So, today...

... I Cancelled My Amazon Prime Membership

2021-01-17T12:13:00.005+00:00

Simple put - Irish customers aren't getting nearly as much as their UK counterparts, but are charged the same (£7.99 a month or £79 a year). I won't go into the new import tax and VAT that we now need to pay on most purchases shipped from the UK post-brexit.

Here's a comparison of available benefits that I would have been interested in. The others either don't interest me or are available in both jurisdictions.

The argument is that Ireland are too small to be catered for, but much like Amazon's attitude to Irish customers - I don't care.

Delivery

	Ireland	UK
Unlimited Premium Delivery	No	Yes
Unlimited Same Day Delivery	No	Yes
Delivery Upgrades	Yes	Yes
Unlimited Priority Delivery	Yes	Yes
Amazon Day	Yes	Yes
Amazon Fresh	No	Yes
Morrisons On Amazon	No	Yes

Videos & Photos

	Ireland	UK
Prime Video	Limited	Yes
Prime Video Channels	Yes	Yes
Prime Photos	Yes	Yes

Music

	Ireland	UK
Prime Music	No	Yes
Prime Music Unlimited	No	Yes

Prime Wardrobe

	Ireland	UK
Prime Wardrobe	No	Yes

... I Set Up A Spotify Alternative for Irish Punk

2021-01-16T21:17:00.007+00:00

https://playitfaster.com is my Funkwhale instance.

There you'll find a load of music by Irish punk bands.

To connect to it from an Android device, you can use ~~Otter~~ Funwhale for Android.

It's available to install from Google Play.

No login details are needed, so you can connect to my instance with the following setup:

Check `Anonymous authentication`
Set Host name to playitfaster.com

And here's what the UI looks like once you've logged in. I like it!

...I fixed an Issue Where IFTTT Couldn't See the Name of The WiFI Network My Phone was Connecting to

2018-11-13T08:05:00.002+00:00

I've entered the IoT world and bought my first smart bulb. Nothing fancy, just cheap. Something to play with. I'd the bright idea (pun absolutely intended) of turning on a light to the rear of the house as soon as my wife's (android) phone connected to our home's WiFi network.

IFTTT is usually a good option for this and I'd tested its "Android Device" services trigger - "Connects to a specific WiFi network" with good results. An integration with the "Smart Life" service allowed me to turn the light on once the trigger had been activated.

This was all well and good on my own phone, but when it came to my wife's, the simple applet refused to do what it said on the tin.

I debugged by creating a simple Applet which used the same trigger, but instead of turning the light on it sent a system notification from the IFTTT with a simple message "Connected to $SSID_NAME". In the case of my own phone, $SSID_NAME resolved to the name of our network, however on my wife's it displayed "unknown ssid". Because of this, the "specific WiFi network" name was never matched.

Strange.

The applets were identical. I'd not done anything differently when installing IFTTT and the Smart Life apps on our phones. No extra permissions, nothing.

A spate of googling later, brought me to the realisation that my wife's IFTTT app needed the "Location" permission in order to see the WiFi network's name. I'd been messing around with random IFTTT services on my own phone. These included location service, which had of course prompted me to grant the Location permission.

Once I'd manually granted IFTTT the location permission through the system app settings, my wife's phone was able to turn on the light as soon as she'd arrived home.

... I Realised Why My OnePlus 5 Couldn't See my 5GHz Wifi Network

2017-07-10T11:08:00.000+01:00

I'm running dd-wrt on my Linksys 1900ACS V2.

My shiny new OnePlus 5 couldn't see the 5GHz network. This has been an issue on work's wifi too.

I discovered under each of the 2.4 and 5GHz network advanced settings that my "Regulatory Domain" was set to the United States. I flipped this to Ireland and Voila! my phone now happily sees and uses the 5GHz frequency.

... I had Jenkins Build Steps Fail Just Because Grep Returned Nothing

2014-06-09T12:56:00.000+01:00

All I wanted to do was check if a docker container was running and if it was, stop it.

Simples.

Apparently not :(

Every time the Shell Execution Step with the following code ran, it marked the job as failed, if the docker container wasn't running.

docker ps|grep appserver || true
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then #appserver container is running - stop it
docker stop appserver
fi

What isn't immediately obvious with Jenkins' Execute Shell build step is that it is run with -xe arguments.

The -e causes the step to fail for any part of the script that has a return status that isn't 0.

To override the the default behavior, one must add a shebang to the step's code as follows:

#!/bin/sh
docker ps|grep appserver || true
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then #appserver container is running - stop it
docker stop appserver
fi

Very annoying, but easily fixed.

... I hit a wall when trying to use right click to paste with putty into a tmux window

2014-01-18T16:01:00.000+00:00

Not an issue I'd ever thought I'd come up against, but not being able to paste from my browser into a tmux window is quite the show stopper.

