Controlling HS110 smart plug with Amazon Echo

I recently purchased a TP-Link HS110 smart plug wanting to get it to work with the Amazon Echo Dot I got for Christmas. 

Alexa can find some smart devices "out of the box" but was unable to detect this model of smart plug.  TP-Link has a web service that you can sign up for but I don't really want to sign up for any third party services because I don't trust them to have hooks in my home network.

I did find a script to control the TP-Link plug here.  I believe it works with both the HS100 and HS110 models.  This allowed me to control the plug easily from any of my linux machines using only a shell script and a few command line tools that are usually already available on linux.

I also found this python script that acts like one or more WeMo devices.  If you run this script on the same network as your Amazon Echo, it will find the fake devices you configure and allow you to send on/off commands to the script.

So with a little scipt-fu I modified the the python script to invoke the shell script to control the smart plug and bingo!  Now I can ask Alexa to turn the plug on or off and she dutifully complies.

Raspberry Pi WiFi

I have jumped on the raspberry pi bandwagon.  So far I have not done anything else that thousands of other geeks haven't done.  I did want to post what I had to do to get my wireless working.  I am using a usb wifi adapter with a Realtek RTL8188 chip.  The adapter was recognized, but for some reason wlan0 did not show up in the wireless configuration ui tool.  I had to add this to /etc/network/interfaces:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "mynetwork"
wpa-psk "mypassword"

Of course you would need to replace mynetwork and mypassword with whatever is appropriate for your network, but put them in double quotes.

Next I need to figure out how to make it output video to HDMI.

Acer Iconia Tab A100 Mini Review

I recently purchased a refurbished Acer Iconia Tab A100.  It came with Android 3.X and I immediately upgraded it (which took about 5 or 6 rounds of software updates) to Ice Cream Sandwich.  I have been using it almost every day for about a month now for light reading, listening to music, and playing games.

The Good
* Nice screen
* Feels solid, not cheap
* No software glitches so far
* Fast enough (it's not the fastest tablet I have tried, but slowdowns are rare)
* External Micro SD slot (for up to an extra 32GB)
* Ice Cream Sandwich

The Bad
* Doesn't charge over USB
* File Transfer

I haven't found a really easy way to do file transfers yet.  It does not support USB mass storage mode as previous version of Android did. It is also not as simple as it could be because I am using Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) and my first attempt at installing the necessary stuff for MTP did not work.

I don't have anything really bad to say.  The battery life has been okay for me, but it might not be good enough for heavy users.

Bottom Line - for only $130 plus shipping you get a lot of bang for your buck!  I bought mine from 1saleaday.com.  The only bad thing about buying it from them was that it was about a month between the time I ordered it and the time it arrived on my doorstep.

Motorola Atrix2 Review

Here are my early impressions of the Motorola Atrix2 I bought my wife for Christmas.

• 1. Price - Free (with upgrade/new account) Thanks Radio Shack!
• 2. Fast - everything is fast with virtually no lag ever
• 3. Pretty - the screen looks fantastic
• 4. Big - the large screen is nice for web surfing, but it is definitely not as pocketable as I would like.
• 5. Crapware - it comes with it - but you can uninstall most or all of it!
• 6. Android - comes with version 2.3 - I am holding out hope that it will get an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich.
• 7. Battery - good enough - at least as good as other smart phones I have tried.

More Video Rotation

I also got some video from a relative that was shot in portrait mode on an iphone so when trying to view it on a computer it was sideways. To rotate it I used Avidemux on Linux. Here are the steps I used to convert it:

• Open the file
• Choose MPEG-4 AVC (x264) for the video codec
• Click Filters
• Find rotate in the list and double click it
• Choose whatever rotation you need (for me it was 90 degrees)
• Click Close button
• Click Save
• Choose filename to save converted video
• Done

I believe it will not apply any filters if you try 'Copy' as the video codec - but you should be able to choose other video codecs if x264 is not what you want.

Hope this helps!