Tusheti trip, July 2016

We went to Tusheti region of Georgia at the end of July 2016 for a ten day trek. Here is a short summary of practical information from the route.

Maps

• Geoland maps, both on paper (purchase in Tbilisi at their HQ), for GPS and on-line at http://mygeorgia.ge (use the flag to switch to Latin letters).
• OpenMTB maps are a good free data source for Garmin GPS.
• Soviet 1:100 000 military maps are still worth the try. 

Getting there and back

Tbilisi-Alvani-Omalo

Marshrutka goes every morning at ~9-10 AM from Ortachala bus terminal in Tbilisi to Telavi and possibly Khemo Alvani (price is 7 GEL with luggage, the driver will try to get more).

From Khemo Alvani over the Abano pass you'll need a 4WD jeep (seriously). You can ask the marshrutka driver to negotiate you some, or get some on the spot. Standard price is 50 GEL per person or 250 GEL per jeep; most common is Mitsubishi Delica.

We went with Mamuka Kindolauri, +995 577 378 414 and we can recommend him (he can also arrange to pick you up at the airport).

Shatili-Tbilisi:

There is a marshrutka link between Shatili and Tbilisi twice a week. The road is way better than the one to Omalo, but still it takes six hours to get to Tbilisi. Buy tickets in advance, the driver stays in Shatili on Tuesday night and during the weekend.

Marshrutka schedule:

Tbilisi (Sangori station) to Shatili: Tuesday and Friday at 9 AM.

Shatili to Tbilisi: Wednesday and Sunday at ~10 AM.

Approximate price of Delica to Tbilisi is 250 GEL; the price is generally the same to Barisakho (200 GEL) or Roshka (250 GEL).

Food and fuel

In Tbilisi, gas cartridges can be purchased in Geoland and there's one more shop to be opened in the Old town, near the Public service building, soon.
Also, you might succeed in Tbilisi mall.

There's a small shop in Omalo, but no option to buy fuel.

There's a small shop in Shatili, with canned meet, sweets, tea etc..

On the Shatili-Tbilisi road benzin/gasoline can be purchased in the grocery shop in Barisakho (5 l bottles for water), the shop is generally well equipped.

Mobile coverage

4G is widely available in villages, not in the mountains to much, though. MagtiCom seems the best option, if you want voice and data coverage.

SIM can be purchased at the airport for all three companies, beware that at least Beeline does not offer all the options at the airport.

• Beeline: Limited coverage around Omalo and the upper valley. No coverage in Shatili and further then Verkhovani. See the coverage map. Note that international SMS don't work off the shelf and aren't covered by "unlimited SMS" plan.
• Magti has better coverage in the mountains and covers Shatili and the Shatili-Tbilisi way (coverage map).
• I didn't find coverage map for Geocell.

This could help: http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Georgia

Electricity

Many guesthouses in the villages have solar panels and will be able to recharge a phone or so. In Shatili, there's a hydroelectric station and power is abundant (everyone has electricity).

Other resources

• Slavomír Horák's http://tusetie.webnode.cz 
• http://www.caucasus-trekking.com/tusheti
• Wikiloc has numerous track records in the area, downloadable to GPS:
  http://www.wikiloc.com/trails/hiking/georgia/akhmetis-raioni/omalo
• Tusheti national park: http://www.tusheti.ge/

Using Samsung Gear 360 without a Samsung phone

Samsung Gear 360 is a 4k 360-degree camera designed to be used with a Samsung VR ecosystem and a phone capable of running the Samsung 360 Manager.

However, it seems at least partially usable without it.

Data access:

• Images and videos can be read out using the MTP protocol via a USB cable.
• There is microSDXC card slot with DCIM and MISC folders, where the images and videos are stored as JPEG and MP4 files.

Image stitching: 

In the single-lens mode, the camera writes out rectangular image (what's that projection called?).

In the dual-lens mode, it writes out one JPEG with two cylindrical fisheye images. Those can be separated and then stitched using Autopano or Hugin for example.

The videos can apparently be stitched in Autopano Video, but the workflow demonstrated in "360 Rumors: Stitch Samsung Gear 360 videos and photos, and correct color differences with Autopano" requires preprocessing on Windows/Mac.

Remote control options:

The camera has Bluetooth, WiFi and USB interfaces and there are three modes controlled by the Bluetooth button.

Gear 360 Manager

That's probably of no use unless the Manager interface is somehow discovered.

Remote control

This enables BT, but I failed to pair it with anything I have.

Google Street View application

When in Google Street View mode, the camera acts as a WiFi AP with a DHCP server. The network seems to be chosen a randomly chosen C class one from the 192.168.0.0 range, the camera sits at .1.

The ESSID is shown on display, just add space and underscore for the default one: e.g. "Gear 360_(xx:yy)" and the number below is WPA2 passphrase.

Then it provides DHCP, DNS and HTTP services (port 80).

This suggests that there might be some way to trigger image capture at least.

See also:

• 360 Rumors: Interval shooting for the Samsung Gear 360
• Google Street view setup
• 360 Rumors: Stitch Samsung Gear 360 videos and photos, and correct color differences with Autopano

Tethering Blackberry cellular data connection to other devices

This is to summarize tries to get a Linux laptop (with success) and an Apple iPad 3 (without success) connected to a Blackberry phone and use its cellular data connection.

Blackberry OS 7.1 introduced a WiFi hotspot feature. It does work as expected for laptops and non-Apple devices. There's battery drain problem and the phone gets hot, but overall it works and with 3G it's fast enough for me. It does not work with Apple iOS devices since iOS 6—there are numerous posts on this topic, Apple does not care to respond.

Up to now, I didn't find a working solution. Below are the dead-ends I did explore, with a short explanation. Which can be wrong—and you are welcome to comment.

WiFi hotspot tethering

The phone acts as a ad-hoc WiFi network peer and after connection provides an IP address via DHCP and set's up a NAT. iPad usually does associate (WiFi level), but fails to get DHCP.

There is a number of tricks people on the forums recommend. One that works and is recommended by the Apple support is to do hard reset/full wipe on iPad and restore the apps and data from backups. I can confirm that works—for the first connection. Also, changing name of the network and iPad and resetting the iPad network settings works for the first time. Dead end here.

Bluetooth tethering

There are two common ways used to utilize other devices network link via Bluetooth. One is Dial Up Networking profile (DUN), second the Personal Area Network profile (PAN).

Dial Up Networking (DUN) profile

When using DUN, the client device has to specify/know what APN to use and possibly what number to dial. The phone acts as a PSTN modem, basically. That's the older way and iOS does not support it—unless you jailbreak the device and install third party apps. The Bluetooth on Blackberry Bold 9900 that I used for the test does support DUN and it's possible to utilize it from a laptop in the usual way.

Personal Area Network (PAN) profile

Personal Area Network is used to set up network connection. The client does not care about how the upstream link is to be established, that is on the phone/modem to take care of.

Blackberry OS 7.1 does not support PAN profile. However, there are downloadable applications such as EasyTether Pro, which provide that part of BT stack. The BB then acts as a NAP (Network Access Point), much the same way as a WiFi AP.

There are few steps required to connect an Ubuntu 12 laptop to the phone. Associate them, find the device in Bluetooth settings, enable use of PAN. Then initiate the connection in the Network Manager (all via notification area icons).

Linux computers can also act as NAP's—if you have a laptop connected upstream via WiFi, you can use it at the same time to provide connectivity to an iOS device. That requires enabling the Network Access Point switch in Bluetooth settings/Local services.

On the iPad side, you pair the BT with the laptop and initiate a connection. An infinity-like icon will appear in top left corner of the screen—where normally the WiFi signal strength indicator is. You can't ping the outside world, but everything else works flawlessly.

Now, what if we try this between the iPad and the Blackberry. You pair them (this works), then tap to connect. That fails—iPad fails to connect. Easy Tether people kindly responded to a support request, saying that due to Blackberry imposed limit on L2CAP size, they really can't do anything to support iOS in Easy Tether. That's it then.

There's only one way I made the iPad utilize the BB cellular data. You bring an extra laptop with you. You connect iPad to the laptop (via PAN/NAP). You connect the laptop to the Blackberry (via PAN or WiFi). And hey, it works. Super practical way, I'd say.

Zenfolio referral code

Hmm, just if anyone happens to have use for a discount ticket for Zenfolio.com: you can get 5 USD discount using referral code: WKW-S52-A7J.

