Muyiscoi Blog

Rants, Reviews, Raves, Reads and the Rest!

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Trying to do normal stuff with SELinux enabled

by @uaiHebert

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So true!

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CSS

by Mils and Steben

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Live migration

by @davetapley

[muyiscoi]

continuation of the pi series on the way

For the people, if any, waiting for the next installment in my RPi articles, its on the way. I had a little health issue, but that's gone now. Also, I'm trying to do a bit more research first. 

Stay tuned!

[muyiscoi]

2014

Happy New year everyone !!

[muyiscoi]

2013: Year in Review

As the year comes to an end, it is customary to look back and take stock of all that happened in the year, both good and bad. This year has been particularly eventful for me. 

For one, I never foresaw, at the beginning of the year, that I would be where I am now. I have neither surpassed nor fallen below my expectations/predictions. I simply sidestepped them. 

At the beginning of the year, I was rounding up my service year, in which by some random turn of events, I had found myself in my first real position of leadership as a CLO in my local community of corpers. Once that was done with, I came back home, having no real sense of what comes next. 

For a long time after that, what came next was whatever I happened to think of for that particular day. That, mixed with errands for family members, as well as the odd job application here and there made up the majority of my day.

Eventually, I got tired of doing nothing and looked up an old acquaintance where I did my IT back in 2010. He was welcoming, and made me an offer for a short contract, for which I would be paid an undisclosed amount of money. At the time, I wasn't too picky, obviously, and even though the renumeration wasn't decided upon, or indeed had any binding documentation been signed, I accepted his offer and started there the following week. The engagement was meant to be for 5 days, of which I was to work for 3. I finished the engagement, expecting to get a miserly but not too insignificant payment for my work. At that point, my employer declared that he would like me to have a more formal arrangement with the company. Seeing as I didn't have anything more important doing at the time, I was inclined to agree, and even though the amount being offered was so little as to barely cover my cost of transportation, at least it would get me out of the house, and even maybe lead to better things, so I accepted the offer. 

Several weeks later, I was fed up. Business was particularly slow for the company at the time, and I was still expected to put in a full 8 to 5. On top of that, I had spent weeks at the company without signing anything official, and that was beginning to irk me. 

I still hadn't been paid for the earlier agreed upon short contract, and it was going on a month now without any official agreement, so I was likely not to get anything come salary day. At that point, I'd had enough and confronted the boss. 

At the end, I had to stop working there, and when he eventually did call, the money I recieved barely covered my transportation to get to the office that day.

I don't begrudge my acquaintance his actions. Business was slow and he was trying to leverage an existing relationship with a naive and eager former employee. Unfortunately for him, I might be both of those things, but I am neither stupid nor desperate. He would not be seeing me in his office anytime soon.

Shortly after that sordid ordeal, I came across the advert for the Etisalat Geek Force Internship contest. It ticked enough check boxes in my interest categories that I began to get excited. The recruitment process was really unorthodox, and I didn't know what to expect, but I gave it all my best anyway. Eventually, I found myself in the "Geek house", and six weeks later, as one of the 5 winners. That eventually landed me where I am now. 

As I review my life in 2013, I cannot help but wonder how different things would have been if my 2013 had gone exactly like i thought it would. I thought I would be doing my masters in Software Engineering by now, In some country far from here. What a mistake that would have been. I still plan to do my masters, God willing, but I know now that I am not cut out for Software Engineering, and it took more than that rejection from the University of Manchester for me to realize it. I now have a clearer idea of where I should be headed, and although I seem to have taken a detour on the way there, the coming year is another opportunity to set myself aright. 

If the new year is anything like the one almost gone by, one thing is certain; There will be great and surprising events that I could never foresee happening, and I would come out of it with a better realization of who I am, who I am to become and would have gotten several steps closer to getting there. 

I can't wait to see what the new year brings!. 

Happy Holidays everyone!!.

[muyiscoi]

Setting up Raspberry Pi as a Media Centre device

In the last post, we looked into setting up the Raspberry Pi in general, and what that entails. 

This article is gonna focus on setting it up as a Media Centre device.

I have lots of media (Music, Movies, TV Series, etc.) on my laptop and I've always wanted a stress free way to have that content available to me on all my devices, be it on my TV, iPad or Phone. 

The perfect solution for this came in the form of Plex Media Server. 

