2022 - 07 - 17 - Peru - Lima

The initial idea for our three week Peru trip was to do everything ourselves and plan bus, trian, taxi whatever on a day to day basis like we usually do, but in the end we ended up using http://www.PeruHop.com/ for most of our travel needs and we couldn't have be happier. 

PeruHop has different "hop on hop off" experiences where you pay for the end to end trip and spend as much time as you want in each stop. We went for the Lima - La Paz - Cusco trip and booked a return flight with Viva Airlines from Cusco to Lima.

The first day in Lima was a bit of a shock, even after living in a reasonably "crowded" city like Milan. https://www.airportexpresslima.com/ was recommended by every source we found to go from the airport to the city centre but they shut down in mid July. After seeing the warnings of express kidnappings we ended up booking a taxi in the airport which cost more than negotiating a price with a taxi driver.

One of the first things I do when visiting a new country is go to a local supermarket so see what they sell. I was surprised to see that they sold a typical Italian Christmas sweet "Panettone" in what would be the middle of summer for us:

We soon learned that Peruvians love sweet stuff. Inka Kola is probably the best example. It's extremely sweet, tastes like bubblegum and people have it with food instead of water, beer or wine. 

The tourist info in Miraflores was excellent and we bought a Peru SIM and booked a free walking tour of Lima. In retrospect we didn't need the Peru SIM as Google Fi gave better coverage and speed and worked in Bolivia and Colombia as well. The Motorola G8 Power battery life is also way better than the Alcatel - MW40V 4G router we used with the local SIM.

 

I'm back (sort of)

It's been way too long since I wrote anything here.  I can't really cover what I do at work so I'm pivoting to cover other topics that interest me like travel and photography. 

If all goes as planned I'll publish a post every day or so about my trip Peru this summer. 

Fellow early bird

It was a great morning to get some exercise.

Parco Bresso ~7am

Bye, bye Linate as a motorbike friendly airport

One of the things I really liked about Milan Linate airport was the free motorbike parking next to the checkin area. I have saved a lot of time, and money, over the years by going by motorbike.

That changed last year when they "upgraded" the free area with subpar asphalt which made motorbikes fall over:

It's weird, but it's cheaper to fly London and back than to go to the airport and back by taxi or park your motorbike for a business trip...

Arduino Halloween

Had fun with the kids yesterday preparing for Halloween

Ingredients:
1 pumpkin
1 recycled Happy Meal toy (I think)
1 Arduino Duemilanove
1 distance sensor
3 yellow LEDs
3 red LEDs
2 blue LEDs
1 9V battery
1 300 Ohm resistor

I love hacker friendly toys

My old Nabaztag was the first victim.  This time it's the turn of a Nerf Blaster clone:

After removing some standard Phillips screws, I got exactly what I wanted:

• The orange "launch" module in the bottom left of the picture. It's a standalone piece that's originally powered by 3 AA batteries but should work fine on a Arduino friendly 5V (or higher :-). Even the mounts can be recycled for the project I'm working on.
• The orange "piston" at the top of the picture. I had a simpler design in mind but this one is more compact so it will work even better.

I bought this toy in a local store but I usually go to the flea market in Cormano where I can pick up a R/C car / toy without remote control for a few euros. Way cheaper than buying individual components like wheels, engines, and electrical components piece by pice.

Photos / video of the final project should be available "soon".

How to configure WiFi connection on a HP F4580

Just a note to myself as I wasted more time than I should have fixing this.

I recently changed the WiFi access credentials and my HP F4580, obviously, stopped working. Neither the Mac nor the Windows drivers I had let me edit the WiFi settings but I finally found a way to reset the WiFi configuration:

• Turn on the printer
• Click and hold down the Cancel button
• Click and release the WiFi button
• Release the Cancel button

This creates a ad hoc network called hpsetup that you can connect to via WiFi to configure the router.

Android table rover

This guy is the reason is the reason I haven't gotten any more work done on my Android powered rabbit.

I started off using 3 MaxBotix MB1000 sensors (downwards left, forward, downwards right). The forward sensor always worked pretty well but I had problems getting fast and accurate readings from the sensors pointing downwards. Without calibrating the sensors (making sure they were pointed away from any object) I got results that where to inaccurate to use for table top navigation.

Tonight  I tried the Sharp GP2Y0D810 sensor from hobbytronics which makes a huge difference. It's lightning fast and it has a small red LED which is lit when there is an object within a 2-10 cm range which is a great help for debugging. The sensor may be less versatile then the MaxBotix sensor as it only gives a true/false result for a limited range but, in my experience, it's fast, accurate and developer friendly which I exactly what I need. It also cost a lot less :-)

The rover in the video is using two Sharp GP2Y0D810 sensors pointing downwards and a MaxBotix MB1000 for obstacle detection.