From DV to Vimeo on Linux

Short summary of "how to get a movie from DV camera to Vimeo on Linux" (after several tries with 16:9 format rendered as 4:3 :-)).
Download data from camera (used Firewire port and Kino). Only needed thing was to load raw1394 module and add permissions to r/w to /dev/raw1394 before launching Kino.
Exported movie as DV-AVI (type 1).
Converted the resulting AVI to H.264 (and rescaled it on the way).

mencoder -profile vi -aspect 16:9 -vf scale=848:480 $1 -o $2

Here the vi profile refers to a section in ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf:

[vi]
profile-desc="Lo-quality x264 video with aac"
vf="pp=ci"
ovc=x264=yes
oac=lavc=yes
lavcopts="ac3"
x264encopts="threads=auto:subq=6:partitions=all:8x8dct:me=umh:frameref=5:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b:qp=30"

Value of the qp parameter in x264encopts determines quality - the lower, the better (and larger file). In general 10 seems very nice, 30 acceptable for not-so-hi-quality source.

Actually - the size it's rescaled to should probably be chosen better...

Playing with Selphy CP530 (and not really amused)

Selphy printers are small, cheap to get and not that expensive to use. In addition, there are are no inks that would dry when you don't use it for few days. Why is it cheap? Color space of the printer is very poor and there's no support for color management - so except for special types of images you are going to need more then one paper to make the result look acceptable (and in many cases even that is not going to help).

Sky - long exposure

I tried to make an exposure of a night scene - so long that the stars would turn into arcs of light. Results are below - I think that I at least got some ideas how to do that right.

First - how long the exposure should be to get a reasonable effect? If the stars rotate 360 degrees in 24 hours, that makes 5 degrees in 20 minutes. That should do.
Canon 400D has exposure time limited to 30 sec unless in bulb mode. Bulb mode only makes sense if you have remote shutter trigger - you can surely hold the shutter button 20 minutes, but there's no way the image will be sharp. After several tries to securely lock the trigger mechanically, I reverted to 30 sec exposures, expecting to combine them later. As 30 sec would probably result in some sensor hotspots, I turned the long exposure noise eliminitation on, took some spare clothes and spent half an hour half sleeping and half pressing the button.

As a result I got 21 images with ISO 100, F3.5, on a 16 mm equiv. lens, spaced ~1 min in time from each other - 30 sec exposure, 30 sec noise elimination exposure, write, my wake up time.
After 10 frames the battery died and the image got slightly shifted, so I only used the remaining ones/second part of the series.


This was created by loading the images as layers into Gimp, turning the overlay option to Lighten only for each except background layer and tuning the curves slightly. As you see, the stars and clouds move - but stars turn into dots, not arcs...

Just to try I also fed the same images to Picasa's Collage option. Here you get more blurred image, against with dots for stars, but the merging seems to be done in a smoother manner. Maybe just sum of 1/n weighted matrixes?


Anyway, what might work better for the given set of stills is to combine them into a video.
This was done in mencoder using:

mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf type=jpg:fps=5 -ovc x264 -x264encopts crf=5.0 -noaspect -o a.avi


Next time:

1. Take the remote trigger with me :-)
   
2. Replace the battery in camera before shooting to make sure it will last when it's freezing around.
3. Try withouth long exposure elimination, so we'll get lines, not separate points.
4. Try with stopped down lens and noise elimination for a time like ~10 or 15 minutes.
5. Try clear sky without the moon and (especially) without clouds
   

Synology network backup - how is it implemented?

There's a "Backup to remote rsync-compatible server" option in the Synology Disk Station 2.2 firmware. Question is - how to really use it and how is it implemented? How about security and accounts? Can anyone use the rsyncd? Those are some questions for start...

Once you enable the "Network backup service", one more share is created in the "Shared folders" --- there's a NetBackup share now. You can also use the GUI to modify access to the folder based on uid/gid. As there is the option to "use rsync compatible remote server" let's look around for the rsyncd cfg files on the DiskStation (via terminal access).

There's an /etc/rsyncd.conf and /etc/rsyncd.secrets. The rsyncd.secrets lists root with a password hash, the configuration file lists NetBackup rsync module with root user allowed to login. There's a rsync process running as a daemon on the station.

