23 Aug 2007
Not like this hasn’t been said before, but I recently discovered a particularly retarded instance wherein DRM broke (and not for good). In this case it was a “bonus track” on a CD that had to be downloaded separately (problem number 1) and I’d let the CD disappear (I own the bloody thing somewhere, so sue me) but still had a 320kbps VBR-encoded MP3 copy sitting on the fileserver here. In the same folder as the MP3s was a WMA file laced with that certain poison — and here’s what it did when Windows Media Player went to acquire rights automagically:
And people wonder why I refuse to buy music online.
22 Aug 2007
Dropping out connections, etc., and general pain was the normal state of PC-syncing for this particular phone (probably exacerbated by my history with Windows Mobile perfection!) — so today I snapped and went looking for a software update.
There is one. It is so near perfection it makes me cry.
If you’ve been let down by older versions of SE’s PC Suite software, give this version (2.10.38 at time of writing, I was upgrading from I think 1.17.x?) a try. 44MB download, but well worth it.
16 Aug 2007
Gephex is brilliant. Probably a great way to build a really capable vision mixer (with some good real-time capture hardware) on a shoestring budget. I’m sick of dropping $120 and trekking over to Artarmon every time a few sources need to be strung together! Actually, if it weren’t for the fact that hire was locked in for an imminent evening, I’d probably have cancelled and spent my $120 on another capture card, instead. It’s nearly 10 frames behind realtime but that’s on a regular Windows box running as an un-prioritised process… on a dedicated *nix machine I reckon that would drop back to about 4 frames, which is totally a fair deal (you normally lose ~2 to genlocking/keyers anyway, and more if there’s a chain of mixers involved). Oh, yeah, and it does myriad effects and keying, too. Need to figure out how to link network streams in, but its pretty much perfect already. This is totally taking precedence as my spare-time hardware project — it’s just calling for some proper gear to be built. Time to buy that book on microcontrollers methinks.
There are other hardware projects I’ve got cooking, yes, but none so immediately useful or easily implemented. The great thing about this is the hard work (read:software) is essentially done already. At worst I’d need to hack some kind of interface driver, but, really, it’s pretty much functional as is. And, because it’s already been ported to Linux and BSD, it’s really trivial to build a barebones system upon which to base it all. Preserving keyboard + mouse input is a totally necessary design parameter anyway (for reasons of network stream integration, titling(!!), etc.) so hardware can be periodically switched on as it becomes available. I’m tempted to pull apart my languishing Athlon XP, but it feels too powerful for the task (not even kidding… this thing is lightning fast) and I wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of the RAM in it. My biggest concern is tracking down capture hardware that’s Linux or BSD friendly. Ideally there’ll be a security capture card that does PAL at full frame rate and has 4 inputs, because essentially that means it’d be trivial to add a few extra cards and, all of a sudden, it’s quite foreseeable to have a 12 input vision mixer that will key and title away til the cows come home.
One concern I have is that the mixer component only takes two sources… which is much the same as on any hardware mixers I’ve used (two buses: select source on A + B bus, mix buses), but it feels really inflexible. I’d chain them together but think that might necessitate extra genlocking time and increase overall latency. I can’t actually think of a usage scenario for this one, though, so it’s not a big deal. Because keying exists independently of mixing it’s not a concern of 2 sources + keyed source, and that’d be the main situation in which such a thing would be at all necessary.
The other cool thing about this is you can mix digital and analogue sources with impunity. Need SDI? Sure, get an SDI capture card and add an input source. Firewire? Done deal. Same goes for output: because you can output via FFMPEG, your “vision mixer” potentially also encodes an IP-distributable stream simultaneously with realtime output to a monitor.
This is an inestimably cool piece of software, but the most brilliant thing is it isn’t really anything new. I discovered it because I was looking for EffecTV which I’d last used in a production context over 12 months ago… Gephex uses existing open-source filters and processing solutions and just provides an excellent means of chaining them together. You can create some excellent motion artwork with it, but the most exciting thing for me is that it enables use of cheap and disposable x86 hardware in place of hideously expensive and proprietary (read: more expensive, but also inextensible and not particularly flexible) solutions that the ‘pros’ use.
Increasingly I’m disinterested in ‘professionalism’ about this sort of thing, because that’s way out of my price league and, to be honest, the most common place I wish this technology were applied is in church and Christian event contexts, where (even if there is money) no-one is interested in effective communication through applied technology. So we continue to try and push forward with no money and a bunch of innovative and irreverent (to the pros) solutions.
Ultimately, it’s about achieving excellence in the quality and nature of the work done to share the gospel and build up the body of those who follow Jesus — but excellence can be attained without even a smattering of ‘professionalism’.
That said, I’d still love to own an MX-70.
14 Aug 2007
I don’t like deleting emails and, accordingly, don’t. Windows Live Search may not agree with me. This is alternately because Office/Outlook 2007 sucks, or it does. I’m presently rebuilding its index of my email because it somehow manages to continue blissfully unaware of thousands of messages in email folders. This is what happens when your email program mandates dependence on an external search product. Generally speaking, I’m not too desparate when it comes to looking for other files on my system (though, I’ve got to confess at this point, I am increasingly so after adopting WLS) — email search is the critical feature for me.
I am at the point where if this continues to prove ineffective I will be abandoning either WLS, Outlook, or both.
But for now I’m waiting for a rebuild and using Kerio’s excellent webmail product to conduct searches near-instantaneously and vastly more comprehensively than Microsoft’s obviously deficient search does.
07 Aug 2007
Now, I’m not sold on this whole greenhouse thing just yet (The Great Global Warming Swindle had at least as much sway over my opinion as that Powerpoint presentation to which it was, perhaps, a counterpoint), but as a matter of mere consumption (and intellectual curiosity) I was keen to learn just how much power one of my computers, in particular, was using annually.
This one sits in a cupboard, answers to the name of ‘whisper’, reaches obscene temperatures in summer (yet does not crash), and, at its heart, features a low-power-consumption processor and motherboard by VIA. It also has two hard drives and a single 512MB (8-chip double-sided (16 total)) DDR-400 DIMM.
And that is all.
Most of the time, it’s relatively untaxed… it acts as file storage, a web server for miscellaneous stuff I want to share quickly, and a development box for more adventurous things. At one stage it was hosting streaming media (and, very very briefly, a Counter-Strike server… it is horribly under-specc’d for such duties). It’s also useful for SSH’ing into and bypassing proxies when you really need to get to something (entirely legitimate, mind), but increasingly less so as a certain workplace of mine blocked SSH out access when we moved floors. No matter — I’ve identified a HTTPS-SSH solution to that particular problem, but haven’t been motivated to implement it just yet!
So, here’s the run-down:
Load Idle
VIA EPIA PD10000 23W 15W
Generic 512MB 2W 1.5W
ST380011A 12W 8W
ST380011A 12W 8W
49W 32.5W
Most of those have been rounded a little bit, but… let’s just say it only uses 49W at the most.
Then, there’s the 65%-efficiency-at-full-load (230W) power supply to consider. We’re no-where near full load, but let’s just say it’s consistently efficient (or, in-efficient) regardless of load. In practice, it’d probably be slightly better for lower loads due to reduced heat production.
So, our 49W suddenly becomes (49×1.35) 66.15W
That’s 579.47kWh/year, which (apparently) equates to about 400KG of emissions. This, friends, is absolute worst-case scenario. More realistically, the system will be idle most of the time, using 384.3kWh/year, and pumping out around 260KG of carbon.
I’d be interested to see how this would compare to a typical laptop computer.
For this particular computer, there’s only a little that can be done to improve efficiency. The obvious target is the two hard drives, which, combined, draw nearly as much power as the rest of the system! Considering there’s not a dramatic amount of storage presently in use, I could almost justify replacing these with a solid-state device (in the form of an IDE-card reader bridge, because real SSD drives remain prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain in this country) if the need were really there.
And what would create such a need? Well, part of the reason I wanted to find out was to see how many hours this thing could live off a fairly cheap UPS for. Turns out it’s probably got at least an hour’s worth of life in it, which is moderately incredible compared to the typical ten-minute-or-it’s-fsck-time expected parachute expectancy!
The only problem in adding a UPS is that they’re not the world’s most energy efficient devices themselves, with an APC 500VA model chewing 24BTU (82.02W, since we’ve been working in that thus far) per hour when “online”. BTU is a measure of thermal energy dissipation, by the way, so probably it’s also less-than-ideal for sticking in a cupboard in which the next-largest heat source is probably the power supply at a meagre 17.15W (assuming its inefficiency is purely thermal, which, of course, it won’t be — other non-thermal radiation must account for at least some of its loss).
So, there we go. A fairly useless exercise that will become marginally less useless if ever there are rolling brownouts in Sydney and I need something to be able to weather the power storm. The other great thing about UPS is they provide fairly decent power conditioning, too. Given you can pay about $50 for a decent 6-way surge protected board, or only $140 for a 500VA (300W) APC UPS these days, it’s really not that bad a deal afterall.
Sources:
VIA EPIA-PD10000 power usage: http://www.via.com.tw/download/mainboards/3/4/OG_EPIA-PD_111804.pdf
Generic 512MB DDR-400 memory power usage:
My memory, from prior reading and specs of higher-quality memory that actually publish such data.
Seagate ST380011A power usage:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/cuda7200pm.pdf
SFX-230M2 switching power supply (used by a lot of big OEMs like Dell and HP, it turns out) specifications:
http://www.sirtec.com.tw/photot2/10205/210205R11.pdf