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After the Playstation Network Hack I decided to change to secure passwords for all my accounts. The drawback is that nobody can remember secure passwords anymore, so there is no way around using a password safe. The only application that is available on all the different platforms I use is KeePass (V1.x on Windows, KeePassX under Linux, and KeePassDroid on Android). Under Windows the the 1.x version must be used in order to stick to the same file format as the KeePassX and the KeePassDroid applications. ...

One important feature for the audio renderer is the support for presets. I do not want to search for my mobile phone in order to select a music source when I enter the kitchen in the morning. The use-case where you turn on your analog radio and the tuning wheel is right at the position of your favorite radio station is unbeatable simple. Therefore the audio-renderer has a list of MP3 streaming URLs where the first one will be played upon startup of the process. The channels can be switched by sending a signal to the server process: ...

A very early version of my UPnP audio-renderer had been released on Gitorius https://gitorious.org/gupnp-audio-renderer (Update 2011-08-01: It has been renamed to m3player and been moved to here). It implements the necessary parts of the UPnP MediaRenderer specification. The implementation is based on excellent frameworks like: GUPnP GStreamer GLib The initial target for the renderer is the OpenWRT platform (see previous articles about a WiFi music player). I decided to use C instead of Vala (that was a decision against Rygel) as the memory constraints are very limited and I need to save memory whereever possible. Although my C language skills are a bit rusty, I did not want to learn another language. Additionally, the usage of Vala would increase the effort to port the whole vala stuff to the OpenWRT build-system. Luckily GStreamer and GLib are already available on OpenWRT. ...

Follow the commands below in order to setup a local environment for working with the latest development version of the GUPNP framework. mkdir $(pwd)/base git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/gssdp cd gssdp ./autogen.sh --prefix=$(pwd)/../base --exec-prefix=$(pwd)/../base make && make install cd .. git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/gupnp cd gupnp PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$(pwd)/../base/lib/pkgconfig ./autogen.sh --prefix=$(pwd)/../base --exec-prefix=$(pwd)/../base cd .. git clone http://git.gnome.org/browse/gupnp-tools cd gupnp-tools PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$(pwd)/../base/lib/pkgconfig ./autogen.sh --prefix=$(pwd)/../base --exec-prefix=$(pwd)/../base cd .. Run the following commands for setting the environment to use the fresh compiled libraries instead of the OS provided ones (Empathy under Ubuntu 11.04 uses an older version of the GUPNP libraries. I ran into segmentation faults because the libraries did not match): ...

[] [] For my low-budget wireless music player I had to tweak OpenWRT in order to support my setup. For initial tests I decided to use the Music Player Daemon and madplay. The following steps describe how to setup OpenWRT on the TP-Link WR1043ND. It assumes that the OpenWRT 10.03.1-rc4 firmware has already been installed, that the IP address of the router has been set to 192.168.0.111, and that an USB audio, as well as that an USB stick has been connected to the device via an USB hub. ...

After searching the net for quite a while I could not find a pure wireless music player for small money. In case you want to equip multiple rooms in your house with a music player it will cost you a lot of money. All products on the market come with a lot of features, of which most are not necessary. The following links show interesting hacks on how to build your own WiFi music player based on OpenWRT: ...

The following message occurs when the <urlbase></urlbase> tag of the root device description is empty when trying to autoconnect actions: ** (process:25888): WARNING **: Failed to get SCPD: Cannot resolve hostname ((null)) Changing it to http://localhost fixes the issue. <?xml version="1.0"?> <root xmlns="urn:schemas-upnp-org:device-1-0"> <specVersion> <major>1</major> <minor>0</minor> </specVersion> <URLBase>http://localhost</URLBase> <device> <!-- ... --> </device> </root> The message is a bit misleading. I was first trying to find an issue with my DNS configuration.

Because the GUPnP stack is lacking some documentation I describe my experiences with getting it complied under Ubuntu 11.04. The commands will setup an environment that does not interfere with the Ubuntu provided packages, which are older than the ones compiled here. The library files will be installed under the location: ~/workspaces/openwrt/upnp Download: mkdir -p ~/workspaces/openwrt/upnp cd ~/workspaces/openwrt/upnp wget -O - http://gupnp.org/sites/all/files/sources/gupnp-igd-0.1.11.tar.gz | tar xvfz - wget -O - http://gupnp.org/sites/all/files/sources/gupnp-0.16.1.tar.gz | tar xvfz - wget -O - http://gupnp.org/sites/all/files/sources/gupnp-igd-0.1.10.tar.gz | tar xvfz - wget -O - http://gupnp.org/sites/all/files/sources/gupnp-tools-0.8.3.tar.gz | tar xvfz - wget -O - http://gupnp.org/sites/all/files/sources/gupnp-dlna-0.6.1.tar.gz | tar xvfz - wget -O - http://gupnp.org/sites/all/files/sources/gupnp-av-0.8.0.tar.gz | tar xvfz - wget -O - http://gupnp.org/sites/all/files/sources/gssdp-0.10.0.tar.gz | tar xvfz - wget -O - http://gupnp.org/sites/all/files/sources/gupnp-vala-0.8.0.tar.gz | tar xvfz - Prerequisites: ...

After an update to Ubuntu 11.04 VirtualBox was not running anymore. Startup fails with a hint that the kernel modules exited in error and that I should use DKMS to reconfigure the kernel module. Running the vboxdrv setup command also led to an error: $ sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup [sudo] password for desktop: * Stopping VirtualBox kernel modules * done. * Uninstalling old VirtualBox DKMS kernel modules * done. * Trying to register the VirtualBox kernel modules using DKMS Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 2.6.38-8-generic (x86_64) Consult the make.log in the build directory /var/lib/dkms/vboxhost/4.0.2/build/ for more information. * Failed, trying without DKMS * Recompiling VirtualBox kernel modules * Look at /var/log/vbox-install.log to find out what went wrong The log file indicates that a header file was missing: ...

The original versions of smppd-web by Christopher Hofmann neither support adding and removing links on the fly nor do they support dial-on-demand ISDN interfaces. That is the reason why I extended the original codebase by these features. Further more the users for which I developed the software are german speaking only so that gettext support was also an important feature. Initially I added support for german and english languages. As I’m not a SuSE user in general, the new version probably does not follow the SuSE directory guidelines and it does not come packaged as a RPM. Therefore it would be great if someone with SuSE RPM packaging know-how would create a successor RPM package out of Christopher’s original version. Or even better Christopher packages a new version for OpenSuSE ;) ...