My office sucks

My office sucks.

This is a real office:  http://picsfromtheoffice.blogspot.com/

Flight simulator is nowhere near this…

The Cloud, the AVCHD and backups

Most developments and news area around the “cloud computing” phenomenon…

Ubuntu will have it: Ubuntu One, and there are a lot of players on the market, namely dropbox, skydrive to name a few.

While you can buy a lot of space on these “clouds” to make sure that you follow the backup paradigm 3-2-1 (three copies, two different media types, and one copy offsite), and use the cloud as the offsite backup for photographs, digital documents, and other small files, backing up AVCHD media into the cloud is not yet a sound proposition… Files are HUGE, in the GB area, and backing up into the cloud would take hours if not days…

So for this kind of critical files, I’ve not yet found a solution than copy them into a pen and move them offsite by “sneaker” net….

Canon HF200 on Linux/Kubuntu 9.04

Being an 100% Linux user, the software shipped with Canon HF200 is not useful for me because it’s Windows only. Anyway, I’ve tried Pixela Software, the shipped software  on a virtual machine, and I wasn’t convinced…

So far  on Linux there is a complete lack of tools for management the video files that are produced by this camera, namely the MTS file format, despite being able to play them with no problems, only with small quirks… Right now I’m using VLC, and the x.264 codec downloaded from the sources, not the one shipped with Kubuntu and the quality the video is more or less OK. The latest ATI drivers for my ATI 4870 also improved a lot the visualization of the video. Playing the MTS files on the WD TV works 100%, and the quality is superb.

So I can play the files in my computer, BUT for KDE 4.3  Dolphin, it  has no support for thumbnails for MTS (M2TS) files… so I need to open each file to see wich are it’s contents… a painfull task.

It took me a while to solve more or less this issue. It’s not perfect, but it helps:

Using the latest ffmpeg, donwloaded from the sources, I can create JPG thumbnails related to the each MTS file. The idea came from here: http://johannesluderschmidt.de/?p=525

I’ve changed the script so that I can create AVCHD thumbnails:

#!/bin/bash
for FILENAME in *.MTS
do
if test -f “$FILENAME”; then
echo “Create thumbnail of $FILENAME”
ffmpeg -i “$FILENAME” -ss 00:00:01.00 -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 180×120 “$FILENAME”.jpg
#cp $FILENAME ~/test1/
else
echo “File $FILENAME not existing.”
fi
done

Save this file with a name like avchdthumb.sh, somewhere on your path, and make it executable with chmod +x avchdthumb.sh

Now you can go to your folder (folders) whre you have stored your MTS files, and just run the command like this for example: /home/primalcortex/tools/avchdthumb.sh

It will take a while, depending of the number of files and the your computer horsepower… I have an I7, so can’t complain…

At the end the result will be for each MTS file a new MTS.jpg file with the initial frame as the thumbnail.

Now I have an idea what’s in the MTS videos.

If thumbnails in video format are needed, like the first 10s, then this URLhttp://code.google.com/p/hdffxvrt/ will do the job. Just change the line for the resolutionof the HF200 to 1920×1080, and execute the script with:  hdffxvrt thumb 0001.MTS. This will create a 10s clip in MOV format named 0001.MTS.mov.

This is a good as it gets. Now I’ll I need is Picasa in Linux to support AVCHD

Regarding the camera itself, when connecting through USB to the Kubuntu, there is no problems in detecting and accessing it through Dolphin, but it’s faster to use a SDHC card reader to copy the files. The camera can create thumbnails for the videos when connecting by USB, but in my case it failed to create ALL thumbnails… weird…

Windows 7 – Um substituto: Mais seguro, mais rápido, e gratuito

O Windows Vista já foi rei, mas agora tem um substituto: O Windows 7. Segundo parece resolve todos os problemas que há/havia no Vista… Apesar do Windows Vista ser um flop, é preciso compreender que só falhando é que se aprende alguma coisa, pelo que o falhanço do Vista pode ter impactos positivos no Windows 7 e que segundo o que anda para aí na Net, é o que parece…

No entanto, o Windows continua a ser um sistema operativo cujo objectivo base é um negócio e por isso alguém tem de pagar o esforço dessas melhorias. Quem pagaou o XP, o Vista e outro software MS terá agora de pagar o Windows 7…

Assim se vamos mudar, porque não mudar de vez? É certo que é preciso mudar de forma de pensar, de trabalhar e mesmo de usar um computador. Pessoas que encontram dificuldades no Windows, perdoam e esquecem essas dificuldades, mas noutros sistemas operativos alternativos já não….

Sistemas Windows com vírus, cavalos de troia, contas de home banking acedidas indevidamente, insegurança nativa que facilita a vida ao utilizador, mas torna o sistema inseguro, etc, são o dia a dia destes utilizadores. No entanto não desistem e continuam a usar o Windows porque pensam que não há alternativa…

No fim chega tudo a um ponto que se tem de perguntar:

- Confia no Windows para manter a sua informação confidencial e longe de acessos indevidos?

