This will be the first release in quite a few years that I won’t try at the day of release. I’ve been using OpenSuSE since Pre-Novell (9.0 I believe), and have usually upgraded as soon as possible.

But why not this time?

Because the last three times I tried to upgrade, it was a mess for two days. The sturdy and solid SuSE is gone, and I’m left with a flaky OpenSuSE, which usually needs a few weeks to settle the most annoying bugs.

Preciously, SuSE was the one distro that you could be sure was working. But not anymore. They’ve simply got to many fuckups on the release day for me to thrust ‘em.

I will upgrade. But not in a few weeks.

On Ixus 100/SD780IS (can someone explain why canon insists on seperate names for EU and USA?), it is as of writing only a beta port – some flaws, such as the camera turning of in some conditions.

The manual for installing CHDK was not that great, with a lot of technical details missing in my opinion. Here’s what I did to get it working.

Manual load

To make the firmware update available in the menu, I had to put the camera into play mode (press the button to display pictures), enter the menu, set Lens retract to 0 mins. and restart the camera and go into play mode again. Pressing menu gave me the firmware update at the bottom. And it worked. But it’s quite slow way to ender chdk…

Automagic booting

For some reason, pressing ‘Make bootable’ in CHDK-menu did not work on this camera. I don’t know if it was because it’s a beta, or what the reason might be. I assume that you’ve already tested manual loading, so card is loaded with files…

Making the flash card bootable by hand was somewhat a hassle, as the procedure was not documented in the FAQ or Howto from CHDK. Except the mac guide for some reason.

It turns out that I had to edit the boot sector of the memory card. This is not for the faint of heart… Grab a copy of your boot sector with dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p1 of=bootsector bs=512 count=1. Replace mmcblk0p1 with whatever device the first partition of your memory card happends to be.

Open the file in your favourite hex editor (ghex2 or emacs for instance). Now, replace byte 64-72 (or 40-48 if you count in hexadecimal) with the value ‘bootdisk‘.

Write your modified boot sector back to the card with dd if=bootsector of=/dev/mmcblk0p1 bs=512 count=1, eject the card and flip the write protection switch. Power on your camera. Enjoy the glory.

My impression so far…

Ok, shooting in raw is quite nice. It means a chance to manipulate colour balance after the photo is taken. It gives a lot of possibilities originally out of range on a compact camera.

But the by far coolest thing is motion detection. The possibility of scripting, and controlling the camera with scripts is certainly nice

Eller, Armin Bahrami påstår dei var klar over det. Resten av redaksjonen er ikkje like samstemte. Men uansett – det artige her er at mr. Fiskeslo har blitt opphavsmann til organisasjonen White Wesir, som jo er et klingande navn, med ei litt punkete sjakkbrikke som logo.

Det moynar kokte sammen var hårreisande. Alle med gjennomført 2FY ville sjå sprikande hull i det som sto der, og det var også intensjonen antar eg. Men Nyhetsspeilet har åpenbart ikkje folk med grunnleggande kunnskap om naturvitenskap – eller så er dei redde for å bruke kunnskapen.

Ikkje når folk påpeikte feila i materialet, eller når spøken vart avslørt, slutta Armin Bahrami å tru på materialet. Han hevder fortsatt rapporten frå White Wesir er ekte – til tross for at den faller på elementær fysikk.

Og no er altså Armin Bahrami på ferie. Kanskje greit å få litt fred fra dei som påpeiker så drøye hull i våset ditt at en uten problem kan fly en 747 gjennom dei hulla? Eller kanskje du skulle prøve å gjere det du oppfordrer andre til – studere bevisa, skaffe deg fagkunnskap og vurdere kva som heng på greip og ikkje? For å flytte vatn med greip er ikkje lett, Armin.

But the PLC world? It’s a closed universe, with no protocol documentation (that I can find anyways), obscure parts that costs ten times more than I’d hope for them to. And all tools are in a walled garden – either you use Brand A, or Brand B. You don’t mix ‘em. Once you’ve settled, and spent a couple of thousand dollars on programming software, you don’t change because the other is simpler.

And yet we’ve got standards for it: namely IEC 61131-3, which defines the languages. Yet, every make have their own peculiarities, and you can’t expect a project for Brand A to run on Brand B. At least not without rewriting large parts of it.

