Jon Grant's Technorama

freesat UK digital HD service launch today

2008-05-06T13:53:00.003Z

UK Digital Satellite TV has been around for a couple of years, but today it launches as one integrated system with 7 day programme guide all setup!

The DVR (Digital Video Recorder) option isn't available yet, but TVs from Panasonic are on sale with HD support integrated now! Channels now include BBC HD and soon ITV1 HD. Now just need Channel4 to exit their tie-in with Murdock's BskyB and a couple more channels ;) Use MythTV DVR to share those programmes around the house.

Title abbreviations

2008-05-05T23:34:00.001Z

Mister became Mr., which dropped the punctuation to become Mr. Mrs and Miss combined to become Ms. and then Ms without punctuation.

How long till we simply go for M. ? and then Just "M Smith". The only problem is what happens when the first initial is needed and that is an "M", looks a bit silly as M M Smith.

Germany generaly does H. now instead of Herr so it seems only a matter of time.

Time for a new phone

2008-05-05T20:31:00.002Z

I've been looking at getting a new phone recently, my Sony Ericsson K800i is 18months old and tech has moved on. The Nokia N95 isn't that much better than what I've really got, but the N96 looks promising, even if it still has the tiny 240x320 QVGA display! The Sony Ericsson W999i looks ace, and features the QWERTY rocker-button style keyboard which was popular on the M600 and P1i.. but it's not out yet.

My fav would be one of the two models out only in Japan at present: Sony Ericsson SO905ics is a 5MP Cybershot phone complete with FWVGA (864x400 px) DVD resolution display. The other choice is the Sharp 922SH, again decent screen size and handy QWERTY keyboard, but I don't know if this is touch screen, which is really needed for browsing the interweb (so hard on E90 as no stylus!). Hopefully equiv models to 922SH and SO905iCS will be released in GSM+3G unlocked varieties soon so I can give them a try.

youTube links

2008-05-04T23:29:00.002Z

Why are youTube links not the name of the clip? Take http://youtube.com/watch?v=HiUwKQzNXA8 for example, when it could have been http://youtube.com/watch?The_Cameron_Sneeze_Clip ! One of them lets us know what we are getting when we click on it in an email from a friend etc.

Modern keyboard layout design

2008-04-18T21:22:00.008Z

I'm disappointed with current keyboards so I thought I would design my own layout. I've looked around at desktops, laptops and mobiles and they just haven't moved with the times. Even Nokia's N810m PDA has a keyboard layout which seems to have been inspired by Sharp's MZ80A with a grid pattern QWERTY. Nokia E90 and E91 is just as bad (or worse.. as it isn't touch screen..!)

Starting with my Dell Laptop, I see may superfluous keys, taking up valuable space, drop the following:
Blue numeric keypad overlay
NumLock
Pause
PrintScreen (move it on to "+" key to be used with Fn).
Insert (has this ever been useful?)
All F keys, move their F function onto the number 0-9 keys.
"¬`|" key removed, and Esc moved down.
"|\" key.
WindowsFlag key
Right Ctrl key
Right Alt Gr key
ContextMenu key
Caps Lock key
PageUp (moved onto normal key, used with Fn)
PageDown (moved onto normal key, used with Fn)

Certain keys aren't big enough, Shift, Space, Backspace, Delete and Enter, so these should be a decent size.

This leaves a modern optimal layout of:

Esc, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, -, +
Tab, Q, W, E, R, T, Y,U,I,O,P,[,],ENTER
Shift,A,S,D,F,G,H,J,K,L,;,@,
Ctrl,Z,X,C,V,B,N,M,,.,? UP
Fn, Alt, SPACE LEFT,DOWN, RIGHT

Down to 55 keys!

Use this on mobile platforms like Nokia 810, cut out the punctuation+arrow keys to take it down to 40.

Now we just need some standard locations of the quote and @, as they are pretty handy on English keyboards, but foreign keyboards like American and Norwegian don't have some wierd locations. Can't they just use the same locations as the UK convenient ones?

Check out this wacky keyboard design, it's a shame no vendor has dared to change keyboard layouts in the last 20 years!

I've tried out the Asus Eee, but the keyboard is traditional and wastes space, with my layout it could just work. The new Eee 900 is 22.5cm wide, I think 26cm wide would be better to fit in a fuller QWERTY, but it could be enough. HP 2133 Mini-Note PC is 25.5cm wide, which would be a better choice for similar size, but the keyboard is still a legacy cluttered layout.

I'd like to try out a DOVAK keyboard layout, but it would be hard when i needed to use a QWERTY layout on someone else's PC.

