Phantom power begone!

My old 2007-era Samsung HL-S5679W TV has worked pretty well, except for the fact that it consumes 20 watts of power when it's "off".

At the time, I wished someone would make a simple USB-controlled power switch, but I was too lazy to build it myself. Finally, 4 years later, something's available:

The USB Net Power 8800. It costs around $30 from various sellers.

The software it comes with is crap, and it only runs on Windows. So I started up Windows XP in VMWare Player, and used the Linux usbmon facility to snoop the traffic.

I was able to figure out the USB control transfer messages needed to get/set the power state, and wrote this Python script to control it from the command line.

Finally, I connected the box to my TV, and set up an LIRC irexec config to run the script in toggle mode when I press "Power" on my remote. Now, I can still control my TV from the couch, but there's no power consumption in "off" mode (well, except for the server that's sending the USB commands, but I leave that running regardless.)

Theoretically, the box should pay for itself in under 2 years, since each watt costs about $1/year.

My main gripe with the 8800 is that it requires an active USB connection to keep the power relay turned on. So, there's no way to run the attached device while your computer's off.

IPv6 on Verizon LTE

I took this photo of one of the LTE demo netbooks in a Verizon store.  It looks like they're actually providing IPv6 access to customers now.

The IPv6 address of this machine was 2600:1010:b003:8a10:a04c:f03b:d53a:c3f9, connected through AS22394.

It was locked down in some sort of kiosk mode, so I couldn't run any traceroutes or anything.

USB Infrared Receiver

I was bored on Sunday, so I ordered an HP 5070-2584 USB Infrared receiver for $12.95 on eBay, just to see what it was capable of. Its USB device ID is 0471:060c. The box itself is nice and compact, and the cable is 2.3 meters long.

I was able to get it working right away with LIRC and the "mceusb" driver. My initial concern was that it might only be compatible with Windows Media Center remotes, but that thankfully turned out not to be the case.

Using LIRC's "irrecord" utility, I've been able to create keymaps for my Samsung TV, my FusionHDTV5 remote, and even the 6-button remote that came with my air conditioner.

I had previously been using my FusionHDTV5's IR dongle to control MythTV, but:

• It only supports one IR protocol (RC-5, I think)
• Instead of using LIRC, it shows up as a keyboard, so I need to patch my kernel to change the keymap.
• It's got an annoying bug where the I2C bus freezes up, and I need to completely power off the computer to get it working again.

Anyway, this new receiver looks like it will be much more flexible. I assume that all of the mceusb-compatible receivers have similar capabilities, but I haven't tested any others.

First Post!

I figured I should set up some sort of a blog, because my other sites haven't had an update in years, and the Internet could use some proof that I do, in fact, still exist. Maybe I'll actually get around to writing more stuff here someday.