Business - Justin Foell

In 2014 I had a personal ban on Strava. Not because Strava has prompted some people to do stupid things (it has), but because they shut down a perfectly working API and left all of their users (and 3rd party developers such as myself) hanging while they developed their “Version 3” API.

As one of the developers of a WordPress plugin for Strava, all work was effectively abandoned.

Continue reading →

I did enjoy using Strava not so much for the competitive-ness, but as a general recording keeping spot for all of my miles. While I understand that competition is the main selling point, it’s ancillary to me. I just like that I can see what my cycling friends are also doing.

Garmin Connect?

In the wake of the API shutdown, I perused the other options out there. Since I had a Garmin GPS, I thought I’d check out their prospects to see if they “get it.” They supposedly had an API for Garmin Connect so I inquired with this email:

I was looking for details about the Garmin Connect Web Services API. All it says is “coming soon” and the developer forum seems to be unmoderated spam:https://forums.garmin.com/forumdisplay.php?54-Garmin-Developer-Information I am an author of the Strava plugin for WordPress – as you may know Strava recently changed it’s API access so many apps and plugins no longer function. Now is the time for disruption! Publishing the Garmin Connect API would be a great way to get some momentum behind the project and get users who are fed up with Strava to come over to Garmin Connect.

In the meanwhile, I tried out Garmin Connect by uploading a track. One of the niceties about Strava (besides the fact that people are actually using it) is that they remove the non-moving time. Whether I’m at a stoplight or grabbing lunch, I can view a ride as just the moving portion. Garmin awkwardly leaves it in, which can dishearten you when you look at the average speed:

Also, they seem to be heavily invested in relying on Garmin devices (see the watch icon near the question marks above) – and only the latest ones. Lastly, Strava can calculate the calories burned based on my weight and my bike’s weight (part of my profile), measured against the speed and profile of the GPS track.

* Side-note: the latest Garmin Connect dashboard menu looks a lot like the latest WordPress Admin menu, dontcha think?

Garmin Connect – Dead on Arrival

After the less-than-stellar first-time user experience, I heard back from Garmin Support:

After looking in to this issue further it appears that the Web Services API is not yet available. Unfortunately I do not have any information on when the API will become available. Unfortunately the only thing I can suggest is to create a post on the forum asking for more information. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

In the forum, I also got a response from another user who put it bluntly:

Many are those who have contacted Garmin and have not responded.

That project is dead.

Strangely, Garmin is still pushing their connect service hard, along with their hardware of course:

garmin bicycling may 2015 — Garmin Ad in May 2015 Bicycling

The Return of the Strava API

Once the V3 API became available, support tickets regarding WP-Strava started coming in. I didn’t even know that the API had gone public. If there was some sort of communication effort on Strava’s behalf, they failed because I missed it. But now work has slowly come back to life with the WP-Strava project. And now I’m slowly filling in all my rides from 2014 that I recorded with my GPS, but never uploaded to Strava.

MapSource out, QLandkarte In

I used to use MapSource (an old unsupported Windows program by Garmin) to capture my GPS tracks and save them as GPX files for Strava. The state of support for my Garmin Vista HCx was changing in Linux itself. The old garmin_gps driver which acted as an old school serial (COM) port worked with Wine/MapSource, but not with the newer direct USB driver. It was time to find something new, preferably native to Ubuntu.

QLandkarte GT is a somewhat clunky, but usable solution. Actually, when you go to the QLandkarte GT website there’s an announcement about a successor program called QMapShack, but the latest version included in Ubuntu 15.04 wasn’t very full featured – so it will have to wait. I’ve learned to use QLandkarte quickly despite its clunkiness, so I thought I’d share my workflow.

Saving Tracks in QLandkarte GT

I won’t cover downloading tracks from the Garmin, as it was all very easy. Just remember to install the qlandkartegt-garmin package in Ubuntu to get Garmin support in QLandkarte GT.

As you can see QLandkarte GT’s color scheme doesn’t exactly jive with Ubuntu’s default color scheme. In the upper left there’s a persistent context menu which may be useful, but the only thing that’s really visible are the icons. The only ones I use regularly are from the Tracks section of the application: the “Join” action (green plus icon) and the “Download” action (blue down arrow icon).

