New Toy!

This summer, just a week before going to Brasil, I received a new gadget (I prefer to call them Toy’s). The Nokia 5800 Xpress Music.

I love it! Really, it joins together the kind of functionality you’d like in a mobile device. It has a few drawbacks which I can imagine more advanced and experienced smart-phone users miss. However for me, as the first phone with a camera on it (..!!..) I love it!

PRO’s

• WiFi
• GPS
• 3.2 mp Camera + Low res camera for video calls (if you do any ?)
• position sensor (screen rotates as you rotate the phone)
• Easy to extend, make your own apps and widgets
• Quite long battery life

CON’s

• No keyboard (on screen keyboard works fine though)
• GPS is slow, assisted GPS uses a GPRS carrier making it very expensive (believe me! I was roaming in Brasil and forgot to switch that off :S )
• 3.2 mp Camera is considered low res for some people nowadays’
• Not too many free applications to download
• Menu’s too static, no real (android) desktop feeling

Im really impressed! I have seen the iPhone, and thought it was too big. The blackberries…, I simply find they have too much of the “Business Flavour” and are just boring (sorry!?). The only phone I actually had in my hand and can be seen as serious competition, is the HTC Touch running the Android OS. I liked the Desktop idea I miss a bit on the 5800. This all, looking at the low cost range of course!

I already built a small application for it, a rip of the iPhone mosquito repellant. If you’re interested, drop me a comment, and I can send you a copy.

Messi para Iniesta, xuta Iniesta…..

I Gooool!!!

Aquí teniu el fragment d’audio del gol d’aquesta setmana. Possiblement el millor que es pot baixar de l’internet en aquest moment

(en mp3, així ho pots posar en el mobil)

Here’s the audio fragment (the one I liked most) from the goal against Chelsea in the Champions league Semi-final:

http://alex.k.bcn.googlepages.com/GOL3.mp3

!!Gol de lo puto gusiluz!!

eeePC Upgrade

Yesterday afternoon I read about the new Ubuntu version (9.04) which was just launched, the Jaunty Jackalope.

I had a look and thought it would be interesting to install, but noticed some other distributions for netbooks. Among which the moblin (moblin.org). This interested me, as Im allway’s into trying out something different. I downloaded the image and used the Ubuntu DiskImager tool to get it on a 4Gb USB stick. This all worked fine!

The tool is great, I have been doing magic in the past to make a bootable USB install which is now a piece of cake! I set-up the Eee Bios to boot from it, and it presented me with a nice bootmenu. But any option I selected, left me with a black screen and an eternal hourglass. I tried switching to console, but it did not let me log in!

So, after a few hours I decided to get the Ubuntu IMG for Netbook remix, and give it a go. To be fair, a piece of cake! in about 45 minutes I had a running system. Another hour to get all the updates, and that’s it!

The touchpad and the wifi worked fine directly. It also detected the screen resolution fine. I switched back to the standard desktop because I hardly used the netbook remix mode from the Easypeasy distro.

Thats all for the moment. One of these day’s Ill try to fine-tune it a bit more as from my first impression it was running a bit slow. Ill keep you posted!

ah, and I have one question which people might be able to respond… why is everything Brown in ubuntu?

here it is!

Here is the Excel file in all its glory! I admit it looks pretty boring now, but in the weekend afternoons when the games start, you´ll see the effect!

Auch! cannot just place the Excel file here. I renamed it to .PPT, so if you´d like to use it, you´d have to rename it back to .XLSM

quiniela-automatic

La Quiniela – Excel Data Import

Football (yes, soccer in countries where it is hardly played is big in Barcelona. Really big! I have always enjoyed watching football games, but nothing like I’m now, here with FC Barcelona! Especially this season is spectacular. I also started, together with my girlfriend placing bets or “doing the quiniela”.

The quiniela you play by predicting the outcome of 15 games played, mixing 1st and second division games. You either bet on 1, X or 2. hometeam losing, equalled or lost. this is how the form looks like:

I wont explain how it works, it is far too complex, and even after many years here, I have still not discovered them all.The idea is that I play with my girlfriend(who luckily likes football too) and this gives us a tiny bit of football thrill in the weekend. A few weeks ago I started to look and see if I could make this in an excel sheet, so I can have a view on how the games are going on each goal scored.

This excel sheet started out very simple. I would manually copy my bets, and enter the scores every time I heard “gooooooool” on tv, or checked using teletext(a technology with no reason to exist). Then, after a while, basically because one weekend we where late, filled in the sheet, and did not get to the betting office on time, I filed my bets on line.

Sometimes, when you live in spain, you expect certain things to either not work, or not work well. This was not the case,  and I found the spanish betting website to be very practical. It lets me fill in the exact same form, by ticking the boxes.

(If the Internet was not partly blocked here I would have had a screen shot…. Somehow they do not see betting as a work related activity…)

After validating the bet you get your bet presented on your screen like the ticket you get in the Betting office. a text overly on the image of the ticket, basically like this:

1    1    1    1    X     X
2    2    X     2    1    2
3    1    1    1    1    2
4    1    1    1    1    1
5    X     X     1    1    1
6    1    X     1    X     X
7    X     1    1    1    1
8    1    X     1    X     X
9    2    2    X     1    2
10    1    X     1    2    2
11    1    2    2    2    1
12    2    X     2    X     X
13    X     2    2    1    1
14    1    1    1    1    1
15    X

I copy pasted this in excel and one part of my excel sheet was already a bit automated (there was no more need to manually get the bets in) This made me think about a fully automated one, that would display the live scores and display the cells with the bets color-coded, and at the bottom the total amount of winning bets. Here is where the problems started. The color coding was pretty easy with excels’ conditional formatting. With a few IF functions this was starting to look good:

The yellow column is the game status changing when I started entering the results. The blue cells are my bets, changing colour when games are playing according to the live result.

I use Office 2007 at work, and at home. When I browsed around in excel, I found how easy they made the data import! getting the data from a text file where I saved my bets was a 2 minute job.

I also discovered the get data from web functionality. I started playing with to find out if I could get the live results from some website, and use this to refresh my sheet each minute. This was not as easy as I thought. It would be, if the websites would update their data each minute, but I guess it is hard to find a volunteer to go to the office on Sunday morning to cover just 1 second division game. The only Live source I found was … TVE Teletext …

If you check the link, you’ll see their page has exactly what I needed, and on top of that it is updated almost by the minute. The only but… is that they present it as an image!!

That made me have a more thorough look at the page. after looking at the source code, I saw that the alt tag of the image contains all the data. Ready to be extracted!

<img id=“FABTTXImage” src=“210_0001.png” width=480 height=336 usemap=“#210_0001″ border=0 alt=“210.1 Q U I N I E L A tve Jornada 40 22 MAR 2009 1 Getafe C F -Rec Huelva 1 FINAL 2 Sevilla -Valladolid 1 FINAL 3 Barcelona -Málaga 1 FINAL 4 Real Madrid-Almería 1 FINAL 5 Villarreal -Athletic 1 FINAL 6 Mallorca -At. Madrid 1 FINAL 7 Osasuna -Espanyol 1 FINAL 8 Deportivo -Betis X FINAL 9 Numancia -Sp de Gijon 1 FINAL 10 Elche -Hércules X FINAL 11 Murcia -Alavés 1 FINAL 12 R.Sociedad -Girona 1 FINAL 13 Salamanca -Tenerife 2 FINAL 14 Albacete -Huesca 2 FINAL 15 Racing -Valencia 2 FINAL 15 25 55.295,44 12 23,31 14 88 18.850,72 11 3,60 13 3874 285,47 10 1,00 CUENTA NARANJA 3,5% TAE 4 MESES.553″>

Great I thought. I am still playing with my Google maps page, and was already learning quite a lot of javascript with that, so this was a perfect chance to keep learning. I used the PHP include to get all the pages code, and then made a small (java)script that reads the HTML code, then with a few regular expressions, it displays an html table with the live results.

<html><head>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”jquery-1.3.2.js”></script>
</head>
<body>

<?php Include (“http://www.rtve.es/tve/teletexto/200/210_0001.htm”);?>

<TABLE border =”1″>

<TR><TD>Results</TD></TR>

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var page210, page210New, page210Res;

// get the alt text of the image in a variable

var page210 = document.getElementById(“FABTTXImage”).getAttribute(“alt”);

// remove first part

remove = “210.1 Q U I N I E L A tve Jornada “;

page210noIntro = page210.replace(remove, “”);

// Take date off

page210noYear = page210noIntro.replace(/\d{2}\s\d{2}\s\w{3}\s\d{4}\s/,”");

// should be the line to extract score and status

page210Res = page210noYear.match(/(\s(-|1|X|2)\s(FINAL|-)\s)/g);

// Build the table

// start a for loop to run through the elemnts of the array

for (i=0;i<page210Res.length;i++){

// write a row for each entry

document.write(‘<TR><TD>’ + page210Res[i] + ‘</TD></TR>’)}

</script></TABLE></body></html>

This did the job fine, If you like have a look.

When I tried to import this into excel, all went pear-shaped! Excel could only read the first line of the table and nothing else. AAARRGHHH!!! was my first reaction, until I thought about it. Excel might have problems with client side javascript. Don’t ask me why, but that was my first thought.

(It could have been anything to be honest, maybe even some security setting in Excel!)

Again, I was sat back a bit. The next and last thing I wanted to try, I sto do the same thing completely in PHP. As this is a server-side language, I thought that excel must be able to render its contents.

This is the PHP script I wrote:

$page = “http://www.rtve.es/tve/teletexto/200/210_0001.htm”;

// read from where to where

$start = ‘alt=”210′;

$end = ‘>’;

// open the page

$fp = fopen( $page, ‘r’ );

$cont = “”;

// read the contents

while( !feof( $fp ) ) {

$buf = trim( fgets( $fp, 4096 ) );

$cont .= $buf;

}

// get html contents

preg_match( “/$start(.*)$end/s”, $cont, $match );

// tag contents

$contents = $match[ 1 ];

//Start stripping text
$remove = ‘/.1 Q U I N I E L A tve Jornada /’;
$replacement = ”;
$contents = preg_replace($remove, $replacement, $contents);
$remDate = ‘/\d{2}\s\d{2}\s\w{3}\s\d{4}\s/’;
$contents = preg_replace($remDate, $replacement, $contents);
$addBR = ‘/\s(-|1|X|2)\s(FINAL|-|1ºT|2ºT|DES)\s/’;
preg_match_all($addBR, $contents, $array, PREG_SET_ORDER);
$count = count($array);

echo “<font face=’arial’ size=’8′>”;
echo “<table border=’1′ width=’250′>”;
echo “<tr><td width=’125′><B>Resultado</B></td><td width=’125′><B>Status</B></td></TR>”;
for($i = 0; $i <= $count; $i = $i + 1)
{
echo “<tr><td>{$array[$i][1]}</td><td>{$array[$i][2]}</td></TR>”;
}
echo “</table>”;

I’m sure that I can reduce a lot of code here and merge a few regular expressions. Maybe, Maybe not.

To my big surprise it did. It rendered the table very nicely, without the ugly include I needed with the previous solution. And best of all, I could import the data directly in excel!

Job Done, Mission accomplished. Last weekend was the first test and we both enjoyed watching the “minuto y resultado“  television show, with the excel sheet on the side updating itself every minute, and showing us how each goal influences our bets. Really nice.

(by the way, I play now for over 6 years , and managed to win 20€ once!)

EDIT: I believe that I can automate the import of my bets a little bit more. Maybe a button in firefox, that saves the bets to the text file…. To be continued…

Google Maps – My First Map-App Part 2

Well, after a few days of playing with the Google map code, I really started to understand how it worked. I have managed to add most of the things I wanted and I am now at the stage of removing some errors or mistakes I made. Also I am wondering how I can add a layer on which users can plot their own bicycle routes. This would be very nice, because this way it will have different uses for different visitors.

The to do list from the previous post tuned into:

• Change the icons. Especially the one that locates me.
• See if it is possible to obtain the xml stream from Bicing, and add all the stations to my map.
• Add info balloons for the Bicing stations, showing information about the free slots, and remaining bicycles.
• Add an overlay with all Barcelona cycling lanes. (you can only find big PDF maps with them, since there are only a few cycling lanes in Barcelona I decided to make my own overlay for that.
• Add an overlay with nice (touristic) cycling routes.
• Add user layer, I would like all visitors with a Google account to be able to add and save their routes to this map.
• load general map when location is not found (now showing grey screen)
• add message when (part of the) page is loading

I have had quite some positive reactions on this idea. People who have seen it generally like it a lot. As soon as I’m done Ill make sure the link is available!

Google Maps – My First Map

I have had several attempts at playing with . With playing with Google, I mean use the opportunities that they give people to work/play with their tools and API’s.

Even though the whole copyright and ownership discussions, I still think it is a great chance for people like me to have a go at developing mash-ups of web applications in a fast and easy way. After receiving my eee pc, I started looking into web based applications. Mainly because of the limited storage capacity of the EEE.

I found that there was a lot of them! To be honest, most of the ones I decided to use where Google’s. The main reason to use these was the fact that I can include all, or most of them on the IGoogle page, and have an overview of everything, even with a tiny screen.

When I was looking around, I found that Google Gears offers off-line application access which is really nice.I also stumbled upon something that I would really like, and could not find anywhere. At least in the shape I’d want to use it.

I’m talking about a map here. I “needed” a map, that would center on my position (without GPS) and show me the Barcelona Bicing stations (big public bicycle project here in Barcelona) and bicycle lanes around.

The first issue was solved quickly, I found the Google Lattitude Gadget, which shows me a small map on my iGoogle page. Strangely, most of the times it does not work and when it does, it sometimes freezes my browser. This gadget made me think that geo-location using the wireless signal does work, as most of the times, it pinpoints my position within a 50 m. radius. More than enough for my purpose!

Also I looked at the Geode Add-on for Firefox, providing this functionality. I decided to build a map using that, as the code to write to get a location is extremely easy:

if (navigator.geolocation)
   navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(pos){ // position found
        alert( pos.latitude + " -- " + pos.longitude );
      }, function(){ // No position found
        alert( "Error getting your position. Sorry!!");
   });

For the people interested in where that information comes from, have a look at SkyHook, they provide the location data, coming from a huge database with access points, cell phone towers etc.

After a while (I am not a Java-script expert;) playing with the map and the geode location details I managed to build a map that centers on my position.

This however, was not something new, I wanted to give my map a use. So I decided to add a layer on top. I wanted a layer from the Google maps / My Maps to show. I built a map there with markers for my home, work and 3 or 4 other “interesting places”. Strangely enough that was very easy. Even adding a little check box on the page, switching the layer on or off worked fine.

The result was not too spectacular though. A map, showing me a few boring reddish google markers. The plan evolved to make sure I am not re-inventing the wheel (a lot of us tend to do that far too much!).

As explained, I wanted this map to become a handy tool for every Barcelona cyclist. The bicing stands, The bicycle lanes, maybe even specialised shops or beautiful sites, worth a stop or a picture are the minimal I wanted to show.

The to do list evolved to:

• Change the icons. Especially the one that locates me.
• See if it is possible to obtain the xml stream from Bicing, and add all the stations to my map.
• Add info balloons for the Bicing stations, showing information about the free slots, and remaining bicycles.
• Add an overlay with all Barcelona cycling lanes. (you can only find big PDF maps with them, since there are only a few cycling lanes in Barcelona I decided to make my own overlay for that.
• Add an overlay with nice (touristic) cycling routes.

For the moment this is what I am working on in my spare time. Ill keep this blog updated….

work of art in progress

My new toy

That (previous story) is how I ended up with yet another new toy, the eee-pc 4g/7001.

This is her, on the left. Even though the picture does not really show the design very well, I liked it because it gives a good idea of its size. It is really small and not heavy at all.

This ee pc in particular, the 4G / 701 is one of the older models and come to me with the following specs:

• Display 7″  (800*480px)
• CPU & Chipset Intel Mobile CPU & chipset
• WLAN WiFi 802.11b/g
• Memory 512MB, DDR2
• Storage 4GB S.S.D. (Solid-State Disk)
• Web-Cam 0.3 Mega Pixel Video camera
• Built-in stereo speaker, Built-in microphone
• Battery Life 3 hrs (4 cells)
• Dimension & Weight 22.5 x 16.4 x 2.15~3.5 cm.

It came pre-installed with the Xandros OS, a linux build for the eee-pc.

To be honest, and I have the machine for 3 days now, I am very happy with it. There are two things that I can imagine would bother a lot of people. One is the Keyboard (I’m lucky I have small fingers) and the other one is the screensize, which is 7″ with a resolution of 800*480.

The operating system Xandros, is not too great either. It looks a bit like a children OS.

This is the first thing I have changed. I first tried installing Windows 7 on it, but ran in too many problems (mainly booting the installer from USB… if anyone made that work… pls let me know!).

Now I installed “EasyPeasy”, a Ubuntu based linux distribution that is designed for small displays. This worked fine from the start. Booted fine from USB, installed with no problems and recognised most hardware except for the webcam.
(looks a lot better!)

The screen is nicely layed out and I am very happy with the system. On my laptop I always use to have a small Ubuntu partition, so it is not really new to me. This new window manager makes working with a 7″ screen a lot less painless, even though some (Ubuntu system) windows are too big, leaving the Cancel-Ok buttons hidden.

I am still fine tuning the system. Taking out stuff I do not use, and adding applications, I already miss.

My first plan, when the machine is set up 100% (I’m afraid, really afraid it will never be) Is to play with Google Maps. I have seen some really nice Iphone applications that make use of the Iphones’ GPS. I would like to see if it is possible to obtain the same results and applications using the Gmaps API, in combination with the Firefox Geode location add-on.

To be continued….

Killer Game

The last couple of months, I was involved in a violent spree of killing in my office. We launched a cluedo-type killing game with about 90 employees and with an Asus 4G 701 eee-pc as the main prize.

To be very honest, it was a lot of fun. Also quite some paranoia, and in general I believe this game caused an increase in productivity (as your desk was one of the few places you could not be killed).

I teamed up with a  friend, and we made a deal. She really needed the eee pc, as her laptop was broken. Because she’d use it mainly for watching m0vies, and facebooking I offered her a deal. I would fix and upgrade her laptop, and I’d get the eee pc. She took the deal (’cause she’s my friend, or ’cause its a good deal) and we started the game.

This is the Story:

ISC KILLER – The Santiago Nasar Story

The nickname I used in the game explains how my expectations where set:

El día en que lo iban a matar, Santiago Nasar se levantó a las 5:30 de la mañana para esperar…“

Since I did not expect to stay a live much more than one day, I decided to take the name from Santiago Nasar, the main character from a book. The book he’s from (Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada – Gabriel García Márquez) starts with the above phrase. “Appropriate“, I thought.

The first round went smooth…. My first kill did not take too long; she fell on the second day of the game. What I did not know by then, is the importance of my next action (or the lack of it).

The plan was good. I would let my victim alive and watch how people start dying (as I knew she was good) and on the last day of the first round I would finish her off.

As I said, the plan was good, but even a perfect assassin makes mistakes. The Friday the first round ended, I went to work a bit early (I know, strange, but then again, there is a reward at the end) and had my weapon (a balloon prepared. What I did not knew is that my victim would be in a training the whole morning!

It was obvious I was unable to kill twice in the first round, which left me with the idea I was removed from the game.

Right after the first round, I went for a two week Christmas holiday. Relaxed and without any fear when turning corners.

When I came back from my days off, I was convinced I was not in the game anymore, and I was quite happy to find out I still was. This made me decide to take it a bit more seriously and start killing…

I used my twitter feed (http://twitter.com/alexkbcn) to log the rest of the game, this would help me to talk less about it (which is helpful in this game) and have people follow what’s going on. Resuming:

ISC Killer game, a assassination Game we play in our office just entered the second round!…. guess what.. I’m still in! Santiago Nasar 1:44 AM Jan 13th.

One victim down! 1:44 AM Jan 13th.

ok second victim just dropped….. 15 to go! 11:16 PM Jan 13th.

received name of next victim. Don’t know the guy and I’m not sure if that makes it easier or more difficult 1:40 AM Jan 14th.

ok, found a picture of the guy 5:42 AM Jan 19th.

got a spy on him now, hope to get him today!! 4:02 AM Jan 20th.

got tipped that he was leaving… followed the poor guy down, and … Paf! Dead by a Beach-Towel! 5:42 AM Jan 20th.

aiaiai! got my next victim… he/she is a bit too close and I’m not sure whether  to use a spy in this case. 6:46 AM Jan 20th.

… kill someone with a Santa Claus hat??!! 6:48 AM Jan 20th.

looking around the office for a Santa hat.. 6:52 AM Jan 20th.

Santa hat located 12:41 AM Jan 21st.

Santa hat in the bag, and awaiting my chance. 5:43 AM Jan 21st.

where is my victims’ schedule? 12:35 AM Jan 22nd.

almost got killed yesterday! almost!! Yesterday evening, about to leave, I found a guy waiting suspiciously at the door of the office 12:36 AM Jan 22nd.

Monday! 3 people left in the game 9:11 PM Feb 1st.

almost got killed yesterday! almost!! Yesterday evening, about to leave, I found a guy waiting suspiciously at the door of the office 12:36 AM Jan 22nd.

so we called that one… “doing overtime” 12:37 AM Jan 22nd.

followed my victim out for a cigarette yesterday evening…. when leaving the room… Bang!! number 4 down. 10:50 PM Jan 22nd.

awaiting message with new victim. 10:50 PM Jan 22nd.

new victim received…. Have to kill him/her on a different floor, with a BIBLE!! 12:35 AM Jan 23rd.

new victim! couldn’t get any worse… it’s the guy sitting next to me!?! 10:59 PM Jan 27th.

weapon to use: A monopoly Board! that will be tough, as none of the expats I work with brought their monopoly boards along to Spain! 11:00 PM Jan 27th.

cutting pasting a printed monopoly board now. 12:36 AM Jan 28th.

where can I get a Monopoly Board?? (without paying for it obviously)… after all, I’m still Dutch! 5:54 AM Jan 29th.

ok monopoly board located… I LOVE TWITTER!!! 6:52 AM Jan 29th.

Monday! 3 people left in the game 9:11 PM Feb 1st.

ok 2 people left! Waited for my victim in the staircase for over an hour!! Worth the wile though! 1:42 AM Feb 2nd.

managed to agree on a cease-fire for today… both me, and the last killer left need a break! 1:43 AM Feb 2nd.

soooo nice when there is no need to worry! 6:27 AM Feb 2nd.

ok, tomorrow the game will end.. (I hope) 7:13 AM Feb 2nd.

spent my morning waiting in a staircase, only to find out my victim already passed-by. Better luck next time 10:29 PM Feb 2nd.

arghh, my victim came in 3 minutes before me!! all the waiting for nothing 4:27 AM Feb 3rd.

now working from a different floor, as my killer is posting in front of my office. 4:27 AM Feb 3rd.

jeeez, she’s patient 4:31 AM Feb 3rd.

had a long wait this morning! after one hour she came in and escaped me through the stairs…. Bad luck again! 12:22 AM Feb 4th.

Yesterday, my absence at my desk, even though everyone knew where I was, caused a huge problem!! 12:24 AM Feb 4th.

..and this problem yesterday made me decide to give up. After my long wait this morning, I asked my killer if she could make an end to it. 12:25 AM Feb 4th.

and she just did. 12:25 AM Feb 4th.

Último momento, Santiago Nasar a muerto” 12:26 AM Feb 4th.

Fon-Tastic! – update

Well, today (actually my last day before x-mas leave… ) in the office we did quite a lot of testing (since we also did quite a lot of drinking afterwards, I will not be able to tell what we exactly did;)

I found however, that the DD-WRT firmeware for the fonera (now using V 24 SP1) is a bit different then DD_WRT for other routers. My friend MF who uses DD-WRT on a netgear router saw that with the fonera it is not possible to put the router in repeater mode. (this is what he uses to make the router act as a repeater… duh!!).

This made us think it would be impossible to make the router repeat the wireless signal to wireless and the we would need to be physically connected (cable) to the router to be able to connect to our “distant” accesspoint”.

We then did some tests using the different modes to be able to make the router repeat the signal of the access point it was connected to, while we where both connected though a wireless virtual interface.

This works now and I have set this up at home. It works great! My router connects to a router closeby, but not close enough for my laptop IPW3945 Wireless card to pick it up. I have attached a windsurfer homemade antenna pointing to the accesspoint which increased signal quality by allmost 20%!!!

As this was my end objective, Ill leave things as they are now. At least untill my friendly neighbour (offering his open ADSL connection and router access) makes a change on his router*.

Ill post some pictures of my setup soon! (…)

* He should be very thankfull, as his router would disconnect from the ISP very frequently, leaving him/us without internet for hours or sometimes days. This has been sorted now, thanks to a small script that runs on my router, pings google, and if the ping fails, runs the connect command.