Gallery of jpegs:

or as a printable PDF (to fit square paper 28x28cm)

Ok, to be fair most of the time my internet connection is great – it’s nice and fast. But periodically it will go all wonky for a few days and then I want to ‘keep an eye’ on it. A bit tricky… However there are two good things: there’s a fairly simple web page on the router that gives me all its stats, and Be (my ISP) has an excellent forum with lots of helpful technical people & Be staff to give tips on what to do. So if I can gather useful info for them, I’m sure I’ll be able to fix it.

What I decided to do is only use Python to ‘scrape’ the data I wanted from the Router’s web page and the stuff it into some data store and give me a nice graph out of it. I did look at cacti/rrdtool but I would have had to install and configure lots of other things (as I’m on a Mac) and I just wanted to use Python ideally, because Mac OS X comes with Python pre-installed.

So instead, I’ve knocked up a simple script that reads the Router status once a minute and writes a row of data out to a sqlite database (which is very simple to knock up). Then I have another script that reads out of that database and produces a html page with a graph or two. I’ve used the Google Visualisation API to draw the graphs, because they have a simple python API for it and a nice timeline graph that I can use.

I’ve a little Mac mini that I can leave on running my little ‘monitor.py’ script and Mac OS X has ‘web sharing’ (using Apache web server) that I can use to invoke ‘report.py’ to produce some nice interactive graphs of the history of my router. (a quick link on how to set this up)

So now I will leave this running for a while and see what data it produces. When I have a LOT of data I should probably summarise per hour and/or per day, and not keep every single minute’s worth of data. I don’t need to worry about that too much yet.

I might even be able to use this approach at work, although we do have Cacti set up there, so that may be a better option, but it is very complicated to configure and this might be a simpler/more flexible solution – especially with lots of good graphing solutions now out there.

The scripts are here: speedtouch_monitor.zip (41 KB)
They should work with a Speedtouch 585 Modem set to it’s default IP address (eg any Be customer).
You will probably need to enter your router’s password in the monitor.py file.

Also here is an example report from report.py.

To help show this I’ve made up some example images.

This set shows how thin lines and text get blurrier as they get smaller. The original 128×128 image has been scaled down to 64×64 and 32×32. The bottom row of text on each image has not been scaled, but added after scaling at an equivalent point size.

128×128 original	64×64 scaled	32×32 scaled

We can see that the lines blur into each other and become less sharp. Notice how the bottom line of text is more bold than the middle line, especially in the 32×32 image. This is why it’s usually a good idea to add text onto an icon once it’s been shrunk to the correct size. Conversely if you want to photoshop lots of different parts of an image to make a montage, I tend to do it at 2x the resolution I need and then scale down, as this blends the different parts together and makes them ‘sit’ well. (e.g. this image which is a montage.)

The next images show a 128×128 grid and its scaled down to 50% and then 25% of its original size.

128×128 original	64×64 scaled	32×32 scaled

Here it’s even clearer that the high contrast black and white gets averaged out to a grey.

To compensate for this, you can use the Photoshop ‘sharpen’ or ‘unsharp mask’ filters to inject more contrast and harder edges back into your image. You may even want to increase the contrast directly (either after, or even before scaling down). There’s no right or wrong way to adjust – it depends on the image and what looks good to you. Obviously, some very fine details may be unavoidably lost in the scaling and no amount of ‘sharpen’ will bring them back.

direct link for download

Even better, there are Instructions for building your own…

I love it! Robots, hacking stuff, all put together in the one post – whoohoo!

Well, not really, but I certainly need a solution to the age old question of “where is all the tech going in the new flat”.

My current solution of 19 inch rackmount equiment in a DIY box on wheels is actually rather good, although very ugly and only suitable for hiding in a cupboard – which is what I’ve currently done [I'll find some pictures later]. However the nice lounge in the new Victorian flat does not have such a handy location that I can box in. Also, I wanted to do something a bit more… interesting. Also quiet, and not the “I will overheat your Xbox 360″ kind of quiet that I currently have… I have open the door to the cupboard to stop the 360 basically melting, and as that is far and away the loudest thing ever it pretty much defeats the whole point. So, some kind of sound proofing AND ventilation is required there.

