Mark Gibbs
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Mark Gibbs
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It’s time to rein in social media services
If you run a social networking service then the one thing you don’t want to be considered to be is a publisher. As a publisher, you become responsible for whatever your users care to post which means when they post something that’s illegal in any way, you are as liable as the poster to be prosecuted. On the other hand, as a “platform”, where no editorial control is exercised, a social media service is only obliged to act on content when they received a court order or a DMCA takedown notice. Pixabay This distinction between being a publisher and a platform is crucial to the major social media services because the cost of vetting and policing user-generated content would be prohibitively expensive even if it were possible (every minute, Twitter generates 350,000 tweets while in the same window 510 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Float Shelf: An elegant way for Apple users to clean up their desktops
I love my iMac. There’s something so elegant and practical about the design and, as a result, many companies have attempted to come up with products that fit the Apple aesthetic but, sadly, most fail. Now, way back in 2012 in a roundup of Kickstarter projects I wanted to get my hands on, I covered the Hand Stylus, a beautifully designed pen-style stylus for tablets that is still my favorite tool for drawing on an iPad. Designed by Steve King, the Hand Stylus was the first of a series of products from his company, Prism Designs, and the company’s latest product, the Float Shelf, echoes the whole Apple look and feel as well as being really useful. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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dweet.io: A simple, effective messaging service for the Internet of Things
In my last post I discussed Freeboard, a powerful, polished, open source Web dashboard and mentioned that Bug Labs, the creators of Freeboard, also offer a very interesting Internet of Things messaging service called dweet which we’ll look at today.Now, there are many messaging services (for example MQTT) that can be used by IoT applications but few that are really simple and free as well; dweet is, indeed, simple and free though there is also an inexpensive enhanced level of dweet service we’ll get to later.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Freeboard, web dashboards made easy
Amongst all of the things in our digital lives there’s one that’s increased exponentially over the last few years: Status data. Even though many services and devices are highly reliable we still need to keep an eye on everything so we need to monitor our network connections for availability and throughput, our servers and web apps for status, our log files for errors, our sales systems for orders, our trouble ticket systems for backlogs … the list grows every day and because each data source is a silo, we wind up with a ridiculous number of isolated status reports to routinely check . What we need is a dashboard to integrate all of our data sources.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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7 Linux command line tools you didn’t know you need
Off to workImage by PixabayThe Linux world offers an incredible range of free and open source tools to do everything you can think of and lots of things you probably haven’t ever thought of. In this roundup we highlight seven command line utilities you probably haven’t run into before and we’ve got everything from monitoring file system events to running re-attachable ssh sessions to printing banners.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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What’s in a Raspberry Pi name? How to rename your RPi under Raspbian
A common task after setting up Raspbian-based Raspberry Pi systems is to change the machine’s name (the hostname) because it will, by default, be set to "raspberrypi".While this may not be an issue if you have only one RPi on your network, for anyone developing Internet of Things (IoT) systems where there are multiple RPi’s, it would obviously be desirable to give them more useful hostnames. You can change the hostname temporarily using the hostname command (note that you must use sudo otherwise the command will fail) but, once you reboot, the name will revert to what it was previously set to and what we usually want is to change the hostname permanently. There are a number of ways this can be achieved including using the hostname command in a shell script at startup which could perhaps be useful if you need a dynamically defined hostname but the method most often cited is by editing the hosts file, thusly:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Using the Raspberry Pi to thwart the creepy clown menace
Like me, I suspect that you have been, in turns, amused and puzzled by the recent outbreak of creepy clowns. But should you doubt the significance of this weirdness, realize that it’s not only a United States phenomena, it’s global! TIME just published an article titled The Creepy Clown Craze Is Now Taking Over the World while The Verge tried to be sort of rational with The 2016 clown panic: 10 questions asked and answered. But no matter how much the media deny it, this is a serious thing, people. You thought the zombie apocalypse was a big deal? The clownpocalypse could well be Trump-sized, as in yuuuuuuggggggge. But fear not, dear reader, I have the answer as to how we can stay safe from marauding clowns; it’s a device called the Clowntector, an early warning system to spot and locate clown activity so professional, anti-clown professionals can do their sacred duty.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Building a Raspberry Pi-powered Barkometer, Part 4
In Part 3 of my epic series “Building a Raspberry Pi-powered Barkometer”, I covered how to capture audio using the arecord command and how I’d discovered that I got better sound out of an old USB webcam than the fancy-schmancy (but very cheap) USB sound card I started out with. I wound up in Part 3 collecting 60-second sound files in WAV format in a subdirectory on the Raspberry Pi, each named for the sample’s start time (e.g. 2016-09-07-04-42-27.wav).We need to get these files off of the RPi so we can analyze them. In theory, this could be done on the board but for now we’ll FTP them to another machine for analysis. So, to get the recordings to somewhere we can slice and dice them, we’re going to use ncftpput, an FTP utility included the ncftp package. To install ncftp we'll run the following command on the RPi command line (as always, when installing a new package, you should run sudo apt-get update first):To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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LXLE: A Linux distro to give new life to old hardware
I’ll bet that somewhere, perhaps at home and most likely at work, you’ve got some old hardware lying around. What to do with it? It still works but what’s it running? Windows XP? Vista? Windows 7 Starter or Home Basic?Yep, you’re stuck on some old version of Windows but moving that machine up to a newer version of Windows could be tricky ‘cause one or more of those old graphics cards and printer drivers have probably have fallen out of the update cycle. Even if those subsystems are still available, you’ll still have a problem as the newer OSs' are pretty much guaranteed to suck the life out of old processors with the result that performance and therefore usability will be marginal at best. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Building a Raspberry Pi-powered Barkometer, Part 3
In the last two parts of the Barkometer, which is my IoT project to prove that my dog is not a barkoholic, I discussed the hardware and my problems with getting a clean recording. It turns out, much to my irritation, that the Sabrent USB 2.0 External 2.1 Surround Sound Adapter was the problem all along. But before I discuss the hardware problems, let me explain how to record sound on a Raspberry Pi …The subsystem of Raspbian that deals with sound is called the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). ALSA is a huge, complex project with support for an incredible number of sound cards and is basically death by features. It handles everything from single channel recording (what I’m trying to do) to generating tones, white noise, and all sorts of test signals, to playback of multi-channel audio. Truly a massive engineering feat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Eero, my Wi-Fi hero
Getting really good Wi-Fi coverage is hard in most buildings unless you can place your access point in the center of the building and the building doesn’t have lots of metal in it to distort and attenuate the signal. A cheap solution is to use a range extender to improve the reach of your Wi-Fi but, unfortunately, many of these products use a single radio to repeat the signal which results in reduced bandwidth. There is, however, a better way: Eero, a company that’s been shipping their eponymously named product for just over a year, have the best solution I’ve tested so far. The eero system (I must note here that the company and devices are named after the architect Eero Saarinen, famous for his clean, sophisticated design aesthetic, and Eero writes the device’s name in the style of e.e. cummings: all lower case, thus “eero”) creates a mesh network, each node having two radios so that they can send and receive simultaneously using adaptive routing to maximize throughput. The product really is nicely designed with the same kind of polished look and feel that characterizes Apple’s products (in fact, the design strikes me a much like the Continue reading
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Eero, my Wi-Fi hero
Getting really good Wi-Fi coverage is hard in most buildings unless you can place your access point in the center of the building and the building doesn’t have lots of metal in it to distort and attenuate the signal. A cheap solution is to use a range extender to improve the reach of your Wi-Fi but, unfortunately, many of these products use a single radio to repeat the signal which results in reduced bandwidth. There is, however, a better way: Eero, a company that’s been shipping their eponymously named product for just over a year, have the best solution I’ve tested so far. The eero system (I must note here that the company and devices are named after the architect Eero Saarinen, famous for his clean, sophisticated design aesthetic, and Eero writes the device’s name in the style of e.e. cummings: all lower case, thus “eero”) creates a mesh network, each node having two radios so that they can send and receive simultaneously using adaptive routing to maximize throughput. The product really is nicely designed with the same kind of polished look and feel that characterizes Apple’s products (in fact, the design strikes me a much like the Continue reading
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Down with idiotic disclaimer footers and dumb surveys!
