Archive for February, 2008

In receipt of a Squeezebox Duet

I was thrilled (really!) to receive a Squeezebox Duet from the nice folks at Logitech Streaming Media Systems (formerly SlimDevices). It really is a great gadget and, having been testing the Squeezebox Controller (aka “Jive”) for a while, it’s good to get my grubby mitts on a Receiver too.

The Receiver is just a little box that makes noise - like a traditional Squeezebox, but without the display - and it’s good. It “Just Works” and, for a gadget itching to be mainstream, that’s pretty important. Her Kateness was kind enough to be the Non-Geek-Guinea-Pig and did all of the setup. And it wasn’t that hard either.

It does present one problem though: the new Receiver is in the living room, the older SB2 in the kitchen. So what to do with the redundant SB3? The study might be a good place, but then I’ll need to buy some Audioengine A2’s to go with it. :-( ;-)

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Filed under SqueezeCenter, tech : Comments (0) : Feb 12th, 2008

Psion Wavefinder works on Linux!

It’s so long since I signed up for the Yahoo group about linux support for the Psion Wavefinder that I’d almost forgotten I ever did. And the messages (just five in the past 18 months) didn’t give me much hope that the Wavefinder would ever work under Linux.

But on Friday, a post appeared from one David Crawley, who has got the device going and released a lump of code under the name OpenDAB. This is utterly cool. I hadn’t ever bought a Wavefinder, because of the lack of drivers, but resolved to get one if Linux support was ever achieved. It’s long-since out of production, but they pop up on eBay every so often.

So I’m a happy camper - and will be even happier if I win an eBay auction soon.

(And congratulations to David on such a great hack)

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Filed under tech : Comments (2) : Feb 10th, 2008

Browsing ’sshd’ logs

Feb  3 07:55:09 kurobox sshd[16067]: Failed password for invalid user stud from 189.11.251.194 port 50372 ssh2

I have nothing else to say.

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Feb 7th, 2008

Highlighting anything, using bash and sed

While writing code for SqueezeCenter or Jive, I found that I was struggling to easily mentally grep all the passing messages.

But no more! This quick hacky bash function (which I’ve put in my .bashrc) will let us run any command-line script and highlight a word.

highlight() { param=$1; shift; $* | sed "s/\($param\)/\x1B\[31;1m\1\x1B\[0m/gI"; }

For example, to run the software ‘jive’ program, looking for the text ‘livedepartures’:

highlight livedepartures ./jive

Yes, it could be improved, but it does the job well enough for me…

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Feb 6th, 2008