Archive for June, 2006

Centre of Communications

Monday, June 26th, 2006

I reckon that pretty much everyone who reads Jedimoose (which contains a reasonable cross-section of geeks and non-geeks, I believe) will have heard of VoIP, or, if not, then probably Skype. Since broadband became really common, VoIP has been on the increase, and Skype certainly grabbed a lions share of the market.

For a little while I’ve been watching with curiousity as various free (as in beer) projects have grabbed the interest of the community, and one or two open source (free as in freedom) projects have also been interesting. However, I haven’t really been tempted by anything until now.

OpenWengo is an open source VoIP client, using the standard SIP protocol (which almost everyone apart from Skype seems to use) and sponsored by the Wengo company, who provide some of the pay-for services (like dialling out to landlines, or have a number for people to dial in to).

The thing that interested me most about WengoPhone is that the current beta of version 2 incorporates a lot more than you would normally expect – not only does it do voice and video, but it will also send SMS (€0.085 each) and connect to instant messengers – yes, you can connect to MSN or GoogleTalk with it (or Yahoo or AOL). They plan to make the client able to connect to other SIP services, and not just their own too. But if you do sign up to the Wengo service, then you get 2 months worth of free, 2 minute calls to landlines. And after that the call rates are not too bad (€0.01/min to most European countries).

The beta software is not the most reliable, I’m the first to admit. And it sucks that all the operator messages are in French (it’s a French company). But I’m really impressed with the quality of service, and that the client is open source. Wengo me now :) (if you want my username, leave a comment or drop me a mail)

mrBen

Posted in Computing, Internet, Linux, mrBen | No Comments »

Media Player Redux

Monday, June 26th, 2006

I said in my previous post that I would post some additional thoughts about my new media player after a couple of weeks of usage. Overall, the experience has been very good – the player produces good quality music, is nicely built, and does what I want it to. There are a few annoyances, though:

  • The Music – Hold – FM slider. The button itself feels very flimsy, which in turn makes it very difficult to operate. Even worse is that because it is a 3 stage slider, it’s very easy to slide it past hold, and onto FM, requiring that you then slide it back to Music, and then hit play. It would be better to have 2 sliders, 1 for Hold on and off, and the other for Music or FM selection. Having the sliders more robust, and more flush to the edge of the player, would be a good move too.
  • Ordering – I’ve not quite sussed out how it orders the files on the player. I _think_ it’s alphanumeric, which can be a PITA if the CDDB entry for a particular album doesn’t include track numbers.
  • Big files – I mostly use the player for listening to LUGRadio, which is typically about 80-90 minutes long. It would be nice if I could pause playing it, skip to listening to some music, and then return to listening to LUGRadio at the place I left off. Sadly, I don’t think this is possible (I’m not sure if any player works like this?)

Mostly, though, I can’t moan :)

mrBen

Posted in Computing, Music, mrBen | 1 Comment »

Highlights of Saturday’s Doctor Who

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

The Electric Light Orchestra.

Peter Kay.

Every moment with Jackie Tyler (Rose’s Mum).

The Doctor not going on about how much he loves humanity.

The Tardis (which is criminally underused).

BigAl

Posted in BigAl, Film & TV | 2 Comments »

Drunken times and other events

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

A gentle weekend which (as usual) was far too short.

It was a friend’s 30th celebration in the pub on Saturday night, so much beer was enjoyed. It was good to see the guys there (the old-IO mob for the uni days).

In the past I have been refered to as The Paisley Bigfoot as chances of seeing me in any social context have always been remote. Still, that’s something I really want to change. Even though I actually prefer my hermit-like ways it’s really not doing me any good.

So with that in mind (and extremely hungover to boot) I actually made it to Church the following morning. Not usual Church mind, because they were all away for the weekend and I’m sure mrBen will fill you in about that, but Central Fellowship in the city center. It was your standard shiny Christian stuff, not remarkably different from what goes on back at Whiteinch CofS.

Although it is good to have a bit of a change every so often. To recharge the old spiritual batteries.

So after that we went to a wee place on Argyle St, across from the Tron Theatre, for lunch. Less than impressed. Although the place looked really nice inside, the service was patchy and the food (healthy burgers for both of us, oh yes) wasn’t anything to write home about.

Then it was up the road (with a sneaky purchase of Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War) to lounge about and for me to get over the last of the hangover.

All good stuff.

