Author: admin

Telephony

YAC Caller ID Server for Asterisk

I recently upgraded the firmware of the IP phones in a small office using my Grandstream HTTP configuration pusher. One of the users complained that the Caller ID display under the new firmware was too small to be legible. I’m not convinced that the size of the font actually changed, but I wanted to offer…
Arduino, Hardware, Raspberry Pi

Santa Hatifyer v1.0

Well, it’s Christmas time again. I really haven’t had a lot of blog posts since last Christmas, so my 2013 desk-decorations (deskorations?) are still fresh on my mind. I cheated this year, and didn’t stick to stuff I had on hand (although at the core is a Raspberry Pi, which the office had available). I…
Hardware, Raspberry Pi

PartyTube – YouTube-video powered party jukebox for RPi

Last month I had a Halloween party. Many people don’t seem to like the music I like, and I generally don’t like their music either. While planning my party it occurred to me that the music selection should be a collaborative process that included the guests. I spent the next few hours making my “Partytube”…
Telephony

Grandstream Simple HTTP Configuration Pusher

Here is a simple bash script that logs into the web interface of a Grandstream IP phone and submits some configuration changes, and then reboots the device for the changes to take effect. I wrote this to update a handful of Grandstream phones with a new phonebook XML URL, but it could be used for…
Telephony

Grandstream Phone Book Creator for Elastix

Do you run the Elastix PBX management environment to Asterisk? Do you use Grandstream IP Phones? If you answered yes to both of these questions, then this might be helpful to you. Grandstream GXP21xx/GXP14xx/GXP116x IP phones (and possibly others) can be configured to automatically download an XML formatted phone book file. The Elastix interface already…
General Nonsense, Software

Fun with Garmin Forensics

As you’ll recall from my Christmas post the company I work for is replacing their fleet management equipment, and in part that means upgrading some of our older Garmin GPS screens. As a result a steady stream of old equipment has been trickling into my office. Even though these units no longer fit our needs,…
General Nonsense

Garland & Garmin Greetings

My office at work wasn’t feeling very Christmas-like, so I flaked out a little and hatched a plan to address the stark lack of festiveness. I have a bunch of these old Garmin Nuvi 5000 model GPS displays in my office right now. We are replacing our fleet management software and with it our vehicle…
Bash

Bash Snippet: Decimal to Binary Conversion

Convert a decimal value into the binary representation and vice versa in Bash using only built-ins. If you know a better way, please let me know. To ensure a properly formatted expression for the arithmetic expansion in bin2dec, the dec2bin function prefixes zeros as needed to pad to a character count evenly divisible by 8….
Bash, System Administration

Detect Wi-Fi Clients on your DD-WRT Router

Here is a script I wrote that scrapes the web interface of a router running DD-WRT. The script looks for the MAC addresses of wireless users. When it sees a MAC address that it hasn’t logged before it issues an alert. To help identify the new equipment, a portion of the MAC address is sent…
Helpful Tools, VBScript

Import Nextel iDEN Contacts to Google

Sprint is decommissioning it’s Nextel iDEN network in 2013. The Nextel network has been very popular with businesses for it’s push-to-talk (PTT) “walkie-talkie“-like service. Several rugged (and bulky) mobile phones like the Motorola i355 and i365 are well adapted to the sometimes harsh environments of field work and clumsy service technicians. Unfortunately it seems that…