agit8.org

Ipad or New Phone?

johannes — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:50:27 +0000

Unlike most people I have spoken to, I have actually found a place for an ipad in my little gadget universe. I can see it being a more capable replacement for my Nokia N800 which is now getting a little long in the tooth. The only issue I have is that the Ipad is a device that is tightly locked down by Apple (do you hear that all those Android Tablet manufacturers?). That was the reason I steered clear of the Iphone in the first place.

At the same time, my Nokia E71 is now slowly dying (charger pin getting loose so that it does not charge properly anymore). I have been thinking maybe I should go with one of those giant-screened Android phones like the HTC Desire or the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. Buying one of these phones will be around the same as buying a 3G Ipad. Hmmm!

Linux Mint 9 Isadora on HP Mini Note 2133

johannes — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:42:12 +0000

I have jumped the bandwagon with the updates this time and downloaded and installed Linux Mint 9 (Isadora) on my old HP Mini Note 2133 which has been a testing bed for all sorts of OS and software. Upon completion, however I have noticed a couple of important issues:

The K3520 Vodafone dongle does not get recognised by the network manager anymore. When I plug it in, it shows up as a CDROM drive, but does not get unmounted an then used as a modem like it was with Linux Mint 8 (Helena).
The Interface seems to be really slow as to make it nearly unusable. The delay between clicking on a program to launch it and the actual launch is around 3-5 seconds. This is unacceptable.

To keep myself sane, I think I will just go back to Helena for now and be happy that everything works well enough to use the netbook on the move.

Linux Mint on HP2133

johannes — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:26:02 +0000

I have not used my HP 2133 for a few months now. I used to use it a lot for writing documents and stuff on the bus or train during commutes, but that was only after I got a larger battery for the laptop. The original battery was for all intents and purposes useless. For a laptop that was designed to be used as a “netbook”, being connected to the internet when away from home, (the marketing deparment? at) HP decided it was a great idea to put a 3 cell battery in the unit.

So in a little over an hour you go from full charge to nothing just by using the laptop the way it was intended to be used. So despite its small size, the 2133 was never really designed to be too far away from a charger for too long. It is almost like having a car like a Honda Jazz with a petrol tank the size of a coffee cup. “Yes it is frugal, sir, but it will only go for a half a kilometre no matter how you drive it.”

Recently I discovered the wonderful Linux Mint 8 (Helena), while searching for a desktop linux distro to install as a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro. Despite all the misgivings that I have had in the past for the various Linux distros, I must say that they have been improving all the time. The last time I tried to install Linux on the 2133 was when Ubuntu 9.10 came out. What a disaster that was. Wifi did not want to work, then I went back to 9.04 but found that I could just not get my Vodafone Prepaid Mobile Broadband stick to work (K3520). In the end, out of frustration and spite I decided to whack XP back on and because I needed a little mobile word processor.

Linux Mint seems to run with a little bit of lag sometimes, but overall the experience has made my faith in Linux desktop distro strong again. Using Helena I could use my Vodafone Prepaid Broadband to connect to the net and wifi worked right out of the box.

If you need a decent desktop distro that looks half decent (who like brown anyway?) and works well out of the box for your 2133, then I can recommend Linux Mint 8 (Helena).

Working with my head in the clouds

johannes — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:58:18 +0000

I have been working with a lot of documents since late last year and I must say that over the last few months I’ve grown accustomed to working on my documents online using Google Documents. It is the one application from Google that I have used consistently and constantly and I think it is simply brilliant.

Sure, I have had a few funny formatting issues that have cropped up every now and then when I upload and convert microsoft document formats such as PPS and DOCX, but they are minor issues compared to the convenience of having your documents accessible from anywhere and the ability to instantly edit and share them with people of your choice, think collaborators and people who might want to know what your thoughts are on a particular document.

The recent ability to upload any kind of file has added an extra level of convenience. I have been able to upload zipped packages containing documents and images for particular events and classes without having to convert them to Google Document format.

The convenience of editing your documents at home and then downloading and distributing them where you need them (such as lesson plans and tutorials for my students in the class room) has been the winning feature for me. It definitely beats even carrying them on USB sticks and HDDs wherever you go. If you have not yet been using Google Documents for managing your documents, then you definitely should!

