Steves Computer Vision Blog: February 2013

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Circumventing 6 Strikes Rule with Transmission

Here are some easy steps to help circumvent the new "Six Strikes Rule" the ISPs have put in to place (I don't know if I would go as far as calling it the Six Strikes Law since it's just a company agreement).

If you really want to get crazy about it, use TOR or set up an SSL server somewhere using something like Amazon Web Services.

In the mean time, here are some simple little things you can do to try to prevent your ISP spying on your files and prevent those letters from coming in. We will do this two ways, once using the web client and once with the command line

Note: I would also recommend using VPN or a proxy but we won't go into that.
And if you are on a college network, you should definitely consider enabling LPD.

Editing Transmission Options Using the Web App

Go to the appropriate transmission web page. If you don't know this. See below:

http://stevenhickson.blogspot.com/2012/10/using-raspberry-pi-as-web-server-media.html

Click the wrench to open up the options. Then change require encryption to true and click enable blocklist. You can pick whichever blocklist you want but I use the following blocklist:
http://iblocklist.charlieprice.org/f/tagqfxtteucbuldhezkz/bt_level1.gz

Simply paste that in the box as shown below and you are ready to go.

Editing Transmission Options Using the Command Line

Open up your terminal and stop transmission by typing:

sudo service transmission-daemon stop

then edit the settings file by typing:

sudo nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

Change the following settings:

"blocklist-enabled": true,
"blocklist-url": "http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_level1&fileformat=p2p&archiveformat=gz",
"encryption": 2,

Then simply start transmission again with the command:

sudo service transmission-daemon start

To automatically download things and use your transmission to your fullest potential, see this page.

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Thursday, February 21, 2013

Updating your Raspberry Pi: Packages, Kernel, and Firmware. (Also, fixing omxplayer problems)

**Note, this is for Raspbian and other Debian based distros**

Also, this tends to fix Omxplayer when it won't work

I've found that almost all of the omxplayer problems are solved by properly updating your raspberry pi. Before you say "I already did that!", read below to make sure you have taken all of the steps since the kernel and the firmware require different commands.

Updating Packages

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

This updates the package list and upgrades all the packages. You can use the -y flag if you hate typing yes. After the kernel and all packages are upgraded, this command should show you:
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded

Updating the Kernel

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

This upgrades your linux kernel distribution. These are regularly released. You can see which version you have by running:
uname -a

Right now I have "Linux raspberrypi 3.6.11+"

Updating the Firmware

sudo rpi-update

This upgrades the firmware as long as you have the Hexxeh script downloaded. It and instructions can be found here:
https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update

If you are having issues with video, make sure your memory split is set appropriately. I uses 128/128.
You can set this by editing /boot/config.txt and adding the line gpu_mem=128

If something is wrong, especially with omxplayer, make sure your packages, firmware, and kernel are all up to date. When they are, your problems will most likely be fixed.

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