Stream Videos and Music Over the Network With VLC

VLC includes a fairly easy-to-use streaming feature that can stream music and videos over a local network or the Internet. You can tune into the stream using VLC or other media players.

Use VLC’s web interface as a remote control to control the stream from elsewhere. Bear in mind that you may not have the bandwidth to stream high-definition videos over the Internet, though.

Broadcasting a Stream

To start broadcasting a network stream, click the Media menu in VLC and select Stream.

In the Open Media dialog, select the media you want to stream. You can select one or more files on the Files tab, select a CD or DVD on the Disc tab, or even capture video from a specific device on the Capture Device tab. For example, you could stream your desktop by selecting Desktop on the Capture Device tab.

Click the Stream button after selecting your media.

The Stream Output window will appear. The first pane just lists the media source you selected – click Next to continue.

On the Destination Setup pane, you’ll need to choose a destination for your stream. For example, you can select HTTP to listen for connections – other computers can connect to your computer and watch the stream. You can also select UDP to broadcast to a specific IP address or range of IP addresses.

After selecting your destination, click the Add button. You may also want to activate the Display locally check box – if you do, you’ll see and hear the media being streamed on your local computer, so you’ll know it’s playing correctly.

After adding a destination, you’ll be able to customize its settings. With the HTTP destination, you could specify a custom path – but the default one will work fine.

You can also tweak the transcoding settings – by transcoding to a lower quality, VLC can save network bandwidth.

Click Next to continue to the Option Setup pane – you probably don’t need to tweak any of the advanced options here. To start streaming, click the Stream button.

If you selected the Display locally option, the media will start playing locally on your computer.

If you have a firewall enabled, ensure that VLC is an allowed program or no computers will be able to connect. If you’re trying to stream over the Internet, you may also need toforward ports on your router.

Connecting to a Stream

To tune in to a stream, click the Media menu in VLC on another computer and select Open Network Stream.

Assuming you used HTTP, enter an address like http://IP.Address:8080. See this postif you need help finding the other system’s IP address.

(If you specified a custom path for your HTTP stream in the Path box, you’ll need to specify the custom path here. For example, if you specified /path as your custom path, you’d enter http://IP.Address:8080/path in the box here.)

After clicking Play, the stream should start playing. To control playback remotely, trysetting up VLC’s web interface. If you encounter an error, make sure VLC isn’t being blocked by a firewall on the streaming system.

Taken From: http://www.howtogeek.com/118075/how-to-stream-videos-and-music-over-the-network-using-vlc/

Forward Ports on Your Router From a Desktop (UPnP)

UPnP is a convenient way for programs to forward ports without you having to pull up your router’s web interface and forward ports manually. Unfortunately, some programs that require port forwarding don’t support UPnP – that’s where UPnP PortMapper comes in.

This application takes care of port forwarding for you, right from your desktop. If your IP address changes, you don’t need to log into your router and change your port forwarding rules – you can have the application update them for you.

If you visit a friend’s house and join their network, you don’t have to ask for their router’s password to forward ports – just fire up the application and activate your preset rules.

Installation

UPnP Port Mapper is written in Java, so you’ll need the free Java Runtime Environmentinstalled to run it. After installing Java, you can download UPnP Port Mapper from SourceForge. In addition to Windows, this application also works on Mac OS X and Linux.

UPnP Port Mapper communicates with your router with the UPnP protocol, so you’ll also need a router with UPnP enabled to use this application. If UPnP is disabled on your network’s router, this program can’t do anything.

After downloading UPnP Port Mapper, double-click the .jar file to launch it.

Forwarding Ports

To get started, click the Connect button in UPnP Port Mapper. If you see a Windows Firewall pop-up window, click the Unblock button. You may have to allow Java network access in the Windows firewall pop-up that appears.

If UPnP PortMapper informs you that it can’t find your router, click the Connect button again unblocking the application in the Windows firewall.

If it worked, you’ll see a list of UPnP port mappings in the top pane (this list will be empty by default), as well as your router’s external IP address on the Internet and its IP address on your local network.

To create a new port forwarding preset, click the Create button.

Enter a description for your port forwarding rule and provide a list of one or more ports to forward. You can specify port ranges or forward a list of ports using a single preset.

