We got hacked!
The house phone is an Asterisk PBX and our service provider is Sipgate. They informed me last Thursday that our system was compromised, due to some unusual call activity, but no more info than that. So we changed all our passwords for our SIP account. FAIL.
Saturday and Sunday and Monday saw more calls made; Sipgate support don't work weekends and we didn't notice until the call credit low warning hit my inbox on Monday evening. Another email to Sipgate, this time they tell us that our Asterisk PBX is making the calls, and no we can't have the money back. A quick check and lo! I allowed external guest extensions to connect to the PBX, and I didn't restrict the IP addresses of registering devices. DAMN! Ah well, you live and learn.
Fortunately Sipgate charge up front, and we only put £10 on at a time. The bad guys made off with £4-ish of calls, we don't have auto pay setup and we do get an alarm when the credit goes below £5. All told the most we can loose is £10 and this saves us £15 every month (no line rental).
So a quick crash course in securing Asterisk, and a dollop of iptables firewalling for the PBX and we're back up and running.

Three Challenge

Apparently 3/Three don't accept that I own the phone. Worrying; I suspect this is true for all mobile phone companies. Because I don't have the purchase receipt or the details of where it was originally bought, they won't accept that I am the owner. So what?
Well if the original owner phoned them up, read out the IMEI and said the phone had been stolen, they would block the phone. Fortunately they didn't register it, but I can't register it either.
My other motivation is that 3 will unlock the phone for £15.53 (apparently) whereas all the other places want about £24. I shan't be using 3 once the phone is unlocked ...
The system beggars belief to my mind; they sent me a SIM to my postal address, they can see from their network that I am calling from my handset (with the IMEI), you'd think they'd want to encourage people to register. At worst they've got some personal details they can bundle up and sell on (email, phone number address etc.) at best they've got that plus marketing data about the second hand market for their handsets, something they probably need to know about if they want to sell more new handsets.
Hopefully the seller will be forth coming with the store and the date of purchase which can then be used to confirm to three that I actually own the handset now and so it can be registered to me.
(and then promptly unlocked and switch to Giff Gaff :D).

My new year's resolution will be to post more to the blog :D
So, I have bought a new phone and I may have become an early adopter. The phone is the Xperia J (aka st26i), it's locked to three at the moment, and so not in use. I have a free three sim, I've registered it with them and I'm waiting on unlock codes. In the mean time I will be taking it apart and posting photo's.
Three will unlock the handset for a fee (it was originally bought as a pay-as-you-go handset). However you have to register the handset with them. Currently I'm hoping that they will accept paypal as proof of purchase, if not I'm reliant on getting the original purchase receipt from the original owner.
Handset looks good, nice weight, great sound when used with my Nokia Lumia 920 headphones.
Can't wait to get it unlocked so I can use it with my regular network, also looking forward to removing all the Three network branding on the device.

New stylus!

So I picked up a new stylus for my Nexus. It's truly a wonderful thing. I am sooo pleased with it I had to hammer out this short post. A decent stylus & Grafitti is an amazingly fast way to enter text. Truly so much quicker than picking keys from the touch keyboard. Which stylus? This one:

from Amazon.
The tip is sponge, but covered in a knit cover. It glides! & the price is FAB!

Skype rewind on the nexus 7

So we all hate the new Skype with its fixed landscape mode. You want the old version back? Try installing from the Amazon Appstore. But be warned, if Google Play has auto update set, it will re-upgrade you to the latest version.

Furby Care and Resurrection

I recently went shopping with my wife and while in John Lewis we ended up in their toy department. To my surprise Furbies are back and have new features, and having checked out the web (slayer furbies) I went up into the loft to retrieve the original 1998 Furbies that I knew were still up there.
The Furbies had survived, mostly I think because they had developed faults which I hadn't fixed for their original owners (my 2 daughters).
Getting the Furbies going required a bit of sandpaper to refresh the battery terminals for one, and a jumper wire soldering on the other to bridge the broken battery compartment terminal.

Furby Care and resurrection:

1. They don't wake up by themselves, you have to tip them upside down.
2. They don't "learn" anything, it's all pre-programmed 
3. They randomly generate their name and personality upon reset, the reset procedure is to turn them upside down, depress the tongue and hold it depressed and then press the reset stud in the base with a pen. 
4. If they "jam" you can un-jam them using the reset stud on the bottom, this causes the single internal motor to run through a complete motion cycle backwards and forwards.
5. Initial power up - this stumped me, they'd been in the loft for 10 years with no power, the first set of rechargeables I dumped in simple drained immediately without sparking any life, I was testing the Furbies with a test meter which is how I noticed the drop in voltage on the cells. The second set caused a little spark of life, but the Furby wasn't completely responsive until the third freshly charged set went in (they've survived now for 5 days on that set though). I think they must have some capacitative component that maintains a fairly large charge and drains the batteries realy quickly when depleted. In '98 we were fairly strapped for cash, I can't imagine a constant supply of duracel batteries would have been popular on our weekly shopping bill. 
6. Their memory survived ten years! They woke up speaking English and wanting to play a game and be fed, which is presumably where they were up to in their "learning" when they were retired from animation. I reset one of them to test this, still can't work out there names though. 
7. Tickle technique: I skinned one of the Furbies (there are guides on-line to tell you how to do this, use your favourite search engine :D ) because I thought the tickle sensor on the stomach of one of them wasn't working, however I discovered it's a rocker, the switch rotates around a vertical pivot; the easiest tickle technique for me is to hold the furby upright in cupped both hands, and use your thumbs alternately to rock the switch; you can also reach the back sensor with your fingers to "pet" the device using its' back sensor.
8. Clapping slowly can get them to dance (they don't dance as good as the new ones though), they don't seem to respond to music with a fast beat.

That's as far as I've got with them. There are Furbish dictionaries, so you can decode what they're trying to say, putting two together and stimulating them accelerates the "stupid" one to the same level as the "clever one". I've seen them play hide and seek together with no interaction from me, both spooky and interesting.
I had thought I would use them to make an computer controlled animatronic Furby, but I think my girls might want their Furbies back now that they're working and we can afford the batteries :D
I have the makings of an IR sender in the loft from another project, the IR codes that the Furbies use to talk to one another are well documented now, to I may try to make them sneeze via IR for my next post on this topic.

That's all for now!

Haipad revisited.

Slatedroid: namko seems to have a working 3.0 kernel. So the Haipad is on charge, prior to upgrade. :) If OTG is working I will buy some USB temperature probes and see what we can do with them and perhaps even waterproofing the tablet for installation in the green house. Although there are so many cheap android on a stick devices now it's insane, it might be easier to just spend £30 on one of those (many have released kernels on slatedroid).