Projects

Picture Pages, Picture Pages - Part 2

The digital picture frame system I set up on the Audrey has been working great for about a year now. But recently on one of the Audrey websites I frequent, someone suggested using the Audrey to display Flickr photos. I thought that was a great idea, so I gave it a try. Here's what I came up with:

http://www.kevincooney.com/projects/audrey/flickr_control.php

Basically, just type in a tag to search for (e.g. artwork, bw, green), and you'll get a slideshow of photos that fit that tag. Now, they're not always the best photos -- since they're submitted by the general public -- but it's nice for a change of pace when I've seen enough of my own pictures.

Picture Pages, Picture Pages

Once I got the Audrey up and running, one of the first projects I attempted was a digital picture frame. Since the Audrey is pretty small, is in plain view in the kitchen, and is pretty much always on, I figured it would be perfect for such an application.

]]> Turns out there are a couple ways to do this, all of which are pretty complicated. But seeing as how the Audrey has a great full-screen web browser, and I'm a web guy more than a Unix guy, I decided to just have Audrey display the photos as a web-page.

To do so, I set up an Apache webserver on my computer that has all the photos on it. Then I wrote a script (in PHP), which will pick a photo at random, resize it to fit on Audrey's screen, and then serve it on the page. Then I set up an Audrey channel to point to the URL of this PHP script.

This worked great, but it was pretty slow, since I have a lot of photos, so picking one takes a while. Also, resizing the photo takes a second or two. So I made two improvements to the script to improve the speed. First, I switched the order of operations: Now, I show a photo, and then pick a photo at random and resize it to be served the next time the script is called. This way, the parts of the script that are time-intensive are run after a photo has already been shown. Second, I decided to cache the list of photos on my computer, so that the script doesn't have to re-read all the photos on my computer on each load. I save the cache to a file, and the next time the script loads, it reads from the cache file. If the cache file is more than a day old, I build a new cache file, to make sure I have the most recent photos.

If you're interested, here's the final code for it:
Main PHP script
Library to resize image

Audrey Gets a Barcode Scanner

I've been working on a kitchen recipe/inventory/shopping-list application off-and-on for about a year now, with the idea of using an Audrey as the hardware. To really make this thing useful, I wanted a UPC barcode reader, so I can register when I purchase or discard grocery items.

I bought a CueCat scanner for about $8 on eBay, and thought I had a winner, since it's a USB device.

I plugged it into the Audrey, but it didn't work. Turns out the Audrey wasn't intended to support generic USB devices. I was bummin'. The project went on the back-burner.

About a month ago, I had some time on my hands, so I dusted off the ol' Audrey, and tried again. This time, though, I overwrote Audrey's operating system with one that supports USB devices. I plugged in the scanner again, but still no luck.

After some fooling around, I found that I needed to tell the Audrey to look for the scanner as a USB mouse (for anyone trying this, use the "wm popup" menu" by hitting Paste+Enter). Viola! The CueCat now reads barcodes like a charm.

So now I'm back to writing my kitchen inventory application. I originally wanted to call it "Chefmate", but apparently someone beat me to it. So Amy suggested "Kitch 'n' Bitch" (she doesn't like the Audrey, apparently). I love it.

I'll post more progress here.

gArchive

After my web hosting company "lost" my website, I knew I should be smarter about backing up my files. In the "offline" world, this was relatively simple: I bought a second hard-drive for my PC, and now save weekly backups to it.

The online world, however, wasn't as simple. I was able to set up a weekly cron to zip up all my files, but where would I put it once it's done? I don't have any kind of publicly-accessible FTP server.

My solution came via a PHP program called gDrive, which lets you use a gmail account (and it's 1GB+ of disk space) as storage.

So I wrote two scripts which tar, gzips, emails (via gDrive), and then deletes my archive once a week (script 1, script 2). Works great, and no more worries.