Twitter the next text messaging app?

I was reading a tweet by @haacked and came to a realization, not sure if he has realized it but using twitter as your text messaging is brilliant.....

Phil Haack (haacked):
If you are with @shiftkey tell him we're waiting for him outside the lobby of the Hyatt by the valet!

Here's why:
Suppose @shiftkey doesn't check his messages often, but his buddies with him do, if they follow haacked they may see that message and relay it to him, its like being able to get someone's attention without having to explicitly text him and friends, one message and you're done. I really like the idea, my only issue with twitter still is privacy, of course I've heard rumors of people tracking others inline presence to determine if they're home or not (for nefarious purposes) aside from that hiccup its a really useful tool for that. Of course if you don't know shiftkey and you most definitely aren't at the hotel this is just noise, which makes me wonder, would location aware tweets make sense? You only see a tweet like that if you're within x miles of said location/person?

Just some thoughts!

Speed up Eclipse in Ubuntu

In an effort to keep old hardware running trying to build Android Apps, I was really looking for a way to speed up eclipse. The best improvement I've found is to run using the Sun (Oracle) JDK, it's impressively faster, but for some reason or another you can't just apt-get it anymore.

I found a github site https://github.com/flexiondotorg/oab-java6.git that handles that, however it required a few extra steps, so I just made a quick script for it.

I'm sure there are some parameters that can be added so you don't have to keep adding yes to things, but this was a quick and easy with minimal monitoring, if you make an update (just fork the gist),  then let me know and I'll include it here.

Here is the gist:

Ripping DVD's in Ubuntu 12.04 -- Handbrake

It took me a little while to figure it out, but these are the steps I use to setup a fresh install of Ubuntu with the necessary software to rip dvd's.

Let me know if you have any additional tips and/or tricks to install that will setup everything!

Roku SSDP nodejs

I tried using the SSDP to find the roku ip address using ncat as recommended by Roku, but using wireshark to moitor it just didn't seem to be working. In Ubuntu using sudo wireshark brings up the app, selecting your network interface under filter type in udp.dstport == 1900 and click apply, I was seeing my router and the roku box notifying the 239.255.255.250 ip of their ip addresses, but I wasn't seeing the "M-SEARCH * HTTP/1.1 showing up. I wanted a nodejs solution so I tried searching for that, hoping that might change things up, I found this:

However placing the roku parameters ST: just wasn't working"roku:ecp", I did notice in the notify from the box that it was using MX as 2, so I tried updating that, however still no luck. After consulting nodejs.org I discovered the optional call back and in their example they close the connection when the call is completed. So I made the update to the following.

It appears that the program was closing the client connection before the message was sent out (and a response occurs), so once I put in the callback to close it, I got a response. Hope that helps anyone else who wants to use SSDP.

 Check out the Roku Remote nodejs module I am working on.

Music Glove Explained

I realize (thanks to a twitter follower) that I never really explained how my music glove actually works.
(Introducing Proof of Concept Music Glove)

Here goes.

The glove connects to the arduino over I/O. (basically just use some I/O pins to read a pressed state).

I wrote some code (referenced by this post: ) to transmit over the arduino's RS232 (Serial) port. The RN-42 uses RS232 to communicate to the device, so as long as the baud rate, etc are the same, then sending data from the Arduino to the RN-42 is a breeze.

Next we need a way to read the data. Download the bluetooth chat application from google (located here: ), modify it where the line says

Next I added some code to read received data.

The receive message section should look something like this:


Changing Volume, songs, etc, are all located in the following function I stuffed in there.

Of course you need a preferences to deal with things but you don't have to, you can simply just say if you see A, then do the action listed for the one you want in the above code.
Put it all together and you have a device which will change the volume or songs (if you set it up via preferences). Remember that some of the options are not publicly declared intents so they work right now, but may change in the future. If you have further questions go ahead and leave a comment, or find me on twitter @onaclov2000.