Kogan Smart Plugs

The Physical Device

These are piggyback plugs with a toggle button, on-off LED (ring around the button) and status LED. They plug into a wall, with the device you want to control plugged into the back, which can be switched on and off by the button, or you can use the smartphone app.

The Smarts

The Wi-Fi module for this device comes from Tuya, along with the app and server infrastructure.  In addition to off/on functionality, the app also provides you with power consumption information, and timer and more complex programming capabilities.   The smart automation gives you access to data from other Tuya based devices you own, Weather, Sunset/Sunrise, Location, so fairly complex automation is possible. Location is from the smartphone, which could be useful to turn things on when you are arriving home, and off when you are leaving, provided you live alone.  Anyone with a family or flatmates though probably needs a presence detection that covers multiple people, which this does not provide.  The app also interfaces with Alexa and Google Home, as well as IFTTT, to provide access to basic functionality and automation scenes.

The Details

To free yourself from the Tuya ecosystem, you first need to know more details about how the device is wired internally.  This applies whether you are using something like tuyapi to control the device without changing the firmware, or reflashing alternate firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome.

Tuya smart devices

Over the past year, I have collected a number of smart home devices, the majority of which are based on the Tuya platform.
Here is some of what I have learnt about these devices.

1. The apps are all compatible.
   If you buy a new device, it is worth checking whether it works with the app you already have installed before installing yet another brand specific app on your phone.
2. The features are defined by the device, not the app.
   I bought two heaters, the first branded by Kogan, the second by Goldair. The Kogan heater had full automation enabled, the Goldair heater app worked only as a remote control and for setting simple off/on timers. On seeing that the apps had identical UIs apart from color scheme and available features, i thought to try the Goldair heater with the Kogan app. It worked, but the Goldair heater was still unavailable in the automation UI, and interestingly, the Goldair color scheme was still used to display the Goldair heater.
3. Tuya also publishes their own brand app.
   I ended up switching away from the brands own app on the assumption that Tuya's own app should have the full feature set (the Goldair one was missing the automation UI completely, though I never tried using the Kogan heater with it, so it may have just been hidden due to no paired devices supporting it). It also gets updates before the branded apps, but from what I saw during the few months I kept multiple apps installed, it is only a couple of weeks ahead at most.
4. Local control is possible

More remote control decoding

Astro have now retired their old decoders, which I spent some time a few years ago trying to control from my PC. It seems at least someone has found a use for that info, but from reading the thread, what they actually wanted was the remote codes for the latest generation Samsung decoders that Astro replaced all the old decoders with.
In the public interest then, here is an updated LIRC config, and additionally a kernel rc configuration file for the Samsung Astro Byond decoders. Be warned: the kernel rc configuration is using standard key codes, including KEY_POWER, which may cause your PC to shutdown in many default configurations of GNU/Linux desktops - where all available input devices are grabbed by X. Changing to KEY_POWER2 might help with that particular problem - but unless you configure X to ignore the remote control, you'll still see side effects from other keys.

Android Studio - a frustrating experience in usability

Lately Eclipse has become excessively slow and unstable. So I decided its time to take a look at Android Studio.

I downloaded, and installed with the default settings - mistake number one, as I found out later. Startup took forever, just like Eclipse. I created a new project, choosing the Settings Template, as I know I'm going to need a Settings page for this app, which also took forever. When it eventually finished, there was an error about gradle failing to sync...so basic operations like editing and compiling will not work. WTF! So about half an hour of poking around and searching the net later, I find that my proxy got set when I installed, but today I'm working from home. Apparently some of the other slowness is attributable to that too, as it seems much more responsive when I have disabled the proxy.

Advice #1: When designing software, use the system proxy settings, don't introduce your own. People move between networks, and they shouldn't have to reconfigure a dozen separate places when they do.

Astro xmltv listings

For quite a while now, I've been pulling TV listings from the Astro website. At first this involved scraping some HTML and the scripts I had were pretty ugly and worked only for the channels I wanted. Then they added some RSS feeds, which made the scraping a bit easier and less prone to breaking every time they updated the look of the website (which was often). For a couple of years now, the RSS feed has been replaced with a JSON API, and I had a pretty good grabber written for that, but never got around to sharing it. Recently they switched to a dedicated server for the JSON API, and gave it an overhaul, so my script stopped working. Now that I've updated it to the new API, its a good time to share.

