Posts and notes Project

A few years ago I was in the position of needing a solution to backup and sync dotfiles (configuration files for various pieces of software) across my machines.

Specifically, I had Mac computers and Linux servers, and needed a way to nicely keep these files up-to-date between them. For example, I may have spent some time crafting and tweaking files - such as my .vimrc and .tmux.conf - and needed a way of ensuring all of my devices could access the latest version of these files.

Another project I try to maintain (when I can!) is SSO Tools.

This is a simple web service that aims to help developers test their own services’ single sign-on (SSO) functionality. The motivation behind the project was that many commmercial offerings were too expensive for solo developers, or just far too complex for simple testing.

SSO Tools aims to provide a simple interface, with functionality that allows for registering identity providers (IdPs), test IdP users, and service providers (SPs). It is targeted at developers looking to quickly, yet robustly, test and iterate on their SSO setup in their applications.

I don’t tend to talk much about the projects I’m working on, but thought this would be a good opportunity to write a post about one such project - Treadl.

Treadl is a web app (and more recently and less popularly a mobile app too). It enables weavers to create and store their weaving patterns and projects online. This could be simply for personal use, or for sharing projects with others as a portfolio.

The Gemini protocol has gathered even more momentum in the few months since I last posted about it.

Its popularity is largely driven by its privacy-focused and content-oriented design. It doesn’t allow for bloated sites or resource-hungry client-side scripting. It’s a means for simply and easily accessing content that is useful to you - either by hosting a capsule yourself or by joining an existing community.

In this post I am introducing Capsule.Town - a way in which I can try and give back to the FOSS community.

A previous note about Philips Hue bulbs got me thinking that the API exposed by the bridge might be used to warn if the house lights are left on too late at night, or even if they get turned on at unexpected times - potentially for security.

I put together a simple program that periodically checks the status of known Hue bulbs late at night. If any bulbs are discovered to be powered on during such times then an email notification is sent. It runs as a systemd service on a Raspberry Pi.

I have recently posted about CENode and how it might be used in IoT systems.

Since CENode is partially designed to communicate directly with humans (particularly those out and about or “in the field”) it makes sense for inputs and queries to be provided via voice in addition to or instead of a text interface. Whilst this has been explored in the browser (including in the previous Philips Hue control demo), it made sense to also try to leverage the Alexa voice service to interact with a CENode instance.

In a previous note I discussed CENode and briefly mentioned its potential for use in interacting with the Internet of Things. I thought I’d add a practical example of how it might be used for this and for ’tasking’ other systems.

I have a few Philips Hue bulbs at home, and the Hue Bridge that enables interaction with the bulbs exposes a nice RESTful API. My aim was to get CENode to use this API to control my lights.

I recently blogged about Nintendo Hotspot data and mentioned it could be more usefully consumable in a native mobile app.

As such, I wrote a small Android app for retrieving this data and displaying it on a Google Map. The app shows nearby hotspots, allows users to also search for other non-local places, and shows information on the venue hosting the zone.

The app is available on the Play Store and its source is published on GitHub.

In my last post I discussed methods for streaming music to different zones in the house. More specifically I wanted to be able to play music from one location and then listen to it in other rooms at the same time and in sync.

After researching various methods, I decided to go with using a compressed MP3 stream over RTP. Other techniques introduced too much latency, did not provide the flexibility I required, or simply did not fulfill the requirements (e.g. not multiroom, only working with certain applications and non-simultaneous playback).

Back in March, I emailed Magic Seaweed to ask them if they had a public API for their surf forecast data. They responded that they didn’t at the time, but that it was certainly on their to-do list. I am interested in the marine data for my Gower Tides application.

Yesterday, I visited their website to have a look at the surf reports and some photos, when I noticed the presence of a Developer link in the footer of the site. It linked to pages about their new API, with an overview describing exactly what I wanted.

Over the last few months, I’ve started to use Weka more and more. Weka is a toolkit, written in Java, that I use to create models with which to make classifications on data sets.

It features a wide variety of different machine learning algorithms (although I’ve used the logistic regressions and Bayesian networks most) which can be trained on data in order to make classifications (or ‘predictions’) for sets of instances.

This is just a quick post to mention that I have made the source for the Gower Tides app on Google Play public.

The source repository is available on GitHub. From the repository I have excluded:

• Images & icons - It is not my place to distribute graphics not owned or created by me. Authors are credited in the repo’s README and in the application.
• External libraries - The app requires a graphing package and a class to help with handling locally-packaged SQLite databases. Links to both are also included in the repo’s README.
• Tidal data - The tidal data displayed in the app has also been excluded. However, the format for the data stored by the app should be relatively obvious from its access in the source.

Last weekend I went to CFHack Open Sauce Hackathon. I worked in a team with Chris, Ross and Matt.

We started work on eartub.es, which is a web application for suggesting movies based on their sound tracks. We had several ideas for requirements we wanted to meet but, due to the nature of hackathons, we didn’t do nearly as much as what we thought we would!

A few posts back, I talked about the development of an Android app for tide predictions for South Wales. This app is now on Google Play.

If you live in South Wales and are vaguely interested in tides/weather, then you should probably download it :)

The main advantage is that the app does not need any data connection to display the tidal data, which is useful in areas with low signal. In future, I hope to add further features, such as a more accurate tide graph (using a proper ‘wave’), surf reports, and just general UI updates.

I’ve taken to writing most of my recent presentations in plain HTML (rather than using third-party software or services). I used JavaScript to handle the appearance and ordering of slides.

I bundled the JS into a single script, js/scriptslide.js which can be configured using the js/config.js script.

There is a GitHub repo for the code, along with example usage and instructions.

Most configuration can be done by using the js/config.js script, which supports many features including:

I’ve always been interested in the development of smartphone apps, but have never really had the opportunity to actually hava a go. Whilst I’m generally OK with development on platforms I feel comfortable with, I’ve always considered there to be no point in developing applications for wider use unless you have a good idea about first thinking about the direction for it to go.

My Dad is a keen surfer and has a watch which tells the tide changes as well as the time. It shows the next event (i.e. low- or high-tide) and the time until that event, but he always complains about how inaccurate it is and how it never correctly predicts the tide schedule for the places he likes to surf.