Category Archives: Technology

Really everything related to technology

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).

Technology

Analog TV is sooo 1990

Yeah, you losers out there in the rest of the world: we no longer do analog terrestrial TV broadcasting in Sweden. At October 15 2007 the last parts of Sweden go DVB-T.

(Yes, some dinosaurs are said to still get analog TV over their cable networks but I’m sure they will be extinct soon enough..)

Sagem 64140TThe upsides with DVB for a casual TV user such as myself, is the built-in standard EPG and the fact that the time is sent to allow “terminals” to sync and stay accurate easily. It would be even better if the Swedish broadcasters would a) send program data for more days ahead than what they currently do (currently they only provide roughly 48 hours ahead) b) fill in more details in the meta data about the programs – right now a film or a TV show can be explained as “American movie” or “drama” with no further explanation.

BTW, a little side-note. In my house-hold we switched to digital early this spring with the Stockholm area switched off analog and not long after the switch I one day noticed how my EPG would show all the Swedish åäö letters in a funny way (and my box uses the name of the show for recorded files so they ended up looking funny as well). It looked exactly like they were UTF-8 encoded suddenly – but assumed a more regular character set like iso8859-1 or similar. I filed a bug report to Teracom, and I don’t know if I had any impact at all but in a day or two the bug was gone.

Technology

Movie Trailers by MMS

When I took the PendeltÃ¥get train home from work today, I couldn’t help noticing a big ad for some new Swedish upcoming film, displayed on the wall of the car. The ad wasn’t particularly interesting by itself, but I found the offer “SMS this word to this number and you’ll get a three minute trailer for the movie sent back to you as an MMS” shown on the ad a really cool idea.

I was tempted to do it just to try out the technology, but while I pondered about actually doing it I reached my station and I went off and forgot all about it…

Electronics, Open Source

Hack Everything!

Being an ordinary hacker person in an industrial country such as Sweden, I own lots of random technical devices that I either have and use in my home or carry around for my use and enjoyment. Most, if not all, of these provide a fair amount of features and bugs. Many of them are controlled by an internal microcontroller.

My dect phone, my gsm phone, my DVB-T boxes, my TVs, my music players, the “entertainment system” of my car, my DVD-players, my wifi-router, my printer, my digital camera, my GPS, my video camera and the likes.

lcddisplay.jpg

I seriously wish I had the docs and the source code for all of these, and thus the ability to change them to behave more like I want them to. I don’t believe I’m alone either. I wouldn’t even have to do most of these changes myself, we would have communities built up around basically all of these devices so that people from all over would share their ideas and code to improve your device. I would hack them all, if I could.

Of course, some of these devices aren’t at all possible to upgrade since they’re produced and sold without that ability and for those I’d have to accept this (and buy a different model the next time around), but a lot of these things can be reprogrammed at will already if we only knew how.

If only the manufacturers didn’t hate us.

Electronics, Licensing

Ainol License Violation

Ainol V2000 is one of them Chinese portable media players we see pop up every now and then in a never-ending series – most of them never really reach the western markets.Ainol V2000

For this particular player the firmware is available, and by simply inspecting the contents of that we can see that it is packed with open source and free software, but nowhere is the source for this package to be found… (not all of these packages are GPL licensed of course)

GEMDOS, Mplayer (various parts), unzip by Gilles Vollant, MAME, Snes9x, FLAC, wxMusik, VisualBoyAdvance, SDL, FFmpeg, Avifile…

The image also seems to contain code from Real and possibly also from Microsoft (based on a guess on the file name strings)…

And if you want to dig around more, here’s the 5.2 MB firmware file available for download. It seems Ainol’s official web site doesn’t even mention this V2000 model?

(Marcoen brought most of this to my attention.)