Increase Speed and Save Traffic with Opera Turbo

If you have a traffic limitation I have some great advice: Install Opera.
Starting with Opera 10, there is the integrated "Opera Turbo". With the
help of that proxy you not only speed up the loading of websites by 4x and
more, but you also decrease the amount of data transfered, which makes
your volume last much longer.

After a whole day of 3G web surfing, Opera Turbo had saved me 2 GB of
traffic! (Only about 100 MB were left, that 20x less!) So the first thing
after setting up 3G should be setting up Opera with Opera Turbo!

Oh and you'll probably also want to put this list into your Opera urlfilter.ini. This stops Opera from loading ads, saving you even more traffic. But you can't use save as, you must use copy & paste to get rid of the html elements in the file.

Mobile Internet with the Skypephone S2 in Ubuntu

It does not (yet) work out of the box. There is a little trick you need. You need to manually load the usbserial module supplying the vendor and product ID. You can find those IDs via the lsusb command. Just add an 0x at the beginning and then load the module:

sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1614 product=0x0407

The support should be automatic in one the next upcoming Linux kernels, though. You can of course automate the module load with an entry in /etc/modules:
usbserial vendor=0x1614 product=0x0407

Then the module is always loaded in the right way at boot time and you just need to plug in the mobile phone for it to pop up in Network Manager (with the help of Mobile Manager). Once that's the case in Gnome with nm-util you can use an easy wizard that should already include your settings. In Kubuntu 9.10 the KDE support for connecting was broken, though. But it's fixed now in Kubuntu 10.04. Too sad many of these changes are never backported...

And now: Enjoy mobile Internet! (And don't miss my next entry on how to save traffic and speed up your new mobile internet.)

If you're in the UK, order your next Three SIM via my agent link, please.

More on Google, Censorship and China

The NYTimes has posted a great feature on the debate with many experts providing their intriguing views on the subject.

Circumventing Censorship - Evading the "20th Century's Berlin Wall"

The New York Times presents the status quo in censorship evasion with examples of Iran and China. A quite interesting read. Don't expect a how to, though.

Install Daily Fresh Ubuntu Directly over the Web

If you're doing a fresh installation and you don't have a CD downloaded yet, I can recommend the netboot installer. It let's you download and install the freshest packages from a mirror near you. All you need as preparation is e.g. a USB-Stick that boots into grub. Checkout this howto.

Basically all you need to do is copy the kernel "linux" and the initrd "initrd.gz" to your stick. Then boot them from Grub and you can start your installation.

The great thing about it: During the installation you can chose whether to install Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu, etc. And you will automatically get the newest available packages right away. There's no need to fetch and install updates after the installation.

And getting the newest packages right away might save you a lot of trouble because of bad packages in the installation cd. And the network installer itself also gets updated regularly.

Comfortable Internet TV on your Linux Box with Boxee

Now here's a company that did it the right way: The software is based upon the XBMC, is thus open source and released for Mac and Linux already while the Windows version is still in development :)
Boxee allows you to easily access popular channels such as BBC, Joost, MTV and Hulu. But right now their apt server is not working properly at all.
Btw. You need to register before you get the download address.

Google Really is Going Towards the Browser OS

Google just released the native client, a browser plugin that helps to efficiently use the CPU of a machine accessing a web page. Available for many browsers - except the Internet Explorer. After Google Gears and Chrome this piece of Software is another important step towards establishing the technical infrastructure for a Browser Operating System.

Is the World Ready for a Cyberwar?

After reading a lot in the media about the so called cyber war, I wonder: How well prepared are the nations? In the media it seems as if Russia and China had active cyber warriors sitting and waiting to get into action or if not already attacking. But I can hardly imagine that any technologically advanced nation would not have highly professional IT security experts available...

What do you think? Or are the US cyber warriors just more sneaky? Would the US invent the internet for military reasons and then just sit there while everybody else seems to be putting up their armies? Could a cyber war lead to a real war? Are plain computers the 21st century's war machines?

TV International?

I still wonder why TV is not really international yet. We have endless countries with interesting TV channels. Especially US channels would probably get a lot of international viewers, as many people speak English and they often show things earlier than the TV stations in other countries.

But they don't broadcast their channels. At first they always claimed it would not be feasible technically, until Zattoo came along and proved what was clear before: Where there is a will, there is a way.

Now the TV stations claim they don't own the rights. Or they go online for some regions like hulu.com. And I still think: Where there's a will, there's a way. How long do we have to wait, until the Internet tears down the borders of TV stations?

How long until it will be possible to legally and comfortably watch your favorite TV series when it first aired.

Registration Hell

I know this is an old hat: You have to register for everything. Then came OpenID to the rescue. Only that it's so complicated to actually implement it on the server side and use it on the user side (what exactly do I have to put into the user box?) that it never quite arrived.

Now more and more I notice myself not bothering to register somewhere to add a comment to a bug, or file a new bug if it doesn't really matter that much to me. I've got probably a hundred or more accounts at different places by now and it's so bothersome. I really hope something's going to eliminate that problem at some point...

