Skype Video auf Android deutlich verbessert

In einem der letzten Tests hatte ich Skype Video auf dem Samsung/Google Nexus S getestet. Dabei war das Video und der Ton für mich gut, für die Gegenseite aber abgehackt und ruckelig. Das Problem hat Skype mit der aktuellen Version, die auf mehr Handy lauffähig ist, nun behoben. Ein zweistündiges Videogespräch nach Brasilien lief unproblematisch. Dabei wurde das Handy recht warm und danach war der Akku dann aber auch leer (von 60 % auf 15%). Trotzdem: Es macht jetzt einen riesigen Spaß auch mit Skype Videotelefonate zu führen. Die Unterdrückung von Hintergrundgeräuschen und das Telefonieren mit Lautsprecher an (statt Headset) geht dabei besser als mit Google Talk Video soweit ich das getestet habe. Das Video war meiner Meinung nach etwas weniger scharf als bei Google, aber das könnte auch an dem anderen Gesprächspartner liegen. Einen kleinen Hakler gab es noch als das Gespräch durch einen Anruf unterbrochen wurde. Das Videogespräch wurde zwar vorbildlich geparkt und ließ sich nachher fortsetzen. Aber ich konnte den Anrufer aus dem Mobilfunknetz nicht hören. Reproduziert habe ich das bisher allerdings nicht.

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Google Talk Video Review (Nexus S) (English)

So I finally got to test Google Talk Video on the Nexus S. The result is simply:
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Guess the Size of an Lrzip Archive of all Linux Kernel Sources Since 1.0

I've reported before about the efficiency of Lrzip. Now Con did a useful and fun thing: He created an lrzip archive of all the sources of all 2.6 linux kernels. And guess how much space it took? Update: Guess how big an archive of *all* Linux sources since 1.0 is.
A few hints:
- All sources in a tar are 10.3 GB.
- The 2.6.39.1 kernel is 73 MB as a tar.bz2 archive.
- Now it would be less, because the first kernel was smaller (just 32 MB).
- So taking the average (73+32=105/2=52.5) times 39 would be just 2GB (compressed!).

- 19,617,064,960 bytes linux-1.0-2.6.39.tar
- 11,067,473,920 bytes linux-2.6.0-2.6.39.tar

- ( 2,000,000,000 bytes linux-2.6.0-2.6.39.tar.bz) estimate
-   1,535,618,848 bytes linux-2.6.0-2.6.39.tar.xz 13.8%

With heavy, slow IO it took less than an hour to compress, and lrzip was more than twice as fast as xz.

Now that I gave you all these numbers let's see how much it really is... (make a guess an click the link)
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Learn Flashcards Efficiently - Tips and How to get OpenCards Running in Linux - Slow Opening of Files in Openoffice and LibreOffice

OpenCards is a great, optimized memorizing software that ensures you need as little time as possible to learn your flashcards.
What you get

• As it's based on Openoffice, you can make full featured flash cards including diagrams, mind maps and everything else supported in Impress.
• Focus on learning. As it logs your progress and automatically schedules the next time to question you, you can learn without organizing what to learn when.
• The repetition schedule is based on modern psychological research. The Leitner system is "a widely used method to efficiently use flashcards that was proposed by the German science journalist Sebastian Leitner in the 1970s. It is a simple implementation of the principle of spaced repetition, where cards are reviewed at increasing interval." (Wikipedia)

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Free Time? Try some Open Source Video Games

Wikipedia has a nice long list of open source games, linking to their description, often including videos. It will keep you well busy over the free time. A personal recommendation is UfoAI (Alien Invasion), a great 3D round based first person shooter and infrastructure building combination:

It's fascinating to first build your infrastructure and later venture inside it fighting of invading aliens. Of course first you have to select and train your people, research and build of steal guns and ammo, etc. But be careful, the game can be quite addictive.


More Videos.

If you liked this post, you might want to link to it and subscribe to the RSS feed so you won't miss the next one. In any case, check the related posts below. Maybe I'm just having a really bad day and normally write much more interesting posts about theses subjects. Or maybe you'll only understand what I meant here once you've read all my other posts on the topic. ;-)

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Android and Fritz Box VoIP

The only app that worked well in my experience was CSIPSimple. And it was easily configured and feature-laden yet small (1.3 MB) and low-resource at the same time. I couldn't get sipdroid or others to run properly.

