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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for April 12th, 2017

NeonHorizon/lipopi: Guide to setting up LiPo batteries on the Raspberry Pi

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/12

Interesting hardware project: NeonHorizon/lipopi: Guide to setting up LiPo batteries on the Raspberry Pi

Pictures: Daniel Bull – Google+

Basically it’s a mini-UPS that works for any Raspberry Pi, but for a model 3 you have to add a tiny capacitor.

From the readme:

  • Description: LiPoPi is a guide to setting up the Raspberry Pi with a LiPo battery including both running and charging it
  • Project Website: GitHub
  • Requirements: A Raspberry Pi (any model – see notes about the Raspbery Pi 3) and an Adafruit PowerBoost 500 Charger or 1000C Charger
  • Skillset: Requires soldering skills and a basic knowledge of the command line
  • License: GPL Version 3

–jeroen

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Posted in Development, Hardware Development, Raspberry Pi | Leave a Comment »

Hosting Grumpydev Imageflair locally – part 2 – trying to get the text and images to display

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/12

Blank imageFlair

Blank imageFlair

Hosting Grumpydev Imageflair locally ended with two issues left: an empty image and my wish to include more complete StackExchange bits like the current StackExchange flair does.

I thought fixing the empty image would take a rainy day. It actually took a few rainy hours.

No text

The culprit is that I didn’t have the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web installed. Which was no coincidence as the free download of those from Microsoft terminated in 2002. The upside is that because of their licenses, they are available as open source and most linux distributions have a script package that will download these fonts. OpenSuSE has fetchmsttfonts for this.

Alternatively, you can use the web.archive.org to download manually, but that’s a tad tedious. But if you love tedious: Free downloads – TrueType core fonts for the Web.

zypper install fetchmsttfonts

That installs the fonts in:

/usr/share/fonts/truetype

The drawback of having fetchmsttfonts is that the original Microsoft versions of these fonts are downloaded from corefonts.sourceforge.net each time the fetchmsttfonts package is updated, potentially overwriting newer versions of the fonts in that directory. If you don’t want that, use the trick at  (not yet archived at the WayBack machine) font handling – install fetchmsttfonts, copy fonts, rpm -e fethmsttfonts, copy fonts back.

Having the fonts installed, I thought the only thing I needed to fix were the multiple references in config.php from that pointed to Arial.TTF. I took the poor man’s approach and just did this being in the directory of config.php:

cp /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arial.ttf Arial.TTF

Filled Imageflair

That didn’t work either: still no text showed.

So I decided to run imageFlair.php from the command line after setting $imageflair_debug = true; in config.php which then resulted in all sorts of warnings like

PHP Warning: imagettftext(): Could not find/open font

After reading I decided to build a small php-gd.tester.php script containing phpinfo(); and gd_info showing these portions for PHP GD (non-relevant bits stripped):

Additional .ini files parsed /etc/php5/conf.d/ctype.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/dom.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/gd.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/iconv.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/json.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/mysql.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/mysqli.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/pdo.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/pdo_mysql.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/pdo_sqlite.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/sqlite3.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/tokenizer.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/xmlreader.ini,
/etc/php5/conf.d/xmlwriter.ini

gd

GD Support enabled
GD headers Version 2.1.1
GD library Version 2.1.1
FreeType Support enabled
FreeType Linkage with freetype
FreeType Version 2.6.3
GIF Read Support enabled
GIF Create Support enabled
JPEG Support enabled
libJPEG Version 8
PNG Support enabled
libPNG Version 1.6.21
WBMP Support enabled
XPM Support enabled
libXpm Version 30411
XBM Support enabled
WebP Support enabled

And the gd_info dump:


<?php
echo "<h1>gd_info</h1>";
$gdInfo = gd_info();
echo "<table>";
foreach($gdInfo as $key=>$value) {
echo "<tbody>";
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td class='e'>" . $key . "</td>";
echo "<td class='v'>" . $value . "</td>";
echo "</tbody>";
}
echo "</table>";
?>

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php-convert-gd_info-to-html.html

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GD Version 2.1.1
FreeType Support 1
FreeType Linkage with freetype
T1Lib Support
GIF Read Support 1
GIF Create Support 1
JPEG Support 1
PNG Support 1
WBMP Support 1
XPM Support 1
XBM Support 1
WebP Support 1
JIS-mapped Japanese Font Support

Too bad though: no information on where it sources the fonts from.

No image

Having no solution for the font rendering yet, I focussed at the lack of profile picture.

In the past, the images were generated with gravatar information in the JSON, but now that is empty. See for instance the output of http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.json versus his image http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.png


{
"id": 1,
"gravatarHtml": {
},
"profileUrl": "http:\/\/superuser.com\/users\/1\/jeff-atwood",
"displayName": "Jeff Atwood",
"reputation": "14,561",
"badgeHtml": "<span title=\"24 gold badges\"><span class=\"badge1\">&#9679;<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">24<\/span><\/span><span title=\"79 silver badges\"><span class=\"badge2\">&#9679;<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">79<\/span><\/span><span title=\"109 bronze badges\"><span class=\"badge3\">&#9679;<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">109<\/span><\/span>"
}

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1.json

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That reveals quite a change in the JSON that imageFlair expects. Actually there is a lot of HTML in there.

So decided to try http://superuser.com/users/flair/1 in addition to http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.json with this result:


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"&gt;
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"&gt;
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<style type="text/css">
.valuable-flair .userInfo .username a, .valuable-flair .mod-flair
{
color: #1086A4;
}
</style>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//sstatic.net/flair-Default.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div class="valuable-flair">
<div class="gravatar">
<a title="See my profile on Super User" target="_blank" href="http://superuser.com/users/1/jeff-atwood"><div class="gravatar-wrapper-50"><img src="https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/51d623f33f8b83095db84ff35e15dbe8?s=50&amp;d=identicon&amp;r=PG&quot; alt="" width="50" height="50"></div></a>
</div>
<div class="userInfo">
<span class="username"><img src="http://superuser.com/favicon.ico&quot; width="16" /><a href="http://superuser.com/users/1/jeff-atwood&quot; target="_blank">Jeff Atwood</a><span class="mod-flair" title="moderator">&#9830;</span></span>
<br />
<span class="reputation-score" title="reputation score">14,561</span>
<br />
<span title="24 gold badges"><span class="badge1">&#9679;</span><span class="badgecount">24</span></span><span title="79 silver badges"><span class="badge2">&#9679;</span><span class="badgecount">79</span></span><span title="109 bronze badges"><span class="badge3">&#9679;</span><span class="badgecount">109</span></span>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

view raw

1.html

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Two downsides here:

  1. This doesn’t work for the combined stackexchange flair: http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1.png works, but http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1 gives a 404.
  2. Rendering HTML servers side to PNG requires a lot of work.

Time for another rainy day (:

–jeroen

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Development, Linux, openSuSE, PHP, Pingback, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Stackoverflow, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »