It seems to me there must be some problem with power management somewhere if completely unloading a module has my netbook using more power (at least 1 W) than if it's loaded and the card suspended by the driver. What's going on here? This is just an open question for now. Any hints are welcome. I am aware obviously that the driver module has power management functions which cause this. The question for me is: Why is that so much more efficient than normal power management?
Tips for Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 in Wine (1.3.15)
Once you've managed to get an old version and install it, here are some tips.
Adobe Digital Editions eBook Download in WINE
It's really easy: Install ADE with winetricks. Then start it and log in with your Adobe ID. Now you can Download files to your computer. They are now in your home directory in the Folder My Digital Editions. Just copy them from there to your eBook Reader. Done!
This requires you to register the ebook Reader with Adobe on another Computer. But starting in Wine version 1.3.37, it's possible to do that within wine as well. For this and more, please look into instructions the WineHQ ADE website, specifically modifying the Ebook reader's drive letter to be a floppy drive with winecfg.
Rooting Woes with Nook Simple Touch Firmware 1.1.2 ("Noot")
I had quite some issues with the rooting. Though the package developed for Firmware 1.1 worked fine to root, there were a few issues:
- Market doesn't work until about 12-24 hours later. Mine said the market wasn't reachable. But this really goes away.
- Amazon Market only works only with US credit card. OK this doesn't bother most Nook users living in the US.
- Market search doesn't work even after market works. Even restoring the old market app where it worked didn't fix this for me.
- The package no longer includes the Search Market app.
- Opera Mini 7 doesn't work, but FCs -- but v. 6.5 does work. Make sure you do a full Titanium Backup before you upgrade! ;)
- I have to re-register it with Adobe for reading books with sideloaded ebooks with Adobe DRM.
Hence I had to install the first apps via adb and Titanium Backup, which I found via scrolling through the all apps section in the Market for pages, then finding one of the developers apps and going into their other apps. From there it was pretty much a breeze.
But in the end the update was really worth it:
- The NoRefreshToggle (get it, it's awesome, esp. e.g. for browsing!) works for longer than just about 30 seconds (in 1.0) now - pretty much forever it seems.
- The whole device is much snappier and has much, much better battery life in root use as well in my case.
- Resume works better. E.g. androidvnc now immediately has a connection again after resume. I think wifi consumes a lot less power, too.
- Someone got multitouch working, too, it seems.
- Market doesn't work until about 12-24 hours later. Mine said the market wasn't reachable. But this really goes away.
- Amazon Market only works only with US credit card. OK this doesn't bother most Nook users living in the US.
- Market search doesn't work even after market works. Even restoring the old market app where it worked didn't fix this for me.
- The package no longer includes the Search Market app.
- Opera Mini 7 doesn't work, but FCs -- but v. 6.5 does work. Make sure you do a full Titanium Backup before you upgrade! ;)
- I have to re-register it with Adobe for reading books with sideloaded ebooks with Adobe DRM.
Hence I had to install the first apps via adb and Titanium Backup, which I found via scrolling through the all apps section in the Market for pages, then finding one of the developers apps and going into their other apps. From there it was pretty much a breeze.
But in the end the update was really worth it:
- The NoRefreshToggle (get it, it's awesome, esp. e.g. for browsing!) works for longer than just about 30 seconds (in 1.0) now - pretty much forever it seems.
- The whole device is much snappier and has much, much better battery life in root use as well in my case.
- Resume works better. E.g. androidvnc now immediately has a connection again after resume. I think wifi consumes a lot less power, too.
- Someone got multitouch working, too, it seems.
Linux and its Collaboration Explained (Video)
I can recommend this video giving a quick intro to what Linux is and does today as well as how it's built, though there's probably not much new in there for regular readers.
OpenCards with Impress Faster in VNC
If you ever wanted OpenCards to be a bit more snappy when showing the cards, for some reason runnig it inside a VNC server does help!
Transcoding with VAAPI decoding accelaration using VLC 2.0
I saw that vlc gets the decoded image back from the graphics cards when using hardware acceleration, e.g. VAAPI. So I thought this should also work as encoding accelerator, so the CPU only has to encode, not decode the video and cause at least some speedup, especially for large video files encoded into small files. I'm using the GMA500 poulsbo chipset for this test with 1,6 Ghz Atom(TM) CPU Z530.
Benchmarking VLC Encoding/Transcoding Speed
If you need to benchmark how fast vlc transcodes a certain file with certain settings, it's a bit tough. It doesn't seem to have any way to display the frames per second (fps) during encoding and no benchmark option as mplayer. A good way to work around this is to check how long it takes vlc to encode a certain file for a few seconds, e.g.
time vlc --stop-time 25 (...) vlc://quit.
e.g. time vlc --stop-time 25 /D/MVI_6615.MOV --sout "#transcode{width=384,height=288,vcodec=h264,acodec=vorbis}:standard{access=file,mux=mkv,dst=test.mkv}}" --sout-x264-crf=24 --sout-transcode-threads=2 vlc://quit
This encodes for 25 seconds and then quits and displays the time it took. Make sure to have vlc://quit at the very end of the command line and after your input file. The "user" value is what matters, this shows how long it kept the cpu occupied. Of course this only works on Unix systems. Also be aware that the second time the input file comes from cache, so only use the values from the second or later encodings for comparison.
time vlc --stop-time 25 (...) vlc://quit.
e.g. time vlc --stop-time 25 /D/MVI_6615.MOV --sout "#transcode{width=384,height=288,vcodec=h264,acodec=vorbis}:standard{access=file,mux=mkv,dst=test.mkv}}" --sout-x264-crf=24 --sout-transcode-threads=2 vlc://quit
This encodes for 25 seconds and then quits and displays the time it took. Make sure to have vlc://quit at the very end of the command line and after your input file. The "user" value is what matters, this shows how long it kept the cpu occupied. Of course this only works on Unix systems. Also be aware that the second time the input file comes from cache, so only use the values from the second or later encodings for comparison.