The default setup of the station therefore only allows root user to connect via the normal rsync remote method (no ssh) to the NetBackup module. No data encryption, MD4 based challange-response authentication and the GUI settings aren't reflected in the configuration files --- they only alter the filesystem permissions.

This is ok for a closed network setup --- but questionable on an open network.

JabRef settings

To get JabRef generate keys as ijrb80_251, that is "lower case abbreviation of the journal name, volume and first page of the publication", set Key pattern to [journal:abbr:lower][volume]_[firstpage].

DVD authoring under Linux

The goal was to make a DVD from short videos captured on two digital cameras and some pictures. Although it's rather easy to do today, the tools available still do have some rough edges.

System used: Ubuntu 9.04 with the Ubuntu Studio extensions on x86_64 platform.

General steps to do were:

1. Get videos from camera to computer
   
2. Cut out the right parts, working losslessly
   
3. Convert the parts into a MPEG2 DVD compatible files
4. Create parts with titles, texts, image slideshows
   
5. Create DVD menu and burn the whole thing.
   

Getting the source videos
One camera directly generated MPEG2 files on its internal SD card.
The second one had a Firewire DV output. This can be handled using Kino easily, it was only necessary to load raw1394 module and adapt permissions of /dev/raw1394. The output, saved as AVI was then already viewable in Totem.

Cutting out the right parts
I used Kino, otherwise Cinellera or kdenlive are very helpful.

Getting DVD-style MPEG2 files
Video DVD content is split into files - "Titles" and those can have bookmarks, called "chapters". To get one file per title it was necessary to deinterlace and convert the DV AVI files into MPEG2-PS, deinterlace the MPEG2 files from the other camera and join them. In this case I didn't care about transitions between the joined files.
I used tovid for deinterlacing and doing the conversion. Only problem is that the conversion is painfully slow (several hours on my hardware).

tovid -force -deinterlace -dvd -pal -wide -parallel -in $INFILE -noask -out $OUTFILE

The -force was to make tovid deinterlace the MPEG2 files from the SD-card camera.
Resulting .mpg files can be joined using mencoder easily:

mencoder -of mpeg -ovc copy -oac copy -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -o $OUTFILE $SOURCEDIR/*.mpg

Titles
There was need to get just some still slides with text. The most convenient way for me was to generate the stills in inkscape - 720x576 bitmaps with text,, graphics, whatever you need, and then convert them to the MPEG2 using dvd-slideshow.

DVD Menus
There are several programs available, DVDStyler seemed most versatile. Only bad thing for me was that the buttons it renders have aliased fonts and look very ugly. As a workaround I described the menu items as normal text and used a simple arrow image as cursor/selector.

Of course, once you compile the whole thing, you find that you are some 100 MB over limit :-) But that can be expected...

Travelling in Poland with a dog

This is a short summary of what I think might be useful if you plan to travel with a dog to Poland - we just got back after walking some days along the north coast.

All following bans have to be interpreted in context - it depends on the situation and the dog whether they will be enforced or just silently ignored.

General notes
The dog has to be kept on leash (na smyczi) everywhere unless specially permitted. Mostly respected, especially in cities. But if the dog is friendly, people usually don't say anything. Some breeds are considere aggressive (officially), those have stricter rules.

On the coast we've me mostly german shephard dogs, yorkshires and golden retrievers. From time to time there was a pit bull terrier - with a muzzle and on a short leash.

Transport
There are two main transport companies - PKP trains and PKS busses, then there are multiple local bus companies. We had no experience of dog not being accepted. Unless you travel in a crowded busses it is usually even ok without the muzzle/kaganiec. Often the dog is silently ignored by the driver (no need of ticket) in busses.

We've been told by Polish people that we can just travel without the dog ticket even in trains, but we haven't tried that. In trains the dog pay either 4 zloty or 15 zloty (EC/IC), in busses they travel free or pay like children.

If you plan to travel in a couchette or sleeping wagon, you have to (in theory) buy the whole coupe, that is six places for a couchette or three for a sleeping car.

