May 6th, 2012 / No Comments » / by Sean
So a good friend of mine introduced me to a curious problem that I helped him solve. So there are a few bad commercial solutions to automatically search Craigslist for new postings and notify you in some fashion.
- AdRavage works well enough, however the results they email out are often several hours old by the time it sends you the email (at least for the free version).
- Ad Finder Pro which that code is horrible, and badly documented. I tried getting it to run and got various php errors, and the php dependencies are not documented. In the end all I got was a bunch of php errors and no emails. The features leave a lot to be desired, such as no searching by price or by specific category.
So after failing at these various methods I dug into the problem and found a workable solution that is free.
Craigslist has had RSS feeds for a long time, and you can pull an RSS feed of nearly any category or search you can make on Criagslist. Therefore all we need is a RSS feed reader that will notify you of changes to the RSS feed. So after a fairly short time I found RSS2Email which with the proper configuration can be easily used to accomplish this task.
- I will assume you have a Ubuntu system/server setup and running
- Install RSS2Email
sudo apt-get install rss2email
- Copy example rss2email config file
cp /usr/share/doc/rss2email/examples/config.py ~/.rss2email/
- Edit config.py file, change attributes like:
- DEFAULT_FROM
- SMTP_SEND
- {SMTP settings}
- Then run the command to create a new feed database.
r2e new {email address}
- Note you can use your carriers’ email to text function to get these messages on your phone! Only suggested if you have a unlimited texting plan!
- Now you can add a RSS feed URL to be monitored. Note the added quotes around the URL are required the & will throw off the bash command. You can get the RSS url at the bottom right of any category or search results page on Craigslist.
r2e add "{RSS URL}"
- Add the command to your crontab to run the rss2email on a regular basis
crontab -e
- Add the following to your crontab file
*/5 * * * * r2e run
Note the first time this runs on a new feed it will send you a lot of email! You can avoid this by running the following the first time you add a new URL
r2e run --no-send
Have fun, you can add as many RSS urls you want by running the add command from above. Just be careful Craigslist may ban your IP if you hit their servers too often with too many searches. I wouldn’t recommend going below a 5 minute cron interval.
Posted in: OSS, Technology
Tags: criagslist, Linux, Open Source, OSS, r2e, rss2email, ubuntu
May 5th, 2012 / No Comments » / by Sean
So I ran into a fat finger situation and selected the wrong editor to edit crontab with in a fresh Ubuntu install. So run the following command in order to re-run the selection menu.
sudo select-editor
Posted in: OSS
Tags: editor, nano, ubuntu, vi
April 12th, 2012 / No Comments » / by Sean
Found this little guy today.
Posted in: Photos
December 14th, 2011 / No Comments » / by Sean
So there is this rather lengthy install guide to install Sickbeard on Ubuntu. I really don’t get why it is so wordy it doesn’t take 4 pages to explain how to do this fairly short install. If you want the hand holding sure read through the guide but for those who just want to get on with it here is a quick synopsis of what needs to be done.
1. Download sickbeard from here.
2. Make directory for sickbeard files to live.
sudo mkdir /opt/sickbeard/
2. Extract sickbeard to location
sudo tar -C /opt/sickbeard/ -zxvf midgetspy-Sick-Beard-68c5fae.tar.gz
3. Move to your directory
cd /opt/sickbeard
3. Copy upstart script to /etc/init.d/
sudo cp init.ubuntu /etc/init.d/sickbeard
4. Modify your upstart script
sudo nano /etc/init.d/sickbeard
a. Change APP_PATH to:
APP_PATH=/opt/sickbeard
b. Change RUN_AS to:
RUN_AS={your os username}
4. Set permissions to upstart script.
sudo chmod a+x sickbeard
5. Update rc.d
sudo update-rc.d sickbeard defaults
6. Start sickbeard
sudo /etc/init.d/sickbeard start
Posted in: OSS
Tags: install guide, K.I.S.S., Linux, OSS, sickbeard, ubuntu
December 13th, 2011 / 2 Comments » / by Sean
So I’ve had some troubles converting a Ubuntu Server from a physical system to a kvm compatible system. After trying and failing a few methods I found one that worked well.
