FritzBox Callmonitor fCallMonitor

As promissed in my last blog post I have worked on some other projects and this time I want to speak about my FritzBox which I am using as my modem for my ISP. It has many options which also includes some APIs for incoming as well as the option to fully administer it remotely.

There is a very powerful and widely tool called jAnrufMonitor which I can recommend to you if you want to have a real feature rich client to your box. For myself jAnrufMonitor is not the tool I want to use as it is not very comfortable to use and even worse it depends on a Java installation and it installations tend to fail due to this dependency (to be honest on my Windows 10 64 Bit I did not get it to work even so I read all the (many) FAQs and entries in the forum from people with similar problems.

So I decided to give it a try and for those knowing me my first goal was to get notifications using Snarl on incoming call. So my first version did exactly this: when the phone rings a notification pops up showing the phone number of the caller (and displaying them in a list window). I am calling it fCallMonitor.

I have used fCallMonitor for some weeks and while it works without problems my own wishes added feature requests to it. The first one was to see who is the person behind the phone number so I added a lookup call to Klicktel (a reverse search engine for at least German phone numbers). Then I noticed that it would make more sense to lookup my own contacts so I added lookups in the Windows contacts and the FritzBox phonebook.

Then two weeks ago I got quite some problems with spam calls (automated dialers every few minutes) so I added an interface to tellows.de which hosts a database of know malicious callers.

So now when the phone rings I immediately see the calling number, the name of the caller (if known) and the spam state of the number.

In the moment I had completed all this I found another very new tool which has its focus on easy to block numbers in the FritzBlock – so if this you major goal for a tool give FritzBlock a try (even more as Volker is a very nice as we already have discussed each others ideas for future updates).

My own timeline is now to make fCallMonitor a very feature rich (but still easy to use) client currently focusing on my own wishes but as always if there is someone interested into getting some features please comment here or send me an email – the chances are high you’ll get what you want very fast 🙂

Finally this is how it looks right now

 

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Renym, Quarter Berth or my daily Twitter usage

Since this year my main working PC is once again a Windows machine so while not posting any news here I did some small developments for myself the last weeks.

The fist one is what I call Renym which is the REbirth of NYMphicus. I have learned by pain that the Views-concept in Nymphicus works extremely well for me and some other power users but the added complexity made the usage to complicated and had some technical drawbacks (like I always struggled to define what is my last read state in a mixed View). So as I already had the full technical stack in the background (including for example live updates due to streaming interface or multi account setups) I did for me “just” a new downsized traditional user interface which looks very similar to other lightweight clients (even so not really found often on Windows). So this is how it currently looks like:

Next to this I added quite some updates in the background which have been introduced since my last Nymphicus release – most important the option to display quoted retweet (see screenshot above) as well as creating quoted retweets.

Next to this I have created a very lightweight tool to create tweets on the fly. It is the idea of Spinnaker (which itself has been heavily inspired by Sail on the Mac). It just lives in the system tray and registers a global keyboard shortcut which opens the compose window right away:

Having said this everything you see is working and is in daily usage by myself. I am thinking about if or if not I should add the still needed extra polish to publish them (as Open Source btw.) so if anyone out there says he likes what he sees in this post: let me know and the chances I’ll create public releases will sky rocket… 🙂

Oh, and I have planned at least to other blog posts here about tools I am working on for myself but which might be interesting for more people than just me.

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Desktop Google Reader is dead – Meneré to replace it!

While finishing the code of my new Open Source library with Feedly retrieval I made a hard but I think in the end good decision: Desktop Google Reader is dead! 🙁

But don’t worry as it is getting a better successor which is called Meneré. In fact Meneré is already available for download at https://www.li-ghun.de/menere/ featuring Fever support and will get Feedly as soon as the API gets public.

While Meneré will be paid software (5.99 EUR) I will add all features Desktop Google Reader has today (like unread items, Snarl notifications, sending to various services and so on) to the free version – I promissed you get a new client and you’ll get it – and as promissed for free!

The auto update of Desktop Google Reader will then point to Meneré – please don’t feel stressed to pay for Meneré – just do so if you like to support me (or if you you want one of the new features).

That said as long as Meneré is lower than version 1.0 (current state: 0.6) all features are available in the free version (to be honest: there is no code for license handling available).

Desktop Google Reader is here and will stay Open Source as well as the new library I am writing for Feedly (and other RSS services) at https://github.com/liGhun/RSSharp – so if anyoine would like to pick up I would offer quite some help.

Background: The API of Feedly is more modern (and nice) than the one of Google Reader and in fact to make it right it would have been a rewrite of 80% of the code – code being four years old from a time when I started doing Desktop development…

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And a new theme…

Freshly restarted this homepage already got its first update: I found some really great themes and one of those is now activated here 🙂

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Homepage (again) reloaded

After the last relaunch to this homepage the updates have had been very, very few. This has two reasons:

  1. I do concentrate much on my projects on http://www.li-ghun.de/
  2. The Programm used (called RapidWeaver) is a great Mac desktop app for homepage. But in fact when I update stuff for Tlhan Ghun this is more or less always on the Windows machine so I would need to change the computer in order to post. Sounds little work but did not happen in fact…

So now I am with the huge community of WordPress users and for my needs it looks like the best current alternative. I hope to have more updates here again now.

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FileSystemSnarl 2.0 out now

After many months with no (visual) updates I completed a complete rewrite of FileSystemSnarl

Here’s what new in 2.0:

  • Cleaner layout
  • Placeholders in all notification classes (titles and bodies)
  • Persistent settings
  • “Jump start” option (directly start watching when folder name is valid)
  • Minimize to tray on startup option
  • Uses the latest Snarl API
  • New installer
  • Now licensed under BSD license

The main window of FileSystemSnarl 2.0

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What's going on, last.fm, Firefox, Outlook, …

As you might have noticed the updates to the homepage have decreased over the last week. Main reason is a quite time consuming task I have (and love) to finish in “real world” in the moment so that until second half of September I do not have much time for coding.

That said from time to time I find some minutes to make small changes or new ideas – so here what will be available soon.

  • last.fm snarls: the library I used to connect to the last.fm API seems to have some clues since quite some time so the notifications of the current song don’t work anymore. I already exchanged the external library with an own connector to last.fm and changed some more small glitches. Will change the communication with Snarl too (let it be a Snarl app) before I gonna release this all new version. If you want the notifications working for now see http://dl.dropbox.com/u/982128/Tlhan%20Ghun/LastFM/Setup-LastFmSnarls-2.0pre2.exe to get an early preview which is still a standalone app
  • FireSnarl: Firefox 4.0 is in the works and FireSnarl stopped working due to changes they did between Beta 1 (where it did work) and the newer beta releases. I will get it back to work when 4.0 leaves the beta stage as I then can be sure they won’t change the API anymore
  • Outlook: I am forced now to use Outlook at work (OK, it’s better than Lotus Notes…) so I started to create an addin for Outlook to get notifications using Snarl. As said my time is limited but a first working version can be found in the Snarl discussions at http://groups.google.com/group/snarl-discuss/browse_thread/thread/33b86950ec5a105
  • Homepage: After the switch still not everything is finished (e.g. the download links are hard to see at the bottom and the documentations (if available) are not linked anymore in the moment. This will be quite time consuming so please be patient… Even the flattr button is not up anymore in the moment
  • digiTweet Snarl edition: As many other clients also digiTweet broke with the recent change in Twitter API access (now only OAuth – which I hate…). I don’t think I will build another update as changing to OAuth would be quite some big change which I don’t wanna invest that much time for a client not done by me whose code is hard to read for me…
    • That said I am currently desperately missing the perfect Twitter client for me on Windows at all and have some plans and ideas to build an own from scratch with a new concept I didn’t see at any client on Windows until now which would be perfect for me. Did I mention the missing time…? 😉

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New website now online

Here we finally are. After some hacker killed my old Drupal website (thanks to my intrusion detection and my iPhone I was able to shut it of within a few minutes so nothing really bad happend) I now have switched tlhan-ghun.de to the new layout and technical basement.

Not all looks already as it should finally but step by step I will add the missing parts. Hope you like the new layout.

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New website to be here

This is the first testing entry for the new Tlhan Ghun Website. This website will be completely redone using a much smarter Tool than Drupal and is hopefully completed within May 2010 (no guarantee so far…)

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