Plex Media Server

Plex Media Server is a free (but closed source) Media server application that indexes and organizes all kinds of media from Music to TV shows, Movies, Anime, etc. It also downloads Album art, Show banners and other metadata, even down to TV Show theme music. Plex media server is very easy to setup and is available to install on all major OSes. 

I run Ubuntu on my laptop, so naturally, that's where I installed my Plex Media server instance. After installation, Plex Media server runs as a background service which autostarts on booting the system. It has a web UI (pictured above) for managing your media collection. Its all really straightforward and easy to follow. I did have a little issue where some of my media wasn't being recognized, but after changing file permissions, I was able to fix that. 

The initial indexing of my vast media collection took a while and at the end, about 1gb of data, but it was definitely worth it. Once I had plex setup as a media server on my laptop, I could then move on to setting it up on the Raspberry Pi.

RasPlex

Plex doesn't have an official Home Theatre app for the Raspberry pi (or Linux), even though they have one for iOS, Android, Windows and OSX. 

Some fine folks over at RasPlex have fixed this though, by creating RasPlex which is based on OpenELEC, which is in turn based on XBMC, which the original Plex Home Theatre app is based on. So, they are all more or less the same. :D.

Installing RasPlex on the Raspberry Pi has been made quite easy by the RasPlex team. There are installers available for Windows, OSX and Linux. Once the Installers are downloaded, they can be used to download the latest version of RasPlex, and also flash it to a compatible 8gb SD card. Pop that SD card into the Raspberry Pi's slot and voila!, you have a working install of RasPlex.

As long as your Raspberry Pi is connected to the same network as your Plex media server, RasPlex should detect your media collection and allow you to play media directly on your TV. 

Issues

I ran into a major issue after setting up RasPlex on the Raspberry Pi. Although it worked just fine on the big TV in the sitting room while connected via HDMI, it refused to display a thing when connected via composite video to the smaller TV in the room. After a bit of googling, I discovered that RasPlex is configured to use HDMI only by default. I guess the developers assumed nobody would be using TVs without HDMI input in 2013. Thankfully, there's a workaround and it only involves editing a text file. I did have to do the edit on a windows machine though (something to do with those pesky file ownership and permissions issue), but apart from that hickup, it was a quick fix. 

Once that was done, the RasPlex displayed properly on the TV and once I got a "3.5mm audio jack to composite audio converter cable", I could also get audio into the TV. 

OpenELEC

OpenELEC is another Media Centre platform available on the Pi. RasPlex is built on OpenELEC, as evidenced by the OpenELEC splash screen that comes up when booting RasPlex.

However, if you want something as close to running generic XBMC on your Raspberry Pi, OpenELEC is the way to go. 

Installing OpenELEC, like most installations on the Raspberry Pi is as easy as flashing the image unto a memory card. There are instructions on how to do this for each platform on the OpenELEC wiki. I did this on my trusty Ubuntu laptop and it worked perfectly. 

Booting up OpenELEC on the Pi takes you to a generic XBMC UI. Its clean and uncluttered. 

Mr preferred solution, of the two, is RasPlex.

Controlling your Media Centre

Although the Raspberry Pi supports both USB Mouse and Keyboard, these are not ideal when dealing with a Media Centre platform. One would not like to get up to the TV in order to change the media playing. 

Thankfully, this is remedied by a host of Remote applications available for both iOS and Android.

For RasPlex, my favourite remote app is simply called "Plex Remote". Its a free app in the play store, and so long as your android device is connected to the same network as the Raspberry Pi, it detects your RasPlex instance immediately and allows you to control its UI and launch your media.

For OpenELEC, any plain old XBMC remote would work. There are several of them on the Play store, but I haven't tried out any since I did not decide on using OpenELEC in the long run, so I can't recommend one.

Miscellaneous

The solution above allowed me to elegantly stream my media collection from my laptop acting as the server the Raspberry Pi connected to my TV. However, at other times, I might want to stream the same content to my phone or tablet instead. 

Plex has awesome applications for both iOS and Android that do just that. Both applications cost $4.99 on their individual stores. They automatically connect to the Plex server and allow you to stream your content directly to your device. 

The centralized nature of the media ensures that you can do cool things like marking videos as "watched", filtering videos by genre, and even resuming from your last position across all devices.

So, I can start watching a movie on my phone, and later on, go over to the TV and continue from exactly where I stopped the last time. 