You can also specify a specific remote host. If you enter an IP address, only traffic from that IP address will be forwarded to your computer from your router. For example, you can use this feature to only allow connections from a friend’s IP address on the Internet.

The Use local host box is checked by default, making it easy to forward ports without having to double-check your computer’s local IP address. However, you could also use this application to forward ports to multiple different computers on your network.

Port forwarding presets you specify will appear  in the Port mapping presets box. Select a preset and click the Use button to activate it.

Clicking this button forwards the ports on your router – they’ll appear in the Port mappings box at the top of the window. You can remove port mappings by selecting them and clicking the Remove button.

The port mappings will be saved on your router until its UPnP data is cleared – depending on your router, this may happen when your router is restarted. If you open UPnP Port Mapper later and click the Connect button, you’ll see your active port mappings.

You will also need to reapply port mapping settings if your computer’s local IP address changes.

With your presets, you can quickly and easily apply these port mapping settings on any network with a router that supports UPnP – this can be convenient if you move around and need to forward ports for gaming, servers, or other purposes.

Taken From: http://www.howtogeek.com/122227/how-to-quickly-forward-ports-on-your-router-from-a-desktop-application/

Sync Gmail Calendar with Outlook

There are many tutorials out there but they are all too complicated or/and give you paid, complicated tools to do the job.

The tool on this post is free, and will sit on your tray and won’t bother you, while maintaining your calendar synced. I’m gonna show you the easiest way to do it.

Google Calendar Sync

Download page: http://www.google.com/support/cal..wer=89955
(Direct link to download)

Installation

1. Read through the Google Calendar Sync Terms of Service, and click I Agree.

2. Follow through the Installation Options and click Install to finish the set-up process.

3. Once Google Calendar Sync is installed on your computer, the Google Calendar Sync Settings window will appear:

Just enter your email/password and click Save. If you don’t want to sync back to Google Calendar choose “1 way: Google Calendar to Microsoft Outlook”

You are now syncing Google Calendar with Outlook!

This is very helpfull, specialy if you have an android phone, since it automatically syncs with gmail calendar. Now I have my Outlook calendar on my phone.

Based On: http://knokio.com/guide/sync-gmail-contacts-and-google-calendar-with-outlook/#.UC1YSt1lSbN

Windows 8 Portable USB Drive (No Extra Tools)

For a long time Linux users have been able to install their OS onto a portable USB drive, but Windows just caught up. Read on to find out how you can install Windows 8 onto a USB drive so you can take it wherever you go.

Note: This was written on the RTM version of Windows 8 Enterprise and you will need to have an RTM build of the Enterprise edition to complete the steps in this article.

Using Windows To Go to Create a Portable Workspace

Press the Win + X keyboard combination and select Control Panel from the context menu.

You will need to change your Control Panel view to the Small Icons view.

You should now see Windows To Go near the bottom of the Control Panel, click on it.

You will now need to select the USB drive you would like to turn into a portable workspace, then click next.

The wizard will automatically scan your CD\DVD and Removable drives for valid Windows installation files, once you have selected a version of Windows click next.

Note: If you store your installation files elsewhere you will need to add it as a search location.

You can optionally set a BitLocker password, but we’ll pass on this option for now.

Once you have reached the end of the wizard, you will be warned that your USB drive will be formatted. You can then click on create to kick of the creation process.

That’s all there is to it, you now have a bootable USB with Windows on it.

Note: Your portable USB will not show up in Explorer, this leaves us with a problem later on when you don’t need to use it as a Portable Workspace anymore.

How To Reformat Your Windows To Go USB Drive

If you’re done using Windows on a drive, you can reformat the drive, but you’ll need to open a command prompt and type diskpart, then press enter.

Once you enter Diskpart you will need to find out which drive is the one you need to format, the list disk command will show you all the drive currently connected to your system. Take note of your drive number because we will need it in the next step.

We now need to select the disk, you can simply use the select disk command along with your drive number from the previous step.

Now that the disk is selected we can go ahead and wipe it.

Note: Clean is a ruthless command that will wipe all the file systems off your drive without any warnings, if you have selected the wrong drive previously this will result is a loss of data so make sure you have the right drive selected.