ICSI Netalyzr comparison of SiADSL and Tiscali

I'm in the process of migrating from SiADSL to Tiscali for my home ADSL connection. I have been very happy with SiADSL but I need more bandwidth in upload for video conferences, i.e. Google+ Hangouts with extras. The increase from 7Mb/512kb to 20Mb/1Mb should make a significant difference.


I heard from Michele that Tiscali blocks some ports so I wanted to have a record of the differences between the two provider in case I had problems. Netalyzr to the rescue! It can run as a Java Applet or as a command line client for the more security conscious. It takes several minutes to run and tests everything I ever knew about and then some...

So, what changes between Tiscali and SiADSL?

Tiscali blocks some TCP and UDP ports which I consider a feature, not a problem, if you have Windows machines on the network:

• Direct TCP access to remote RPC servers (port 135) is blocked. This is probably for security reasons, as this protocol is generally not designed for use outside the local network.
• Direct UDP access to remote NetBIOS NS servers (port 137) is blocked.
• Direct UDP access to remote IKE key exchange servers (port 500) is blocked.

I was surprised to notice this potential problem though after I moved to Tiscali:

I passed from PPPoE which uses a max MTU of 1492 to PPPoA which supports 1500 and I had forgotten to update the max MTU on my border router. I tried to leave the max MTU at 1492 but quickly had problems so I increased it to 1500 and it has been working like a charm since. I would have blamed my connectivity problems at Tiscali unless Netalyzr found the problem for me.

I'm also pleased to see that this warning I had on the SiADSL connection is gone with Tiscali:

Exactly the behavior I have seen over the last year(s). Uploads with Picasa killed internet access and video conferencing with many participants is "impossible" even with no other traffic.

Finally an anti fog solution for helmets and glasses that works!

I use my motorcycle every single day of the year as long as the roads are not icy which is 360+ days a year in Milan :-)

The only problem I have is that my helmet and glasses fog up when it get's very foggy or cold. I have tried everything, but so far the only thing that has worked is keeping the visor up.  Not fun when it's below zero...

EICMA changed that when I found the Zeibe.es stand. I got a sample of their helmet anti fog product which worked very well on my glasses so I ordered a set of their long lasting anti-fog treatment. It worked perfectly today on my helmet visor and glasses. I don't know if it will last the advertised two weeks, but I'm very happy so far.

It really does work as well as the demo video shows:

How to fix Roomba 500 series battery problem

My Roomba 520 has been out of service for more than six months. The wheels worked fine but the internal brushes didn't turn around anymore. I picked it apart and cleaned the internal gears and engine several times which made it work for a while but I finally gave in and bought a new engine.

Surprise, surprise, it refused to start even after charging it for more than one day. I always got this never ending loop:

It successfully undocked from its docking station but it just reset whenever it tried to start the brushes which led me to believe it was a low battery problem.

Mixing various instructions I found on the internet, I ended up with this procedure which seems to fix the problem:

1. Connect the Roomba and charge it completely (until the light turns  green)
2. Disconnect the Roomba from the charger (the light turns off)
3. Turn on the Roomba by pressing the Start button once (the light turns green)
4. Press and hold down the Dock and Spot buttons for 15 seconds to reset the Roomba (the Roomba turns off)
5. Release the Dock and Spot buttons (the Romba plays the 5 tone startup sound)
6. Go back to step 1

I have repeated the procedure 5 times so far and the run time keeps increasing. 

The Nabaztag is dead, long live the Nabaztag

My Nabaztag has been collecting dust on my desk since the online service powering it died this summer.

The first meeting of GTUG Milano was the perfect excuse to have some fun and use the Nabaztag for something useful. Using this Nabaztag disassembly video it didn't take long to pick it apart and figure out which wires controlled what.

Thomas took care of all the electronics work and I added some lines of code to the Android ADK demo code to create a proof of concept Android ADK powered rabbit.

  

Take it for what it is; a proof of concept that just controls the two ears, 3 multi color LEDs and does some text to speech. It does not do any of the useful things that the Nabaztag did like reading mails, rss feeds, showing weather information etc.

It could though, as all of it is easy to implement on Android. Which is why it's time to make it do something useful :-)

I've decided to replace the Android ADK Demo Shield with a Arduino Mega ADK which is smaller an "only" costs 59 euro. It will be the interface with the Nabaztag hardware and control the ears and LEDs initially. The rest of the work will be done by an Android device.

To be perfectly honest, I probably got a bit carried way when ordering the Arduino Mega ADK. I got some LEDs with the idea of organizing them in a grid to show basic symbols, but then I found the 32x16 LED matrix and couldn't resist it. The idea of replacing the 3 multi colored LEDs found in the Nabaztag with something that can display information was just too much to resist. I think it should fit in the almost empty Nabaztag shell but I may have to do some rabbit surgery if it doesn't.

Add the power of cellbots and we have a pretty powerful rabbit on our hands. Let's just hope it does not turn Evil...