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What I like about Android - and what I don't -- My Android Review (including my Favorite Apps)

Find out what I like and dislike about the android system after a critical review on the Samsung Galaxy 3. And at the end there's a list of my favorite apps.

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Full of Little Bugs but not Without Potential - First Impression of the OYO E-Book Reader

The new e-reader on the European block was just released and while it features a webbrowser, audio player, web store next to the book reading and everything with a touch screen, everything is also slightly buggy:

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Introducing (native!) µTorrent for Linux

If you've ever looked into the various programs available to download via bittorrent, you will probably have discovered µtorrent. Back then it was probably already tiny and full-featured at the same time. It even had customizations to better run inside WINE. But it didn't run natively on Linux. Of course that made the very low resource bittorrent client much more resource hungry. Now this all changed. (Screenshots inside)

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LG Flatron 1970H and how it really isn't VESA mount compatible

The monitor needs a special metal plate fixed to the stand in order to be VESA compatible. After calls to LG hotline, the replacement parts hotline, the distribution hotline and the replacement parts distribution hotline it turns out this part is not available anywhere and nobody even knows of it. The nicest part though was when I told the man that the device is several years old. He immediately lost interest and hung up. Nice. Thanks, LG.

Update:
Whooops. I had that weird plate in my package all along. This wrapped. Sorry, LG. All I can blame you for is no longer having replacement parts after... roughly 5 years.

More about → LG Flatron 1970H and how it really isn't VESA mount compatible

Standby-Strom des Edision Avantage DVB-T Receiver - Energiespar-Tipps

Ich habe gerade mal ein bisschen rumprobiert, um zu sehen wieviel das Teil an Standby-Strom verbraucht. Normal, ohne USB oder SD-Karte, verbraucht es recht gute 1,5 Watt (Conrad Voltkraft 3000 Energy Meter, ist recht exakt, Herstellerangabe < 2 Watt). Mit USB-Festplatte, die offenbar nicht ausgeht: 3,5 Watt.

Normal:    1,5 Watt
Stick:        1,5 Watt
USB-HD:  3,5 Watt
SDHC:      4,4 Watt

Es empfiehlt sich also aus Stromkostengründen einen USB-Stick dafür zu kaufen und keine Festplatte, auch wenn letztere weniger Kostet pro MB. Sonst zahlt man das Geld über die Stromkosten wieder zurück (1 Watt sind bei 22 cent pro kWh ca 2 € im Jahr). Auf jeden Fall sollte man auf eine SDHC verzichten, die jährlich ca. 6 € an Strom zusätzlich kosten würde. Wenn man ihn vom Strom trennt, spart man ca. 3 € pro Jahr, muss dann aber natürlich auf zeitgesteuerte Videoaufnahmen verzichten.

Insgesamt bin ich mit dem Gerät sehr zufrieden, vor allem für den günstigen Preis. Es lohnt aber, noch in einen möglichst kleinen/kurzen USB-Stick (da nur vorderseitiger USB-Anschluss) und ein besseres SCART-Kabel zu investieren (das mitgelieferte macht ein sehr schlechtes Bild!).

Die Videorekorderfunktion mit Timer muss ich noch testen. Sofortaufnahme und "Pause", also "Time Shifting", haben bereits gut funktioniert.

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Fast, Cheap, Reliable VPN for Linux

I did some research into VPN services because even if I'm not in the US or UK for a while I don't want to be prevented from accessing certain websites there and signing up for services there.

You can sign up to the PureVPN shared IP services here. I have good experience (hulu with maximum quality streaming, iplayer work fine) with the cheapest version.

I recommend chosing the Monthly or Quarterly plan for tests ($14), but there is a three day test account ($3) available as well. It seems there is a bandwith limit now, and without you pay more.

Payment processing can take a few hours so be aware you can't start you fun and tests directly. Settings for network manager (gnome) can be found here. It works fine for me after installing network-manager-pptp-kde. Let me know in the comments if you need help. The most important part is to deselect everything in that one list except CHAP in the advanced settings and dselect MPPE. You can also try the nm-applet from Gnome, which you can of course also use in KDE. In my experience it often works better than the KDE version anyway unfortunately.