The actual page that made me write this was a pidgin bug ticket, which is related to pidgin using fsync way too often and causing very bad latency in the process. (~300+ms on my system). I found it using latencytop after reading this interesting interview. And I was wondering if something has been done about the problem. It doesn't look like it...

Chrome on Linux Now Really Easy

CodeWeavers has ported Google Chrome to Linux using Wine. You can download packages here.

Update: In my experience the package is not really worth trying. I had much better results running it with normal wine as mentioned before. The CodeWeavers package is really easy and comfortable.

But the AMD64 version I tested is also much slower and less responsive and I think it crashes more often than, but that's hard to tell with Chrome ;-). And the tabs often hang after loading a webpage and the webpage disappears until you press reload. And the letters are not on the same line, but always higher or lower.

But the cool thing about the port: SSL works. That means you can actually use google webpages with login like GMail. I hope that is ported back to wine, making chrome actually usable in Linux.

Update2: The problems I had seem to be related to 64-bit, as other webpages don't mention these issues.

Memory Usage - Pidgin vs. Kopete

The GTalk outage gave me some time to run another test of pidgin vs. kopete in memory consumption. Pidgin used to always win this competition, which is - next to the then better working file transfers - why I use pidgin.

I tested it again today and this time the Kopete coming with KDE 4.1.1 in Kubuntu won!

• Kopete used about 18 MB ram
• Pidgin used 23 MB ram

These results and the differences were reproducible. They were tested with "free" in the console. I started one program, then the other and in between ran free in the shell - several times.

Of course these results apply only if you're running a KDE 4.1.1 desktop. If you're a gnome user, pidgin is very likely to use less memory for you.

Also reproducible was that Kopete ate a lot of memory when opening the - currently very slow - configuration dialogue.

There seems to be a bug somewhere, as this memory is not freed until after you restart kopete. So after configuring something in Kopete 0.60.1 make sure you quit and restart it.

Feel free to test it yourself and post your results. Make sure to include what distribution, program versions and desktop environment you use and that you have the same amout of accounts active in each program.

Beware of the Paypal

I recently had a cancelled transaction with paypal. I payed, an hour later the shop told me they don't have the product available. The payment was cancelled.

And then paypal froze the money in my account: "money withheld". 13 days after the transaction the money is finally back on my bank account and I think to myself: Avoid paypal, especially for large sums of money.

Of course Paypal loves to get an involuntary free two week credit from me and work my money without giving me anything back. And that they just freeze my money just shows you what kind of company paypal is.

If you, too, live in Europe and get into trouble with Paypal, don't hesitate but contact FIN-NET, the european bank complaint network:
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/finservices-retail/finnet/index_en.htm
The more people complain, the more paypal will have to behave itself.

Opera Link Disaster

Well, what was I going to do?

I tried to recover what was left. Many folders and files were just randomly spread across the Opera link directory where I at first couldn't find them, instead of deleted.

Then I tried to ease, but online editing is hardly possible. Trying to sync really deleted most of the bookmarks this time. At least there wasn't as much to sift through.

So I put everything in the trash and picked out the good stuff, put it into new folder and basically started over. Now I will backup my bookmarks and pray this won't happen again.

You really need to work on that sync code, guys at Opera!

The Incredible Dangers of the Buggy Opera Link

In Opera 9.5 a pretty cool feature is introduced. At least that what I thought at first. Opera link synchronizes your bookmarks between an online account and your computer and your Opera mobile.

The problem is only that it's written so incredibly bad, that it's extremely dangerous to use. You must definitely make a backup of all your bookmarks before even thinking about using Opera link.

I had a database of about 550 bookmarks. They were neatly organized in the last few months and of course many were new. Because in the past Opera link often duplicated my bookmark folders, I created a new account to sync to.

The problem is I was too damn stupid to make a backup before using Opera link. And now the worst possible thing happened.

Opera did not use the newly created account I told it to use. It did not backup my bookmarks. It "synced" to the old account. It deleted all my bookmarks from the last 6 months forever. And it replaced them with the mess that had existed before.

I'm indefinitely frustrated right now, more than I have been in a very, very, very long time.

I think I will switch my browser.

The Internet

I just wanted to try out something I found on the DVD of my computer magazine. I don't know why, but I just went to the website to download it. The problem is just that I'm in Australia and the download limit for this month is already exceeded and thus the bandwidth throttled to 6kb/s.

And after I had downloaded half of the file from the Internet it occured to me: Why not copy it from the DVD? And so I did. Crazy how you can get accustomized to downloading everything online...

Opera Speed running under Windows and Linux

I've installed Opera 9.5. It's really nice and I'm actually writing this entry with it right now. But then because of unfortunate resume problems after a BIOS upgrade with my Acer notebook, I've installed and tried the new version in Windows as well.

And frankly, I was amazed. The websites loaded so quickly it seemed they were just there immediately. Awesome work, Opera. But then I started wondering:

Why is Opera so much faster under Windows?

Check it your ISP throttles P2P traffic

Researchers at the German Max Planck Institute for Software Systems put together a website that 

• tells you which ISPs are throttling
• has a test for ISP bittorrent throttling
• and gives other people's bittorrent throttling test results with ISPs.