You can get some great professional silent rack mount boxes from people like Kell Systems. They look and sound great, and for an office I would absolutely buy one, because (a) I would’t be paying for it and (b) it does look like OFFICE furniture, rather than home furniture.

So, my plan is to buy a nice old cabinet or set of drawers, fit rack motunts to it, stuff it with sound dampening boards/foam and then add some quiet fans to it to ensure nothing melts.

I did think finding an appropriate old cabinet would take a while, but fortunately my lovely other half Bobble is an eBay genius and found an excellent one! Even better was that no-one else had spotted it so I snapped it up for a mere ten pounds. Yay! Ok, so its going to cost 70 pounds to transport it back home, but its still a bargain to me.

Take a look – a lovely retro 50s or 60s (not sure when) TV cabinet. Excellent wood panelling and importantly, plenty of space and already has some ventilation holes! Perfect!

So, once I get this baby home I’ll measure up and no doubt make some SketchUp designs of what will go inside… hee hee!

A brilliant mod of a GameBoy to hold an iPod – and all the buttons work as well due to a custom iPod dock internally. The iPod wasn’t harmed either… fantastic!

The full set on Flickr has more details.

In flat news, I’m just about to finish painting the study after spending a very dusty last weekend preparing it. I’ve already drilled holes for the shelves and cut the Conti board, so the shelves will go up pretty quickly when I’m done.

Now I must away to painting!!

Overall plan – hard to see at this size but notice I’ve only shown details in the rooms the builders need to know about. They don’t need to see the stuff I’m going to build in the study…

An overview of the parts of the flat that are changing the most – the kitchen and the lounge.

The kitchen before – two doors, built in cupboards, poor use of space.

The kitchen after: removed a door and regained space from cupboards.

An overview of the finished kitchen, including extractor ducting.

Alternate angles of the kitchen – we’ve played with a few layouts ‘virtually’ and now have settled on the Fridge at one end and and the oven at the other. This works out better when considering movement between food storage, preparation and cooking areas.

The bathroom currently has a second toilet (no idea why) and a shower, but a small bath can be fitted in, with an overhead shower. Much better, especially with lots of excellent tiles and Italian plumbing.

The WC before – the white box on the right is an old coal store type area, with an outside hatch! That’s being ripped out to give us more space, for a sink.

Afterwards, a sink, a suspended pan and a hidden cistern behind a simple thin wall.

That’s all for now! Hope you’re not bored senseless with flat plans… but that’s my spare time at the moment

Unfortunately I’m very busy getting lots of other things sorted out with the flat, and of course am still very busy at work which just slows everything down further

However – good news so far is that a structural engineers says our plans are ok, but we do need to pester the council for some plans. grr.

On the really good side, I am finally going to rack mount up all my kit … I’ve just put in an order for some rack strips and a shelf, and will go buy some MDF and put a cabinet together. Possibly this weekend, we’ll see!

Also I’ve done a ton of wallpaper stripping, which is hard work but rewarding.

I will post some pictures, possibly tonight!

Useful Links:
This is a good page on DIY rack case building.
I’ve also found eBay is a good source of rack components and prebuilt cheap rack cases.

Edit: rack mount stuff is here and looking good, I’ll be measuring and buying MDF soon… but it is horrible weather today and I have other chores. Nuts!

If you are in any way interested in 3d modelling, do try it out – it is a fantastic program for 3d modelling. It doesn’t have the power of something like Max or Maya but it is very fast and interactive and easy to use. If you have to make anything you can easily build a 3d model of it first to help plan it. I have used it for doing some pretty complicated modelling work when Bobble was on her interior design course, and have also used it for fun modelling of silly ipod things (will try to dig out the picture later).

Currently only the windows version is available for download but I know from experience that there is a Mac version, hopefully that will be available soon!