Running Flash projector in kiosk mode

johannes — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:06:55 +0000

Recently I created a work using Flash to play video file to create a computer-generated narrative by playing the files in certain orders. When done writing the ActionScript for the project and sure that it was going to work as designed, I came across another problem: how to install it in the gallery space so that it can be running by just turning the projector on and booting the computer. Due to the fact that the space in which the work is installed is run by mostly non-techies, the ability to make the work run just by turning it on is a requirement.

The problem that emerged later during installation was that to make the Flash projector run fullscreen on boot up was quite difficult. I tried using task scheduler to make the application run at full screen after the auto-logon feature of Windows XP, but the taskbar always appeared in front of the projector. I even tried to tweak the registry to hide the the taskbar on startup without success. In the end, I managed to run the projector fullscreen on bootup by putting a shortcut to the projector in the startup folder in the start menu.

With the shortcut installed in the startup folder of the start menu, Windows XP will boot and the computer will automatically logon to the desktop and then when the sequence is completed, the projector will be started at fullscreen.

As it turned out, running the projector at fullscreen in a fully-automated sequence was the least of my problems. I also had to deal with the memory leak issue in Flash player 9 and 10, especially with the use of the timer object. The whole installation would grind to a halt after a couple of hours due to these problems.

Browsing sweetly with Google Chrome on Mac OS X

johannes — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 08:39:44 +0000

Since I have been having some performance issues with Firefox 3.1.2 on my Windows XP laptop, I switched to using Google Chrome experimentally, to see if it was some issues with my hardware or just something I picked up from upgrading to a newer version of Firefox. During the experiment, I grew to love the snappy performance of Google Chrome on my Centrino Dell laptop. It seemed to just start without much hesitation and it would quickly chew through my browsing history as I am typing a URL, without the hiccup that Firefox seems to go through at startup.

Naturally when I went back to using my MacBook running Leopard 10.5.8 I felt that I was missing something. Even though browsing the net with Firefox on the MacBook was generally pretty snappy, I felt a longing for something similar to the Chrome experience on Windows XP. Since I heard that the Chromium team was releasing experimental builds for Chrome on Mac OS X, I thought I would download it and check it out.

I went to the Chromium website and downloaded a zip file containing the latest build of Chromium (version 4.0.223.4 (29381)). I unzipped the file and run it from the folder on the desktop and it asked to be the default browser, so I let it be the default browser. After that, I decided to move it from the desktop to the Application folder and just put a link in the Dock so I can run it without having to search through the folder.

Keeping in mind that this was an experimental build, I was prepared to encounter some bugs and crashes, but so far I have not found any serious ones. The only thing I have noticed is that it makes my MacBook spin the fan hard whenever Flash content was encountered. While this could be a bug in Chromium for Mac OS X, having worked with the Flash player for a while and having witnessed its voracious appetite for system resources on OS X, I am not at all surprised if the bug is in the Flash player itself rather than in the Chromium browser.

All I can say is that this build of Chromium is almost ready for prime time and I have been using it daily for the last four weeks without any major issues. It kind of makes me forget to use Firefox and Stainless for a while. It would be really nice, though, to be able to import all your settings (cookies, bookmarks and all) from Firefox into Chromium.

Photoshop on Atom 330 Dual Core machine

johannes — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:13:27 +0000

In the interest of being green, I have been looking at the idea of building a lightweight machine with a reasonably low power consumption to do simple tasks computing tasks, like updating a blog, writing documents and simple editing of multimedia projects and occasionally running software for art exhibitions. When I first looked around the market, the obvious choice was a computer built around Intel’s Atom processor. It has all the right lows, such as low price and low wattage, but unfortunately it also has a low in performance as well. There are also solutions available from vendors such as VIA, but having owned an HP 2133 that was built around the Via Nanobook platform, I am not convinced that it will be one that can easily run multiple operating systems without a major effort to find drivers, etc.

