I bet all of you know about grooveshark, the awesome music service. And sharkzapper is a cool chrome extension that puts the control and information about anything playing in your grooveshark chrome tab into a little button on the address bar. It is a very good extension but I felt that what it was missing was lyrics. Before I could comment on the extension’s chrome market page, I noticed that it has a github repository. “Open Source”, oh joy. So, I forked the repository and after some hacking around, I’ve now added support for automatic searching and fetching of the currently playing song into the sharkzapper popup window and it updates itself whenever the song changes.

What was even cooler that I learnt a bit about using YQL in the process

I’ve sent in a pull request to the author of the extension to the original author of the extension to merge this code. In the meanwhile, if you would like to try this out, you can hit up my github repository, download the code and install into chrome by enabling developer mode and choosing “Load unpacked extension”.

Happy listening

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Adding Lyrics to SharkZapper for Grooveshark, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

My project Kinect on PS3 got featured in this month’s Chip magazine . They have a special gaming edition of Chip Insider which featured the project along with a 2 page interview of mine. If you buy chip, do look out for it on pages 46 and 47. I also have a scanned image of the pages below.

Interview Page 1

Interview Page 1

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Featured in Chip India August 2011 Edition, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

This post describes my first attempt at making Kinect work with a PS3. Microsoft’s new XBOX 360 accessory, kinect has made a powerful entry into the market, becoming the fastest selling gadget of all time. Looks like their “You are the controller” tagline is working. Of course, Sony’s “similar” accessory Move is selling well too but is far behind kinect adoption probably because nothing beats the lure of making something work with just “The Force” .

Now, of course, kinect doesn’t work with PS3 obviously but then if we can’t break the rules, we can at least bend them a little towards our way. I’ve  created a mashup that allows you to use kinect as an input controller for the PS3.

Please note that this is pre-alpha quality software currently. I haven’t updated to a lot of recent code for the below libraries and also haven’t done most of the performance/feature improvements yet. The axis performance specially needs lot of tweaking and it works well only while sitting. Putting this out purely as a proof of concept. For the things that I plan to add soon, please see the Todo section below. Follow me at @shantanugoel for latest updates.

VIDEO IN ACTION

The program makes use of several other programs in order to provide this functionality. To compile/use it, you also need the following programs:

1. OpenNI Libraries – To get data from kinect

2. NITE Libraries (Choose “Middleware” on the page) – Builds on top of OpenNI to provide gesture detection etc

3. PrimeSense Libraries for kinect – Kinect drivers to get raw data

4. DIYPS3Controller – The main component for PS3 connection and also known as sixaxis emulator. This emulates a DS3 on the PC and send the inputs to PS3 through bluetooth.

Installation/Compilation/Usage

1. Make sure that the above 4 things are installed on your machine and working fine.

2. Download the source of this project to the NITE Samples directory. You can even place it anywhere else but you would need to tweak the makefile to account for the changed paths.

3. Make any changes to the source that you need.

4. Change the included ps3 controller config xml file and place it in one of the locations where diyps3controller can find it.

5. Run make -f kinect-ps3.mak

6. The executable will be available in Samples/Bin directory of NITE.

7. Run kinect-ps3 (without any arguments)

8. Run emuclient (from ps3 controller software) and choose the new xml config file

9. “Become the controller”
Default Config:

Menu Profile – This is the default profile that kinect-ps3 starts with and allows to operate the PS3 menus. Moving hand in any direction will move the ps3 menus as if you were using the DPAD with those directions keys pressed. If you run out of the kinect’s watched space, then just do a backward push with your hand, bring your hand to center and then again do the backward push and continue scrolling. This is like you lift your finger up and then start dragging from edges of a laptop’s touchpad.For selecting any item, make two successive push movements with your hand without changing any x-y direction.
Game Profile – This profile can be switched to by doing 3 successive backward movements of the hand while in Menu profile. Right now I’ve implemented only directional controls in game profile because I’m still struggling with multiple hands detections and skeletal tracking. A full profile will be activated soon enough. Currently, the your hand’s x/y movements and directly translated to right stick x/y movements (e.g. this is looking in different directions in various FPS games). Moving the hand towards or away from kinect (z-axis) translate to left stick y movements (e.g. this is moving fowards or backwards in most FPS games).
Issues/Queries/Suggestions

Please direct them to me by commenting here or emailing me at shantanu AT shantanugoel DOT com

Coming Soon/ToDo

-Full Menu and Game profiles

- Skeletal tracking for better game profiles

- Switching back to menu profiles from game profiles

- Easier way to specify user custom profiles instead of changing code for the same

- Performance improvement for game profiles

Full source code of the project has been released at https://github.com/shantanugoel/Kinect-PS3 under GNU GPL v2.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Making Kinect Work With PS3, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Skype on linux works great but the problem that I faced was that it does not handle the buttons on the bluetooth headsets. My wife uses skype to call into her work related conference calls and was pretty frustrated that she had to keep sitting in front of my laptop (her laptop didn’t allow to install skype) just to switch mute on and off. So, I whipped up this little trick to do so. Here is how:

1. First I looked at the skype API (pretty simple, based on dbus). Also found a sample script somewhere that allowed to answer and hang up calls through skype API.

