Category Archives: Technology

Really everything related to technology

Mail

gmail hiccups

gmail is fancy and offers lots of space

gmail is often praised these days by people all over, and yeah it is a neat web app and the amount of disk space they offer for this free service is daunting!gmail logo

I do however have several arguments against using gmail that make me not using it myself for anything that is critical.

gmail blocks zip files

The main and major complaint can be phrased like this:

(reason: 552 5.7.0 Illegal Attachment p9si2809195fkb)

That’s the exact message gmail includes in the reject mail when I try to mail my own account with a zip file attached. The zip file itself is perfectly harmless (and contains source code).

I actually get completely legitimate zip files from people every now and then, perhaps even once per week or so and having it reject these mails without even properly explaining why to the user is quite a show-stopper!

gmail spam filter is inferior

The other issue I have with gmail is its annoying spam filter. This too is often claimed to be one of the better things with gmail, and given that they have millions of users and can do pretty detailed statistics on received mails they do have the opportunity to make a decent filter.

But, given that the spam filter is one huge you-have-no-choice-but-our-way there’s no way for me to alter configs, tweak it for my specific spams or make it better deal with the false positives that it picks. And I’ve had it catch far more false positives than my regular spamassassin filter on my main mail account and then I get probably a thousand times more mail and spam on that account.

Electronics

My Next Digicam

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Sony DSC-W1 5MP Digital cameraMy trusty old Sony DSC-W1 is several years old by now and it does show when I compare my camera with those of my friends – and especially when I compare the resulting images. I’m pondering on getting a new one, but I’m struggling to find one that matches my criterias:

  1. (Ultra-) Compact. I want to be able to bring it with me easily, in a pocket or similar. Otherwise I end up not taking any photos at all… So it shouldn’t be any bigger than my existing really. I also enjoy and mostly do point-and-shoot style photographing.
  2. 3″ LCD. I got one of the first 2.5″ LCD cameras and I loved how the big screen makes photographing and viewing pics on it more fun. I’ve seen some cameras with >2.5″ screens and I think they look awesome.
  3. Image Stabilizer. Clearly (according to reviews) they can make a difference, especially with zoom or in low light conditions.
  4. Good low-light images (at least comparable to the excellent Fujifilm Finepix F31fd). It seems even the more recent Fujifilms has went downhill in that department, based on reviews I’ve read.
  5. I think I would prefer a camera that accepts SDHC cards so that I can go with 4GB or perhaps even 8GB at once, easily and cheaply.

And what contenders are there really? Lots of them, but I’ve found none that even reaches 4 out of 5 in this list! 🙁

Oh, and note that the number of pixels ain’t terribly important as long as they’re at 6+ something megapixels.

Suggestions anyone?

Electronics

Tomtom MapShare

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Tomtom ONEI have one of these lovely little Tomtom ONE GPSes, and the other day my brother notified me about their cool recent update to their firmware!

Now they feature map correction abilities, and apparently your map corrections and added details such as points of interests etc can be shared with your friends!

Very cool (sounding). This turned out to be a little easier said than done (as usual). First, I had to boot my computer into in Windows and run the “Tomtom HOME” software. It turned out to crash repeatedly after about 20-30 seconds of use, but after a lot of restarts it managed to upgrade both the GPS unit and get a fresh new “HOME” software version. With the new HOME software it stopped crashing and funnily enough the new version immediately downloaded yet another new HOME upgrade…

Anyway, now I have the latest firmware and I try out the menu option for map correction only to see… that it claims my maps are too old to use this feature! OK, I have the “Scandinavian” version and using the Tomtom HOME it says I already have the latest version… I assume this means that I should rather buy another map set or similar. It claiming I have the latest is suspicious anyway since I know my brother have newer maps. After some checking, I learned that he bought newer maps a while ago. Ok, time to get updated maps. In fact, they don’t even sell “Scandinavian” maps these days so I guess my map route was a dead end, now the closest thing is “Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland” which is almost twice as much data – and thus such an upgrade requires me to get a larger SD card first! 😉

I’ll get back when I’ve got a new card and a new map!

As many times before, one can’t but to wonder what my parents or similarly (not at all) tech-skilled persons would do if they would face this kind of challenge…

Linux, Technology

OpenMoko yes, Greenphone no

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Trolltech’s GreenphoneObviously Trolltech announced their killing of the Greenphone, a Linux and qtopia powered GSM phone. I was seriously trying to get one when they launched it, but during the time they had troubles providing me one I rethought my position about it and decided I didn’t really have time nor energy to work on it and thus I never ended up getting one…

Openmoko So for the eager hackers wanting an open phone to hack on, I guess the Openmoko Neo1973 is now the evident “winner” of this moment.

Technology

China and Chinese Technology

Still in China… I find it quite amazing that at the markets I’ve visited there are hoards of salespersons trying to sell me “ipods” that are almost exclusively all fakes. The fake/real ratio must be something like 20:1 or so!

While here, I’ve enjoyed a talk/lecture by a man called Fredrik Härén who lives here in Bejing. He talked about how China is developing at a marvelous pace and that we in the western world have “settled down” and if we don’t wake up and realize how things actually are, we are going to be overtaken by the asians a few years ahead. I think I’m quite prepared to agree with Fredrik on that. The Chinese are all hungry, eager and developing. We are full, laid back and more eager to teach others about how good we are…

Bejing is currently one gigantic construction area . They build countless skyskrapers, buildings, centers, streets, houses in preparation for the olympic games that will take off here in August next year. They also seem to more or less build the entire olympic setup: arenas and buildings etc from scratch. People who were in Bejing 10+ ago witness about how nothing is the same anymore. And quite frankly: Bejing is just another modern city with large buildings, streets and concrete. There are hardly any signs of anything Chinese, asian or eastern left in the city. I bet you can fool anyone that this is New York or Singapore or any other no-cultural-aura-left-world-city for quite some time if you’d just take a city tour. Amazing, but a bit boring. Impressive skyskrapers. I’ll love to see how the CCTV buildings will look like when they’re ready – two leaning towers currently under construction meant to be ready before the olympics.

Technology

4K Makes Lots of Data for Future Kids

Yeps, it seems people these days do “4K” (4096 x 3112) movies when they want to be on the bleeding edge of digital movie resolutions. That’s more than 6 times the number of pixels of full HD (1920 x 1080).

Dalsa 4K cameraJonathan Schwartz of course sees an excellent opportunity to tout ZFS in this world of really really huge data amounts, since as he puts it “the digital master for an average 4k film is roughly 9 Terabytes” – and with working material included of course a lot more.

Now, I figure this of course is a perfect market for huge data storage and file systems that can deal with this, but my gosh this will stretch their backup systems to the limit – not to mention the problem with data longevity. How will this material and data live and be stored for future generations to be able to take advantage from it? I already have thoughts about this for my digital images and video snippets, but when the world is going towards insane data amounts and for almost every part of life, I can see how we in the future risk having less traces left from the past than what we have today from our past…

Also, if bluray/HD-DVD is suitable for HD content, what on earth will we need for 4K content?

Network, Open Source

download flv videos from youtube

My wife wants to keep some videos found on youtube, and I really can’t recommend just keeping bookmarks to a random web site like that. Not if you want the content to be available in a few years ahead, or even ten or twenty years. Then downloading the files to keep the locally is the only sane way to make it somewhat more reliable.

To download the files you can do it with a browser or with a command line tool:

Browser StyleGreasemonkey

  1. Use Firefox
  2. Install Greasemonkey
  3. Within Greasemonkey there’s concept of user scripts that customize it, and we want a certain customization for youtube pages. So we get the YouTube to me v2 script installed.
  4. Now, each youtube web page gets a red stripe on the top of the page that allows you to download the FLV.

Command Line Style

There exist several command line tools “out there” that do the job. I tried youtube-dl and it did the job splendidly by only proving the main HTTP URL on the command line.

The main lacking feature is that it names the output flv based on the ‘v’ variable in the URL so the downloads end up being named things like “f_8wuVEYMZ8.flv”…

Play the local FLV movies

For this, I can only recommend the lovely VLC media player, available on all modern platforms.

Electronics

Chinese Cool-looking Fake iPhone

I’m quite impressed by what these Chinese cloners can produce.

As can be seen on this youtube video, there’s a nice typo on the boot-up screen (“tPhone”) and it does use the Windows startup sound(!), but it is an otherwise pretty decent-looking clone.

As for someone who’s never seen a real iPhone, just seeing them on shabby youtube videos certainly gives the impression that this fake is pretty similar to the original one. Even functionality wise. Apparently this one even supports MMS and works with any SIM card…

Now, it’s less than two weeks till I’ll go to China… 🙂

Electronics, Rockbox

Zunes, New Zunes and Hacking it

Microsoft (New) Zune Microsoft hasn’t given in yet it seems, as they announced their updated Zunes yesterday. They’re available as 4 or 8GB flash and a 80GB hdd version, and these ones are claimed to play more movie formats (like h.264 and MPEG-4) and they actually seem to be capable of using the wifi for things like syncing music etc.

The zune music is also said to go DRM-free… All in all, I’d say they seem to really make an effort to be a serious iPod alternative.

Anyway, there hasn’t of course been any serious dissect of these new Zunes yet but given how their earlier models were made it seems unlikely that they will attract any larger crowds of eager hackers. They also seem to have applied a fair amount of cryptography, another Apple-like approach, so it is hard to put a replacement firmware on it.

The guys in the Zune Linux project have really no clues about what hacking these things require, and their early chatter on deciding what logo to use and what “distro” to base their work on have just been hilarious jokes. I don’t expect this new set of models to change this situation in any significant way.

I’m not aware of any known skilled (Rockbox) hacker having a go at Zune. The old Zune models are however quite similar (but not identical) hardware wise to the Toshiba Gigabeat S models, for which there is a Rockbox port in the works (as I’ve mentioned before).