You may run into problems if your router doesn't support pptp forwarding. Then you either get a better router, or - in the long term probably the cheaper and better option for your speed - get a better router.

By signing up via a link from this blog you support the author.

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Power Naps for your Linux System

I've always wanted a tool that can automatically suspend my system automatically once all the jobs (mencoder scripts, updatedb, etc.) are finished. Then I could start tasks, leave my system alone and trust that it would take care of going into standby itself. Most software only checks for keyboard and X input, which exactly doesn't help for my scenario. But now there's "powernap".

It's included in normal Ubuntu repositories and in its default configuration it suspends your system if no activity is detected for 5 minutes. What's still confusing me is that it by default checks for activity of initd. This does not seem to make much sense and I think a long list of typical software would be a much better alternative. Also I wonder whether it would also detect mouse and keyboard inputs, which might be nice and useful. But it's a good start in any case and you can set it up to run for your purposes.

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Creative X-fi Surround USB Review and Guide for Ubuntu 9.10 or Newer

This article will review the Creative X-fi surround usb first quickly in Windows XP and then in Linux. It will give you some basic performance ideas and hints for fixing problems and having more fun with it.

After my survey of the possibilities for USB surround sound in Linux, I ended up ordering a Creative X-fi Surround USB. As you could read there, there is a helpful webpage that includes e.g. ready made .asoundrc files.

Windows XP
On my netbook, without installing any special drivers, playing a song on an otherwise unoccupied Windows XP utilizes about 20% CPU, minus the almost 5 % that somehow seem to be there almost always...

I've read reports that there are clicking sounds, which I can imagine well with a heavy system load. I've heard them at first after plugging it in, but by now they disappeared. It sounds crisp on my Sennheiser headphones and the base is noticeably better than my onboard sound, obviously, but that doesn't say much.

Now let's see how it fares in Linux...

Reboot. Plug. Play. It could hardly be easier. All I had to do was to tell mplayer which device to use (mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=S51). Then it happily started playing over my new external sound card. The sound is as excellent as under Windows. But better than Windows: Surround sound works out of the box in my Kubuntu 9.10 system.

The combination of AC-3 surround with VAAPI accelerated 720p movie on my netbook utilizes around 10-12 % CPU. There is no stuttering in Linux, even with heavier load. Just playing music hardly seems to have any impact -- maybe around 5 % CPU. I'll have to let the Phoronix suite benchmark all this sometime. In Windows even just playing music in VLC and increasing the volume setting with the knob on the device can create stutters.

Right now for some reason the slightly dusty Chromium version on this netbook keeps bringing the system into a hard stutter making characters appear slowly on the screen up to a second after I type and the mouse does not move smoothly. But the sound plays smoothly in the background. Just plain wonderful.

Resume

I can definitely recommend the sound card for USB (surround or stereo) sound in Linux. I'm not sure if I would use it for Windows. Let's see after I installed the drivers, which will probably drive me mad.

But be aware that there are clicking sounds when the card is first intialized. If you want to use it for e.g. system sounds, you may not be very happy with that. They also seem to appear during heavy disk access (apt-get dist-upgrade), even if I'm not playing any music. That's definitely weird...

The microphone input works flawlessly. I didn't have problems with over-amplification, though I can imagine that being an issue with the lack of hardware mixing. And I definitely have a sound card for surround sound HD movie nights now. And the crazy thing is I can do it all perfectly with my little netbook. Thank you, Linux. Thanks also to you, Mandar.

Post Scriptum
Some additional information for nerds: When the card is not in use, it produces not wakes in powertop, when in use, it produces about 200-300 wakes/s (no matter if surround or stereo sound).

Update
The clicking sound seems to be related to the power supply. The problem disappears in the same work load (e.g. heavy disk updatedb) if I plug the power adapter into my netbook.

Update2
As I almost expected the device is not anywhere as good in Windows as in Linux. The crystalizer does sound nice, but there are many glitches in the Windows driver. E.g.

• sometimes when you pause they playback, the result is a constant beep until you press play again, 
• during forwarding in movies, there are short beeps. 
• Once after removing the plug and putting it back inside, the entire system hung, only working again after removing it again and then showing and error message. 
• the driver uses much more CPU than in Linux and it's a 50 MB package
• there are no volume controls for rear, center, lfe and front channels, only 1 master control (in Linux you can fix this -- maybe MatrixMixer works for Windows?)
• the microphone input sounds slightly noise shaped, esp. in combination with the "crystalizer"

Hence I would make my recommendation more clear: I wouldn't recommend it for surround sound in Windows I think. It might still be your best option due to the lack of alternatives, though.

And here's my .asoundrc so far:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "softvol" #make use of softvol
}

# create softvol master channel
# see http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/How_to_use_softvol_to_control_the_master_volume
pcm.softvol {
type softvol
slave {
pcm "dmixer2" #redirect the output to dmix (instead of "hw:0,0")
}
control {
name "Master" #override the PCM slider to set the softvol volume level globally
card S51
}
}

# create stereo dmixer, because using the 6 channel one causes stutter if the channels are empty
pcm.dmixer2 {
type dmix
ipc_key 2343
slave {
pcm "hw:S51"
channels 2
}
}

pcm.dmixer6 {
type dmix
ipc_key 2342
slave {
pcm "hw:S51"
rate 48000
channels 6
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_time 0
buffer_size 4096
}
}

# reroute the channels because rear and sub/lfe are exchanged
pcm.mysurround {
type route
slave.pcm "dmixer6"
slave.channels 6

ttable.0.0 1
ttable.1.1 1
ttable.2.4 1
ttable.3.5 1
ttable.4.2 1
ttable.5.3 1
}

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My Open Source Game of the Year...

... is most probably OpenTTD. It's the same old Transport Tycoon kind of game - you think! Until you realize that the users have created tons of beautiful content including fully open source Grafics, Musics and Sound effects, but also new vehicles like the transrapid and tons of maps from all over the world! :)

This is one of these old style games created with lots of love and care, but
WARNING: it's highly addictive!

If you're under linux, you need to download the graphics package and unpack it into ~/.openttd. I wish the software would do that for you as well in the same way it downloads sounds, maps, extensions and everything else completely automatically!

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Switching my Main Browser: Opera 10.51 Review

Well, Opera doesn't seem to have convinced everybody, but it certainly convinced me to switch over again with version 10.51. Also in my personal test it was faster than Google Chrome beta and today's Chromium in the sunspider test (705 vs. 820 and 10xx ms). It works flawlessly with Google Mail, Blogger, etc. It consumes less memory than Chrome or Chromium, especially with many tabs open and uses less CPU when it's just idling. How I love the browser wars!

You can download the newest bleeding edge version of Opera from their Desktop Blog page.

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Try Openshot for Video Editing!

I've had lots of problem to even convert the AVCHD files from the HD camera at all at first. But now that totally changed. Openshot is a really new and really great video editor that's based on ffmpeg and can read my .m2ts files without a problem. I can deinterlace them and cut them together for output in almost any format from FullHD to QCIF.

The problem is that at least version 1.1 had a slight issue with memory leaks. It grew to consume more and more RAM. So I recommend to close and reopen it before doing the encode. Or you just close it and do the encode with the command line program openshot-renderer! That also means you can easily edit the video on one computer and then encode it on some other computer, e.g. a headless server. And Openshot encodes pretty quickly as well. Even on my slow old notebook I can export from FullHD in a very short amount of time!

Video editing has never been this easy, fun and fast!

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Moblin 2.1 IVI FC Release tested on the MSI Wind U110 (GMA 500/Poulsbo)

Phoronix hasn't gotten to it yet, but now I've done a quick test with the Moblin distribution IVI version with supposed GMA 500 support (moblin-2.1-preview-ivi-20091208.img) to see how well it's working on my netbook and what feature advantages its IEGD driver may have over the psb driver.