Remote Control

I eventually gave up on the idea of trying to prod the serial port on my Astro STB and bought a cheap IR transceiver from some guy in Hong Kong via ebay. My first attempts at learning the remote codes were frustrating - irrecord complained about something being wrong after incorrectly guessing the settings, and when I finally got some codes learned, I found that a lot of the buttons had the same code, so 2, 6 and 8 were all being detected as KEY_2. Eventually I started trying to manually configure the basic settings based on some of the standard protocols, and eventually hit on RCMM-32, which learned all the codes and can reliably detect them when I press the buttons on the remote.

So now the codes are learned, along with the codes for the extra buttons for controlling a Panasonic DVD player on the bottom of my TV remote, which have now found a use giving basic control of Freevo in case the wireless keyboard, bluetooth equipped mobile phone or one of many wifi equipped gadgets is not close at hand.

Next step is to go the other way and send the codes out to the STB. The transceiver doesn't seem to be sending anything out at all. I still haven't narrowed down the problem, it may be a faulty IR LED, or an incompatibility between the transceiver (MCEUSB gen 1) and the software driving it (LIRC 0.86). Now that I have the remote codes, it might also be a good time to go back to trying the serial link, but that'll have to wait for another night. For now, I'll just post up the Astro remote codes, in case anyone else is struggling to get them working with LIRC.

Controlling my STB

My latest experiment is to see if I can control my Astro decoder via the serial port on the back, so I can have Freevo record from different channels (currently I'm mostly recording the kids shows from NHK that are on in the middle of the night, so we have to remember to leave the decoder on channel 963 each evening). There is of course no documentation about the serial port anywhere on the net, but a few US set top boxes have been hacked, so there is some hope.

What I know after an hour of poking around:

Atoms Moved

I've now successfully imported a 700 post blog into draft.blogger.com

There were a few more quirks of blogger.com along the way. Having next and previous links in the Atom feed causes blogger to reject the entire import file, so I ended up putting them in as comments. There were also some old posts that didn't have an author (perhaps from some beta version of Roller, and blogger rejected those due to the empty name field.
Finally, I had an old comment from the blog's early days that was not UTF-8 encoded in the database (it doesn't appear correctly in Roller either), so I had to reencode that before blogger.com would accept it for import.

Moving Atoms

Having now found an apartment in Malaysia, I'm now faced with the logistics of moving. One problem I'm facing is that for the last 5 years I've run my own server, which now supports several blogs, a forum and my mobile phone's OTA backup. If I knew it was just for a week or two, I could take it offline temporarily, but from what I can tell, internet connectivity in Malaysia is probably not going to be reliable enough to keep all this online for a reasonable proportion of the time, and unless I pay serious money I'll be stuck with the hassle of a dynamic IP address. So I'm looking to migrate at least the blogs and forum off to other services. I've just finished migrating the posts and comments from my first blog (there are still hard links back to my server that need fixing), which was no easy task, as although draft.blogger.com supports Atom based import, it is very particular about some things, with very little documentation and completely useless error handling - it just seems to stop processing as soon as it finds something it doesn't like, and if nothing has been imported yet you get a general meaningless error message, but if one or more posts were successfully imported, it just silently fails to import the posts starting with where it failed. So here is what I found.

Unicode and fonts

Kenichi Handa has been hard at work on a Unicode based Emacs for some years now. For Windows users, there is nothing radical in the default build, a few more languages are supported, and a wider range of Unicode characters, but the Windows specific code has only been updated enough to keep working. In future, optimisations and simplifications can be made due to the internal encodings of Emacs and Windows being both based on Unicode. Messing around with code pages to get fonts displaying will be a thing of the past, and can be already thanks to the new font backend.

While work progressed in parallel on Emacs 22 and the Unicode codebase, there were several other developments happening outside the core Emacs development team. Multiple terminal support (multi-tty) has already been merged with the CVS trunk, though it doesn't mean much to Windows users. Limitations in the way Windows handles console output mean that it is never likely to provide much in the way of new features on Windows, though it may be possible to rid ourselves of the runemacs.exe hack without sacrificing console support using the multi-tty feature.

Another new development was support for X freetype font rendering. On the face of it, this doesn't seem to mean much to Windows users either, but after being merged with the Unicode branch, it has been refactored into a new font backend design, with better support for unicode fonts. No longer are fonts defined by their character-set, Emacs can make use of font meta-data to determine which Unicode subranges each font supports. Currently the font backend is not enabled by default, but has to be enabled with a configure option. A backend has been implemented for Windows native fonts, and is ready for testing.

• Checking out the Unicode branch:
  
  cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co -r emacs-unicode-2 emacs
  


• Building Emacs with font backend support:
  
  cd emacs\nt

configure --enable-font-backend

make bootstrap

  

Future work

The new font backend is noticeably slower on Windows. A lot of this is probably down to the fact that the old font code cached the font metrics for ASCII characters of fixed width fonts, whereas the new font backend does no such caching yet. We can probably do a better job of caching by calculating which ranges of characters the fixed width applies to, rather than just ASCII. We might even allow multiple such range/width combinations to be associated with a font, to speed up CJK text display (where characters in the font are one of two widths).

There is no support for BDF fonts in the new font backend. BDF fonts will be given their own font backend, hopefully mostly reusable on other platforms.

A Uniscribe font backend may be introduced to enable some of the more advanced layout features in Windows XP and later. The new font backend design makes it easier to add new support like this without complex dynamic loading logic to support older versions of Windows.

topic:[emacs]

Izakaya ryori (pub food) - 居酒屋料理

An izakaya is a typical drinking establishment in Japan, though they have always had more emphasis on food than the typical English or New Zealand pub. Like English pubs, and New Zealand cafes, some izakaya have recently started to modernize their menus, combining different styles and bringing foreign influence to traditional Japanese favorites to create new "modern Japanese" dishes. This is especially noticeable in competitive areas like Ginza, where izakaya have to differentiate themselves from the hundreds of other eating and drinking establishments in the area to attract customers.

Unlike Western pubs, much of the izakaya is private areas where you reserve a table, so more like what we would see as a restaurant, although many after-work groups use it as we would a pub. Some traditional izakaya have seats at the bar, where you interact with and are served by the owner, but more upmarket ones are strictly table service, with waiters and waitresses rushing about in response to bells at each table, making you imagine you are on an aeroplane.

Despite being in notoriously expensive Ginza at the heart of downtown Tokyo, a variety of dishes and several hours drinking at Tomoru came to approximately ¥6000 per head. As well as the crayfish salad, branded omelette and meaty morsels pictured, we also had several other mouth watering dishes washed down with wine and beer.

Okonomiyaki (savoury pancake) - お好み焼き

Okonomiyaki is native to the Osaka and Hiroshima areas of Japan. It is a pancake made with potato flour, and containing cabbage, and assorted other vegetables and meats, and in the Osaka variation, noodles. Once cooked, the pancake is topped with brown sauce, mayonnaise and bonito flakes or tiny flakes of nori (seaweed), which appear to dance as the heat rises around them. If you are a connoisseur of Korean pa-jeon and Vietnamese banh xeo, then okonomiyaki is a must try dish, along with takoyaki, small dough balls containing octopus that are often sold from carts on the street.

This Okonomiyaki Special was ¥900 from a small store near Hiroshima station. We had another in a quick lunch stop at Shin-Osaka for ¥650.

You can easily make okonomiyaki at home following this recipe or many like it. Often at restaurants, you will be given a bowl of raw mix, and cook it youself on a hotplate at the table. At other restaurants, you might sit at a counter in front of the chef as they cook in front of you, as common in many types of Japanese restaurants, and probably the closest you'll come to "teppanyaki" style cooking in Japan.

Adding some zest to Picasa's HTML export.

Google's Picasa is great for managing your photos. It even has an Export as HTML Page option, which lets you generate a webpage for your photos. But all of the page styles it generates are very simple - if all your photos aren't the same size and orientation, the result is messy.

There are some good web page designs around for photos. Lightbox 2.0 is one, but you have to code all the HTML pages by hand, which is tedious and error-prone.

Picasa lets you generate ugly web pages easily, and Lightbox 2.0 lets you generate good looking web pages with a lot of effort. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to generate good looking web pages as easily as you can with Picasa?

When exporting from Picasa, you have the option to export the page as XML Code. This isn't very useful by itself, but with an appropriate stylesheet, you can easily transform it to anything you want. I wrote a stylesheet for converting to a Lightbox 2.0 style blog entry.

picasa-to-lightbox.xsl

Because I use this for blog entries, not complete webpages, there are some stylesheet definitions missing from the generated html, along with the rest of the html head section. See the Lightbox 2.0 webpage for details on what is needed.

To convert Picasa's generated index.xml using Xalan, I use the following command-line:

java -cp xalan2.jar org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN index.xml -XSL picasa-to-lightblox.xsl -OUT blogpost.html

Leave a comment if you have any more Picasa tips.