2. Modified the script to switch the mute on and off instead of answering/hanging up. Script can be downloaded at the end of this article. You can also modify it to take some other action that you want.

3. Install “blueman”. If you are using Ubuntu, just type “sudo apt-get install blueman” in shell.

4. Once blueman is installed and you have done your headset pairing etc, right click on the blueman icon in the system tray and click on “Local Services”.

5. In local services, click on headset tab and you can see a input box where you can give the path of a program/script which will be run whenever the “answer button” on the headset is pressed. This is important to note that blueman only supports the answer button and nothing else and I didn’t have the inclination to develop a full-fledged AVRCP compliant program to capture other buttons as all I was interested in mute functionality. You can see the screenshot of this below:

6. Make sure that you give the path where you saved the script that you downloaded in step 4 and you are all set now. Make a call and click on the answer button of your headset to see the magic happen

Let me know if you have your own hacks like this or know of a way to have a full fledged capturing of all headset buttons.

DOWNLOAD: Skype Bluetooth Mute Button Script

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Mute (or Answer) Skype Calls with BT Headset Button in Linux, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

This article will tell you a simple way to login automatically to beam cable (Beam-Telecom) internet connection instead of using the web login manually. Not only that, I’ll also tell you how to do this auto-login through your router if you have one with a custom linux firmware. I took a beam cable connection a few days ago. The price is excellent and speeds are good but the only thing that bothered me was the web based login. You need to open up a browser and login through their online portal before you can access the internet. Now, if you don’t log off, then the login may persist even across PC/router reboots but many times it doesn’t. But in these times, it becomes a pain in the wrong place when I am just looking to play online on my PS3 or one of my various net-capable devices, scattered around the house, are trying to pull data and this forces me to open up my laptop just to login. Even for people who use the internet only on their PC, they might not be using the browser all the time and find it a hassle, minor one but still a hassle, to open a browser and login. Hence, I set out to find a way to do this automatically. (BTW, I’ll also be listing out how I came onto the solution in case you are in interested. If you are not, feel free to skip some paragraphs below to move to the solution)

First off, I came to know that Beam cable supports PPPoE logins, but for the life of me, I (and any of my friends) couldn’t get it working. So, I thought of an alternative approach. Since, this was just a login through a web page, there was a good chance that I could automate it through perl/wget/curl etc. I immediately opened up their portal and took a look at the source code in the hopes of finding out the login form, which I could use to find the POST data that they want and submit it through wget. But what I found was that they are using javascript to do the login process, so no direct way of finding this out. And on top of that, the functions are not embedded in the page but loaded through an external script.

Hmm, a setback but a minor one. Javascript is still a client-side executed environment so all hope wasn’t lost. I could have waded through the browser cache to find the js files loaded by the portal and went through the functions to reconstruct the data that I need but I chose an easier way. There is this excellent addon for firefox called “Live Headers”. It shows you all the transactions happening between your browser and the server. So, I just fired it up, filled in my login details in the portal and hit “Login”. On seeing the live headers log, I found out the exact url as well as the POST data that they were sending to do the actual login and from there it was a piece of cake. With “wget”, it is as simple as executing

wget <url> –post-data=<data>

So, by substituting the information that I got, this is the command that you need to execute on your PC (For linux/mac it is already installed generally and for windows, you will need to download from here)

wget http://123.176.37.2/newportal/Ajax.php –post-data="function=ExecuteLogin&user=YOURBEAMUSERNAME&pwd=YOURBEAMPASSWORD&remember=false&timestamp=1271186686298"

Please remember to replace YOURBEAMUSERNAME and YOURBEAMPASSWORD with your actual username and password respectively. Also, please note that the above command is all one single line (it might appear in multiple lines in your browser).

So, everytime you need to login just run this command. Now, how to do this automatically? For linux, just put it inside a shell script for linux and set it to run automatically on bootup. For windows, paste the command in a text file, and save it as beam_login.bat and put it in your start up folder so that it runs everytime on boot. (You might want to put some delays in there as it might take some time to get connected to the network or you can query the network interface to run it when the network is up. Let me know if you want to know how to do this for your platform and I can help you).

So, this is for the PC, now how about if I need to use non-browser capable devices. This is easy if you have a router with a custom linux firmware (because they generally have wget installed or allow you to install it). I have an Asus wl-500w with oleg’s custom firmware installed and it was a piece of cake with it. I just created the following shell script

#!/bin/sh

if [ -e Ajax.php ]
then
  rm Ajax.php
fi

#Limit the number of retries to prevent the router from going into continuous loop
num_retries=10

while [ $num_retries -gt 0 ]
do
wget http://123.176.37.2/newportal/Ajax.php –post-data="function=ExecuteLogin&user=YOURBEAMUSERNAME&pwd=YOURBEAMPASSWORD&remember=false&timestamp=1271186686298"
if [ -e Ajax.php ]
then
  rm Ajax.php
  break
else
  sleep 2s
  num_retries=`expr $num_retries – 1`
fi
done

Then I set it to run on boot and voila!! A tip for other users of any of the asus routers with oleg’s firmware (like wl-500g, wl-520gu, wl-500gp etc). The firmware has some scripts in the /local/sbin folder that are run at various times. I suggest you put the above code inside the post-firewall script. (Do not forget to run “flashfs save && flasfs commit && flashfs enable” to save your changes). Now, every time my router reboots, it automatically logs in to the connection

Hope I have been clear in the isntructions. If you are unclear about anything or need any help in implementing it for your specific platform, do let me know.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Automatic Login For Beam Cable, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

If you are a proud owner of an Asus WL-500W wireless router (or maybe another one of the same series like wl-500g, wl-500gp, etc), then you know that this router has a very useful USB port with which you might have attached your external hard disk and have already offloaded all your downloding tasks to it, or maybe using it for various other purposes. Whatever maybe the reason, the main point is that because of this hard disk, now we cannot just turn off the power of the router any more. It has to be shut down gracefully like a PC. One way is to ssh/telnet to it and then give the “halt” command but then you have to switch on a PC specially just to turn off your router. Well not any more. I was looking for a better way to do this and just found out the simplest one. And if you are using Oleg’s custom firmware then you are in luck too.
With the 1.9.2.7-g version of his firmware, oleg added a new feature with which if you press the EZ Setup button at the back of the router for 3 seconds, it executes a script “/usr/local/sbin/ez-setup”, if present. So, all you gotta do is create a new text file named “ez-setup”, and paste the following contents in it:

#!/bin/sh
halt

Then save it at /usr/local/sbin in your router and make it executable by running “chmod +x ez-setup”. And you are done. You can now try out whether your router is shutting down gracefully or not by just pressing the EZ Setup button for 3 seconds.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Easiest Way to Shutdown Asus WL-500W, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I have one of those crappy DSL modems that all these ISPs give to you with the connection. My ISP is Airtel and the modem that I have is Beetel 110–BXi (They also have other models like 220–BX and 220 BXi). One thing common among all these modems is that they do not provide secure access like Secure Shell (ssh) as all they provide is ftp/telnet/http etc which are all clear text protocols. Hence, it is a huge security risk to expose these interfaces to the internet and then access them from outside. So, I (and most others) don’t allow these services to be accessed from WAN. But I do have the need some time to access it. So, what do I do? I follow a simple process to allow myself a pseudo-ssh or telnet picggy-backed over ssh connection. How is that?

Well, I have an excellent wi-fi router (Asus WL-500W) that does have ssh (which I have configured to listen on, say, port XXXX). Now all I do is:

1. Disable telnet access to modem from WAN but enable from LAN. 
2. Forward this particular port XXXX in modem’s configuration to the router’s IP.
3. Optional: Register for a dynamic dns account (e.g. dyndns.org) and update the same in modem’s config so I can access my modem through a domain name since I have a dynamic IP which changes all the time.
4. Now, ssh to my external (WAN) IP from outside (say from work). Since, the port is forwarded to my router, it the router that answers my ssh request.
5. After logging in to my router, simply telnet to the modem using its LAN IP and configure away.

Simple, isn’t it? I would advise you all to make a similar setup for yourself as well, if possible, rather than taking risks of unsecure access.[tags]Airtel, DSL Modem, ssh dsl modem, Asus WL-500W, WL-500W, telnet[/tags]

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Secure Access To Your DSL Modem’s Telnet (telnet / ssh), was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Most of you must be knowing by now that I bought the amazing Asus WL-500W router a few days back. This router builds on the great lineage it has in its predecessors, the WL-500g, WL-500g Deluxe, WL-500gP, WL-500gP v2 etc, and shines ahead with being much more than a router, rather a complete headless linux PC. Anyways, to the point. In most routers/modems, if you forget the password to your web-administration gui (which generally resides as 192.168.1.1), the only option left is to reset the router, thereby losing all your settings etc. But not so with this little beast. If you remember your ssh password (which BTW is available if you have installed a custom firmware on our router), then you can just login through it to your router and execute the following commands to save your skin:

nvram get http_passwd

This will display the current web administration password.

nvram set http_passwd=”NewPasswd”

This will set the new password. But remember that you have to enter another command (given below) to make sure that your new password is saved.

nvram commit

Now, just reboot and enjoy [tags]AsAsus WL-500g, Asus WL-500g Deluxe, Asus WL-500gP, Asus WL-500W, Asus WL-500W hacks, How to reset web admin password, reset asus wl-500w password, reset password, Linux, Hack, administration password, password hacks, web administration, web admin[/tags]

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled [TIP] Asus WL-500W Hacks:How To Reset Web Admin Password, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

A few people (e.g. Varun) told me my previous post differed from the way how google chrome / Microsoft IE8 handle Incognito (Private Browsing) mode. The main consideration was that while chrome/IE8 don’t write anything to disk at all, the firefox method is an after-effect, i.e., writing to disk and then clearing it up while closing the window. Well, true but nothing is non-rectificable . So this is a post about a method that one can use to go “really” undercover with firefox. But before we begin, please make sure you have read Part 1 of my post, because here I’ll start from the point where we left off in the earlier post.

I began thinking on the lines of setting up a ramdisk first (and remapping the browser cache folders to the new path in this ramdisk), so that nothing gets written to the hard disk, ever, even if the browser tries very hard. Best security right? Yes, but it involved a few issues like data is still there until you reboot also a part of your ram is always blocked, etc. So I went with the approach given below.

Method: Easier and privacy on-par with Chrome/IE8

Just do the following in addition to the Step 4.

• Uncheck “Keep my history”
• Uncheck “Remember what I enter in forms and the search bar”
• Uncheck “Remember what I’ve downloaded”
• Choose “Keep until I close firefox” for cookies
• Press advanced settings in “Private Data”, select unselect options according to your choice. For max protection, select everything.
• Open a new tab, and write “about:config” (without quotes) in address bar, press enter.
• Search for “browser.cache.disk.enable” and set it to false
• Search for “browser.cache.offline.enable” and set it to false

Done. You are secure and remember, this is just a one time setup, you won’t have to do this again and again.

Side Note: Usability is another concern. However, I think that is debatable and varies from user to user highly. The steps lined up in these 2 posts aren’t too hard to carry out and take around a minute to do, and is a one time effort. Now, compare this with option where you use google chrome and love its in-built incognito mode but then have to leave all the extensions and greasemonkey scripts of firefox behind which made browsing so much more accessible for you. Another path could be to use both the browsers. Anyways, I’ll not go further down this path. This is for you to decide what you feel is more usable for you . This is just something to say “It’s not impossible”.

PS: If anyone is still curious about the ramdisk approach, let me know..

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Firefox Incognito / Private Browsing Mode – Part II, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Update: Part 2 of this post is now up here to allay some of the drawbacks that were pointed out.

There has been so much hype over the “Incognito” (or Private Browsing) mode of Google Chrome / Microsoft IE8, with many internet users screeming Hallelujiah. But I don’t understand what the hoopla is all about. This mode has always been there in Mozilla firefox as well. You just need to devote less than one minute (yes, you read that right, less than one minute) to set it up. Well, actions are better than words, so here it goes:

Step 1.) Run the following command to start the firefox profile manager.(In Linux, press Alt+F2 and in Windows, press Win+R to bring up the run dialogue box)

firefox -ProfileManager

If it says something on the lines of “cannot find command” then use full path to firefox/firefox.exe in linux/Windows respectively.

Step 2.) Press “Create Profile” and enter “Incognito” (or a name of your choice) as your new profile name and press “Finish”.

Step 3.) Select “Incognito” profile and press “Start Firefox”.

Step 4.) Go to Edit->Preferences->Privacy. Select “Always clear my private data when I close Firefox” and unselect “Ask me before clearing private data”.

Step 5.) That’s it. Setup is done. Now, whenever you want to go undercover, run the following command

firefox -P Incognito -no-remote

Note 1: You can run incognito mode and normal mode together simultaneously.

Note 2: Its advised that you put the above command in a shortcut for easy/quick access.

Isn’t that simple? Now, can you roll back that drool factor of being able to go “undercover” in google chrome or Internet Explorer 8?

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Firefox Incognito Mode Is Here: Move Over Chrome/IE8, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings