Phil Royle

Back in September I wrote about the release of a travel bug (TB) in to a local geocache – it was the third TB I had released and now it has become the third I’ve had to mark as missing. It was the shortest life-span and distance travelled of all of my TBs, managing only 19.5 miles and 1 change of cache. It’s not at all unexpected to be honest. The cacher who took it from where I left it forgot to log it into the cache that it was ultimately lost in… maybe someone picked it up from there and has forgotten to log it as well. Time will tell.

It’s not the end of the world, it’s just a bit of fun, but I was hoping to see at least one of the three TBs I bought travel to somewhere interesting. I really used to enjoy geocaching, but since its rise in popularity it’s less and less fun. More caches keep popping up in more and more uninspiring locations, more and more people try it, find a handful of caches then give up. I just wish those people wouldn’t keep taking TBs and losing them or keeping them because they can’t be bothered with it any more.

This week I bought a Garmin Forerunner 410 GPS watch with heart rate monitor, which is a great fitness device and really easy to use with Linux.

I was slightly concerned that I wouldn’t be able to download the data it collects because Garmin doesn’t provide any software for Linux clients, but in the end it was really easy. It uses an ANT+ USB device to wirelessly connect to the watch and I’m using python-ant-downloader to fetch the data. It was a quick and easy install following the instructions on the GitHub page and with a single call to ant-downloader it downloads the data from the watch and (if you’ve configured it) uploads it to Garmin Connect for analysis.

I wasn’t sure about using Garmin Connect at first, but I’ve been really impressed with the interface and level of detail, so I’ll be sticking with it for the time being. I’m also trying out SportsTracker but I’m not sure that I’ll continue with that. I am however uploading basic data to my website; at the moment I’ve only done one run with the HRM, but I’ll be wearing it when cycling and walking to collect data on those activities too.

It’s not just about the tech though! I want to monitor and improve my fitness and a heart rate monitor is a great help for that… and if it gives me more data to collect and geek out over then that’s a wonderful bonus too

Now I just need to move away from the PC and start working up a sweat!

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours trying to get my new Hauppauge HD PVR working under Linux so I’m writing down the steps I took in case I need them again and sharing them here in case somebody else finds the information useful.

Some background information first; I’m running Debian 6 (AMD64) and the HD PVR I bought is the “Gaming Edition”, which I believe is the same as the normal one, just with a multi-console component cable included… and different colour lights.

First, I installed the latest Video 4 Linux drivers with:

git clone git://linuxtv.org/media_build.git
cd media_build
./build
make install


The build part complained about missing lsdiff and Proc::ProcessTable, so I installed patchutils and libproc-processtable-perl and then ran it again successfully. I then rebooted and connected up the PVR, checked dmesg to find out which video device number it had been assigned and then tested with

cat /dev/video1 > test.ts

This created a video file that could be viewed in Movie Player, but it won’t work in VLC (which is my preferred player) for some reason – I’d get audio but no video. However, the quality of the video was somewhat less than stellar; the colours were washed out and there was no detail in the whites. I installed and tested it on a Windows PC with the supplied drivers and software to confirm that the device was working OK (it was), then set about trying to find out how to change the picture settings.

I installed v4l2-ctl and ran it with the –all switch to gather information about the PVR and found that it had a recent firmware version, I can’t recall the version number, but it was from 19/10/2011. I then found this page, dated 20/10/2011, which is a patch for setting the min/max/default values for the hdpvr picture controls. I applied it, rebuilt and reinstalled the hdpvr driver, rebooted and… success! Picture quality is now much closer to the test video I’d captured on Windows and adequate for my needs.

So, the steps taken were:

Install lsdiff and Proc::ProcessTable (this step not required if you already have them installed):
sudo apt-get install patchutils
sudo apt-get install libproc-processtable-perl

Download the Video 4 Linux drivers (includes the hdpvr module required for the Hauppauge):
git clone git://linuxtv.org/media_build.git

Apply the patch (I did this manually as it was only a few lines and I wanted to see exactly what settings were changing, but you could use the patch command.)

Build and install the V4L drivers:
cd media_build
./build
make install


Reboot, connect PVR, run dmesg to find the video device id assigned, then test with:
cat /dev/video1 > test.ts (change /dev/video1 to whatever device id was assigned, i.e. /dev/video0, /dev/video2, etc.)

Those are the steps I took, but it was hard work to find all the information and I don’t doubt that you’ll run in to problems that I didn’t. I probably won’t have all the answers, but feel free to ask if you need any clarification on this.

Now I just need to find some software for capturing the video that’s a little more refined than cat and then to capture some video!

I’ve had an HTC Desire Android phone for about a year now and I absolutely love it, it’s the best phone I’ve ever had. But HTC are glacially slow in providing updates for it and keep changing their minds over whether we’re going to get Gingerbread, so I decided to quit waiting for them and install CyanogenMod instead. The process was very easy and took a lot less time than I was expecting. I did have a couple of problems with the Market, which I’ll explain below (resolved now), but apart from that it was easy and highly recommended if you want a slick and more up-to-date Android OS on your Desire (or other supported phone).

I used both the official instructions as well as those found here, which include useful screenshots.

