General Stuff(tm)

[stephen_usher]

Well, it's got to Swindon now... but for some reason they tried a local delivery office rather than the Swindon sorting office. The solder may get to Oxford tomorrow.. or it may go up to Edinburgh, who knows?! :-)

Anyway, this evening I got vbit2 installed on the Pi400 so as to download and update the recreated "CEEFAX" pages, which include up to date news, weather etc. scraped from the BBC web site. Then, using these pages I used the TCL program which runs the Teefax service to create my own local viewdata/teletext service. I thin added a config to the Asterisk softmodem to a virtual phone line, which I can then connect to via V23 modems...

IMG_3938.jpeg

Preparations for Cyber Legends continuing...

P.S. Still no sign of either SMARTY Mobile SIMs.

[stephen_usher]

And I wasn't far off the solder's tour of the country... Instead of going from the Swindon distribution office back to the Swindon sorting office, and then to the Oxford distribution office it's now gone up to the Midlands Super Hub!

[stephen_usher]

Tonight was consolidation of the progress last night with the Teletext server.

Re-wrote the start-up script for Asterisk so that it works under Debian rather than Mageia Linux. The PBX now starts at boot. I also changed the setting on the media box to point to the Pi400 rather than my main server.

Set up cron jobs to (a) download updates to the pages once every half an hour and, (b) a script to start the Teletext to Viewdata server to which the Asterisk PBX softmodem can connect.

Finally, did a full test by rebooting the machine and looking to see that everything came up correctly and I could then dial in and see the content on the ICL One Per Desk.

[PhilC]

That looks great Stephen, just a shame I won't be able to see it.

[stephen_usher]

That looks great Stephen, just a shame I won't be able to see it.

If you visit Cambridge on the 9th/10th November you'll be able to see the completed display.

[PhilC]

That looks great Stephen, just a shame I won't be able to see it.

If you visit Cambridge on the 9th/10th November you'll be able to see the completed display.

Good idea, will see if I feel up to it

[stephen_usher]

Good idea, will see if I feel up to it

:dualthumbup:

[stephen_usher]

The solder has finally arrived.

[stephen_usher]

And so the story of the SMARTY Mobile SIM continues...

It's been two and a half weeks since I paid for a 20GB month long data SIM and two attempts at getting the SIM "1st class mail".

Given that I've not had a postal delivery at home for a month now I'm expecting that one day there will be a huge delivery, but not today.

So, I contacted SMARTY via their chat, the only way. The person I eventually landed with was helpful as far as he could be. I asked him if there was a way of getting a SIM without it coming by post and he told me that they were available in places like Argos. When I asked if such a SIM was able to be connected to my original 20GB account there was silence for half an hour so I went on-line and bought one for £1 click and collect and then left to collect it.

When I got home I connected to the SMARTY portal and attempted to register the SIM... no go. It said that it wasn't the SIM allocated to the account. On the chat there was a message from the help person asking if I was still there from about an hour after he'd gone quiet. Anyway, I then asked if there was a way to connect the new SIM to the account. After a number of times of him going away and checking, he told me that because my account was still in "dispatched mode" all he could do was order another SIM to be posted out. I said OK, but it was likely that this one would get lost too.

Anyway, I need this SIM operational for Cyber Legends so created a new address on my server with which to register the SIM I'd bought this morning and put £5 (2GB) on it. That at least worked.

I have now got the Pi, 4G router, Medatrix gateway and OPD all talking to each other. With the Pi serving the "Ceefax" pages from a local cache which is merely updated every half an hour it's only using around 8MB an hour so the 2GB will be plenty.

[stephen_usher]

This evening I did some maintenance on Euclid, the Sun Ultra 10 running the "Bullet" bulletin board.

Imaged the 9GB IDE hard drive, which had one bad block, and transferred the contents onto an CF card and put that into the machine. Also serviced the front fan so it turns again. I'm going to replace it with a Noctua as it's rather noisy.

On the Noctua front, I also replaced the fan in the Mediatrix VoIP gateway device. No more screaming fan, so I'll be able to keep it running once it returns to the rack after the exhibitions.