Well, it's not a lot:

• The resolution was set to 800x600. No other resolutions were detected (xrandr -q)
• The colors were distorted. It looked like 256 colors but randomly exchanged.
• The touchpad was not working. The mouse moved in seemingly opposite or random directions and kept skipping back and forth. I had to use an external mouse to do anything at all.
• The sound wasn't working, thought that might possibly be fixed by disabling power saving, just like in Ubuntu
• Wifi wasn't working. I could not add networks or configure the wifi. " Join other Network" was greyed out. The iwconfig tools have to be started manually from /sbin. They found a network, but I didn't bother to try to set it up with wpa_supplicant manually. A path is not set. wpa_supplicant was already running with 99% cpu usage when I boot.
• Switching to the console and back is impossible. It completely and irreversibly crashes the graphics until a reboot.
• ACPI showed tons of errors in dmesg.
• Trying to suspend crashed the system.
• I wonder if there's an application in the distribution that can take advantage of VAAPI accelerated video decoding. There is a video player. But I had no easy access to the hard drive's partitions (ntfs).

The distribution as tested on my netbook is in two words:
utterly unusable.

The psb driver set up according to my howto works flawlessly compared to that! It interesting how difficult it seems to be for Intel to get its own chipset to work in its own distribution with its own driver.

But, yes. Moblin was very snappy. ;-) (I think that just shows just how cool XFCE is, though.)

More about → Moblin 2.1 IVI FC Release tested on the MSI Wind U110 (GMA 500/Poulsbo)

Kubuntu 9.10 is a Beauty

It works nicely on intel graphics (except GMA500!), installs fine and seems much snappier than the 8.10 I was still using. It's a definite upgrade recommendation, as well for your friends who are thinking about Windows 7. ;)

I'll let you know if I'll have any worries. But so far, everything has been wonderful. KMS works great, suspend-resume is fine, KDE 4.3 is lovely... :)

Good work guys!

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KDE 4.2 - Fresh, Hot, Pretty, Efficient - A Release to Enjoy

I've seen quite few real reviews of KDE 4.2 so far. Let me show you a screen shot and begin with my summary: It's a great release.

Plasmoids
The core, no actually every part of the KDE4 desktop consists of plasmoids, little applets comprising parts of the desktop: The menu, the panel, the clock, desktop applets such as wheather and disk space, network and CPU usage displays, news overviews and many more are already included.


After some problems with achieving the high goals of a flexible interface the developers have by now achieved much. You can put the plamoids anywhere on your screens. I have two displays and really enjoy being able to setup each display with its corresponding plasmoids. I really enjoy the prettier new taskbar and the new style. You can now move plasmoids from the panel to the desktop and back, but that's not easy yet.

Platforms
I don't know about the OS X port, but my girl friend is already enjoying the Windows port of KDE including great applications such as Parley in a native Windows build. And they work more or less flawlessly. I think the sounds support was not perfect, but everything else works nicely and the installer is pretty simple to handle while remaining flexible. (It's not easy enough yet that she could install it herself, though.)

Stability
As it's a .0 release, you will definitely be able to crash plasma. Probably during the tryouts for setting up your plasmoids. I recommend quitting and restarting plasma after you've got your basic configuration done with kquitapp plasma && plasma &. Then continue with the fine tuning.

Upgrade
KDE used 4.2 my previous(4.1.4) configuration successfully. Even my applets were still there at the same place. That's a nice thing and I think between 4.0 and 4.1 it didn't work well for me.

Bugs
The screen flickering problem disappeared for me. In KDE 4.1 my second screen kept going blank for about 1,5 seconds about every 10 seconds. I had to work around that bug by starting kde manually. That's solved now. I get one flicker during that startup of KDE but that's it.

Polish
There will of course be some polish in the 4.2.x releases. Some plasmoids are still buggy and can crash plasma. The weather applet crashed plasma if it didn't find the city I was searching for e.g. Sometimes removing an applet can crash plasma. But there are more practical plasmoids and they work better than in 4.1. The rss reader lets you scroll through with your mouse wheel, a memory usage applet is still missing.

Efficiency
You can see how efficient the plasma approach and implementation is when suspending your computer and then resuming it. The clock will take up to a minute to be set to the current time. That's because it gets the time only once a minute - when a new minute starts. That saves CPU usage in between and shows how much thought the programmers put into an efficient implementation. Even my desktop full of plasmoids uses only very little resources of my system. It doesn't slow you down. It even works nicely over NX (remote desktop). When idling, plasma creates about 1 wake per second in powertop on my system.

More about → KDE 4.2 - Fresh, Hot, Pretty, Efficient - A Release to Enjoy