Google Calendar

Ryan

After a friend told me about how useful google calendar is (I had heard of it before, just never looked at it), I finally went and registered at google to have a look myself. For a web application the gui is pretty good. What I liked most about it, is that I can easily synchronize the entries in google calendar with my calendars in thunderbird or my cell phone. For my cell phone I use MyPhoneExplorer (already had that installed, I use it to write SMS via a bluetooth connection to my computer). For thunderbird I use to addons. The first is a calendar addon called Lightning since thunderbird has no calendar out-of-the-box. The second is an addon written to sync between google calendar and thunderbird called Provider.

Everything was pretty straight-forward to setup, took me less than half an hour to find information, get everything installed and running smoothly.

Links:
Google Calendar http://www.google.com/calendar/
Provider https://addons.mozilla.org/de/thunderbird/addon/4631
Lightning https://addons.mozilla.org/de/thunderbird/addon/2313
MyPhoneExplorer http://www.fjsoft.at/de/downloads.php

Streaming a webcam over narrow bandwidth

Ryan

Just some random lego that I whipped up this week. Wanted to stream a webcam into the internet using a minimum of upstream bandwidth (that’s the reason I stream it to a server with a fast connection, where it is provided to clients). I probably could have used a higher fps oder quality, but I wanted to find a solution that didn’t require any additional software to be installed clientside (and this solution works over proxies).

Client side: grab video output from /dev/video0, put a timestamp in the picture, and shove it to the IP 10.11.12.13 (not really).

vlc v4l:/dev/video0:size=320×240 –sub-fps 3.0000 –v4l-fps 3.0000 –sout-transcode-fps 3.0000 \
–sout “#transcode{vcodec=WMV1,vb=60,scale=1,sfilter=time,fps=3}:\
duplicate{dst=display,dst=std{access=rtp,mux=ts,dst=10.11.12.13:1234}}” \
–noaudio –no-sout-audio –time-format %Y-%m-%d,%H:%M:%S \
–time-position 10 –time-color 16777215 –time-size 12 &

Server side : grab the stream from the cam (no options needed since we sent it to the default port 1234) and provide it as mms:// on port 8080 (I choose mms:// since all windows computers have the windows media player)

vlc udp: –sout ‘#standard{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,dst=10.11.12.13:8080}’

Synchronizing files over the Internet – version 2

Ryan

A while back I posted my solution for Synchronizing files over the Internet. And even though it works, it is still way too slow for me (it takes a god awful long time to scan the server side files for changes). So I started my search for a faster solution again. While googling for a windows program that does the same thing rsync does for Unix I found something better: a Windows version of rsync. This isn’t one of those boring cygwin compiles of rsync that burdens you with the whole cygwin side effects (well, probably it IS just a cygwin compile, but the frontend takes away any “residue” of that).

Anyway, now I’ve got a rsync server running under Linux on the Internet, and my clients have the Windows rsync client that gets run automatically every 30 min. It’s simply blazing fast since the server and clients can independently calculate any changes in files and the network (bottleneck) is just used to transfer what was changed in the files (and minimal file information).

fasting

Ryan

Every year a few of us at work have a little bet going on … The 6 weeks between carnival and easter we fast. To sum it up: forbidden is everything yummy. No chocolate, no snacks, no sweets, no cake or cookies, nothing sweet from the bakery, and if you are right now thinking “what about ….” yeah, that’s probably forbidden too.
So now comes the fun part, if one of us gets weak and eats something that is not allowed, he (or she) has to eat a slice of bread with Vegemite. If you don’t know what Vegemite tastes like: it is probably the most disgusting thing ever mass produced on earth. Sorry @ any Aussies that might read this, but your taste buds are defiantly borked, must be some genetic defect that allows you all to eat it without your body going into “self preservation mode” and trying to eject it again.

Server downtime

Ryan

The  server hosting this page will have a slight downtime tonight between midnight and 7:00 am. I’m having the RAM upgraded to 2GB since the swapfile has been doing a lot of work lately (my mysql databases have grown pretty large and when I orderd the server a few years back 512MB seemd to be enough ;))