What a sad state of affairs, compared to the open world of GNU/Linux…

Gi folk valgmuligheter! En kan bytte ut SMS-appen med to trykk – via Android Market. En kan bytte ut input-metode, og kort sagt: du kan bytte ut dei fleste komponenter uten å måtte gjere ting manuelt. Det er berre å finne den nye komponenten i market, og installere den.

Det er til gjengjeld veldig gjennomført. For å velge ringetone fritt må du finne en app som kan la deg sette t.d. ein MP3 som ringetone – det ser ikkje ut som android kan gjere dette utan tillegg.

Det er vel omtrent stikk motsatt av det Apple har lagt seg på med iphone, og android følger jo på mange måter opp UNIX-filosofien: gjer en ting, og gjer den bra. Masse apps som har ett formål, og som funker bra til det formålet. Til gjengjeld har systemet minimalt med funksjoner i utgangspunktet.

I like it.

This is the memory device shown from both sides. Dimensions? 35mm long, 7mm deep, and 20mm wide at the widest point

This is what it looks like when the (protective) soft rubber coating is off. 27mm long, 15mm wide and 5mm deep. Quite a reduction from last step.

And finally - the reason it was broken: the electronics, and the memory chip. Yup, literally broken. And the dimensions of this thingie? 25.5mm long, 11mm wide and just short of 2mm thick

In total, the active parts of this USB memory device 561mm³, and can contain 16GB of data. If we scale this up, we get 14260GB, or approx. 14TB of data per liter of volume. Using 3.5″ hard disk drives as the standard, they are approx. 100×143.75x25mm, or 359375mm³. The biggest 3.5″ today is 2TB or so, which means they measure in at approx. 5.5TB per liter of space – or less than half of the data densitity of flash drives…

Now, do the math with a Micro SD card, which can hold up to 16GB, and measure in at 15x11x1mm, or 165mm³ – or just short of 100TB per liter of space…

- Han er 20 år, og er i en livsfase der han gjerne drikker alkohol hver helg. De gangene han har vært i kontakt med politiet, er det episoder som må karakteriseres som vanlig helgefyll blant ungdom.

Angiveleg er det forsvararen til ein som har mista sertifikatet som kjem med denne påstanden. I artikkelen kjem det fram at vedkommande har fått forelegg for ordensforstyrrelse (som han godtok), fått inndratt stereoanlegget, og fått fleire advarslar frå politiet om bråk.

Eg veit ikkje kva erfaringer nemde advokat har med helgefyll, men eg trur ikkje det er veldig stor del av Noreg si befolking som har den erfaringa der… Det verkar heilt ærleg ein anelse komisk i mine auge å hevde at det der er vanlig helgefyll…

Section "ServerFlags"
  # Uncomment the following option to reenable
  # kbd/mouse driver sections.
  # Otherwise evdev driver is used.
  # Option       "AutoAddDevices" "off"
  Option       "AIGLX" "on"
  Option       "AllowMouseOpenFail" "on"
  Option       "ZapWarning" "on"
EndSection

That’s right. Just uncomment that one line, # Option "AutoAddDevices" "off" – restart X, and everything worked. You can do this from SSH, or you can do it from the console – where the keyboard works fine. Just boot in single user mode or ssh in.

Nå er kull tilbake i skjønnhetsbildet, mest på grunn av den store etterspørselen etter naturlige ingredienser i produkter. [...]
Også for sensitive hudtyper er trekull godt egnet, siden det er et rent naturprodukt.

Eit fantastisk utsagn frå minmote.no.

Hestemøkk er eit naturprodukt. Eg veit ikkje om eg vil anbefale nærkontakt av den grunn.

Asbest er eit naturprodukt, og særs helseskadelig.

That is the only show stopper for me right now – I can’t sort music in any other way than playlists. I can certainly make playlists, and I can share them, but I cannot tag music for my own part, for easier searching, or for correcting and extending spotify’s tagging.

Spotify’s metadata has a few shortcomings – like for classical music they typically don’t list the conductor of the orchestra, and the composer is often part of the title field of the album.

I’d be happy if this was a per-user feature, so that I only see my own tags, but it would be even better if one could share sets of tags with other, or use crowd-tagging for adding more metadata to music.

(As a sidenote – Spotify lists little or no metadata about music, which is a sad thing.)