Mystery button

I am very impressed with my Diesel Toyota Avensis.
It may be 4 years old, but I am getting over 60mpg which is a massive improvement over the A3 that I have been driving for the last 7 years.

The only thing that bugs me is... what is this button for ?

Met Office Weather on Roku Soundbridge

The MOWeather script can be downloaded here

Why isn't Tools4Roku good enough for you ?

- well it is very good, and if you have a more advanced Soundbridge, I'd recommend heading over to Juergen's website and downloading his script.

However, my M400 can't display pictures and has a very small screen. I also found the RokuUI module a little clunky and wanted to create an easier interface to send display updates - hence the RokuLCD module.

Note that the RokuLCD module requires the RokuUI module as it inherits and uses the RokuUI methods. For more information on RokuLCD, the documentation is encapsulated within the module and can be accessed via a tool such as pod2html, or viewed here.

Installation

You're going to need something that runs Perl - whether it's a PC, a MAC or some other piece of hardware.
That box will also require the Net::Telnet package and wget (available for windows at http://www.gnu.org).

The following settings are user configurable:
$rokuIP	your Soundbridge's IP address
$displaytype	your Soundbridge's model - 400 or 500 (anything else will default to 400)
$pause	the number of minutes to wait before displaying weather
$refresh	the number of minutes to wait before refreshing data
$WebAddress	the Met Office URL for your area - see below.

To get the WebAddress (in the UK only), go to http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/

Choose UK from the dropdown weather menu (under the Met Office logo)...



then "UK, region and location forecasts" under the Forecast heading...



then type in your postcode:



Copy the URL within single quotes into the script.

The MOWeather script can be downloaded here

Weather on Roku Soundbridge I

The Roku Soundbridge is a truly cool toy - even if you only use it for listening to internet radio hooked up to your stereo.

I've got tons of equipment that tells me the time, so I decided to use Juergen Gluch's Tools4Roku script to show the weather forecast when it is not in use.

Problem is, he's got a pretty fancy model that displays pictures, whereas I have the M400 with its simple 2x16 character LCD.

Once I got started butchering his Perl script, I started to see that the M400 really could benefit from a simpler interface than the one offered by the RokuUI Perl module (written by Michael Polymenakos). I stress that there's nothing wrong with RokuUI, it just felt that a few extensions could improve its use for the M400.

Firstly, I had a play with the marquee feature - the script would move on to the next item before a line had been completely displayed, so I had to figure out a good length of time to display the text dependant on the length of the text. After a bit of experimentation, I found that 5 seconds for every 25 characters seemed to work.

  $duration = (int(((length($text))+24)/25))*5;

  $rc = $self->msg(text => "$text",
                   keygrab  => 1,
                   mode => 'marquee',
                   duration => $duration);

However, marquee was too restrictive as it only be uses the top line, allowing access to only 16 of the meagre 32 characters.

A new marquee is needed!


To Be Continued...

Connecting a Southern Electric BetterPlan Monitor to an Ethernet Network

I signed up for the BetterPlan product from Southern Electric and was intrigued by the RJ45 port on the underside of the monitor that they supplied.


Curiosity finally got the better of me and I connected it to my router via an ethernet cable...


The display mostly cleared, and the temperature reading appeared to drop by 10 degrees, then slowly recover.


I fiddled with some of the buttons, et voila - factory reset !

A month's worth of data lost and the monitor couldn't contact the base station. I think that the temperature refers to the radio channel, but it was easier just to reset the base station as described in the manual.



Nothing ventured...

Installing Linux 1

For as long as I can remember, Explorer on our PC inexplicably crashes or fails to refresh when I delete files (I have to hit F5 to see whether the file has really been deleted), but the computer has been in too much use or I haven't had the time to reinstall...

...until now.

Being an incorrigible techie, I am going to try out Linux.

The biggest hurdle is going to be making sure that it is wife-friendly.

I've decided on Ubuntu as it seems to be popular and not aimed at propellor-heads.

My wife needs to be able to type and read documents in Polish, English, German and Italian - this is relatively easy to set up in WindowsXP and MS Office.

She also needs access to the excellent iFinger dictionaries that we have bought. I suspect that this will be a major stumbling-block.

Since I am not brave enough to just over-write the home PC, I have a spare P3 that is going to be the guinea pig...

UDP Flood to Host

I've looked at the earlier posts and they're way too negative.
The world is too negative already without my help.

Anyhow, I keep getting this error on my 3Com wireless router:
2007.08.29 20:58:33 **UDP Flood to Host** 192.168.a.b, 1024->> 192.168.c.d, 1000 (from ATM Outbound)

The first address is my Dreambox. I do not recognise the second address - it's not on the same network.

Who or what is the dreambox trying to contact ?

To Be Continued...

...Continued:

The problem is in /var/tuxbox/config/newcs.xml
under <debug>
I need to remove udp from <output>console,tcp,udp</output>
as the host is set to: <udp_host>192.168.0.100</udp_host>

- Problem solved !

First Post

OK, here goes - my first post. I guess that I should introduce myself and what I aim to accomplish. My name is Ed, and I am interested in techie bits around the home.

For my first few posts, I think I'll be focusing on VOIP and Satellite TV. I have a Dreambox DM500 satellite receiver which is a cute little linux box linked to a cheap Maplin LAN Disk to act as a PVR. At some point I would like to have another go at setting up a MythTV box to do the whole PVR thing, but I ran into problems and out of time when I was looking into this last year.

On the VOIP side, our phone is plugged into a Grandstream HandyTone 488 - this means we can make cheap international calls without needing to switch the PC on or mess about with proprietory systems.

I used to have the HandyTone 486 - this was a slightly simpler unit which had a far better pass-through when needing to use the landline. I may just have been unlucky with this box though. Either way, they have reduced our phone bill dramatically (my brother-in-law has the 486), and my wife can happily natter on for hours without us needing a second mortgage to pay off BT.

The (dis ?)advantage of the HandyTone is that it's not tied to a specific provider, you can just sign up with a company and alter the settings on the box to reflect this.