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Recently, an Android version of Winamp was released and included in its feature list was very useful wireless syncing with the Windows version of Winamp. Unfortunately, my file server at home doesn’t run Windows and Winamp under Wine is an unstable mess, so attempting to use that feature was out. Like a good Linux user, I didn’t take this lying down – we don’t sit around like Windows users waiting for someone to build the solution for us, we cobble something together using tools already available! What I decided to do was to emulate the mechanism that I came up with when I built my Car PC. Basically, the core of wireless syncing in the Car PC was rsync, combined with a little bit of logic to get a list of music track locations to pull over. By offloading some of that logic onto the server, this seemed possible.

First, I installed an rsync app for Android and tested it out. Rsync backup is just a front end for rsync, which is perfect because it lets you use all the normal rsync options, allows public key authentication (so you never need to enter a password) and displays rsync’s output to a log window. I wanted to pull files from my server so in my rsync profile I selected “rsync in reverse” and added the command line options “-vHrtDL --chmod=Du+rwx,go-rwx,Fu+rw,go-rw --no-perms --progress --partial” most of which is the default for a new profile, but I added:

• -L, to follow symlinks
• --progress, to display file transfer progress
• --partial, to allow file transfer resuming

Android won’t know any of the new music files have been added yet, so they won’t show up in any music players (which all look up available tracks in the built-in Android media database), so you need to install something like SDrescan to run after the files have copied over which will magically make them visible in the music app of your choice.

That’s the phone side sorted out, I just need something sensible to point it at – I don’t want rsync recursing over my entire music collection wirelessly, it would take ages.

On the server, I’m running the (somewhat ageing) Firefly Media Server, which indexes and serves music for my Roku Soundbridge. I’d previously written a data abstraction class in PHP for the sqlite database it runs on, so I used that to produce a script (to run periodically under cron) which picks a list of albums from a playlist (created by another script) and creates a bunch of symlinks to them in the folder that I set as the target in my rsync profile, the idea being I have a regularly changing folder which one rsync command can look at to pick up new music.

I now have wireless syncing that works anywhere with an internet connection, as well as on the local network (unlike Winamp) and the idea of keeping a static rsync profile and using a source folder full of symlinks provides a cunning way of pushing content onto your phone. It would be quite easy to create something like a web interface to pick files on the server and have symlinks of them created on a single rsync source folder. On top of this, Rsync backup provides hooks for Tasker to link into, so you could set this up to run automatically at some opportune moment.

A couple of months ago Samy Kamkar presented a cool hack at the Black Hat Conference which demonstrated that by using a cunningly constructed URL against specific internet routes, you could inject some javascript on their configuration pages and trick them into sending their own MAC address (the router’s own unique code) to a script which would use it to look up their address on Google’s API, thus telling the attacker a pretty good estimate of your physical location.

This was only possible because as well as photographing everything, the Google Streetview cars have been recording the locations of every wireless access point they encountered. By recording the signal strengths of certain access points by the location they were observed in it’s possible to do a simple triangulation calculation and get a pretty good estimate of where the access point is.

I found this pretty fascinating, so I created a little PHP script to use this trick, perhaps it could be used to help locate a stolen laptop, for example. The script works like this:

1. Attempt to scan using the wireless network adapter for any nearby access points. Save their key details (BSSID, signal strength and most importantly, the MAC)
2. Compile all this into POST data and send it to Google using libcurl. Even without nearby MACs Google’s location API will do a better job at locating the machine than the usual GeoIP services.
3. Get a bunch of data back from Google, including longitude and latitude estimates and a street address. For ease this also gives you a Google Maps link

The accuracy depends on how many neighbours your wireless card picks up and how much data Google has harvested from the wireless networks on your road, but for most people it will be accurate almost to the right house number.

The script is on my SVN server for download

Facebook recently released a feature that allows you to download a static version of your Facebook profile which includes all your videos, photos, your wall and a few bits of periphery information. If you’re planning on quitting Facebook, this is great because it means you don’t lose anything and it’s also a nice offline backup of your Facebook info.

To do this, go to Account -> Account Settings and pick “Download Your Information”.

What this doesn’t get you, however is all the photos you’re tagged in. For this you need to go through the Facebook API. Here’s how to grab all those photos in the best possible quality in a bit of a hacky way. No idea if it violates Facebook’s terms of service – who the hell knows what they are any more?