Switch to the tracks tab and then download tracks from the GPS. Then you can edit individual tracks by right clicking and choosing “Edit…”:

Once the track edit screen is open you can change the name of the track, and remove (hide) any points from your track that may be erroneous:

Typically I also need to join tracks, especially if I turned off the GPS at a stop or if the GPS lost signal at any point. Joining tracks is also clunky. You don’t select the tracks and then choose “Join Tracks”, you choose “Join Tracks” which brings up a dialog where you can specify which tracks you want to join, and what new track to save them as:

Now that I’ve got my track organized, I want to save it as a GPX file. This took me a while to find, but you need to select File -> Export Geo Data. Then after you select a filename, you’re prompted to select what GPS elements you want to save:

Use the “All” checkbox at the bottom left to un-check all elements, and then you can select just the track(s) you want to export.

Then I can upload them to Strava using their easy-to-find file uploader. Here’s how it looks in a post using WP-Strava:

Elapsed Time	Moving Time	Distance	Average Speed	Max Speed	Elevation Gain	Calories Burned
03:34:01 hours	03:13:22 hours	42.15 mi.	13.08 mph	41.16 mph	1,115.81 ft.	1,260 kcal

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Here’s a write-up for how to create an animated gif from a video on Ubuntu 14.10. I know 15.04 is almost in beta, but hopefully this process won’t change too much. Submit a comment if things change and I’ll revisit it and update.

This is an easy way to create those animated gifs you see on your favorite tumblr blogs. Now that Netflix works in Linux, you can do it easily with your favorite shows.

Continue reading →

You’ll need the following installed:

google-chrome, vlc, gimp, gimp-gap (gimp animation package), avconv

Capture

Open up chrome and load up your favorite show from Netflix. Let Netflix run in the window (not full-screen). No need to maximize your chrome window, it only needs to be bigger than your desired output resolution.

Fire up VLC and choose Media → Convert / Save…

Go to the Capture Device tab and select Desktop for the Capture mode.

Also, set the frame rate you’d like to use. TV shows normally use 30 f/s and movies 24 f/s. For gif-ing purposes, 15 f/s is usually good enough to convey the idea.

Press Convert / Save and you’ll be taken to the next screen. Select Convert, and the profile for Video MP4 (H.264 + MP3) is fine. Then put in a destination for your output file.

Queue up your show because when you press Start it’s going to start recording right then. When the clip you want to capture is over, press the stop button on the VLC player. You should have a MP4 of your entire desktop including your video.

Split into frames

My go-to program for splitting videos into frames would be ffmpeg, but it’s missing in action. There was apparently a rift in the ffmpeg development team. Luckily, avconv is an almost syntactically identical replacement.

From the command line convert your video into individual frames. Set the rate (-r) argument to the same frame rate as your capture to make things easy.

avconv -i vlc_capture.mp4 -r 15 image-%3d.png

At this point you can preview your images and delete any “extras” you may have at the beginning and the end of the sequence.

Edit in Gimp

Now open all of the frames in Gimp. Use File → Open as Layers…

This tutorial assumes images are brought in as layers with the first frame (lowest number) on top due to the relative ease of “merging down” layers. To do this, make sure the images are ordered in the chooser in reverse order. Before we export, we’ll reverse this process.

Once it’s in Gimp and the frames are in the right order, first on top for this tutorial, crop your image to cut out everything but the video. Then Image → Scale Image… to set the final output size, something reasonable like 500 pixels wide.

Add Captions (words)

Find the first frame you want to add text to, and set all the other frames above it invisible by clicking the eye icon in the layers window. Then on the first frame you want to add text to, use the text tool.

The Impact font seems to be popular for memes. I like to add a one pixel outline to make sure the white text stands out. To do this, create a transparent layer under your text layer. Select the text layer, right click and select Text to Path.

Select the new transparent layer, then choose Select → From Path.

Now you’ve got the text selection on a different layer. Use Select → Grow… to grow the selection by one pixel. Then use the bucket tool to fill it with black. Merge the text and outline layer when you’re satisfied.

When you like the look and placement of your text, it’s time to copy it onto all the frames. This can be tedious, so I recommend using keyboard shortcuts. Layer → Duplicate Layer is Shift+Ctrl+D. Duplicate your text and space it in between the next frame, repeat.

Once all the frames that should have text have a text layer above them, it’s time to merge. There’s no default keyboard shortcut for Layer → Merge Down so I recommend creating one, I used Shift+Ctrl+M. Merge each text layer down to the frame below, making sure everything is set to visible or merging will just throw away the invisible layer(s).

Once all your frames have the appropriate text, it’s time to experiment…

Convert & Export

Change the Image → Mode from RBG to Indexed… Select a low palette count like 127, or 63 for animations. This is where you can really help reduce the final image size in bytes. The lower you find acceptable, the smaller the image. If you can get the final size under 1MB and you’re doing good, under 500KB and you’re getting better, but you won’t know until the last step, so you may have “undo” your way back to the RGB image and re-adjust.

If your image layers go from low to high, top to bottom (respectively), now is the time to do Layer → Stack → Reverse Layer Order otherwise your gif will run in reverse!

The Gimp Animation Package will allow you to now choose Filters → Animation → Optimize (for GIF). This will remove everything except for the “moving parts” to make the export small(ish). It will save changes as a new image.

Last Export As… and give the export file a .gif extension.

Check:

As animation
Loop forever

Set Delay between frames to 1000 / n where n = number of frames per second you selected when using avconv.

Press Export. Enjoy!

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When the internet really started catching steam, email was one of it’s flagship services. Back then it was simple but somewhat archaic – it’s goal was to be redundant enough to get your message through even if it required several tries. It was the digital equivalent of:

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Think of all the stuff that has been added atop of email such as encryption and MIME encoding to send attachments. But it was our must-deliver mantra that was used by the spammers for their personal gain. Then even more layers for spam and virus filtering were added. Spammers have sort of negated that “must deliver” image of email to where I click send and think, “I hope it will be delivered.”

Continue reading →

God Save the Email Administrator

I used to manage my own email server. Postfix SMTP, Courier POP/IMAP, Amavis/Freshclam SPAM & Antivirus. I don’t like being an email administrator. It’s frankly too much to keep up with. I just want email to work. Recently I switched my self-managed email to google mail. I figured it would be a set-it-and-forget-it type of deal. I was wrong.

The reason I still had issues is because I still wanted control of my DNS. Turns out there is a lot contained within DNS besides MX records that can effect mail delivery. I found this DNS TXT record page at google that got me started, but each individual entry could use some additional explanation.

SPF Records

Before moving to google, I had added this SPF record:

                IN      SPF     "v=spf1 mx a ip4:198.58.117.237 -all"
                IN      TXT     "v=spf1 mx a ip4:198.58.117.237 -all"

I’m not sure why the SPF record exists on its own and in a TXT record, but I don’t really care, as long as email goes through. But it wasn’t going through. The problem with this set up is, it tells the receiver that anything received from my domain is good if it came from my server IP (mostly system & website generated notifications). But my google mail comes from google, not my IP. So I was getting bounce-backs from picky providers. The solution was to add google into the mix and loosen the failure type on the “all” mechanism:

                IN      SPF     "v=spf1 mx a ip4:198.58.117.237 include:_spf.google.com ~all"
                IN      TXT     "v=spf1 mx a ip4:198.58.117.237 include:_spf.google.com ~all"

Google Site Verification

This is one of those things you probably already did by putting a HTML file on your site to prove to google that you own it. This gives your ownership even more credibility. It’s not required for email delivery, but since I was going over the list of TXT records, I figured I’d add it. Locating this section in the webmaster tools is tricky, so I made a video:

Add the verification key to your DNS file:

                IN      TXT     "google-site-verification=DqPNHNAJ5DnBpLr1TzZe38vQucZZ49wnCGiU9e75RTo"

After saving your changes and restarting bind, you can test to make sure your new TXT entries are showing using dig. I recommend using the ‘@nameserver’ parameter so you can query your own nameserver before the changes have propagated internet-wide.

$ dig @ns.foell.org TXT foell.org
...
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;foell.org.			IN	TXT

;; ANSWER SECTION:
foell.org.		604800	IN	TXT	"v=spf1 mx a ip4:198.58.117.237 include:_spf.google.com ~all"
foell.org.		604800	IN	TXT	"google-site-verification=DqPNHNAJ5DnBpLr1TzZe38vQucZZ49wnCGiU9e75RTo"

DKIM

I don’t know the full details of how DKIM works, but it’s an encryption key added to your domain name which helps insure that the email received was sent from who you think it was. It works because your email provider (google) adds a DKIM domain key to the header of the email, and the receiver can validate it by using the DKIM public key saved on your DNS record.