We can now use the Win + R keyboard combination to bring up the run box  and open Disk Management.

As soon as the Management console opens you will need to initialize the disk.

Then you can go ahead and create your drives partition.

That’s all there is to it.

Taken From: http://www.howtogeek.com/121322/how-to-create-a-portable-version-of-windows-8-without-extra-software/

Cisco IOS on Unix/Linux - IOU (Full)

Moved here: http://myhowtosandprojects.blogspot.pt/2013/08/installing-and-running-iou-checking_10.html

How to Get Free Cisco Books (Routers and Switches)

Recently I had a problem with a cisco 2960 switch, to solve it I needed to do a password recovery, so I tried the Ctlr + Break/Pause procedure that I had learned on the CCNA classes, and it didn’t work, so I went online serching for more information an found the following a online book (webpage):

“Catalyst 2960 and 2960-S Switch Software Configuration Guide”

This book has all the cisco 2960 possible commands and configurations for a particular IOS version, and you can download it freely in PDF.

In this book I found that for this particular equipment the recovery was done in a diferent way.

So I went on google and tried searching for other equipments:

Google: Cisco xxxx Software Configuration Guide

and found the same type off manual.

These manuals are a great source of information, in these you can see what the equipment can do, and how to do it, this is especially important if it’s done in a different way from the other equipments.

I highly recommend that you get these for every cisco equipment/IOS that you work with.

WiFi for Arduino via dd-wrt Router (Serial/TCP/USB)

I love Arduino but its lack of wireless bugs me. And it sucks that WiFi Shields for the Arduino cost as much a cell phone. I want something cheap. Turns out, small, cheap WiFi routers like the Asus WL-520gu can run theDD-WRT Linux firmware and act as serial-to-network gateway for Arduinos (or most any other USB device). Here’s how to do it.

(Hey, is this a Wifi-controlled BlinkM? I think it is.)

A quick video showing a router acting as a serial-to-network gateway:

This is not that new of a concept, hacking Linux onto a router for some neat DIY purpose. One of my favorite past hacks is MightyOhm’s WiFi Radio project. And of course, see my own book Hacking Roomba for an example of how to put a Roomba on the Net.

This post is specifically about trying to make a DD-WRT router a transparent gateway for an Arduino.

The steps are:

1. Install DD-WRT Firmware
2. Configure Router to be WiFi Client
3. Do Some Tests
4. Install USB Serial Drivers
5. Install Serial-to-Network Proxy

1. Install DD-WRT Firmware

To get it working, you need to install two firmware files. The first is to convert from standard Asus firmware to a standard DD-WRT, then the second adds in additional features.

Follow the steps in the “New Wiki Install Material” section on DD-WRT’s wiki on the Asus WL-520gu. It seems scary at first, but stick with it. (And for more than you ever wanted to know about Asus and TFTP, see Asus_TFTP_Flash.)

Below is an abbreviated and summarized version of the full instructions.

1a. Download firmwards and needed tools

Download the “trx” firmware to your computer. (“trx” files are what Asus routers need when updating via TFTP) It is called: dd-wrt.v24-12548_NEWD_mini_asus.trx.

Also, download the second “bin” firmware to your computer. (“bin” firmware files are what DD-WRT uses. It is called: dd-wrt.v24_usb_generic.bin

1b. Install 1st firmware (“.trx”)

Connect your router to your computer via an Ethernet cable, set your computer to have the IP address 192.168.1.7.

Do the mentioned “30-30-30″ reset to the router, then send the “trx” firmware file with tftp. On Mac OS X (and Linux), do this by opening up a terminal window and typing:
% tftp 192.168.1.1
tftp> mode binary
tftp> put dd-wrt.v24-12548_NEWD_mini_asus.trx
tftp> quit

Then wait for five minutes (seriously). Power cycle the router and its web interface should be available. It will ask you for a admin username and password, be sure to fill this out.

1c. Install 2nd firmware (“.bin”)

This is a pretty standard firmware upgrade process. Just follow the instructions in the DD-WRT page above and you should end up with a router that’s ready to go.

2. Configure Router to be WiFi Client

With the router running a good basic DD-WRT firmware, it now needs to be modified to act like a wireless client, instead of an access point, enable things like SSH server for command-line access, and enable USB.

