Tasker variable select function

I had a task where I wanted to be able to enter a custom number into a variable. Tasker has a "variable Query" action that pops up a box and allows you to type in the variable, but I didn't like it because you have to tap on the box to bring up the keyboard, type out the entry, then save it. But a workaround is simple, as long as you know certain values the variable could be.

Task: VarMenu1
1 Variable Set %VAR to EOF (you could use 'variable clear' but I prefer using EOF since errors will sometimes manifest as EOF)
2 Perform Task VarMenu2
3 Wait Until %VAR doesn't match EOF

Task: VarMenu2
Task Type: Menu
1 Set Variable %VAR to 0
2 Set Variable %VAR to 1
3 Set Variable %VAR to 2
4 Set Variable %VAR to 3
...etc (change numbers to suit your needs)

Used alone, VarMenu1 acts like a function or library, a piece of code that you can leave by itself and call any time you need to perform a certain task, in this case custom setting a variable. Any time you're writing a task that requires you to input a custom value for a variable, just put "Perform Task: VarMenu1" and your task will pause to allow you to select a value from a list.

You can also use variables for task names when using the "Perform Task" action. This would be useful if you want to prepare more than one menu of variables. Instead of 0,1,2,3, maybe you also want to have a menu for 0,5,10,20. Just make a new menu task containing those numbers, let's call it VarMenu3, change the "Perform Task" in VarMenu1 to a variable and set the variable before that step.

1 Variable Set %VAR to EOF
2 Variable Set %VARMENU to VarMenu3
3 Perform Task %VARMENU
4 Wait Until %VAR doesn't match EOF

Voila, flexibility!

X10 coolness

I've been slowly getting into X10 home automation lately. It works like this, you get an X10 control module that plugs into the wall near the computer and a cable comes from it and plugs into your computer. Then you get software to control the control module. The control module controls whatever other modules you want to use throughout the house.

The most basic module is the lamp module, which is a small box that plugs into a wall outlet, then your lamp plugs into the module. From the computer, you tell that module to turn on or off.

What happens is that the control module sends a special signal through the wires in your house. The signal is picked up by all the X10 modules you have. The modules themselves have dials where you can select identification letters and numbers on them. You take a module and select, let's say, B4, so that module is now identified as B4. When you send the signal "B4 on," it turns itself on, which turns the lamp on.

There are numerous different modules to do different things. There are wall switches, modules for plug-in electronics like the lamp module and a similar appliance module, security modules, camera modules, dimmers, timers, weather sensors. Anything you can think of, the possibilities are endless.

You can also use them with remote controls and there are a few apps in the Android Market to run them from your phone, but I like setting them up to control from my phone over ssh. There is a Linux program called Heyu for use with the CM11A control module. Heyu can perform nearly two hundred different commands and uses simple command line syntax like heyu on B4. This makes it extremely simple to script, which in turn makes it extremely simple to control through the phone using the basic ssh command I've posted many times:

ssh USER@IP -i /PATH/TO/SSH/KEY 'heyu on B4'

This can be set up as a script to be ran from a terminal, through a GScript shortcut, or with Tasker. Of course, Tasker and X10 make an extremely useful pair.

I really haven't set much up yet except to manually turn a couple of lights on. I plan on getting a module to control the garage door next. This is done by using a "universal module" that acts like a single state button instead of an on/off switch. When the module is activated, it just does it's thing once and there is no way to reverse it. Every time it is activated, it is the same as pushing the garage door opening button so there is no way to know if it is up or down.

I plan to set it up with Tasker to activate it when I am close to home so the door will be open by the time I pull into the driveway. I'm not sure how reliable that will be, so I'll probably add a statusbar reminder that the door is open in case it is activated accidentally.

I've also considered getting a camera for the front door and a doorbell sensor. When someone rings the doorbell, the computer could tell the camera to take a photo then send it to me via MMS. If it looks like someone trying to sell something, I can ignore them. If it's a family member with a birthday present and I'm at work, I can open the garage door so they can come in.

I have no plans to do this, but this would be a cool setup...

Send a notification to the phone when the door is open

Have Tasker silence/ignore the notification if I'm at home and end the task.

If I'm not at home have Tasker say "Sir, I've detected that your garage door is open but you don't appear to be near your house. Would you like me to close it?"

Pop up the voice command window.