Here’s how to get your DKIM key:

Add it to your DNS file:

google._domainkey IN    TXT     "v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCnCPVKm4lCMECaU/eFOQewJaGpAk/hx4D8pQCRQ+Iq1Y7pUL09iyFImWRveBTBRccOEy/gchsZoseBVMvAS4L86GQhUgi+4tk4VvpxkQLgbuPouoLs54W4kIDUhgZcmNe4fBjoIMgHQvRfXc1G6MnwBZcU3a0URtxfhExFCflfUwIDAQAB"

Verify that it has been saved using dig

$ dig @ns.foell.org TXT google._domainkey.foell.org

DMARC

DMARC combines both DKIM and SPF to combat phishing and protect your domain’s reputation. I added this to my bind resource record:

_dmarc          IN      TXT     "v=DMARC1; p=quarantine\; pct=100\; rua=mailto:postmaster@foell.org"

Test using dig

$ dig @ns.foell.org TXT _dmarc.foell.org

Again, I’m not exactly sure how it all works, but I now get informational reports from servers that I’ve sent emails to, letting me know my “standing” from an email perspective as they see it. I don’t plan on being proactive about them, but they’ll be useful if I start getting bounce messages again.

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With all new Apple i-devices moving to the lightning connector, I’ve found my alarm clock with it’s 30-pin dock connector has reverted to it’s 20th century radio-only state of use. I suppose I could use an adapter, but it seems like a great way to break something (by adding a longer lever).

Then I remembered I have a 6th generation iPod nano sitting in a drawer. You know, the one that looks like this:

But with older iPods that exist outside of the “App” and jailbreak realm, there a beast to contend with: iTunes. Continue reading →

With the Minnesota Orchestra back in business (and now with their music director re-hired), Jessi and I purchased a subscription package of concerts to attend. With the orchestra pulling out all the stops on their repertoire, we wanted to attend almost all of the concerts. But that was unrealistic.

So when we couldn’t attend concerts that we wanted to hear, we could listen to them on the radio. And if we couldn’t listen in, there is the radio stream, which I could capture.

Radio stations have for the most part made streaming easy. Some have made attempts to secure their streams from easily being captured by using proprietary protocols like RTMP. But it remains that a stream is still a stream, and it can always be saved. It may just take a greater or lesser degree of difficulty.

Continue reading →

Luckily, many stations opt for the tried-and-true streaming MP3 delivery method that every device can support without special hardware or software. My local classical affiliate is no exception. I found the address to the stream in apmplayer-all.min.js file (I used Chrome to un-minify it).

Then I put together a script that would save the stream…

First, I created a script, and saved it to /home/justin/bin/record_orchestra.sh on my system:

#!/bin/sh

DATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
STREAM='http://cms.stream.publicradio.org/cms.mp3'
DESTINATION="/home/justin/Music/mnorch_$DATE.mp3"
STOP='22:30'

cvlc --demux dump --demuxdump-file $DESTINATION $STREAM &
PID=$!
echo "kill $PID" | at $STOP

The script needs to be added to the crontab of my unix system to kick it off at 8PM on every Friday.

$ crontab -e
# m h dom mon dow command
0 20 * * fri /home/justin/bin/record_orchestra.sh

Script, explained

A little explanation of what’s going on in the script:

I’m using the date command to help me name the files. mnorch_20140214.mp3 for example is Valentines Day – Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Holst’s Planets 😎

I’m using VLC to capture the stream. cvlc is just a wrapper that’s included with VLC. It runs in a “headless” mode where nothing displays – perfect for a cron job. I’m telling it to do a raw dump of the incoming stream so the file doesn’t get transcoded, just saved exactly as it was streamed from the station. The ampersand (&) at the end of the cvlc command makes it run in the background.

Using the $! shell variable, the script saves the process ID of VLC. Then using the at daemon, we tell it to stop VLC “at 10:30PM,” when the show is likely over.

← Summary Only

Justin Foell

Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

Category Archives: Business

Using QLandkarte GT for Strava

Garmin Connect?

Garmin Connect – Dead on Arrival

The Return of the Strava API

MapSource out, QLandkarte In

Saving Tracks in QLandkarte GT

Creating an animated gif using VLC & Gimp

Capture

Split into frames

Edit in Gimp

Add Captions (words)

Convert & Export

Gmail extras SPF, DMARC, & DKIM with Bind

God Save the Email Administrator

SPF Records

Google Site Verification

DKIM

DMARC

Adding music to iPod Nano 6G in Ubuntu

libhashab.so binary – trusted?

It Works

Record a streaming radio program

Script, explained