First of all you’ll need a system which has wget, grep, sed and awk. You can get these for Windows and this should all work, but I’m going to assume you’re logged into something with a bash prompt.

1. Find your Facebook ID. If like most people you have an alias for your homepage, click on your profile picture and you’ll see “id=xxxxxxxx”. That’s your Facebook ID
2. Create a URL for calling photos.get in the API. Go to the API documentation page for photos.get and in the Test Console at the bottom, enter your Facebook ID for “subj_id”.
3. Run the call. Click “Call Method” – you will then see a bunch of code on the right and you will have a URL at the top starting with https://api.facebook.com/method/photos.get?subj_id=. Click on it to open that page in a new window.
4. Download the data. Either copy the file from the browser window (ctrl+a, ctrl+c, paste into a file) or run wget -O photos.json "<your URL>" to save your data in a file called photos.json
5. Grab the images. You can now run cat photos.json | sed 's/,/\n/g' | grep src_big | grep http | sed 's/\\//g' | awk -F\" '{print $4}' | wget -i -. This will pluck out the URL of each photo you’re tagged in and download them to the current folder.

You’ll then see wget going crazy downloading all those photos and when it’s done you’ll have a copy of every photo you’ve been tagged in. After that you’re free to stick them into an album, edit them into your existing offline Facebook profile – whatever you fancy.

1. Root your phone if you haven’t already and install the latest stable CyanogenMod, which includes bash. If this step sounds scary, stop reading now
2. Install ConnectBot:
   
3. ConnectBot is a fantastic SSH client, but it also has a local terminal emulator. Open it up and select “local” from the drop down list and give it any nickname.
4. Open it up to see the local shell works. It will, it’s not bash though and it won’t have tab completion. Hit the menu button and disconnect.
5. Long-press the connection and select Edit host.
6. Find the “Post-login automation” option.
7. enter:

   su
   bash
   export PS1="\w\$ "
   cd /

   This step automatically switches you into root mode (you will be prompted by the superuser manager the first time you do this), starts bash, sets your prompt to the working directory and then changes directory to root.

8. Hit “OK” and then the back button to return to the connections screen. Select the connection to test if it’s all working.
9. For quick access, you can add a shortcut to the home screen. Long press on the home screen, select “Shortcuts”, “ConnectBot” then the name of your connection.

Tada! A one-click root terminal in bash with tab-completion (courtesy of ConnectBot’s keyboard shortcuts). Much better than the Terminal app every other blog tells you to install

Update: This now uses the oAuth Twitter class, not the basic auth function library.

Do you ever get people you follow on Twitter who, for some reason have suddenly become really spammy? Normally they’re great, but maybe one evening they’ve come back drunk and are vomiting tweets all over their feed, or maybe they’re live-tweeting some inane reality TV show for the opening night or are taking part in an incredibly uninteresting meme hashtag.

Whatever the reason, you don’t want to ditch them entirely, just until they’ve stopped blabbing on about stuff you don’t care about.

So I made a command line script to get around this. If you want to temporarily unfollow someone, write:

unfollow mrspammy for 1 week

or for several users:

unfollow mrspammy,mrsspammy,mrspammystennispartner for 4 days

Due to the genius of of PHP’s strtodate(), the words after “for” can be pretty much any time period phrase that works with the “+” modifier from the current date. You can also specify exact dates:

unfollow mrspammy until next tuesday

or

unfollow mrspammy until 12 july

This then looks at users that were previously unfollowed, checks if you want to re-follow them by now and does so if required. Run it without specifying any unfollows to just get this behaviour. This means you can also put unfollow in cron (or whatever) to run periodically and it will automatically check if users need re-following by now.

This is written for Ubuntu. Any Linux will be OK, Mac too probably if you have the paths set up properly. You might even get it working under Windows.

To get it working, you need

1. My Twitter library under svn
2. The unfollow script
3. PHP installed with libcurl

Put the PHP files in the same folder. You then need to:

1. Edit $confpath in unfollow
2. Create twitter.conf.php, containing two define() statements with TWITTER_EMAIL and TWITTER_PASSWORD in. These should contain your username and password.
3. chmod u+x unfollow
4. optional: Add unfollow to crontab to run at whatever interval you want
5. optional: make this folder part of path, symlink to unfollow or in some way make unfollow callable without defining the entire path

And you’re good to go. Easy

Let me know if you end up using this or my twitter library at all.

