Emacs - Justin Foell

I started my voice over IP (VOIP) installation with the pre-configured for raspberry pi – “Incredible PBX” software – care of the Nerd Vittles crew.

For phones I have a Linksys RTP300 analog telephone adapter (ATA) that I purchased at a local thrift store. It’s a discontinued product, but they’re easy to find for cheap on eBay.

The one I purchased had firmware that was coded to only work with Vonage. Years ago I was able to hack it and unlock it. https://thegeekoftheworld.com/unlock-rtp300/

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I hacked mine the old-fashioned way (circa 2012) by editing the bin file using emacs ‘hexl-mode’ http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21133882-

Since I did this years ago, some of the instructions and firmware files are getting hard to find, but if you need instructions – let me know in the comments and I’ll try to help as best I can.

Getting into the RTP-300 admin panel

It had been at least a year since I’ve logged into the admin interface on my RTP-300. Luckily, there are some fun things you can do to help figure out how to get in. If you have a phone hooked up to it and it’s powered on, you can use the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to get information. This article from Cisco (who purchased Linksys) has many of the available codes.

Pick up the phone and dial #### to get into the IVR menu. Then press 110# and the nice lady will read back to you the IP of your ATA.

Good info, but it wasn’t running the web interface on port 80, so I had to figure that out. The IVR option for port wasn’t working, so I did an nmap scan of all ports 1-65535 from the command line – you could use the raspberry pi or any other computer on the same network as your RTP-300:

$ nmap 172.16.0.11 -Pn
Starting Nmap 7.60 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2020-04-04 18:02 CDT
Nmap scan report for voip.lan (172.16.0.11)
Host is up (0.0048s latency).
Not shown: 999 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
8080/tcp open http-proxy

There it is, port 8080. I made sure to add the address (with port) in my password manager. Then I had to use Firefox to finally connect to the ATA admin because Chrome wouldn’t complete the connection – likely because the RTP300 doesn’t have support for HTTPS. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

But we’re in! We’ll first do some configuration in Asterisk and then come back to the RTP300 configuration.

Connecting the RTP-300 to IncrediblePBX

IncrediblePBX comes with some SIP extensions pre-configured, so I roll with the defaults. I use extensions 701 and 702 for the two lines on my RTP-300. To navigate to them in IncrediblePBX, visit your IncredbilePBX address in your browser. Then use the “Incredible PBX Admin” credentials you set up when you initially installed IncrediblPBX.

Once you’re logged in to the IncrediblePBX/Asterisk web admin, navigate to Extensions (under Applications).

There you can see there are a few extensions pre-configured for you, including 701 & 702, which will work great with the RTP-300.

Click the Edit button to the right (paper/pencil icon) to edit and view more information about that extension. You’ll need to do two things in here. First, copy the “Secret” key for each extension.

Second, for extension 702, also change the SIP port to 5061. There’s a note in there about how 5061 is sometimes used for “Line 2” on ATAs – and that’s exactly the case for the RTP-300.

RTP-300 Admin Navigation

The RTP-300 admin interface is little weird. Once you’re logged in you’ll want to navigate to the voice menu item on the far right.

Click the “Admin Login” link to switch from an informational view to one where we can actually make changes. Then click “switch to advanced view”.

Advanced view will show all of the extensions and settings.

RTP-300 Extension Configuration for IncrediblePBX

Configuring phone lines 1 & 2 is fairly simple despite the overwhelming number of settings fields on the admin. We just need to enter three values:

The IP address or domain name of our IncrediblePBX server as the SIP “Proxy”
This is the SIP server the ATA is going to register this line with.
The Incredible PBX extension number as the “User ID”
The extension secret as the “Password”

Test!

Once you have these settings saved, the ATA should now register itself with Asterisk on your IncrediblePBX system. The best way to know if it worked is to pick up the receiver one of your lines – you should hear a dial tone 📞

If you’ve got a dial-tone and a phone on each port, you should be able to dial each extension with 701# or 702#. The # isn’t strictly necessary, it just instructs the ATA that you’re done dialing so it can stop waiting for further input. If you’re feeling fancy you could add a 70X entry to the dialplan on the line configuration of the ATA.

If that’s working, try one of the pre-configured Nerdvittles custom extensions. You can see them in the IncrediblePBX/Asterisk web admin by going to “Admin” and “Custom Extensions.”

Try 947# for weather by zip code ⛈️ or 951# for the latest news 📰

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So, I started a new job. Besides actually leaving my home to at least occasionally go into the office, the other big change is I’ve been given a brand-spanking-new MacBook Pro to use (our shop is a part of the Apple Consultant Network).

