Recent content on Dual Elephants - Chris Debenhams homepage
I have been cleaning up my music collection, which I have ripped from CDs over the years, finally getting around to tagging them properly. I used MusicBrainz Picard to tag my music, but what I didn’t know is that it was adding a bunch of tags which contain ‘PMEDIA’ (even in places like the composer field, which makes no sense). Seeing this as annoying, I needed a way to clean up…
In my homelab, I’ve been using Longhorn as my primary Kubernetes storage solution. It’s fantastic for high-availability block storage, but I still wanted a way to keep my data synchronized with my central NAS for long-term backups and to make it easier to recover from total cluster failures. Initially, I was manually adding a pair of initContainers as sidecars to every single service…
A new tool to help you digitize your physical book library.
Recently, I migrated all my homelab Kubernetes storage to Longhorn. While Longhorn provides excellent features, monitoring its performance is crucial for identifying potential issues and optimizing resource utilization. Longhorn offers Prometheus as the recommended monitoring solution. However, since I use InfluxDB for my time-series data needs, I needed to find a way to integrate Longhorn metrics…
I run a variety of systems including a couple which are running Debian stable. This means that packages (although stable) are often not as current as I’d like. To help get around this I started using prebuilt binaries directly from the upstream projects when they are hosted on GitHub. But this created a new problem - how to keep them up to date. This article introduces a shell script…
Recently I was thinking about how my websites are handled and realised that they are extremely static and so using WordPress as the CMS was overkill. This led me down the path of trying to find a replacement. After looking at some of the various static-site generator options I settled on Hugo for a couple of reasons. The first reason was that I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years…
Now that I have xLights being built fine within docker (see Automatic testing of xLights builds via Travis-CI/Docker/Github ) the next step is to package up the application as an appimage binary so that it can easily be run on varied linux systems. It is being built based on Ubuntu Trusty and has been tested to work on Ubuntu 16.04, 16.10, Fedora 25 and OpenSuse 42.2 (and should hopefully work…
xLights is a free and open source program that enables you to design, create and play amazing lighting displays through the use of DMX controllers, E1.31 Ethernet controllers and more. With it you can layout your display visually then assign effects to the various items throughout your sequence. This can be in time to music (with beat-tracking built into xLights) or just however you like.…
Details of building xLights for Linux
This is the seventh post in my series on how I setup my christmas lights Links to rest of series: Post 1 - The controllers Post 2 - The megatree Post 3 - Arches, candy canes, small spiral trees and large spiral tree Post 4 - Nativity Scene Post 5 - Windows, Singing Tree and tune-to sign Post 6 - Palm trees, carport and roofline Post 7 - LED Shirt This post focuses on my LED shirt. To see it in…
This is the sixth post in my series on how I setup my christmas lights Links to rest of series: Post 1 - The controllers Post 2 - The megatree Post 3 - Arches, candy canes, small spiral trees and large spiral tree Post 4 - Nativity Scene Post 5 - Windows, Singing Tree and tune-to sign Post 6 - Palm trees, carport and roofline Post 7 - LED Shirt This post focuses on the palm trees, carport and…
This is the fifth post in my series on how I setup my christmas lights Links to rest of series: Post 1 - The controllers Post 2 - The megatree Post 3 - Arches, candy canes, small spiral trees and large spiral tree Post 4 - Nativity Scene Post 5 - Windows, Singing Tree and tune-to sign Post 6 - Palm trees, carport and roofline Post 7 - LED Shirt This post focuses on the windows, the singing tree…
This is the fourth post in my series on how I setup my christmas lights Links to rest of series: Post 1 - The controllers Post 2 - The megatree Post 3 - Arches, candy canes, small spiral trees and large spiral tree Post 4 - Nativity Scene Post 5 - Windows, Singing Tree and tune-to sign Post 6 - Palm trees, carport and roofline Post 7 - LED Shirt This post focuses on the Nativity scene at the side…
This is the third post in my series on how I setup my christmas lights Links to rest of series: Post 1 - The controllers Post 2 - The megatree Post 3 - Arches, candy canes, small spiral trees and large spiral tree Post 4 - Nativity Scene Post 5 - Windows, Singing Tree and tune-to sign Post 6 - Palm trees, carport and roofline This post focuses on the arches along the front, the five candy canes…
This is the second post in my series on how I setup my christmas lights Links to rest of series: Post 1 - The controllers Post 2 - The megatree Post 3 - Arches, candy canes, small spiral trees and large spiral tree Post 4 - Nativity Scene Post 5 - Windows, Singing Tree and tune-to sign Post 6 - Palm trees, carport and roofline Post 7 - LED Shirt This post focuses on the main megatree.
