A long time ago I was active in the local scouting group. To earn some money to keep our group in a healthy financial position we organized a so called vedettweekend. It's an event where people can have a beer, vedett obviously spin a dance, enjoy a spaghetti and have a good chat with your friends.

I always played with the idea of creating a social media wall on one of the projectors we rented for the event. But I never found/made time for it, until today.. My youngest brother is who's interests are overlapping with mine brought up …

As I already wrote about in the past I have a raspberry pi running at home. I do also have a VPS running somewhere on the interweb for an owncloud instance.

Being a sysadmin I wanted to know when my home devices become unreachable and when the owncloud instance is down. By mail in the first place if possible by sms message for free in the ideal world.

And guess what, I managed to reach the ideal world to monitor my instances. Over here I'll describe how I managed to do so.

msmtp

First of all you need to install …

Recently I bumped into GTalkSMS when I was surfing the net for manuals on irssi & bitlbee using to chat so I could move away from pidgin.

This GTalkSMS tool is quite cool. When am at work or at home my mobile isn't always in my sight. Therefore it could happen someone has to call me a few times before I answer the call.

(biggest frustration of the girlfriend meaning you have to answer your call within a time period of 3 seconds because you're working in IT)

Using this nifty tool you can control your mobile through your favorite chat …

On this page I will describe the way I went trough to configure an sms gateway using a laptop, huawei modem, falcom A2D-1 or the option Globetrotter hardware using the open source software kannel & playsms.

The main goal of this project was related to the scouting movement in Belgium I'm active. We wanted to interrogate all of our members who were on a start weekend of the next scouting year. To do this we had the idea to use the sms communication channel. This because almost every youngster has the possibility to send sms messages without a big effort.

To …