Using yes/no, open/closed, up/down as the keyword, I could answer in a natural voice and say "yes please close it for me" or "sure, close that sucker, I must have forgotten" or "nah, leave it up" or "it's ok, I want it open"

It could then say "Ok, closing it now," run the command to close the door and once the sensor detects that the door is closed say "It's closed, sir"

Like I said, I'm not going to do that, but it illustrates how well Tasker and X10 gear could work together to both perform really cool actions like opening doors for you and also make your phone behave somewhat like an intelligent assistant.

Happy Holidays!

I haven't been around much lately but I wanted to drop in and wish everyone Happy Holidays. I also wanted to let everyone know that the current economic climate has not affected my Christmas budget and all of the readers of this little blog can expect to receive the same thing I got you last year!

ssh error and fix

I've helped several people with this so I might as well post it here for others to stumble across. ssh can sometimes give this error:

stderr: ssh: Warning: failed creating //.ssh:
Read-only file system
stderr: Host '[my PC's ip address]' is not in the trusted hosts file

For some reason, ssh is trying to create it's hosts file in /.ssh, which is read-only, giving the error. For me, it happened when trying to use it in a script executed through GScript, but I believe it happens in other circumstances as well.

The solution that has worked for me and a few others is to replace the stock ssh binary in /system/xbin with a link to the ssh binary from Better Terminal Emulator Pro. Unfortunately, BTEP costs money but if you're using ssh or anything else from a terminal, I highly recommend buying it.

After you install Better Terminal Emulator Pro, back up the stock binary by typing this in a terminal:

mv /system/xbin/ssh /system/xbin/ssh.bak

Then put a link in /system/xbin to the BTEP ssh binary:

ln -s /data/data/com.magicandroidapps.bettertermpro/bin/ssh /system/xbin

This has been necessary every time I install an update because they always contain the stock ssh binary. Luckily, this fix has worked every time.

Finally, a use for twitter

I've never had much use for Twitter but I've recently found myself using my phone to log into my computer to check various things throughout the day. While I have those things set up with GScript shortcuts for quick checking, there's no reason I need to manually be logging in to check them.

You used to be able to post to twitter with curl, but not since they switched to OAuth. Now the simplest way is with TTYtter, the command line Perl Twitter posting script.

Once you run TTYtter and set up your login info, you can post to Twitter using ttytter -status="blah blah blah", but I usually like setting up things to use either pipes or argument type input, plus I'll never remember the name ttytter, so I use this little script named "twit"

#! /bin/sh
if test -z "$1"

then
in=$(cat /dev/stdin)
ttytter -status="$in"

else
ttytter -status="$@"

fi

which can be used in two ways:

command | twit

or

twit blah blah blah

I set up a private twitter account and use TTYter to push various information to it. Some information comes from and hourly cron and for others that run at unexpected times, I just added "| twit" to them.

I use LauncherPro on the phone and it comes with a twitter widget. Set to update every 30 minutes, I just look at the widget to get an update on pretty much anything I may be interested in.

Simple "to do list" voice script for Tasker/voice

I had to do something at work today which required me to examine several things to see if they needed done, do something to them, and mark them off my mental list of things that needed done.

This is something that nearly everyone does on a daily basis but there were just too many items on my todo list to remember them all so I took 10 minutes and whipped up this little script which I named "list".

#! /system/bin/sh
grep -E -i -q "add|delete" /sdcard/.voice || exec echo sorry
grep -E -i -q "^add|^delete" /sdcard/.voice && sed -i 's/^/list /' /sdcard/.voice

COMMAND=$(awk '{ print $2}' /sdcard/.voice)
ARG=$(cut -f3- -d ' ' < /sdcard/.voice)

if [ $COMMAND == "add" ]; then
echo $ARG >> /sdcard/list
echo "Added: $ARG"

elif [ $COMMAND == "delete" ]; then
sed -i "/$ARG/d" /sdcard/list
echo "Deleted: $ARG"

fi

This simply adds or deletes things from a list based on whether it finds "add blah blah blah" or "delete blah blah blah" in the file at /sdcard/.voice.

I created a new task in Tasker with the following actions:

1- Variable set %LIST to EOF
2- Locale Execute Plugin: @ list
3- Wait 500ms
4- Read Paragraph /sdcard/list to var %LIST
5- Flash %LIST

I set this to trigger on the keyword "list**" with the Tasker voice command I've been talking about in the last few posts. The end result is this:

I say "list add go to work"

It flashes:
go to work

I say "list add pay bills"

It flashes:
go to work
pay bills

I say "list delete work"

It flashes:
pay bills

I say "list add go on vacation"
It flashes:
pay bills
go on vacation

I say "list delete bills"
It flashes:
go on vacation

I say "list add sleep late"
It flashes:
go on vacation
sleep late

I added a line in the script to make this loopable. The line I added will add "list" to the beginning if it's not there already and execute normally. If called by the normal voice task, you still have to say "list add/delete blah blah blah" because "list" is the trigger word, but when called in a loop, you can just say "add/delete blah blah blah" and the script will recognize it. This makes it possible to keep using the list while performing your duties.

Speech recognition on Linux, through cheating

Speech recognition on Linux is hard to come by. I've been looking for a long time and never found anything that is very useful.

Most of the solutions available are nothing more than libraries for developing speech recognition programs which require you to build your own language models. They're mostly meant to be used in other software. Many of them look like they're very well done but I'm not a credit card company looking to set up a call canter so incorporating them are well above my ability. After playing around with a few of these, I decided they were a no-go.

I was hoping there would be a solution in the cloud, like an API to Google's online voice recognition engine, but Google doesn't have one and there don't appear to be any others available either.

So I decided to cheat. All I really need is to be able to say a few simple words and have it translated to a text file. I have voice recognition on my phone that does that, so why not use it?

To avoid repeating myself, this, like everything else on my blog lately, uses ssh with keys, Tasker with the Locale Execute Plugin, the Google voice recognition API called with Python that appear in my last few posts and a short script on the phone.

The short script we need is this, which I will call "vhome" for my examples:

#! /system/bin/sh
cat /sdcard/.voice | ssh USER@IP -i /PATH/TO/SSH/KEY 'cat > /PATH/TO/A/FILE && /PC/COMMAND/SCRIPT'

All this script does is place the text from the /sdcard/.voice file into a file on your computer. From my previous posts, it should be clear how Tasker/Python/Google all work together to get your words into a file on your phone and this simply gets that file to your computer.

The "&& ..." is optional and used for executing a script on the computer which will do something with the text. This example assumes you do want to use that because I didn't pre-filter it on the phone so the file on the computer will literally contain "computer [commands to be carried out]".

The script on the computer would get rid of the first word and parse the rest for keywords linked to commands to execute. It could be as simple as one if/elif loop to look for matches and run commands. This can then be easily added to for new commands by inserting a new elif/then line for the keywords to match and commands to run.

Now it's as simple as setting up the Tasker task to trigger the script on a keyword, like "computer" for example and say "computer [commands to be carried out]".

An example of using this would be saying "computer search more common hades." The script on the computer would get rid of "computer" and using an if/then loop would recognize "search" as a keyword, read the rest of the text into a variable and run this command:

firefox "http://www.google.com/search?q=$VAR"

The biggest downside is speed. It takes about 8-9 seconds from start of the voice API to command execution on the computer. One way to make this useful may be to set up a task in Tasker that keeps looping until you say a keyword to stop it. A quick example would be:

1- Write File .voice (this is used to zero out the file)
2- Run Script voice.py
3- Read Paragraph file: .voice to %VOICE
4- Goto Action 3 if %VOICE matches EOF
5- Stop If %VOICE matches halt
6- Locale Execute Plugin execute vhome If %VOICE matches computer
7 Goto 1

This task would show the voice recognition prompt. When you say "computer [commands to carry out]", it will execute vhome then show the voice recognition prompt again, unless you said "halt", in which case it dumps out of the loop and exits. Using this, you can place the phone on your desk and have voice commands at the ready.

So, that's about all. You now have speech recognition on Linux, thanks to cheating.

If you're also interested in speech synthesis on Linux, I suggest grabbing a good TTS engine like Festival and replacing the default diphone voice with a better one. Some of the most popular are the ARCTIC voices from Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute or the HTS version of those voices from the HTS working group at Nagoya Institute of Technology. The voice I use is "cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts". I haven't tried many TTS engines because Festival seems to do everything I want, especially taking text piped to it from a shell. This makes it pretty easy to set up a script that can be called to make the computer talk on certain events. You can add it to the examples above so your computer says "Yes sir, I'm opening the search results for More Common Hades."