I just built and uploaded version 0.8 of Greyhole on Google Code. This version doesn’t change much of what is normally visible to the end users (except the regular bug fixes). Instead, 0.8 focused on improving an area of Greyhole that has always been messy: the communication channel between Samba and the Greyhole daemon.

This week, I created a new website for Greyhole. This website centralize all the information one could want about Greyhole: A presentation of what Greyhole is (homepage) Links to download the latest version Links to past versions downloads Links to the code repository, issues tracker & wiki (documentation), all hosted on Google Code Link to “Fund a Feature | Donate”, hosted by fundry.com RSS feeds for Greyhole news (which you really should subscribe to if you’re reading this!

Des fois, ça ne va juste pas assez vite à ton goût. Comme avec tou.tv.  Ça fait longtemps qu’ils disent qu’une version pour iPad est prévue, mais pourquoi attendre quand on a tous les outils pour que ça fonctionne maintenant ?

I wanted to keep track of fuel consumption (L/100km) for our two vehicles. I wanted to be able to send email to enter data, or use a simple web interface. The email part was important, because I don’t have a data plan on my cellphone, so being able to compose and queue an email at the pump, to have it sent automatically when I was later within reach of a known Wifi network, was a very nice to have.

Implemented in PHP, the result is not that pretty, but it’s nice enough, and the ease of use allows me to keep it updated without too much hassle.

I love 1Password. It looks good, it’s safe, it has a web-accessible UI, it has an iPhone/iPad application…

What I didn’t like about it was it’s Chrome extension, which required me to use the mouse to click the 1Password icon in the toolbar each time I wanted to auto-fill a form with login details!! That was so annoying.

So annoying in fact that I took upon myself to implement keyboard shortcuts in the 1Password extensions.

Normally, only the root user is allowed to open ports below 1024. That’s why, if you try running an application as a normal (non-root) user, and that application tries to open a port below 1024, you’ll get an error (access denied most likely).

If you’re running Fedora (and that would probably work on other distros too), there’s a command you can run, as root, that will allow such programs to open any of those ports, even if they’re run by a regular user.

Earlier this week, I stumbled upon an iPhone app that allowed users to receive push notifications on XBMC. When a notification is received in XBMC, it appears in the lower right corner of the screen. Pretty cool.

This made me think it would be nice to see incoming phone calls there.

So I took out the Ovolab Phlink device I had sitting on a shelf, and created a small ‘ring’ script for it. That (Apple)script checks for the caller ID when the phone rings (and for a matching entry in my address book), and if it is available, calls an external PHP script that handles the network-wide notifications.

A projector and 120" screen sure are nice to watch TV shows and movies, but having them on the 3rd floor of the house makes the projector unhappy.

Being on the ceiling of the almost highest point in the house, during hot summer days, that projector can become quite hot. And when it does, it tries to compensate by fuelling it’s fans with enough voltage to make them sound like jet engines. (Not PowerMacG5-running-in-single-user-mode jet-engines-loud, but still…)

To try to quiet it down a notch, I built what some people call a hush box.

The iPad is now very popular in the house. I seldom can use it as a recipe book to cook something, as it was intended… It’s either in my oldest’s hands, playing Labyrinth 2 HD, either on my wife’s lap, browsing her Facebook & reading her emails.

But still, sometimes, it’s nice to use it for other things. One such other thing would be to stream videos from the Amahi home server sitting in a closet upstairs. One can watch a recorded TV show in bed, or hand the iPad to the big kid to let him watch Cars or Nemo while we’re watching the news, or something non kid-friendly.

Being of the DIY kind, I made my own web-app to achieve this, using the new HTML5 videos tag.

So, I’m now happily using Greyhole. Good for me, you say? Not long ago, a 1 TB hard drive that was part of my storage pool died (my fault really, handling it while it was powered up). Greyhole handled this beautifully, re-creating duplicate copies of the files that were stored on that drive to continue protecting all my data. But I didn’t have enough free space on the other drives to allow all the duplicates I want to be created.