How often do you receive an email message with a footer like this: The contents are not to be disclosed to anyone other than the addressee. Unauthorised recipients must preserve this confidentiality and should please advise the sender immediately of any error in transmission. This gem of pseudo-legal nonsense is from a message that I did not solicit and is the work of eDigitalResearch.com at the behest of ”The Expedia Customer Experience Team." At some point, someone in either or both organizations must have thought this footer was necessary which is curious because the serious, weighty, highly private content in the message was a customer satisfaction survey addressed to me. Was this, you might be wondering, a very personalized survey with, perhaps, sensitive, personal data included? Nope, and here, at the very slight risk of their dogs of law snapping at me, is the message that had the above footer appended:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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What to do when Verizon won’t close your email account
Way back, in the mists of time, when we were all much younger and the world was a brighter, happier place — almost a year ago — I published a piece on Verizon’s impressively terrible e-mail service: Why Verizon's email service sucks and what to do about it. But wait! There’s more making it even suckier! Reader “D C”, commenting on the post a few days after publishing, noted that: Verizon also blocks POP access from outside the US. So while I'm traveling, I'm not able to get my personal email. They disclose this nowhere on their site, nor do most of their support people seem to understand this policy. Pretty absurd.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Building a Raspberry Pi-powered Barkometer, Part 2
In the first part of this project I discussed the goal, to wit, to document and quantify how often my dog barks, and discussed the hardware I planned to use. One component I neglected to mention was the Edimax N150 Wi-Fi Nano USB Adapter which, after some experimentation, I discovered was a problem when the USB sound card was in an adjacent USB port because every sound sample I captured started with a burst of noise lasting 30 to 75 seconds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Building a Raspberry Pi-powered Barkometer, Part 1
I recently had a visit from my local animal control department. A youthful, uniformed guy rang the doorbell and handed me a letter. He told me that there had been a complaint from a neighbor (he, of course, was not at liberty to reveal the identity of the neighbor) about my dog barking. This was unexpected because my dog, Harvey (he’s an Australian Shepherd), doesn’t bark that much and when he does, it’s usually just a couple of midrange yelps. He mostly barks when he exits the back door (he always assumes that there’s some critter that needs to be dealt with) and occasionally, if the birds dare to land on our trees, he'll shout a few times but even then, it’s a brief protest rather than a drawn out rager. I’d argue that other neighbors' dogs are far noisier than my dog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The discerning nerd’s guide to Raspberry Pi hardware (2016 mid-year edition)
HardwareImage by Mark GibbsIn my "Ultimate Guide to Raspberry Pi Operating Systems" (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) I listed pretty much every noteworthy operating system and OS variant available for the Raspberry Pi family of single board computers. But what of the hardware all this OS goodness runs on? It's not like there's just one Raspberry Pi board. So, if you don't know your Model A from your Zero from your generation 3 Model B, this is the guide for you.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IoT Engineering Tip: Simplifying SSH Host ECDSA Key Checking
Those of you new to Internet of Things (IoT) engineering and using boards such as the Raspberry Pi will probably have come across an irritation: Every time you wipe the operating system on your IoT device and then try to use the Secure Shell (SSH) to access it, SSH will complain with something along the lines of:RedQueen:~ mgibbs$ ssh [email protected]@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Machine learning and forgery
There’s no doubt that pretty much everything humans do can be sliced, diced, and replicated by algorithms so it’s not surprising that recent work by Tom S. F. Haines, Oisin Mac Aodha, and Gabriel J. Brostow, researchers at University College London, has resulted in the fall of yet another bastion of being human: Handwriting. How did they do it? Machine learning.Their paper, called "My Text in Your Handwriting," describes software that semi-automatically analyzes a sample of a handwriting, then generates whatever text you want in what looks like the identical style of the original handwriting sample. UCL’s press release explains:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microduino mCookie; a platform for experimenting with the Internet of Things. Great idea but …
If you’re experimenting with the Internet of Things, you now have a huge range of platforms to choose from. Many of these platforms are essentially bare boards and hooking up sensors often requires adding breadboards, breaking out the soldering iron, and down and dirty wiring. While there’s nothing actually wrong with any of this as a way to experiment and develop ideas, it’s less than ideal where getting quickly from a concept to a working device is the goal. So it was that Microduino’s mCookie system was designed to make IoT experimentation fast and easy as well as inexpensive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here