Radio Scrobbling via MQTT

Since I often listen to the most excellent Soma FM during the day (go support them, it's worth it!) I often wish that I could go and stash some similar tunes to listen to when I'm not online. To do this, I sell my soul to CBS and use last.fm to generate similar / listened to by others recommendations.

Sadly Rhythmnbox doesn't scrobble radio stations (even though the scrobble API has a flag for this
track.scrobble(chosenByUser=0) to indicate that its been chosen by a radio service), despite it updating my 'now listening' status on IM. So, in a geeky overkill solution I decided to save time in the long run and use a pub/sub system with MQTT. Oh, and use some python and twitter along the way...

The design is that I have an MQTT publisher that uses the tritter streaming api (via tweepy) and filters for all the somafm twitter streams that Rusty pushes with BigUrl. This gives me near realtime announcements of the start of the track being played (after some trivial split / strip manipulation)

ie

justcovers       Pat Boone - Enter Sandman  (2012-06-25 07:20:30)
digitalis        Zephyrs - Stand Round Hold Hands (Ulrich  (2012-06-25 07:20:37)
secretagentsoma  Eat Static - Love Truncheon  (2012-06-25 07:21:02)
beatblender      Kerry Chandler (Lazy Dog Ben W - Isis  (2012-06-25 07:21:29)
sonicuniverse    In The Country - Only The Birds Can See Us  (2012-06-25 07:21:29)

..which I can then publish to an internal MQTT broker using mosquitto python bindings.

In a separate process I have a subscriber that I can point to the broker and 'subscribe' to the radio station when I'm listening and it scrobbles that information to last.fm. 

All in, an interesting sunday evening work. 

Temp / Humidity update

Since yesterdays posting, I plugged the FTDI outpur from the nanode into my bifferboard (needed to install kmod-usb-serial-ftdi) and have knocked up a simple python script to read the output and post to pachube^Wcosm

and lo:
https://cosm.com/feeds/60594

DHT22 + Arduino

I recently purchased a DHT22 (Also known as RHT03 on Sparkfun) from Proto-Pic temp and humidity sensor with the aim of using it as an outdoor sensor in the garden. Although there are several DHT22 libraries on github I couldn't get the nethoncho one (or the patched forks) to return anything other than checksum error.

However the combined dht11/22 one I found linked on arduino.cc seems to work just fine. Need to test with -ve temps next but an overnight plot on the bench seems reasonable

Despite many forums saying that it needs 5v I've managed to get it working OK with the 3.3v pin on my nanode, next step is to test on a jeenode and send the output via RF. Oh, and then get a solar panel to run the thing...

Prowling round Android

One of the apps I miss from my iphone days is Prowl - This also allowed me to receive IRC messages when away (screen detactched) - Since then I've discovered Notify My Android which does the same thing to android devices, and lo, a quick patch of my script is available

as normal, on github (https://github.com/Elwell/irssi-prowlnotify)

Yubico / Yubikeys

I'm impressed.

I have small keyring with a USB memory stick, 2 yubikeys and a cofee machine cashless RFID key on. Stupidly I left said key in the vending machine. The system operators at work collected it and set about finding the owner. 1st up, they discovered that they can't read any files off yubikeys (heh) but googled the image and found the manufacturers website and said they had found serial #.... and #.....

Having spend the last 2 days rummaging in car / home looking for it, I got an email from yubico saying that <email> had found my key, based on the serial no of the one I purchased. Work also got an email for the other serial no, which they traced to me.

I'm *very* impressed by this level of attention at yubico, and it means when distributing keys within the business it pays to keep track of the serial no (printed under the 2d barcode).

It does raise the question of how (if) one should notify yubico if they're passed on - especially if I overwrite the yubi profile (as I have done) to prove that I am the rightful owner of the key.

Things to consider with revocation / blocking, especially with a distributed architecture like Fedora....

apcupsd via Python to Pachube

In python, the 'default' URL accessing toolkit (urllib2) doesn't support PUT, however I've discovered requests which a) does and b) is in Fedora. So one apt-get install python-requests.noarch and you're off.

So - one trivial script (reusing much of the code for my MQTT variant) you get https://gist.github.com/1903259. The only minor niggle was working out how to prepend the minimum extra json content (version and datastreams) as I'd not used the json libs before. (Hmm yet another github toy - embeddable gists with syntax highlighting. Nice) Update now I have 24h worth of data - plot attached

Cool Stuff

Things you find on the internet...

The Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) Hydrology dept monitors the water temp at its gauging stations (http://www.hydrodaten.admin.ch/en/) including the one downstream from Lac Leman. Soneone else is feeding these into pachube as a data feed (https://pachube.com/feeds/43397) which means it's trivial to generate an on demand plot of last weeks water temp: