#“TP-Link TL-WA830RE Wifi Extender - A pile of junk until you install DD-WRT”

I use a lot of TP-Link gear for home stuff. It’s as cheap as chips and the hardware is usually totally reliable. But the software, dear god the software. I cannot understand why Chinese manufacturers of cheap networking gear don’t take a leaf out of the book of Chinese manufacturers of cheap phones. The latter all use Android now, so why don’t the former all use DD-WRT or OpenWRT? When free software is 10x better than anything you have built yourself, save time and effort and point all your engineers at improving DD-WRT instead of your own crappy code.

Some of the walls in my parents house are 3ft thick so Wifi is a “challenge”. My Mum finally joined the world of computers and the internet last year when she got an iPad. The problem is that the main router is in one room whilst she likes to use the iPad in the kitchen. And those walls get in the way.

We tried using a setup with TP-Link Powerline adapters and a DD-WRT-hacked FON rotuer in the kitchen but the house wiring is so old it was totally unreliable. At the start of the year, they got someone in to move the phone wiring closer to the kitchen so the router would be visible. And this just about works but the signal is very weak still.

I have previously had some success with using WDS to connect routers together over Wifi on an XBox-1 but it was a nightmare to configure and I’m trying to do all the setup for the parents remotely.

Given that they are using a TP-Link W8961ND with stock firmware as their main router, I thought it would make sense to go for an out-of-the-box solution and use a TL-WA830RE Range Extender. They are both made by the same company and I believed their claim that a simple push of the QSS button on both would “just work”, so I got one on Amazon (Note they are now selling the V2 which is different). The reviews mostly seemed positive too.

I have a W8961ND as a backup here too. So the plan was to set it up identically to the parents one, then configure the Range Extender with it and then they should be able to just plug it in when I give it to them at Easter.

But no. Zero success getting them to talk to each other. Automatic methods didn’t work and manual methods seem to involve MAC addresses so that means whilst I might get it working here, it would then fail for the parents.

Grrr. So I did my usual trick. I headed over to DD-WRT to see if there is a version for it. There isn’t but there is for a similar model and the forums said it worked fine. It did.

I then followed the simple instructions here and here to make it a client bridge and 10 minutes later I had extended the wireless from one end of our house to the other using the same SSID.

Now to see if it works for the parents :-)

#“The state of Open Source projects in Ireland vs other countries, based on GitHub activity”

Last weekend I was working away on a personal side-project of mine and I suddenly realised I follow almost no Irish projects or developers on GitHub. I then started writing this post which was going to be an attack on our lack of people who work on OSS projects outside of work.

But rather than go with gut, I decided to see if I could back it up with data. I decided GitHub relative activity could give us a strong metric of where Ireland fits in to the Open Source world. Of course there are tons of other OSS project hosting sites like Sourceforge, BitBucket, Assembla, Gitorious and even self-hosting but GitHub should do as a rough measure.

I assumed someone had done some simple analysis like this before but all I found were “unusual” visualisations. Then I discovered that GitHub posts all their public commit data to Google BigQuery. This is a big online DB that you can query in a simple SQL console. I lashed together some simple queries and the data basically proved me completely wrong.

[sql] SELECT count(*) as commits, repository_owner, actor_attributes_location FROM [githubarchive:github.timeline] where actor_attributes_location CONTAINS ‘Ireland’ group by actor_attributes_location, repository_owner order by commits DESC LIMIT 100000000 [/sql]

So in total, I can see 9381 repository committers that mention “Ireland” in their location and have done at least one commit.

That drops to 5872 if we exclude people who have only ever done one commit.

[sql] select commits, repository_owner, actor_attributes_location from (SELECT count(*) as commits, repository_owner, actor_attributes_location FROM [githubarchive:github.timeline] where actor_attributes_location CONTAINS ‘Ireland’ group by actor_attributes_location, repository_owner order by commits DESC) where commits > 1 [/sql]

And 1799 if we exclude those who have done 5 commits or fewer.

Note that these are not repository owners, just people who have done commits.

If we then filter it down by people who have committed to their own repos we get 970. So with a population of 4.6m, 970 people have setup a GitHub account with a public repository and committed at least once to it.

[sql] SELECT count(*) as commits, repository_owner, actor_attributes_location FROM [githubarchive:github.timeline] where actor_attributes_location CONTAINS ‘Ireland’ and actor=repository_owner group by actor_attributes_location, repository_owner order by commits DESC [/sql]

At this point I was totally depressed. 970 repos. And many of these may be company ones or forks of other repos or school exercises. But then I decided to compare to some other countries.

Let’s start with the UK (Population: 63m): 7643 repos Using UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland: 9929 repos Gives us 724 vs 970 using Ireland as the baseline

Finland (Population: 5.4m): 1332 repos Using Suomi, Finland: 1333 repos Gives us 1135 vs 970 using Ireland as the baseline

Australia (Population: 21.5m): 4375 repos Using Australia, Oz: 4375 repos Gives us 936 vs 970 using Ireland as the baseline

New Zealand (Population: 4.5m): 1048 repos Using New Zealand, NZ: 1181 repos Gives us: 1207 vs 970 using Ireland as the baseline

Canada (Population: 33.9m): 4526 repos Gives us: 614 vs 970 using Ireland as the baseline

Finally, the spiritual home of OSS and the actual home of GitHub:

USA (Population: 315.5m): 6146 Using USA, US, United States: 7913 Gives us: 115 vs 970 using Ireland as the baseline

(My guess is this number is way too low and Americans just use city/state as they consider the country implied :-))

So I was wrong. Ireland isn’t particularly bad. Really, we’re all in or around the same ballpark except for the US. So this isn’t just an Irish thing. People working in the tech industry worldwide just don’t seem that interested in writing code in their spare time and making it freely available to others.

Thoughts? Corrections to my SQL? Anyone want to build a better query for the US?

#“Avoid Google+ lock-in by using Picasa with Dropbox”

We all know that Picasa Web Albums will be shut down in 2013. Or given a lobotomy and renamed to Google+ Photos.

But desktop Picasa is a decent enough photo management tool that you can use without any reference to Picasa Web or Google+. And Dropbox is fab. However I find the Dropbox photo import mechanism both unreliable and crude. Everything gets dumped into one folder, and that’s when it works at all.

So I now have the best of both worlds by simply setting my Picasa Import folder to a Photos folder on Dropbox. Picasa handles everything locally with the camera and Dropbox syncs everything to the cloud.

#“Adam Savage’s home office cabinet - Wow.”

I’m having a fantastic time watching Adam and the gang on tested.com. The older kids are enjoying some of them too. The omelette episode caused 11yo Oisn to make his first ever omelette and I fully expect Adam to announce Dishbusters soon.

But this cabinet. I kept saying “no way” throughout. Just watch it.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I0rX7t1J0Q

p.s. And I am so getting a Success Kid model.

#“Amazon \“Send to Kindle\” should be built on RSS to replace Google Reader”

I’ve seen a few mentions today of a new “Send to Kindle” button that you can add to your site/blog. It means people can send clips of your web content to their fave e-reader.

It just struck me that Amazon is missing a serious trick with the Kindle here. An RSS-based reader which works on E-ink, Fire, Android and Cloud Reader could be something awesome. Whilst I use some web-clipping services like Pocket, I much prefer to subscribe to sites. Being able to click a Kindle button that I know is also an RSS button would make me very happy indeed.

Now that Google wants to kill RSS in favour of G+ in a classic but doomed Microsoft-style embrace/extend/extinguish, this could be a big opportunity for Amazon to both attract all the old GReader userbase and turn RSS into a mainstream Subscribe Button. Like we all thought RSS would be, back in 2006.