Beaches/Coast
On guarded beaches the dogs are allowed only to pass through not to stay there and they should have a muzzle and be on a leash. On wild beaches it's ok just to keep them on the leash. In reality there are dogs everywhere, even on guarded beaches and it's just on a common sense to keep or not to keep them on the leash when outside the guarded beaches. As long as you keep it under control and it does not endanger somebodys children it's usually ok. People and children mostly interact well with the dogs, fairly often the children run to the dog to hug it.

In Slowinski National Park the dogs are strictly forbidden on the beaches. In reality you can argue that there a trail on the beach - so you can walk there. We discussed this with the guards and they just asked us to leave the beach on the first exit. Possible reason for this ban are foki/seals that sometimes come here - the dogs will disturb them.

Food
There are shops with things for animals in every small city and it's sometimes possible to buy raw meat. Fish is available everywhere along the coast. People generally do ask you before feeding your dog with something.

Shops/restaurants
Mostly no dogs allowed.

cp866 in dosemu

Before I forget this - to get a cp866 xdos terminal (dosemu) in Ubuntu, setting following in /etc/dosemu.conf helps:

$_external_char_set = "cp866"
$_internal_char_set = "cp866"
$_layout = "us"
$_X_font="-dosemu-vga-medium-r-normal--17-160-75-75-c-80-ibm-cp866"

The first two are non-important probably, layout solves (?) some issues with TRIOL and keyboard and the last one is the important one.

Glut on OpenSolaris

One possible solution seems to be to use freeglut and the GCC development cluster. One has to install X client headers as well.

Sansa Fuze surprises (both bad and good)

After some time reading reviews and comments I decided to try a Sansa Fuze player. I was looking for a player capable of MP3, OGG and WMA, with display large enough to browse and select tracks comfortably, stable firmware and acceptable sound. Given price constraints, this let to Fuze + microSDHC card. Although most cons and pros were clear from the reviews and comments, some were not. So a subjective summary follows. The experience is based on a Sansa Fuze player firmware 1.01.22, 2 GB version + card.

The bright side:

• The click-wheel is easy to use and precise, UI is simple and logical.
  
• The on-card and in-memory albums are integrated seamlessly in one library (good).
• MicroSDHC expandability
• OGG and FLAC support.
  

The dark side:

• The cover attracts dust a lot, microSD slot and the docking connector are non-covered.
  
• Proprietary docking connector (no miniUSB like in Creative Zen).
• The front/display cover is very prone to scratches (no competion to glass)
• Only one playlist created on the device (?), more via connected computer
  
• Charging while playing is possible, but requires disconnecting USB data pins (see below)
• Radio stations are only labeled by frequency (can live with that :-))
• Equalizer only works for MP3, not for radio.
• Video and photo support are there, but due to the screen size the usability is pretty limited.
  

To charge while playing, USB data connection must not be established. So you can either use an external USB charger or disconnect USB data pins. Latter option means for example to put a piece of paper there to block the two pins in the center. Using a powered hub with no computer connected made the player either freeze or poweroff upon disconnection.

If no further surprises emerge, it's better then I expected.

Considering on-line backup

Considering S3 for on-line storage/backup, I'm looking around for tools to do that (or competitive non-S3 solutions).

Interesting blogs/places related to the topic:
John Eberly - using s3fs and rsync. Should lead to UNIX-portable solution.

Encrypted offsite backup with EncFS, Amazon S3, and s3cmd - AES encrypted data (via encfs) are synced to S3 using s3cmd.

Non-S3 solutions that seem interesting so far:
Jungledisk - maps S3 bucket as disc, 30 day eval, $20 per license (any computer sharing the same S3 bucket). Crossplatform.
Mozy
2.2 GB free, no transfer cost, Windows only, 5$/month unlimited backup.
Block-level upload/diff. No versioning, no web access in the basic version.
Carbonite - 15-day trial. $50/year (e.g. $4.2/month). Windows only client, Mac Beta. No versioning.
DropBox - versioned cached network folder, 2 GB free, 50 GB $10/month or $100/year. Crossplatform clients + web interface. Data are stored both locally and on the server, multiple machines are synchronized.

