For a while now I've wanted a standalone internet radio; something that only required power and had wifi and would then stream audio from my desktop machine. A bit like the Slim Squeezebox but without the need to plug it into a HiFi setup. I'd found the range of devices based on the Reciva Barracuda module, but they all seemed a bit too expensive to impulse buy. Currys are now doing the Logik IR100, which uses this module, for £49.99, at which point I decided it was worth a look.

I'd already done some investigation about the module. It runs Linux, Reciva do the Right Thing and make their code available, and it can have its firmware upgraded. There used to be a wiki of info, but it's disappeared recently. Richard Kalton has a blog of his progress - he's got a shell, but doesn't seem to have found any serial console pinouts and seems to have gained the info required to get a shell (which he doesn't disclose) from reading the flash off the board itself. 'bill888' also has a general Logik IR100 page.

The radio itself seems quite consumer friendly. You plug it in, press the on button and tell it to search for networks. It then shows a list of ESSIDs which you can select from. It'll let you enter a WEP/WPA key if necessary, but I setup an unencrypted wireless network for testing. It then downloads a station list and you can chose what you want to listen to. Seems to do exactly what it says on the box.

It doesn't support Oggs though. And all my music is Ogged. So I want in. As a first approach I'm trying not to take it apart - it doesn't seem like anyone's got serial access, or confirmed JTAG as working, so there doesn't seem to be anything to be gained by opening it up yet. So I decided to watch network traffic, in particular what it does when you ask it to check for new firmware.

The initial request is for:

http://copper.reciva.com/cgi-bin/service-pack.pl?serial=<serialno>;sp=<current service pack>&hw=<hardware id>&sv=<serial firmware>&check=1

This then sends a redirect to:

reciva://copper.reciva.com:6000/service-pack/sp-wrap-cache/sp.255-c-158.tar

Now reciva:// is an encrypted custom protocol it seems, that passes the serial number to the server, which then returns a challenge, which the device then hashes up and generates a session key, passes back to the server and asks for the file. You can see this in lib/rtp.c from the curl tarball on the Reciva GPL site. Unfortunately there are bits missing - several files (rtp_encrypt.h, rtp_encrypt.c, sernum.c) and it appears to want to talk to some sort of sernum daemon. As such I haven't been able to get a copy of the firmware upgrade tarball. :(

However, if I could get one and have a look to see the format (is it a full file system image, or just changed files? Is it relative or absolute paths?) then I think it should be possible to build a new firmware image, hijack the connections to copper.reciva.com on my local network, and redirect to a http:// URL rather than a reciva:// URL, thus avoiding having to do the encryption stuff. Assuming, of course, that the upgrade isn't itself signed or encrypted. More prodding required...

So. In a month's time I become unemployed. Which is something I couldn't have predicted a year ago. This is going to mean a lot of changes for me, most of which I haven't really been able to even start to plan until the news was out in the open. Scary stuff.

I've spent the last week and a bit in Edinburgh, at DebConf7. I found it took me a couple of days to adjust for some reason, but after I'd managed to lose all sense of time everything went much better. I'll probably spend the next week recovering and catching up with real life.

I have to say I don't feel I achieved a whole lot while I was there. When I went to my first DebConf (DebConf4, in Brazil) I spent a lot of time hacking and making progress on things. I didn't manage to do so well in Finland, nor this year. I'm not sure that's entirely what DebConf is about though. I saw a lot of people; the UK crowd who turn up to most things, people I hadn't seen since Finland, and those who I hadn't see since Brazil (and must try harder to see more often). And of course several names I was able to put to faces. This is a really useful part of such events - I find it's much easier to deal with people online once I've met them in real life and have an idea where they're coming from.

Having said I didn't achieve much I did many to leave with a lot of things in my personal todo list. I had the calendar conversation a couple of times again, at greater length, resulting in being told that I should just do it. So I need to think about a proper design. I started looking at Just Writing Code, but the problem is such that I believe a more rigorous approach is required. Another item was ARM hacking; I sat in on the ARM BOF and caught the end of the Emdebian stuff, as well as talking to Wookey and Neil Williams quite a bit about it. Wookey's convinced me that working on mainline Balloon2 support is still useful, even if everyone is more interested in Balloon3. And I thought a bit about starting to do some AM work again, assuming I can find enough time to do a decent job of it.

Mao was sadly lacking; I got a couple of games in, but not the number I'd come to expect from previous DebConfs. I think the trick is to find Marga sooner...

In addition to the travel to Edinburgh we ended up with a daytrip to the Isle of Bute - thanks to Patty Langasek for organising this. We managed not to lose anyone, and had a visit to a public loo from 1898. Post DebConf a bunch of us ended up in Solva for a party to celebrate Daniel and Rob's civil partnership. It was well worth the travelling, and good to see people who hadn't been at DebConf. Finally, on the way back home, we detoured via Stonehenge.

Anyway. Now I'm back home, Katherine's turned up for a bit and hopefully I'll manage to do some of my todo list. See y'all next year in Argentina, assuming I can find the funds.

I have to say “Yes” to the BBC. People say things about redheads they would think twice before saying about any other discriminated group.

Dear Lazyweb,

I am prone to downloading random documents (usually PDFs) from the interweb. Often these have helpful filenames like 30430.pdf. Renaming them helps, but I seem to collect lots of them.

Is there a simple document management system I can import them into that will let me at least categorise things, and then search for titles etc (bonus points if I can actually search the text in the documents, but I can cope if I need to manually enter the info on import)? PDF is the most useful format for me, but I'm sure I'd end up using Word or whatever support too.

apt-cache search dms turns up MyDMS and Owl though both look a little heavy - I only need it for local personal use.