I won’t go through the process I took; I pretty much followed George Smart’s instructions, with the only exception that I *did* flash the radio, though I haven’t checked whether the Bluetooth works yet, as it’s not something I often use. The only problems I had were with the Market app; the first time I tried to download apps from the market, I would get the ‘Downloading’ progress bar, but it wouldn’t download anything. I did some research and it seems that the solution is to go through the flashing process again, which I did (it only took a minute or two to complete) but when I tried again all apps from the market would fail to download “due to an error”. Not very helpful. This time, rather than flashing it again, I deleted my Google account from the phone, re-added it and then the market and everything else worked fine.

Waaay back in the nineteen-hundreds (1999, to be exact) I began a course in C programming with a training company, whose name I won’t mention, that I paid a large amount of my own money to complete. The material was of poor quality and out of date, but I struggled through. At the same time I read other sources and followed a couple of C programming usenet groups, from which I learned how wrong a lot of what I was being taught was. Armed with information gleaned from these other sources, I bought myself a copy of ‘The C Programming Language‘ (Second Edition) by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie and proceeded to read it cover to cover. Suddenly a lot of the language elements I’d struggled with before became clear and I started to really enjoy writing code and began finding more faults in the coursework. I wish I’d just bought the K&R book instead of paying over 100 times more for the course, as I learned more from that little book than I ever did from the course. Recently I began dabbling with some C programming again, and whenever I need to look something up that I’ve forgotten (and it’s often) the first source I go to is K&R, and it’s usually the only source I need.

The point of this post is that today I learned that Dennis Ritchie has passed away and, like a lot of people who knew of him and his work, I was saddened to hear the news. Not only did he create the C programming language, but he was also co-creator of the Unix operating system, without which I wouldn’t have the Linux operating system I’m using to write this blog entry, or the web server which hosts my blog and website. Ritchie’s contribution to the world of technology was huge, yet there is little to no mention of his passing outside of the technical news sites. I guess because he was a quiet and private man (from what I gather) and you need to be the head of a “cool” company like Apple to get the headlines when you die.

Anyway, thanks for everything you did for tech, Dennis and may you rest in peace.

Dennis Ritchie: the giant whose shoulders we stand on.

Following on from my previous post about geocaching the other day, I’ve since been out and found 5 more caches and also released a travel bug into the wild. Despite saying I had no intention of looking for the caches close to home, there were a few which, on closer inspection, seemed to be worthwhile doing, so I opted to walk the Buckley Heritage Trail and look for 5 caches along the way.

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On Thursday last week I logged finds on a couple of geocaches while out for a walk in Clocaenog forest. Not really news of earth-shattering significance, but it was the first time I’d sought caches since the very start of the year, and in the last 12 months I’ve logged fewer than half a dozen finds. After pondering why I’ve gone from someone for whom searching for geocaches was a regular thing that crept into many aspects of my life, to being something that I don’t often even think about now, I decided to write down some thoughts.

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Yeah I know, it’s been a while.

I’ve been wanting to get back in to programming recently, after not having done much for a few years (aside from some PHP coding on here and other sites) and I wanted to find an open source project that I could get involved with. I wanted a project that I find useful, as well as interesting, and I’ve decided upon Viking, which is a “GPS data editor and analyzer” that I’ve used for a while. At the moment I’m not involved with the project in any official capacity, I’m just studying the code and coming up with ideas for additional features, etc., and testing them out on my machine.

I’ve used Viking for editing the GPS tracks, images and stats used in my walking routes and I’ve just added a few more and linked to them from my walking diary.

To the existing Welsh Marilyns page I have now added Munro Bagging and Wainwright Bagging pages to my website.

I’m hoping to make a couple of trips to the lakes in 2011 and would love to head back to Scotland too, so hopefully I’ll be able to tick a few of these off.

For about the last year I’ve been using a Palm Pre smartphone, but I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with it, so this week I gave up and bought an HTC Desire to replace it and I’m really happy with my decision. The biggest thing that bugged me about the Pre was how unresponsive it was – you’d tap to open or refresh an application and it just wouldn’t do anything for sometimes several seconds. Its WebOS operating system uses what it refers to as ‘cards’, which is basically an app’s window, and I would frequently get a warning message that I had too many cards open. Even when I only had one open and trying to open another I’d get this message, which is very frustrating when for example the open app is the email client and you’re trying to click a link to open a webpage – you can’t close the mail app because then you wouldn’t be able to tap the link! I was advised to ‘overclock’ the phone to overcome this, so I duly installed a custom kernel and an app to set the phone to run at 1Ghz (instead of the standard 500Mhz) and this made it quicker and also did away with the ‘too many cards’ error, but before long it seemed to be just as slow again.

The other thing that lets it down is that very few people are actively developing apps for WebOS, which is a shame because I actually quite like it as an OS, it’s mainly the hardware that is the problem. I’ve lost count of the number of services that offer mobile apps for iPhone and Android and nothing else, i.e. not for WebOS. There are some good apps in the catalog, but having now moved over to Android I’m blown away by the greater quality as well as quantity of apps available. I also haven’t had any problems with speed or unresponsiveness from the Desire so far. I’ll post another entry soon with more thoughts on Android and some apps I’ve found useful and/or impressive.