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Using python to control a phone with bluetooth

I would like to know if there are any API's for python to programmatically control a phone, like starting and ending calls, but also to record conversations.
I would also like to use the Headphones and Mic of the computer to talk over the phone.
Any info would be great, I tried googling for something, but nothing useful came up.

Be careful when using PyBluez! The results will actually depend on the BT-USB dongle you are using. Depending on the hardware(the BT chip in there), PyBluez will use one or another BT stack - for example there was one from WIDCOMM. Results will vary, as PyBluez is actually wrapping around those stacks - all of which are far from complete.
So, when you have a working project, be sure to know what actual BT stack you were using :)
For Python audio stuff, you could try this.

PyBluez is an effort to create python wrappers around system Bluetooth resources to allow Python developers to easily and quickly create Bluetooth applications.
Unfortunately I've not found a page dedicated to its features, but it could be a good starting point, whether everything you need is in its feature set, or if you could build your application upon it by extending it.
http://code.google.com/p/pybluez/

What is the Python equivalent of Lame MP3 Converter?

I need to convert mp3 audio files to 64kbps on the server side.
Right now, I am using subprocess to call lame, but I wonder if there are any good alternatives?

There seems to be a slightly old thread on that topic here: http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/72083-lame-mp3-encoder-for-python/
The final conclusion was to create a custom binding to lame_enc.dll via Python->C bindings.
The reason for that conclusion was that the existing binding libraries (pymedia/py-lame) have not been maintained.
Unfortunately the guy didn't get it to work :)
Maybe you should continue to use subprocess. You could take advantage of that choice, abstract your encoding at a slightly higher level, and reuse the code/strategy to optionally execute other command line encoding tools (such as ogg or shn tools).
I've seen several audio ripping tools adopt that strategy.

I've been working with Python Audio Tools, which is capable of make conversions between different audio formats.
I've already used it to convert .wav files into mp3, .flac and .m4a.

If you want to use LAME to encode your MP3s (and not PyMedia), you can always use ctypes to wrap the lame encoder DLL (or .so if you are on Linux). The exact wrapper code you'll use is going to be tied to the LAME DLL version (and there are many of these flying around, unfortunately), so I can't really give you any example, but the ctypes docs should be clear enough about wrapping DLLs.

Caveat: relatively new programmer here and I haven't had a need to convert audio files before.
However, if I understand what you mean by server-side, correctly, you might be looking for a good approach to manage mass conversions, and your interest in a python solution might be in part to be able to better manage the resource use or integrate into your processing chain. I had a similar problem/goal, which I resolved using a mix of Merlyn's recommendation and Celery. I don't use django-celery, but if this is for a django-based project, that might appeal to you as well. You can find out more about celery here:
http://celeryproject.org/community.html
http://ask.github.com/celery/getting-started/introduction.html
Depending on what you have setup already, there may be a little upfront time needed to get setup. To take advantage of everything you'll need rabbitmq/erlang installed, but if you follow the guide on the sites above, it's pretty quick now.
Here's an example of how I use celery with subprocess to address a similar issue. Similar to the poster's suggestion above, I use subprocess to call ffmpeg, which is as good as it gets for video tools, and probably would actually be as good as it gets for audio tools too. I'm including a bit more than necessary here to give you a feel for how you might configure your own a little.
#example of configuring an option, here I'm selecting how much I want to adjust bitrate
#based on my input's format
def generate_command_line_method(self):
if self.bitrate:
compression_dict = {'.mp4':1.5, '.rm':1.5, '.avi': 1.2,
'.mkv': 1.2, '.mpg': 1, '.mpeg':1}
if self.ext.lower() in compression_dict.keys():
compression_factor = compression_dict[self.ext.lower()]
#Making a list to send to the command line through subprocess
ffscript = ['ffmpeg',
'-i', self.fullpath,
'-b', str(self.bitrate * compression_factor),
'-qscale', '3', #quality factor, based on trial and error
'-g', '90', #iframe roughly per 3 seconds
'-intra',
outpath
]
return ffscript
#The celery side of things, I'd have a celeryconfig.py file in the
#same directory as the script that points to the following function, so my task
#queue would know the specifics of the function I'll call through it. You can
#see example configs on the sites above, but it's basically just going to be
#a tuple that says, here are the modules I want you to look in, celery, e.g.
#CELERY_MODULES = ("exciting_asynchronous_module.py",). This file then contains,
from celery.decorators import task
from mymodule import myobject
from subprocess import Popen
#task(time_limit=600) #say, for example, 10 mins
def run_ffscript(ffscript):
some_result = Popen(ffscript).wait()
#Note: we'll wait because we don't want to compound
#the asynchronous aspect (we don't want celery to launch the subprocess and think
#it has finished.
#Then I start up celery/rabbitmq, and got into my interactive shell (ipython shown):
#I'll have some generator feeding these ffscripts command lines, then process them
#with something like:
In[1]: for generated_ffscript in generator:
run_ffscript.delay(generated_ffscript)
Let me know if this was useful to you. I'm relatively new to answering questions here and not sure if my attempts are helpful or not. Good luck!

Well, Gstreamer has the "ugly plugin" lamemp3enc and there are python bindings for Gstreamer (gst-python 1.2, supports python 3.3). I haven't tried going this route myself so I'm not really in a position to recommend anything... Frankly, a subprocess solution seems a lot simpler, if not "cleaner", to me.

Accessing a Panatone Huey via Python

I have a Panatone Huey, a monitor calibration probe (device you attach to the monitor, and it gives you colour readings) - I want to get readings from the device in Python.
Having never written such a device driver before, I'm not sure where to start.
I've found are two open-source C/C++ projects that interface with the Heuy - ArgyllCMS and mcalib.
ArgyllCMS comes with a spotread command which returns readings from the device, although it only functions as an interactive command line tool, so running it via subprocess will not (easily) work.
The code ArgyllCMS uses to communicate with the device is in spectro/huey.c
Not tried it (only just found it while writing this question), but mcalib contains much less code, mainly just heuy.cpp - however it has a worrying number of FIXME comments and incomplete methods, and the code appears to have been automatically generated (unhelpful variable names)
There seems to be three options:
Modify spotread to work without any interactive prompts, call it via subprocess
Create a C-based Python module around huey.c or huey.cpp
Re-implement the interface using something like PyUSB
Being much more familiar with Python, I'm tempted to use PyUSB, but will this be substantially more work than wrapping existing code with the Python C API? Is there anything obvious in either of the C implementations that will not be easily doable in PyUSB?

Given the existence of spotread the easiest (though perhaps not the best) way to proceed would be to use pexpect. It allows you to interact with other command-line programs.

'proper' & reliable way to get all installed windows programs in Python?

I've seen numerous ways of retrieving installed programs on WinXP+ in python. What is the proper and most robust way of doing this?
Currently I'm accessing HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall and reading each of the keys from there to get a list. (I've been told this isn't the proper way of doing things) I've seen examples of using WMI/Win32com to do this as well but have seen comments along with those implementations that WMI might be turned off on certain machines and that it's not a very reliable solution.
Is there a method which is both proper, and reliable to get a list of installed programs? None of the WMI examples I've seen have worked on this machine (hence my reluctance to use it, I'm only running WinFLP; which is a stripped vers of XP.)
I seem to have also found the TechNet article which my searches have turned up which is provided to a similar answer on my question: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ScriptCenter/en-us/154dcae0-57a1-4c6e-8f9f-b215904485b7 Note that Vista/7 listed under Platforms very clearly says "Nope"...won't work. So the WMI deal seems like it's a no-go...
Being able to retrieve the installed path would be an upside as well, as right now my current code does not account for someone installing on another drive, or in a non-default directory.

The technet script you refer to perfectly works under Win 7 (with Python 2.5 32bits), and I really cannot see why it shouldn't.
Actually, the real weakness of the WMI approach is that it only lists products installed through the Windows Installer. So it's will not give you the full list. Many programs use different installers. Just compare the results between the (Select * from Win32_Product) and what is displayed in the Control Panel. So, unless you are sure that the program that interset you in your listing are installed with MSI, WMI is definitely not an answer.
So it may be not very pythonic, but the best way, as far as I know, is to use the registry as you've done. This is actually how the control panel works, so at least Windows considers it to be the most robust way to do it.

WMI is the correct way to look for installed programs as it will work across different versions of the OS and will be supported going forward. Looking for specific regkeys may work fine for specific versions of Windows but is not guaranteed to work in the future. Here is some simple python code to check for Box Sync which I just tried on Windows 7. Note that not all fields will be available for every product so be aware these will be 'None.'
import wmi
w = wmi.WMI()
for p in w.Win32_Product():
if 'Box, Inc.' == p.Vendor and p.Caption and 'Box Sync' in p.Caption:
print 'Installed {}'.format(p.Version)
The downside I have seen with WMI is it is very slow to start up.

Is there a cross-platform python low-level API to capture or generate keyboard events?

I am trying to write a cross-platform python program that would run in the background, monitor all keyboard events and when it sees some specific shortcuts, it generates one or more keyboard events of its own. For example, this could be handy to have Ctrl-# mapped to "my.email#address", so that every time some program asks me for my email address I just need to type Ctrl-#.
I know such programs already exist, and I am reinventing the wheel... but my goal is just to learn more about low-level keyboard APIs. Moreover, the answer to this question might be useful to other programmers, for example if they want to startup an SSH connection which requires a password, without using pexpect.
Thanks for your help.
Note: there is a similar question but it is limited to the Windows platform, and does not require python. I am looking for a cross-platform python api. There are also other questions related to keyboard events, but apparently they are not interested in system-wide keyboard events, just application-specific keyboard shortcuts.
Edit: I should probably add a disclaimer here: I do not want to write a keylogger. If I needed a keylogger, I could download one off the web a anyway. ;-)

There is no such API. My solution was to write a helper module which would use a different helper depending on the value of os.name.
On Windows, use the Win32 extensions.
On Linux, things are a bit more complex since real OSes protect their users against keyloggers[*]. So here, you will need a root process which watches one of[] the handles in /dev/input/. Your best bet is probably looking for an entry below /dev/input/by-path/ which contains the strings "kbd" or "keyboard". That should work in most cases.
[*]: Jeez, not even my virus/trojan scanner will complain when I start a Python program which hooks into the keyboard events...

As the guy that wrote the original pykeylogger linux port, I can say there isn't really a cross platform one. Essentially I rewrote the pyhook API for keyboard events to capture from the xserver itself, using the record extension. Of course, this assumes the record extension is there, loaded into the x server.
From there, it's essentially just detecting if you're on windows, or linux, and then loading the correct module for the OS. Everything else should be identical.
Take a look at the pykeylogger source, in pyxhook.py for the class and implimentation. Otherwise, just load that module, or pyhook instead, depending on OS.

I've made a few tests on Ubuntu 9.10. pykeylogger doesn't seems to be working. I've tryied to change the /etc/X11/xorg.conf in order to allow module to be loaded but in that specific version of ubuntu there is no xorg.conf. So, in my opiniion pykelogger is NOT working on ubuntu 9.10 !!

Cross-platform UI libraries such as Tkinter or wxPython have API for keyboard events. Using these you could map «CTRL» + «#» to an action.

On linux, you might want to have a look at pykeylogger. For some strange reason, reading from /dev/input/.... doesn't always work when X is running. For example it doesn't work on ubuntu 8.10. Pykeylogger uses xlib, which works exactly when the other way doesn't. I'm still looking into this, so if you find a simpler way of doing this, please tell me.

Under Linux it's possible to do this quite easily with Xlib. See this page for details:
http://www.larsen-b.com/Article/184.html