News

New Release: Rsync for Tasker 0.7

• Added an automatic update check which shows a notification to download and install the update.
• Updated dependencies.

For full details and to download this release, see the Rsync for Tasker page.

New Project: Rsync for Tasker

I’ve written a plugin app for Tasker which allows running rsync over SSH from your Android device.

This currently has some rough edges (no support for host-key verification, unclear error messages) but I’m using it on a daily basis to backup files from and sync photos & music to my phone and am pleased to report that it works well.

Sadly Google rejected my submission of this app to the Play Store (and my subsequent appeal), due to the use of the MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission which is needed for the app to be at all useful. This unfortunately means that the app has to be manually downloaded and installed but I will be adding an update notification in the near future to make it easier to keep updated.

Generating Mosquitto password hashes with Ansible

I had the need to generate a password file for Mosquitto with Ansible but couldn’t easily find the correct incantation elsewhere online. A bit of poking around in the source and experimenting yielded the following jinja2 template which I thought might be useful to share:

# {{ ansible_managed }}

{% for item in mqtt_accounts %}
{{ item.username }}:{{ item.password | password_hash('pbkdf2_sha512', item.salt) | replace('$pbkdf2-sha512$', '$7$') | replace('.', '+') }}==
{% endfor %}

The passlib pbkdf2_sha512 hash is very nearly the right format but for two minor differences (handled by the replace() filters) and trailing ==

• The scheme identifier needs to be $7 instead of $pbkdf2-sha512
• Passlib’s implementation uses an adapted base64 encoding which uses . in-place of the usual + and also omits padding that Mosquitto expects.

Note: The salt value needs to be exactly 12 characters long for Mosquitto to accept it.

New Release: Radio Downloader 0.36

The main change in this release is a switch from the .NET framework 2.0 to 4.5.2. This shouldn’t affect most existing users as this version of the .NET framework is installed by default in currently supported versions of Windows (and handled by mono under Linux), but it should hopefully make installing Radio Downloader easier for new users.

There are also a number of small bug fixes to keep things running more smoothly.

For full details and to download this release, see the Radio Downloader page.

New Release: Radio Downloader 0.34

This release contains the following enhancements:

• A ‘smart’ name column in the downloads list which shows both the programme and episode name.
• Reduced disk space usage with more efficient image storage and automatic pruning of never-downloaded programme data.
• Display of full details about podcast download errors.
• Support for Debian and Arch Linux based distributions. Radio Downloader is however less well tested under Linux so your bug reports are welcome.

Also included are fixes for a selection of different bugs discovered since the last release.

Please note that any advanced users who had previously configured DatabasePath in Radio Downloader.exe.config will need to configure the replacement AppDataDir setting instead.

For full details and to download this release, see the Radio Downloader page.

My open-source contributions

I’ve added a page listing the contributions I’ve had accepted by open-source projects. This is mostly so I have a list that I can refer to but hopefully also helps to highlight the importance of contributing back to the community when you have the opportunity.

New Release: Radio Downloader 0.32

This release adds the following new features:

• An option to view the feed URL for favourites and subscriptions.
• Support for consuming and producing Podlove Simple Chapters data.
• The option to change the program database location (for advanced users).

This release also fixes a fair few bugs (most notably download errors connecting to servers only supporting TLS 1.1 and 1.2) and includes a number of enhancements, including an overhaul of the code which handles date stripping from episode titles.

There are also a number of changes ‘behind the scenes’ laying the groundwork so that Radio Downloader can run on Linux as well as Windows in the future.

Please note that the Windows installers are no-longer signed by my code signing certificate as the price of these has risen since the last release to the point that sadly I can no-longer justify the expense.

For full details and to download this release, see the Radio Downloader page.

New Project: Remeha Boiler Logger

I’ve shared a new utility I’ve written to log sensor data from my Remeha boiler in the hope it will prove useful.

Although written about a different model of boiler with a newer protocol, I found Robert Hekkers’ blog posts about the protocol of his Remeha Calenta a useful starting point.

New Release: BBC Graphics Viewer 3.0

This release doesn’t add much in the way of new features to the application itself, just the ability to save displayed images in formats other than Windows Bitmap. However, the big change is that it has been ported to the Qt framework so it can now run under Linux as well as Windows.

Additionally, there are .deb and .msi installable packages available for download for Debian-based Linux distributions and Windows respectively.

For full details and to download this release, see the BBC Graphics Viewer page.

New Project: libbeebimage

I’ve extracted the BBC image format loading code from the BBC Graphics Viewer, made it a stand-alone cross-platform library with C and C++ bindings and called it libbeebimage. This is what I’m using to convert images included in the 8-Bit Software Online Conversion via a ruby extension written in C.