Ubuntu AMR playback fix

2008-04-13T16:08:00.005Z

If you're running Ubuntu like me you may have found that videos you've taken on your mobile don't play with audio when you've copied them to your PC. This is because AMR audio codec support isn't included in Ubuntu, or part of their universe and multiverse extension repositories. However, AMR is in debian-multimedia.org, so follow the guide on adding it to your sources.lst, and then install "ffmpeg". you can then play your videos by:

ffplay video.3gp

It's not great, but it does work.

Installing libavcodec* from debian-multimedia doesn't get it working in VLC or the updated mplayer though (I presume mplayer wasn't compiled with external AMR codec support enabled).

It's common multimedia support which is really needed in Ubuntu, this is the sort of thing everyone wants working out of the box! The alteriative is to follow one of the compile guides.

Web font sizes

2008-04-12T20:36:00.003Z

Text always look small on pages when browsing at a higher resolution on my laptop I notice. Which shows that the web browser is rendering at the dpi level, rather than millimetreage. So 12pt font at 72dpi (28dots per cm) screen res will be 4mm high. If the res is 144dpi that 12pt character will only be 2mm high, which is tiny!

So shouldn't text be rendered at a millimetre size to make it consistent across displays?

OpenGL Debugger

2008-04-12T20:16:00.003Z

Came across this BuGLe OpenGL Debugger, a great tool, allows inspection of states and backtraces, fantastic!

OpenGL has had some what of a resurgence in recent years primarily in the ES variety on mobile, but also on Mac OS X and GNU+Linux distributions thanks to Compiz ;)

Mobile Web Problem

2008-04-09T21:47:00.008Z

Back in the 90s when we were all still creating our websites in HTML 3.2 we optimised pages for dial-up and compressed images down to the smallest gif we could. One unfortunate side effect of the Broadband boom in the UK worldwide is that websites don't cater for the optimal page sizes which mobile devices necessitate.

Even with the bandwidth problems of popular sites (BBC News front page is 278KiB) until last week the BBC News site did fit on my 800 pixel wide Nokia 770. However they have changed it now, so a minimum display width of 1000 pixels is required. We can of cause switch to the low graphics version.. but when the version before fitted, it is a shame we have to go back to a nearly text-only web page if I choose to browse on a mobile device.

A lot of web designers (including the BBC?) make the mistake of looking at the screen resolution of their visitors and assuming that people browse full-screen, when many people do not maximise their browser windows.. so that 1280x1024 display window is actually only about 800x600.

If you look at the resolutions of mobile devices you will see all the current Sony Ericsson models run at 240x320 resolution, and Nokia models the same. Apple iPhone is slightly higher at 320x480. LG KU990 Viewty comes in at 240x400

The other thing for website designers is to remember is that a 240pixel wide display which measures 2 inches across is 120dpi (compared to a normal desktop 72dpi), so if you display your text at 10pt, that will look 40% smaller (why aren't font sizes specified in cm on screen ?)

So web designers, remember there mobile market for browsing is growing all the time, optimise for small page bandwidth, and page width/height no more than 800px (my site comes in at 768px ;)

The other problem is sites with broken HTML, like the BBC News site, 375 errors. That is shoddy! (I should point out that blogger which generates my site has left 169 errors on the page, so I'm not in the clear either!).

Hebrew spam

2008-04-07T20:34:00.002Z

Every day my server is getting pounded with HTML spam emails containing Hebrew characters. I'd love to have a simple set of rules to reject during SMTP session with a 55x code any email containing such character sets that I can't read anyway. I'd also like subjects of detected spams (which I don't train otherwise) to be utilised to reject during SMTP session with the 55x code. Both of these are better than accepting and sorting in a "Spam" folder, as the sending machine needs to know that its email isn't getting through. And if there are any false positives, they will never know unless we reject the SMTP session!

GNU+Linux rtsp and mms support

2008-04-06T15:20:00.004Z

There are a lot of rtsp:// and mms:// served streams online, and GNU+Linux distros like Ubuntu are not yet being released with native support for playing them or saving them to a file. Mplayer, Kaffine and Xine are all unable to play the stream URLs. Mplayer seems to be able to play the audio, but it is all crackly and breaks up.

If we use the workaround of converting the RealPlayer RPM, installing libstdc++5 and then pasting that into RealPlayer we can play rtsp:// streams ;) but we can't save them :(

It's a shame, as there are a lot of sites like youTube Mobile. Which don't rely on Adobe Flash, so we would have otherwise been able to watch the streams. mms:// is common as WMV and WMA files are served that way often. To be a multimedia distribution GNU+Linux needs to support these protocols out of the box from Firefox ideally. The current workaround is to install the DownloadHelper extension in Firefox (unfortunately Firefox still needs a restart.. reminds me of MS-Windows restart issues still!).

K800 torch

2008-04-04T20:19:00.002Z

My Sony Ericsson K800i doesn't come with a way to turn the light on as a torch like my old K700i did. Fortunately someone has created a Java Torch application! There is also a Symbian P1i Torch application for the Sony Ericsson P1i if your lucky enough to have one of those phones.

Flip, Slide, Clam and Open style mobile phones!

2008-04-03T20:30:00.004Z

We've had Flip phones (aka Clam shell) and Open phones for years.. but it seems "slide" is all the rage.. I did used to like "flipping" but I'm not convinced on sliding yet! and it's another moving part which could break.. Here's me hoping phones in the style of K800i and P1i will remain popular ;) The market is definitely big enough to support the variety we have though.

Ubuntu FLV video seeking not working

2008-04-03T19:49:00.006Z

After the problems with Flash in Ubuntu I thought I would try play the Flash Video (FLV) file I downloaded.

Unfortunately, while VLC and Mplayer can play it.. they can't seek.. so we either have to watch the entire clip or not bother at all..

Xine at first appears like it is going to work, seeking at the beginning of the clip works, but go beyond half-way and it locks, and sometimes needs to be killed as it is unresponsive :( Other FLV clips have all the same problems with VLC, Mplayer and Xine.

GNU+Linux is going to find adoption hard going when it can't play "de facto format" Video files out of the box. FLV is only a custom H.263 format after all..

Jobs commented on Flash not being supported by the iPhone, which is a bit odd considering it can play H.264 and MPEG4. Not getting Adobe's Flash may be a blessing in disguise for the platform though! Also.. at least Apple have not made the mistake of adopting Silverlight yet (like Nokia appear to have, after their good decision of purchasing Qt!).

Ubuntu mouse device changing

2008-04-02T20:59:00.002Z

I highlighted the problem of flaky second mouse support in ubuntu before. My fix works well, but you will find that as xorg does not reference devices by UID, numbering will change and mean that mouse2 becomes the USB mouse!

So really X.org needs a revision to reference by UID, and the Linux kernel needs to expose that to X.org like it does for other devices in /dev

ISS tracking

2008-04-01T22:45:00.000Z

Ace, we can track the International Space Station in real time!

MiG-31 Foxhound flight to the unknown

2008-03-28T21:34:00.001Z

A MiG-31 flight is one I definitely would like to do, right to the edge of space!

Too much packaging

2008-03-27T22:26:00.002Z

I'm sure everyone is noticing just how much superfluous packaging food and products now come in. Now rather than taking all that packaging off individually wrapped apples in a larger bag at home, imagine if we took all the packaging off while still in the supermarket. Imagine if we left it all there neatly placed in black sacks, and took the food home in our reusable shopping bags. Supermarkets would have to hire skips at great expense to take away the packaging, and would soon stop buying produce from supplies who over-packed their food ;)

Ubuntu not ready masses?

2008-03-24T23:16:00.005Z

When I plug in my USB WD "MyBook" it pops up in Kubuntu desktop automatically, and when I want to remove it, it sometimes doesn't have the "Safely Remove" option, so I have to go to root to unmount it (as users are bizarrely not allowed to unmount removable USB drives!?).. anyway, after it's unmounted by root the system locks up when I unplug it.. so much for USB being plug and play with the Linux kernel.

Of cause if it had downloaded the symbols, generated a back-trace from the core-file it could have automatically offered to submit that for further analysis and a fix.. sadly it doesn't support that still. Also it didn't seem to do a recover of the filesystem (i'm using ext3 with all its journalness), when I restarted the computer, so maybe it's just ext3 with its journal recovers automatically? I'd file a bug report, but without the QA staff to follow it up on Launchpad I can't see it being tackled.

I wish there was a pay model so we could contribute to cover QA staff salaries.

The final oldness is that as I don't want to keep my WD drive in Microsoft's FAT32 format I've got to go through quite a manual process to reformat it as Linux's ext3 format. (Why can't I just right click on the FAT32 icon on my desktop and select format and be prompted for the root password etc?)

I need to revert to the command line, repartition with fdisk, format with mke2fs (remembering to set a label with -L and -j for the journal). Then when it mounts I'm left with only a "lost+found" directory, and I can't create files in the root of the drive as a user... so go back to root, create a folder, change the permissions on the folder to 700, change owner and group to user. Rather a faff to use a removable drive in the standard partition format, eh!? I'm not sure how well my non-expert friends would have managed.

English spelling irregularities

2008-03-21T11:53:00.005Z

English spelling is pretty eccentric, I wonder if it would ever be possible to switch the spelling of words to a phonetic base. Would be hard as spelling is so engrained, and also many other countries speak English as their first language. However, other languages have tried to make modifications over time, i.e. like High German dropping the sharp-s character, so "Grüße" becomes "Grüsse", I still see the ß charcter widely in use, so the government trying to change may not necessarily make it successful. Also, do we really want to have to change languages back to just latin letters..?

Dell Inspiron 1300 Ubuntu Mic not working

2008-03-20T21:28:00.007Z

The latest Kubuntu is still shipping with no working Mic input, no problem though as the fix is simple, we just need to pass the right model code to snd-hda-intel kernel module. I'm using a Dell Inspiron 1300, but other laptops also use STAC9200, such as the Dell Inspiron 6400.

Normally we would cat cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 and use the SigmaTel chip id: "STAC9200", but in the case of my chip using a name is not supported, so we must use "ref". If you look at the alsa kernel code patch_sigmatel.c you can see it is "ref":

static const char *stac9200_models[STAC_9200_MODELS] =
{
[STAC_REF] = "ref",
};

We can specify the options in either /etc/modules or /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

options snd-hda-intel model=ref

Alsa wiki page for more info. One thing I wonder is that why is it called "snd-hda-intel" in the kernel tree and options, but in the output of lsmod it shows up as "snd_hda_intel" why the underscore difference!?

No online marketing opt in

2008-03-10T22:12:00.006Z

I wrote about Phorm the other day. While thinking about this online marketing problem I had a quick look online. There are ways to confirm you don't opt into online web tracking services. The BBC even put up a page about their tracking of visitors.

So the list of steps sites to set the special cookies:

DoubleClick no marketing opt in.

Onmniture (WebSideStory) SiteCatalist HBX Hitbox no marketing opt in.

Nielsen no marketing opt in (make sure you click "Total Opt-Out" !)

Google Web History remove guide. (Highlighted on ORG-Discuss list)

I do think we need an international standard ad-tracking opt out like the BBC say.

For the meantime we just need Firefox and other browsers to start shipping with these cookies set by default. Also we need a Firefox extension which let's users control the cookies in a more friendly manner.

One child policy

2008-03-09T16:59:00.004Z

Everyone knows of China's One-Child Policy, the BBC is running an article on it and how it has avoided overcrowding and resource issues families not having those 400M births that would have happened otherwise.

Our little pale blue dot is the only M-Class planet, we have precious little resources on the surface of the planet and China's One-Child Policy looks like a good decision to prevent overcrowding, and I expect other countries may fallow suit. After WW2 population was at 2.5B, now it is at 6.5B, and if no careful planning is done it will be 20B by 2050.

Nice quote from the BBC article:

"Compared with the world's other developing countries with large populations, we have realised this transformation half a century ahead of time."

One problem will be avoiding the one-child growing up spoilt, there must be many group activities, and sharing encouraged. Also the birth ratio of boys to girls is more different than in other countries.

Phorm unique tracking

2008-03-09T16:24:00.007Z

BBC ran a story earlier this week: Ad system 'will protect privacy'. Also the PMs site has a petition worth signing. The Phorm site has a privacy page with some more information.

Phorm say their tracking is anonymous, but surely they have miss-understood the definition of Anonymous (from the Greek ανωνυμία):

Oxford English Dictionary:

Anonymous a.
1. Not identified by name; of unknown identity.
2. Having no individual or unusual features.

Or as Chambers Dictionary puts it, "without character; nondescript"

Once I have been assigned a unique number which identifies every communication with me uniquely, surely I am no longer anonymous?

Once they have tagged my interests as "cars", "music", "travel" and "gadgets" surely that would constitute something along the lines of "individual or unusual features" ? I'm certainly no longer nondescript.

The honest way would be for Phorm to phrase it: "uniquely identified, profiled and browsing categories tracked by a number rather than a name".

Let's see what the Information Commissioner's research into Phorm reveals.

vCard Firefox integration missing from Kubuntu

2008-03-09T15:50:00.003Z

vCard (.vcf, text/x-vcard) has been around for a long time. However, Kubuntu isn't setup with Firefox to load the vCard from web pages. We need to set firefox to use /usr/bin/kaddressbook, or manually save the file and then open it. The browser needs tight integration with the rest of the GNU+Linux distro!