1. Shut down your system to be cloned.
2. Install a hard drive (SATA/USB etc) to store your disk image of your boot drive.
3. Boot system up with a Ubuntu Desktop Live CD
a. Mount the disk drive to copy your image to.
b. Determine your disks, open Terminal type in…
sudo su -
fdisk -l
Note the location of the drive you wish to clone. Which should be something like /dev/sda
4. Copy your drive using dd. Change the drive location, and filename to your appropriate information.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/usbdisk/sda.img
5. Reboot your machine, remove the Live CD.
6. In your QEMU or KVM virtual host. Copy over the image file from your drive to your storage pool.
7. Create a new virtual machine using existing disk. Select the copied image file, use the ‘raw’ format.
Posted in: OSS
Tags: dd, p2v, raw, ubuntu, virtual, virtualization
December 1st, 2011 / No Comments » / by Sean
A quick something I modified and put together in order to put at the top of all of my crontab files since I almost always have to look it up.
# Crontab Quick Cheatsheat
# * * * * * command to be executed
# ┬ ┬ ┬ ┬ ┬
# │ │ │ │ └──── day of week (0 - 7) (Sunday=0 or 7)
# │ │ │ └──────── month (1 - 12)
# │ │ └──────────── day of month (1 - 31)
# │ └──────────────── hour (0 - 23)
# └──────────────────── min (0 - 59)
Posted in: OSS
Tags: cron, crontab, Linux, OSS, reminders
November 20th, 2011 / No Comments » / by Sean
So a recent xkcd comic reminded me of a current problem I’ve been working through. So I’ve been messing with ZoneMinder off on and on the last couple of weeks trying to get that running again. And I swear I can relate to this problem all to well. I really don’t get why video surveillance has to be so complicated. Especially when it comes to configuring local webcams, when an app like Cheese can pick it up automatically and Zoneminder is such a chore. And in general Zoneminder is definitely an app that was written by a programmer and the UI and configuration is just so bad.
Posted in: OSS, Technology
Tags: Cheese, Linux, OSS, surveillance, webcam, zoneminder
November 11th, 2011 / No Comments » / by Sean
So I’ve recently purchased a IP Power 9258 in order to reset my flaky cable modem (thanks Time Warner for blaming my network gear and nor yours) automatically. So since I’m programatically checking to see if my internet is up (BTW pinging your dyndns address is a great way to check if your internet is up) I needed a way to programatically set the power state of various ports on the IP Power 9258.
setpower
You will need to modify the script to set your own ip username and password. As well as you may need to install Perl Telnet module (“apt-get install libnet-telnet-cisco-perl” on Ubuntu)
Usage:
perl setpower.pl -p 1 -s 0
Where -p option is your port (1,2,3 or 4), and -s option is power state 1 for On, 0 for Off.
Posted in: OSS, Technology
Tags: DynDNS rocks!, IP Power 9258, PDU, Perl, Remote reboot, Terrible Service Providers, Timer Warner Sucks
November 9th, 2011 / No Comments » / by Sean
So I’ve been wanting to track my devices for years since I had a Macbook stolen from me a few years ago. I put together some cron jobs and logged ip information but this only goes so far. I know there are some commercial applications such as LoJack that do such things but I have lots of devices and that would be a bit costly. So when Apple recently updated OS X Lion & iOS 5 to push the ‘Find my iPhone’ functionality to the iCloud this basically is what I wanted for free. As good as the ‘Find my iPhone’ feature works it isn’t historical and is only a simply on-demand feature. This isn’t bad but I wanted more.
So after some searching there is a great API sosumi interface Tyler Hall reverse engineered the ‘Find my iPhone’ app so calls can be made on the fly. Tyler Hall has some great stuff here and includes some good examples but it isn’t quite collecting all the data that is there. So I expanded on his example and am polling all data and device info, and inserting it into a database. This needs to be taken a little further with a web interface front end but for now this is what I have. Read the README and you should be able to get this up and running on your LAMP system.
AppleTracker.tar
Posted in: OSS, Technology
Tags: Apple, Automation, Find my iPhone, PHP, sosumi, Tyler Hall
September 24th, 2011 / No Comments » / by Sean
So I got some junk mail from some relator who apparently made a lot of assumptions about me. 1. That I want to buy or sell a house in the next few months. 2. That I am a Dallas Cowboys fan. 3. That I own a refrigerator that is magnetic. He failed on all counts. So I decided to take his nice magnetic mailer and convert it to something with a little social commentary. And of course having access to vinyl and a vinyl cutter makes this much easier.
So now what to put this now awesome magnet on! There are so many things I like. Maybe a Bus, as I like public transportation, or a police car, or a plane.
Posted in: Blogging
Tags: converted junk, junk mail, spam, vinyl