Plex Media server uses Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) to stream media across devices. Therefore, if for some reason, you don't have $4.99 to give the Plex developers, you use one of the free UPnP applications available on android. I can confirm that BubbleUPnP does recognize the Plex server and allows you to play your media, but you do lose some of the cooler features such as the resume feature highlighted above.

Its nice to be able to setup your home media centre using the Raspberry Pi, and stream your content from a central server to multiple devices. However, sometimes, your media might be on your phone or tablet. One might not be inclined to first copy it to your server, index it, and then stream it. 

Luckily, there are ways to stream content directly from your phone or tablet to your Raspberry Pi powered TV, and we will explore that in the next post!.

[muyiscoi]

Getting started with Raspberry Pi

After being constantly hounded by several people, I've finally gotten around to writing this post.

Instructional blog posts on getting a Raspberry Pi to do just about anything imaginable are a dime-a-dozen on the internet. That means, a lot of the stuff I'm writing in this post are not new, and are stuff I also learned from reading blog posts and wikis. I however am bringing a uniquely Nigerian perspective, and this might be useful to others trying to accomplish something similar in a similar environment.

Now, without much ado, lets get into it.

What exactly is a Raspberry Pi?

According to the guys that made it,

"The Raspberry Pi is a low-cost credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard".

 It was originally designed for the educational purposes, especially for kids, but its uses have ballooned over the years and now, it can be found doing stuff like running Home Theatre software, controlling robots, home automation/ surveillance systems, etc.

I was originally interested in the Raspberry Pi just as a device for experimentation, and the extremely cheap price of $35 made it even more appealing. I bought this pack from Amazon and got the Pi along with a clear case, HDMI cable, Micro USB power pack and an 8gb SD card preloaded with some Pi software for Noobs. 

I got it sent to Nigeria through Shippyme.

Setting up

Setting up the Raspberry Pi is relatively easy to do, even more so if you have Linux experience (as I do), but still fairly easy if you don't. The Raspberry Pi folks officially recommend a variant of Debian Linux called Raspbian. Since that was one of the preloaded OSes that came with my SD Card, I loaded it up first to see how things ran. If you don't go the route of getting the pack, you would have to install Raspbian yourself. The setup process is relatively painless but the download would set you back 500+ Mb.

Raspbian is a full featured debian distribution with all its binaries recompiled against the ARM architecture which the Pi's CPU has. It comes with a modern Desktop environment and has all the important bits of any OS. Overall, its pretty boring. Of course, there are things that can be done to spice up Raspbian and add some extra features, but I didn't linger on Raspbian to try any of them out. 

The Raspberry Pi is essentially a Computer board. Therefore, in order to use it, accessories such as a Keyboard, Mouse and even power supply have to be added externally. The Pi possesses two full USB ports for the peripherals, as well as a HDMI port for Digital Video/Audio output, Composite video and 3.5mm audio jack for Analogue output. The Pi doesn't have a Wireless receiver, but it does have an RJ45 Ethernet port for all your networking needs. This turned out to be a bit of a limitation for me, but I was able to overcome it later with a bit of spending.

Issues

The only major issue I had while setting up my Pi was the fact that I use a MiFi device to connect to the internet. The device broadcasts a wireless network, and doesn't have an Ethernet port. Since the Raspberry Pi doesn't have a wireless card, this posed a bit of a problem as regards getting the Pi connected to the internet.

I eventually overcame this by getting a fairly cheap Wireless Access point (TP-Link WA701ND) which has one Ethernet port as well as broadcasting a wireless network. The device doesn't have a SIM Slot though, so it can't be used to replace my MiFi. 

I setup the TP-Link access point as a Wireless repeater to the network propagated from the MiFi. This essentially made the access point connected to the same network as MiFi, and meant that any device connected to the Access point via LAN (in this case, the Pi) also got connected to the same network originating from the MiFi. This fixed my issue with getting the Pi online.

Using the Raspberry Pi.

Once you have everything setup the way you like, its time to actually use the device to get some work done (or not, depending on what you want). In my case, I was interested in using the Pi as a Home Theatre PC. This meant Raspbian wasn't a good fit for me. Luckily, there are two excellent solutions available for the Pi in this field, both based on XBMC. OpenELEC and RasPlex.

In the next article, I'll discuss how I got both setup, my experiences with them, and also discuss how to get content streamed from your media server PC, phone or tablet to your Raspberry Pi.