- Confia no Internet Explorer para aceder às suas contas de home banking?

- Num sistema fechado, como sabe que está seguro? É como viver numa casa onde toda a manutenção é feita por pessoal que não se conhece e não se vê…

Assim se vai experimentar o Windows 7, que tem uma licença gratuita até Junho de 2010, porque não experimenta o Kubuntu 9.04 que tem licença gratuita, até onde você quiser?

Experimentar não custa, e verá que algumas ideias do Windows 7, até foram baseadas onde realmente acontece a inovação: o KDE 4.2.

Kubuntu 8.10 64 bit install

I’ve replaced my aging P4 1.8Ghz computer with a brand new I7 920 one… The old machine couldn’t even ran Kubuntu very well do to the Nvidia G400mx graphic board/driver issues. It just locked up the keyboard and mouse when using the restricted driver and had to do an hard reset to get out. So because my portable PC is an ATI graphic chip, Ive choosen for the new rig an ati 4870

So, I7 920 running on an Asus P6T with 6GB of RAM. This means 64 bit OS.The graphics board is an Gainward 4870.

Installation: Could only do it by using safe mode for graphics. Just after choosing the install language, press F4 to choose Safe mode, and you’re ready to go. If you do no choose the safe mode, after boot the screen just stays blank.

I  boot to the live CD and press on the Install icon on the desktop. This way allows me to surf the web during the installation …

I’ve created three partitions: one for / (root), other for /boot another one for swap. So far so good. At the end before beginning installation I choose advanced and move the Grub boot loader to disk (hd1). hd0 is not my boot disk. The order of boot is definied in Bios. Just make sure that it makes sense on your installation.

The installation detected everything on my Asus P6T. This means that sound is working, ethernet is working and usb is working.

After sucessufull installation and one reboot, two things must be done:Install the ATI drivers, and upgrade all packages to the current releases.

1st) Upgrade. Just follow the ballon that will appear on the right low side of the screen and upgrade to the latest package releases.

2nd) Upgrade to KDE 4.2.2. Follow the instructions on http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-4.2.2. At the end of step 3, just press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE or logout, so that Adept can show you the new updates for KDE. Upgrade KDE and then logout and login again.

3rd) Install the 64 bit ATI drivers. Just follow the instructions. Download, make sure that the driver is executable (chmod +x ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run in my case) and run it with sudo: sudo ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run. At the end just make again CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE so that the X server reloads.

Execute the comand fglrxinfo to make sure that the driver is loaded:

fglrxinfo
display: :0.0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
OpenGL version string: 2.1.8543 Release

The Ati control Panel can be acessed by the  amdcccle command located on /usr/share/ati
Now you can install your favorite software. In my case the first thing that I’ve installed was firefox and the Adobe Flash player plugin. Then I’ve moved my profile from my old system to the new system.

You can after this upgrade the Open Office 2.4 to the latest version by adding the Ooo repository: Just check this: http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-To-Install-OpenOffice-org-3-0-in-Ubuntu-8-10-96449.shtml

For starters, that’s it. You can now follow the Perfect desktop installs from howtoforge.

[K]Ubuntu kernel upgrade breaks vmware

When after a kernel update from the repositories or pushed by the adepter updater, vmware refuses to start, you have to run the vmware-config.pl script again.

Disco rígido Zaapa 2.5” de 320GB

Acabei de comprar uma coisas destas na Chip7:

Para vossa informação: A caixa é um bocado rafeira, já que o conector USB está de esguelha, e tem de se forçar um bocado o conector para a ficha entrar… nada de grave.

Não tem entrada extra para alimentação pelo que é fornecido um cabo USB em Y com duas fichas USB na ponta.

Finalmente o disco que está dentro desta caixa é um Samsung SpinPoint M6 de 320GB

Estou a copiar agora todo o conteúdo do meu velhinho WD de 80GB, e vamos ver se é tão bom como a WD.

Maquina de pão Clatronic – Pão integral do LIDL

Os pães feitos com as farinhas de pão integral do LIDL, ou seja o pacote vermelho, estavam sempre a sair completamente achatados e maciços. Eram comestíveis, mas não cresciam nem ficavam “gordinhos”.

Depois de algumas experiências, o truque é adicionar alguma gordura e usar o programa UM e não o programa para o pão integral.

Neste momento estou a usar como gordura óleo de girassol biológico comprado na BioCoop no Prior Velho, mesmo em frente à BA1 de figo maduro.

Como gosto de plane-spotting (http://www.portugalspotters.org/) ainda dá para ver umas descolagens e aterragens a seguir às compras!