After each step below, reboot the router.

2a. Enable wireless client mode

Go to the “Wireless/Basic Settings page, and set the router to be a wireless client on your network. If you have WEP/WPA, you’ll need to go to the Wireless/Wireless Security page to set that up. And if you want your Arduino to have a static IP address instead of a DHCP-obtained one, head over to Setup/Basic Setupand change “Connection Type” to “Static IP”; you’ll be presented with a set of form fields to input the IP address.

Note that at the end of this, your router will have two IP addresses: one being the “management” IP address of 192.168.1.1 you’re currently using to configure the router and only available via a “LAN” Ethernet port, and the other being the DHCP or static-assigned IP address on your network. The router considers this the WAN IP address. (even though this router is not going to be acting like a router in the normal sense)

DD-WRT “Wireless/Basic Settings page

2b. Enable useful management options

In the Services/Services page, in the “Secure Shell” section, enable SSH so you can log into it and copy files to it.

DD-WRT Services/Services page

In the Administration/Management page, in the “Remote Access” section, enable Web and SSH access from the WAN port (and the IP address the router gets from your WiFi), and in the “JFFS2 Support” tab enable JFFS2 so you have some flash memory you can write to.

DD-WRT Administration/Management page

Go to the Security/Firewall page, and turn off the firewall. This doesn’t need to be a super secure thing (at least not to start). And it causes lots of problems that are hard to diagnose.

DD-WRT Security/Firewall page

2c. Enable USB

Go to the Services/USB page and enable the USB kernel drivers. The firmware doesn’t come with USB-to-serial drivers needed for Arduino, we’ll do those later.

DD-WRT Services/USB page

3. Do Some Tests

At this point, on reboot your router should join your WiFi network, grab an IP address from your network’s DHCP server, and have two IP addresses. The first, is the “LAN” admin IP address of 192.168.1.1. This only works when you have an Ethernet cable plugged into one of the LAN ports. The other address is the “WAN” address that’s obtained over WIFi from your network.

3a. Find the WAN IP of your Router

Because of the various settings above, the admin page and ssh server is available on both IPs. If you go to the Status/Sys-Info page (using the admin IP address and an Ethernet cable), you can see what the WAN IP address is, like below. On my network, the Asus got an IP of 192.168.42.138.

DD-WRT Status/Sys-Info page

3b. Test out SSH login

You should also log into the router now. The username is “root”, not the admin username you chose when first setting up the router. The password however is the password you chose during first setup. Open up a terminal window and ssh in.

DD-WRT is a real Linux, but with a reduced command set. Many useful commands are there though, like “ping”, “wget”, “lsmod”, “df”, etc.

4. Install USB Serial Drivers

Now that you have a working system, time to put on the USB serial drivers. There isn’t a very good way of doing this on such a memory-constrained router like the WL-520gu (the routers with more built-in flash can properly use the “ipkg” package management system to get these drivers). But here’s one way:

4a. Find USB Serial Drivers

This USB kernel modules post on the dd-wrt.com forums has a zip file called “fs_and_usb_modules_2_4_37.tar.gz ” containing the three files we need to talk to an Arduino. You can download that driver bundle yourself and pull out the files needed.

Or you can grab them from here:
- fs_and_usb_modules_2_4_37/usb/serial/usbserial.o
- fs_and_usb_modules_2_4_37/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.o
- fs_and_usb_modules_2_4_37/usb/acm.o
The last one is what you use if you’re using an Arduino Uno. The other two are what you’re using for any other kind of Arduino.

4b. Put Drivers in Router’s flash space

The “JFFS2″ feature lets us use part of the flash memory as a disk. We’ll put the drivers there. So ssh into the router, cd over to the jffs partition and pull down the drivers.
% ssh root@192.168.1.1
# cd /jffs
# mkdir kmods
# cd kmods
# wget http://todbot.com/asus_wl520gu/fs_and_usb_modules_
2_4_37/usb/serial/usbserial.o
# wget http://todbot.com/asus_wl520gu/fs_and_usb_modules_
2_4_37/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.o
# wget http://todbot.com/asus_wl520gu/fs_and_usb_modules_
2_4_37/usb/acm.o

4c. Load drivers and set to startup automatically

Back in the DD-WRT web interface, go to the Adminstration/Commands page and copy the below into the Commands window:
insmod /jffs/kmods/usbserial.o
insmod /jffs/kmods/ftdi_sio.o
insmod /jffs/kmods/acm.o
Click “Run Commands” to run the commands immediately. Click “Save Startup” to make these commands run on reboot. You could have also typed those commands on the command-line.

