Laptop bag prototype – 95% recycled content
May0
I haven’t had much time recently to do as much on Loopcase as I’d like but I did manage to get a prototype laptop case made fro Tommi last week. It is for a Sony 13.1 inch Z-Series (VPCZ116GGB).
I really like having a separate case for the laptop/mouse/power adapter to my pack or other bag. Having a laptop in with my soup pot or tape measure and pliers I seem to carry around doesn’t feel right. So this format – a padded sleeve with front pocket for the peripherals works really well. You can always throw it in another bag if needs be.
Bunk beds from recycled materials
May0
Finally finished this project a few weeks ago – bunk beds for my ‘god’ children (what a strange phrase) Manu and Moana. These are constructed from old rimu timber bed frames and fittings and have ski slats. Lots of fun :-)
Shoestring IT Cabinet Project
Apr0
Wastebusters, where I work two days a week, is a community owned organisation and I have been chipping away at replacing their consumer grade tree of 8 port network switches with something that matches the needs of a growing office with up to a dozen people working at once. Plus with our move to VOIP the network needed to handle the increased demand and reliability requirement.
Today I fitted out a nice steel electrical switching box that turned up in the yard a few months ago as an IT cabinet. It houses:
- 20 port Cisco network switch Bis got from the eDay last year
- 2 x Linksys VOIP ATA’s that will talk to the Trixbox PABX and currently talk to Kiwilink
- A Linksys NSLU2 with a 320gb drive connected for shared storage
- A Linksys DSL modem and switch
I outfitted the box with some quite sketchy looking aluminium brackets that carry any heat away from the switch and ATA’s and stand the whole lot off so air can vent around everything. There are openings top and bottom so a thermal chimney effect will hopefully keep everything cool on summer days. While it looks a bit rough I think it will perform well and offer some protection from the main thing that seems to go wrong around here which is cables falling out of devices when they are knocked by somebody.
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- A bunch of stuff from the recycling centre plus a drill
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- The cabinet kinda showing the aluminium fins
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- The cabinet with everything and the Trixbox PABX laptop the right
Photos by Simon
Trixbox, FreePBX and System Recordings using Audacity
Mar3
I am building an Asterisk box for Wastebusters using the excellent Trixbox CE mixup of Asterisk, FreePBX and LAMP. It is on a Toshiba laptop andas of yesterday I had everything working well except uploading system recordings and the outgoing SMTP for voice mail.
This morning I managed to solve the System Recording using a free opensource audio recorder toolbox Audacity. The steps to record a message for an IVR are below.
- Get the latest version of Audacity, I think it needs to be later than 1.3 (currently in Beta).
- First set the “Project Rate (hz)” at the bottom on the screen to 8000hz.
- Record a message (standard Audacity help files cover this including editing/clipping the message) you should have something like the below. Note at this point it is in Stereo and the wrong bit rate and sample format to use in Asterisk.
- First change the track to mono. Click on the “Audio Track” menu just to the left of the blue waveform and and go down to “Split Stereo to Mono”, this should create two tracks. You can delete one of them.
- Clicking on the “Audio Track” menu again scroll down to “Set Sample Format” and change it to “16-bit PCM”.
- Go to the main “File” menu in the top of the window and pull down to “Export”. Where it says “Save as Type” select “Wav (Microsoft)” it should say “signed 16 bit – PCM” after “Microsoft”. Click “Save”.
- An “Edit Meta Data” box should come up. Just click OK.
- A box called “Advanced Mixing Options” will come up and there should be one “Output Channel” if so click ok.
- Upload to Asterisk using “System Recordings” or directly and test.
I tried all the Wav compressions available in Audacity GSM, Ulaw and Alaw but none of them worked in Asterisk. Strange.
Updated: 16th June 2010 – new bitrate setting.
Wanaka house insulation off to a good start
Mar0
Energyhouse our Wanaka Wastebusters initiative to deliver house insulation in Central Otago is off to a good start with our first houses in Wanaka started last week. Simon, resident light/lense expert came out and waved about his expensive camera gear and got some great shots of our model pretending to be hard at work (actually he was beading with sweat). See them on his Flickr. These will be great on our flyer coming out soon.
