Cover the bike for aerodynamics, safety, and to allow the bike to run in bad weather.

Design specification

Take one person, a book bag, and a couple of bags of groceries from home, to school, and then back home again.  Keep the person driving the bike from getting too hot or too cold, keep them dry, and be safe.  A 10 mile trip should take about a half an hour.

Aerodynamic

It is important that a design like this needs to be aerodynamic so that it will slip through the air with as little effort as possible, this allows you to use much smaller batteries and motors to maintain the speed you want. Design will have to incorporate a light weight carbon fiber shell that covers every part of the vehicle.  This shell would have to be very light weight, mostly just a single layer of carbon fiber, but with reinforcements in critical areas, and large enough windows to allow the person in the bike a clear field of view.

Insulated

About a half an inch inside the shell I would like to have a layer of silver bubble paper to reflect summer heat away from the person in the seat.  This stuff is very light weight and is great at reflecting heat.

Ventilation

There will have to be air vents that allow external air to flow through the compartment on hot days, these vents would have to be adjustable so that on colder days you can close the vents to keep the compartment warm.  The compartment has to be sealed tight enough so that the shell reinforces the frame, but enough air has to come in to keep the driver from suffocating.

Power

A small electric motor and small battery pack will supplement pedal power, not replace it.  Shouldn't even require a license plate, electric bikes that can only go 20mph don't need to be licensed.  You state laws will vary.  As you accelerate or go uphill the motor will boost the person pedalling to make it easier.  When you decelerate or go down hill the motor will brake the bike and recharge the battery.

If possible put a thin solar panel on top of the bike to recharge the battery as long as the sun is shining.  We will also be able to hook a small fan to force air through the cockpit to keep the person cool, and power that fan directly from the solar panel. The more intense the sun shine, the harder the fan will blow. 

No heater

A lightweight design with thin tires would just not be safe in the winter anyway.

Frame

The frame would have to also be a light weight welded aluminium with a heavy duty light weight floor that can handle a lot of abuse. Maybe put a thin wooden panel over the aluminium frame using construction adhesive, and then vacuum seal a carbon fiber layer on both sides of the frame, sandwiching the floor panel and frame inside a carbon fiber and epoxy shell. 

Phone Dock

Use power from the battery to recharge the phone and run a low power amp running a couple of speakers so you can listen to music or audio-blog as you ride around.  

Security

Because this bike is light enough to carry away then there has to be an external strong point to lock it to the end of a bike rack.  The compartment should also lock at a strong point.

Started programming the Google Reader Replacement.

I wrote about why I am working on this project

There is going to be a server side and a web client side of things.

On the server side I need to:

1. Query the database for the next feed to read and when.
2. Schedule the read.
3. Read the feed.
4. Store the feed so that there are no duplicates.  (what to do with updated records?)
5. Update the record to show when the feed was read.
6. Repeat.

On the web client side I need to:

• Create a login system to keep people's feeds separate. 
• Create a form that allows people to manage (add, remove, and organize) what feeds they are subscribed to.
• Create a form that allows people to view their feeds. (I'll add marking records as read later.)

One of the beautiful things about this system is that if there are a million people all subscribed to the same feed then you only have to download that feed once and store it once.  The server side will scale pretty easily.

The client side is a different story.  With each person having a different set of unread records, the more users, the more power is going to be needed to track everything.

Today, on the server side I am looking at the basics of doing the server side actions:

Using libcurl to read an rss file. 

Example code here: http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/simple.html
More examples here: http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/example.html

Using libxml2 to parse the xml in the rss file.

The web site is here: http://www.xmlsoft.org/
Example code is here: http://www.xmlsoft.org/examples/index.html

Store the records in mysql.

Example code is here:  http://zetcode.com/db/mysqlc/

Building a Media Center to work with Raspbmc hooked to TV.

Now that I have a proper media center using UPnP to play videos from a laptop computer, I want to free up that laptop again and create a much more robust solution that uses much less power and is dedicated to just sharing files on my network.