BigAl

Posted in BigAl | 1 Comment »

Currently Listening To…..

Monday, June 19th, 2006

I’m not a big music listener, but recently I’ve been in search of some good Creative Commons music that I can use in the upcoming Camp Drama Video. And thus I have come up with a couple of gems that I thought I would share:

  • Jamendo is a great source of CC music – there’s tonnes of good stuff for all different music tastes.
  • Who is Elmo Blatch (aka WIEB) has a member who is part of the LugRadio IRC channel. The EP that you can download from the site is excellent – quite a variety of styles. Although be warned that there is some swearing, so it should have a big black ‘n’ white sticker on it ;)

Listen. Enjoy. Comment.

mrBen

Posted in Music, mrBen | 2 Comments »

All good things…

Thursday, June 15th, 2006

…must come to an end.

Still, companions come and go. That’s part of what makes good Doctor Who.

BigAl

Posted in BigAl, Film & TV | No Comments »

Rockin’ with the Sith

Wednesday, June 14th, 2006

A performance from the 2006 MTV Music Awards.

Gnarls Barkley.

Cool band. Cool music. Cool Vid.

Nuff Said.

BigAl 

Posted in BigAl, Music | 6 Comments »

Freespiration

Monday, June 12th, 2006

A short while ago, Linspire announced the creation of the Freespire project, a free, community-driven distribution based on their commercial Linspire product. I’ve been mulling over this move for a while, and why I think that, ultimately, it’s going to struggle.

In his interview with LugRadio, Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire, said that having a community-based distribution that was easily available was important so that techies in companies could see it, know it, and ultimately be able to endorse the commercial product should it become a viable option in their company. And I think there is one major problem with this assertation: Linspire is, as Kevin himself said in a previous interview, the AOL of Linux distributions. Thing is, business don’t use AOL. Perhaps a better distinction is that Linspire is the XP Home to the XP Pro of other Linux distributions. Companies aren’t going to run it on their desktops, and thus I think that Freespire is not going to help this at all.

I’m not sure what incentive there is for existing Linux people to get involved in Freespire. With the Fedora project (probably the closest example we have of something similar) succeeded in part because Red Hat completely withdrew their desktop product for a while, and Fedora was ‘the’ Red Hat desktop for a while. Ubuntu has succeeded because they’ve managed to make an extremely usable, Debian-based, desktop distro, without being overly ‘offensive’ to the advanced, technical users.

I’m also unclear as to whether there is any incentive for existing users to offer Linspire as a distribution to their friends/family. Generally, I find that most people install and setup $favourite_distro for people, as it is easier for them to provide support on a distro they know and understand. But I’m not convinced that Linspire will ever be the distro of choice for this kind of person.

Probably the biggest advantage of Freespire/Linspire is the available of proprietary codecs, and other pay-for software (that you still have to pay for) via Click ‘N’ Run. But such things are available easily enough on desktop distros, and this kind of installation is only going to get easier.

I would be interested to hear others’ thoughts – especially Jono, given that he’s on the Freespire board ;)

mrBen

Posted in Computing, Linux, mrBen | No Comments »

Streaming to Windows Media Player

Wednesday, June 7th, 2006

Took me _ages_ to work out how to do this with VLC, so I thought it was worth writing it down, in the hope that the Google crawler will pick it up and help other people out.

  1. In VLC pick your source (File, Capture device, etc) and then check the ‘Stream’ option and open the settings dialogue.
  2. Select MMS as the output format, and choose a port (I used 8080). You don’t need to put in an IP
  3. Use the default MPEG TS encapsulation
  4. Transcode to WMV1 video and MP3 audio – set whatever other compression/bitrate settings you want here.
  5. Hit OK, and then OK again, and it should start playing
  6. Point WMP at mms://<your-ip-here>:8080/ and it should pick up the stream, buffer and then play. Hurrah!

Hopefully somebody somewhere will find this useful :)

mrBen

Posted in Computing, Internet, mrBen | 8 Comments »

Another great invention

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

Here’s an idea for a killer product:

I really liked my Creative mp3 player – one of the best things was the small size, and built-in USB plug. It was a shame it was so small. So I was thinking – what about seperating the control elements and the battery from the storage. (In the Muvo, the battery is a little j-shaped sheath, and the controls are on a USB stick that just slides into the sheath). So you have a kind of little remote (like you can get for other players), which controls the player, but also houses a small battery. At the end of the cable, you have a USB socket, into which you can plug any USB key, meaning unlimited, expandable storage.