Favorite windows software: ISO burning
Mar0
Having had sporadic use for an ISO burner over the years I have normally defaulted to ISO Recorder a nice wee application. This time however I had some rewritable CD’s which needed blanking before being record-able. ISO Recorder does not have this function so I trawled around looking for an alternative.
After trying the free version of Nero (couldn’t for the life of me find the ISO record function) I ended up with ISO Image burner which elegantly handled CD-RW’s not problem and I am now installing Trixbox for Wastebusters from CD on a Toshiba laptop we had lying around here.
Custom solar panel bags for Wanaka Search and Rescue
Mar0
The Wanaka Search and Rescue is an impressive organisation and is often called on for searches throughout the lower Southern Alps. A new part of their kit is solar powered radio repeaters they can setup to provide radio services in remote areas. The solar panels are valuable and required some protection so they asked Cactus what could be done.
Cactus being busy aligning itself under its new General Manager and my workshop all setup now for Loopcase I made the cases here. They are 1000d nylon 6 outers with YKK zips and padded sides.
How can Nokia software be so bad? Or am I missing something?
Mar2
I have recently purchased a Nokia 5800 phone, and love it. The hardware is excellent and the touch screen interface exceeds my expectations. I even think the operating system (Symbian) of the phone itself is excellent. I am astounded however by the Nokia PC suite.
My first attempt was to update the operating system of the phone, to do this I installed Nokia System Updater which promptly crashed my computer. A real blue screen of death. On restarts the system hung after login and failed to work consistantly until I had cleaned the software off my computer.
I reinstalled and between system hangs I managed to get the updater working. After connecting the phone with all sorts of threats about how delicate the procedure was the application tried to download the 5800 update 5 times failing each time at around 80mb (the whole update is 120mb) until I had to force it to quit as it showed no signs of giving up. 5 times isn’t that bad you say? Well Nokia is running the slowest servers in the world it seems so 5 x 80mb on my normally speedy line took 6 hours!!
I gave up on the system update.
But then…today I decided I’d like to try the maps loader. I dutifully put the CD that came with the phone in and it went through the “do you want to download the latest from the web?” routine. 4 hours later and the application has failed to download anything meaningful from Nokia with the music software, Ovi NSU all failing due to the Nokia servers timing out.
Crazy! I guess this proves that even if the hardware is brilliant Google Android will still win over Symbian because they know how to run a server and can provide the exciting software experience people want tinkering with a smartphone.
Loopcases on the way
Feb2
I have been fooling around designing clever ways to close bags with out using velcro (wears out to fast) or zips (sometimes slow and fiddly) for almost twenty years, well at least since the early days of Cactus and brainstorming with the estimable Mark Schafer. I have also been meaning to put some large advertising banners than came my way to good use.
The result is “Loopcase” – the intention being a range of recycled material camera cases and shoulder bags. That in itself isn’t particularly new or exciting, but the closure, finish and general um … je ne sais quis? May well be. I am especially stoked with the compact camera cases.
Wireless network between houses – three years and counting…
Jan0
We have had a wireless network operating between 7 houses for around 3 years. The savings on Internet charges have been large and worth the small amount of pain in setting it up and maintaining it.
I get asked a lot about how it works and what we use so here is a brief explanation.
We have a 2.4ghz standard wifi A/G network setup in a star configuration. The central house has a Linksys WRT54G wireless router attached to a standard ADSL 2+ modem, a very reliable unit which has external antenna connections unlike some other wireless routers, you can get these pretty cheap on Trademe. Attached to that and mounted on a small mast is an omni directional antenna from www.gowifi.co.nz something like this.
Each client house has a Linksys WAP54G wireless access point, these are again solid units and we used them because they can be used in reverse as a client instead of an access point. Note – there is a strange bug when configuring these, you need to use IE or Chrome when accessing the configuration panel as some editions of Firefox do not work with it. These have a directional antenna (similar to this) aimed at the hub. Most of these are inside houses and aimed through a window.
Almost all our failures have been at the modem, either it losing its session and not restoring it properly with the provider or it dying completely. We also have a troublesome shelter belt that has grown up and blocked two houses – the gear is true line of sight stuff.
This has enabled our house to lower its telecoms bill from $100+ to $20 by using a voip provider for the phone. Voip is getting better and better in this application but was inconsistant for the first year – still, we are early adopters and that is what you get.
Clients