On the ssh command-line, you can type “lsmod” to see if the drivers have loaded.

If you have an Arduino or FTDI cable plugged into the USB port on reboot, you can also type “dmesg” to see if the Arduino is detected. In dmesg you should see:
usb.c: registered new driver serial
usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for Generic
usbserial.c: USB Serial Driver core v1.4
usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for FTDI SIO
usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for FTDI 8U232AM Compatible
usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for FTDI FT232BM Compatible
usbserial.c: FTDI FT232BM Compatible converter detected
usbserial.c: FTDI FT232BM Compatible converter now attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tts/0 for devfs)

5. Install Serial-to-Network Proxy

Now that you have the Arduino showing up as a serial device to the router, you can use any unix tool that can talk to serial devices to control the Arduino. Or you could write your own. While this router probably doesn’t have enough memory for PHP or Perl, you could write a compiled program in C/C++. You’ll need to install the cross-compile tools, which isn’t exactly trivial unfortunately. You can find some tips at the DD-WRT Wiki on Development, this post and this post on the dd-wrt.com forums, and this OpenWrt wiki page on the SDK.

But perhaps one of the most useful is a “serial proxy”. This is a familiar concept in the Arduino world. A serial proxy is a small program that essentially turns a serial port into a TCP port. There is a good small command-line one called “ser2net” that comes with Ubuntu.

I didn’t want to get the full WRT SDK cross-compiling up and running to port ser2net to DD-WRT and thankfully I didn’t have to. Andrew Hazelden has done the hard work and posted the results in a post about how to use serial ports on the Linksys WRT54GS (a very similar router).

You can read his post for more details and more code. I’ve stuck the single file needed for us here:
- ser2net_2.3-1_mipsel.ipk

5a. Download and Install ser2net

SSH into the router again and do the following:
% ssh root@192.168.1.1
# cd /jffs
# wget http://todbot.com/asus_wl520gu/ser2net_2.3-1_mipsel.ipk
# ipkg install ser2net_2.3-1_mipsel.ipk
# rm ser2net_2.3-1_mipsel.ipk
This will install ser2net in /jffs/usr/sbin/ser2net .

5b. Test ser2net

Time to do some tests. Get your Arduino, load up a sketch on it that reads and writes to the serial port (I like bitlash, a command interpreter for Arduino), and plug the Arduino into the router.

Then on the command-line, type:
# ser2net -C "3001:raw:600:/dev/usb/tts/0:57600 NONE 1STOPBIT 8DATABITS -XONXOFF -LOCAL -RTSCTS"

This runs ser2net with the settings of:
- “3001″ is the TCP port you will connect to,
- “/dev/usb/tts/0″ is serial port (will be “/dev/usb/acm/0″ for Arduino Uno),
- “57600″ is the baud rate

On another computer, open up a network terminal program like the command-line “telnet”:
% telnet 192.168.1.1 3001
You should be able to communicate with your Arduino as if you were using the Arduino Serial Monitor.

5c. Put ser2net in startup script

Once you figure out the ser2net config that works for your setup, you can have that run on startup by editing the startup command. Go back into the DD-WRT web gui and go to Administration/Commands. Edit the Startup script and add your ser2net command line to it. When you click “Save Startup” the result will be something like this:

DD-WRT Administration/Commands page

Done!

Now you can unplug your Arduino, load up any sketch to it, and then control it from where ever you can ping that router. You can even have the Arduino pull data out from the Net by having a different kind of serial-to-network proxy that is Arduino-facing, instead of Net-facing.

This should also work for other dd-wrt routers that have a USB port.

Taken From: http://todbot.com/blog/2010/12/16/wifi-for-arduino-with-asus-wl-520gu/comment-page-1/