Firefox Console XPath Query

To find a page element using an xpath from the Firefox (Firebug) console, use:

$x("//your/path/here")

Windows 7 Custom Text Size

To set a Custom text size in Windows 7, open Control Panel -> Display -> Set custom text size (DPI), and drag the scale.

CT30 Thermostat Wifi Setup

This was harder than it should be. The process that finally worked was something like this:

- Disable cellular data on iPhone
- Forget wireless network on iPhone
- Press the Menu button on thermostat, press Mate twice, ensure yellow light is flashing
- Connect to thermostat wifi network on iPhone
- Go to http://192.168.10.1/ in browser on iPhone
- Follow the 5 steps and enter requested details: wifi network, wifi password, provisioning code
- If you're lucky, the thermostat chirps and then green light flashes

It seemed like the iPhone had trouble staying on the thermostats network and the provisioning process kept timing out.

I had a lot of trouble getting the browser to connect, for more details, see this FAQ:

Convert Tokenized BBC Basic to Plain Text

Use the BBCBasicToText python script from https://github.com/tom-seddon/beeb

For example, to convert a directory of files:

for file in `ls $dir`
do
 txt=`echo $file | sed 's/,ffb/.txt/g' `
 if [[ $txt == *".txt"* ]]; then
  echo $txt
  python BBCBasicToText.py $dir/$file > out/$txt
 fi
done

Raspberry Pi Streaming Webcam with Motion

To setup a streaming webcam:

sudo apt-get install motion

sudo vi /etc/motion/motion.conf  # to enable web access

sudo vi /etc/default/motion      # to enable the daemon to start

sudo service motion start

For motion configuration options, see: ConfigFileOptions

You might also need to add this to your /etc/rc.local file to enable to pi camera on boot:

sudo modprobe bcm2835-v4l2

And if you want to turn the camera led off, add the following to the /boot/config.txt file:

disable_camera_led=1

Install Python MySQL Connector on Debian

Download the "Platform Independent" version from MySQL and follow the instructions here.

Check the version:

user@host ~ $ python
Python 2.7.3 (default, Mar 18 2014, 05:13:23)
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import mysql.connector
>>> mysql.connector.__version__
'2.0.2'

Using apt-get to update packages

Get the latest package lists:

$apt-get update

Check the versions:

$ apt-cache policy bash
bash:
  Installed: 4.2+dfsg-0.1
  Candidate: 4.2+dfsg-0.1+deb7u3
  Version table:
     4.2+dfsg-0.1+deb7u3 0
        500 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ wheezy/main armhf Packages
 *** 4.2+dfsg-0.1 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
$ 

Install the update:

$ sudo apt-get install bash
...
The following packages will be upgraded:
  bash
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 206 not upgraded.
Need to get 1,443 kB of archives.
...
$