[muyiscoi]

Of unlimited internet and software updates

Quite recently, I have found myself in a situation where I no longer (for the most part) have to worry about internet availability and data caps. One of the immediate consequences of that is that I now run updates on applications on both my iPad and phone on a daily basis. For the most part, this has been an okay experience, however, I have now been burned by software updates twice in the past few weeks. I am now appreciating more and more the usefulness of waiting a bit before upgrading apps I rely upon as there might be regressions that are introduced and might not be fixed for days, or even weeks after the upgrade, and our current app system offers no downgrade option for third party apps.

[muyiscoi]

My laptop charges my iPad mini

Just found out yesterday. It shows "not charging" but it actually does charge. My laptop is running Ubuntu 13.04, so that might have something to do with it.

[muyiscoi]

I''ve been on a media centre kick lately. I'm standardizing my setup on raspberry pi using rasplex, with a plex server running on my ubuntu laptop. I will eventually get around to writing a full post about what I'm doing, but I thought I should share a pretty neat app I just discovered that makes some part of the whole package even

SoundWIre turns your android device into a wireless audio output receiver, so that you can play a multimedia file on your pc (windows or linux) or even raspberry pi, and listen to the audio from your android phone. I tested it bad can confirm it works as advertised, with minimal fuss!. I did notice a bit of lag between the video and audio that made the vIewIng a bIt annoyIng, but I'm sure I can iron it out with some fine tuning.

[muyiscoi]

Finally discarded my blackberry torch 9860 today and took delivery of this Samsung galaxy S3!

[muyiscoi]

Elastic Heart by Sia ft. The Weeknd and Diplo

I just heard this song today and it has instantly turned into one of my favorite songs!. It is part of the soundtrack album for Hunger Games:Catching Fire. Lyrics below “Elastic Heart” (feat. The Weeknd & Diplo)

And another one bites the dust Oh why can I not conquer love And I might have thought that we were one Wanted to fight this war without weapons

And I wanted it, I wanted it bad But there were so many red flags Now another one bites the dust Yeah let’s be clear, I’ll trust no one

You did not break me I’m still fighting for peace

I’ve got thick skin and an elastic heart, But your blade it might be too sharp I’m like a rubberband until you pull too hard, I may snap and I move fast But you won’t see me fall apart Cause I’ve got an elastic heart

I’ve got an elastic heart Yeah I’ve got an elastic heart

And I will stay up through the night Let’s be clear, won’t close my eyes And I know that I can survive I’ll walk through fire to save my life

And I want it, I want my life so bad I’m doing everything I can Then another one bites the dust It’s hard to lose a chosen one

You did not break me I’m still fighting for peace

I’ve got thick skin and an elastic heart, But your blade it might be too sharp I’m like a rubberband until you pull too hard, I may snap and I move fast But you won’t see me fall apart Cause I’ve got an elastic heart [x3]

I’ve got an elastic heart

[muyiscoi]

Expecting compliance without restrictions

For most of my adult life, I have been in an environment where compliance was guaranteed by enforcing restrictions. This spanned my university and subsequently NYSC experience. Now, I am in an environment where compliance is expected, but there are no direct restrictions in place to enforce it. This has brought me to true understanding of a statement which is largely considered cliche. "It's easy to comply when there are no temptations". Right now, I am expected to act as an adult, and therefore, there are no direct restrictions from me doing whatever I want, only with the belief that I am a sane and rational adult human being. That is not to say that doing the wrong thing in this present environment doesn't have its repercussions, cos it definitely does, much more stringent ones even. There is something definitely freeing about being treated as a free thing logical animal, instead of being restricted by layers upon layers of rules, most seeming, for lack of a better term, stupid. Now, i have to weigh my actions against my own conscience, sense of morality, and laws of the land/employer. Definitely still seems like a lot of restrictions, but it's infinitely better than the alternative.

[muyiscoi]

Audible return policy

I have just been a happy beneficiary of Audible return policy. When I first subscribed to audible, I used my first two credits to purchase "Prince of Thorns" and "King of Thorns", both by Mark Lawrence. I did this based on rave reviews I read all over the place.

After the download came to pain that was trying to listen to them completely. I restarted "Prince of Thorns" so many times cos I just got confused. Eventually, I gave up and listened till the end, still not getting the full gist of it. I've since dreaded beginning the second book, and even contemplated restarting from book 1. 

I finally gave up today, and decided to try out Audible's return feature, and what do you know, It bloody works!. I was able to return both books, and got back my credits and am now searching for books that are more to my taste to replace them.

Kudos to audible.