I’ve been using a modified original XBox to stream media from around the house since about 2003, however that same box is getting a little long in the tooth – high res videos with a lot of visual noise chug and stutter and even at the best of times the XBox isn’t doing justice to the higher resolution plasma we now have.

So what are our other options? We’ve got a Wii and two XBox 360s. If someone ends up releasing a game on the PS3 we might even get one of those as well.

Wii

This is doable but completely pointless compared to the original xbox. I’d need to transcode everything in to the lower-quality sorenson flash video codec (whatever format it was in, this will be lower quality) and it won’t output at an HD resolution.

PS3

I’m told this works very well as a media playing client and gets along much better than the MS products with other machines on the network (as you’d expect). I don’t have one though.

XBox 360

There are basically two options for streaming to an XBox 360: Setting up Windows Media Center on your Windows-based machine or creating a UPnP (Universal Plug ‘n’ Play) based media server on the network. This is Linux (Ubuntu 8.10) we’re talking about so option one is right out. There are a few UPnP servers for Linux around though. Here’s a breakdown:

• MediaTomb (package name, mediatomb)

  This is a very slick service which is easy to set up, automatically scans your media and presents it in an organised manner. It supports video, pictures and audio with a variety of formats and has the ability to transcode between formats on the fly using VLC. Very cool. Works with everything except a 360.
  Next!

• uShare (package name ushare)

  This is pretty cut-down. The video playback works fine but there is no rescan option at the time of writing meaning you have to restart the service for new videos to appear. Not good if you want to watch something the minute it arrives on the server. This can be partly alleviated by creating a cron job to restart the server daily, but it’s not ideal. The audio library on uShare is also completely useless. It seems to attempt to organise everything, completely fails and only lets you see a handful of tracks in amongst folders which don’t even contain audio. It would have been better if it had just let you walk through the folders like in video mode.

• X360MediaServe (no deb package)

  This requires an old-fashioned manual setup as it’s not in any Ubuntu repository but works well. However it ONLY supports audio so is not suitable for my needs.

• FUPPES (no deb package)

  Steer clear of this if you don’t like the idea of not only an old fashioned manual configure, make, make install style setup but having to google error messages in order to even get it visible from an XBox. It’s almost even worth just using uShare and x360MediaServe both at the same time so that at least you have reasonably hassle-free video and audio.

  If you do happen to have enough patience and you’ve managed to craft the config files into something workable it turns out that this is actually one of the better least rubbish solutions for streaming to 360. The video works and although you have to hammer on the vfolder.cfg file (which doesn’t get built for you) in order to get something workable going it does kind of do the job in a very basic and raw way. Given a bit more time and a decent setup script this might turn out to be quite decent server, but then given a rescan option and proper music support in uShare I wouldn’t even be trying this out.

• TwonkyMedia Server

  Twonky sticks out in this list because although there is a native linux server available it’s locked to free trial only before you have to part with your readies. This proprietary nature of software releases is so foreign to Linux it left me reeling in confusion and I gave up on it before even getting it working. If none of that bothers you then it’s probably the best out of the entire list. I’m a man of principles though. Or a tight-arse.

• Samba

  Inexplicably notable by its absence is Samba, SMB, straight-forward common Windows file sharing. Every OS on earth understands it and I’d been sharing media using it for years already so why doesn’t the 360 support it? No DRM control? Is it because the protocol has been tainted by FOSS under the evil hand of the EU courts? Whatever the reason, it’s pretty typical Microsoft.

At the time of writing I have FUPPES serving both video and music although I can’t map the 360 media player’s “Artist” and “Album” drill down options to it. After a lot of fiddling I got most video working with a drill-down directory list. I haven’t given up on FUPPES yet but the truth is that despite the lack of rescan and decent music support, uShare is still the better option for video streaming at the moment. Install via apt, edit a couple of lines in the config file and then that’s the whole thing set up. Sure you have to restart it to recache the media list but it’s still less effort than FUPPES is.

Conclusion

If you want to stream music, use x360MediaServe. If you want to stream video, use uShare. If you have a ton of patience or you’re a masochist, use FUPPES. If you want to stream both video and music and you have better things to do, use MediaTomb and get a PS3, or you could try both x360MediaServe and uShare at the same time. Bit messy though, right?

Oh hey – could this be the PS3′s first worthwhile exclusive?

Update: Experiment1106 on Twitter pointed out PS3MediaServer which is apparently the best solution for streaming to PS3s (and claims basic 360 support).