About lost messages in Google mail
This morning, at 8 AM I received a message In my Gmail inbox. About 5 PM I started writing a reply to the message on my smartphone. I wrote about six sentences and when I was about to finish the e-mail and checked back to the original message. And it had disappeared.
The only thing left from it is the part saying: reply to the message from ... sent ... .
The draft of the reply is still in my inbox and marked important. So I thought there should be enough reference for recovery and contacted Google about it and I have already received a reply: there's nothing they can do about it.
So please, be aware Google does not guarantee 100% reliability in their e-mail service. You may get a very very important e-mail and if you have no other copy it may be completely gone - forever. If you need that get another provider. Back up your email you receive there regularly.
And let me quote:
"Because there's unfortunately no more we can do to try to recover these messages, we won't be able to respond to future inquiries."
Maybe they removed the beta label to early...
PS: with two step authentication I think it's not very likely someone would break into my account to delete a private message of a student...
Downloading Packages for Expired Ubuntu Releases
When Ubuntu releases expire, the package archive mirror is disabled as well. You will get error messages when trying to access e.g. archive.ubuntu.com or de.archive.ubuntu.com. (e.g. http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic-security/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz not found.)
But the fix is easy:
But the fix is easy:
Regex made easy - Great Regex constructor website
A great tool to help you construct regular expressions is this website: txt2re.com. Thanks a lot to the genious who is so good at regex he can create a tool to create them. You may now imagine me tipping my hat.
Newest version of swype includes Dragon dictation software for android
The newest version of Swype, the text input software for android, includes dictation software which lets you to dictate text directly into any text field on android.
Though there are still some issues with it recognizing my German accent, it already works very well and better than the standard Google text input software, especially in German. The newest version is available only for android ice cream sandwich (4.0), but it's completely free of charge - you can download it from <a href="http://beta.swype.com">beta.swype.com</a>. </p> <p>The only downside so far is that you may not change its privacy settings to stop it from posting information about your usage to the Corporation. But then of course the voice recognition works anyway by encoding the audio data from your voice into packets which are sent to the cloud and processed by servers there. This has been dictated to the dictation software with swype. This last sentence has been dictated with google's speech recognition which is also very good. Also it's much faster and supports selecting alternative results based on the speech input and similar sounds, not just on similar spelling as the dictation support in the current beta of Swype. But neither version works without internet support.
Insecrure Screensavers with Xorg 1.11+
Due to a serious bug, pretty much all screensavers are vulnerable if they run with a recent Xorg 1.11+. I leave it to others to describe more details and a hotfix.
Learn the new Linux Network Commands
Doug Vitale wrote a wonderful summary of the new linux network commands on his blog. It includes typical commands as they were before as well as they replacements.
F.lux adjusts your display to the sun's color and brightness
And there's a Linux version with GUI add well, check it out: f.lux for Linux. This is great especially for people working on a computer and suffering from insomnia or e.g. if you have a work room without windows (glass filled frames that is).
GAP bzw. DECT-Telefone mit der Fritz Box nutzen
Es gibt eine sehr praktische Liste der kompatiblen Telefone, die hilft das richtige zu kaufen. Sonst hat man oft z.B. keine Tonwahl oder keine Anzeige der anrufenden Rufnummer. Grundsätzlich lässt sich sagen, dass Siemens tragbare ISDN-Telefone recht gut funktionieren und Gigaset 1000, 2000, 3000.
Sort Algorithms Visualized and Other Fun Projects
Thanks to ck's blog I just found this great website visualizing number sorting computer algorithms. And I want to share it with you.
Also I love the concept of fold.it to solve difficult scientific problems using computer games and gamers.
And at duolingo.com, a project is in closed beta to learn a language and help translate texts at the same time. (Click bottom left to ask for an invitation to the closed beta.)
Also I love the concept of fold.it to solve difficult scientific problems using computer games and gamers.
And at duolingo.com, a project is in closed beta to learn a language and help translate texts at the same time. (Click bottom left to ask for an invitation to the closed beta.)
Cool Android Apps for eReaders (e-Ink eBook Readers) and Developer Information
E-Ink readers like the Nook touch currently come with 4 bit (16 levels) of gray, no camera, often no sound, no GSM, often no landscape detection sensor etc. And especially, the display refresh rate is very slow. Still or nonetheless they have advantages like battery time, especially with the display on, clear readability in bright direct sunlight over a tablet and display size over a phone and also more and more often come with Android. Here are some apps and hints which work great for that scenario.
Resuming a Copy in Linux -- like cp --resume
When you want to copy a large file and close before the end the copy is interrupted. There are some ways to work around this.
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