WhyMCA Mobile Developer Conference tomorrow and Saturday in Milano

The free WhyMCA Mobile Developer Conference looks very interesting with tracks for Android, iPhone, Windows Phone 7, cross platform development etc. There will be a parallel Mobile Hackathon if you want to show of your coding skillz.

Plenty of interesting topics on the agenda.

Friday 13th

Disaster struck Friday:

You can say what you want about the dreaded BSOD on Windows but at least it tells you something.

Murphy's law struck at the worst possible time (of course) as I had just moved a lot of photos from my digital camera to my harddisk for editing and I hadn't uploaded them to Picasa yet. 

PhotoRec to the rescue, again, as it was able to recover all photos from the memory card. I've used in the past when my Compact Flash card got corrupted. PhotoRec managed to recover all the pictures including old, partially overwritten, photos. It's free, it works and runs on just about every OS there is. What more can you ask for?

I've got almost all my data in the cloud so I didn't loose much but I did loose some Android code I was playing around with. Time Machine would have kept my data safe but I cannot use it on my work machine so I put together a quick script using rsync to backup my personal directory yesterday. Let's see if it works on Friday January 13th 2012...

Challenge: a new dinner recipe each week

I'm trying a less extreme version of Matt Cutts' 30 day challenge for the next few months; at least one new dinner recipe each week.

Why?

I have a set of dinners recipes that I really like so I end up making them over and over again instead of trying something new. It's not a problem from a nutritional point of view due to the variety (meat, fish, pasta, salads, etc) but it gets boring after a while. The kids are old enough to try something new and tell what they think my experiments so why not?

What?
Try at least one new recipe each week.

The first experiment is: Meatballs in tomato sauce (automatically translated so be careful...) with spinach as a side dish:

The Human Chaos Monkey

I have never worked on a project with an automated Chaos Monkey, but I have had the great pleasure of working with a human Chaos Monkey for many years (I'm sure you know who you are :-)

This particular Chaos Monkey insisted on;

1. Having everything load balanced/replicated even in the testing environment (both for testing and for making sure it matched the production environment as much as possible)
2. Making sure that the replicated services worked correctly but killing one instance, waiting for it to fail over then kill it again to make sure it failed back.
3. Running a short stress test even for minor changes
4. Running long, preferably over the weekend, load tests for major infrastructure changes

The result was a rock solid infrastructure that had close to zero downtime apart from planned maintenance windows where changes depended on other systems. The outages we had were due to external systems replying slower than required so we implemented a killer monkey that recycled com+ processes taking to long.

Making the process clear upfront is a great help; there is no way your code is going into production until you've passed the Chaos Monkey.

Five-leaf clover

Four-leaf clovers should bring luck. What about the five-leaf clover I found in the local park?

Too close to Milano and pollution or will I be extra lucky?

Reading protected PDF files on the Amazon Kindle 2

I recently bought a new Nikon DSLR on Amazon.fr as it had the best price I could find in Europe. As usual it arrived in no time in perfect condition but it only had the French manual. I found an English version of the  PDF version of the Users' Manual on the Nikon web site but is not readable by the Amazon Kindle 2 as printing is password protected.

I already own a paper copy of the manual so I don't feel guilty about removing the password protection of the PDF file so I can read it on my Kindle. This one line command on Mac/Linux uses GhostScript to remove the password protection:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=unprotected.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f protected.pdf

It also reduced the size of the file from 23Mb to 14Mb :-)

The first real motorcycle trip of the year

Thick fog in Milan, humid and cold this morning but I decided to trust the weather forecast that promised sunshine further north. Just above freezing until I hit the first hills and Lago di Segrino. Took a quick stop at Madonna del Ghisallo just to enjoy the warm weather (+10), blue sky and fantastic view.

The road up to San Primo was surprisingly good considering the time of year. Only found a few places close to the parking where the road was completely covered by ice.

Didn't stop for lunch at Rifugio Martina this time which is a shame as they have excellent food and a view of both the Lecco and Como branches of the Como lake.

View of San Primo close to the Rifugio Martina restaurant:

Headed down to Onno instead which offered a great view of Mandello del Lario, home town of Moto Guzzi

Moving from .text 0.95 to Blogger

My blogs are moving.

I have hosted my blogs for several years on a Virtual Server provided by http://www.aruba.it/ They have an excellent service, great customer support and you get a "dedicated" Virtual Server running Windows Server for 12 euro a month is a great bargain.

So, why am I moving the blogs? The main reason is that I'm running out of space on the Virtual Server so I have to upgrade to the "professional" version which costs 30 euro. Still a decent price but paying 360 euro a year just to keep my old blogs alive doesn't make much sense so I have decided to move the blogs to blogger. Hosting a blog on Blogger is free and it offers a lot of features that are not present in .text

The main challenge is to keep the old deep links and images working. I think I have found a way to migrate everything using a combination of Blogger and Google App Engine. If all goes well there will be a series of articles about the move to Blogger and the old articles should show up here during the following weeks. Please let me know if you've already migrated from .text to Blogger and have tips to share.