Ryan – Page 23 – Ryan Schulze

Grid clicker script

April 26, 2010May 13, 2013RyanAutohotkey, Farmville, funfari

I finished up my “grid clicker” script. it is intended to simplify testing of games where you have to click certain patterns (a grid). Typical facebook games like farmville or funfari are great examples of this. just download the file (here is the sourcecode), execute it, and an eye should appear in your task bar. Double clicking on the icon in your task bar will start the script, just follow the instructions and everything should be fine.

And while I am at it: here is a spreadsheet I started for plants/trees/animals in funfari: Google online spreadsheets

Wedding & Photography

April 26, 2010April 26, 2010Ryanfotography, photos, Wedding

I haven’t posted anything here in a while. Mostly I’ve been busy preparing a photo-shoot and -documentation of a wedding of friends. As a photographer you will always notice things, when looking at the finished fotos, where you say “hmm, maybe a differnet aperature/iso/flash/exposure setting would have produced an even better result”. but all in all I’m satisfied with the results.

Various new pictures

March 20, 2010May 18, 2011Ryankarlsruhe, neuthard, photography, weingarten

Spent a day this week driving around and taking random photos ….

[album=10,compact]

Schwarzwald in winter

March 9, 2010May 19, 2011Ryanblack forrest, photography, pictures, schwarzwald, winter

A few weeks ago we were in the Schwarzwald for a few days, and since we got a fair amount of snow while we were there I took some pics. I’ve uploaded my 30 favorite here ….

[album=8,compact]

Mythtv and IR Blaster

January 24, 2010March 12, 2011Ryan2 Commentsbash, ir blaster, MythTV

We use a set-top-box as the video source for mythtv. And while this works perfectly fine, we have to manually make sure the right channel is set for what mythtv wants to record. This can turn out to being a pain at time, especially when multiple things are planned to be recorded on different channels. So I went and ordered a IR transmitter from irblaster.info to give mythtv the possibility to change channels itself.

Since a bunch of the infos I found online were a bit out dated, here are a few tips for anyone using current versions of the software (I’ve got mythtv-backend 0.22 and lirc 0.8.4a running on a mythbuntu based system when I wrote this)

Hardware is easy to set up, just plug it into a free serial port.
1st we will head over to http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/ and grab the file for our reciever set-top-box if we don’t already have them.
Then go edit /etc/lirc/hardware.conf and add the transmitter settings, these were mine:
TRANSMITTER="Skymaster_XL10" TRANSMITTER_MODULES="lirc_dev lirc_serial" TRANSMITTER_DRIVER="" TRANSMITTER_DEVICE="/dev/lirc1" TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_CONF="skymaster/XL10" TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_ARGS=""
now include the reciever settings to /etc/lirc/lircd.conf
I edited my /etc/init.d/lirc to execute the following line before starting the daemon (was needed to ensure the lirc_serial module can be loaded):
/bin/setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart none
Restart lircd and you can then start testing if transmitting codes work with irsend works. here is a little wrapper script I wrote around irsend for mythtv to use. You may have to twiddle around with the sleeps and change the $Remote to your reciever. If the sleeps are too long (-> the script takes to long to finish switching channels), then mythtv will timeout and not display live tv.

#!/bin/bash

Remote="Skymaster_XL10"

send="irsend -d /dev/lircd1 SEND_ONCE"

if [[ "$(echo $1|grep -c "^[0-9]")" = "0" ]]
then # non-numeric command
$send $Remote $1
else # numeric
for digit in $(echo $1 | sed -e 's/./&amp; /g'); do
$send $Remote $digit
sleep 1.5
done
fi
sleep 2

#!/bin/bash

Remote="Skymaster_XL10"

send="irsend -d /dev/lircd1 SEND_ONCE"

if [[ "$(echo $1|grep -c "^[0-9]")" = "0" ]]

then # non-numeric command

$send $Remote $1

else # numeric

for digit in $(echo $1 | sed -e 's/./& /g'); do

$send $Remote $digit

sleep 1.5

done

sleep 2

If everything is working fine, then go ahead and tell mythtv to use the script to change channels. This is done in the tuner card setup of mythtv-backend (mythtv-setup).