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GSM Phone Tracking Methods
I decided to conduct a few tests with my fona808. Battery. The at+cbc command give you the current charge mode, percent charged, and millivolts. I found on the adafruit fona808 that the charge mode indicator always gave status 0 (“not charging”) even when charged. GSM Location. This is given by the at+cipgsmloc. It spits out…
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DIY Phone
I was recently granted an adafruit shopping spree by my wife. I chose a FONA808 and some Trinket microcontrollers (literally they are about the size of my thumbnail!). Im still learning the ins and outs of the FONA, but it is amazing how much momentum you can gain by simply following the instructions listed in…
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If you had to do DVD backups from windows
Say you want to let your grandmother backup her DVDs using her clunky old windows laptop. You want a windows solution that 1) rips the DVDs, 2) copies them to a backup, 3) makes them available for viewing from wherever (e.g. accessible over the internet). The solution I came up with is as follows: Download…
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Airlines / Frequent Flyer Programs: The good, the so-so, and the ugly
An earlier blog post detailed heroic feats of airline reward redemption: leaping across multiple rewards programs, bounding over unaccompanied minor restrictions, and otherwise gaining cross-country access for peanuts! And then everything was shattered when I had to change my tickets. This let me see how well each of the rewards programs faired in handling booking…
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A few ways to quickly and automatically binarize an image
For my wife’s Spell To Write and Read (SWR) homeschooling we have a bunch of scanned worksheets. A sample of the scanned image is shown below: As you can see its entirely readable and fine for our purposes. However it is not gentle on our laser printer toner budget. What we really want is the background to…
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Using raspberry pi for two-way video/audio streaming
I am currently writing custom software to create a variety of distributed media solutions. One of these involves a raspberry-pi security camera. Right now my software isn’t finished, but I wanted to prove the concept out using existing software. System requirements: Raspberry pi: Broadcast audio (over the LAN) to a server Broadcast video (over the…
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Key-based OpenVPN for OSX/Linux/QNAP Howto
I’ve had excellent luck setting up a key-based authentication VPN for my home network, which is distributed across the country and consists of Linux, Mac (OS X), and QNAP nodes. What, you ask, does “key-based authentication” refer to? It means that I do not allow people to enter passwords. Instead, clients must possess the proper key,…