Desra Blog

Making SMS work with house alarm again. Some time ago, Eir ceased the SMS center feature, so house alarms couldn't send SMS's any more.  to make things worse, they would try, and eventually time out. Asterisk can act as a service center for SMSs, so setting up a sipura ATA to take the call from the alarm panel , convert it to sip and send it to asterisks, ends up with the SMS sitting in /var/spool/asterisk/sms I used astlinux on an alix system as my asterisks setup, and added this to the extensions.conf exten => 1234/98765,1,Verbose(Receiving SMS from ${CALLERIDNUM}) exten => 1234/98765,2,Answer exten =>  1234/98765,3,Wait(1) exten =>  1234/98765,4,SMS(sms_fixedline,as) exten =>  1234/98765,5,Hangup and made sure the call was routed to this extension. you can simple cron watching the spool directory, pick the sms and forward via an sms provider with curl ...

I recently had to find someone to service and install a fire alarm and security system.  Came across https://www.nfss.ie and they were excellent

I started using android Auto, and found that with my S8 , google maps would be inaccurate, and not update location, and display 'searching for gps' occasionally. This turns out to be the power saving feature enabled on the s8, it disables background location checks.  Unfortunately disabling power saving makes me need to find a charger in the middle of the day, and I pretty much get through a full day without needing a charger. So, I looked at how I can remedy this situation and settled with using Automate to create a workflow, which is triggered when car-mode is enabled.  This workflow then calls a tasker plugin called securetask , which you grant special perms to.  This plugin changes the power state , disabling power saving, so it fixes the problem.  when car mode is exited, it turns powersaving back on.

get radiologos here  and extract to an SD card then get the list of stations, and their PI from https://fmscan.org  , generate the list for you country. each station has a PI, which is in hex, convert it to decimal, and rename the png logo file to sid_<decemial>.png do this for each station, and store it in the logos directory on the SD card insert the SD, start the unit, and select install from the menu that pops up. vw let you download a zip of your countries logos, but you still need to rename them

You can calculate the size of your buckets with commandline tools, or using the analytics feature.  However, all of these incur charges. Alternatively you can run a ' usage report ', save it as a csv , and then do some math cat report.csv | awk -F, '{printf "%.2f GB %s %s \n", $7/(1024**3 )/24, $4, $2}' | sort -n

Time to talk about google app engine, flex , standard , php, and google cloud storage. I've been doing some experimenting using GAE to make a service like cloudinary.  It's pretty simple to do, using imagick, which is installed in GAE.  But here are some simple discoveries; 1)  GAE flex, sounds like GAE standard, but it's not.  if using php55 it's quite different.  with php72 now launched in standard, it's closer to flex, you need a front_controller, and your app.yaml is simpler 2) GAE standard scales really quickly, like to 10k instances in 1 to 2 mins.  Flex takes a LOT longer, think 30 mins 3) GAE can use imagick, imagick is not fast, and cpu intensive , fetching an image from a GCS bucket and rendering it cropped or resized is a 1-2 second operation. you could use appengines image api, but for php it's limited to getservingurl functions. unless you want to write protobuf interfaces . In python, it's way more useful, you can do all the usual t...

I have used apache bench, and more recently artillery.io tools, but it still wasn't ideal.  I came across this tool which will do a better job for basic testing https://github.com/wg/wrk