Strawp.net

I recently dug out an old USB 1.1 Digital TV Tuner – a Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T USB, which I think I bought in about 2003 and eventually gave up on due to poor reliability under Windows, the crappy TV signal quality in Coventry and the success of excellent torrent sites like UKNova. Well, I’ve moved house now, and with an increased TV signal strength also came the bad news that I appear to be on a limited bandwidth ADSL line. I envisaged a single evening of plugging in the tuner, installing MythTV under Ubuntu and having a neat DVR to use.

Sadly, this was not to be the case.

Getting the tuner recognised under linux wasn’t too hard. The required firmware was already present in Ubuntu’s repositories but I couldn’t get the thing to scan. MythTV couldn’t open or ID the card and “scan” resulted in nothing. I even tested with the intended packaged drivers under Windows and got about as far.

Eventually, I found “w_scan” which does the kind of full-frequency scan your TV would do and was able to produce a channels.conf file in the format that tzap uses. Success! On the tzap page of the MythTV wiki it shows how you can use tzap to tune the device and “cat” to just dump the MPEG stream to file. Excellent – time for a quick and dirty script!

I then knocked up a “record” script, which takes easy-to-read commands like “record Eastenders on BBC ONE for 30″, tunes the card and dumps the MPEG stream to a sensible location. Combine that with some cron and I’ve got a hacky little DVR. XBMC can do the front end stuff.

I now have to get used to the idea of knowing I want to watch something before it airs, like we used to do in the 90s.

Here’s my TV shows crontab as an example:

# Record soaps off the TV
29  19  * * 2,4 /home/iain/bin/record Eastenders $(date +\%F_\%A) on BBC ONE for 32
59  19  * * 1,5 /home/iain/bin/record Eastenders $(date +\%F_\%A) on BBC ONE for 32
30  18  * * 1-5 /home/iain/bin/record Hollyoaks $(date +\%F_\%A) on Channel 4 for 27

# Watchable stuff
59  20  * * 5 /home/iain/bin/record Have I Got News For You $(date +\%F) on BBC ONE for 32
59  21  * * 5 /home/iain/bin/record QI $(date +\%F) on BBC TWO for 32
0   18  * * 1-5 /home/iain/bin/record The Simpsons $(date +\%F) on Channel 4 for 30

Or for one-offs (as root, unless you change permissions on the device):

echo "record some tv on bbc one for 25" | at 16:00

(or as commandlinefu.com would probably prefer it:)

at 16:00 <<< 'record some tv on bbc one for 25'

Let me know in the comments if you end up using it.

First there was FireSheep. It allows anyone to hijack HTTP session cookies for a number of sites for anyone using them on the same open access point as you. Now, a predictable counter point for that is that someone would come up with “FireShepherd” to protect this poor flock. However, FireShepherd is no where near as fun as FireSheep – all it does is try and crash FireSheep with fake data and hope for the best, meanwhile your session info is still being transmitted in the clear.

Ideas for FireShepherd to be more useful/fun:

1. Have it force SSL connections on all the same sites that FireSheep snoops on, making session hijacking impossible. Plugins like Force-TLS do this.
2. Have it create bogus logins to sites where the user’s profile pic has been set as goatse, tubgirl etc. When the FireSheep user grabs that user’s session data they will have those lovely pics appear in their stolen sessions list.
3. (getting crazy here) have it perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the wireless network, replacing the network’s router as the default gateway or DNS server. You can then point people to fake versions of captured websites and feed the FireSheep user whatever you want. Oops, there’s goatse again! Oh, what’s that you just went to? A malware site? Careless FireSheep user!

Anyway, there’re some ideas. As Steve Gibson pointed out in the last Security Now, simply switching a network to WPA is enough to protect all the users from this attack. If you’re running a Cafe and want to provide free wifi you can make the network password as public as you want – make a poster and stick it above the till. It is unencrypted wifi, not wifi itself that allows user sessions to be hijacked like this.

As I’m sure you all noticed last week, the latest fun leaked data from a polical party came from the BNP who somehow had their entire membership list leaked onto the internet. For people like myself this presented two fun opportunities:

1. To do a little bit of geographical and statistical analysis on some odd data
2. To laugh at a bunch of hate-filled racists

There were quite a few nuggets of statistical analysis in the first couple of days: A proximity checker to see which of your neighbours members, the obligatory google maps mashups (since, sensibly taken down), a sort of heat map and the Grauniad did an excellent map broken into electoral wards. They were all pretty good, but they still rather suffered from the problem that you see “hot spots” in areas which are naturally population nodes. There was no accounting for population density.

Anyway, in a spare moment I took a copy of the database, cleaned up the postcode information a bit, ran it through a geocoder to get lat and long data and then ran that through a lookup for population density and then grouped the data by postcode area. What I now have is a count of each person in a postcode area, divided by the population density – this should then give a population normalised rank of how hate-filled post code areas are. Anyway, here’s the Top 40, Top Of The Pops style:

They’ve clearly gotten a new marketing person over at Berocca in the past year. Having not really touched TV ads until now, they launched a campaign which is clearly targetted at the blogosphere which featured a slighty embarrassing rip-off of OK Go‘s “Here It Goes Again” and now they’re buying blog posts by launching their “Blogger Relief” campaign. You can register your blog and if they like it they’ll send you a box of free stress relieving gizmos.