You heard it here first – I expect a royalty cheque in the post.

mrBen

Posted in Computing, Music, Toys & Games, mrBen | 1 Comment »

Annoyance: Bad Laptop Keyboards

Monday, June 5th, 2006

This has been bugging me for a while, so I’d thought I’d rant and get it out of my system.

My laptop has a great keyboard. The keys are all in the right places, and they’re of a reasonable size, which means that my success rate is pretty good. I like it.

My laptop is an exception.

I’ve seen some crazy laptop design in my time, and it’s usually the keyboards that get hacked to hell. The first thing that goes is the placement and arrangement of the Insert-Home-Pgup Delete-End-PgDn keys. Some laptops put them in a line down the side – who’s idea was that? But by far the worst error I’ve seen is on the wife’s laptop. Now – my wife, she loves her laptop. And it’s a nice piece of kit. But what evil being, who should be consigned to the mental hospital for the remainder of his days, decided that a great place to put Home and End was on the same keys as PageUp and PageDown, requiring the use of a Function key to access them?

Crazy, I tell you.

mrBen

Posted in Computing, mrBen | 4 Comments »

Oggy Oggy Oggy

Monday, June 5th, 2006

Oi Oi Oi

Got myself a new media player, I did. I’ve been on the hunt for something new for a while now – casually surfing ebay looking for something suitable. I had a few criteria:

1. It should be bigger than my existing player – not hard considering my current player has only 64MB
2. It should have a screen
3. Most importantly, it should play Ogg Vorbis files.

For the unitiated, the Ogg Vorbis file format is much like mp3, although it is better quality sound in smaller file sizes. More importantly, it is an open standard, whereas when you buy an mp3 player, a little bit of cash goes to licensing that format. I like Oggs, and would much rather have everything in Ogg format. An ogg player would make this a lot simpler.

And so, I found one. For a reasonable price on eBay I picked up a 512MB Xcent XT-100, which fulfils all my criteria nicely. It has a built in battery, which will hopefully save me a bit of cash, a nice screen, although a little hard to read in direct sunlight, really good quality sound, a built-in FM radio, and a voice recorder. Oh, and the line-in jack for recording is a proper size jack (3.5mm) rather than the stupid one we have at church, which is 2.5mm….

It doesn’t have a built-in USB plug, which is probably the biggest annoyance. But the flap covering the usb socket is, at least, a decent, metal hinged flap, not a stupid flimsy rubber thing. Also, it doesn’t turn off randomly – it will stay on for a specified number of minutes, or not at all, even when paused. Which is much better than some I’ve seen, which turn off after 30 seconds of inactivity.

Overall, very happy :) But I’ll let you know how I get on after a couple of weeks of usage.

mrBen

Posted in Computing, Toys & Games, mrBen | 4 Comments »

Burny head

Monday, June 5th, 2006

Got a bad case of the burny head yesterday for the brief time that I was actually out in the sun.

I never expected that the weather was going to be so damn sunny/hot yesterday when it wasn’t even remotely like that on Saturday. That’s why God created weather reports I suppose.

Now it looks like a beacon to warn shipping of hazards.

And it hurts like hellfire if it’s touched.

Time to buy a nice hat. One that has a nice wide brim, that Ruthy wouldn’t be seen dead near me in.

BigAl

Posted in BigAl | 6 Comments »

Debt camps

Friday, June 2nd, 2006

For those of you who can’t manage your finances and have accumulated loads of guff in the process.

I have no sympathy for people who whinge about how much debt they’re in and then boast about how much “cool” stuff they’ve just bought.

There’s one example of a guy I work with (you know who you are) who regularly gets himself in to huge amounts of credit card debt and then mummy and daddy pay it off. There’s usually a period when his pay goes to them and him getting some pocket money but this is pretty pointless when he asks for something and just gets it.

Makes me sick.

What makes it worse, he doesn’t learn anything from this experience. He just goes out and runs up more debt.

More and more often you see people just like him who have no concept of money and what it’s actually worth.

So in an effort to teach people not to do it again we should set up Debt Camps where the guilty party is marched off and worked until they repay their debt. No pocket money, no spending money, just a generic set of clothes and basic meals eaten in a small barely furnished room.

I think with a bit of work I’d be a good idea.

BigAl

Posted in BigAl | 2 Comments »