More general S3-based tools (crossplatform/UNIX):
s3fs - S3 plugin for FUSE, there is a commercial version on subcloud
s3cmd - command line scriptable application for copy/get/make bucket against s3 (GPL)
Js3stream - Java app usable as filter to store/retrieve a stream to/from s3.
s3browser - Windows NET 2.0 freeware GUI for S3 bucket management
Jets3t - Java toolkit for S3. Did not test.
Sync2S3 - Windows based sort-of-rsync (?) tool. 30 USD per license.
S3 Firefox Organizer extension- Firefox extension in a commander-like style. What about encryption?

Tools to get S3 as Windows drive:
s3drive - freeware, proprietary, NET 2.0

OpenSolaris on a motherboard with MCP65 chipset

So, just installed OpenSolaris on a Gigabyte motherboard with MCP65 (NVidia) chipset.
Everything worked out of the box except for the NIC, where the Device driver utility said a third-party driver was needed.
Web search has shown there is an alternative driver, but that as well, the device might be supported by the nge driver. All necessary to do was to make an alias for the driver and plumb the interface. To my slight surprise the network daemon took over and configured the device via DHCP.

Steps needed:

1. Get PCI ID of the card (explanation here or here):
   prtpicl -v | less
   ...search for Ethernet or 0200 and get the right PCI ID.
   
2. Add the driver alias, load driver etc.:
   update_drv -a -i 'pci1458,e000' nge
   (if ok, says nothing)
   
3. See if the interface is there
   dl-adm show-dev
4. Plumb the interface (this might be helpful)
   ifconfig nge0 plumb
5. It's up. Well?
   

VMware ESXi server

The bloody thing does not boot at all at our quad-core opteron setup.
Or even better, the setup boots and complains about no storage to write to.
We're not first to see this, though :-(

Links:

1. http://www.grid.org/blog/cameron/development-using-vmware-server-esxi
   

Remote Gnome session in nested window

I needed to access remote Gnome session (actually a JDS session) to try something with the settings. That is - I needed something like the "Remote desktop" setup on Windows. One way is to setup VNC (but that's extra effort with no sense). Second might be IPsec with XDCMP or and VPN (ok, even more extra effort...). So the chosen way was to tunnel X through ssh.

To do this with a standalone X server, you need to start X, run SSH with correctly set up display and start gnome-session script on the remote side.

1. Way:
   xinit -e 'ssh -X who@where gnome-session' -- :1
   This works reasonably, but always somewhere have the "login window" where the gnome-session was started. Pro - you see the errors, con - if you close it, the session dies.
   
2. Way:
   Add xauth data for the display, then start a nested X server and then xterm, which starts a SSH session and exits then. The SSH session keeps running on background and the session looks "normal"
   
   xauth add :1 `xauth list | grep localhost.localdomain/unix:0 | cut -d ' ' -f 2-`
   Xnest -auth .Xauthority :1 -geometry 1024x700 & xterm -display :1 -e ssh -X -f bobr7.fjfi.cvut.cz gnome-session
   
3. The same, just with normal X-server, not Xnest. Maybe a delay will be needed before X-term start?

Further reading:

1. http://www.technovelty.org/linux/tips/xnest.html

Using "Sistema koordinat 1942" with Garmin GPS

The GPS setup is a bit non-exact, giving differences against OziExplorers S-42 setup between 2-10 m. This should pose no problem for "where am I on the map", however.

How to setup an eTrex Legend:
Setup/Units/Position format = User UTM Grid, data same as in OziExplorer, so:
Longitude origin E45 deg
Scale: 1.000
False easting: +8 500 000 m
False northing: 0 m

Map datum = User
I used setup for Kazakhstan from the wgs84fin report:
dx = +15 m
dy = -130 m
dz = -84 m
da = -108 m
df = 0.00480795

Values here depend on where you are, see pages 120 and 121 of the mentioned report.
Errors/differences from what OziExplorer states as User grid coordinates vary depending on where the point is.

For systems used in Czech Republic, see http://tvorbamap.shocart.cz/kartografie/systemy.htm as well.

Links:

1. Pages 120 and 121 of the wgs84fin.pdf report, see http://earth-info.nga.mil/GandG/publications/tr8350.2/wgs84fin.pdf
2. http://www.kmp.vslib.cz/lide/hrus/prispevek.php?klic=070113234207
3. http://www.navgeocom.ru/support/coords/index.htm
4. http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasovsk%C3%A9ho_elipsoid
5. http://etrex.webz.cz/