Googled for a while and found all sorts of scripts to aid me in my quest to get a line of text from the browser into a file I'd opened in vim running inside tmux.

Along came this post and the damn SHIFT key.

Hold shift while right clicking to paste into a tmux window.

The joy!

I fixed the Netflix 15001 Error on Android 4.3 JSS15R

2013-10-02T22:29:00.001+01:00

Myself and my girlfriend bought Nexus 7 (2013) devices.

Last week, I bought a chromecast from the US so we were all excited to get Netflix up and running.

Both devices displayed the following error when we launched Netflix:

Sorry, we could not reach the Netflix service. Please check Network Settings to connect to an available network and use Netflix (15001)

We could get no further than the above. Not even as far as the login screen.

I tried the following to resolve the issue - all without success:

Uninstalled/Re-Installed the Netflix Application
Ensured I was on the latest version of Android 4.3 (JSS15R)
Cleared Google Service Framework cache and data.
Did a full factory reset.

I basically did everything short of flashing the device.

I'd pretty much given up on Netflix completely until a trip to France this week.

For the craic, I tried Netflix from my Hotel. I was VERY surprised to find that I could get to the login screen! Of course, since Netflix isn't available in France, I couldn't get beyond that point.

I was delighted to get back to Ireland last night to find that my Netflix app now worked :)

Anyway, my girlfriend's Nexus was still showing the error above.
Here's what I did to resolve the issue for her.

Set a French DNS IP in Android's network settings

I found the French DNS IP here (80.67.169.12 worked for me)
To set a DNS IP manually, you must go to your network's advanced settings and choose "Static" for IP Settings.

Once I'd done this, I launched the Netflix app, which got as far as the login screen.
I then went back and set the Network option to DHCP again.
Launching the Netflix app again, I was brought to the login screen without issue and could finally log in to use Netflix with the chromecast.

It's an absolute farce that I had to trick a service that I've paid money for into thinking I was in a different country just to use it!

Netflix really need to sort their android development out!

I wrote a song ...

2013-01-03T01:06:00.000+00:00

... and I don't think it came out too bad:

Click here to listen

For this, I used my trusty BR600. This machine offers good recording with minimal hassle.

The drums are completely "analogue".

I used a separate track on the BR600 for the hi-hat, snare and bass sounds.

The "hi-hat" is me tapping a plectrum half way between the stereo mics on the 8 track.
The "snare" is me clapping.
The "bass" is me tapping both of the stereo mics with my fingers at the same time.

Over this I put a simple guitar riff using the unit's "Crunch" guitar effect (P05).

After these were recorded, I used the A-B loop functionality to listen to the above composition repeatedly. This allowed me to start formulating vocal melodies in my head. As these came together I threw some words in.

Tracks 5/6 and 6/7 are used for stereo vocal recordings. I used both of these combos in recording a simple vocal harmony for the track.

Once I had all of the tracks recorded separately, I again used the A-B function to listen back to the full "song" a couple of times and to adjust levels. When I was happy with these, I bounce recorded all tracks to 6/7's Virtual Track 2. Using a stereo track here meant that the exported .wav file was in stereo.

I think it came together quite well. I'll definitely be working on more tracks in the future and probably be using the BR600's digital drum kit.... I've never actually used its mastering functionality, so it'd probably be a good idea to take a swing at that too :-)

Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Tomorrow's post will be on steam engines! (Trains)

I tried to get things going ...

2013-01-02T00:43:00.001+00:00

... by writing one blog post every day for the rest of the year.

I watched Julie & Julia last night.

While the movie's subject matter had little to do with anything in my life, I find myself in a similar predicament to Julie - I'm pushing 30 and feel like I've gone nowhere.

As motivation, I, like many thousands of others, have decided to use a blog to focus my daily endeavors. My steps towards becoming the person I really want to be.

I've really no idea who that person is, but I'll start by detailing a few interests.

Music - I can't imagine life without it. I wish I could spend every day playing music and that this could keep me in food.
Computers - For the guts of 20 years I've spent 6.5 of the 7 days in a week on a computer. I love em and loath em. I've begun to feel that I use the internet much like others do soap operas - I read about other peoples' lives and I live my own through their exploits. I've been trying to cut down, but working in IT doesn't lend itself to getting away from them.
Beer - Like most Irish, I've a massive fondness for beer. I've toyed with home brewing and would like to venture further into this in the near future.

This reads more like a personal notepad than anything else, but fuck it, I gotta get organized.

This is the plan for each day:

I will cover at least one topic from the above 3 headings.
I will set the following days topic(s)

Tomorrow

I will talk about writing a song.

I finally resolved my RT2800PCI Wifi Disconnecting Issue in Ubuntu 12.04 ...