I don’t need to be paid off to thoroughly recommend Berocca – I’ve been addicted to the stuff for years and it’s saved my life countless times, however the odd cheap bribe never hurt anyone.

If that still doesn’t convince you, the prospect of luminescent orange pee after a glass always brightens up a dull day (and freaks out anyone else in the public toilet).

I had a very nice email from Angela at Wikia this morning, inviting me to move the Beebhack Wiki over to their hosting. I think the only reason Beebhack wasn’t over there in the first place was potential hassle around getting a free wiki approved by their staff. Since they’d been kind enough to email me over there, this was no longer a problem.

So, a good time to take advantage of a better implementation of MediaWiki than we had at BluWiki and hopefully some better uptime. Angela even imported all our existing wiki data for us.

Beebhack.wikia.com

The beeb added a little update to the iPlayer again today, clearly as part of their (admirable) attempts at getting iPlayer working on exotic devices iPlayer is now Wii optimised! How cool! I’ve not tested it out, but this is the first “official” iPlayer version which is actually designed to display TV shows on a TV. We are living in the future!

I’ve written a few technical notes over on the Wiki, but basically they’re using the User-Agent string to serve a Flash 7 compatible stream.

Speaking of User-Agents, I’m hearing that the iPhone version of iPlayer has been tightening down on what User-Agent string you can get away with when you pretend to be an iPhone. No more “iPhone, LOL” strings I’m afraid

I’ve created a new wiki all about using BBC content at beebhack.bluwiki.com

In the first 24 hrs it got 1500 page requests and it’s not looking to slow down just yet. I would have hosted it here at Strawp.net but I wanted this to be more community owned than something I would run.

The downside of course is that I really don’t have any detailed information on where any of those hits are coming from…

A few weeks ago I got a bluetooth GPS module for my iPaq, just to play around with. Since Wififofum collects GPS data if it’s available, I’ve been recording wireless access point data as I’ve been walking about the town, commuting to work or driving.

The data I’ve gotten so far (about 600 access points) isn’t that useful on its own, but what’s really interesting is slicing the data in various ways and seeing what you come up with. To do this I built a new site: wifi.strawp.net into which I can upload the log files from wififofum. For a day or so I had the front page of the site plot location data of access points into Google Maps, searchable by SSID, manufacturer, channel etc, however I was advised by friends that doing so was probably a really bad idea, so this information is now on a login-only basis.

The fun part, which is still publicly available is the stats page. If you’ve got a friend that you’re trying to convince they need to secure their wireless network, link them to that page. You can currently see the most popular manufacturers, the most commonly used SSID and – my favourite – the number of access points that have their default SSID and appear to have no encryption set. This is currently at just over one in six (16.9%), which is quite frankly frightening. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the best place to look if you want to stumble across one of these access points is a suburban area where if Coventry is anything to go by, you’re likely to find an insecure access point on any street you care to walk down.

If you’re still wondering what the issue is, the BBC’s The Real Hustle did a very neat little feature on why you should use WPA encryption on your network.

I have a lot of devices that I’d like to keep the same calendar in sync on: Two phones, an iPaq, my work PC, my home PC and Google Calendar. The smartphone and iPaq played nicely with outlook but there was some “glue” needed to get my Sony Ericsson phone and Google Calendar in on it.

The “glue” is a few pieces of software I found recently. First of all, to sync my Sony Ericsson with GCal I use GCalSync over GPRS, then to sync GCal with Outlook I can use either Companionlink for Google Calendar (a little buggy, doesn’t auto-update, not free) or RemoteCalendars which is Open Source and very flexible. A no brainer which one I picked, really.

More info on using RemoteCalendars with Google Calendars on jakeludington.com

If there’s anything good about Summer ending and Autumn and Winter rolling in it’s a new season of TV the world over. In the UK some shows have already had an entire new series and in the US they’re just warming up.

Here’s what I’ve been watching:

- Dexter. A forensics expert who is also a serial killer. Sounds naff, actually really good.
- Everybody Hates Chris season 2. Same as the last season, hasn’t lost its charm yet
- Family Guy season 6. Unlike the Simpsons, this just gets better and better. Currently on episode 3
- Heroes. A new favourite of mine. This series follows the lives of ordinary people as they discover they have super powers. Brilliant characters, compelling plot.
- My Name Is Earl series 2. Proper feel-good, laugh-out-loud stuff
- Robot Chicken series 2. Pop culture gags animated with action figures with plenty of ultraviolence.
- Freak Show A new surrealist cartoon from David Cross about the most ineffective superhero team in the world
- The Mitchell and Webb Look Sighs all round as Mitchell and Webb transition their show seamlessly from Radio 4 to TV. Not a bad miss at all.
- Extras series 2. Trailed off and got a bit formulaic and then pulled it all back for a brilliant last episode
- Lead Balloon. New comedy from Jack Dee who is basically playing himself. Same sort of uncomfortable deadpan humour as Curb Your Enthusiasm and Extras. Great stuff.