I’d love to have all my RSS feeds synced to my old-school Kindle. It’s ideal for medium-to-long-form content. Give it offline reading capability and I’m sold.

In contrast, I doubt I’ll be adding their current button to any of my blogs unless ShareThis adds it as a default.

#“My Second Spring Cleaning”

Were living in a new kind of computing environment. Everyone has a device, sometimes multiple devices. Its been a long time since we have had this rate of changeit probably hasnt happened since the birth of personal computing 40 years ago.

To make the most of these opportunities, I need to focus otherwise I spread myself too thin and lack impact. So today I’m announcing some more closures, bringing the total to 70 Google features or services closed since my spring cleaning began in 2011:

• I first used Google+ in 2011 in an effort to make it easy for me to discover and keep tabs on my favorite topics. While the product has a loyal following, over the years, my usage has declined. So, on March 14th, 2013, I retired Google+. Users and developers interested in alternatives can find me on Twitter, Facebook, App.Net, Github and Flickr.

#“Replacing Google Reader with a $25 Raspberry Pi in the immortal words of Jesse Pinkman”

That’s right

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQSceJJ1Clc

Tiny Tiny RSSnow running beautifully on my Raspberry Pi (using NGINX, PHP-FPM, MySQL):

#“My \u00a31.37 Shrimp Computer”

I heard about the Shrimping It project a few months ago and loved it immediately. Based in Morecambe in the UK (hence the name), it’s an initiative to get Arduino compatible boards in the hands of anyone for less than 2.

I couldn’t resist and ordered the necessary ATMega chip plus Xtal from Farnell in Ireland along with the usual cheapo bits from DX in China.

You also need to splash out on a CP2102 programmer on eBay. Mine cost 2.08.

Last night I soldered the whole thing up, and amazingly for me, it worked first time. I added some headers to make connecting simpler and ran the Arduino LED Blink example on it.

I’ll be using this one for the next i-racer remote control that I build.

If you are interested in playing around with electronics or teaching your kids about it, I can’t think of a better way to spend a fiver.

#“A simple tool to bulk import your RunKeeper data into Endomondo”

UPDATE 17th Aug 2013: The tool should now be able to import Sports Tracker files into Endomondo too.

TL;DR - Download the Windows RunKeeper to Endomondo tool.

I’ve been using RunKeeper as my main mobile running app since January of last year. I liked it so much, I moved to the paid “Elite” tier pretty quickly. For almost a year, I really couldn’t fault it and liked the social interactions with other Irish users along with its rock solid stability.

Then in December, it all went to hell. Whatever they changed in the Android App around the end of the year made a complete mess of the GPS tracking. Every run looked like I was a drunk Mr Incredible, staggering from one side of the road to the other in a single step.

I ran a bunch of tests and compared the data to other tracking apps like Google My Tracks. They confirmed that the problem wasn’t the phone/OS/location/weather/time/mood or even the moon, the problem was RunKeeper. Even worse, my wife’s RK on iPhone was showing similar rubbish data on the same route! Given the terrible mobile signal in Old Chapel, is it possible that RK’s inability to live upload location actually trashes the location data itself?

After bitching and moaning for a few weeks and submitting a problem report, the RunKeeper people told me the all-new V3.0 should be better. And overall the accuracy was much improved, but now the altitude data is rubbish. And for some bizarre reason, they have removed functionality like the Map view in Android.

I expressed my annoyance in a status update on RK and was interested to find two other Irish runners who are equally annoyed by the problems of the past few months and RK’s seeming lack of urgency with fixing the core functionality of their product. And we are all paid users, not freeloaders.

I decided to check out alternatives and quickly landed on Endomondo. Initial impressions are that the mobile app is nice but very laggy on a HTC Sensation, the web-app is dog-ugly but very functional and there are a lot more of my Facebook friends on it than on RunKeeper. It also seems to be more of a generic activity app and I like the challenges they set.