2012-07-03T23:06:00.000+01:00

.... by simply following this post:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=11858549&postcount=9

Much happiness after months of my net connection dropping every few minutes.

Luckily, I use my Ubuntu partition for mostly dev work, so rarely needed much internetting... This most likely means that I'll never code again, now that I have free access to youtube whenever I want it :'(

I figured out how to have `make` stretch my CPU's 8 cores!

2012-06-07T23:55:00.001+01:00

While trying to build OpenCV from scratch, I continuously ran into compile errors.

These would happen ~5 minutes (25%) into the make process.

Using an i7 CPU, I wondered why the compilation was taking so long for a relatively small project. I checked the output of "top" and noticed that the load was hovering around 1, which for an 8 core processor is nothing short of lazy.

A short trip to google told me that the following will let me tell "make" how many cores I want it to use.

make -jX

e.g. make -j8 allowed me to use all 8 cores and therefore cut the compile time accordingly.

SCORE :D

Using Vim Tabs Instead of Multiple Vim Instances

2012-05-16T13:36:00.001+01:00

... I found out that you can open multiple files in tabs with one instance of vim, instead of across multiple instances of vims in different terminal windows!

vim -p *.py

Will open all python source files in the current directory in tabs inside vim.

gt and gT will move forwards and backwards in your tab list.

If you want to create a new tab with vim already running, use the following command:

:tabnew

Yeow!

Slow SSH Password Prompt

2012-05-16T13:20:00.002+01:00

... I finally solved a small, but annoying issue I'd been having with SSH. I think it'd been happening since our newer VMs started using Centos6 instead of 5.

It was taking the guts of 10 seconds for the password prompt to appear whenever I tried to SSH into the server.

I found that this was caused by some sort of reverse DNS lookup being done on my host.

Arsebiscuits to that!

Make sure that GSSAPIAuthentication is set to no as follows in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

GSSAPIAuthentication no

Then restart your sshd service.

2012-05-16T13:15:00.000+01:00

... I am dying.

Finished work, went to the pub for one and then on to a mate's gaff for what turned into "The Ryan Dunn Drinking Game". This simple affair involved drinking every time Ryan Dunn appeared in shot during Jack Ass 3 and lead to extreme inebriation in a very short space of time.

HPUX, Java and Tomcat

2011-03-09T22:22:00.000+00:00

... I was presented with a lovely HPUX VM by HP's partner program.

Having not used a UNIX-based operating system for many years (even then I had NO wish to be anywhere near them), I was faced with the fairly daunting task of deploying our software on the VM using Tomcat Application Server.

That's all well and good when you see it written on paper - Tomcat is a beaut to work with compared to some of it's bigger, mostly uglier, but some times saner (time stamped logs are a winner, THANKS IBM) siblings in the Application Server family. Tomcat, of course, has a rather large dependence on our good friend, Java, so I decided this should be my first port of call.

So, off I wander to google and am soon going about downloading a Java 1.6 JRE from HP's site. Of course, the VM hasn't come with wget pre-installed, so I have to download the JRE to my local file system before SCPing it to the VM. Post-download/Pre-Upload I figure I have to decide on a destination for the upload .depot file and, as most people in a UNIX-e world would, I take a gander at /opt.

This is where the fun starts.

An `ls -al` returns a huge list of goodies that have been thrown into the VM, presumably by the script that built it. These included java1.4 AND java1.5. This /opt directory is definitely my ferrero roche for the day - "spoilt" isn't the word.

With Java firmly on board, I take aim at google again, this time in search of tomcat. This is a slightly less informative affair with most results that have ANY info hinting towards a "build from source" holiday on board a pleasure cruise populated by me, my keyboard and a lovely family, The Dependency O'Hells, with their 5,000 screaming children.

2 hours have passed and I'm four or five pages deep in the google results of "tomcat+hpux". I see what looks like the product of a results farm, with ads splattered left, right and left, but on closer inspection, it would appear that I have found my holy hand grenade - "HP Web Suite". This little bundle includes Tomcat and the tab-complete-less morning I have had looks like it's finally reaching it's Hardy Boys conclusion. The bad guy has AGAIN tried to break into my office and wreck my day. I have just HAPPENED to be lucky as hell and stumbled across his secret hiding place in a remote location known only to Jim Corr. When it looked like I was about to fall off the cliff of Bourne HELL into a boiling pot of "security through obscurity"..... Mr. Hardy bursts through the door with 9,000 of his closest mercenary friends and saves the day.

On the final leg of my trip, I take one more stop at google to find the packages required for installation of this bad boy. I'm skimming over installation instructions when I spy my old friend, /opt...... I look again. I see the line "/opt/hpws/".... The once retreating clouds are now doing u-turns on a one way street and heading straight for me. I take the plunge, I browse to the directory and THERE. Before me it stands proud. After 2.5 hours of head melt.

Already installed.

"Tomcat"