My hardware I choose to use is a now ancient Mini-ITX board by Via, called the EPIA-M.  I had bought this board 8 or 9 years ago, added a 12v powered DC-DC power block, and then threw it in a box and ignored it for all these years.  It only draws 10 watts, and has no fan or moving parts to wear out.   It has 256MB or RAM, but I am going to expand this out to 1GB.

I ran into one hold up, the built in networking had been turned off which made me pass on FreeNAS without giving it a shot at first, but when I began to install Debian, it also could not see the built in networking on the motherboard, so I knew it was a problem and was able to reboot again, change the setting and try out FreeNAS.

FreeNAS

I gave this a shot.  I had known of the system for many years and was interested in checking it out.

Pros:

• Very powerful.
• Can do just about anything and is extendable using plugins.
• Looks like once it is set up it would work for even large divisions.
• Beautiful web interface gives you access to everything.

Cons:

• Very complicated and has a steep learning curve
• Even something as simple as installing plugins is not pre-setup for the user.
• Takes a higher end system with a lot of RAM

If FreeNAS wants me as a user they need to make a version that is meant to be used on low end devices with just a little RAM.  I am a home user that just wants to serve files that are on external usb hard drives, things should just work and transmission and dnla should be built-in.

When I plug in a drive things should "just work".  The drive should be shared to the network as a windows file share and the media file tree it contains should be indexed and shared using UPnP.  Plus, the system kept crashing because evidently I need a base 6GB of RAM, plus 1 GB of RAM for each TB I wanted to serve.   I couldn't install the plug-in jail system properly and after I messed it up I couldn't modify the settings anymore.

OpenFiler

Failed to load, needed a newer motherboard than I had.

Debian

That's right, I fell back to Debian 7.0 and I got it all working in just a few hours.  Even though in some ways this is harder than just learning FreeNAS, because I already am comfortable using Debian and UNIX in general on the command line this was easy for me to get everything installed and working. 

I had to do a base install, then modify the apt-repository list to stop looking at the usb drive for packages, and added in the main Debian repository, then apt-get a bunch of packages to give me samba, minidlna, and other services I wanted to run on the box.  I just googled for help with each part in turn.  These are all just normal Debian things, and you can find a lot of info on every step.

One thing that I had always wondered how to do was to mount disks by label.

http://debian-resources.org/node/9/

And how to assign the label to a DOS disk in Debian?  Mtools!

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/how-to-change-volume-label-of-the-usb-drives-594875/

Work left to do?  Add all the USB drives so they auto mount to the right place.  Configure Samba to share all the directories read/write.

I went with mounting the drives by UUID, here is the relevant section I added to the end of /etc/fstab:

UUID=58212b6a-dc48-45e7-8e9f-1f360d765985 /media/SciFi  auto rw,user,auto 0 2
UUID=beb927ca-4da4-4fc9-b222-be343c4fec38 /media/Text   auto rw,user,auto 0 2
UUID=c7980548-7182-404b-b32d-02c5accd8963 /media/3D     auto rw,user,auto 0 0
UUID=f25eaad0-5896-499c-b476-f57ed12bd49c /media/Comedy auto rw,user,auto 0 2

At boot up this mounts 4 usb drives that are configured with either ext3 or ext4 to the same place each time.

I shared my media directory, where all the drives are mounted with the following section in /etc/samba/smb.conf :

[media] ; user="root"
   force user = root
   comment = Media Directory
   read only = no
   locking = no
   path = /media
   guest ok = yes
   public = yes

This gives full read/write access to all the drives I mounted under the media directory.  I know, I know, "oh you gave root access to these directories" but I am the only one that has access to these folders on my local network and the machine never executes anything from these folders, so no problem.

UPnP Remote Control

I found an application called BubbleUPnP that runs on my android Pad over Wifi and sits between what they call a library and a renderer.    You can even play things locally.  But the amazing thing happens when I selected the new NAS I just built as the librar and Raspbmc as the renderer, and a second later my TV was playing what I had told it to play on my pad computer. As the media plays you have full control of the player, able to pause, fast forward, change the volume and you can read the title and see where you are in the media timewise. All in all a truly amazing thing.  I did have to check a single box on the XBMC settings to advertise my Raspi as a rendering device. So now I can almost get by without having a direct link to XBMC at all.