In the last few weeks I’ve had a number of people asking about how the light show is done so I thought it might be nice to document how my lights are setup during the day using photos. To see the display in action and to download all of the xLights sequences see the 2016 Debenham Lights post. I’m going to write a series of posts showing how the controllers are setup, how the megatree…
All my sequences for this year are sitting at /lights/xLights-2016/ If you wish to use them on your own display you will probably need my xlights_rgbeffect.xml to import them properly. There are videos for them all now on Youtube and on facebook/ Everything is awesome xLights sequence download Edited music download
Back in 1957 Professor Frank Debenham wrote a book about the history of the Debenham Family. Sadly it is out of print now and so can’t be found anymore. Linked from this page are copies of this book for downloading and viewing wherever desired. It is available in two formats. Scanned PDF The first is a directly scanned copy of the book in PDF format. It is quite large (79MB) but is a direct…
Each year I setup a display of Christmas lights in Narara. This year (2015) I pretty much started from scratch as I moved to all pixels (each light is individually controlled) Here are videos of my lights this year. Jingle Bells pon de Floor Light Of Christmas What’s This Wizards of Winter Technical Details For those that are interested this is all controlled by a Sandevices E682 and Advatek…
Christmas Lights
The other day I was at Jaycar and saw that they are now selling small USB sticks that are arduino compatible. It is called the LeoStick and is made by Freetronics down in Melbourne. Seeing that it could pretend to be a USB HID device (ie keyboard/mouse) I wondered if I could do the sort of thing that the USB Rubber Ducky from Hak5 can do As it turns out the answer is YES :)
I was driving past one of those led advertising signs sitting on the side of the road the other day and thought to myself ‘I can do that’ So I’ve hooked up 6 of the freetronics DMD modules (in a 2x3 layout) and got down to coding up a way to do it. In the end I got it working by adding support for multiple buffers into my DMD library - github.com/cjd/DMD Since I have the ability…
I am now the proud owner of an Asus Transformer tablet (not the prime) and so wanted to update mtpfs to work better with it. The biggest change was to add support for multiple storage areas. Now when you mount a MTP device which has internal storage and a MicroSD card (or similar) it shows up as two separate directories which you can access. The download is available from mtpfs page
I had a little while free and so ported a bunch of games I wrote for the Peggy2 to work with a pair of DMD’s In doing so the games now run at 32x32 and are controlled by a Wii nunchuck. The games are snake, pong, breakout and race. The Arduino code is available at DMD_games.zip The two screens are daisy-chained but as the cable connecting them is quite short the top one is upside-down. To…
I recently got two Dot Matrix Displays from Freetronics - They are 32x16 LED panels that can be daisychained via SPI. It came with a quick library which worked okay but could do with a few enhancements ;) My modified library supports multiple displays (tested with 2x1 and 1x2 layout - but should work with other layouts) It also supports multiple fonts, marquee text, scrolling the display around…
It has been a while since I first posted my version of bashpodder (a console-based podcaster in a single bash script) Since then a bunch of small fixes have been added to the script to better handle ‘odd’ rss feeds and also to clean up the output. The configuration of the script now sits in the file ~/.bashpodder Inside this file you can specify where the logs go to and where the files…
For a recent project I wanted to add music. Being that I am not musically talented in any way I figured the best way to do this was to generate the music from a midi file. To help with this I wrote a converter that would take a MusicXML file and output an include file. It simply reads the XML and outputs an array where each note is stored in two uint16 values - the first is the note name as a…
I’ve done a lot more work on the multi-game sketch for my Peggy2 - mostly to add functionality and fix up a few ‘issues’ See the original post here for more details on what is included Download it from here When compiled it uses 13808 bytes so there only a bit of room to spare. I’ve added a two player version of pong (use up/down buttons to control player two - I’ve…
Home Bouldering wall build
Legacy site for Central Coast Rockclimbing
Details on getting Linux working on a TE2100
Details on getting Linux working on an M200
Details on getting Linux working on a Vega tablet
Reqtool is a pure perl application that both handles email requests and provides a web interface to track, edit and resolve these email requests. It requires no external DB or additional apps other than a web server.
MP3 Server Box is a perl script that acts as a network interface to the rxaudio or a patched version of mpg123 player.
LCDproc is a small piece of software that displays real-time system information from your machine on a LCD and is available at http://lcdproc.org/
Gournal is a note-taking application written for usage on Tablet-PCs
My FVWM configuration
MyDSL extension for system rescue
MTPfs is a FUSE filesystem that supports reading and writing from any MTP device (as supported by libmtp )
MTPSync is used to syncronize files/music with a MTP device
I had such fun writing the simple ‘snake’ game for my peggy 2 that I wrote a bunch of other games for it as well. At the moment there is Snake, Breakout, Pong and Race. You can download the sketch as peggy2_games_0.1.zip When compiled it takes up 11432 bytes (it includes the ‘Tone’ library as I have started adding sound to the sketch - connect speaker to ADC5 to hear it)
As mentioned in the [intlink id=“13” type=“post”]Peggy 2 Snake[/intlink] post I wrote a bunch of small utility functions to display a string on the peggy 2. Each character is stored as a 24-bit number (held in a 32bit uint32) where each 4 bits indicates the on/off status for a row of 4 pixels. This results in allowing for a 4x6 pixel character For example the character for…
For Christmas my wife gave me a peggy 2 and I finally got around to building it. [caption id=“attachment_14” align=“aligncenter” width=“199” caption=“Peggy 2 running Snake”] [/caption] It has 24x25 White LEDs with a row of 25 Red LEDs across the bottom. By having that bottom row a different colour I can use that section for displaying score or other…
Okay - now that I have a box it is time to wire it all up. After playing around with various methods of switching I settled on a bunch of solid-state relays connected to the arduino. The advantage of solid-state relays over mechanical onese are that they switched quicker, are less likely to arc and don’t require any additional components to up the voltage in order to throw them. I ended up…
The aim was to start with 10 outlets and build out from there. To make things easier I decided to make a box with room for 10 standard 240V wall powerpoints. Each powerpoint is 117x70mm so allowing for two columns of five points (with space between each to allow for plugpacks)I ended up with a base of 250x460mm. I ended up making the box 220mm deep so that it wouldn’t fall over (the exact…
Last Christmas was my first Christmas in my very own house (was renting before) and so I was able to put up more lights than before. In the process of setting up the lights I thought about making them computer controlled (so as to sync to music etc) I had some X10 appliance modules which did the job for turning them on/off at the right times of day, but there was so much lag that I couldn’t…
A few days ago I installed a new disk in my laptop to replace the existing small one. Being the careful person I am I backed up the important data and then migrated the contents from the old disk to the new one via rsync. Everything worked well and I was able to boot into the new disk right away without issue. That is until I went to update the podcasts I listen to.
I’ve had this blog sitting here blank for a fair while now and so I figured it is about time I did something with it. I work in Sun as a backline OS engineer and have a major interest in Linux along with Solaris. I’ve recently got into electronics and am in the progress of making a Arduino controlled lighting box and also am designing my own little robot. In this blog I’ll…
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