Home Automation + Gmail in Ubuntu

~2 min read

Ok, now that we have a working home automation server setup (see article 1), let’s plug in a lamp module and have it flash when our gmail arrives. First up, plug in the light module, select your house code (‘heyu info’ will tell you your house code) and an unused x10 number on the dial. Find a lamp you’d like to have flash (or turn on, or dim etc etc) and plug it into any other outlet. Turn on the lamp, you want to be sure the light is actually on before you start cursing at your x10 module. Now plug the ‘on’ light into the x10 module. Let’s try turning on the module with a heyu on A3 Where A is your house code and 3 is your module number. Voila, you should have light. a quick heyu off A3 will get us back to the off state. There are many heyu options (dimming !) to try out, but they all work in this manner. Now, let’s install gmail-notify with a sudo aptitude install gmail-notify Gmail notify is a great python script to notify you when you have gmail. We will insert an execute command into the python code (very simple) so when gmail-notify runs and we have an unread email, flash the light (or dim the light, or turn on your lava lamp, etc.)

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Installing scilab and the scilab image and video processing toolbox in ubuntu linux.

~2 min read

For some time now I’ve been into computer vision. However, much of computer vision is done on matlab, a 1000$ piece of software that doesn’t jive with my open source philosophy. Luckily, there are a number of open source alternatives. I prefer scilab, though octave is a good alternative. However, scilab has the advantage of an open source video toolbox. In this first article, I’ll show you how to setup scilab, opencv (the intel open computer vision library), and the sivp toolbox. Then we’ll verify its working by processing video from an avi file or in this case, a live webcam stream.

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Shell Script to Monitor PID cpu usage over time

~1 min read

Sometimes I feel like all the world’s problems can be solved with shell scripts. Here’s one that’s short and sweet. You give it a PID, interval, and outfile, and it keeps track of the PID given till the PID dies (or you kill the script). These values are plotted against time with gnuplot. I wrote it while keeping an eye on ‘top’ on a server. Snag it here

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Ping Rebooter

~1 min read

Ping Rebooter is a simple but useful application, basically it pings a website at some time interval if the website does not return, it uses wget to execute your cable/dsl modem’s reset string. The default reset string is: http://192.168.100.1/gscan.cgi?freq=331000000 This works for my linksys cable modem and has been tested on a few others. I find this useful

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Title Bar Scroller - Read Books on ANY application window title, and so much more!

~1 min read

This is a program I wrote about 4-5 years ago which received some popularity on various international websites and magazines. While not as popular as ssrss, it still made lockergnome and shell city if I remember correctly. You use it to scroll or appear lines of text from a book or text file (or alarm text items you set up, features!) on the current window titlebar of whatever application you are using at the time. Source code available gplv3.

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