I noticed another app that can do everything my wireless keyboard/mouse can do, which is also interesting, will have to give that a try.

3D Printed Case

Right now I am trying to find a case I can print that will fit the mini-ITX motherboard with a nice big 120mm fan for cooling of the mother board and the usb drives I plan to place on top of the case.  If I can't find one I will work on designing one that will work for me.  The board is about 17×17 cm (or 6.7×6.7 inches) wide and deep and about 3 inches tall.   Unfortunately the build place on my Replicator 2 is just 6.3 inches deep, so I am short .4 inches.  Will have to figure out how to make something work.

Physical Setup

Current setup on bookshelf until I can get it in a case.

I had to buy an extension cord and a set of orange extenders to allow me to plug in the 6 power bricks.  This is all plugged into a backup power supply.   Then I wired up the power and the usb connections to a 7 port powered hub that I was using on the laptop machine.    The beauty of this is that I can easily shut this system down and test a Raspi model A computer I am working on to act as a NAS and file sharer as well.  I am not sure how good the power supply is going to be for the mini-itx board.

Finally got a Raspberry PI to try out.

I know, I know, everyone else has had at least one of these for years now.  But I am a poor college student and couldn't afford even the $25 cost, plus the cost of a power supply, case, fast SD card, and everything else that goes into  a new computer system.  I finally got a bit of a break and was able to pick one up on Amazon.  I paid a little more than $35 for the 512MB RAM Raspi with built-in Networking, but the shipping was free, so it all evened out in the end.  And got it in less than a week.  I have not been this excited about a computer in many many years.


When it showed up I looked at the mini USB power supply and saw that it was not going to fit.  It was entirely my own fault, I saw micro USB and read it as mini USB.  I was able to pick up a 1.5 amp power supply at a local Radio Shack with the right connector to fit my Raspi.   If I could recommend a single change to make this device more standard, please change to mini usb in a future revision. So now I have to buy a few micro USB cables from monoprice.com before I buy more Raspis.

Below is the $20 wireless USB mouse/keyboard/laser pointer with illuminated keys that recharges from a normal USB mini plug. I am using this tiny keyboard to interact with the raspi and it is working surprisingly well.

I put the Raspi into a plastic case I printed in January and mounted it to the back of the monitor.

Why the Raspi?

Inexpensive to buy.
Super low power.
Easy to configure.

The drawbacks.

All external access runs through USB.
Micro usb port is not common.
A little too complex.

Inexpensive.

The $25 version will run just about anything the $35 version will run, just a little slower. Since most people already have an HDMI TV, then this device can be added for the cost of itself, a keyboard, mouse and

Raspbmc Distribution

The first distribution I tried out turns the Raspi into a media player.  It is called Raspbmc.  I have been looking for a new media player for a half a year now, since the company that I bought the last player from nuked the device with an update and then told me to buy a new one.  I blogged several times about that hideous disappointment.

Looks like the raspxbmc media player release updates itself to the very latest version from the Internet, and then compiles the latest and greatest the first time it boots. I suppose after the first boot not much will need to be updated on a weekly basis. But it sure does not lend itself to immediately playing a video and achieving satisfaction. *L*   Oh! As I am typing this, after about an hour the xbmc interface came up and it is running perfectly. 

Watching an HD episode of Doctor Who right now and it is playing full screen without any problems.  The Raspi is flawlessly playing video at 1080p. It can even play my day turns into night video in apple .mov format at 1920x1080, which has twinkling little stars in the sky that show perfectly. The only files I am having trouble playing are H.264 files in an mp4 container, which are supposed to just work. Very strange.   [ I figured out that this was my fault.  I had tried to get the MP4's  to be transcoded for my old media player.  Once I turned off transcoding in the Mediatomb config file this just started working.  Trying to figure out why flv files won't play over the network next.]

I am getting more and more impressed with this Raspbmc release. I was able to adjust the corners of the screen image to match the monitor corners, and how square a box appears on the screen to perfectly fit the image to the monitor. I have never used a media player that had this detail of customization. And you can keep watching a movie as you configure the device. Astounding.