While using Linux professionally for the last 13 years is sort of coming to an end, Linux certainly isn’t going away from my life, especially after using it almost exclusively at home for 20 years.

The MacBook is still a BSD unix system at heart – with some great hardware, and a lovely, albeit sometimes frustrating, user interface laid on top. Mac enthusiasts might abhor that the only application I set to launch on boot is the terminal. This article is not for them, because in old-school fashion I’m going to cover installing and using Emacs and some other extras in OSX.

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Installing Emacs

Installing Emacs via homebrew is very easy so I won’t go into it, you can follow these instructions: http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Installing_Emacs_on_OS_X#Homebrew

OSX 10.11 (El Capitan) actually includes GNU Emacs 22, but it’s only the terminal based version. If you want the newest version and a full GUI, follow the homebrew instructions above. If you need to move or rename the old version, you may need to keep OSX’s attributes and latest security layers in mind. Rather than moving my old version, I added an alias to my ~/.bashrc:

alias emacs="/usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.5/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs"

However, OSX’s bash won’t read and run~/.bashrc, only ~/.bash_profile, so to my ~/.bash_profile I added:

[[ -s ~/.bashrc ]] && source ~/.bashrc

In my ~/.bash_profile I also added a ~/bin directory to my path where I can put custom scripts:

export PATH="~/bin:$PATH"

To shorten up emacs I added a shell script called em to my ~/bin directory:

#!/bin/sh
open -n -a /Applications/Emacs.app "$@" &

One caution about doing something similar to this is that em (edit) is now very close to rm (remove) since the ‘E’ and ‘R’ keys are neighbors. Just make sure you know what you’ve typed before hitting return 🙂

Fix Home/End Keys

I’m not sure why the Home/End keys don’t have normal behavior as I’ve become accustomed to. Here are some fixes I’ve found that work:

Home/End for most applications

$ mkdir -p ~/Library/KeyBindings/

$ vi ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

Then add the following:

{
    "\UF729"  = moveToBeginningOfParagraph:; // home
    "\UF72B"  = moveToEndOfParagraph:; // end
    "$\UF729" = moveToBeginningOfParagraphAndModifySelection:; // shift-home
    "$\UF72B" = moveToEndOfParagraphAndModifySelection:; // shift-end
}

Home/End in Terminal

Open Terminal, then go to Terminal -> Preferences…

Go to the Profiles section, highlight the terminal profile you use the most, then click the “Keyboard” tab. You’ll probably have to add two new entries for Home and End, but first highlight F1, click edit, then copy the \033OP action code so you can paste it in the new codes. Click cancel after copying the F1 code.

Click ‘+’ to add Home. Choose Key: “Home”, Modifier: “None”, Action: “Send Text:”, and paste in the action code. Click “Delete One Character” and then type “H”. You should end up with \033OH for Home. Follow the same procedure for End, but map it to \033OF.

Home/End In Emacs

Edit your ~/.emacs file (you could instead edit it with Emacs and it would be oh so meta).

$ vi ~/.emacs

Add the following:

; Fix home/end in OSX
(define-key global-map [home] 'beginning-of-line)
(define-key global-map [end] 'end-of-line)

PHP Add-ons

I wanted to add a PHP Code Sniffer to do syntax checking and documentation/standards enforcement. To add it via homebrew, I first needed to add the alternate homebrew-php repository. See the installation instructions here. Then I could install phpcs:

brew install php-code-sniffer

I added this because I want to use the official PHP Code Sniffer for WordPress.

I installed the Code Sniffer for WordPress from github into my ~/Sites directory and then added it to my phpcs configuration by running:

phpcs --config-set installed_paths /Users/jfoell/Sites/WordPress-Coding-Standards

Then I verified that it was installed by running:

phpcs -i

The installed coding standards are MySource, PEAR, PHPCS, PSR1, PSR2, Squiz, Zend, WordPress, WordPress-Core, WordPress-Docs, WordPress-Extra and WordPress-VIP

PHP Code Sniffer in Emacs via MELPA and Flycheck

I added MELPA stable packages to my ~/.emacs file (see their installation instructions), then updated MELPA from within Emacs:

M-x package-list-packages RET

Then I installed the flycheck extension (which will use PHP CodeSniffer to do on-the-fly syntax checking):

M-x package-install RET flycheck RET

Then I added the following default phpcs standard setting and init hook to my ~/.emacs file:

(custom-set-variables
 '(flycheck-phpcs-standard "WordPress")
)

(add-hook 'after-init-hook #'global-flycheck-mode)

Other Emacs and Terminal Goodies

To add Tab Bar Mode support, I cloned the Aquamacs tabbar project into ~/.elisp/tabbar. Then I added these lines to my ~/.emacs file to load the tabbar library and start tab bar mode automatically:

;; Load custom tabbar mode
(load-file "~/.elisp/tabbar/tabbar.el")
(tabbar-mode)

Lastly, here’s a great article on getting the terminal prompt and output to look a little nicer: http://osxdaily.com/2013/02/05/improve-terminal-appearance-mac-os-x/

Happy Hacking!

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Jessi got me a Kindle Touch for my birthday and of course I have been geeking out, looking for free/cheap content to put on it, so I can put it through the paces. I thought I’d share a couple freebies.

According the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution licenses for the GNU Emacs Manual and Version Control with Subversion (respectively), I’m within my right to reformat – in this case from HTML to mobipocket e-book format – and redistribute these works free of charge:

GNU Emacs manual – Richard M. Stallman

Version Control with Subversion – Ben Collins-Sussman,_Brian W. Fitzpatrick

If Emacs or SVN seem too old school or “so last year” for you (again, respectively), I recommend getting the very professionally done – and also free – Pro Git book.

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Converting HTML to an e-book using calibre

Converting a single-page HTML file to mobipocket format proved to be very easy. I used calibre – highly recommended, especially since it runs on all platforms and isn’t java*.

* I am not promoting Python or its hippie ways, but calibre seems like a great use of the language to reach the broadest audience.

The only extra thing I had to do during conversion was remove the full urls from the anchor tags. For example links like:
<a href="http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn-book.html#svn.foreword">Foreword</a>

needed to be changed to:
<a href="#svn.foreword">Foreword</a>

Or else when selecting “Forward” the Kindle would close the book and launch the browser to bring up that page. Calibre provides a simple search and replace step as part of the conversion.

The Kindle Itself

The Kindle Touch’s interface does leave something to be desired, although I’m hopeful it will improve with software updates. It is great for reading books, especially if they are “professionally” formatted by a “real” publisher. On free books (like the ones I’ve provided or public domain books from Project Gutenberg), I’ve found sometimes navigating from the table of contents to a chapter will sometimes land you past the point where you actually wanted to go. Sites like feedbooks often have reformatted versions of the public domain books found at Project Gutenberg that may or may not work better on your device.

The Kindle Touch really falls on its face worst when using the web browser. While the browser is listed as an “experimental” feature, when using it I pine for the page up/down buttons as sliding the viewport (ala iPad) is very clunky. I’ve found the best way to move around in the browser is to double-tap the bottom of the screen if you want to page down, although it really just re-centers the viewport. Effectively it’s like a half-page-down.

Also while the ads don’t interfere with reading, they bothered me when the Kindle was just sitting there. Its e-ink staring at me in its powerless state, exhibiting some douchey lady with expensive sunglasses trying to sell me a spa package. I wanted to be greeted by Jules Verne! Rather than going my usual route of jailbreaking the device to skirt the ads, I bought my way out of it through Amazon. Then my screen-savers changed from ads to an ironic collection of images evoking typesetting.

It’s ironic because on the Kindle you have a grand total of three (3) fonts to choose from, and the 4th generation Kindles have disabled 3rd party software (such as calibre) from being able to add/set a user font. While I understand it might be retro-grouchy to expect the Kindle to render such nuances as hanging punctuation, it would be nice if the Kindle provided some facility for publishers to at least temporarily impose their font on us (until we override it in the settings menu).

For anyone curious enough to want to know how to convince WordPress that e-books are not a threat to national security, see this.

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Justin Foell

Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

Tag Archives: Emacs

IncrediblePBX and the Linksys RTP-300

Getting into the RTP-300 admin panel

Connecting the RTP-300 to IncrediblePBX

RTP-300 Admin Navigation

RTP-300 Extension Configuration for IncrediblePBX

Test!

Emacs on OSX

Installing Emacs

Fix Home/End Keys

Home/End for most applications

Home/End in Terminal

Home/End In Emacs

PHP Add-ons

PHP Code Sniffer in Emacs via MELPA and Flycheck

Other Emacs and Terminal Goodies

Free Subversion and Emacs books for Kindle

Converting HTML to an e-book using calibre

The Kindle Itself