Hiyashi udon (Cold noodles) - 冷やしうどん

At every tourist attraction, people will get hungry, so there is always a restaurant somewhere, usually something quick and cheap, so families can get on with sightseeing and save their money for the gifts they need to take back to friends, family and workmates back home. Here at Yoshimi Hyakettsu (Yoshimi "100 caves"), there was a small family run restaurant which had run out of everything on this chilly spring day except hiyashi udon - cold udon noodles. Udon are a thick white noodle made from wheat flour. They are normally served in a hot soup, but in summer they can also be eaten cold with a soy based dipping sauce on the side. Here you see the noodles, sauce and wasabi, chilli and ginger to be optionally added to the sauce.

Udon are not the only noodles eaten cold. Zaru soba (buckwheat noodles on a bamboo mat) is another popular dish, as is hiyashi chuka (cold ramen noodles). Harusame (rice or bean vermicelli) is another noodle that is commonly eaten cold in Japan and elsewhere.

Asari (Clams) - あさり

Fresh seafood is very big in Japan, and it doesn't get fresher than when you collect it yourself. These live clams were collected in Ise Bay by the uncle of the family I stayed with as an exchange student in 1989. We used them in miso soup and spaghetti vongole, it sure beats the canned or frozen variety you would get in most Italian restaurants here in the UK.

While I was staying with the family, and whenever I have visited since, uncle Jouji would often bring some fresh food over. He lives just out of town, and is retired so has plenty of time for gardening, fishing and gathering shellfish.

Asking to be sued

Spotted today on the front page of Google News UK. The article itself was worded slightly differently.

 

Someone's asking to be sued, but is it Google, or ABC News?

Yuba ryori (Yuba cuisine) - 湯葉料理

Japan is home to many restaurants specializing in one specific type of food. Shozankaku Matsuyama, on the top floor of the Isetan shopping centre above Kyoto Station, specialises in Yuba - a byproduct of the tofu manufacturing process sometimes called tofu skin. Every dish they serve contains yuba, and their menu is extensive. I opted for the Takenoko Zukushi (Bamboo shoot set menu) for ¥5000, while Chizu went for the plain Yuba Zukushi for ¥4500. Each set menu consisted of around 7 courses and a drink. We both started with yuba sashimi, slightly different variations but both with fresh cold yuba alongside the more conventional raw fish.

Next up was another cold dish, of yuba in soymilk. After that the dishes diverged, and the bamboo shoot theme became apparent in my dishes, such as the steamed rice topped with peas served with pickled bamboo shoot, yuba and other pickles.

The dishes continued coming out, with yuba tempura, yuba rice, yuba noodles and others not pictured here (the photos were out of focus, or we were too busy enjoying the food and forgot to capture them), including yuba desserts.

Jin chess client

I have just learned of a Linux.com article about the alleged GPL violation by IChessU using the Jin chess client with their proprietary video chat extension. I was somewhat surprised to read that Alexander Rabinovitch was quoting this blog as supporting his position. I cannot imagine what post he is referring to, and noone has contacted me about this. For the record, I do not support his position. From what I understand of the case, Rabinovich initially contacted the author of Jin about licensing his code for a proprietary chess client he was intending to distribute. The Jin author made an offer of licensing the Jin source for a one off fee of US$4000, which would have allowed Rabinovich to distribute unlimited copies without needing to comply fully with the GPL. Rabonivich turned down this offer and decided to try to sneakily get around the GPL, by linking to the Jin code via a socket layer which he wrote [update: it seems he may not have even used sockets in the end, and in fact linked more directly].

It is a common misconception that the GPL only applies to statically linked modules within a program. It is an even more common misconception that the GPL cannot apply if there is a socket link between two modules. This has never been tested in court as far as I am aware, and it all boils down to what constitutes a derived work under copyright law.

My opinion is that if you add a network protocol to a GPL program specifically to get your proprietary module working with it, then you are creating a derived work, and the GPL applies to the work as a whole.

Hi Mum

Google Maps has just extended their mapping to Australia and New Zealand. The NZ maps even show the boundaries between sections! I wish I had this before I went to New Zealand in December / January. If only I could figure out how the searching works, at the moment it only seems useful for locating places that you already know where they are.

15 minutes of fame

My brother Adrian has just had his 15 minutes of fame, after a $12.2M cock up by his bank which they couldn't seem to put right for three days. I'm still fighting my own bank over a £20 penalty they charged me a few months ago because I paid my credit card off before they sent the bill out so I wouldn't get stung with late charges while I was away. Thats the £20 penalty for late payment that OFT ruled as excessive last July and gave the banks three months to change, then finally followed up on last month after the EU competition commision came to the same conclusion.