For the sake of simplicity, I decided to just build around a motherboard from Foxconn with an Intel Atom processor 330 (dual core) built-in, or rather soldered onto the board. The model number for the board is 45CSX and it has 1 slot for DDR2 RAM with a 2GB ceiling. To house the board I also bought a Foxconn RS-338 case which comes with a 150W PSU and enough space for a 3.5″ HDD and a DVDRW drive. Since RAM is so cheap these days, I bought the maximum 2GB size for $40. All up, the rig cost a little under $300 and I decided to mate it to a 24″ widescreen 1920×1080 LCD from ViewSonic.

After installing Windows XP SP3 (yes, I know I should have installed Linux, but I wanted to test the performance of the CS3 suite on this rig), I installed the Adobe CS3 suite to test the machine and see how it performs. Upon running Photoshop CS3 and even together with AfterEffects CS3, I came to the conclusion that this machine is not as bad as it’s been cracked up to be. Photoshop launch seems to be quite snappy and AfterEffects seems to run just fine (takes just as long to launch on my MacBook).

Everything seems to work fine and yes, there was a performance difference compared to my MacBook with a C2D 2.16Ghz processor, but for something that costs a little over a quarter the price I think it is a quite acceptable trade off. So unless you work with Photoshop and AfterEffects in a heavy-duty production, I can recommend this setup as a secondary machine.

In case you are interested, I tested Photoshop on this machine with a file that has 134 layers, each with a mask of its own. AfterEffects was tested with a six layer 1:30:00 length animation.

Update your Wordpress installation before it gets hacked

johannes — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:41:50 +0000

A couple of friends have got their Wordpress blogs hacked over the past week. If you are running an older version of Wordpress, you should update it to the latest immediately.

Working with mod mpeg2 streams

johannes — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:35:36 +0000

Earlier this year, I purchased my first tapeless camera, the Canon FS11. I purchased it to be able to keep an ultra compact video camera with me that will not weigh my shoulders down too much and at the same time I wanted something that would not lighten my wallet a whole lot. The FS11 seems like an ideal candidate because it is reasonably priced and has the expanded built in storage with a possibility for expansion via SDHC cards. It is also nice and compact in size. As a nice bonus, it also has a microphone input.

The problem with these types of cameras is, as I later discovered, was that it encodes the video into an mpeg2 stream, which is then stored inside .mod files. After a few trials and errors to find a good process, I finally settled with using VLC to process the files. Here’s the process that I use:

Download the files to the computer’s HDD and then manually change the extension to .mpg. If you try to play the files without changing the extension, VLC won’t play the files because the extension is associated with an entirely different file format which is to do with audio. So, if you double-click the file to open in VLC, it will not show you anything. By renaming the extension to mpg, VLC will try to read them as mpeg streams.
Because in the .mod files the audio is encoded in AC3 codec, some video players and editors will not recognise the audio in the mpeg stream. To alleviate this problem, I use VLC to encode the audio from the mpeg stream into separate wav files.
In the video editor, the mpeg gives the visual and the wav file will give the audio.

If you are shooting straight for DVD, then most of DVD authoring software will be able to handle the AC3 audio inside the mpeg stream, so step 2 above is not necessary (tested with Adobe Encore CS3).

Google Chrome OS will open new doors (and close windows)

johannes — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:13:08 +0000

With the recent announcement of the development of the Google Chrome OS, the possibilities for the end user has opened even wider in terms of choice of operating system for desktops, notebooks and especially netbooks. An OS with the Chrome browser as its centrepiece will certainly open interesting possibilities for the holy grail of ubiquitous availability of data which is the central tenet in the concept of cloud computing. No longer will the user need to carry their data with them, but the data will come to them wherever they could have an internet connection. This will certainly change how we work, in much the same way as working with Microsoft Word compared to working with Google Documents.

I suspect the new OS will be based on one of the pre-existing Linux distro (Ubuntu?) with the Google layer built on top to enable constant synchronising of data when online and caching mode when offline (ala Google Gears?). When it is released, hopefully it will free us all from having to worry what or which computer we are working on at any given time. To a certain extent, I have already implemented some of the ideas of cloud computing by using Google services to synchronise my calendar on my notebooks and phones. I guess the only other thing that I would like with the Google Chrome OS is cheaper data rates. This issue of data charges is what prevent a lot of people from utlising cloud-based services more often on their wireless devices (phones).