But then I ran into a problem. I’m not moving Apps unless I can keep my running history. I keep a record of all my activity on a Google Doc spreadsheet but that obviously doesn’t have the GPS data. RunKeeper have an excellent API and also provide a full dump of all your GPS traces as a zipped GPX file. The problem is Endomondo, it can only import one GPX file at a time. And life is too short for that nonsense.

So I sat down and decided to create a simple importer which takes all of your unzipped GPX files and concatenates them into one large GPX file which Endomondo can handle. Once imported into Endomondo, the activities all appear separately as you’d expect.

I did my usual programming-by-Google-Search and found some simple generic Python GPX concatenation code (on GitHub, natch) which I had to modify to work with RK data. Of course I realised that the average runner is not going to be able to use a Python script with installation dependencies so I used Py2Exe to build an executable. Then I realised that most people nowadays won’t be comfortable with a command line app and I had a quick poke around PySide. A bit of messing with some example code and I had a nice GUI. Thennnnn I found PyInstaller which gives me a single windows EXE without needing an installer etc.

And so finally I get to the point. A simple Windows App which you point to a directory containing all your unzipped GPX files from RunKeeper and which generates a single endomondo.gpx file which you can import into Endomondo.

Converting from RunKeeper to Endomondo

1. You export from RunKeeper as follows:
   1. Click on your name in the top right of the main screen
   2. Select My Settings
   3. Scroll down and you’ll see a small blue link on the bottom left to “Export Data”
   4. Click that and follow the instructions
2. Download runkeeper2endomondogui.exe
3. This is a Windows Executable. You don’t know me from Adam. Please run a virus checker on it after you download.
4. runrunkeeper2endomondogui.exe
5. Use the File menu to select the directory with all of your RK GPX files
6. Currently the import only does those GPX files. So it is missing all of my manually entered treadmill runs (and there are a lot of those).
7. My code is very rough and may show “not responding” as it grinds through larger files. It tells you what it is doing in the main window so just be a bit patient, particularly if you have an older PC.
8. When it is done, you’ll have a new endomondo.gpx file in the same directory as the exisiting files
9. I’ve read that Endomodo craps-out on files over 10MB, so if the endomondo.gpx file is bigger than that, you’ll have to do this process in batches with sub-sets of the RK files. As a guide, my 47 GPX files including several half marathons and a full marathon come in at 4MB.
10. You import into Endomondo as follows:
    1. Once my tool is done, go to Endomondo and select “New Workout”
    2. Select the “Import from File” option
    3. Point it to the endomondo.gpx file
    4. Endomondo will appear to hang when you do the import. Leave it running and then open another browser tab and check your activity history. When it is fully populated with the imported activities, you can then safely close the original browser tab.
    5. That’s it, you’re done

The code has a few path dependencies on Windows but it should be trivial to change it to work on OS X and Linux.

All of the source code is, as always, up on GitHub, for you to change as you see fit

Questions or Problems or Expressions of Horror at the awfulness of the code? Leave a comment here. Not on Facebook or Twitter.

#“OpenVPN on Windows 8”

I’m two months using Windows 8 64-bit on my desktop and I’m still ok with it. The only real weirdness is a lot of disk churning even when nothing is happening. I turned off indexing but to no avail.

The only major annoyance has been OpenVPN. Whilst it works fine when it’s on, the problem arises when I disconnect or shut it down. The routing gets all messed up and I cannot connect to any external site. The fix is to disable/re-enable the network adapter which is a total pain in the ass.

I did some searching but didn’t find anyone else having the same issue. But I did find that there is finally [a] a new version of OpenVPN and [b] a 64-bit version. Even better, this official version works with saved passwords, which the old one didn’t.

I’ve been running it all morning and testing disconnect/re-connect. All seems fine. So if you are a BlackVPN or similar user and you are having Win 8 issues, give it a go. Obviously, like all other versions of OpenVPN, run as Administrator.