Showing headlines posted by D

The new European e-reader 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:

As expected, the intel_idle includes C4 and C6 CPU power saving modes in kernel 2.6.36, even if your BIOS doesn't announce them. (...) This can make your netbook quieter while on AC and extend battery life (...)

The following will show you how to stop your hard disk from spinnig up due to fsync in active laptop_mode. So get your kernel source ready. There are several libraries that help you to disable fsync temporarily so your hard disk doesn't always spin up to save your notebooks battery. Of course that is not very flexible as you need to preload the libraries meaning you have to restart the programs.

Back then utorrent was Windows-only and only ran with WINE in Linux. (...) Now this all changed. (Screenshots inside)

I always wanted to sync a few folders of my system across all my computers. E.g. the my scripts directory, where I constantly fiddle with my scripts and create new ones, my documents I always want to be able to have and edit everywhere, etc. I would never know where the most current version is without bothersome comparison of the dates. I would have to check every file and then copy the newer one. But that's now history, thanks to unison and my sync configuration I will describe below.

I often wanted to compare what new messages appear or disappear in a new kernel so check out what might have changed, esp. when debugging. The problem is that diff is confused by the timing information that is by default prepended to dmesg information in Ubuntu kernels. Here's how to remove the timing information to have a clean, diff-compatible dmesg log...

When a consumer installs a Linux system, this has various consequences for him, which are sometimes hard to estimate at first. I've written a little summary touching the differences to Windows and Mac OS X in drivers, open source and support.

This is just a really, really short basic howto for setting up the poulsbo X driver and VAAPI video acceleration on Ubuntu 10.04. I will post more details later.

Mplayer updates the information about the amounts of frames it displayed, the played time, the remaining time, etc. every single time it displays a *frame*. This is not only completely unnecessary, it can unnecessarily hog several percent of your CPU in many terminal implementations, especially in current KDE 4 and Windows. The higher the frame rate, the more wasted CPU power.

Check out how well the X-fi USB works for surround on my netbook in combination with VAAPI accelerated HD video. CPU load figures inside.

"What do you expect with only 1 GB memory in Vista?" a random second stage Dell support guy just asked me after I told him that the system crashes with a Kernel_Inpage_Error bluescreen. "It's just not sufficient for Video Processing." Find out how the Dell support tried to help and how I fixed the problems - at least for now.

Okay. So the Canon EOS 500D does create FullHD video. Well, alright, it's just with 20 fps. But that's actually not as bad as I had feared. Yes, there are no options whatsoever. That's kind of weird. And then there's this tiny details related to the options...

Phoronix hasn't gotten to it yet, but now 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.

I know this is quite political, but it's open source politics: A new initiative has been taken to propose a EU directive that prevents software patents. I have just signed the petition and invite you do to so as well. http://petition.stopsoftwarepatents.eu/

"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."

Have you ever wondered how much quality your HD camera can deliver? This script helps you to find it out if you have a camera that encodes interlaced video. It uses special filters to calculate 50 whole frames out of the half frames, which makes motions seem extremely fluent. You could play the file at half speed slow motion and still have a full 25 frames per second.

I've finally managed to get it running. FullHD videos with only 30 % cpu on an Atom netbook. Here is what I had to do...

After installing ffmpeg from svn with checkinstall, I had the problem that the also installed library libavcodec51 is not compatible with the one delivered with Ubuntu. But I could not simply uninstall it so that the manually installed version was used because that caused problems with libxine1-ffmpeg, which stopped kaffeine, amarok and other software from running properly.

Okay, I may not be able to completely fulfill that promise, but you will most likely be saved from the second pass and thus a lot of encoding time quite often with this tipp. If you don't need the resulting file to e.g. nicely fit on a CD, this is probably perfect for you. Let's begin.

If you're installing a few programs in WINE, you may notice that they tend to influence each other negatively. The fix is to install them in completely different operating system environments, also known as WINE bottles. This way it's easy to completely remove applications by just deleting their "bottle". Let me show you how to make this effortless with standard WINE and a simple shell script.