Playing movies from the local network is perfect. Ted Talks plugin allows perfect playback. Internet movie Archive plugin has mixed results, some things play great, others just silently fail. The Apple trailer plugin just doesn't work, the videos just lag and freeze constantly.

PiMame Distro

The last distro I looked at was  the Pimame release, a game emulator release that could be the basis of a mame cabinet or the like.  It did not like the first SD card I tried, so trying another card now. Seems that the machine doesn't like some SD cards.  Need to get a few more large compatible SD cards for all the large

I got pimame, an emulator for old arcade and other gaming systems working on that Raspi.  The ROMs I have did not work using advanced Mame, but they worked fine using  Mame4All.

That tiny keyboard is not going to work for this, need to hack together a real arcade controller, perhaps hooked up wirelessly to the data pins on the Raspi. :D


Raspberry Pi Chameleon
http://www.stefanopaganini.com/raspberry-pi-chameleon-overview-and-tutorial/
http://betanews.com/2013/01/18/turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-the-ultimate-emulator/





This distro looks like it has all the old 8 bit machines emulated and includes the Mame emulator as well.  Going to give this a try tomorrow.

Other distros.

The raspi debian release feels like it is almost up to the level of puppy Linux distro in usability. I understand there are a lot more packages that can be downloaded and installed to configure it the way you want.

I want to try out the Plan 9 release as well. Have always wanted to take a look at that OS.


I always want to see what is involved in trying out the digital pins that are exposed in a big header on the board, turn on an led, maybe detect a push button closing.  

 Future plans


OK, step two is to get another Raspi and setup a server that all it does is torrent, backup, and share files with a web server, media server, and a samba file share. :D 

Got my old backpack functional again.

I have always been a fan of external frame backpacks.  This modern insistence on tiny internal frame packs is just a fad, I tell you.  I found a back pack I used when I was a teenager in my mom's garage.  Someone had removed the waist strap, rendering the pack useless, because the reason these packs work is by transferring all the weight directly to your hips and legs and supporting your back.  

New Army Surplus Waist Strap Replacement.

I found a new surplus army waist strap on Amazon for cheap, and it cinched in place with nylon webbing like it was made for that frame.  The new waist belt is much better than the original one.  Maybe next I will upgrade the shoulder straps next. :) 

Every zipper works on this pack, after being the main pack for three of us boys in our formative years.  No holes, no tears, no rips.  The aluminum tube frame was welded at each joint and it is unbowed and unbent after carrying literally tons of stuff over the years.  Amazing quality built to last.

Google Reader going away is a wake up call.

Google reader is how I have come to rely on reading web pages on the Internet.  It was my single portal page to the entire web.  I stopped "browsing the web" years ago because I could just add a bunch of news and tech sites to Google reader and then easily keep up to date on everything that was happening.  There is only three ways I get to an article on the Internet, primarily through google reader, secondly through google search and once I am on a page I might follow a link from that page. 

Do I need to worry that Google search is going to be dropped?  That Google Mail is going to return to sender?  That Google drive will just cruise on down the turnpike?  Maybe instead of just replacing Google Reader, that this is a wake up call that we need to replace Google.  Maybe this is going to motivate a large group of people to actually get something done.

The open source community needs to step up and create something that is a game changer.  Imagine a single app that brings in all your web pages, social media feeds, email, event logs on servers, essentially anything that can generate a stream of messages or events, and then filters that fire hose of information down to a manageable level, getting rid of everything you don't care to read about.  Let what you do care about the most to be easily shareable, not just on the reader service itself, but back out to all the social media sites and to groups you have created in email as well.

Configure it so that it can use many different feed readers, or just use a built in P2P model to share feeds, so that we don't have to depend on something like Google feeds again.   Store the data locally so that it is yours all the time.  I can only imagine all the plugins that people could write to do amazing things.

 I know that I am planning on working this summer on a small web app and back end RSS aggregator  that will run on my local machine to at least bring me back up to where Reader was at without the sharing part.   I'll share the progress I make on it here with you all.