Setting up an automated Raspberry Pi broadband speed monitor

Based on this Make article:

http://makezine.com/projects/send-ticket-isp-when-your-internet-drops/

Grab the scripts:

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install speedtest-cli
git clone https://github.com/HenrikBengtsson/speedtest-cli-extras.git

Create an IFTTT account and add the ‘If Maker then Google Drive‘ recipe to your account. This step deserves further investigation… this is an incredibly easy way to integrate access to online accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Google etc) and trigger writing messages to them via a REST based api call. Very, very cool.

After you’ve done the above, while logged on to IFTTT, click Channels in the top right, find the Maker channel and click it, and you’ll find your secret key value to use in the next script.

Copy script from this Gist, modify to add your secret key from above setup:

https://gist.github.com/aallan/bafc70a347f3b9526d30

At this point you can follow the other steps in the Maker article to set up to run the script using cron, and you’re all set!

Competing music cloud offerings

Everyone has (or is about to announce) their own cloud based music offering right now. I’ve got almost all my mp3s of every CD I own uploaded to Google Music, the new albums I buy from Amazon mp3 are stored in their cloud offering, and now Apple is expected to launch their offering.

The film industry apparently has a cloud based offering cooking, called Ultraviolet, which is expected to layout the standards for offering cloud based movies. Pretty soon, all music and video physical formats will disappear, or at least become niche like vinyl.

Now we just need to get bigger pipes to our houses, oh, and remove the ridiculous capping on monthly bandwidth usage. AT&T – if you implement the 150GB bandwidth cap for my neighborhood then we’re switching to Comcast cable.